SDN Starship Design Commentaries

[Prometheus Unbound]

The Defiant-class may be too small for a backup bridge to be practical, in that the only places to put it might be so close to the main bridge that the same hit is likely to take out both compartments. I don't remember if the Intrepids have any place other than the main bridge from which you can coordinate the ship.

Both the Defiant class ("Starship Down") and Intrepid class ("Deadlock") can be controlled from main engineering as/when required with full control of the ship. The Galaxy class can also do this ("Brothers").

[Alyrium Denryle]

I don't remember if the Intrepids have any place other than the main bridge from which you can coordinate the ship.

Pretty much any UFP ship can be controlled from main engineering, if I recall properly.

[Zeropoint]

As a point of comparison, the carrier that I served on not only could be, but WAS controlled from engineering. That is, we received orders for engine speeds from the bridge or CIC, but control of the steam valves for the engine turbines did not extend beyond the engineering spaces (the reactor operator needs to be able to give orders to the throttlemen). Steering was, I believe, normally handled remotely by the helmsman, but the crew working in the steering gear room could certainly disconnect the remote system and/or operate it locally if something went wrong with the remote system.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

That might be one reason that in the Galaxy class battle bridge, there was no engineering station per se; the battle bridge is reachable via a dedicated turbolift from the main bridge, though the decks in between also have access to the same turbolift shaft. It can also be reached directly via corridor. According to Generations production art, the Ent-B also had a battle bridge. One interesting footnote is that in the Enterprise lineage, the warp nacelles of the Excelsior class are second only to the Sovereign in terms of length.

What bugged me about the Excelsior class was whether its failure as a transwarp prototype was entirely down to Scotty's sabotage, if so then he inadvertently set back the Federation by decades. It's equally plausible that in the 23rd century, "transwarp" simply meant a much faster warp factor, and it was only in the 24th that the term was redefined to mean a much faster method of travel altogether.

[NecronLord]

In the real world, the Galaxy class was designed with the notion that seperation would happen before battle; at which point the battle bridge is exposed.

That proved too costly to film.

It's kinda sad they never showed just battle sections of Galaxies in the Dominion war though.

[Prometheus Unbound]

What bugged me about the Excelsior class was whether its failure as a transwarp prototype was entirely down to Scotty's sabotage, if so then he inadvertently set back the Federation by decades. It's equally plausible that in the 23rd century, "transwarp" simply meant a much faster warp factor, and it was only in the 24th that the term was redefined to mean a much faster method of travel altogether.

they never say either way but I can't believe Scotty wouldn't tell them what he'd done, after the fact. I mean, he only took 2-3 chips "from their main transwarp computer drive". It's not like he destroyed a prototype that had no blueprints or burned down all the research.

And they knew he'd done it - he was charged with Sabotage of the USS Excelsior (later dropped).



We don't even know the transwarp project failed, thinking about it.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

In the real world, the Galaxy class was designed with the notion that seperation would happen before battle; at which point the battle bridge is exposed.

That proved too costly to film.

It's kinda sad they never showed just battle sections of Galaxies in the Dominion war though.

I think in the Second Battle of Chin'Toka showed the engineering section of a Galaxy biting the dust. The problem with saucer separation is that it deprives the drive section of using the large phaser arrays that the saucer possesses. The idea I think is that SS is meant for one-on-one skirmishes, in fleet engagements it would prove far less useful. And it would inevitably result in some saucers floating around by themselves because their drive sections were destroyed.

[Lord Revan]

Something I'm not sure is mentioned yet but we should as default assume there's a (semi-)rational reason in-universe why things are done the way they are. It's way too easy to assume "they're stupid" for everytime when something seems less efficient then you think it could be at first glance, so we should avoid the "they're stupid" explanation as much as it's rational to do so.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Something I'm not sure is mentioned yet but we should as default assume there's a (semi-)rational reason in-universe why things are done the way they are. It's way too easy to assume "they're stupid" for everytime when something seems less efficient then you think it could be at first glance, so we should avoid the "they're stupid" explanation as much as it's rational to do so.

Agreed. Which is why some of us have gone into so much detail with their power systems. If you assume they are stupid, you get nowhere and you end up engaging in autofellatio.

..............

One thing that always made me chuckle though. In babylon 5, Omega Class Destroyers have rotating sections. Leave the firing arc problems out. Hell, leave the mechanical problems out. Just think about acceleration for a minute.

