I always thought the indent right down the middle of the saucer section was really odd. If I was going to design a Nova-based hunter-killer, I'd keep the profile flat and narrow like the Akyazi-Class (or certain Oberth-Class gunship variants minus the underslung modules) with Voy-era/DS9-era Defiant-Class armor / modeling textures and details.
Small, narrow, and fast. Difficult to hit, alone or in packs.
I always thought the indent right down the middle of the saucer section was really odd. If I was going to design a Nova-based hunter-killer, I'd keep the profile flat and narrow like the Akyazi-Class (or certain Oberth-Class gunship variants minus the underslung modules) with Voy-era/DS9-era Defiant-Class armor / modeling textures and details.
Why would I completely rework a solidified design?
I'm kinda stuck on a choice for weapons. If you go back and look at the deck plans you'll see where the dorsal phaser arrays would've been and the ventral arrays would be in the approximate same location on the underside. There would also have been a few shorter arrays all over the ship to get full 360* coverage. Then I got to thinking. What about a smaller version of the phaser cannons that the Defiant employs? Maybe two of them with a 10* +/-5* firing arc. On top of that I was thinking of possibly elminating the idea of 360* coverage. Why? Resources primarily, I suppose. Something else I thought of is that this isn't meant to be a ship designed to hang around in combat. It could be extremely fast, but lightly armed set up to do strafing runs if need be. With that said, I think that mainly forward firing weapons would be best to utilize the strengths of the ship.
Well, it seems to me that you already planned to have strip-style phaser arrays, and I'm not sure where you'd put pulse phaser cannon. I can understand conserving resources, but maybe just one primary foreward phaser strip?
Let me clarify a bit. I was going for a more powerful type of phaser originally...something akin to what's on the Nova. There would have been the longer dorsal and ventral arrays set up like Voyager and other strategically placed shorter arrays throughout. I have since decided that those would be overkill and came up with the option of smaller arrays, possibly as small as what is seen on runabouts or somewhere between that and the Nova type. They would be more sparsely located across the hull. Instead of the two long dorsal arrays I'd just stuff a single array where you had suggested and do the same on the ventral saucer.
Come to think of it...I am worrying about this way too much. I'll work on the model and see what y'all think.
Need some advice for continued development so any help is appreciated.
I know I'm late to this party, but your thread just caught my attention today. First let me present my bona fides so that you may see that I am not simply pulling things out of my butt. For five years after graduating from high school, I was a Hospital Corpsman of the United States Navy. I served on a ship with less than a hundred crew before moving to a ship with more than five thousand crew.
Shift A
-CO (Officer, duh),
On most ships, the Commanding Officer won't actually stand a regular watch. He has other things to be concerned with, and has to be ready at any time to respond to emergencies. He is responsible for everything that happens aboard.
Conn/Ops (1 Officer, 1 Enlisted),
You need someone at the helm and providing navigation on all watches, that's true. There's no reason why either of those has to be an officer. However, if your helmsman is an officer, he can double as Officer of the Deck (OOD). Operations is also a must, but you've correctly identified that it can be filled by a rating.
Security x3 (1 Officer, 2 Enlisted),
Really? Why? The ship I was on didn't have any billets for Master-at-Arms, and had no brig. Ship's self defense was a secondary duty certain crew were trained in (I spent a couple of really fun days playing with shotguns in a mock-up, learning to repel boarders), rather than a designated billet. Think of it this way... with only twenty four people aboard, can you afford to have a group this size who only exercise their primary job once in a blue moon? I'd have one armorer to maintain the hand weapons, and give the rest of the security space to engineers.
Engineer x4 (1 Officer, 3 Enlisted),
Seems reasonable. I think you may even have under-estimated how many engineers you need, but my comments on that come later.
CMO (Officer) and Science (Enlisted) = 12
Doctors, and even nurses, are a rare commodity. I strongly doubt that a ship with only twenty-four crew rates its own. Instead, I suggest a Hospital Corpsman. When I served aboard the small ship, there was initially just the one HM1 until I struck into the rate... and that was for several more people than you have in your notional crew.
