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Starship Design Bureau

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MysteryCPU said:
I may be missing something, but the angular, widened saucer is not stated to be more compact or have less mass than the phaser design. It is simply wide where the phaser design is long. And there is no description as to the design being more agile. It just allows for either a fighter hanger or foreward facing deflector. Which does affect Warp speed, but not agility.
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It's not that the wider front directly makes the ship faster, it's about keeping the form factor down, and avoiding to have to find somewhere else to put the system. We have quite limited vertical space to meet our design goals.

Based on combat experience with the Borg, the brief is for us to keep the mass and silhouette of the ship to a minimum whilst maximising thrust, as this makes ships nimble and harder targets, increasing their chances of survival:
Sayle said:
Pouring over the logs and reconstructions of the Battle of Wolf 359 you notice a number of common themes for the smaller vessels - while the Miranda-class starships were quickly immobilized and destroyed, the more modern New Orleans-class managed to outright evade some of the Borg Cube's fire. You quickly make a note to all teams that any designs should present a minimal profile to enemy weapons fire and ensure decent engine profiles versus mass factor.
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As a direct result, the Saber should not have a secondary hull to save on weight and present a smaller target:
Sayle said:
This will likely mean eliminating the traditional secondary hull as much as possible, giving the proposed ship a sleeker form factor.
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The option for placing the deflector in the saucer is noted to help us by meaning we don't have to find another place for it in the limited space we have:
Sayle said:
The second idea is to do the opposite, widening the saucer instead of lengthening it, putting the bow of the ship closer to the center of mass. This would present an attractive opportunity for an access point to the heart of the saucer, allowing the placement of a shuttle bay for attack fighters or off-ship operations - or perhaps the primary deflector, allowing you the very limited verticality you have to play with to be devoted to other useful systems.
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If we don't have the deflector placed in the primary hull, then we need to find somewhere else for it. This costs us mass and space, and potentially risks having to add a shrunken or inset secondary hull, which ideally we don't want to do. It's possible we might be able to go with the elongated front and still keep within our mass goal by finding somewhere else for the deflector, but the text states this will come with costs in terms of internal space.

This might be a problem when we come to fit in a shuttle bay as well, or if we want space for the expanded medical bays this quest loves putting in every design, etc.. It's a question of trade-offs.
 
MysteryCPU said:
I may be missing something, but the angular, widened saucer is not stated to be more compact or have less mass than the phaser design. It is simply wide where the phaser design is long. And there is no description as to the design being more agile. It just allows for either a fighter hanger or foreward facing deflector. Which does affect Warp speed, but not agility.
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It's more an implied benefit than outright stated, but I think the general idea is that if we can mount the big deflector dish in the saucer instead of having to fit it in the secondary hull, we can make the secondary hull that much smaller and lighter than it would have to be otherwise.
 
Ah. Thank you for explaining your thoughts.

However, the description of minimizing the secondary hull appears to apply to all three saucer sections. Note that even the OTL Saber class, which appears to use the widened saucer with the integrated deflector, also has a secondary hull. There is no indication that the secondary hull would be larger on the phaser saucer build (I suspect that we will lose a module space for deflector). But, even so, it is an assumption that that would have a large affect on the agility of the ship as that is not stated or really implied.

Even assuming your assumption that the widened hull has an affect on the agility of the ship because of a smaller secondary hull, the concern still exists that if the phaser is not strong enough it doesn't matter how agile the ship is: it will lose and die if it cannot damage the Borg. If it cannot damage the borg, all it can do is be an extra target. I do not want an entire class of ships that cannot damage the borg and are functionally extra targets.

Thus, even a slightly less agile ship that is more likely to be able to damage an adapting borg cube is preferable for a ship designed to take on the borg.
 
I'm not sure we can skimp out on a deflector tbh, not if we want this ship to have any ability to go to warp. So, if not on the saucer section, it'd probably need to be on the conjoined secondary hull.
 
I personally think that any of the three options would work out, and it's a matter of preferred style. I want more firepower myself.
 
[X] An angular, widened saucer to accommodate a forward-facing shuttlebay or deflector.

It's Starfleet. A fightier ship doesn't have to mean more phasers - a larger, more powerful main deflector dish for bouncing the graviton particle beams off and what-not also improves combat capabilities.

As for the size of carriers, a lot of it's about sortie rate, right? More space not only means more fighters, it means you can turn them around faster. But that runs into how they're used, because wet carriers use their fighters at long, long ranges - would a Starfleet carrier do so, or would it be launching to support relatively nearby vessels (and itself), in which case they're not going to be returning from a mission and getting back out again ASAP as often? I'm not sure wet carriers are a great analogy unless the fighters are decently warp-capable, more so than the average carried shuttle.
 
MysteryCPU said:
Ah. Thank you for explaining your thoughts.

However, the description of minimizing the secondary hull appears to apply to all three saucer sections. Note that even the OTL Saber class, which appears to use the widened saucer with the integrated deflector, also has a secondary hull. There is no indication that the secondary hull would be larger on the phaser saucer build (I suspect that we will lose a module space for deflector). But, even so, it is an assumption that that would have a large affect on the agility of the ship as that is not stated or really implied.

Even assuming your assumption that the widened hull has an affect on the agility of the ship because of a smaller secondary hull, the concern still exists that if the phaser is not strong enough it doesn't matter how agile the ship is: it will lose and die if it cannot damage the Borg. If it cannot damage the borg, all it can do is be an extra target. I do not want an entire class of ships that cannot damage the borg and are functionally extra targets.

