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"Alpha Centauri is a beautiful place to visit, you ought to see it" - Kirk to 1969 USAF officer Fellini, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (TOS)
Nebula: 3.309 million metric tonnes
Excelsior: 2.35 million metric tonnes
Defiant: 355,000 metric tonnes
Akira: 3.055 million metric tonnes
Miranda: 655,000 metric tonnes
Norway: 622,000 metric tonnes
Saber: 310,000 metric tonnes
Centaur-type: 870,000 metric tonnes
"Shelley"-type: 1.27 million metric tonnes
Yeager: 550,000 metric tonnes
Intrepid/Constitution-type: 1.3 million metric tonnes
Excelsior-type w/ 3 nacelles: 660,000 metric tonnes
Constitution-type that looks like a destroyer: 650,000 metric tonnes
Oddly enough, no mass is given for the Danube-class. Fandom reports that the Constitution-class is 190,000 metric tonnes, but discussions over on RAST have indicated that a line in TOS stated Enterprise as being "nearly a million tons;" this works out right with the Excelsior-class.
For fun & effect, I'll throw these in as well:
Saladin: 95,000 metric tonnes
Hermes: 94,500 metric tonnes
Ptolemy: 126,500 metric tonnes
Federation: 285,000 metric tonnes
Of course, these are all based on the 190,000-metric-ton figure for the Constitution & should be revised accordingly.
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"Do you know how much YOU'RE worth??.....2.5 million Woolongs. THAT'S your bounty. I SAID you were small fry..." --Spike Spiegel
Ah... the Saladin, Hermes, Ptolemy and Federation... The "canon" Franz Joseph designs!
Oh, and if anybody else is interested, this are some other I already had before my request was made:
Intrepid: 700,000 MT
Sovereign: 3,205,000 MT (canonicity of this figure is uncertain, but I'll take it)
Ambassador: 3,710,000 MT
Galaxy: 4,960,000 MT
Kobayashi Maru: 147,943 MT
Type-15 shuttlepod: 0.86 MT
Type-15A shuttlepod: 0.97 MT
Type-16 shuttlepod: 1.25 MT
Type-6 personnel shuttle: 3.38 MT
Type-7 personnel shuttle: 3.96 MT
Type-9A cargo shuttle: 4.5 MT
Sphinx-type workpod: 1.2 MT
Intrepid is on-screen reference ("Caretaker" [VOY]), Sovereign from an old thread in this forum, Ambassador/Galaxy/shuttles/Sphinx from TNG:TM, and Kobayashi Maru from a screen in ST2.
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"Alpha Centauri is a beautiful place to visit, you ought to see it" - Kirk to 1969 USAF officer Fellini, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (TOS)
quote:
Ah... the Saladin, Hermes, Ptolemy and Federation... The "canon" Franz Joseph designs!
There's absolutely nothing canon about them.
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"Ultra Magnus is Undeniably Fun!" David Stevens, New York Magazine.
"Total Complete excitement from start to finish!" -WPIX-TV, New York
"This isn't a thrill ride, it's a rocket..." -Richard Caves, Time Magazine.
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Falls don't hurt. It's the sudden stop when you reach the bottom that hurts.
Length: 23.1 meters.
Height: 5.4 meters.
Beam: 13.7 meters.
Mass: 158.7 metric tons.
And armed with six phaser strips and 13.3 centimeter microtorpedoes and four full sized photon torpedoes.
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Sisko: "We run alright, run right at them."
Smiley: "Ah, Pattern Suicide."
Federation Starship Datalink - On that annoying Tripod server.
[This message has been edited by Hobbes (edited June 12, 2000).]
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"Ultra Magnus is Undeniably Fun!" David Stevens, New York Magazine.
"Total Complete excitement from start to finish!" -WPIX-TV, New York
"This isn't a thrill ride, it's a rocket..." -Richard Caves, Time Magazine.
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"Are you alright? You sure? 'Cause you just went through a wall."
-Detective Drycoff, Gone in 60 Seconds
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"Do you know how much YOU'RE worth??.....2.5 million Woolongs. THAT'S your bounty. I SAID you were small fry..." --Spike Spiegel
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"Cry havoc and let's slip the dogs of Evil"
There's also a lot less volume in a Sovereign than an Ambassador, even taking into account the longer nacelles (& thus more coils, weighing more overall) on the former class. The 3.205 million-metric-ton figure comes from the SciPubTech poster & provides a nice low-end possible figure; I'd venture to say that the absolute upper limit would be 3.88 million metric tonnes. These figures are based on nothing more than mental comparison, zero math, & a sh*tslinging ability honed by 2 years of politcal campaign work.
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"Do you know how much YOU'RE worth??.....2.5 million Woolongs. THAT'S your bounty. I SAID you were small fry..." --Spike Spiegel
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"No matter where you go, there you are."
The USS Entente NCC-2120 (not 2100, Fitz ), USS Revere NCC-595 and USS Columbia NCC-621 were mentioned in radio chatter in ST:TMP. The ships were all three taken from the Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph, which identified these ships as Federation class dreadnought, Hermes class scout and Cygnus class scout. No class names were, however, mentioned on screen.
