(First of all if this belongs to Mpsims, I give permission to a moderator to move it. You are welcome).
Something (I don’t know what) has led me to believe that there are a lot of trekkies in this place. Therefore I have a great idea (I hope it is original). Let’s make a completely new Starship. I have a couple of ideas, I hope every damm geek in this board helps:
Holodecks, our ship won’t have one. They are dangerous… very dangerous. As a compensation it will have Satelite tv with all the premium channels (if future sailors are like the present one they won’t miss the holodeck if they have Playboy tv).
Seatbelts. Come on! a single torpedo and everyone start bouncing the ceiling.
Fuses. Again, one torpedo and crewman number three is barbacued. It’s not fair, with 0.50 cents they can solve the problem.
Decoration: I don’t like the interiors, they look like the one of a bad hospital not the ones of a starship. More metal is required.
I know we are designing a ship, but those uniforms have to go. I say we want more skirts.
I propose a technology known as “vent ports” to be equipped on the warp core. This amazing development will allow the contents of the core to be evacuated into space in the event of a core breach or containment field failure. Repairs can then be performed on the now-empty core.
Actually, that wouldn’t work. The “stuff in the core” is anti-matter. If you take it outside of the containment field, it explodes. So venting it is basically exactly what they’re trying to avoid.
I disagree. There is no matter in space, thus the antimatter has nothing to react with. As far as reaction with the hull, well, if your shields are down you’re hosed anyway.
There was a Next Generation episode where dress uniforms were these robe things. There is a scene with Riker and Worf where Worf is bitching about having to wear a dress.
There is no matter in space, but there is matter to be encountered when leaving the ship.
If you beam something over, you have to lower your own shields.
Scotty did it in a book to win the Kobiashi Maru test, beaming over anti-matter.
Better option: have only as much antimatter in the core as you need at the moment. And put some manual overrides on the matter/antimatter reactors, so you can shut the damn thing off even in the event of computer failure.
Seatbelts, yeah. And grab handles on the consoles and along hallways so you can still get around even in a total loss of artificial gravity.
And manual joysticks and throttle levers. Ever tried to steer a plane with a touchscreen? Don’t. Real control consoles have physical buttons and switches, with guards over them so you can’t push or flip one accidentally by bumping into the control panel.
And everything’s way too big. Far too much wasted space. I bet you could shrink the size of a Federation starship 50% easy with zero loss of functionality just by cutting out superfluous rooms and making the hallways narrower. Make it look less like a resort hotel and more like a battleship inside.
And there should be some of those 3-dimensional displays that float in the air. They clearly have the technology to do this, but you almost never see it.
Oh, and don’t put the bridge on the outside surface of the ship. That’s just dumb, a clear holdover from the days when the bridge crew had to look out of windows with their own eyes to see what’s going on. It should be deeply buried somewhere in the interior behind armor.
Get them some real guns, with actual barrels you can sight along, and that don’t look like some kind of handheld vacume cleaner.
As for personal weapons…can we load up some rapid-fire weapon for the away teams? Hell, it wouldn’t even have to be an energy weapon. Even one of those old water-jacketed WWI machine guns would do the trick in a lot of the combat situations the away teams get into.
<bitter rant>
Anyone remember “The Siege of AR-558”? When they had the difficult task of keeping the Jem’Hadar from running across a 10’x10’ rocky clearing? Well, I guess it WOULD be difficult if your weapons have a worse rate of fire than a single-action revolver.
<end bitter rant>
And I agree on not building uselessly large rooms and hallways, but would it be so wrong to hire a decorator? I mean, just because you don’t want it to look like a holiday inn doesn’t mean the corridors have to look like the inside of a ventilation system.
Ranchoth
Space is… now I might get “technical” here… 3 dimensional. You’d think that you might want to take advantage of this more often. [sub]yeah, I know there’s “higher dimensions” in Star Trek, but kept it simple in this situation[/sub]
Whenever they show the ships on the screen, they are always oriented on the same plane in space, and they are always facing towards each other. Well, the new ship should be more realistic. It doesn’t matter if you’re “upside down” compared to the other ship - your ship has it’s own internal gravity field/reference frame.
Also, in battles the ships should be much more free to maneuver in three dimensions. Usually the only time Star Trek gets this right is when they are fighting a much larger enemy, like a Borg cube. I only suspect that they bother doing this because it would like downright silly to have all of the Federation ships attacking the cube on the same plane in space.
Star Trek also hasn’t done a very good job of showing that ships plot courses in three dimensions. Face it, it would look cooler if the ship headed straight “up”, or off on a “diagonal”.
Why don’t the away teams wear some kind of futuristic descendant of Kevlar? It would be a lot better than getting wounded by some primitive flintlock, as Spock once was.
Jeffery’s Tubes (or however the hell you spell) – what is up with those silly things… hasn’t someone figured out it is uncomfortable to crawl around duct work to do repairs… why not use some of the excess hallway space to make engineering pathways you don’t have to crawl around on all fours to get around. Grotesquely bad design.
It shouldn’t be built in a traditional shipyard. Instead of using shipyards, they should have a big giant ship-making replicator (with a big giant power plant, of course).
Oh, and the sickbay should be equipped with advanced transporter technology. Imagine how many lives they could save if they could simply disassemble a patient into a pattern buffer, alter the pattern to fix the injuries or remove the pathogens in question, and then reassemble the patient in perfect health.
In regards to some of these suggestions it sounds like everybody is trying to re-invent the Defiant. I cheered when the Defiant first came out because Finally they came up with something that looked like it had a clear and defined purpose… kicking ass. I always liked Babylon 5 ship design better, at least since there has BEEN a Babylon 5.
[channelling inner geek]
I thought the whole purpose of having the engines out on ‘nacelles’ is that they COULD be jettisoned in the case of some kind of warp core failure. Wasn’t there an early Star Trek episode where they had to jettison the nacelles but it would kill Scotty who was in the tube connecting them, or something?
[/channeling inner geek]
The nacelles are out there for the warp field. They “broadcast” the warp field around the ship, they aren’t the actual engines.
And the warp core can be ejected right out of the engine room. Sproing! and it’s gone. (I think they talked about doing this in Next Generation) Along with all power. (Like Tripp did in the shuttle that one time.)
I’m going to stop now before I start looking things up and citing them…
-Rue.
