My friends and I were out to dinner, discussing airplane travel versus cost and fuel expenditure. A heated debate it was...
Anyway, here it goes, once again - I am making an analogy between aircraft and spacecraft:
A plane travelling in a strong headwind needs to expend more fuel to travel at the same speed as if it were travelling without a headwind. The same headwind also slows the plane's velocity.
Though winds at a local level are possible in pretty much any strength and direction, there are strong trends in which air flows in one particular direction in large swaths. Ex: The Gulf Stream
Airplanes tend to travel along these whenever possible, as a good tailwind will help you reach your destination as much as a strong headwind will hinder it. The result is planes which travel all in the same general area, because of the benefits the natural conditions offer.
More advanced starships in the Star Trek universe are more streamlined then their predecessors.* One can conlude from this that a streamlined design offers more advantages in performance but at the price of simplicity. An analogy can be made in modern aircraft development. Modern airplanes are streamlined to reduce aerodynamic drag.
Extend the concept to spacecraft, and take into consideration that Star Trek ships operate in subspace and it seems likely that starships must contend with some sort of hyperdynamic drag, a subspace version of atmospheric drag.**
If there is a hyperdynamic drag that Trek spacecraft must contend with, it would seem likely that subspace shares some traits of an atmosphere in that drag may be less in some areas and higher than others. Local conditions may even change with time, just like local winds do depending on a chaotic set of variables.
There could be subspace versions of the Gulf Stream across physical space, allowing starships to fly in the same general path at higher than normal rates of speed. Additionally, local conditions could be just about anything at any specific time, either hindering or helping warp travel on any particular day in any particular area.
*This is debatable. I think it's a pretty clear trend. Excluding the NX-01, of course. Which I am doing, considering NX-01 throws all of this out the window and makes it damn near unexplainable. But everybody will agree that NX-01 is a special case, and we'll leave it at that for now.
**Another debatable point. I am personally all about explaining how Starfleet ships work in terms of actual engineering principles, and the best way that can be done is by comparing them to their closest modern analogs, aircraft. The visual evidence for this point is speculative, but this is the best solution I can think of according to Occam's Razor.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
Of course, the problem with streamlined = more efficient is that it would take an incredibly moronic person to ever come up with the Constitution in the first place.
Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :
quote:Originally posted by The_Tom: Of course, the problem with streamlined = more efficient is that it would take an incredibly moronic person to ever come up with the Constitution in the first place.
Why? That sounds the same to me as saying that car designers in the first half of the 20th Century were morons, or (to continue the aircraft analogy) that WWI airplane designers were morons for using radial engines instead of later WWII in-line engines.
Besides, efficiency alone does not always dictate vehicle designs. For instance, we've known for a long time that aerodynamics affects a car's performance and efficiency, but most cars from the first half of last century were built as if the designers only gave aerodynamics a passing thought . . . though there are exceptions:
For all we know, the NX-Enterprise is the Dymaxion Car of its day . . . and then the Constitution Class was designed in an era when resources and energy production were easy and cheap. Or, other factors could have driven efficiency into the back-burner, such as a desire for simpler curves and angles for a greater ease of construction or more useful internal space. But, by the time of TNG, ships such as the Galaxy Class were designed to eke every bit of speed (or efficiency) out of the engines, and so the spaceframe was designed to again utilize "hyperdynamic" principles, giving it the curvy shape.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
I'll grant that hyperdynamics might be an incredibly arcane science and all, but honestly, you expect us to believe that efficiency and speed meant so little to engineers or were so poorly understood 100 years after breaking the warp barrier (indeed, considerably more if you factor in older warpfaring races) that they were building starships out of slab-sided polygons?
