This is an "out-of-character post" to introduce myself, talk about what I'm trying to do here, and what I'd like people to do here.
First off - welcome to my blog and thanks for your interest.
Feel free to browse around. Comments are welcome provided they are respectful in tone. Also, feel free to link these designs in you own websites. Please don't repost the material entirely elsewhere without permission (which I'd likely give). Also, if you are an author and would like to use any of the ideas I've blogged about here in your own work you are welcome to do so, although please let me know, I'd love to see how you've interpreted and incorporated it into your own material.
I'm an avid fan of SciFi and a bit of a technophile so SciFi science and technology has always been a passion of mine. I have shelves of Startrek, Starwars, and Babylon 5 technical manuals and game manuals. I'm always interested in the science and technology behind the scenes in movies, TV shows, and books. I am often doodling, jotting down here and there little ideas that I've had about science fiction technology. So I created this blog as a place to set down some of the more developed of those ideas.
I also apologize... I'm more technically minded than artistic. I would love to provide marvelous drawings, CAD renditions, or other illustrations to show what I'm thinking of, but I'm not very skilled in that area so, at least for now, these pages will be fairly sparse of images to ooh at.
With this first series of posts I'm work within the Startrek universe, set about the Voyager era, shortly after the Dominon War. My original idea was for a general 'can do everything' ship. But realistically no ship should be able to do everything without becoming prohibitively large and expensive which then limits its utility since it can't also be everywhere. So things eventually ended up being one general purpose space frame, customized into one of four general variants (science, military, luxury, cargo) with mounted mission pods to even further customize its role. Thus one design is able to do everything... but not every ship of that design.
Right from the beginning I know there are some 'issues' with what I'm presenting. Particularly with the third nacelle. Of all the major Scifi series, Startrek has some of the worst (from a real-physics view) designed starships out there. Bilateral symmetry does make some sense when you have a ship designed by humans, but bilateral symmetry is about the worst design possible for spaceflight. The forces involved in rapid acceleration and maneuvering through all three dimensions, without the need for aerodynamics means that engines should be placed either in a single axis or with radial symmetry.
But Startrek fans have put in more effort into making what the writers of the show gave them work than in any other franchise out there. And its some really well thought out and creative work. For example: some of the issue with bilateral symmetry is explained with theories of warp dynamics where a ship starts to tumble (called 'pinwheeling') without two drives offset from the central mass of the ship. One of the main starship design sites made by the franchises' fans developed is set of basic rules for starship design which states that nacelles must come in pairs. In this Alpha class project I do have three nacelles but I'm skirting around the problem a little... Basically, while the ships do have three nacelles, they only use two of them at any given time. The purpose of the third nacelle is to allow the nacelles to be used in a rotation where the 'offline' nacelle can undergo detailed routine maintenance that can't be performed on an active drive. On a regular schedule the three nacelles are rotated through this maintenance cycle to improve the efficiency and lifespan of the ships warp drive.
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