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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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Iron Wolf said:
3 pairs of nacelles
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If they took proper advantage of that radial symmetry and can re-network their nacelles on the fly, it's even better than it looks.

Effects of losing nacelles on various setups:
2-nacelle setup, lose 1 nacelle: Always lose all power (01). Expected value: 0 power at 1/2 nacelles operational.
4-nacelle setup, lose 1 nacelle: Always lose 1/2 of power (01 23). Expected value: 1/2 power at 3/4 nacelles operational.
4-nacelle setup, lose a second nacelle: 2/3 chance of losing remaining power (01 03 or 01 23), 1/3 chance of losing no further power (01 23). Total: 2/3 chance of losing all power, 1/3 chance of losing 1/2 power. Expected value: 1/6 power at 2/4 (1/2) nacelles operational.
6-nacelle setup, lose 1 nacelle: Always lose 1/3 of power (01 23 45). Expected value: 2/3 power at 5/6 nacelles operational.
6-nacelle setup, lose 2 nacelles: 3/5 chance of losing no further power (01 23 45, or 01 23 45 and re-network to 12 34 50, or 01 23 45 and re-network to 0 12 3 45), 2/5 chance of losing 1/2 of remaining power (01 23 45, 01 23 45). Total: 3/5 chance of losing 1/3 power, 2/5 chance of losing 2/3 power. Expected value: 7/15 power (just under 1/2) at 4/6 (2/3) nacelles operational.
6-nacelle setup, lose 3 nacelles: Complicated, but expected value is 14/60 (just under 1/4) power at 3/6 (1/2) nacelles operational.

1/5 chance of being down to 1/3 power
01 23 45 =>
01 23 45
01 23 45
01 23 45
01 23 45

4/20 chance of being down to 1/3 power
12 34 50 =>
12 34 50
12 34 50
12 34 50
12 34 50

4/20 chance of being down to 1/3 power
0 12 3 45 =>
0 12 3 45
0 12 3 45
0 12 3 45
0 12 3 45

3/20 chance of being down to 1/3 power, 1/20 chance of being at 0 power
01 23 45 =>
01 23 45
01 23 45
01 23 45
01 23 45, re-network to 0 1 2 34 5

3/20 chance of being down to 1/3 power, 1/20 chance of being at 0 power
01 23 45 =>
01 23 45
01 23 45
01 23 45, re-network to 0 12 3 4 5
01 23 45

In summary: 2-nacelle setups are totally dead with half their nacelles gone, guaranteed. Paired 4-nacelle setups have a 2/3 chance of being totally dead with half their nacelles gone, but if they get lucky they're at 1/2 power. Symmetric 6-nacelle setups have only a 1/10 chance of being totally dead with half their nacelles gone, the tradeoff being that they're at 1/3 power if they survive.

When they're not missing any nacelles I think they would probably want to set up some resonance that ties all six into a single coherent structure. It sounds like a good way to wring a bunch of extra performance out of the system.

Now I'm tempted to run a bunch of simulations to see what it looks like as number of nacelles goes to infinity. :V
 
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More nacelles must come with some kind of issue, otherwise the Federation would not mostly run on the two nacelle model.
 
Vebyast said:
When they're not missing any nacelles I think they would probably want to set up some resonance that ties all six into a single coherent structure. It sounds like a good way to wring a bunch of extra performance out of the system.
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That's exactly what a benzene ring is. The p-orbitals of each carbon atom align and the electrons delocalise around the whole ring.

Edit: can add more when I get home in 20-30 mins
 
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Goat said:
More nacelles must come with some kind of issue, otherwise the Federation would not mostly run on the two nacelle model.
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Maybe they interfere with each other, resulting in lower efficiency as you stack nacelles? But it can still get more power output, which is why the Constellation has 4.
 
Goat said:
More nacelles must come with some kind of issue, otherwise the Federation would not mostly run on the two nacelle model.
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My guess is that two-nacelle setups are simpler and easier to work with, with the result that they're easier to optimize (fewer moving parts) and/or do Space Magic with (since it's easier to handle the math).
Gravitas Hunt said:
That's exactly what a benzene ring is. The p-orbitals of each carbon atom align and the electrons delocalise around the whole ring.
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Yep, sorta familiar with the chemistry, just didn't feel right saying "they do the benzene-ring thing".

edit: I didn't know that it wasn't actually resonating; the descriptions I'd heard indicated at least some motion. Didn't know it was simply a configuration without the pairing you usually see in covalent bonds. Interesting.
 
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My head-canon on this, hinted at in my drone omake, is that a pair of naucells wants to generate a pair of nice, stable regions of warp bubble above and below it (line of sight "requirement" is related to this), which can be modified to enlarge and shift one a bit at the other's expense (creating a big useful region offset to one side a bit, as in most shuttles and most civilization's ships). We use some fancy, high efficiency modification of all this which doesnt create a second, unusably placed lobe of stable region in our warp fields, instead flattening it and shoving it forward to where we can put a saucer. Or something.

