Geodesic domes don’t have curved parts.
You’re really exagerrating the difficulty of making things curved. Really, it’s a pretty common industrial process done in the most modest of manufacturing facilities.
Aren’t we being old fashioned? If there is no feasible FTL travel, we have to think about ships that will take decades/centuries to reach their destinations. That means : control via autonomic computers, and either:
(1) “coldslee” (suspended animation for the crew
or
(2) fertilized ova with robot rearing of embrionic hmans (kids will be born in mid-flight, emerge as adults at the destination)
This means minimm size-the interstallar ship would be like an artillery shell.
No need for a hge sphere or artificial gravity.
I wonder-will the vast distances between the stars deter hman spaceflight? What is the point of venturing outside the solar system?
Even a trip to the closest star (4.2 light years away) will be impossible.
Well, of course you’d build your ‘realistic’ space ship from stuff you’ve picked up at Home Depot. I hear H&Gtv is going to have a show about it.
Or action that all takes place in one solar system (like Firefly)
It took me the better part of the first season to realize that Firefly was set in a single star system.
I thought, the Inner Worlds were, uh… closer to Earth or something like that.
Though there are some technical flaws, I like the star ships in the Lost Fleet series in that they don’t have any sort of magical instantaneous communication devices (they still have inertia compensators which are pretty much fantasy). The ships in the Longknife series are also pretty realistic, in that they don’t have inertia compensators OR instantaneous communications devices (though they slip on this sometimes), and have to worry about spin and thrust, as well as reaction mass for their fusion plasma drives. I’d go with that, though much of the rest of the series isn’t very realistic…just light weight (though good) military sci-fi.
Oh, John Ringo’s Live Free or Die series is also fairly realistic as well.
-XT
To defend the Star Trek designs, you need to realize that the warp nacelles are not rockets, or thrusters of any kind. They generate a field that warps local space, allowing the ship to move with that warp bubble. Thus the ship isn’t technically moving faster than light relative to its local space, though the space itself is.
Since they aren’t pushing the ship, they don’t need the kind of struts you’d need if they were. The ship does have a thruster-type drive, mounted on the rear edge of the saucer; it is used for sublight operation. You hear it referred to: Impulse engines.
ETA: In the Galaxy-class ship in TNG, the Impulse drive was near the bottom of the connector pylon between the saucer and cylinder sections. I’m not sure how the saucer maneuvered by itself without this drive…
In Star Trek fanwankery, I always assumed that warp drive needed “warp coils”, like a radio needs an antenna. The Federation and Klingons mount these in nacelles seperated out from the hull of the ship in many designs. (Maybe for ease of maintenance or replacement.)
/heh: Hazing for the noob Ensign: Ordered to go “tighten the warp coils”. Handed a wrench.
I don’t know if, in the case of the Federation, the anti-matter “fuel” for the warp reactor is stored in the nacelles. I know that the “warp core” is indeed within the secondary hull, and it is shown is a few episodes or movies ejecting from that hull, and not the nacelles.
How fast is impulse drive? I presume the saucers are not FTL, which has got to be a bitch trying to get home. 
According to Memory Alpha, .5 c
Plus it looked functional and was clean but not sanitary.
[hijack]How cool was it in the Castle Halloween episode when Rick was a space cowboy.[/hijack]
Daughter: But didn’t you dress up like that, like, 5 years ago?
Castle: Yeah - but I LIKED it!
Not hauling ass, but not bad. 
Thanks!
I think Star Trek wanks around realativistic effects of FTL by saying that the ships are in “subspace”, which I guess comes with it’s own set of rules.
I don’t think realativistic effects by going at full impulse are touched on at all. Too inconvenient for the plot(s) and writers, I suppose.
What about time dilation and special relativity? Granted, you need a huge source of energy (Bussard Ramjet?) to accelerate a ship to such velocities but it doesn’t require FTL. Such a ship (at a constant and comfortable 1g acceleration) could traverse the entire galaxy in a decade (ship time). Back home, a hundred thousand years would have elapsed.
They’re not really in subspace, just enveloped in a subspace field. It does take them out of the realm of real physics, though.
in that case, i’ll throw in the S.S. Heart of Gold. once you accept the premise/tech, it does not step outside the rules or consequence of having a ship with an Infinite Improbability Drive.
I thought the space ship in the original Planet Of The Apes was pretty good.
Always loved the survival gear.
IIRC, the saucer section of the Galaxy class starships have an additional couple of impulse thrusters along the rear edge, one towards either side. Also, IIRC, it’s possible for the ship to “launch” the saucer section at warp, and through some technobabble wankery, it can basically coast in warp at some speed.
Mostly though, I figure they just go back to grab the saucer when they are done with their thrilling heroics, or else rescue ships come by later to pick up the survivors from their lifeboat. We’ve seen both happen, actually.
Minor thing that amused the hell out of me once I noticed it: Nobody in Star Trek seems to travel in flying saucers save for the humans.
Oh, and there ARE fighters in Star Trek, but they only show up rarely. One TNG episode, IIRC, had a Starfleet cadet die in a training accident in such a fighter while performing an illegal astrobatic maneuver (turns out it was illegal for good reason). Those appeared to be of the “small and zippy” school of starfighters.
In a couple episodes of DS9, we also see Starfleet using fighters. They are shown attacking in massed formations, swarming their targets and running like hell in hit-and-run attacks. They tended to get swatted after a couple of solid hits. Some webside did a scale comparison of them compared to other ships they flew past, and figured out that for starfighters, they were pretty big, something like 30 meters long. Mostly they were really big engines, with a cockpit bolted to the front.
So, there are a series of books by Elizabeth Moon collectively known as “Vatta’s War”, about a young merchant captain who gets caught up in a very involved plot involving space pirates and corporate intrigue. Something that I liked about that series was that the captain, being young and inexperienced, did not know how everything aboard her ship worked. The reader didn’t get to learn much more than she did.
Basically, you’d have a group of crewmen huddled over a box with wires coming out of it, and explaining to the Captain what that box would do if it wasn’t broken. Some boxes they could fix, some boxes even the crewmen didn’t understand, and could only order replacements for. Interesting contrast to the “Do Anything Engineer” that you see in other shows like Star Trek. Note that this wasn’t because the crewmen were uneducated or lacking in skill, simply that the technology needed for things like intersteller FTL travel was beyond what anybody working on a freight hauler carrying a thousand tons of agricultural equipment was ever going to really understand.
Quote:
"Basically, you’d have a group of crewmen huddled over a box with wires coming out of it, and explaining to the Captain what that box would do if it wasn’t broken. Some boxes they could fix, some boxes even the crewmen didn’t understand, and could only order replacements for. Interesting contrast to the “Do Anything Engineer” that you see in other shows like Star Trek. Note that this wasn’t because the crewmen were uneducated or lacking in skill, simply that the technology needed for things like intersteller FTL travel was beyond what anybody working on a freight hauler carrying a thousand tons of agricultural equipment was ever going to really understand. "
Yep-I always liked it on the old Star Trek episodes, when some Klingon criser scores a hit on the Enterprise-sparks and flames ensue, and then Spock pulls out a screwdrived from the tool box, gets usder the console, and pokes around a bit.
A few seconds later, all the electricity comes back on, and all is right. Did they have a circuoit breaker box in the Enterprise? Never recall seeing one!