Aerodynamic efficiency is far less of a concern on a car than efficiency at cutting through subspace "wind" on a spaceship that's expending huge amounts of energy travelling for years on end across hundreds of light-years. Model Ts are slab-faced because construction technology made that easier and because industrial design trends at the time hadn't yet identified "curvy" as "cool" (as would happen in the thirties) and to a lesser extent because fuel effieciency was not on the consumer's radar screen. But in the 23rd century, construction technology would certainly make it possible to build a curvy starship if they wanted to and efficiency would certainly be a consideration if it was known that cutting easily through this subspace wind was desirable. If "hyperdynamics" makes as obvious a difference as you imply, then I find it impossible to believe that by the mid-23rd century they hadn't figured out that large flat faces are bad.
[ January 27, 2002, 10:53: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
I fail to see why the NX-01 is regarded streamlined. It's a saucer with two bulky outgrowths with nacelles stuck on 'em. The Phoenix and even the Botany Bay were more streamlined than NX-01. And so is the TMP S.S. Enterprise, and the S.S. Mariposa... right?
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
But they did know it. That's why they stopped using spheres for primary hulls and developed saucers. it wouldn't have been possible for an engineer from 2245 to draw up the blueprints for the Galaxy based on a set of equations describing the subspace environment. Engineering is just not that easy.
Put an engineer and a scientist together, supply them with the full set of equations describing in every detail an environment that the engineer then has to design a craft to operate in, he is still going to start off with basic designs. The more complicated the environment, the more difficult it is to design a craft to take full advantage of that environment. The best way to find out anything has been, since the begginning of time, trial and error. And this will remain the best way to improve designs for as long as engineering exists.
When you build a ship, the ship encounters limitations from its environments. It can't encounter limitations that it won't face. In other words, a ship can't be designed to overcome the obstacles of Warp 9 when it will never reach Warp 9. But as one ship hits Warp 5, the next 5.5, the next 6, the next 6 for a week's worth of continous operation, these obstacles are overcome. They have to be overcome as they are encountered. No way the Wright Brothers' Flyer should've been designed for supersonic speeds.
And again, comparing starships to cars is a faulty analogy. The operational environment of cars has been the same pretty much the same since their existence. There is very little variation on how cars operate in their environment. All are pretty much traveling over pavement around sixty miles an hour. And also, cars are designed to meet the illogical and nonsensical wishes of the general public. Aircraft, as starships would be, are not burdened by the neccessity of inducing the public to spend thousands of dollars on purchasing one.
And, finally, whose to say their understanding of the subspace environment was completely well developed at the time of TOS? If it really is more complex than anything we can possibly imagine, there must be facets to it that we can't even comprehend. It's entirely possible that the subspace environment is difficult enough to understand to take hundreds of years to completely comprehend. With Pheonix, they could only make a warp field. With Daedalus, they understood that having two lobed ships offered certain advantages. By Constitution, they knew there was hyperdynamic drag. By Galaxy they knew that curved surfaces could displace hyperdynamic drag more effectively, etc. etc.
Large flat [forward facing] surfaces aren't bad per say. They're just not as good as other solutions to the problem. With engineering, there aren't right and wrong answers technically, its more a matter of which answer is better.
(The NX-01 is more streamlined. There are less right angles than the Constitution, the forward facing area is much less than the Constitution, and the design is much more integrated than the Constitution. And that's saying nothing about the Daedalus...)
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
"That's why they stopped using spheres for primary hulls and developed saucers."
But they didn't. We now know they were using saucers (NX) at about the same time (or earlier) than spheres (Daedalus). Not to mention the Olympic...
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
quote: But they didn't. We now know they were using saucers (NX) at about the same time (or earlier) than spheres (Daedalus).
Excluding the NX-01, of course. Which I am doing, considering NX-01 throws all of this out the window and makes it damn near unexplainable. But everybody will agree that NX-01 is a special case, and we'll leave it at that for now.
quote: Not to mention the Olympic...
Large flat [forward facing] surfaces aren't bad per say. They're just not as good as other solutions to the problem. With engineering, there aren't right and wrong answers technically, its more a matter of which answer is better.
