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It's entirely possible that it's primarily to offer us internal storage or more storage period, as is stated explicitly in the update, with the closeness to the shuttle bay being mentioned as merely a "nice bonus" - hardly the strongest wording. It's also entirely possible there is some sort of major benefit to cargo throughput to shuttles, but how much of one and in what scenarios it's most useful is very much up in the air right now, and it's silly to presume any kind of confidence about it.
Again, rather than arguing about this for fourteen pages (and counting), we could at any point simply ask the QM to specify, rather than elaborately theory crafting about it and then getting into fights about our made-up justifications. It's not actually terribly important in this case, but it would be good to get into the habit of asking questions on this stuff, because we've done this before over quite consequential votes.
For example: @Sayle, would you care to elaborate on how much the Loading Bay and Shuttle Deck stack up in terms of the ability to quickly loading cargo onto shuttles (and hence the rate of shuttle deliveries), and the general logistics of getting cargo from the cargo pod to the Shuttle Deck?
Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
What in the fresh fuck... Is that supposed to be a deflector on the front of the secondary hull there, or does the ship simply not have one?Okay, really, last one,
Mechanis
Confirmed Extremely Screwed
- Location
- Absconding with Alacrity
In the secondary hull, yes. it is R E C T A N G L E
(because they're lagging behind there and basically have Mk 1.5 deflectors)
KlavoHunter
THOU SHALT WORSHIP NO GODS ABOVE ENTERPRISE!
Curious what your thoughts are about all the non-Starfleet vessels that have no obvious deflector!
Mechanis
Confirmed Extremely Screwed
- Location
- Absconding with Alacrity
Generally means some kind of non obvious deflector, because one of the setting conceits is that No Deflector=your ship blows up the moment you go to Warp (or at least, very quickly thereafter).
because there's no armor or shield in the universe that can stand up to C-Multiple kinetic impactors, the only defense is not getting hit at all. Even a stray hydrogen atom is a ship-killer at that kind of speed.
cokerpilot
Here comes the rain.
[X] Shuttledeck [8 Engineering, 32 Type-F Shuttlecraft]
Chargone
Invisable operator
- Location
- New Zealand
If I recall correctly, in-quest at least, the warp field does Some work on that front by itself. But relying on it to do the whole job means going a lot slower and/or using a much more powerful warp drive. Something something warp geometry. It was relevant to a few of our earliest designs, if I remember rightly.
Of course, that's only for the quest. Other continuities are another matter.
Endorfinator
Awkwardly Social
- Location
- California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think it was that we could run the ship shields while at warp but that it would be very inefficient compared to a proper deflector
- Location
- california
[X] Shuttledeck [8 Engineering, 32 Type-F Shuttlecraft]
- Location
- west
Just this ship, actually. We could have gone deflector-less but it would strain the shield and warp field while slowing the ship down a whole factor.
[X] Loading Deck (4 Engineering, 16 Type-F Shuttlecraft, 6 Cargo]
- Location
- west
What would have been cool and weird is putting two pods on the sides with vertical nacelles. Now that I've thought of it.
NexusEye
Aspiring God
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Shuttledeck [8 Engineering, 32 Type-F Shuttlecraft]
We already have cargo for days from the cargo pod, we don't need more, I don't really care about the number of shuttles but I do care about the engineering score given this is meant to be an engineering ship and the shuttle deck gives twice as many engineering points, I want this to be an engineering behemoth.
We already have cargo for days from the cargo pod, we don't need more, I don't really care about the number of shuttles but I do care about the engineering score given this is meant to be an engineering ship and the shuttle deck gives twice as many engineering points, I want this to be an engineering behemoth.
0t4n1z3r019
Member of the HAFPTG
- Location
- Philippines
[X] Shuttledeck [8 Engineering, 32 Type-F Shuttlecraft]
@Sayle, why does the Shuttledeck contribute more engineering score? Are the shuttles themselves being used for engineering work? Like, reconfigured into workbees? Or utilizing the extra technical support staff or shuttle maintenance bays or something?
Also what does the loading deck contribute, specifically, that the other one doesn't? Just faster loading of cargo?
Also do we the designers expect this ship to be able to make use of all of its hypothetical 32 shuttle complement simultaneously for more than a very brief period and maintain that fleet of shuttles?
Also what does the loading deck contribute, specifically, that the other one doesn't? Just faster loading of cargo?
Also do we the designers expect this ship to be able to make use of all of its hypothetical 32 shuttle complement simultaneously for more than a very brief period and maintain that fleet of shuttles?
Evidently, considering that they are two different scores and that more cargo reduces engineering in this case.
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Again, the people designing these ships aren't idiots that will suggest unworkable options, if we get offered 32 shuttles the ship can service 32 shuttles.