XO (Officer),
Again, on most ships, the XO doesn't actually stand a watch. On a ship as small as this one, she might.
Nurse (Enlisted)
Nurses are far more educated than you seem to think. In the modern US Navy, nurses are officers, and as a nurse, I agree that they should be. Again, I think what you're looking for here is a Corpsman, and I wouldn't even have two on a ship this size.
All for a grand total of 24 (10 Officers and 14 Enlisted).
In the modern navy, that's far too many officers. Your CO and XO have to be officers. Your ChEng probably does, though on a ship this small, he might be a warrant officer. Operations probably wants an officer department head, as does Science... maybe. It depends on the mission parameters. If your ship is going to do heavy-duty science, then yes. Otherwise, I'd suggest a Chief Petty Officer for the job. Everyone else? Enlisted.
Some of you may be asking why only two shifts?
Actually, I'm thinking "he's never stood watch and watch." Watch and watch is hard. It wears you down, and spits you out. People start making mistakes, and mistakes with antimatter are deadly. I did six-on-six-off a couple of times during my years in the Navy, and have done back-to-back twelves a couple of times as a nurse. If you do it for more than a few days, you're ready to roll cannon balls across the deck.
My suggestion: For a watch, you need to have helm, operations, and say four people in engineering. That's six watch standers. Times three shifts is eighteen. That leaves you six for CO, XO, Corpsman, Science specialist, supply officer, and gunner's mate. Of course, the science specialist can be one of the three who stand operations watches, so there's another billet to figure out.
Wow. Quite a response, Jennifer. Thanks a lot for all that info.
Since I had posted the crew assignments that you were referring to there have been some massive changes. Once I laid out the deck plans I realized leaving the crew at 24 left virtually no room for the small amount of luxuries I wanted to include. Now, the crew stands at a maximum of 14.
The reason for so many officers (which as an enlisted person, I don't agree with) is that trek has virtually no visible personnel who are NOT officers. I was trying to compromise on what I thought would fit into trek, yet attempt to balance it with real world. However, since I'm bumping down the number of crew that may change as well.
I'll think about it some and post up new assignments. I look forward to your input.
Actually, I'm thinking "he's never stood watch and watch." Watch and watch is hard. It wears you down, and spits you out. People start making mistakes, and mistakes with antimatter are deadly. I did six-on-six-off a couple of times during my years in the Navy, and have done back-to-back twelves a couple of times as a nurse. If you do it for more than a few days, you're ready to roll cannon balls across the deck.
I reread your post and had to comment on this. Could you describe for me what back-to-back twelves entail? I'm curious since every deployment I've been on has been twelves for the entire time. Usually, it was six days on and one day off. Quite a few times the one day off never happened. We were fine with it over a six month period.
I reread your post and had to comment on this. Could you describe for me what back-to-back twelves entail? I'm curious since every deployment I've been on has been twelves for the entire time. Usually, it was six days on and one day off. Quite a few times the one day off never happened. We were fine with it over a six month period.
I think he is referring to shifts for work.
Your right to an opinion does not make your opinion valid.
Could you describe for me what back-to-back twelves entail?
Well, let's say that, like me, you're a night shift nurse. You have to be at work at least half an hour before your shift starts, so you can get pass down from the previous nurses on the patients you've been assigned. You spend twelve hours working with those patients, usually running most of the night and trying to keep your charts up to date as you go. If I get more than five minutes of break all night, I'm surprised. Then, at the end of the night, you have to give shift report, and make sure everything has been charted. I'm usually there at least an hour after shift change. So a nominal twelve-hour shift is more like thirteen or fourteen.
Then comes the fact that no one respects day sleepers. "Oh, Jenny's just asleep," they say, "I can bother her for this!" or "she can do this for me!" They don't think about the fact that they'd be pissed off if I woke them up at three in the morning for a favor. So a lot of the time, you don't get enough sleep, and then you have to go right back in and do it all again.
