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Starfleet Design Bureau

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Starship Design Bureau Starfleet Design Bureau
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Skippy said:
As I say, structural integrity fields are a thing, and make ships much more resilient than they would otherwise be. Given that polarised hull plating uses energy to make matter harder than it otherwise be, and a SIF also makes matter more resilient, they seem strongly related.

There are armour technologies we see later on, like the ablative armour used on the Sovereign and Defiant classes among others, or the armour Voyager used against the Borg. But these also take power from the ship's main reactor to deploy, and the future armour can even regenerate when more power is supplied. So neither of them are precisely "armour" in the sense we might use it today.

It seems like Star Trek weaponry is really devastatingly powerful, and most conventional matter simply can't cut it as armour without a lot of added help.

The duranium hull of a starship with its SIF fields at full does seem pretty resilient in its own right, though. Given the quantities of energy involved in even a single phaser/torpedo blast, the fact that ships aren't always vapourised in one hit implies they must be pretty damn tough.
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Looks like the timeline goes from armored ships, to shielded ships, to shielded and armored ships. It'd be interesting if armor technology could eventually catch back up to shielding technology, meaning you'd see some ships deliberately eschew shields in favor of only using armor.
 
Skippy said:
There are armour technologies we see later on, like the ablative armour used on the Sovereign and Defiant classes among others, or the armour Voyager used against the Borg. But these also take power from the ship's main reactor to deploy, and the future armour can even regenerate when more power is supplied. So neither of them are precisely "armour" in the sense we might use it today.

It seems like Star Trek weaponry is really devastatingly powerful, and most conventional matter simply can't cut it as armour without a lot of added help.
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The Sovereign and Defiant's "ablative armour" are not the same as future Voyager's "ablative armour" and do not require power, cannot regenerate, and are not deployed in the field. Voyager's ablative armour is more like replicated plates.

Star Trek weaponry is really devastatingly powerful. Weapons fire on unshielded objects like asteroids and planetary surfaces are extremely violent. But Star Trek ship hulls also seem to be extra resistant(1) to energy weapons and torpedoes. When phasers and torpedoes hit shields and hulls the damage is much more restrained. Seems those structural integrity fields really mitigate a lot of damage.
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(1) This is an alternative future where shields replaced hull plating, but shields were down. Also someone finally targets the bridge. (PUT THAT SOMEWHERE INSIDE DANGIT!)
 
Derpmind said:
Looks like the timeline goes from armored ships, to shielded ships, to shielded and armored ships. It'd be interesting if armor technology could eventually catch back up to shielding technology, meaning you'd see some ships deliberately eschew shields in favor of only using armor.
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I've seen some things claiming polarized hull plating is something that isn't as complicated as shields and can be worked out earlier but is just stupidly hard to make, so once you've worked out shields it's just not worth it, in theory maybe it could be useful as a back up, but the investment is just too large for the reward.

I guess that eventually some advancement eventually made armor easier to produce.
 
NavySeel said:
I've seen some things claiming polarized hull plating is something that isn't as complicated as shields and can be worked out earlier but is just stupidly hard to make, so once you've worked out shields it's just not worth it, in theory maybe it could be useful as a back up, but the investment is just too large for the reward.

I guess that eventually some advancement eventually made armor easier to produce.
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I feel like this could be true. Polarized hull plating implies the plates themselves were made for it, while structural integrity fields seems to just strengthen all parts of the ship as long as it's connected.

It also sounds like hull plating requires work done on every single external plate, while shield emitters only require a few emitters on the external hull somewhere. Sounds like shields emitters take more energy in exchange for giving better protection, taking up less space, and uses less mass. If you have strong enough structural integrity fields and shields, hull plating becomes extraneous.
 
As a general thought, I do hope to imagine the NXs (I really hate that 'NX' is the class name rather than 'Enterprise-class' or something) get to stick around a bit longer than in canon, even if only in a reduced capacity as like monitors or something.
 
The big thing is maintenance. You only have to work on the shield emitters for normal maintenance and if they take battle damage.

Whole energized plates are going to take damage no matter when they get hit and you have to do normal maintenance that's probably way more intensive. Also, you have to run energy conduits throughout your entire hull instead of fixed points complicating ship design even further.
 
