We never got actual specs, but it definitely would've driven the cost up to have four nacelles, and the main reason it failed was that the four nacelles were an attempt to maximise the cruise performance of the obsolete warp 7 engine. Insert that Omni-Man "Look at what they need to mimic a fraction of our power," meme with an Excalibur pointing to a Radiant.
Honestly, it looks really neat, and does feel significantly more like a ship you could see on a TOS-era version of Lower Decks or the like.
So I hated how the Newton design turned out enough to do my own fully noncanon version of it right away. My hope is that this manages to cross over into 'charmingly eccentric,' rather than 'universally hideous.'
If nothing else, we can call it the Mirror-Universe version.
I'll be appending this to the original Newton-class MSD shortly.
We do know she is considered an Engineering Cruiser per the fleet listing.
I think we can conclude that the Radiant has forward-only photorps. Because if she had a pair of aft photorps, chances would be pretty good she'd frag pursuing D7s!
Even a single aft torp wouldn't be enough to fight off a d6 or d7, not unless you had crazy strong shields. We were told the Archer class couldn't deter d6s with 1 aft photorps and invariably died trying.
Oooh, it's a smol bean, instead of another Sagarmatha saucer re-use...
Is this a quest canon design according to sayle? If so it offers some very interesting technical insights.Radiant-class
Classification: light cruiser
Length: 241 metres
Beam: 112 metres
Height: 75 metres
Decks: 7
Mass: 110,000 tons
Type-1 deflector shields
3 Type-2 phasers
2 Type-1 photon torpedo launchers
Efficient Cruise: Warp 5.6
Maximum Cruise: Warp 6.7
Maximum Warp: Warp 7.2
Range: 156 LY
Science:
-Expanded Medical Facilities
Engineering:
-Cargo Bay
-Shuttlebay (4 shuttles)
Other:
-Additional Antimatter Storage
Depends on if it's threadmarked, but given the Saladin and Newton were put under media I'd say the odds are decent.
Looking back at the revised Newton, I actually wonder if a refit-Newton might wind up as our equivalent to the TMP-era Miranda, with a replacement design coming along with the Excelsior to instead take up the "massive longevity" part of the Miranda's legacy - unless my deck counting is very wrong, if you split the impulse engine installation there is actually just enough room for a full 7-8 deck vertical warp core with a deck or so to spare sandwiched between the impulse engines. It's probably not the best solution to "Warp 8 engineering ship", but it honestly feels a bit like a San Fran solution - why completely re-design when it's possible to just modify an existing design to take newer components? And if you're opening up the back of the ship to a full rebuild to support the new core, splitting the impulse engines to provide more room in the center probably isn't too much of an issue. They've even got experience with splitting the Type 3, assuming that's what's in use on the Radiant-class.
Radiant-class
Thanks, that's good to know!
It's because the fleet is tiny. If the cost of the resources needed to build starships is the limiting factor, then realistically every person in Starfleet should be an elite who had to compete to get their spot in Starfleet at all.
I kinda assumed we already had lots of smaller, weaker ships like that, but the issue is they'd end up being slower and weaker than our warp ships by such a degree they'd steadily become less relevant.
While a chunk of the cost of a combat vessel is in the nacelles and warp core, it's not actually enough of a proportion of the cost, even assuming the larger fusion reactors were free, to make that viable.
What if we nix the the warp core and Nacelles completely and just have another ship tractor beam it to the location it's needed..
warp speed is used to get around in system IIRC
That's what I was talking about. If you did that and relied solely on fusion power for your shields and weapons and impulse engines and everything else, and even if that fusion power system was completely free, that still would leave most of the cost of a similarly equipped starship to pay for. Because while the nacelles and warp core are a good chunk of the price of a starship, it's not actually enough to make single-system vessels at all cost-effective for defense. You're looking at maybe being able to build five monitors instead of four starships of the same combat capability, and those starships are vastly more effective at actually waging a war because they can do anything besides sit and wait for the enemy to attack this one place.