It didn't seem so bad in the Navy, when I was younger, but as I get older, I find I hate the twelve hour shift more and more.
If you pare the crew down to 12, you've got more of a PT boat situation... they've got to have a base somewhere, whether that's a tender or a starbase, or whatever. And you lose the need for most of the officers... maybe two, all told, in your crew of 12.
Also, I don't know how things are when you deploy, but onboard ship standing watch is only part of what a person does. Everyone in the Navy wears several different hats. Before I struck Corpsman, I was part of the ship's self-defense force... and everyone on-board is trained in damage control and firefighting. On the small ship I was stationed aboard, I stood watch as a lookout and helmsman, in addition to my job as Corpsman. You go stand your watch, and then you go do your regular job, whatever that might be. I chipped a lot of paint while at sea, my first year in the Navy.
And yes, some of that is no doubt automated in Starfleet, but someone's still got to perform maintenance on vital systems, and update charts, and keep publications in order, and....
Then comes the fact that no one respects day sleepers.
My roommates were like that until I started doing that to them. Just doing normal things, paying no mind to whether or not they needed to sleep. One moved out, the other (a model/dancer/and singer) got wise and found ways to not make noise during the day.
Regards Juvat's point about there being loads of officers on trek ships, bear in mind it's only on screen. For my ships, I had only a small number of officers and most were enlisted crewmen. Saying that, most of you people seem to have experience from actually being in the military and the closest I've come to that is going to an air show about 20 years ago.
Think I had about 25 officers on a crew of around 500.... Saying that, I had planned on doing a fair few 'lower decks' style stories with actual 'midshipmen' to show they were the bread and butter of the ship.
Entertainment in general seems to focus on officers. Top Gun, for instance, barely acknowledged there was such a thing as enlisted folks. And that's okay... they were telling a story about fighter pilots, and pilots are officers in the modern Navy. (Thank you, Hap Arnold). Even when enlisted are acknowledged, it's most often as comic relief.
The truth of the real world, though, is that the vast majority of work aboard a ship is done by enlisted folks, and a PT boat like this might well be commanded by a Chief Petty Officer or a Warrant Officer. Special Boat Units, PT Boats, riverine patrol boats, are all enlisted-heavy.
As far as working in a deployed location goes for aircraft maintenance (weapons loading, known as ordinance in the Navy, specifically), here's a sequence of events to give you an idea of why I chose two shifts as opposed to three. First, like you, we show up approximately thirty minutes early. During that time we had role call and were given turnover from the prior shift. After that, and before our shift even started, we had toolboxes signed out and ready to relieve our counterparts on the flightline. Shift start comes around and we're all in the truck and on our way to work. From that point on it was an endless cycle of loading aircraft, launching aircraft, recovering aircraft, reloading aircraft and troubleshooting problems along with scheduled maintenance in between all of that. The end of the shift comes and the guys we relieved come in to relieve us. We go in and take care of all of the paperwork that comes with maintenance and provide in depth turnover. An hour later we go back to the barracks. Rinse. Repeat. Obviously, just like you, a twelve hour shift is always more than a twelve. I believe this applies the vast majority of the time. That's in my 12 1/2 years of experience anyway. Plus, the higher rank you achieve, the longer turnover takes...guaranteed.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with the PT boat comparison. Part of my idea was to have these little guys stationed at all types of locations and serve as police action type ships, but primarily as patrols for whatever system they were in. Perhaps two or three stationed in a Federation system cycling out for two week rotations. My initial reasoning behind why you would never see them on screen was because they aren't long range ships by any stretch of the imagination and since "most" missions seen in trek take place in unfamiliar territory without a Federation presence there would be no place for my ship.
Anywho, still working on crew assignments. Thanks for the responses everyone.
Part of my idea was to have these little guys stationed at all types of locations and serve as police action type ships, but primarily as patrols for whatever system they were in.
Ah, the System Defense Boat concept. I'm in favor.
