- Pronouns
- She/Her
I would never use the word quiet to describe a Gaeni tech cruiser:
Last edited:
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
-
- Tags
- star trek exploration fully automated luxury gay space communism top level canon (canon) #hashtagcontent all-encompassing space amoeba cardassian boy bands cardassian magical girls darkest bureaucracy debate makes the qm cackle like palpatine hoh is an empire quest it has to be foreign infiltrators more ships ship happens singers delenda est starfleet this is not an empire quest ur waifu is collective?
I would never use the word quiet to describe a Gaeni tech cruiser:
AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
A basic axiom that a lot of geeks and essays like that ignore is "Don't assume that you have enough information to assert that people portrayed in universe as competent are fucking stupid"
We have to assume that the results that we see are come to via smart people doing things smartly even when the plot and visuals counter indicate it. It's like the script claiming that ships are a hundreds of kilometers apart and moving at significant fractions of the speed of light when firing on each other (Even shown in tactical displays!) but the visuals show them engaging very slowly at tens of meters apart.
Egregious enough errors will certainly break suspension of disbelief, but so will production errors or bad acting.
We simply have to assume that in-universe people described as competent in their fields actually are competent.
In Trek for instance we can assume that most designs (Except the Intrepid class because that Chibi Soverign class honestly seems to be a delicately put together hanger queen of a technology testbed that is disabled by fucking cheese > : V) Have a variety of backup systems that we never hear about because it's not that important; no one really has to get panicked until [Final Safety-measure] fails. We can actually assume that Starfleet ships are safer than say, Cardassian ones, because they actually give a shit about their crews.
Starship design in particular is one of those things that really stands out to me as an example of geeks talking out of their assess. That essay you linked, for example, bitches about no real ship ever explodes from a mere mechanic hit as opposed to a magazine hit and complains about how Matter/Anti-matter drives fail deadly. I mean, 1: The Antimatter reserves are the magazines as well so that's a pedantic rebuttal. But 2: Oil, and coal, and steam, or even uranium doesn't fucking explode when it hits air or the deck. A Trek ship has no recourse to loosing anti-matter containment aside from hoping to put it somewhere else.
Honestly due to Star Trek being in the future, modern geeks bitching about starship design is about as relevant as someone complaining about the sail placement on a Gerald R Ford-class and wondering why the thing is so flat when you should just put some goddamn masts on all that open deck space. Or wondering where the Oars on an Essex class are. I mean if there is some failure with the ship's fancy future drive system (That operates on lighting a fire under the ship's deck?!?! How fucking dumb is that ???) just use a simple and proven technology as a backup right?
The fact that most trek ships, even across divides of ideology, doctrine, and techbase have commonalities between them; Involving, for instance, very delicate shapes that seem oriented horizontally along the path of the nacelles seems to indicate that it's actually less efficient to do "more efficient" things. Optimizing a ship for SIF savings and mass in the center may be like a modern warship adding masts and moving the superstructure around so that you can throw up semaphore towers.
Undoubtedly these concerns crop up when designing Trek Ships, but the people doing the designing probably have hundreds of other more important concerns and would rather move things around so that the Cochran fields eek out another .5 of high speed warp than worrying about slight thruster efficiency or wondering why someone would fuck up shield emitter coverage to worry about.... torque??? when you can just tie the SIFs into the shield emitter grid more tightly.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
This is a lot of very very different suggestions. The obvious answer is "well, you'd be watching a different series, go watch that series instead of trying to turn Star Trek into YOUR series." But, to be precise...
1) The hull would be more tightly integrated, but accidents in the engineering hull would be more likely to propagate through to the heavily crewed parts of the ship and cause major damages. Reduced surface area means less room for sensor arrays and other surface-mounted systems. But, again, sturdier hull. Better for battleships, not much of an improvement for explorer vessels.
2) Whatever reason the Federation has for putting the bridge in an exposed location, I assume there is one, rather than literally all Fed designs being incredibly stupid for hundreds of years. Whatever that reason is, maybe it's not important, but it's there.
3) With enough shuttlebay redesign, a heavy armored bulkhead set of doors isn't a problem- it just uses up extra surface area on the hull compared to a force field system.
