posted
Either Voyager-esque sensor palates...or possibly non-skid bottoms for retracted landing gear?
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Or lift engines. There are several such clusters across the belly, and they seem to feature pairs or triplets of roundish nozzleish things. If you squint right.
Of course, CoG issues would require some sort of vertical propulsion farther aft as well. Perhaps the actual impulse engines can vector down? Their construction certainly is intriguing, as if they were meant to slide in and out, or pivot around a vertical axis, or something. But tilting down is also a possibility.
The model seems to lack armament, but there are small squarish hatches in several places... It makes sense for an aerodynamic ship to have cover plates on the plasma and phase cannon banks. Did the ship ever fire anything else besides a phase cannon beam from the general bow area?
No nav deflector, either, but there are those four round yellow things below the bridge that need not be windows...
Finally, this is a big ship! For a reasonably sized bridge, it seems we need total length in the 150-180 m brackets. There's probably more volume inside the delta than there is in a Constitution saucer.
posted
I'm going to hazard a guess that with all this talk about Lifting Bodies - that it was built with atmospheric flight in mind. Easier to land it sometimes than send down shuttles or use the unreliable transporter. It mightn't have even been fitted out with a Transporter.
To me, the side view looks Sabre-esque.
-------------------- "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica." - Jim Halpert. (The Office)
posted
My guess would be that is has a cargo transporter, but nothing that's approved for organic matter. Remember, that tech was brand new in "Broken Bow" and it might not have filtered down to the older ships yet, particularly since it would likely require them to make room for new equipment.
Even if the ship was designed to land, I've got to believe they have some kind of aux craft aboard. There's what appears to be a lauch observation dome on her belly like the one on Enterprise. Perhaps there's only 1 door instead of the four that Enterprise has.
posted
Hmm, this does recall the saber as much as the Norway classes...
The greeblies on the bottom must be sensor palettes a la Voyager and basically everyone else. I'm also in favor of a shuttlebay of SOME sort being on the ship, though it's likely that they just didn't think anyone would be looking close enough - and they'd be right.
Mind you, these ships HAVE received upgrades too - when we first see 'em, they're blazing away with phase cannons as if they'd never had plasma weaponry. I see no reason why they wouldn't have torpedoes, fully-rated transporters (the Sarajevo from later on apparently did), and a slightly faster than warp 2 engine (given the implication that even old freighters could be easily upgraded).
posted
The lack of a Big Brass Dish deflector is probably as solid evidence as any that this is the older of the two designs between this and the Intrepid style ship. Perhaps deflector tech hadn't taken that step yet when then Delta was built.
posted
Well, it seems to me as if the entire forward part of the superstructure appears to be the bridge. If you look at the window size, it seems like it's one deck, maybe two on the outside.
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