FJ's Saladin class destroyer and Ptolemy class transport/tug schematics could be glimpsed on some computer screen in ST2. I wasn't able to tell, but I recently found it on the website of pIna'Sov.
And for the Galaxy/Ambassador/Sovereign masses... The Galaxy mass was directly mentioned on page 57 from the TNG:TM, and the Ambassador mass on page 75. I take the SciPubTech mass for granted, as no canon figure is known yet. Still, I think there's no objection against these three figures. Taking Shik's very logical theory in account, the three numbers are just fine to me.
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"Alpha Centauri is a beautiful place to visit, you ought to see it" - Kirk to 1969 USAF officer Fellini, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (TOS)
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"How many Libraries of Congress per second can your software handle?"
-Avery Brooks, IBM commercial
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"The things hollow--it goes on forever--and--oh my God!--it's full of stars!" -David Bowman's last transmission back to Earth, 2001: A Space Odyssey
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"How many Libraries of Congress per second can your software handle?"
-Avery Brooks, IBM commercial
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"Alpha Centauri is a beautiful place to visit, you ought to see it" - Kirk to 1969 USAF officer Fellini, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (TOS)
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"Alpha Centauri is a beautiful place to visit, you ought to see it" - Kirk to 1969 USAF officer Fellini, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (TOS)
Armed with microtorpedoes, phasers, and shields.
Type 18 Pod
Length: 4.5 meters
Height: 3.1 meters
Beam: 1.8 meters
Mass: Unknown
Armed with limited phasers.
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Sisko: "We run alright, run right at them."
Smiley: "Ah, Pattern Suicide."
Federation Starship Datalink - On that annoying Tripod server.
Also, the shuttlecraft and runabout weights seem a too low in comparison to the TNG ship weights. If we assume that Danube is roughly boxed shaped, its volume is about 1700 cubic meters. But since its weight is only 158 tons, its density is about 0.09 tons (i.e., 90 kg) per cubic meter or about 1/10 that of water. Same with the type 10 shuttlecraft: its volume (assuming a box) is 188 cubic meters, but its weight is only 20 tons. Its density is again about 100 kg per cubic meter.
A possible explanation for this discrepancy (very dense capital ships and very airy shuttlecraft) is that capital ships and shuttlecraft must be constructed in very different ways with very different materials and equipment. An alternative explanation is that whoever thought up these figures doesn't know what they're talking about.
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When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
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It doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing as long as you look good doing it.
Plus, as mentioned, the starships have very different components. For one thing, they're made of tritanium and duranium, which could easily be heavier than the stuff used now. Plus, the hulls might be thicker, to withstand warp speeds better, not to mention any particles that might get through the deflector at normal speeds.
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"How many Libraries of Congress per second can your software handle?"
-Avery Brooks, IBM commercial
But of course there are reasons to make ships lighter. Just because they're operating at warp speeds doesn't mean we can completely ignore mass and force relationships. Even at warp speed heavier ships should take more energy to move than lighter ships.
TSN: I don't understand your reference to gravitational effects here. Are you saying that since starships don't have to float we can make them as massive as we like?
Actually, I would expect seagoing ships to be more robustly constructed than starships. The forces exerted on your hull in the vacuum of space would probably be less than those exerted by water. Look at the lunar module, whose walls were made of foil: it would get ripped apart in either the air of the water. Hulls in Star Trek don't seem to be any thicker than those of modern ships. In Star Trek, you also have energetic shielding and structural integrity fields, which would decrease the need for strength in the materials used. The Sovereign class even does away with physical windows in some cases. Although we can't be sure what happens at warp, I don't think we've seen any indication that forces are so much stronger than those exerted by air or water.
By the way I'm proud to say I'm one of those dumb schmucks who's spent hours and hours trying to figure out how much a starship weighs. However, I can't say that the world is a better place for mine having done so...
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When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
Shuttles might be lighter, BTW, because they're designed to work close to planets, where there's more gravity than where stasrhips usually are.
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"How many Libraries of Congress per second can your software handle?"
-Avery Brooks, IBM commercial
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It doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing as long as you look good doing it.
Of course, thrusters would "work" regardless of the mass. Any thrust applied would impart some change in velocity, albeit negligable. The trouble is that the more the ship weighs, the more thrust you have to apply to create a given change in velocity. This is definitely an argument for making the ships as light as possible.
Now, if some variation of antigravity technology could be used to somehow negate the mass of a ship, then you wouldn't have to worry so much. Is this what you are thinking of when you suggest that warp technology is being used to help at impulse? That might work nicely.
Fructose: I know that you meant Paramount. I think Frank or someone mentioned a few months ago that Sternbach supposedly based the ship weights on those of modern spacecraft. Since modern spacecraft (rockets) are even less robustly built than modern surface warships and are filled mainly with fuel, I don't see how starships can weigh so much. Space probes are also flimsily built and don't have crew compartments. But I think that the established weights of Starships are way out of line (too high and too low). I think that we shouldn't accept these weights blindly and then try to rationalize Paramount's sloppiness. Now, if someone can actually show me how they calculated these masses, then I might be more willing to accept them.
