quote:Originally posted by Reverend: I would think using transporters as a weapon is banned by treaty.
What about using them to deliver weapons, like mines onboard an enemy ship?
Not relevant to this thread.
Update to the exterior. I know it's looking a little mono-chrome and the gradients are all over the place, that'll be fixed as it progresses. First I want to get all the lines in the right place.
In other news, I've been looking at the Steamrunner-Class as a candidate for the mothership and assuming Bernd's length of 355m is correct then it's looking pretty good. At that scale the read shuttlebay door is actually slightly bigger than the Galaxy's big door and the facilities inside the saucer should be able to comfortable hold three or four hoppers. More if the majority of the saucer's interior is given over to shuttle and cargo bays. Which is as good an explanation as I've heard for the deflector (and perhaps even the warp core) being all the way out there in a separate pod.
posted
Hmmm Steamrunners could certainly carry these, possibly the Norway as well, assuming they entered and left the bay single-file...the pylons could provide some coverage there.
Hmmm...a Galaxy could have that lower cargo bay in the aft secondary hull converted to launch these, I suppose. Wartime and all that.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
Oh sure, other ships can carry it. With some rigging that ventral open cargo area on the Excelsior could handle at least a few for example. What I'm thinking of is that the Steamrunner is a born carrier class or medium transport. Of course in peace time (that is, 99% of the time) it would act and a mid to long range transport carrying supplies and personnel, even shuttles and runabouts, acting as a roll-on/roll-off ferry for smaller vessels that are too slow for deep space travel. Of course the real advantage of a transport this size is that it's small enough to be nimble and as such a viable combat craft, unlike say a large bulk freighter or container tug. While at the same time it's bigger than say a Deneva (my version anyway) or a Ju'day-Class so it can pack for of an offensive punch rather than depend on speed and defences to run and escape, which also makes it useful as a mothership to the hoppers when orbital fire support is needed, or an LZ needs clearing. Also because most of it is empty space, in war time it becomes very versatile and easy to convert to other uses. Dropships with orbital weapons support, med-evac, munitions, prisoner transport, fast supply runners or just a plain old troop transport.
posted
Steamer's a nice choice I think, Rev. She looks pretty tough and able to handle being a light transport/carrier.
She's fairly small too, so she might very well be able to land.
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Daniel Butler
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posted
For some reason I've always thought of Steamrunners as sort of 'tanks' - fairly slow things with a lot of shielding and maybe ablative armor, with a large complement of quantum torpedoes and not many phasers or probes or all that. Sort of a heavy support vessel. Your vision might make more sense, though.
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posted
Man, the Steamrunner is a cow in those games.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
I could never get into playing it when I tried the Demo. After the Homeworld games it just felt...well, crap.
As for the Steamrunner's weaponry, I'm thinking some of those random features on the underside of the saucer could be modular weapons bays that could potentially be fitted with orbital fire support and planetary bombardment type ordinance. So the artillery isn't entirely inconsistent.
posted
Neat idea about the modular weapons bays. Possibly they'd have mass-transporter emitters there rapid evac. as well.
Nemesis showed the Enterprise-E snatching up a shuttle in flight via transporter, so maybe a specialized ship like the Steamrunner could beam Hoppers into the holding bay from planetside.
How else they gonna get back to the mothership? If the area is still "hot", they'd be target practice going up.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
...but then they'd have to drop shields to transport...ah but then they'd have to do that for docking anyway. Hmm. Ok, my argument against that one (under normal circumstances) is that if they're using hoppers in the first place it probably means the ground has transporter scramblers in operation. No beam ins, not beam outs.
But yes, being primerally designed as a medium transport ship, it would have mass transport capabilities.
Since it's relevant to the hopper, here's a diagram I made depicting a rough idea of how I thing the interior is laid out. The blue outlined area is from the base of the main aft bay upwards (about 3 or 4 decks on average) while the red is the two or three decks below that, from the two smaller bays upwards. The decks between there and the ventral hull would be used for loading bays, cargo lifts, those modular weapons bays and perhaps even landing gear. It's crude, but it give you an idea as to how much cubic space there would be and how it still leaves a surprising amount of floor space for the crew areas.
The transporter thing can still work if the Steamrunner is useing those wacky Nemesis shields: they could drop shields over only the ventral saucer, transport and raise shields back up.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
That's one of my bigger issues with Trek, and in particular fan treknologists like ourselves: People fail to realize just how big these ships are. They're enormous. There's tons of space for all sorts of things aboard.
quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: Now that rocks.
The transporter thing can still work if the Steamrunner is useing those wacky Nemesis shields: they could drop shields over only the ventral saucer, transport and raise shields back up.
Well I'm thinking the Steamrunner and this particular Hopper were both designed around the time of the Cardassian War, some time in the late 2340's or early 50's so I don't think that kind of tech was available at the time. So I can't make design oriented conjecture based on technology that was developed after the fact.
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