4) Adding numerous nacelles would almost CERTAINLY be suboptimal for purposes of making the ship perform as a warp drive ship, but would reduce accident vulnerability. Good for battleships, as long as you don't expect your battleships to maneuver or travel as fast as other, better optimized ships with the usual twin nacelle configuration, I guess?
5) Shuttles that were lifting bodies would be slightly less efficient for their overall purposes, but with extensive training MIGHT be able to be landed on planetary surfaces in the unlikely event of a shuttle engine failure, IF the planet is the kind of place where you can land an unpowered hypersonic glider AND the engine failure occurs while you're in the atmosphere. Consider the awkwardness of landing the space shuttle. Without a runway to land on. Not easy.
6) There are lots of reasons to think there are separate computers. They're networked together, yes, probably for a lot of reasons I could go into but I don't feel like writing several paragraphs on that when unless you actually want to focus on this one. It would probably be possible and very likely is in fact ALREADY DONE to have at least some independent computing devices on the ship, but this doesn't mean it's a good idea to totally lock out different computer networks from one another with no interplay between them.
7) I strongly suspect they DO have internal bulkheads and circuit breakers and things. The lack of seat belts is a frustratingly necessary convention of Hollywood production, where the bridge is just a big room and the only way for the core cast of actors to indicate that anything seriously bad has happened to the ship is for the actors to go bouncing around the room while squibs explode on the bridge. Other shows have the same problem, you know.
Also, everything AKuz said.
Enterprise:I would never use the word quiet to describe a Gaeni tech cruiser:
"In my defense, she was running on low emissions to cut down self-interference for a long-range telescopic survey when I first saw her. She WAS very quiet."
[beat]
"This lasted about six minutes. I now retract my that part of my original description, and will never use it again."
Last edited:
The warp field has to be projected between the nacelles. We assume a corresponding increase in complexity adding more warp nacelles to project between; more nacelles are less reliable because more can go wrong. So having lots on the outside of a sphere or cube is actually a net negative under conventional understanding. If we change the assumptions it may be possible.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Also depends on effects of a failure. If any failure is unacceptable (either because failures are necessarily energetic catastrophes or because any speed loss is crippling), then you minimize points of failure and harden those as much as you can. If failures result in degraded capability (take a nacelle or nacelle pair out of service) and degraded capabilities are acceptable, then you start making redundancy/expense tradeoffs.
Re: computers on trek ships.
I recently found my old Galaxy-class tech manual.
From memory, the Galaxy has three main computers, each in a small FTL field and each capable of running the whole ship. They are also 7-8 stories high. I assume because of the whole localised warp field going on.
There another 300+ smaller non-FTL computers as a backup to the main ones. Collectively the backups can run the ship if all three main systems are disabled.
I recently found my old Galaxy-class tech manual.
From memory, the Galaxy has three main computers, each in a small FTL field and each capable of running the whole ship. They are also 7-8 stories high. I assume because of the whole localised warp field going on.
There another 300+ smaller non-FTL computers as a backup to the main ones. Collectively the backups can run the ship if all three main systems are disabled.
Last edited:
- Location
- the Moon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I submit that there's no good reason to move it. It's a small target, very well defended from below, and (importantly) not near critical combat systems. Losing the command crew still leaves a ship with engines, power weapons, and a mostly intact chain of command
- Location
- Central Standard Time
In converted tbg terms, that means three or five primary supercomputing banks for critical operations, with many nodes around the ship in redundant networks.
There's probably a couple secondaries as backup and for scientific computing.
UbeOne
Daydreaming CPU
- Location
- Philippines
- Pronouns
- She/Her
*reminds me of the exposed bridges of Star Destroyers*
- Location
- USA
Eh. I was re-reading one of the sci fi comics I like. This guy makes fun of lots of different sci fi in this particular comic, and he uses his comics a bit of a mouthpiece for his politics, but he makes a few points that specifically reference TNG episodes in the first story arc of the comic. I tried to describe some of the issues here, but it came out a bit disjointed. Still, the worldbuilding is fantastic, if you can stomach the politics and nitpicking of other settings, or enjoy that kind of thing (I do, but I have to be in a particular mood to do so). Still, to do the nitpicking, he obviously has to know about and love the source material in great detail, so there's that. Anyway, here is the comic in question.