Rotating sections are fantastic when you have an installation in a Lagrange point, or in orbit. Something that is not accelerating, or at least where the forces are canceled out and the crew experiences no apparent acceleration. However, they work less well when a ship is under active thrust or enters a gravity well without having a stable orbit. Because when moving, your acceleration is limited because you dont want your crew to fall over, say to about 1/3rd G. When in a gravity well without an orbit...oh god the gravity flux. When the Agamemnon was chasing the White Star around Jupiter, the gravity flux would have given the crew of the Agamemnon the inside scoop of what it feels like to live inside a clothes dryer.

It would be better across the board to just not use rotating sections, and have the crew use thrust-gravity to avoid bone and muscle loss.

The only alternative is that they have inertial dampeners. But how might those work without artificial gravity?

[Lord Revan]

Something I'm not sure is mentioned yet but we should as default assume there's a (semi-)rational reason in-universe why things are done the way they are. It's way too easy to assume "they're stupid" for everytime when something seems less efficient then you think it could be at first glance, so we should avoid the "they're stupid" explanation as much as it's rational to do so.

Agreed. Which is why some of us have gone into so much detail with their power systems. If you assume they are stupid, you get nowhere and you end up engaging in autofellatio.

Yeah I wasn't accusing anyone, I posted it as a reminder to remember to keep this as objective discussion about starship design and why things are done the way they are rather allow this thread to devolve into bashsing of franchices person posting doesn't like.

[Starglider]

It would be better across the board to just not use rotating sections, and have the crew use thrust-gravity to avoid bone and muscle loss.

The rotating section itself is not a horrible idea. The ships probably spend most of their time in orbit (e.g. enforcing blockades) and coasting (on transfer orbits or in hyperspace). They use high thrust fusion rockets and have low propellant mass fractions, so they can't spend that much time under acceleration. The problem is that they should stop the rotation and lock down the section before combat or any kind of hard maneuvering.

For crew fitness, it might be sufficient to just have a smaller internal centrifuge that doesn't require a rotating hull section. However maybe they have shipboard functions which are much less efficient without gravity, e.g. maintenance bays / machine shops for the ship and its fighters. Even having gravity for a proper galley is going to help with crew morale.

[The Romulan Republic]

I'd have thought the primary purpose of the battle bridge would be to command the engineering section if they separated the saucer section.

No, the Intrepid does not have a back up bridge, though you might be able to jury-rig some degree of control from Main Engineering.

[Borgholio]

I remember the old Connies had an Auxiliary Control room, which functioned as a battle bridge of sorts. Not sure where in the hull it was located, but we did see it in action in The Doomsday Machine.

[Sea Skimmer]

It didn't seem like a space that could be useful to fight a battle, but it was certainly a center that could at least maneuver the ship. They also had a Phaser Control Room in the episode with the Romulan stealth attack, and IIRC it directly controlled the main armament, not the bridge.

[Borgholio]

It didn't seem like a space that could be useful to fight a battle, but it was certainly a center that could at least maneuver the ship. They also had a Phaser Control Room in the episode with the Romulan stealth attack, and IIRC it directly controlled the main armament, not the bridge.

Yeah that always stuck out to me as an oddity. In literally every single episode of TOS, the phasers were controlled directly from the bridge. Plus, this was also the only episode where phasers were not solid beams and instead were some kind of proximity fused energy burst.

[Batman]

Assuming 'the one with the Romulan stealth attack' refers to s1's 'Balance of Terror' the weapons were directly controlled from the bridge until part of their electronics conked out.

[Borgholio]

Was it controlled from the bridge? It's been awhile since I've seen that episode. I thought they were controlled from the phaser room the whole time.

[Axton]

The point about Yamato has already been covered by others, but the "Cause and Effect" point has given me a thought. The ship was being affected by a space anomaly that was futzing with their systems. We know the core ejection system was offline, it's quite reasonable to suppose other safety systems were also affected.

My point, though, is that the failsafes ought to be failure-actuated. I mean, what good are safety mechanisms that only work when everything's fine?

[Simon_Jester]

It may be physically impossible to design a failsafe system to eject a malfunctioning warp core that doesn't rely on the ship's computer or have computer-controlled lockouts to prevent it from firing accidentally. The warp core is buried several decks deep in the engineering hull, it's the size of a building, and it's full of antimatter that will explode within milliseconds (at best) of the active powered containment fields releasing. This is not an easy thing to render 'safe.'