If the Ship was incapable of fully utilizing its shuttle complement we wouldn't have the option.
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I would like to have cargo capacity that can't be lost barring capture or outright destruction of the vessel itself.
And on the flip side of 20 shuttles was not enough it would not be offered.
Well the loading bay means that the cargo is available on short notice to be loaded onto shuttles if you want to do that. But if you want to open the cargo pod that's EVA work. It's essentially like unloading a freighter. There's a lot there, it's just not easily accessible. The shuttle deck means that the ship can handle heavier throughputs that don't involve the cargo like evacuations or surveying, that sort of thing. Twice as good in a crisis, essentially.
- Location
- west
Make a nerf foot ball ship, elongated orb with quad nacelles in a + shape with pods in between the struts.
NexusEye
Aspiring God
- Pronouns
- She/Her
At the risk of committing the cardinal sin of applying real world logic to Star Trek I'm here to present some math, specifically regarding explosions. The thread has speculated about the potential offensive capability of the Halley's cargo pod, ranging from using it as a minelayer to using it as an enormous photon torpedo. I won't be covering the photon torpedo case as that has already been covered by @Tank man here and also because I believe that antimatter is expensive enough that filling the pod with it would be too costly to be practical especially when their are plenty of nuclear fuels that will do. I will be examining four possible scenarios, one assuming the pod is filled with a nuclear explosive with a similar yield to volume ratio as that which can be achieved with modern technology, using the W71 warhead as a template, one assuming it is filled with liquid deuterium, one assuming it is filled with lithium-6 deuteride, a common fusion fuel in modern thermonuclear weapons, and one assuming it is filled with pure plutonium-239. I'd like to mention two caveats, first is that I will not be using Tank man's figures for the cargo pod but rather my own measurements solely of the cylindrical portion of the cargo pod neglecting the rounded ends, with a diameter of 35.5 meters and a length of 123 meters. This is because I'm assuming you can't actually fill the cargo pod with an amount of material the same volume as the cargo pod as well, the walls have to have thickness after all and there are probably other things that take up space inside too so I'm assuming that the amount of space the rounded ends could store and the amount of space lost to overhead inside the cargo pod roughly cancel each other out. This decision has nothing to do with the fact that calculating the volume of the rounded ends would take some mildly complicated math and I don't want to put in the effort for such a small factor. Secondly I'm assuming 100% burnup of all nuclear fuels except the W71 equivalent, in real life nuclear bombs become more efficient as you scale them up as the probability of a neutron hitting another atom and triggering another reaction instead of escaping the bomb goes up, at the scale of the cargo pod only the very edges should have any escaping neutrons and unburnt fuel and can be neglected. I have used Wolfram alpha for the calculations, the internet for the density of the nuclear fuels and the Nuclear Weapons Archive for the energy density of the nuclear fuels as measured in kilotons per kilogram.
With all that out of the way lets get on with the numbers. I will be displaying the cargo pod's weight, its yield in joules and tons of TNT, how it compares in percent to the Chicxulub impactor which killed the dinosaurs and is estimated to have been 120 teratons of TNT, as well as a series of radii representing at what distance the energy/area of the explosion would reach one kiloton per square meter, one terajoule per square meter, one tonne of TNT per square meter, and one gigajoule per square meter. We don't know precisely how much punishment Star Trek shields can take but presumably between some of these distances it can't handle it anymore and the ship is destroyed.
W71 Equivalent
These cargo pod nukes could simply serve as stationary mines, however if one were to wish to turn them into giant torpedoes one would merely need to remove a portion of the fuel to make room for a propulsion system, the new explosive yield would be reduced by however much percent was removed and the new radii can be derived by taking the old radii and multiplying the by the square root of (new amount of fuel)/(original amount of fuel).
Note how the option with the most yield is the plutonium based one, this is because despite its inferior yield to weight ratio it is much denser than its alternatives allowing one to pack much more into the cargo pod. While 2417859 tonnes is a large amount of plutonium it is not unattainably so, humanity had mined 2818415 tonnes of uranium by 2014 and the 99.3% of uranium made of the isotope uranium-238 can easily be converted into plutonium-239 by neutron irradiation with a fission or fusion reactor. One would have to find a method by which to prevent the plutonium from reaching criticality and exploding before the desired time but a honeycomb of forcefields partitioning it into millions of subcritical masses should suffice. I did not do the calculations for uranium but given its density and kilotons per kilogram are similar to plutonium the results would be similar as well.
