Starfleet Design Bureau

Oh, and interesting note, the Soyuz is likely significantly larger than the Bird of Prey she is designed to fight.

The Soyuz is 127 meters long, 17.5 meters tall, and 102.5 meters wide, and most of that is ship volume.

A Bird of Prey canonically seems to be roughly 109 meters long, 20 meters tall, and 92 meters wide, and most of that length is neck and significant amounts of that height is wing drop.

And it is quite likely that the bird of prey has a single thruster. There isn't much space to mount one save directly behind the main hull. With it's low mass it can likely obtain good or very good maneuverability without needing a second thruster.

Note, the canonical MASS of a Bird of Prey is 30,000 tons.

We went with a 150,000 ton space frame.

I think there is good odds we are literally 5 times bigger than a Bird of Prey. Unless it is off our charts in terms of speed that's a nightmare for it.
 
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We were told the BoP we're comparing with is 150 KT, isn't it?

The 30K one seems a bit ridiculous. They should be made of literal tissue paper and incapable of Warp at that mass, the Nacelles alone would exceed 30K tons. Even the Skate, which cut down everything except for guns and a Warp Drive and was largely incapable of independent operations, was 60K.

There's "More Advanced", and then there's Literal Space Magic. a 30 Kiloton BoP that is a credible threat to anything would require Literal Space Magic, I don't care what official material says. A god damn Constable outmasses that over threefold. And that only needs one nacelle!
 
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We were told the BoP we're comparing with is 150 KT, isn't it?

The 30K one seems a bit ridiculous. They should be made of literal tissue paper and incapable of Warp at that mass, the Nacelles alone would exceed 30K tons. Even the Skate, which cut down everything except for guns and a Warp Drive and was largely incapable of independent operations, was 60K.

There's "More Advanced", and then there's Literal Space Magic. a 30 Kiloton BoP that is a credible threat to anything would require Literal Space Magic, I don't care what official material says. A god damn Constable outmasses that over threefold. And that only needs one nacelle!
You appear to be right. The story post does suggest it's a 150K ton ship.

Though if it is the canon size I would expect something closer to 50-100k tons. The simple truth is that a BoP is smaller in overall dims than our ship and a whole lot more spindly.

But by all canonical accounts a BoP is tiny.


And apparently the canonical answer to where the nacelles are is that the nacelles are the humps on the body of the ship. They use an internal nacelle and have apparently found a way to make one that's really short and stumpy.
 
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What it boils down to is hard numbers. There's only so far you can trim a starship down and still have it be Warp Capable, without making some massive sacrifices. I'd probably argue that 60K is the minimum for a viable Warp-capable starship, and that comes at some Serious Costs.

If the Official Numbers say otherwise, the Official Numbers are probably wrong. I can't see a 30 kiloton ship being physically capable of a tactical engagement. That's about the same mass as a WW2 Essex-class Aircraft Carrier, there is no conceivable way that this is capable of mildly threatening anything tougher than a cargo ship.
 
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What it boils down to is hard numbers. There's only so far you can trim a starship down and still have it be Warp Capable, without making some massive sacrifices. I'd probably argue that 60K is the minimum for a viable Warp-capable starship, and that comes at some Serious Costs.

If the Official Numbers say otherwise, the Official Numbers are probably wrong. I can't see a 30 kiloton ship being physically capable of a tactical engagement. That's about the same mass as a WW2 Essex-class Aircraft Carrier, there is no conceivable way that this is capable of mildly threatening anything tougher than a cargo ship.
Keep in mind that BoPs are meant to operate in wolfpacks of 3+ ships, and essentially have two guns, a Torpedo launcher, and that's pretty much it. Those things are small enough to pass UNDER the golden gate bridge, remember; they're freaking tiny, and their hull geometry means they occupy only a small portion of the volume implied by their maximum dimensions. 30 ktons dry mass I'd well believe! Especially since the Klingons could well have something like our electro-ceramics that reduces hull mass.
 
