Design a new Fed ground vehicle

[darthdavid]

I've got a solution. Build a good vehicle then threaten the pacifists with it till they let me build a bunch of them.

[Thag]

The problem I see with the modules is that unless you have them stored in some kind of landing ship close by, you could end up in bad situation with the wrong package loaded and no good way to swap out. Unless you put down two or three vehicles at the same time with different loadouts.

[Tyneras]

I've got a solution. Build a good vehicle then threaten the pacifists with it till they let me build a bunch of them.

Considering the ease of pulling a coup in the federation, you might wind up in charge instead.

[Aaron]

The problem I see with the modules is that unless you have them stored in some kind of landing ship close by, you could end up in bad situation with the wrong package loaded and no good way to swap out. Unless you put down two or three vehicles at the same time with different loadouts.

Perhaps these modules could be replicated onsite ie: on the ship.

[Typhonis 1]

only problem is removing and installing the modules.

[Aaron]

only problem is removing and installing the modules.

That would probably require only a crane if designed properly. Although I have never seen a crane on a Starfleet ship. They could erect one in a shuttlebay and swap modules there.

[Ender]

Either Marina or Shep came up with a bad ass one in a fanfic: M1A2 with a shield, improved armor (swap in duranium and tritanium for some things), sensor suit, phasers for light guns, and a rail gun that fired massive shells filled with AM.

Thing was a beast.

[Sea Skimmer]

Either Marina or Shep came up with a bad ass one in a fanfic: M1A2 with a shield, improved armor (swap in duranium and tritanium for some things), sensor suit, phasers for light guns, and a rail gun that fired massive shells filled with AM.

Thing was a beast.

That was Marina in Fist of the Empire. Though the choice of an M1, and the M2, didn't make that much sense. By the time the third world war presumably ended most if not all ground combat vehicle development, the world would have been a couple designs past both of those and almost certainly none would have been left in service.

[Barton]

You are a redshirt who has beaten the odds and survived your first tour of deep space duty. Realizing that such experience is rare, for your second tour you are assigned by command to an R&D facility in order to create and improve away mission equipment. One assignment is to create specifications for a general-purpose ground vehicle to replace the Argo...thing. You have the following criteria:

-it must be deployable from a starship
-it should be able to operate in hazardous environments (due to nature or the inhabitants)
-it must pass inspection by the Federation Council oversight group (no mobile battle fortresses)
-it must be considered usable by current military standards
-this will be used by Starfleet regulars, no special Section 31 upgrades

The time period would be post-Nemesis. Things to consider would be type of powerplant, locomotion, onboard equipment, armor (if any), and weapons.

(For a ground battle tank type roles)
A modified Federation Tactical Fighter should do the trick i.e. remove the embedded Warp engines. Minus a power draining device may give the energy weapons and shields additional power.

[Thag]

It sounds like all you're talking about is a close-support fighter, not a ground-based vehicle. Aside from its limited usefullness, one of the requirements is the ability to function during unusual planetary/atomospheric conditions, something that Federation small craft have a great deal of trouble with.

[Sarevok]

My idea is a shuttlecraft sized tank. It has tracks like modern tanks for moving. Since it does not need to fly it can be equipped with heavier armour and equipment. Equip it with shields and triatanium armour. Main armament is a heavy duty pulse phaser cannon Secondary armament are small phaser banks.

[Chris OFarrell]

Found a design I thought up a year or two back. Alyeska and I were talking about a 'what if' situation, for designing a Federation ground army and the vehicles they could use. This is what I came up with at any rate. Take it as you will. We tried to stay within established Trek technology to outfit it, or at least technology that can reasnoably be extrapolated from their shown abilities.

UFP AT-01 Main Battle Tank.

Mobility: Antigravity field. Maximum velocity over flat terrain of 150 KPH. Maximum cruising altitude of 100 meters, standard cruising altitude of 2 meters. Can be deployed via Dropship, Orbital drop in ablative drop-pods or transporters.

Powerplant: Custom build Fusion reactor, similar to a runabouts impulse drive. Internal power of up to 10 weeks at full battle requirements. It is designed to fuse Deuterium, but can fuse raw hydrogen if necessary. Power can also be supplied via a subspace power transfer system, like the Cardasian OWP's. Which means in a pinch, an orbiting Starship or ground station can run ground forces, if needed.

Defensive systems:

Passive:
Heavy ablative armour coverage, average thickness of 5 CM though some areas (front arc and turret face) have upto 7 CM protection, some only 2 CM. It is the same composition used in Starships. Inlaid into the structural frame are sensor disrupting alloys to help disrupt sensor and transporter locks.