Moreover, failsafe mechanisms designed to do things like automatically eject the core with explosive bolts if anything goes wrong have costs. For example, if the ship gets hit hard, maybe the bolts themselves will accidentally go off, ejecting the core in the middle of a battle and giving the enemy the win.

Designing failsafes for complex systems that have to work to avoid defeat in combat situations is hard. A great deal of trial and error is involved, and in any given situation it may be simply impossible to make the system fully "fail-safe" while at the same time making it effective and capable of performing its mission.

[Tribble]

It may be physically impossible to design a failsafe system to eject a malfunctioning warp core that doesn't rely on the ship's computer or have computer-controlled lockouts to prevent it from firing accidentally. The warp core is buried several decks deep in the engineering hull, it's the size of a building, and it's full of antimatter that will explode within milliseconds (at best) of the active powered containment fields releasing. This is not an easy thing to render 'safe.'

It's common for an impending warp core / anti-matter containment breeches to be detected well beforehand, even in battle situations (e.g. TNG "Disaster", TNG "Yesterday's Enterprise," DS9 "Emissary", Star Trek: Generations" etc). IMO designing a failsafe system for the warp core / antimatter storage system would be pretty straight forward:

a) It should be a completely independent system separate from all other ship functions, including having it's own computer. Generally speaking this should apply to all important ship functions to prevent a single point of failure from crippling the ship, but it's especially important here.

b) The timing of the failsafe activating could work like this: assuming the ship is totally disabled and unable to maneuver, what is the minimum amount of time required to eject the core and/or antimatter storage pods to a safe distance? For example, if a potential warp core breech is detected 5 minutes in advance and it takes 6 seconds for the warp core / anti matter pods to safely clear the ship, the crew have until the 6 second mark to try and fix things (or continue to use the core in the case of a battle). Up until that time the system would keep the warp core / antimatter pods in place so that the crew could work out a solution, but after that point is reached it would eject the core because failure to do so at that point would almost certainly guarantee destruction of the ship. In TNG "Disaster" the E-D should never have been at risk of destruction due to the antimatter containment system failing.

c) There should be a manual override available to prevent an accidental misfire or if the crew needs the warp drive operating at all costs. And by manual, I mean manual, so that a computer glitch can't muck things up (unlike that ridiculous scene in Voy "Learning Curve" where the supposed "manual" override to a door was actually reliant on computer control and would not be open due to Neelix's cheese infecting the ship).

Moreover, failsafe mechanisms designed to do things like automatically eject the core with explosive bolts if anything goes wrong have costs. For example, if the ship gets hit hard, maybe the bolts themselves will accidentally go off, ejecting the core in the middle of a battle and giving the enemy the win.

Given how deep the warp system is buried, if the ship is hit hard enough that the bolts are physically damaged and misfire, chances are the ship's warp core / antimatter storage system would be heavily damaged and need ejecting anyways. Given the number of times we see a ship exploding when it could have been saved had the core ejected safely, IMO the trade-off is worth it.

Designing failsafes for complex systems that have to work to avoid defeat in combat situations is hard. A great deal of trial and error is involved, and in any given situation it may be simply impossible to make the system fully "fail-safe" while at the same time making it effective and capable of performing its mission.

Agreed, but the point is that the safety record of TNG-era ships is pretty abysmal and could definitely be improved on.

[SpottedKitty]

The warp core is buried several decks deep in the engineering hull, it's the size of a building,

The actual M/AM reaction chamber is pretty much in the middle of the secondary hull, yes, but since the whole warp core gets ejected, and the whole thing is so big... most ship blueprints I've seen show the core with the ejection hatch directly below it.

Although, come to think of it... remember, the dangerous part of the core is the bottom half that has the antimatter feed. If the ejection process instead seals off the core directly above the reaction chamber, wouldn't that pretty much halve the mass that must be quickly and violently tossed out of the ship? This ought to make the whole process faster, need less energy that might not be avaliable in an emergency, and possibly be slightly less hideously dangerous.

[Esquire]

The patented engineer's 'yes, but:' You now have to design your antimatter reactors such that they can be quickly and safely cut in half under combat or emergency conditions, and not simply fall apart under normal ones.

[Simon_Jester]

I guess what it comes down to is that I'm making a general point here- in real life, installing failsafes into an engineering decision always has costs. The financial costs and maintenance costs are the least of your worries. There are also very real questions about whether a given failsafe design will function reliably enough to be worth bothering with, whether it impairs ability to do the mission, and whether the overall increase in the complexity of the ship and its systems winds up offsetting some or all of the safety advantage gained by using the failsafes.