Keep in mind that BoPs are meant to operate in wolfpacks of 3+ ships, and essentially have two guns, a Torpedo launcher, and that's pretty much it. Those things are small enough to pass UNDER the golden gate bridge, remember; they're freaking tiny, and their hull geometry means they occupy only a small portion of the volume implied by their maximum dimensions. 30 ktons dry mass I'd well believe! Especially since the Klingons could well have something like our electro-ceramics that reduces hull mass.

The problem is that This should be physically impossible given that Warp Nacelles are actually mandatory if you want to actually get someplace anytime soon, and that alone is going to eat 15-20 kilotons.

A tiny 30K BoP is a commerce raider, which requires a certain degree of endurance, but with only 15-10 kilotons of mass left that has to go into everything else, this should be impossible. The alternative is that their Warp Nacelles operate several generations behind everyone else's, but in exchange are highly miniaturized. I can buy that.

But that means you need to load supplies, because you can't just Commerce Raid your way across empty space until you find a target. It means you need sensors to detect one, or an insanely sophisticated "Just in Time" logistics setup that can ensure your cloaked commerce raiders don't need to carry more than maybe a week's supplies with them and never miss their delivery. You need fuel, you need...

Look, there's just so many things that you can't handwave off that costs Mass. Having all of this and the armaments to do more than tickle a dedicated-for-purpose starship strains plausibility to the breaking point and beyond.

It's much more reasonable to just go "It's 30 kilotons of mass... After you ignore the Necessary Components that are physically required to even come to the table."

I don't care if canon says otherwise. Because if that were true, it would mean the Klingon Empire have mastered miniaturization of technology that the Borg could only dream of, hundreds of years before they were first discovered. Something has to give.

Either Birds of Prey are functionally parasite craft that go out in short-range wolfpacks attached to an invisible tender ship that can make sure they're always supplied at all times and have never been detected or discovered across all of history, and are only capable of winning fights against light shipping when operating en-masse and with the cloak advantage and explode if something so much as looks at them with a hostile intent--or they actually have a more reasonable mass than thirty fucking kilotons
 
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The problem is that This should be physically impossible given that Warp Nacelles are actually mandatory if you want to actually get someplace anytime soon, and that alone is going to eat 15-20 kilotons.

A tiny 30K BoP is a commerce raider, which requires a certain degree of endurance, but with only 15-10 kilotons of mass left that has to go into everything else, this should be impossible. The alternative is that their Warp Nacelles operate several generations behind everyone else's, but in exchange are highly miniaturized. I can buy that.

But that means you need to load supplies, because you can't just Commerce Raid your way across empty space until you find a target. It means you need sensors to detect one, or an insanely sophisticated "Just in Time" logistics setup that can ensure your cloaked commerce raiders don't need to carry more than maybe a week's supplies with them and never miss their delivery. You need fuel, you need...

Look, there's just so many things that you can't handwave off that costs Mass. Having all of this and the armaments to do more than tickle a dedicated-for-purpose starship strains plausibility to the breaking point and beyond.

It's much more reasonable to just go "It's 30 kilotons of mass... After you ignore the Necessary Components that are physically required to even come to the table."

I don't care if canon says otherwise. Because if that were true, it would mean the Klingon Empire have mastered miniaturization of technology that the Borg could only dream of, hundreds of years before they were first discovered. Something has to give.

Either Birds of Prey are functionally parasite craft that go out in short-range wolfpacks attached to an invisible tender ship that can make sure they're always supplied at all times and have never been detected or discovered across all of history, and are only capable of winning fights against light shipping when operating en-masse and with the cloak advantage and explode if something so much as looks at them with a hostile intent--or they actually have a more reasonable mass than thirty fucking kilotons
The TOS technical canon was a mess pretty often.
While by the time TNG arrived the people creating the show did consult engineers and actually had internally mostly consistent technical manuals for a lot of things, the early series had a lot of "rule of cool" approach going for it.
 