The hull also is covered with mimetic holographic projectors, similar to the technology used in Star Trek Insurrection. It allows the tank to become invisible to the naked eye, though anyone with halfway modern active sensor technology would be able to see the tank. Though combined with the sensor distorting materials, it is still hard to pin it down sufficiently for a weapons lock. The holographic generator can operate for upto one hour off a capacitor system with the remainder of the tanks systems shut down, increasing the difficulty of picking it up by an order of magnitude. Generally only close range sensor sweeps will be able to pick it out, orbital surveillance is unlikely to do so. The ‘cloak’ will be disrupted when weapons are fired and cannot operate with an active shield grid. The system can be reactivated 50ms after a weapons discharge.

Active:
A high capacity regenerative shield grid is the primary and first line of defence against enemy fire. Similar to those on board Federation runabouts, it has two shield arcs (forward and aft). Fully multiphasic, the shield is proof to all known shield penetrating weapons, including Phased Polaron Beams and Breen Energy Webs.

The second defensive system is a high level Structural Integrity Field. It strengthens the hull against physical impacts and has a surge capacity tied into the sensor array, allowing upto two seconds of extreme hull reinforcement at any one point, with a 5 second recharge cycle. It can absorb the damage from HV attacks, high explosives, NDF weapons and directed energy weapons. It cannot protect against antimatter, gravitic or phased weapons.

The third tier defensive system is a series of Electronic Warfare systems designed to defeat enemy EW equipment including sensors, jamming, cloaking and transporter technologies. Multi frequency encrypted Subspace and EM data links between other sources from infantry to orbiting Starships are used to get as complete as picture of the situation as can be gathered and to ensure the EW actions of one unit are complementing, not disrupting, another’s.

Offensive:
The TA-01 has two primary weapons systems:

The Primary offensive weapon is a Mark 2-G Pulse Phaser Cannon mounted in a fast tracking - fast locking turret. Capable against both ground and air targets, it has an effective range of sixty kilometres though line of sight issues make its use at that rage very rare. The gun has a cyclic fire rate of three shots per second for ten seconds before a four second cool down is needed. This fire rate can be maintained for upto one hour before the phaser capacitor is burned out and needs to be replaced (as seen in season 6 of DS9 with the Defiant’s PPC's) with one of six spares carried on board. The procedure takes roughly three minutes and can be done internally. After all capacitors are used up, the phaser is inoperative and will remain so until resupply is achieved.

The second primary weapon is a pair of phaser strips running in a 'U' shape forward and aft of the turret around the skirt. While they only reach one fifth the average power of the primary turret, they are none the less highly accurate and useful against all manner of targets including armour, infantry and enemy guided munitions in a CIWS role. The emitter stipe is very hard to knock out of action.

The UFPMBT-16 has several secondary weapons systems.

A heavy compression phaser gun for the commanders copula (which turns independent of the main turret) of similar design but greater power to the Type 3B rifle allows a defence against infantry, unarmoured vehicles and other targets that the commander may see fit to fire upon.

Two sixteen cell VLS Micro torpedo launchers are built into the port and starboard sides of the tank, just forward of the primary turret. They provide smart long range missile firepower with a high yield utridium warhead of enough power to destroy all but the most heavily armoured of enemy tanks. It can be fired in cruise missile mode, to proceed to an exact point and hit a static target, in active seeker mode where it will home in on any enemy target in a set area or in designate mode where it will fly to a preset position then home in on a 'painted' target be it painted actively by friendly units or a preset homing beacon. Other units forward of the tank, such as infantry, recon or UAV can directly command the weapons and request them as fire support, without asking the Tank Commander, if they have been released to that role. It is not uncommon for several infantry squads to be assigned a ‘tank’ as fire support and use its missiles as if they were their own man portable weapons, saving them from carrying them around.

*note, Micro torpedoes are said to be 30CM long in the DS9 TM, which is why I give the tank so many of them*

Four Mark 1 attack drones are installed in a launch bay on the aft section of the tank under an armoured hatch (the same drones as seen in ST9). They provide a recon ability for the Battle Tank as well as a limited infantry suppression ability. The can be controlled directly by the tank commander or allowed to search on their own, or again commandeered by other units in the field. Their datalink can be sent directly to the tank, bounced off a repeating station to not give away its position or broadcasted on a non directly frequency for all units to receive.


Tank Systems:

The tank contains a crew of four.
The Driver who pilots the vehicle.
The Gunner who controls the offensive weapons array.
The Defensive systems operator who controls the shields, SIF field, sensors, EW systems and mimetic camouflage.
And the commander who operates the recon drones, communications systems and commands the tank. He also has the ability to take control of ‘his own’ fire support in orbital and ground artillery, directly calling fire missions onto target. Often a recon drone will scout in advance and targets of opportunity selected for destruction on the fly.