Another thing I was thinking about today: rotating crews. Modern ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) have two crews -- commonly called the the Blue crew and the Gold crew. The boat comes in, one crew comes off, the other crew goes aboard, and the boat pulls out, disappearing below the waves for six months.
Applied to these little SDBs, you could have, say, a two-week rotation. Leave the Starbase, make a low-warp patrol of the neighborhood, pull in, resupply, change crews, lather, rinse, repeat. The thing about PT boats or gunboats is that they're basically useful in two situations: 1) when you don't care if you get their crews back, and 2) if they're capable of moving faster than the targeting systems used against them can handle.
These guys are basically a step up from runabouts. In sailing ship terms, a runabout is like a ship's longboat... it can be used for trans-oceanic transport, but you don't really want to use it that way. An SDB would be more like a cutter or sloop-of-war.
I'm sure there's nothing I've written that you haven't already considered; I'm just voicing more thoughts on the subject. :cool:
More on the subject of PT boats: Two fantastic books about PT boats at the height of their glory are They Were Expendable and At Close Quarters. They were expendable was written very early in WWII, and At close quarters was written after the war, by one of the skippers who was interviewed for they were expendable.
Alright...I think I've got it. At least as far as a "typical" crew of twelve is concerned. This will leave provisions for an extra two personnel if the need arises to either transport someone or just plain beef up the crew.
CO
- LT
XO (chief engineer)
- CPO
CONN/OPS x4 (two would double as master at arms and two would double in science roles including sensors, etc.)
Engineering x6
All positions with ranks not listed would be enlisted billets that would fall under the supervision of the XO (which should realistically be called the NCOIC).
This is looking great Juvat. The one thing about this vessel that seems a little off is the proportion of the warp nacelles in relation to the rest of the ship. The nacelles seem just a little too bulky for this ship. If I might suggest, reduce the overall bulk of the nacelles by about a fifth and see how it looks. The only part I would not change is the nacelle length.
Granted, Voyager's nacelles were too small proportionally for the rest of the ship........so having nacelles and stuff out of proprtion is not the cardinal sin......just in this case, putting the nacelles on a bit of a diet might help the overall appearance of this great little ship.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I spent quite a bit of time tweaking the nacelle size. As I add more detail I may rethink the size some, but it may end up that they get lengthened rather than what you proposed.
Moving on...UPDATES!!!
I've finished the torpedo launcher and airlocks, plus I've just started with the RCS thrusters. Yes, I realize they're rather large. This is a ship that will pride itself on maneuverability, but anyway...they'll be worked on. Sorry about the second render. I thought it was finished so I saved it then I saw it wasn't. Oh, well.
Posts
Deck 2 Plans from the original 2D thread here.
Small, narrow, and fast. Difficult to hit, alone or in packs.
For example:
Jim Martin's "Valiant-Class" (pre-Defiant) concept
If you were thinking what is actually the bridge viewport is the torpedo launcher then...
Anything to improve?
Why would I completely rework a solidified design?
I'm kinda stuck on a choice for weapons. If you go back and look at the deck plans you'll see where the dorsal phaser arrays would've been and the ventral arrays would be in the approximate same location on the underside. There would also have been a few shorter arrays all over the ship to get full 360* coverage. Then I got to thinking. What about a smaller version of the phaser cannons that the Defiant employs? Maybe two of them with a 10* +/-5* firing arc. On top of that I was thinking of possibly elminating the idea of 360* coverage. Why? Resources primarily, I suppose. Something else I thought of is that this isn't meant to be a ship designed to hang around in combat. It could be extremely fast, but lightly armed set up to do strafing runs if need be. With that said, I think that mainly forward firing weapons would be best to utilize the strengths of the ship.
Am I thinking into this too much?
Ideas?
Come to think of it...I am worrying about this way too much. I'll work on the model and see what y'all think.
Ignore him. He prefers to voice his fandom opinions than give and constructive criticism.
I think if you can find a plausible way to pull off the Phase Canons, than go for it. Otherwise just stick to what you have planned.
Exactly.
