posted
ok, I have a suggestion to why the Akira has the supposed 15 torp launchers.
If it carries fighters then to launch them they would need to lay down cover, right. Well photon and quantum torpedos are a "long range" weapon as opposed to phasers or disrupters.
The TrekRPG Dominion War Sourcebook said that they, along w/Steamrunner were carriers.
NOTE:I have no intention of starting a big argument over one of the coolist ships that Starfleet uses. I just thought I would share my finding with you all.
posted
Yeah, this has been brought up before. It doesn't work because: 1) there are no carriers in onscreen ST 2) 15 torpedoes tubes violates laws of ship design 2.II) 15 tubes isn't logical or practical 3) Jaeger's an idiot 4) Starfleet fighters are too large for the Akira, not even the Galaxy can carry a meaningful amount of them 5) we never see the Akira act as anything other than a regular warship
I used to love the Akira, until this whole thing with Akira being a 15 tubed fighter. Now I love the Excelsior-B. No one ever argues about the Excelsior-B...
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posted
Except for the aux impulse engine vs. aux shuttlebay people, of course...
Frankly, I think the Starfleet interceptor would fit in aboard an Akira or a Steamrunner just fine. Scale the thing so that the cockpit window matches the Type 15 shuttlepod set which was used for the interior, fold the fins, and you can pack a dozen of them aboard easily enough. For a 440-460m Akira, a single-volume rectangular flight deck, as wide as the shuttlebay doors and possibly as high as the boxy part of the hull under the bridge, would be some 150-160m long, perhaps 90m wide, and at least 12m high, so plenty of interceptors ought to be able to sit in there if they are only about 15-20m long. Then there could be extra hangar spaces on the lower levels. The limiting factor is the size of the aft doors, about 9x15 meters, but with folding outer fins and some not-so-extreme downscaling you can fit the fighters in. With Steamrunner, there's no problem at all.
Tactically, it would be either stupendously smart or supendously stupid to give a carrier a heavy torpedo armament. In a multi-ship fleet setup, it makes a lot of sense. Today, SSMs and fighters have basically the same role, so why not equip a launching platform with both? You can then dedicate the other ships in the fleet to the protection duty and omit protective weapons from the launching platform, which allows each ship type to be optimized for its mission.
In a solo ship setup, it's idiocy, though. A carrier has inherent vulnerabilities, so whatever room isn't taken by the carrier function should be primarily dedicated to patching up the vulnerabilities. No "offensive" weaponry at all, just strong shields and good close-in weapons.
Any in-between design would be a compromise, but then again, most technology is.
And just because we never see the "carriers" launching fighters, we shouldn't consider it impossible. Well, actually it IS impossible - the carrier shuttlebay doors do not open! The CGI models aren't built for that function... So we have to assume the fighters are launched off screen. But then again, shuttles tend to be launched off screen, too - TOS and VOY had some actual shuttle launch footage that actually showed the craft departing the bay, but TNG had none. They covered up for that nicely, though.
Timo Saloniemi
[ March 07, 2002, 02:22: Message edited by: Timo ]
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posted
I would imagine that those fighters we see in the Dominion battles came from a mothership of some kind. If you think about it, those fighters going where they were from homebase to the battle and if they survive back to homebase again. That would be like sending a WW2 PT boat from San Francisco to Japan to torpedo a destroyer and sending her back to San Francisco.
In terms of common sense, there has to be a mothership. But of course when using common sense you wouldn't put 15 torpedo tubes and carrier flight deck as well on a ship no larger than a Excelsior class.
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posted
Maybe....the SF designers did add 15 tubes on the AKira but only like 3 actually work....the rest are just to scare the living daylights out of whoever.....
well it was just a thawt.....
Buzz
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capped
I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
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posted
I hate to reopen the whole carrier debate, so I won't.
I just want to place these thoughts:
The only fighters we know of are the warp capable Peregrines (or whatever we call them).
Just because these are the only ones weve seen doesnt mean thats all there are. I could very well imagine a shuttle-sized fighter (such as the Valkyrie from some video game.. looks like a sleek Delta Flyer). The Peregrines could simply be bombers, which arent designed to be picked up by a carrier, so they have the range to go back to a base themselves. A shuttle sized fighter might be sublight only, or low warp. The reason we might not have seen it is that it would have been EXTREMELY stupid to use it during the types of wars weve seen (Borg, Klingon, Dominion) since they all have equal or superior firepower to shielded starships. But we cant rule out the possibility that there are smaller fighters and attack sleds that have limited uses, and probably we can infer that they are aboard Akiras.