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When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
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It doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing as long as you look good doing it.
During the early definition phase of the Ambassador class, it was determined that the combined vehicle mass could reach at least 3.71 million metric tons. The propulsive force availabole from the highest specific-impulse (Isp) fusion engines available or projected fell far too short of being able to to achieve the 10 km/sec2 acceleration required. This neccessitated the inclusion of a compact space-time driver coil, similar to those standard in warp engine nacelles, that would perform a low-level continuum distortion without driving the vehicle across the warp threshold. The driver coil was already into computer simulation (...) and it was determined that a fusion-driven engine could move a larger mass than would normally be possible by reaction thrust alone, even with exhaust products accelerated to near lightspeed.
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"Alpha Centauri is a beautiful place to visit, you ought to see it" - Kirk to 1969 USAF officer Fellini, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (TOS)
------------------
"How many Libraries of Congress per second can your software handle?"
-Avery Brooks, IBM commercial
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"Alpha Centauri is a beautiful place to visit, you ought to see it" - Kirk to 1969 USAF officer Fellini, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (TOS)
------------------
"How many Libraries of Congress per second can your software handle?"
-Avery Brooks, IBM commercial
Actually time dilation can happen at any speed, but the effect is usually too small to be measured. I do remember that time dilation has been measured on earth with a jet (subsonic) cargo plane on a round-the-world flight. A pair of chronometers were synchronized before flight: one was put on a plane that flew (I think) around the world and the other stayed put. When the plane came back its chronometer was behind the other one.
I didn't know about the TNGTM's comments about the use of space-time driver coil for impulse. That's interesting. But in truth I don't believe everthing the TechManual says.
This thing about limiting impulse speeds to 0.25 c doesn't make any sense to me. Wasn't the whole rationalization for stardates (not the real reason of not wanting to specify the date) that it allowed accurate timekeeping despite time-dilation effects?
Putting such a speed limit on impulse makes as much sense as limiting cars to less than 30 mph (48 kph) because higher speeds mess up our hair, in other words, no sense at all.
On a related note: I don't understand how impulse drive works. The show seems to suggest that impulse drive is like a car engine: If you shut it off the ship comes to a complete stop. In the real world, rockets or other reaction drives would continue accelerating the ship as long as they operated. When a rocket is shut off the ship should continue moving at the same speed. Does the fact that starship behave like cars suggest that impulse operates more like warp drive?
The fact that time dilation hasn't been mentioned shouldn't be taken as proof that it doesn't exist. I think it's just something that the producers didn't want to deal with.
I don't know about the effects of warp fields on subjective time. In a ship traveling at the speed of light, time shouldn't pass at all such that you would feel that you had arrived almost instantaneously (ignoring time for accel/decel). I don't know what would happen when you go faster than light (maybe time goes backwards?). Anyways ships travelling at warp seem to have no time dilation, ie, time seems to pass at the same speed as in normal space. What sort of mumbo jumbo does the TNGTM have about this?
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When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
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"How many Libraries of Congress per second can your software handle?"
-Avery Brooks, IBM commercial
About how the impulse drive works: a ship's impulse drive consists of a set of deuterium (2D) fusion reactors. Exhaust products from the fusion drive are magnetically accelerated, and subsequently entering the subspace driver coil. The exhaust products then 'energize' the coil, thus generating a subspace field/low-level warp field.
And how it stops? I haven't ever seen impulse drive outlets on the front of a ship, so I imagine that slowing down from impulse power is achieved by thrusters. However it is questionable if simple, tiny thrusters would be able to decelerate the ship within an eye wink. The TM doesn't say anything of it.
But to me, the TM isn't holy. It has been contradicted soooo many times on-screen. But Okuda and Sternbach just tried to make some things up, and that is understandable, considering all that 'invented' physics from Star Trek.
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"Alpha Centauri is a beautiful place to visit, you ought to see it" - Kirk to 1969 USAF officer Fellini, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (TOS)
Ships seem to be able to slow down much, much faster than they are able to speed up. Perhaps both the impulse and the warp engines must constantly fight a horrendous subspace drag effect. Or then the drag intensity of the effect can be varied. There could be a "subspace anchor" the crew can and will drop when the ship loses power. Or the warp coils or impulse driver coils could act as subspace anchors when not powered up.
The drag force energies involved must be bigger than the kinetic energy of a real-world object at near-lightspeed, since they can bring a ship to halt so rapidly from high impulse or even from warp. So the forces acting on the ship would be immense. Assuming that the "anchor" is permanently deployed and not something the crew can "raise" and "lower" at will, the impulse engines must be horribly powerful - so powerful that it doesn't matter if the ship masses 100,000 tons or ten million tons.
Timo Saloniemi
I was watching STIII TSFS the other day and I noticed at the very begining of the movie they were using the same monitor sequence in the background that included the Saladin and Ptolemy classes showing up on the screen. Would it be possible for anyone with the ST III DVD to get screen captures of these images?
Thanks
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-=/\=-
Captain Stark
http://beam.to/readyroom
"The man on the top walks a lonely path. The chain of command is often a noose." Dr. Leonard McCoy --Obsession, Stardate: 3619.2