Then, with a 4 or 6 configuration you are presumably coupling the inner regions and shrinking the outer ones even more, and are probably using some trickery in the design of the whole thing to better match your hull shape I found the ship isn't radially symmetric. If you lose a naucell, you are presumably taking an efficiency hit beyond the obvious due to non-optimal warp field configuration, at least until you realign coils to compensate. A radially symmetric design probably does a lot to mitigate this. In any case, though, you're still going to have a cluster of unusable stable regions sticking out all around the ship wasting power and causing "subspace drag" or whatever.

This is all stuff that mostly got put together for that Breen ship analysis omake I never finished.

Edit: my thought on ring naucells is that they aren't probably pretty damn power efficient, but obviously use more mass and tend to be a bit fragile. Also, they may not be able to turn at warp or compensate for subspace "terrain" as well because there aren't multiple interacting fields to play off of eachother. Elegant, but only practical with some really clever engineering that diminishes that elegance.
 
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You know we keep seeing these species on our tailward border that exhibit either extreme xenophobia or a desire to control or dominate other species. It's even been mentioned in the omakes related to the Romulan-Klingon War that speak about "shattered worlds" and strange regions of space. I wonder, after the current crisis is over, we could devote some resources to discovering the story behind it. This might help us better interact with species in this part of the quadrant.
 
More nacelles is probably harder to manufacture, if nothing else? Frigates seem to build at around 400 kt/year, while Ambies are closer to 650 kt/year. Then again, the Rennie is down around 300 kt/year, so that may not be a reliable metric.
 
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More, smaller naucells could just as easily be cheaper due to economies of scale and smaller tooling and factories and the like. Unless something involved scales non-linearly (quite possible), I don't think it's as simple as that.
 
I imagine it has more to do with diminishing returns. Per TNG tech manual warp factor is primarily by how much energy you can put through the coils; having more probably just means more weight for extra redundancy.
 
So it's kind of like choosing between one or two engines on a jet fighter or two or four engines on a passenger jet?
 
Iron Wolf said:
I imagine it has more to do with diminishing returns. Per TNG tech manual warp factor is primarily by how much energy you can put through the coils; having more probably just means more weight for extra redundancy.
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My presumption has always been that it is a mix of this and increased difficulty juggling the resulting warp field with multiple poles. I also think that losing an engine out of a multi-nacelle system creates a much more dramatic loss of capability, because the resulting field is wildly off-axis, so although you may have a linear drop in the amount of raw "thrust" (which probably isn't an applicable term due to warp drives consisting of warping space rather than superluminal propulsion per se, so there is very little actual 'thrust' involved), your vector is pointing in a distinctly wrong direction and would need to be corrected. I would expect that forcing a reshaping of your warp field to alter the vector is part and parcel of making a turn while at warp speeds, but I'd expect it to be punishing on performance for the duration. This would be more akin to driving a car with the wheels out of alignment.
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
I also think that losing an engine out of a multi-nacelle system creates a much more dramatic loss of capability
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I'm not sure how a system could be more unbalanced than a two-node system that's lost one of its nodes? Like, most Starfleet designs, losing the left nacelle puts the center of mass of your warp coils out past the rightmost point of the saucer. To use an extreme example in the other direction, if one of the ISC designs lost a nacelle, the center of mass of its warp coils wouldn't even fall outside the deflector dish.

(this, of course, yields the image of the inverse of the ISC design: the most stable system would be the one-nacelle system - you're either fully online or fully offline, no imbalance possible.)
 
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Vebyast said:
I'm not sure how a system could be more unbalanced than a two-node system that's lost one of its nodes? Like, most Starfleet designs, losing the left nacelle puts the center of mass of your warp coils out past the rightmost point of the saucer. To use an extreme example in the other direction, if one of the ISC designs lost a nacelle, the center of mass of its warp coils wouldn't even fall outside the deflector dish.
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Yes, but your coils are probably weighted and angled to stabilise in a "forward" vector. (Part of why higher-speed warp isn't simply a matter of just building a bigger warp core to dump more juice in)
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
Yes, but your coils are probably weighted and angled to stabilise in a "forward" vector. (Part of why higher-speed warp isn't simply a matter of just building a bigger warp core to dump more juice in)
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I'm still confused. The nacelles in a two-node system start out more out of line than the nodes in a six-node system that's down one. Center of thrust is green circle, center of mass/volume is orange circle, necessary corrections are green lines.


Have to correct all the way down to the saucer. And to make matters worse, you don't even have any nacelles to reach out to anchor your efforts there, so you have to do it all with clever action-at-a-distance.



