posted
Presumably everyone's already seen the wonderful news about the NX-01 being "retrofitted for war." My question is more of a technical nature...
Why the hell would anyone expect such a puny ship to credibly function as a warship? And where the hell are they going to magically get all these new weapons from... the Vulcan High Command?
Leaving the logistics aside, I'm wondering how possible it really could be to retrofit a ship like the pre-E to a completely different mission, short of a lengthy stint in drydock a la TMP.
Upgrading the phase cannons (and possibly adding more of them) seems like a fairly reasonable option... or at least one of the simplest. It'd require extra mountings, but Doug Drexler said that all those circular ports were designed just for that purpose, anyway. The only question would be one of sufficient power.
Assuming the rumors are correct, Reed's going to have a field day with his new Starfleet-issue photon torpedoes. The self-contained torpedoes are probably not a big deal... but what about storing those wonderfully volatile matter-antimatter warheads? There's got to be some kind of extra equipment needed for that...
Finally, the traditional defensive component, deflector shields. How the heck are they going to install reliable forcefield generators in such a short time?
Or are we actually going to be seeing some kind of time jump here, where we "skip" a year to give time for the ENT to get its refit? (Seems unlikely.)
I know we're not going to be getting any real answers on this for a while now, but it still seems like something that'll be very implausible without resorting to the quick-and-easy magic of the 24th century, most especially Voyager's never-show-damage hull...
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posted
I envision adding some sort of secondary hull
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quote:Why the hell would anyone expect such a puny ship to credibly function as a warship?
Minutae,
In the Inner Harbor, there's a WWII era submarine docked next to the Aquarium. Compared to a modern submarine, one could say exactly what you said about NX-01. The fact of the matter, though, is that by Earth standards of the time, NX-01 is not "puny", just as America's submarine fleet was not considered "puny" sixty years ago.
posted
As a minor point of interest, NX-01 is fairly close in length as the TOS 1701, coming in at 225m long for NX-01, versus 288.6m for the TOS 'E'. Heck, the Miranda class isn't much longer than the NX-01 at 237.6m.
Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Griffworks: As a minor point of interest, NX-01 is fairly close in length as the TOS 1701, coming in at 225m long for NX-01, versus 288.6m for the TOS 'E'. Heck, the Miranda class isn't much longer than the NX-01 at 237.6m.
Doesn't matter, in terms of usable internal volume, the NX-01 is puny and built like a deck of cards.
As for Snay's argument, I think you forget that the NX-01 is puny, compared to all the other ships out there. We're not concerned with how NX-01 measure up to something in Starfleet's own future, but rather how well it compares with its contemporaries.
As for the updates and so forth, I think I'm gonna puke. Photon torpedoe is cropping up way too early, it's not something you can just stick on a ship and let it fly. Even in TNG, reactants are kept separately and loaded only during arming because the casings can't handle long term storage of M/AM. The NX-01's launcher's don't even have the necessary reactant injection equipment, the spatial torpedoes are self-contained devices that require no known external preparation. Besides, what happened to the comment about the Earth-Romulan War being faught with nuclear weapons?
And I'm seriously going to have an aneurysm if the NX-01 gets shields. You don't slap shield generators on a ship and call it a day either, not for any sort of useful protection. Besides, early shield generators would have been pretty bulky equipment, where is the NX-01 going to pack it without pulling a Voyager?
quote: As previously reported, Enterprise (which will be "retrofitted for war"), is set to head into a dangerous area of space known as the Delphic Expanse to track down the Xindi. According to the magazine, voyagers who enter this area of space "meet a shocking and grisly fate"Their bodies become anatomically inverted (skin on the inside, organs on the outside), yet they somehow remain alive."
Gaaaaaaah! *chews through duranium plates*
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posted
Maybe they will just give it replacated armor and leave the weapons as is.
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posted
Ehm. Right. Retrofitted for war. T'Pol getting an even tighter catsuit. They're really desperate now, aren't they? And yet they manage to make it sound even more cheap and awful than it is now. I can't wait to see how bad this is going to be and what kind of ridicicous things they'll do before the series is cancelled after season 3
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posted
*shivers at the thought*
quote:Leaving the logistics aside, I'm wondering how possible it really could be to retrofit a ship like the pre-E to a completely different mission, short of a lengthy stint in drydock a la TMP.
How possible? Impossible. It'd require taking the ship apart down to its spaceframe, then putting it back together again from the keel up. There are economical & practical limits to what can be accomplished through refitting, even with energy/matter conversion technology on hand.
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posted
Ummm... no. Refititng does not mean taking it down to the framework and uild back up. Take a look at the US Naval ships between the 20's and the 60's The US was able to replace the turrets and put the same size turrents but far more powerful and with a longer range on their batteships. They were able to cut down the super structure, and build anew within a year. They were able to replace the boilers which litterally in on the keep of the ship without cuttinf gigantic holes in the ship. Keep in mind that the Japanese was able to lengthen their Kongo class Battlecruisers, add armor, make them faster, and reclassify them as battleships. Though not seriously real battleships, but on paper, they appeared to be.
You guys are just blowing way out of proportion.
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quote: Prehaps they are some kind of very crude early version? A strait-up matter-antimatter warhead with no guidance, no tracking and a low yield?
I'm not sure you can have a low yield M/AM reaction... Also with no guidance or anything it wouldn't really be much use.
quote: One could also suppose that the Earth has many other nasty inventions but didn't see fit to include them on a peacefull explorer?
Not gonna be a peaceful explorer much longer... I mean really, if they were gonna get ready for a war you'd think they'd either upgrade an existing warship or begin to build new ones. Seems to me they're trying to do too much with the one ship; originally it was going to be a small, poorly equipped and armed explorer, bravely pushing out into the unknown. Now, in what looks to be a rather blatent ploy to inprove the ratings, they've decided to make the same ship a super warship.
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Registered: Feb 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Matrix: Ummm... no. Refititng does not mean taking it down to the framework and uild back up. Take a look at the US Naval ships between the 20's and the 60's The US was able to replace the turrets and put the same size turrents but far more powerful and with a longer range on their batteships. They were able to cut down the super structure, and build anew within a year. They were able to replace the boilers which litterally in on the keep of the ship without cuttinf gigantic holes in the ship. Keep in mind that the Japanese was able to lengthen their Kongo class Battlecruisers, add armor, make them faster, and reclassify them as battleships. Though not seriously real battleships, but on paper, they appeared to be.
Refitting a gun-armed warship is a hell of a lot different from refitting a starship. Ship between the 20's and 60's are about as complex as a wind-up toy compared to something like the NX-01. Not to mention those ships were being refitting with what would be considered conventional technologies of the time, for example tried and tested propellent-pushing-projectile-out-of-barrel, up scaled a bit, for the most part, at most a missile launcher here and there. Here, we're talking about adding brand new technologies that Earth isn't suppose to have experience with into a spaceframe designed never to be seriously armed, AFAWK. Photon torpedoes wouldn't be quite so hard if they replace their launchers, but the technology shouldn't even be available that early. As for shields, that would require reworking the entire hull and the interior. Unless they plan to beam the shield generators and modifications into place, in which case I'm going to cry.
quote:You guys are just blowing way out of proportion.
No! You have no honor!
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