Given that the Federation-Kzin War update mentions the need to put in an absolute minimum detonation distance for photon torpedoes of two kilometers it seems reasonable to assume that battles take place within an order of magnitude or two of this distance, implying that cargo pod nukes would have a useful lethal radius and would be combat effective, especially for the plutonium based nuke whose tonne of TNT/meter^2 radius of 1876 km exceeds the Moon's radius of 1737.4 km and whose gigajoule/meter^2 radius of 3837 km exceeds that of Mars's 3390 km. Cargo pod sized nuclear mines could reasonably interdict spaces the size of astronomical bodies.
Anyway that's it for now, need to go to sleep soon. Hope you guys appreciate my irrational attempt to apply logic and math to something as silly as Star Trek, the pinnacle of soft sci-fi which if it were any softer would be liquid.
With all that out of the way lets get on with the numbers. I will be displaying the cargo pod's weight, its yield in joules and tons of TNT, how it compares in percent to the Chicxulub impactor which killed the dinosaurs and is estimated to have been 120 teratons of TNT, as well as a series of radii representing at what distance the energy/area of the explosion would reach one kiloton per square meter, one terajoule per square meter, one tonne of TNT per square meter, and one gigajoule per square meter. We don't know precisely how much punishment Star Trek shields can take but presumably between some of these distances it can't handle it anymore and the ship is destroyed.
W71 Equivalent
- 49272 times the volume of the W71
- Mass of 63561 tonnes
- 1.031*10^21 joules
- 246.36 gigatons
- 0.205% of the Chicxulub impactor
- Kiloton/meter^2 radius = 4.427 km
- Terajoule/meter^2 radius = 9.056 km
- Tonne of TNT/meter^2 = 140 km
- Gigajoule/meter^2 radius = 286.4 km
- Density of 162.4 kg/meter^3
- 82.2 kilotons/kg
- Mass of 19771 tonnes
- 6.7999*10^21 joules
- 1.6252 teratons
- 1.355% of the Chicxulub impactor
- Kiloton/meter^2 radius = 11.372 km
- Terajoule/meter^2 radius = 23.262 km
- Tonne of TNT/meter^2 = 359.6 km
- Gigajoule/meter^2 radius = 735.6 km
- Density of 820 kg/meter^3
- 64 kilotons/kg
- Mass of 99831 tonnes
- 2.673*10^22 joules
- 6.389 teratons
- 5.324% of the Chicxulub impactor
- Kiloton/meter^2 radius = 22.548 km
- Terajoule/meter^2 radius = 46.122 km
- Tonne of TNT/meter^2 = 713 km
- Gigajoule/meter^2 radius = 1458.5 km
- Density of 19860 kg/meter^3
- 18.29 kilotons/kg
- Mass of 2417859 tonnes
- 1.85*10^23 joules
- 44.2226 teratons
- 36.852% of the Chicxulub impactor
- Kiloton/meter^2 radius = 59.322 km
- Terajoule/meter^2 radius = 121.34 km
- Tonne of TNT/meter^2 = 1876 km
- Gigajoule/meter^2 radius = 3837 km
These cargo pod nukes could simply serve as stationary mines, however if one were to wish to turn them into giant torpedoes one would merely need to remove a portion of the fuel to make room for a propulsion system, the new explosive yield would be reduced by however much percent was removed and the new radii can be derived by taking the old radii and multiplying the by the square root of (new amount of fuel)/(original amount of fuel).
Note how the option with the most yield is the plutonium based one, this is because despite its inferior yield to weight ratio it is much denser than its alternatives allowing one to pack much more into the cargo pod. While 2417859 tonnes is a large amount of plutonium it is not unattainably so, humanity had mined 2818415 tonnes of uranium by 2014 and the 99.3% of uranium made of the isotope uranium-238 can easily be converted into plutonium-239 by neutron irradiation with a fission or fusion reactor. One would have to find a method by which to prevent the plutonium from reaching criticality and exploding before the desired time but a honeycomb of forcefields partitioning it into millions of subcritical masses should suffice. I did not do the calculations for uranium but given its density and kilotons per kilogram are similar to plutonium the results would be similar as well.
Given that the Federation-Kzin War update mentions the need to put in an absolute minimum detonation distance for photon torpedoes of two kilometers it seems reasonable to assume that battles take place within an order of magnitude or two of this distance, implying that cargo pod nukes would have a useful lethal radius and would be combat effective, especially for the plutonium based nuke whose tonne of TNT/meter^2 radius of 1876 km exceeds the Moon's radius of 1737.4 km and whose gigajoule/meter^2 radius of 3837 km exceeds that of Mars's 3390 km. Cargo pod sized nuclear mines could reasonably interdict spaces the size of astronomical bodies.
Anyway that's it for now, need to go to sleep soon. Hope you guys appreciate my irrational attempt to apply logic and math to something as silly as Star Trek, the pinnacle of soft sci-fi which if it were any softer would be liquid.