We can bicker over the details of exactly how the failsafes work, but since none of us actually know how to build a warp core, we don't really know enough to say exactly how one could be ejected, or what failure modes might be introduced into the design of the warp core by making it easy to eject automatically.

The core objection to Star Trek ship design is that ships lack failsafes when it is a basic engineering principle to include failsafes.

This objection has merit- but the level of missing failsafes does not necessarily reflect gross stupidity or incompetence. Many real systems are designed with less failsafes than we would like, and are prone to failures under unusual or stressful conditions. It is hard to design high-performance systems that are also safe and reliable.

Since Starfleet necessarily pushes the edge of its performance envelope, and labors under unknown and unknowable constraints when designing more failsafes into its ships, it behooves us to assume that at least SOME of the 'missing' failsafes are things Starfleet could not feasibly install and still have a working ship.

[Tribble]

I guess what it comes down to is that I'm making a general point here- in real life, installing failsafes into an engineering decision always has costs. The financial costs and maintenance costs are the least of your worries. There are also very real questions about whether a given failsafe design will function reliably enough to be worth bothering with, whether it impairs ability to do the mission, and whether the overall increase in the complexity of the ship and its systems winds up offsetting some or all of the safety advantage gained by using the failsafes.

We can bicker over the details of exactly how the failsafes work, but since none of us actually know how to build a warp core, we don't really know enough to say exactly how one could be ejected, or what failure modes might be introduced into the design of the warp core by making it easy to eject automatically.

The core objection to Star Trek ship design is that ships lack failsafes when it is a basic engineering principle to include failsafes.

This objection has merit- but the level of missing failsafes does not necessarily reflect gross stupidity or incompetence. Many real systems are designed with less failsafes than we would like, and are prone to failures under unusual or stressful conditions. It is hard to design high-performance systems that are also safe and reliable.

Since Starfleet necessarily pushes the edge of its performance envelope, and labors under unknown and unknowable constraints when designing more failsafes into its ships, it behooves us to assume that at least SOME of the 'missing' failsafes are things Starfleet could not feasibly install and still have a working ship.

The ejection systems are already in place, it's the way it's being used and the fact that it's hooked up to the main computer that's the main issues. And yes, whoever thought that hooking up everything including the failsafe systems to a central computer was a good idea was at best grossly incompetent, and at worst criminally negligent.

[Simon_Jester]

I have a thought regarding the computer systems on the Enterprise-D (and for that matter the good old NCC-1701, no bloody A, B, C, or D), spurred by your comment.

Does the ship actually have a single "central computer?" Or does it have a distributed computer network?

There's certainly a lot of places in the ship where there's plenty of room for localized computers of considerable power. And in several entire episodes of Trek that I've watched from one end to the other, I can't recall a single instance of the ship losing all computer support due to a single localized incident. No lucky shot ever takes out the computer. The ship can lose weapons or shields or propulsion or sensors that way, but it never seems to lose the computer, just as it never seems to lose artificial gravity. The only things that normally threaten computer functionality are:

1) Software problems (which can surely infect a distributed network and every computer attached to it),
2) Threats that affect the entire ship and everything in it (say, an energy-draining field), or
3) Mobile threats (e.g. nanites that infect one or more of the ship's computer cores, and which could quite feasibly spread from one computer to another as far as I can tell).

So then the problem may well be that the Galaxy's computer systems are excessively networked, not that everything is connected to a single central computer in a single room.

If this is true... This changes the nature of the problem. Almost by definition, a shipwide computer network is not a "single point of failure." Indeed, it actively makes it easier to ensure that every relevant piece of software and every important computerized operation can be backed up, performed redundantly in multiple locations, and that any single damaged computer can be cut out of the network.

The only time when having computers connected to the network makes the ship less safe is if you're worried about IT problems- viruses, hacking attempts, and so on. But a starship is a self-contained system, and most of the time it is only in contact with the outside world through dedicated channels, most of which are either part of the official hierarchy, or which can be isolated behind a firewall (a neutral party's messages).

It may well be that in Starfleet's experience, it is safe to have computers tied into the internal network, providing advantages of flexibility and redundancy, and only very rarely does any IT-related threat get past their computer security in such a way as to threaten the ship. Which may explain why they've taken to wiring literally everything into the network.