Now it's possible that for the Olympic, the better answer was a spherical hull, despite the design trends of the time. According to the system that I've devised, it is quite probable and likely that the Olympic was designed to carry absolutely as many people and evacuation/medical equipment as possible and not designed primarily for speed.
[ January 27, 2002, 16:53: Message edited by: OnToMars ]
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
quote:Excluding the NX-01, of course. Which I am doing, considering NX-01 throws all of this out the window and makes it damn near unexplainable. But everybody will agree that NX-01 is a special case, and we'll leave it at that for now.
Or in other words, "The NX-01 doesn't fit into my own imagined lineage of Starfleet ships, therefore I'll ignore it and propose a theory that the NX-01 contradicts"
I still say after 100 years of flying at warp some engineer is going have noticed that ships slow down going through certain regions of subspace and study this phenomena's effects and propose a solution a little bit more insightful than replacing a sphere with a saucer but keeping the ship blocky.
If we, with zero understanding of these fictional hyperdyamics, can look at spaceships and equate their atmospheric aerodynamics with these subspace hyperdynamics (because, honestly, when you say that the Galaxy is sleeker than the Constitution, that's exactly what you're doing) why can't an engineer figure this out as well within a matter of years? I'm not saying that there'd be one be-all-and-end-all discovery, but there'd more likely be a big leap in aerodynamics fairly soon after the Phoenix and then constant tweaking and refinement from then on. Which isn't what we observe, even when you ignore the NX-01.
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
quote: Or in other words, "The NX-01 doesn't fit into my own imagined lineage of Starfleet ships, therefore I'll ignore it and propose a theory that the NX-01 contradicts"
Ya, pretty much. I formulated this before the NX-01 made its appearance, and frankly, I'm rather proud of it. It's all encompassing, explaining every starship design we've seen in terms of real engineering principles and providing a clear evolution between them. NX-01 screws all of this up, without one thought towards technical matters or logic, and only to please fanboys. Considering that it's debatable whether Enterprise is even Star Trek, I feel perfectly justified in excluding it for the time being. If I become aware of a way of explaining it with the same elegance that all other starships are explained under this system, then I'll gladly adopt it. But I'm not throwing away an entire encompassing theory based on one solitary data point.
quote: I still say after 100 years of flying at warp some engineer is going have noticed that ships slow down going through certain regions of subspace and study this phenomena's effects and propose a solution a little bit more insightful than replacing a sphere with a saucer but keeping the ship blocky.
Hell, they could've known about it before Cochrane's flight. They could've discovered hyperdynamic drag along with subspace itself. However, this is the most likely order of events:
Intrasolar pre-war space missions discovered funky substances in the outer planets and brought 'em home. Near simultanaeously, experiments were being run concerning energy at Planck levels (I recall the TNGTM technobabbling that the materials that warp coils are made out of exert changes at the Planck level, causing a change in subspace) and lo and behold, this incredible new physical domain was discovered, and a whole new set of physical laws were figured out to describe it (Transitional Relativity). Physicists further experimented with these funky new materials and started manipulating the subspace environment by making changes to it and moving these changes around.One of these changes just happens to be traveling REALLY REALLY fast. And if you have the thing that's making the changes inside the changes it's making, then it can move pretty much anywhere in the galaxy.
With this basic knowledge of flight, they built a ship made out of an old missile and flew into history. Later, they started figuring out all the subtle and infinite facets of another dimension and changing the designs of "the thing that's making the changes to subspace from inside" to better take advantage of the changes it made. And they decided to call them starships instead of "the thing that's making the changes to subspace from inside."
Posted by Grokca (Member # 722) on :
Just a small point
quote:. Aircraft, as starships would be, are not burdened by the neccessity of inducing the public to spend thousands of dollars on purchasing one.
I would assume there would be competing designs from different engineers so the looks of a starship would also play a part in its design. You would not have to appeal to the public but to Admirals.
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
Admirals wouldn't care about the look. They would care about how well the design could do the job.