posted
I figured this should go separate from Dukkie's Excelsior prototype thread.
Here are scans of the four-page article that I did rather quick-and-dirty, but at a fairly large size. (Be warned...)
OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER: I got somewhat ragged on for posting scans of Sternbach's Intrepid-class article some months back. Please note that I am only putting these scans up to allow those of us without access to the Magazine itself to read and absorb the information contained therein. I am not advocating the use of these scans as a substitute for the Mag. I, however, do not personally care what you do with these images. I am a member of the "information wants to be free" camp.
But, are those supposed to be every Constellation ever built? Because there's only one that's new to this article, as far as I can tell.
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posted
It's also interesting to note that it claims the Soyuz and Miranda classes existed in earlier TOS-forms before being refit.
BTW, the USS Houbolt is named after Dr. John C Houbolt, an aerospace engineering who is credited with inventing twin fuselage aircraft.
-------------------- "Lotta people go through life doing things badly. Racing's important to men who do it well. When you're racing, it's life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting."
-Steve McQueen as Michael Delaney, LeMans
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
The article does indeed seem to imply that only these eight Constellations were ever commissioned. Of course, this leaves out the NCC-7100 ship from Picard's ready room. Perhaps, in light of the TNG Tech Manual's bit about "yellow warp-stress test paint" or whatever , it was an additional vessel that was constructed or partially constructed, but never made it to commissioning. (And yes, I *know* it was always supposed to be the Stargazer, but oh well... )
I don't know if the article is saying the Soyuz and Miranda classes existed in the pre-refit era. I rather got the opposite impression. ("When the Miranda and Soyuz classes also became major outgrowths of the refit program, the production lines expanded...") It sounds to me as if it's actually saying that they *didn't* exist except as offshoots of the Constitution-class.
It's interesting that the museum complex that the Stargazer and Valkyrie (I guess the whole convention studio model thing is moot now ) are stored at is *beneath* the surface of the Moon rather than in orbit.
Also, it's rather fun that the Stargazer was rebuilt after being recovered from the Ferengi in TNG "The Battle" and returned to limited service, considering what we know about the Hathaway in "Redemption."
I'm intrigued by the idea of the "deflector grid field" as a substitute for a navigational deflector dish. This raises some possibilities with other seemingly nav-deflector-less designs...
-MMoM
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
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posted
Sternbach also posits that the Stargazer was BUILT on the moon, and launched from there - a ratehr major feat only hinted at before with "San Fransisco Yards" and the DS9 novel "Antimatter".
posted
Mabye the first Illustration represents the prototype, but it sure does'nt have torpedos.
Strange.
I have a hard time believing that the Constalation served very long during the same time period as the Constitution class. This baby easily has more firepower than an Excelsior class with four torpedo bays! ....plus, being a much smaller starship means that it would out-perform it too!
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
I also wonder if that is all the ships in the class.
BTW, "Deflector grid field" is nothing new. I've been touting it since '98 as an obvious solution to the problem of ships without deflector dishes. I've mentioned it a few times that I can remember on Flare and in other places. In the end it is also on a number of websites, I think EAS is counted among them.
PS: I also seem to remember Rick talking about such a device on the PDE server when it still had his newsgroup.
-------------------- Later, J _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ _ _ The Last Person to post in the late Voyager Forum. Bashing both Voyager, Enterprise, and "The Bun" in one glorious post.
posted
Well, this article disproves the commonly accepted notion that the Constellation Class starships were retired by 2370. (Ahem...Bernd)
One item caught my eye-the Constellation Class ships were designed for spying. They had the ability for covert reconnaisance and were able to send stealth shuttles into enemy territories. (Is this the first mention of this type of shuttles in official Star Trek literature?) Was Captain Picard spying on the Ferengi in 2354 before his ship was attacked?
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capped
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posted
Sweet damn this is how Treknical publications should be... i aM vERY hAPPY iN a sPECIAL wAY!!!
some good notes..
the minus warp-sled TMP shuttle seen in real Starfleet use, as it was in the hangar paintings of the E-refit. noting they are impulse only though, disproves Picard's line about the group of shuttles limping to a Starbase, considering only one of them was warp-capable.. if the 'Gazer was in interstellar space anywhere, impulse shuttles would never have made it anywhere (of course, this is something that Trek has gotten wrong since WNMHGB (when the 1701 just happened to be a light-week or so from a Fed outpost, even though they were in unexplored space), so theyre just being consistent. consistently wrong. oh well.
the list of ships still might not be complete.. remember the article only discusses the initial design of the class.. perhaps those were the ships that were realized before 2300, then there might have been a 24th century series also. (like the 2000 series Excelsiors and the 18xx Mirandas were followed by 4xxxx and 2xxxx-3xxxx versions, respectively (and blessedly non chronologically, you'll note, maybe allowing for a 7100 Constie, just like we had the 956-17xxs range for Connies).
As I was just saying.. non-chronological registries are already shown in this list.. with an explanation that the regs were drawn in a certain order, but different ships yielded ships at different speeds for a variety of factors. hasn't that been my explanation all along? yay!
Mirandas refit from TOS era originals? yay!