The gunner and commander both sit in small 'holotanks' which display in their small seats a holographic wraparound of the outside area. An advanced HUD is part of this display showing various indicators, navigation and targeting systems directly onto the ‘world’, adjusted for distance and perception. The Driver and Defensive systems operator rely on more traditional screens and control panels which use a mixture of LCARS systems and tactical controls. Some prototypes are experimenting with advanced neural interface technology, so far the tests are exceeding all expectations.

[Darth Wong]

You've given this tank considerably more capabilities than a Federation Runabout in every conceivable area, both inside and outside, except for (obviously) space travel. How realistic is this, and how many of these things can they afford to build at that kind of wank level?

[Chris OFarrell]

You've given this tank considerably more capabilities than a Federation Runabout in every conceivable area, both inside and outside, except for (obviously) space travel. How realistic is this, and how many of these things can they afford to build at that kind of wank level?

A Runabout is a medium range multi purpose space vehicle, not a surface to surface vehicle. Yet, it has probably superior defences and almost certainly better endurance as well as being widely adaptable to many missions. As well as extra equipment this does not, improved sensors, transporters e.t.c. Half its space is dedicated to mission specific cargo and effectively is empty space wasted. Hell, front the back, the ship is mostly empty space, completely wasted.

This tank does not waste this space and is somewhat smaller then a Runabout as a result. It carries a single bigass gun which is hardly unrealistic. Heck, the Defiant’s PPC's are physically not even very large. The PPC's on Federation Tactical Fighters fit inside their wings. It doesn't have to have spare room for impulse engines or warp engines, just antigravity units and a fusion reactor. All in mass production.

The micro torpedos are standard UFP weapons, are very small and in mass production. It has more then sufficient room if the DS9 TM's showing of them is accurate and I have no reason or evidence to show to the contrary. Phaser strips on Shuttle and Runabouts are established weapons also in mass productions.

Ablative armour does not appear to be in widespread use for political reasons. Though newer generation warships have it such as the Defiant and Prometheus, though the Sovereign may well as well. Given that DS9, which lacks a shipyard, was able to equip the Defiant with such hull plating in O’Brien’s *copious* spare time, without Starfleet supplying resources or even KNOWNING, I would say its simply a question of priority, not capability.

As for how many the Federation can afford to make, who knows. It shouldn't take much more then the resources for a shuttle sized craft, if not less due to the lack of things like warp coils, dilithium and antimatter reactors. Hell, Voyager was able to build shuttles a dime a dozen.

There is nothing so horribly exotic in the construction of my vehicle to dramatically slow down production as far as I can see. Have I given it more capabilities? Yes in surface to surface warfare, that should not exactly be a surprise. One is a Main Battle Tank, the other is a multi purpose medium range shuttle. Its not a short range attack craft or a air to ground bird. So it should not be surprising if the tank IS able to beat up on the Runabout in ITS environment. Its like saying that its surprising the Defiant is able to beat up on the much larger Voyager in combat is unreasonable, ignoring the fact that Voyager is not a combat dedicated vessel.

[Alyeska]

You've given this tank considerably more capabilities than a Federation Runabout in every conceivable area, both inside and outside, except for (obviously) space travel. How realistic is this, and how many of these things can they afford to build at that kind of wank level?

The Runabout is mostly empty space and has to support both warp drives and impulse engines. This tank doesn't have any of those limitations.

[Enola Straight]

Pwned.

Remember, you need to get approval from civilian oversight, and these are the TNG feds we're talking about. I would think an MBT would be very borderline. Typhonis's looks like the best candidate so far.

When has any Starfleet Authority been subordinated by Civilian Authority?

[Coalition]

The Runabout is mostly empty space and has to support both warp drives and impulse engines. This tank doesn't have any of those limitations.

From freedictionary.com, I got the following dimensions:

Runabout:
Height: 5.4 m
Length: 23.1 m
Beam: 13.7 m

M1A1 Abrams tank:
Height: 2.43 m
Length: 8.48 m
Width: 3.64 m

So a Runabout is twice as tall, about three times as long, and over 4 times as wide as a tank, and you are giving the tank (~5% of its volume) the same weaponry.

Unless 95% of the Runabout is taken up by the power plant, warp core, and cargo, the tank will likely have less than a Runabout's weaponry:

Weaponry:
Six type-five phaser arrays
One micro-torpedo launcher (possibly not on all ships of class)
Defenses: Deflector shields

I'd go for 4 phasers, two of wihch are combined into a heavy phaser for the main gun, and the other two for anti-personnel. A variation (morter?) would replace the heavy phaser with the microtorp, as a modified mortar.

[Chris OFarrell]

Firstly, bumping old threads makes baby Jesus cry!

Or the mods at any rate.

Second, most of the Runabout IS empty space. Watch the TNG episode 'Timescape'. You get good shots of how just about all the runabout is wasted space. Front and rear. You can get the same effect in a much smaller package when you get rid of the frigen dining room out the back...