Heaven help you if you lose a nacelle - the survivor has to correct in a direction that's simply never encountered during normal operation. It'd be like asking a car that pulls to the left to suddenly start flying.



Throttle down in the lower-left, throttle up on the right and top. Done.
 
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ClawClawBite said:
Center of thrust only matters if you are thrusting. Warp drive is spacial distortion, something totally different.
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I don't see how that's relevant? It's always easier to build an effect that spans a distance if you have structures to anchor both ends of the span. I could also phrase it as foundations, or distribution of energy, or sum of squared errors from nacelle to point of action, or in any number of other ways, the result would be the same. Two-nacelle designs are unbalanced by their very nature. They are operating off-axis during normal operation. If it's easy enough to shift spatial distortions around that you can design from the ground up to have their nacelles way out of line with the entire rest of the ship, it's hard to believe that it wouldn't be just as easy to re-balance a 5-node design that's similarly off-axis, or a symmetric 6-nacelle design that's down one nacelle.

Okay, deeper investigation. Let's take this to the limit. Literal limit. I'm going to build a starship that has an infinite count of infinitesimal nodes. Then I'm going to knock out one nacelle. Would you argue that this design instantly becomes incapable of Warp? How about if I knock out a quadrant of its nodes? How about a radially-symmetric ring of nodes around the center?

edit: I could see it if space was sufficiently anisotropic, but that can't be the case here because combat doesn't read like ships of the line wallowing about under sail.
 
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Vebyast said:
I don't see how that's relevant? It's always easier to build an effect that spans a distance if you have structures to anchor both ends of the span. I could also phrase it as foundations, or distribution of energy, or sum of squared errors from nacelle to point of action, or in any number of other ways, the result would be the same. Two-nacelle designs are unbalanced by their very nature. They are operating off-axis during normal operation. If it's easy enough to shift spatial distortions around that you can design from the ground up to have their nacelles way out of line with the entire rest of the ship, it's hard to believe that it wouldn't be just as easy to re-balance a 5-node design that's similarly off-axis, or a symmetric 6-nacelle design that's down one nacelle.

Okay, deeper investigation. Let's take this to the limit. Literal limit. I'm going to build a starship that has an infinite count of infinitesimal nodes. Then I'm going to knock out one nacelle. Would you argue that this design instantly becomes incapable of Warp? How about if I knock out a quadrant of its nodes? How about a radially-symmetric ring of nodes around the center?

edit: I could see it if space was sufficiently anisotropic, but that can't be the case here because combat doesn't read like ships of the line wallowing about under sail.
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Clearly you just don't understand how space magic works.
 
Briefvoice said:
Clearly you just don't understand how space magic works.
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Ah, I didn't notice that we were having a magical tea party, sorry. I'll quit trying to create a model that would allow me to make interesting predictions, observations, hypotheses, or extensions, and instead just treat the whole thing as an indivisible irreducible black box about which nothing can be discerned.
 
Vebyast said:
Okay, deeper investigation. Let's take this to the limit. Literal limit. I'm going to build a starship that has an infinite count of infinitesimal nodes. Then I'm going to knock out one nacelle. Would you argue that this design instantly becomes incapable of Warp? How about if I knock out a quadrant of its nodes? How about a radially-symmetric ring of nodes around the center?
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I'd take this bet, because the entire system is designed to work as a whole and not for redundancy's sake. You knock out one part and all those complex equations and warp field theory we hear about engineers complaining about has changed. And if there are nacelles for redundancy in a design and not used during normal operation, then it seems that ship would be carrying extra weight that doesn't contribute during normal operation.

Another point against multi-nacelles is that all ships we've seen have tried to limit the amount of nacelles to as few as possible, and I can recall only the Federation having tried a four nacelle design like 2-3 times.
 
Vebyast said:
It's always easier to build an effect that spans a distance if you have structures to anchor both ends of the span.
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While arguably true, we're actually building a field envelope out of emitters, and having additional emitters creates additional issues like interference, side lobes joining together to create fields where not desired, and increased complexity in shaping a field which is a serious issue when both safety and performance are directly related to the shape of the field. In this case the only reasons to use more emitters are when you are unable to create the desired field strength with a lesser number, or unable to create the desired field shape with a lesser number. If redundancy is desired it is best accomplished by having inactive backups, not additional active signal that makes the field issues more complex.

Higher numbers of emitters are actually less redundant beyond some point, because you'll start shaping the field simply by surrounding the whole area you want it to be with emitters, culminating in ring drives. Rather than having spaced out a bunch of emitters to make the field, you've defined the desired field area by wrapping it in one big emitter. When part of it breaks your whole scheme for shaping the field is likely to go out the window.
 
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