This satisfies a) onscreen canon. they would fit within the ship, and there is a satisfactory explanation why they weren't used. b) design intentions. this theory also satisfies the designers comment that the Akira can be used as a carrier. we just know why is isnt:-D .
I like the dummy torpedo tube ideas too.. probably empty hardware slots designed to possibly have new weapons systems integrated in the future, keeping the Akira fresh despite its age (*ducks* sorry didnt mean to go there!)
[ March 07, 2002, 22:40: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]
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posted
The only way I would consider it a carrier is if the ship carried heavily armed shuttlecrafts or runabouts, not the Federation Fighters. Also, a thru-deck carrier seems a bit dangerous to me; all the enemy has to do is to aim where the shuttle deck is at and blow the ship in two.
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posted
Plus, the very nature of a through-deck hangar bay practically guts the ship, and takes away a large volume of internal spaces that would normally be used for something else. For a ship that's relatively small like the Akira (compared to the big ones like Galaxy and Nebula), this is no small matter.
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posted
I'll accecpt a foward and aft shuttlebay, but perhaps the deck where both of them are located is used to store shuttles and for maintenance.
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Amasov Prime
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posted
Well, some time ago I had an interesting idea about ground attack troop transports. The holoship from IX could be sort of warp-capable upgrade of a landing boat. I thought about it and maybe there's a large carrier structure with nacelles and a command module holding those - maybe four - vessels like a container freighter in some structure and then just dropping them from the atmosphere of a planet.
You have no idea what I mean, right?
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posted
Kyle, have you been drinking coffee again and not Starbucks? Just kidding...
I think I know what you mean; you are talking to something similar to the droid drop ship from Episode 1 or the ship Tom Hanks was in during the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan.
-------------------- "It speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow, it's not all going to be over with a big splash and a bomb, that the human race is improving, that we have things to be proud of as humans." -Gene Roddenberry about Star Trek
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quote:Originally posted by Timo: But then again, shuttles tend to be launched off screen, too - TOS and VOY had some actual shuttle launch footage that actually showed the craft departing the bay, but TNG had none. They covered up for that nicely, though.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo! I'm ashamed, what about Best of Both Worlds Part II? Does that not count as a scene of a shuttle departing the bay?
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posted
I don't think so. IIRC, it's the standard type of "shuttle interior set with two characters chatting, bay wall visible behind -> brief movement of the said wall as stage hands frantically shove it towards the stern of the shuttle set -> cut to an already-departed shuttle". They didn't even have a matching set of type 7 shuttle and shuttlebay miniatures - a bay miniature was only built for "Cause and Effect", and that just for the main bay which was unusable for live-action because of its supposed immense size.
As long as we're talking "assault carriers", I think it's a good idea to dedicate most of their volume to one application and forget about saving any cubic meters for secondary things. A Steamrunner could be nothing but a big shuttlebay with two nacelles and an itty bitty dangling engineering section attached. (And she's truly through-deck, whereas the Akira "bow doors" would have trouble ejecting a workbee, let alone a full-sized shuttle!)
Another dedicated assault carrier could be the Norway. Virtually unarmed and lacking most of the standard recognizable starship gear, she could be a big bad barge carrier. Much like the barge carriers operated by the USN, she could store dozens of assault barges on rails running between the longitudal pylons. It's just that the Norways in FC were running empty...
Take a look at a barge carrier of today to see the similarities - the aft-extending twin deployment booms, the monobloc hull design, etc. Also, take a look at an LPD of today to see similarities with the Steamrunners - the big forward mass with a central cavity, opening to an aft "flooded" compartment sitting between the engines. The only thing missing from the Steamrunners to complete the illusion is a helo deck covering the flooded well, but a starship would look pretty silly with a helo deck.
This analogy would explain why the Steamrunner, the Norway and possibly the Sabre look different from "regular", saucer-hulled ships - they are special-mission ships, and RL special-mission ships tend to look weird. The Akira looks far more "regular" with that orderly saucer of hers, so assigning a special mission to her is optional.
The multitude of tubes are for launching torpedo/probe sized drones. Small units packed with sensor jammers, ECM, EW, decoy generators, etc., etc. Launch a hundred of these along with your dozen fighters and they keep the enemy ships from blowing the fighters to pieces for long enough for thr fighters to get within weapons range of the target.
We didn't see them in the Dom War beacuse they would either be black specs (operating in jamming mode) or would visually (and to sensors) appear to be fighters (operating in decoy mode).
Only some of the tubes would actually be loaded with standard photon torps, which fits in nicely with First Contact where only a few of the tubes actually fired.
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