posted
The crazy woman in this episode that makes all the people live without Technology - is that the same actress as Angela Patrelli from Heroes?? Maybe I'm getting my crazy women mixed up?
-------------------- "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica." - Jim Halpert. (The Office)
...Although it looks like the ship would fall on her ass, with the legs placed that way, bow ballast or no bow ballast. And the very small ground clearance looks awkward on a ship of this size. The original Sternbach sketch gives a more plausible relative clearance, especially if we assume there is some stroke to those landing legs and they are pulled in all the way after landing.
I guess this is the thing that bothers me the most about the design. How long and broad can one make the ship while still retaining the logic of a one-deck structure? The smaller the ship, the more sense the single deck makes. And we do know the Santa Maria was only about four times as large as the runabout, by O'Brien's words. It could be length, as shown, but it would be more plausible if O'Brien was speaking about volume.
posted
Actually I'm keeping a very strict scale here and so far the ship is a little over twice the length of a Danube and just under twice as wide.
You're right though, the ship is about as wide as I dare make it, but any "thinner" and it become too small to handle (20? 30? did they even give a figure?) passengers and crew plus cargo, hygiene facilities and short term communal spaces. That is the dilema of designing this thing though and as it is I'm pushing it as far is it can within the parameters. Even so it's a crowded ship (hence the seperation of crew and passenger sections) and to acommodate the numbers I'm going on the assumption there are only 8 or so bunks in the passenger cabins, with people generally sleeping on rotation while everyone else either showers, eats or hangs out in the communal room, children included. I'm going with the idea that O'Brian and Sisko were given the two upper cabins which used to be the Crew and Captain's quarters/map room/office respectivly.
As for the landing gear, I think those things are largly for stability as I plan on adding numerous skids to the underside of the hull and another set of gear on the aft section to balance things off. Even so, under normal circumstances the ship would have anti-grav thrusters and the SIF to hold things together. The Santa Maria of course lost all that when they landed, which is why I'm imagining they removed the nacelles, impulse reactors and warp core from that back. I assume they already vented all the plasma and dumped the antimatter pods in orbit before the containment fields failed. God knows what they did with the plasma coolant. Probably still bottled up and sitting at the bottom of the swamp, if it's not all still aboard the ship. Now that's an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
posted
One thing about the engine debate. We can presume that they weren't lost. The ship landed to make repairs, presuming a controlled situation. Whether they dismantled them later is unclear. If her anti-technology field prevented the warp drive from working, Evil-Bitch-Lady might not have been in any rush to fiddle with toxic materials.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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posted
Well, we've always been told that the nacelles are the heaviest part of a ship, making up a large percentage of the mass... I can't imagine it would have been easy for the colonists to remove them using manpower alone...
-------------------- I haul cardboard and cardboard accessories
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posted
Oh easy. A bit of rope, some scaff, a block and tackle, maybe an A-frame and/or a tripod. Plus it helps to have 20 or so adults on hand, so plenty of manpower. Anyway, once they're loose, gravity can do most of the work. Just put Archimedes and Newton in the driving seat and you'll be fine.
Another possibility, inspired by your looks for the ship: perhaps this was a tug-barge combination, and the Mad Matriarch organized for the tug section to be abandoned and destroyed before entry to make sure the ship could never return. Sort of like Earth 2.
posted
I'm not saying they did, I'm not saying they didn't, just that they could. Perhaps the dense coils were making that end sink? Either way, they're small enough to have been hidden behind those trees and tents.
The tug idea isn't a bad one, though there's absolutely no dialogue to support it and in fact I think it was explicitly stated that they had problems with their warp drive and so had to land for repairs. Which suggests they took the warp drive with them when they went. Furthermore Sisko calls this a "Erewhon-Class Personnel Transport" not a passenger module or something that might necessitate a tug.
posted
Granted, although there have been one or two misleading designations for onscreen ships before...
Skimming through the TrekCore script, it seems the ship developed (no doubt faked) life support problems and landed, after which the engines and other systems failed (probably as Alixus flipped the switch on her device, but also possibly simply because she and her son sabotaged or shut down the involved systems one by one). Probably doesn't tell us anything useful about the nature of the ship, except that she landed on "engines" and was supposed to take off again.
Of course, the ending makes it sound as if there wouldn't be a way to fly Santa Maria out again, even when the duonetic trap was turned off - transporter evacuation onto a tiny runabout would be the preferred way to move the community. But then again, perhaps that was for practical rather than treknological reasons.
posted
Well for one thing she wasn't airtight any more as wots-er-face made a point about how they removed all the doors. Secondly, as I said before I imagine they would have had to have dumped the anti-matter pods, otherwise when they set down near that whozit field generator they would have probably lost containment and exploded on the ground. I have no idea what story reason could be given for dumping the pods when at that point they were only having life support trouble, but that's not my problem. That, plus the need to dispose of various hazardous substances (plasma coolant etc.) probably means the engines are at least partly dismantled.
There's also the matter of what 10 years in a fertile swap will do to the integrity of the outer hull and whatever else they might have stripped out to make use of. Opticable for rope, insulation padding for ground sheets, that kind of thing.
One thing that is bugging me though, is there any indication of just how many passengers were on-board? There seamed to be about 15-20 hanging around outside the ship at any time, plus whomever was working in the fields, the "mine" and however many were inside. I think we only saw 2 children young enough to have been born on the planet (they're the last one in the final shot) and mention was made of three who died from the same insect that killed Meg (presumably there were other deaths.) I'd guesstimate the the original compliment would have been in the 40-50 region.
posted
I think the engine design still needs work, but that's looking nice. You intentionally reusing the bow of one of the Jum Martin's designs for the stern of this design?
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
That's probably because I haven't worked on the engines much yet, just roughed out the general shapes and proportions. Still, I kind of like them being simple squashed rectangle looking things.
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