I know I'm late to this party, but your thread just caught my attention today. First let me present my bona fides so that you may see that I am not simply pulling things out of my butt. For five years after graduating from high school, I was a Hospital Corpsman of the United States Navy. I served on a ship with less than a hundred crew before moving to a ship with more than five thousand crew.
On most ships, the Commanding Officer won't actually stand a regular watch. He has other things to be concerned with, and has to be ready at any time to respond to emergencies. He is responsible for everything that happens aboard.
You need someone at the helm and providing navigation on all watches, that's true. There's no reason why either of those has to be an officer. However, if your helmsman is an officer, he can double as Officer of the Deck (OOD). Operations is also a must, but you've correctly identified that it can be filled by a rating.
Really? Why? The ship I was on didn't have any billets for Master-at-Arms, and had no brig. Ship's self defense was a secondary duty certain crew were trained in (I spent a couple of really fun days playing with shotguns in a mock-up, learning to repel boarders), rather than a designated billet. Think of it this way... with only twenty four people aboard, can you afford to have a group this size who only exercise their primary job once in a blue moon? I'd have one armorer to maintain the hand weapons, and give the rest of the security space to engineers.
Seems reasonable. I think you may even have under-estimated how many engineers you need, but my comments on that come later.
Doctors, and even nurses, are a rare commodity. I strongly doubt that a ship with only twenty-four crew rates its own. Instead, I suggest a Hospital Corpsman. When I served aboard the small ship, there was initially just the one HM1 until I struck into the rate... and that was for several more people than you have in your notional crew.
Again, on most ships, the XO doesn't actually stand a watch. On a ship as small as this one, she might.
Nurses are far more educated than you seem to think. In the modern US Navy, nurses are officers, and as a nurse, I agree that they should be. Again, I think what you're looking for here is a Corpsman, and I wouldn't even have two on a ship this size.
In the modern navy, that's far too many officers. Your CO and XO have to be officers. Your ChEng probably does, though on a ship this small, he might be a warrant officer. Operations probably wants an officer department head, as does Science... maybe. It depends on the mission parameters. If your ship is going to do heavy-duty science, then yes. Otherwise, I'd suggest a Chief Petty Officer for the job. Everyone else? Enlisted.
Actually, I'm thinking "he's never stood watch and watch." Watch and watch is hard. It wears you down, and spits you out. People start making mistakes, and mistakes with antimatter are deadly. I did six-on-six-off a couple of times during my years in the Navy, and have done back-to-back twelves a couple of times as a nurse. If you do it for more than a few days, you're ready to roll cannon balls across the deck.
My suggestion: For a watch, you need to have helm, operations, and say four people in engineering. That's six watch standers. Times three shifts is eighteen. That leaves you six for CO, XO, Corpsman, Science specialist, supply officer, and gunner's mate. Of course, the science specialist can be one of the three who stand operations watches, so there's another billet to figure out.
No, and I hope I've shown you why. :cool:
Since I had posted the crew assignments that you were referring to there have been some massive changes. Once I laid out the deck plans I realized leaving the crew at 24 left virtually no room for the small amount of luxuries I wanted to include. Now, the crew stands at a maximum of 14.
The reason for so many officers (which as an enlisted person, I don't agree with) is that trek has virtually no visible personnel who are NOT officers. I was trying to compromise on what I thought would fit into trek, yet attempt to balance it with real world. However, since I'm bumping down the number of crew that may change as well.
I'll think about it some and post up new assignments. I look forward to your input.
I reread your post and had to comment on this. Could you describe for me what back-to-back twelves entail? I'm curious since every deployment I've been on has been twelves for the entire time. Usually, it was six days on and one day off. Quite a few times the one day off never happened. We were fine with it over a six month period.
I think he is referring to shifts for work.
Well, let's say that, like me, you're a night shift nurse. You have to be at work at least half an hour before your shift starts, so you can get pass down from the previous nurses on the patients you've been assigned. You spend twelve hours working with those patients, usually running most of the night and trying to keep your charts up to date as you go. If I get more than five minutes of break all night, I'm surprised. Then, at the end of the night, you have to give shift report, and make sure everything has been charted. I'm usually there at least an hour after shift change. So a nominal twelve-hour shift is more like thirteen or fourteen.
