Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
The idea would be that engineering would be in drive sections like, Dukhat's old Tolstoy concept with the saucer, nacelles above, & secondary hull below would in this case actually be a Cheyenne variant. And yes, the limitations of keeping various saucers & drive sections idled & stored is exavtly why they'd be standardized as the quad-engine firm later on. Same with Nebula being standardized with the triangular wing after all the different variants. They were the beginning & end of Stafleet's obsession with modularity through pods & shit.
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Also, mind you, all of this is being written as part of situational historical overview for context. Whenever the website goes live, more detailed pieces on the individual classes will be the promise of future content, hashing things like this out in far greater detail.
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I like the idea of Cheyennes being retrofitted as quad-nacelle explorers, especially if the Nebulas (Nebulae?) retain some e degree of modularity (mission pods would be easier to convert & store). But I do feel that there’s some other unseen DSE class out there, that’s been the mainstay of DSE missions and we just know nothing about it.
“According to issue #108 of the Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection, the Cheyenne-class was a type of light cruiser with a crew of 320 and a top speed of warp 9.6. This class was used for deep space exploration and defensive patrol duties.”
Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
My main issue against Cheyenne having DSE as its main role is its size. It's tiny, mang, seven decks in the saucer & like nine altogether. Sure, it's 362 meters, but only like 190 of that is actual ship. Not a lot of room for explorer-y stuff in there.
My explorer classes (that is, ones specifically typed with that nomen) through the end of the war havr been Excelsior, Ambassador, Renaissance, Nebula, Navajo, Galaxy, Paladin, & Sovereign.
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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It seems like, if anything was going to be used for long missions in deep space with no returning to port in the meantime, it would be something like the Galaxy. You'd want the crew to have all the comforts you can give them. You'd want them to take their families with them, since they otherwise won't see them for years. Maybe that's what they were all up to during TNG, aside from the E-D.
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It’d explain that putative second tranche of hulls being rushed into service in the Dominion War without completed internal spaces, certainly.
On the Cheyenne size, sure, maybe it’s too small. But why should DSE crews need to be large? With years of travel ahead, they might potentially struggle to find people willing to be absent for a decade. And there would be no need for large science teams onboard, which could do their work on any normal Starfleet vessel. You’d need mostly survey and mapping staff, some expertise in diplomacy, cultures and linguistics and sociology. Anthropology! Physicists and cosmologists, not so much. CF that guy in “Good Shepherd” who became withdrawn and obsessed with his research to the detriment of the wider crew and his own performance reviews....
Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Size-wise, I'm thinking less about crew & more about capabilities, labs & the like. Crew comforts, too, though. Your points are valid, though, especially from the mid-2370s on when we see a lot more automation, a lot more adaptability in ships which require smaller crews. But I have Cheyenne starting in the late 2330s, when requirements & needs are different. I don't think even something like Intrepid would've been possible at that tine, not at its size with the capabailities & crew it has. So sure, later [i]Cheyenne]/i]s could be build for primarily DSE, & earlier ones refit for it, but I don't think it was the original primary purpose.
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Not disagreeing, but I don’t think the Cheyenne’s overall size precludes a larger crew complement, not when put up next to the original Constitution with its 430 crew.
Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
I guess it all comes down to what we think the interior is like. For me, TNG-era explorers kept pushing toward that "mobile starbase" concept with as many labs & researchers & science types as possible aboard so that they could handle whatever they found or was thrown at them, & so I tend to discount the idea of small explorers.
But then I remember how I've built this world (which, of course, you don't know yet) & how those big ships were the spearhead of the push, the exploratory vanguard, & that smaller ships followed on after them for more in-depth & lingering explo in deyail. Put in that frame, then yeah, I'd say you're definitely right in that Cheyenne could be well-configured for such duties.
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More widely, I'm suddenly finding the whole deep-space mission thing persistently intriguing. They're the five-year missions of the twenty-fourth century. How do you outfit and crew a mission that might be away for a decade or more? Is a large crew better (to stop people getting sick of the same faces alll the time) or is smaller better (less chance of things going wrin with people)? Would they be family missions? Companionship is good, but if the isolation leads to the ending of relationships, you;re still stuck on the same ship together!± And is a deep-space explorer the right environment to bring up kids?
posted
I would think that any ship would in theory be able to handle deep space exploration, but the question would be how well. After all, most of the great sailing expeditions were out for years, generally with much smaller crews than a Starfleet ship, and fewer amenities too. Lee’s musings on crew relationships make a lot of sense, the ship would need more space if it were to support civilians and extracurricular activities in a way that sailing ships never dreamed of. Heck, Riley’s bowling alley was probably an extravagance on the Constitution class.
So I think the most basic question is, how many people do you want to send out, and how much equipment should they bring? It'd be easy to send out a Daedalus-class ship to survey systems, have boots on the ground checking out a system, but they might not have room on board for a specialist in, say, astromycology to investigate the strange lifeform they encounter. How often would you need such a specific field of knowledge? How many specialists for different obscure fields would you want to bring along? And there’s the risk of them getting bored if there’s nothing that applies to their specialty.
I think that’s the real impetus behind the Galaxy class... not the deep space exploration itself, but that it was the biggest concept yet to send everyone out there all in one ship, including with their families if they wanted. And to have lots more specialists to do their work during the initial exploration, rather than sending specialized follow-up missions.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Exactly. It was basically the pinnacle of that idea, & the necesssary/needed tech demanded ever-larger sizes. We see a minor tech revolution in the 2370s that lets Starfleet downsize ships & crews to where Intrepids can do detailed DSE & even Defiant can handle some science stuff; my own (as usual, unedited) postwar thoughts:
quote:Integration was a necessity for future endeavors. When Voyager returned home, Starfleet had already begun planning its first postwar classes around the new operational philosophies being developed from the lessons learned over the previous decade. Foremost, there was far less support for embarking families and civilians aboard frontline deepspace starships. The option was still there, still acceptable, but no longer did they look to create enormous communities in space like Galaxy or Nebula. Neither was there a plan to abandon the recent comfortability with defensive missions. Starships currently in production still embarked a larger percentage of military modules and hardware than in the prewar years but once again tempered it with the emphasized balance of scientific exploration capacity, continuing a trend over the past fifteen years in shipbuilding where technological advances had realized true multimission capability for starships of all sizes, to where an Intrepid was essentially a miniature Galaxy in operational ability and a Defiant built for martial purposes could still perform science missions, albeit within a limited range. The traditional boundaries of the different ship types were blurring—a cruiser could be an explorer or frigate as needed, an escort could be a science ship or a light cruiser, and an explorer could be as nimble as a destroyer–prompting redefinition to the current looser modern type/duty classifications in 2380. Constant upsizing no longer was seen as necessary as miniaturization of equipment meant smaller vessels could pack more punch, and the trend had become “smaller over larger” using more automation and computer control, requiring fewer crew. Fewer crew per ship meant more available essential personnel to staff the average 759 ships being commissioned each year since the start of 2376, and also that the larger explorers and heavy cruisers could be given increased scientific and diplomatic facilities with the people to man them as required volume and power for primary operations was reduced. When combined with new technologies currently being studied and adapted meant starship mission flexibility was almost 100% complete.
Of course, as we've seen, that trend is but a blip as ships sizes continue further upwards, as shown bu the 2km Universe class.
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