BTW, the warp scale.. notation as 'absolute scale' .. acknowledgement for the change between TOS and TNG.. yay!
so the big thing on the bottom is a focused sensor beam array. funny, i just thought it was some sort of mech war greeblie.
the disappearing torpedo bays are wierd.. since the cutaway drawing was a cutaway, maybe it was showing the internal structure of where the torpedo bays were hidden.. they could fire from ports between hidden plates at the front of those pylon bends
BTW, just because the ship has 4 torp launchers doesnt mean it outguns an Excelsior (which probably has more torp launchers than the two I know about anyway). in the fanboy b0RG k!LLERz!1!world, quantity == tEH r0><0Rz!1!, but we have no actual knowledge of how many torpedoes it could fire simultaneously, the reload rate or the yield of the torpedoes. It's possible that the four bays could take twice as long to be reloaded with lower yield torpedoes that couldnt all fire at once, which would make Excelsioras actually more powerfully gunned. This explanation could extend towards the Akira, who just might have 15 of the weakest torp launchers in the fleet for all we know..
hm.. the fact that the 'Gazer served for another decade puts a wrench in the new Intrepid class Stargazer thats popped up in a few comics and other licensed works.. oh well, it can be explained away since the 2893 is chilling on (under!?) the moon
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"The New Constellation Class Project" would seem to imply an old Constellation class
This subsurface museum complex sounds interesting. The ships are kept in a pressurized atmosphere? Any ambitious 3D-artists around?
Are those Vulcan warpshuttle pods in the hangars?
The Miranda/Soyuz as "outgrowths of the refit program" could be explained both ways I think.
I think I'll even add Talvihna IV to my UFP database. These new TDB articles are a very nice addition to the Tech Manuals, and just as canon (or non-canon, depending on your definition of canon.. please, don't discuss this any further )
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posted
weve had the canon discussion before.. i remember the consensus before, that Sternbach knows enough to write the write stuff down that will support what has come before (because he knows all there is to know about a lot of the stuff, he designed it with these specs in mind, or he came up with these specs to explain what he designed).. and that, being the good tech advisor, he doesnt try to establish things that are likely to be contradicted in future productions. he leaves it vague where he should, i.e. areas writers might want to adapt to suit their stories, and gets overly specific in areas that most writers avoid, like the technical specs (and since the writers avoid stuff like that, they put 'TECH' in the script and Sternbachs material gets used anyway.. remember how hard they worked over the past few years to work the saucer landing and captain's yacht into the last few movies, because of such things being publicized in the TNG TM?
Yeah those are the TMP shuttles.. keep in mind your nomenclature is off, Harry, because they were never exclusively Vulcan. I believe you could see them right in the E-refit's hangar bay right in the same movie.
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posted
The shuttle complement of the ship may well have changed during the century of operations... Perhaps back in the TOS movie days, supporting even one warp shuttle was a major feat for a starship, but in TNG it's trivially simple.
Rick, like pretty much everybody else, forgets the five single phaser domes on the dorsal surface. They aren't even reinterpreted as running lights in the drawings - they are simply omitted. Sure, it may be they weren't part of the planned original weapons complement, which is what Rick is listing...
Seven shuttlebay doors for four craft? Crazy. Rick should have left that ambiguous. The four small doors could still be considered dedicated to cargo handling, with just a token internal access point to the main hangar volume.
The bow "hangar door" would have made for a perfectly good navigational deflector! A missed opportunity here. We only ever saw bow views of dysfunctional Constellations, and we know the deflectors of Constitutions don't glow while the ships are powered down.
I love the idea that early SIFs (or super-SIFs, since some sort of artificial reinforcement must have been around since the days of Cochrane) required distinct external gridwork. Of course, the prominent grids could have been what the corresponding things are on Soviet warships, too: degaussing cables, for greater stealth.
The recce role could be specialized enough that no further ships in the class were needed. Or then production was halted when the Excelsiors came along and forced Starfleet to accept the need to build, repair and replenish starships larger than the Constitution. All the compromises made to keep the Constellation down to that size would then be abandoned in disgust.
Rick has a weird take on the nacelle orientation - he seems to be saying that the nacelles just happened to be tilted 90 degrees for no good reason, which forced the designers to rethink warp propulsion. I'd think it would be vice versa: the nacelle tilt was the way to realize some harebrained warp field scheme.
posted
I am in the minority, a minority of one, on this one. When I look at the model, it appears the lower nacelles at an angle. I think this is attributable to the support 'beam' which connects the nacelles to the pylon, then finally to the ship itself. This is evident in the photos by Mike Trice of the U.S.S. Valkyrie NCC-2590. Based on only photographic evidence, the support 'beam' slopes downward in the center, thus having the nacelles at an upward angle. The upper nacelles seem to be at a 90* angle. I would say the angle of the lower nacelles is 15 to 25 degrees upward. Well, anyway, here are the pictures:
I don't subscribe to the idea this is battle damage. This angle of the nacelles would appear to be structural.
Of the many mysteries answered by this article (When was the Constellation Class first introduced into service? What are the ships in this class? What sets this class apart from the other known classes in Starfleet?), I am glad this following mystery was not answered: Why did Starfleet create the likeness of a man on the underside of this class?
posted
Yikes! I never realized how large these images would appear on this page. Is there a control in the size of the image?
When I was looking at the figure situated near the pylon, I noticed a possible second figure located at the front. This figure has a robe with outstretched arms and a mask with a single opening. Agreed, I could be seeing things. I just thought I would remark on this.
Another thought entered my mind-if the pairs of nacelles were the same, wouldn't the lower pair (seen as upper in the first photo) mirror the upper pair (seen as lower in the first photo) in the first pic?
Anyhow, a good question-is it ok to have a reconnaissance ship with performance issues? I don't remember the exact line from "Relics", but my impression was that the Constellation Class starships, especially the U.S.S. Stargazer, were performing less well than anticipated for a starship.
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Topic Closed
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, it was an additional vessel that was constructed or partially constructed, but never made it to commissioning. (And yes, I *know* it was always supposed to be the Stargazer, but oh well... ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
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) are stored at is *beneath* the surface of the Moon rather than in orbit.
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