Then comes the fact that no one respects day sleepers. "Oh, Jenny's just asleep," they say, "I can bother her for this!" or "she can do this for me!" They don't think about the fact that they'd be pissed off if I woke them up at three in the morning for a favor. So a lot of the time, you don't get enough sleep, and then you have to go right back in and do it all again.
It didn't seem so bad in the Navy, when I was younger, but as I get older, I find I hate the twelve hour shift more and more.
If you pare the crew down to 12, you've got more of a PT boat situation... they've got to have a base somewhere, whether that's a tender or a starbase, or whatever. And you lose the need for most of the officers... maybe two, all told, in your crew of 12.
And yes, some of that is no doubt automated in Starfleet, but someone's still got to perform maintenance on vital systems, and update charts, and keep publications in order, and....
Think I had about 25 officers on a crew of around 500.... Saying that, I had planned on doing a fair few 'lower decks' style stories with actual 'midshipmen' to show they were the bread and butter of the ship.
Loving your little ship so far.
The truth of the real world, though, is that the vast majority of work aboard a ship is done by enlisted folks, and a PT boat like this might well be commanded by a Chief Petty Officer or a Warrant Officer. Special Boat Units, PT Boats, riverine patrol boats, are all enlisted-heavy.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with the PT boat comparison. Part of my idea was to have these little guys stationed at all types of locations and serve as police action type ships, but primarily as patrols for whatever system they were in. Perhaps two or three stationed in a Federation system cycling out for two week rotations. My initial reasoning behind why you would never see them on screen was because they aren't long range ships by any stretch of the imagination and since "most" missions seen in trek take place in unfamiliar territory without a Federation presence there would be no place for my ship.
Anywho, still working on crew assignments.
Ah, the System Defense Boat concept. I'm in favor.
Another thing I was thinking about today: rotating crews. Modern ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) have two crews -- commonly called the the Blue crew and the Gold crew. The boat comes in, one crew comes off, the other crew goes aboard, and the boat pulls out, disappearing below the waves for six months.
Applied to these little SDBs, you could have, say, a two-week rotation. Leave the Starbase, make a low-warp patrol of the neighborhood, pull in, resupply, change crews, lather, rinse, repeat. The thing about PT boats or gunboats is that they're basically useful in two situations: 1) when you don't care if you get their crews back, and 2) if they're capable of moving faster than the targeting systems used against them can handle.
These guys are basically a step up from runabouts. In sailing ship terms, a runabout is like a ship's longboat... it can be used for trans-oceanic transport, but you don't really want to use it that way. An SDB would be more like a cutter or sloop-of-war.
I'm sure there's nothing I've written that you haven't already considered; I'm just voicing more thoughts on the subject. :cool:
CO
- LT
XO (chief engineer)
- CPO
CONN/OPS x4 (two would double as master at arms and two would double in science roles including sensors, etc.)
Engineering x6
All positions with ranks not listed would be enlisted billets that would fall under the supervision of the XO (which should realistically be called the NCOIC).
Sound good now?
Granted, Voyager's nacelles were too small proportionally for the rest of the ship........so having nacelles and stuff out of proprtion is not the cardinal sin......just in this case, putting the nacelles on a bit of a diet might help the overall appearance of this great little ship.
Moving on...UPDATES!!!
I've finished the torpedo launcher and airlocks, plus I've just started with the RCS thrusters. Yes, I realize they're rather large. This is a ship that will pride itself on maneuverability, but anyway...they'll be worked on. Sorry about the second render. I thought it was finished so I saved it then I saw it wasn't. Oh, well.
Lemme know whatcha think.
Are you going to make the bit under the torpedo launcher's muzzle that orange plastic texture that the Nova class used?
As I'm looking at these, I find myself also thinking that the nacelles could be reduced in height. Not length or width, but height.