AntiSanity said:
The Sovereign and Defiant's "ablative armour" are not the same as future Voyager's "ablative armour" and do not require power, cannot regenerate, and are not deployed in the field. Voyager's ablative armour is more like replicated plates.
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I did distinguish between them in my post? You're completely right to note though that the ablative armour used by warships of the Defiant/Sovie era though, I had misremembered that.
 
The NX Hulls look big enough that we can make use of em until the TNG era. Its a heavy cruiser hull now but could be an escort hull in the future.
 
Bedpotato said:
Why not? Our NX class is as multirole as the Miranda and in the future will be cheap and reliable. The only problem is numbers to be build.
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Being a bit more serious, the Miranda is significantly more advanced than we were able to make the NX with available tech: far faster, with a duotronic computer, with shields rather than polarized hull plating, with working transporters, etc.
 
Lonosic said:
I forgot that show existed. It lost me with its interpretation of the Federation-Klingon war of the Original series that after season 1 I just put it in my mind closet of "weird."
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Same didn't really watch it, Picard, or SNW; hope we can diverge from canon there. Only new-trek I've really watched are the movies.

Those shows kinda just don't exist beyond a few concepts taken from them, in my personal Star Trek timeline. Though the timeline of this quest is obviously up to the QM.

I will say that STO does a decent job incorporating Discovery stuff, their storylines involving it are fairly alright.
 
First post on this thread and I haven't really followed the Polarized Hull plating sub-thing.
But can I please note that the technology is still used at least up until 2383.
We have seen references to it in DS9, Voyager, Prodigy, and a large chunk of Lower Decks S2 Finale revolved around removing it and the outer hull from their own ship because they couldn't demagnetize it fast enough?
 
Commotion$ocks said:
First post on this thread and I haven't really followed the Polarized Hull plating sub-thing.
But can I please note that the technology is still used at least up until 2383.
We have seen references to it in DS9, Voyager, Prodigy, and a large chunk of Lower Decks S2 Finale revolved around removing it and the outer hull from their own ship because they couldn't demagnetize it fast enough?
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Yeah, its definitely used in a less important role than it is in ENT though.
 
Commotion$ocks said:
First post on this thread and I haven't really followed the Polarized Hull plating sub-thing.
But can I please note that the technology is still used at least up until 2383.
We have seen references to it in DS9, Voyager, Prodigy, and a large chunk of Lower Decks S2 Finale revolved around removing it and the outer hull from their own ship because they couldn't demagnetize it fast enough?
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That's a great point, which I completely forgot about.

This is why I've been saying that it isn't like the Federation ever stopped thinking it was important to make the hulls of their ships stronger. A starship from the 23rd or 24th centuries even without its shields might well be more resilient than an NX-class from the 22nd century. We certainly see Voyager and the Enterprise-D losing shields and still surviving hits and stellar phenomena which would probably have turned the NX-01 Enterprise into a ball of plasma in a single hit. It's just that weapons have gotten considerably more powerful over a couple of centuries too, and it isn't until ablative armour in the 2370s that the pendulum starts to move back.

Even then, according to Memory Alpha, there's apparently references to the Enterprise-D incorporating a layer of ablative armour in its outer hull. So I suspect that the ablative armour we see on the Defiant and other ships might have been a result of iterative development and improvement rather than someone suddenly running around Utopia Planitia screaming that they'd had a eureka moment.
 
AntiSanity said:
(1) This is an alternative future where shields replaced hull plating, but shields were down. Also someone finally targets the bridge. (PUT THAT SOMEWHERE INSIDE DANGIT!)
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To be fair - the entire starship started exploding from the hits that blew the bridge open. I can't say that putting the bridge inside the heart of the vessel would have helped in this situation, it looks like Enterprise's defenses were completely depleted.
 
Zimmerwald1915 said:
Well naturally. Nowhere else on the ship except possibly Main Engineering are the control consoles composed of magnetically-contained antimatter.
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Its not Star Trek if the bridge isn't highly explosive and prone to breaking, also whatever on the ship that always breaks out into steam must also be there, otherwise how would we know the ship is damaged.
 
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