Last edited:
- Location
- madison
that is so very much not the vibe I got from it. To me it came across as a rather mean-spirited strawman of a series he had a beef with. Though the part where he rags on their society as completely unrealistic in a setting where half of it is how the objectivist society that he never goes into much detail on is a super efficient utopia was pretty funny.
Last edited:
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
As someone who's nitpicked quite a few works, no, you really don't have to love the source to know it backwards and forwards.
For example: I know a lot about Twilight!
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah. I'm familiar with that comic.
I'm not going to dispute the author's sense of humor. And he certainly is good at applying a critical eye to things when he doesn't let his biases run away with him. For instance, he gets some really good shots in against the Prime Directive that I think are well-founded.
But on the whole, a lot of his 'lampoon Star Trek' jokes are based on deliberate parodies that exaggerate elements of the setting to the point of strawman status, liking having the captain blatantly calling other alien species 'lesser races' because 'lol Federation smugness,' like having brig force fields you can short out with a pitcher of water (that is obligingly summoned by your cell's replicator)
Or strawmannery that only works because the protagonist is in a position to smugly rant about how his people have superior and safer technologies. And outright fabricating extra drawbacks to the Trek-parody people's technology. So he gets to call the "Fedorks" stupid for using antimatter reactors, because his people naturally have safe/clean/too-cheap-to-meter zero point energy. Or freak out about transporters by making up the idea of them doing this to people.
A similarly vicious and falsifying parody of the protagonist's own civilization would look singularly bad.
I'm not going to dispute the author's sense of humor. And he certainly is good at applying a critical eye to things when he doesn't let his biases run away with him. For instance, he gets some really good shots in against the Prime Directive that I think are well-founded.
But on the whole, a lot of his 'lampoon Star Trek' jokes are based on deliberate parodies that exaggerate elements of the setting to the point of strawman status, liking having the captain blatantly calling other alien species 'lesser races' because 'lol Federation smugness,' like having brig force fields you can short out with a pitcher of water (that is obligingly summoned by your cell's replicator)
Or strawmannery that only works because the protagonist is in a position to smugly rant about how his people have superior and safer technologies. And outright fabricating extra drawbacks to the Trek-parody people's technology. So he gets to call the "Fedorks" stupid for using antimatter reactors, because his people naturally have safe/clean/too-cheap-to-meter zero point energy. Or freak out about transporters by making up the idea of them doing this to people.
A similarly vicious and falsifying parody of the protagonist's own civilization would look singularly bad.
AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Tangentially, I've always found the "Transporters kill you and make a duplicate at the other end" thing a bit funny because canonically speaking you maintain continuity of consciousness during transport.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
To be fair, it would be entirely possible to have subjective continuity of consciousness and still have the "kill/duplicate" thing going on. It'd just mean "you never knew what hit you." Since your reconstructed duplicate appears with zero subjective elapsed time, it would be impossible to tell if you'd ever lost consciousness at some point in the middle of the process, as far as I can tell- unless you could see outside objects moving.
Personally, due to my own beliefs about the nature of existence, duplicates, and the 'ship of Theseus' question, I don't find the action of transporters philosophically troubling. If they do kill people, they un-kill them right afterwards, so all's well that ends well.
AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
u ment to say "simple seamstress" rite?
how could u possibly think i was a agent of the Tal Shiar's Special Operations Directorate's Sol Operations Division?!?!?!?
Thors_Alumni
Proud member of Thors Class VII from Liberl
- Location
- Liberl Zemuria.
Cough"bullshit"cough.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Did Barclay observe objects in the physical, normal outside universe moving throughout the transport?
I thought there was some time spent in a weird swirling whozit dimension or something.
I thought there was some time spent in a weird swirling whozit dimension or something.
- Location
- Patriarchova
So ugly, but so much fun to draw/design.
Can't wait to explain the tactical systems. I came up with some very insane, and very Gaeni, tricks that justify this thing's Combat score.
Can't wait to explain the tactical systems. I came up with some very insane, and very Gaeni, tricks that justify this thing's Combat score.
Last edited:
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Honestly, I like the idea that this thing is basically just any other Trek ship, only they decided to put it on its side for giggles. Maybe represents a transition from models to CGI among To Boldly Go's special effects team, because there's no reason NOT to put the ship on its side if it's CGI.