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I'm confused why nacelle mass or dimensions would be fixed. Wouldn't each one depend heavily on the platform we're putting it on? A Warp 5 nacelle on a shuttle would be different than one on a constitution.
 
I'm confused why nacelle mass or dimensions would be fixed. Wouldn't each one depend heavily on the platform we're putting it on? A Warp 5 nacelle on a shuttle would be different than one on a constitution.

Warp Fields are hard to make, ones capable of pushing a starship harder still. You can't reach speeds relevant to an interstellar polity with will and conventional thrusters alone.

And anything that isn't made of hopes and dreams takes up mass and energy.
 
Warp Fields are hard to make, ones capable of pushing a starship harder still. You can't reach speeds relevant to an interstellar polity with will and conventional thrusters alone.

And anything that isn't made of hopes and dreams takes up mass and energy.

Agreed but the idea that all warp 5 engines are the same size is ridiculous. We may not have the tech to miniaturize something at that speed down that far but the principle remains, especially if you've got an enemy willing to sacrifice top speed for size.

I wouldn't expect a BOP to be running shuttlepod sized warp nacelles but I also wouldn't expect them to be mounting the same nacelles as a Constitution. If you get rid of all the extra structure for the nacelle strut and get to double dip on the surrounding structure by also using it as structure for the ship then you also shave off a ton of weight.
 
I'm confused why nacelle mass or dimensions would be fixed. Wouldn't each one depend heavily on the platform we're putting it on? A Warp 5 nacelle on a shuttle would be different than one on a constitution.
I was about to say

Given the ship's dimensions it almost certainly has lighter Nacelles than a 150 kton ship that's five times the mass; equally, given that we don't see that style of Nacelle on anything else it rather suggests that there is some sort of limitation or compromise being made there. It's also likely that the 30 ktons figure is the dry mass- that is, without fuel, supplies, atmosphere, and so on, with the "actual" mass being higher.

And of course, as I pointed out earlier, we developed a technology that makes our hulls lighter per unit of volume recently.

Saying that the Klingons, who are explicitly stated to be ahead of us at least in some areas, could not have done the same, seems ... Questionable.
 
Let's hope we don't go through a Great Resizing of our own... :V

Bop crewmember: Captain! The Federation ships are... shrinking...
 
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Let's hope we don't go through a Great Resizing of our own... :V

Bop crewmember: Captain! The Federation ships are... shrinking...
It probably doesn't help that the B'rel and K'vort classes are visually identical but the latter is double the dimensions of the former (explicitly; K'vorts are 2× scale B'rels in universe because the B'rel design worked so well that the Empire went "I want this, only bigger so it can have more guns")

Edit:
Seriously, look at this thing.

It's tiny
 
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Don't know how accurate this chart is I think its from a non-cannon AU mostly but the Klingons definitely like building the same ship but a different size, in fact it seems pretty common for most star trek species to have a bunch of ship classes that all look very similar. Out of universe its due to kit-bashing but still.

CDN media
 
Sounds good.

Here is my model of the Soyuz.



She looks pretty good.

For size reference, here she is with a Sagarmartha



Fun fact. If you are in the forward arc these three ships hit equally hard.
What is the purpose of the thin strip of hull directly below the main deflector dish? What is the benefit of that not being empty space when it partially blocks the deflectors field of view?
 
What is the purpose of the thin strip of hull directly below the main deflector dish? What is the benefit of that not being empty space when it partially blocks the deflectors field of view?
It's shown on the top profile as fully coming to a point, so I included it. I literally just do a 1 to 1 conversion of the 2d models to 3d models.

And while deflectors seem to need a mostly clear field of view they don't seem to have trouble with obstructions all that much. They have no problem deflecting stuff on the far side of the saucer of the Sagarmathas, and that thing blocks a lot of their field of view.
 
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