Thus, even a slightly less agile ship that is more likely to be able to damage an adapting borg cube is preferable for a ship designed to take on the borg.
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Looking up images of the Saber-class, it does look like it does hold the deflector in a secondary hull underneath the main dish. That divot in the front instead appears to be for a shuttle bay. AFAICT from the pictures there isn't anything in the front of the secondary hull besides the deflector dish. It looks like the built it to be the minimum size necessary and no more, which makes sense if they want it to be as small as possible.

And while having strong phasers would be good, phasers aren't our only weapon. We do also have our torpedo launchers that performed above expectations when we prototyped them in the Ambassador-class. And comparing the LCARS diagrams, in every ship we've made so far the torpedo launchers take up less vertical space than the deflector dish. So theoretically, if we did put the deflector in the front so we only needed to put torpedoes in the front of the secondary hull the ship could be thinner than a Saber that stuck the deflector underneath, whether that's because it stuck more phasers or a bay in the saucer, while still packing punch for the Borg.
 
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Changing my vote, interested to see how these dual hulls might turn out.

[X] A standard saucer with dual secondary hulls.
 
[X] A standard saucer with dual secondary hulls

More juice is more options, hopefully that can also be rout d to the impulse engines.
 
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[X] An angular, widened saucer to accommodate a forward-facing shuttlebay or deflector.

Screw the deflector/shuttle bay, let's make this a torpedo boat!
 
[X] An angular, widened saucer to accommodate a forward-facing shuttlebay or deflector.

w i d e

I really like the idea of the defector at the front rather than having to make a recessed secondary hull to hold it.

Alternatively this could be the start of a light carrier but I don't know how useful that would be in the current tactical situation.
 
[X] An elongated forward saucer section to maximise the power of a continuous phaser strip.

It seems like a lot of the arguments for the angled forward deflector aren't particularly concerned with the fact a ship that's maneuvering to avoid incoming fire has more limited angles it can return fire at.

If our attempts to evade incoming attacks erode our ability to retaliate, that's not exactly a winning proposition. The point of any evasion in this scenario requires that the warship be able to provide credible firepower in the process.
 
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[X] An elongated forward saucer section to maximise the power of a continuous phaser strip.
 
Arcus said:
Do you actually have a logical rationale for why this would be the case, or are you just assuming?

(IMO fighters in space are frankly a silly idea to begin with, but if the setting already has them...)
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Arcus said:
"Wet naval carriers do it, so space carriers should also follow the same rules" is equivalent to arguing that modern "armoured cavalry" should use horse shaped mechanical walkers for maximum effectiveness because cavalry historically used horses.

Also, the reason why supercarriers are advantaged over smaller designs is that they can have longer runways instead of having to cope with VTOLs or other hacks.

And the comparison of bigger vs smaller should probably be by equivalent tonnage. Comparing a 5 million tonne ship to a ship that masses 1/5th the tonnage is silly. Sure, it can carry 5 times as many supplies, but that doesn't make it exponentially better if you could have 5 of the smaller ships for the same cost.
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It's not *just* the longer runways, although that is a major factor in enabling the operation of larger aircraft like AWACS that smaller carriers cannot support. Carrier operations make use of expensive equipment such as catapults, arresting gear, workshops and maintenance facilities, etc., so IRL reductions in carrier size don't really correspond linearly to cost savings unless you start cutting hard into overall capabilities. Similarly, the number of fighters required to maintain a defensive perimeter doesn't vary with size, so smaller carriers have to dedicate a larger proportion of their aircraft to self-defense rather than all the other things aircraft are useful for. Having more space to play around with also does measurably impact sortie rate; IIRC when the Gerald R. Ford program was starting up, the US did some tests which concluded that larger carriers, even with the exact same number of aircraft, were still able to generate ~25% more sorties over the same time period compared to a medium carrier, because the extra room made aircraft handling/rearmament/etc. much easier. Finally, larger carriers have more volume to dedicate to deep stores of fuel, munitions, replacement parts, etc. which is obviously helpful in general.

Of course, as you say, a lot of these factors won't apply to Star Trek in the same way. Star Trek shuttles probably don't need the same proportional volume of launch and landing equipment, and the combination of smaller numbers and fancy tech means the raw number and size of maintenance facilities can probably be reduced, in turn reducing the minimum efficient size such that it might be reasonable to fit out the current ship design as a carrier. Furthermore, as far as I know Star Trek fighters are by and large primarily employed offensively, so shuttles do not need to be reserved for self-defense, scratching reason two off the list. The third reason would still broadly apply, as while transporters can be employed to make servicing shuttles easier, the actual shuttles still need to be moved around the hangar to launch or whatever. The final reason also kind of applies, but if I am not mistaken Star Trek fighters make use of the same fuel and munitions as the actual ship, which vastly reduces the amount of storage volume that needs to be dedicated specifically to supporting the fighters, once again cutting down the minimum efficient size. Thus, while larger might still strictly speaking be better for Star Trek carriers, the differences in technology and employment narrow a lot of the size-related gaps in capability compared to IRL carriers.
 
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[X] An angular, widened saucer to accommodate a forward-facing shuttlebay or deflector.

A no-secondary-hull ship sounds interesting.
 
[X] An elongated forward saucer section to maximise the power of a continuous phaser strip.

Given that this is a national security emergency with an enemy that is significantly more advanced than ever encountered by Starfleet, having the ability to actually hurt Borg ships is the most important consideration. Everything else is frankly secondary.
 
[X] An angular, widened saucer to accommodate a forward-facing shuttlebay or deflector.

got to admit i think modding the steamrunner would fit our wants better but oh well
 
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