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Handyman4545 — Shuttle-Sphinx M1A1
#enterprise #federation #kirk #shuttle #star #trek
Published: 2020-01-24 05:24:20 +0000 UTC; Views: 223; Favourites: 6; Downloads: 0
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Description
Sphinx Type M1A1
Shuttle tug with articulating arms.
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Comments: 11
That might make for the workings of a good book you know?
The Star Fleet Corp of Engineers.
Especially the salvaging under pressure part.
I've been thinking about the Akyazi I did, in the service of marauders or pirates.
The USS Abreus is listed in the "Ships of the Star Fleet" manual as "LOST".
It was an early production vessel in the series (1017) Dec 2285.
Maybe she suffered a critical failure which incapacitated or killed her crew and was either salvaged or commandeered by other individuals?
If she was "allegedly", salvaged, salvage rights would prevail thus allowing her to travel freely within Federation controlled areas with her new crew.
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I really like the addition of the manipulator arms, so much more grounded than an engineering support vehicle which relies on tractor beams for moving objects.
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Got to thinking about that...
In addition to the environmental support hardware, the propulsion hardware, the electrical hardware, the fluidic hardware, and the control hardware, where do you put the "tractor beam" hardware?
Maybe it fits in a shoe box under the seat?
If it does, why do you need an on-sight pilot?
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Ahh... that’s the beauty of ‘space magic’, it fits anywhere.
As for those who favor practical engineering, I still favor the appliqué component package approach of the older generation of Work Bee, at least as it was conceived and expanded upon. Quite simply it makes more sense to me, and from my admittedly limited experience by observation, that it is better to have a base ‘jack-of-all-trades’ vehicle component which can be adapted to a particular job by swapping out specific components. Your design works for me because it doesn’t need to have a tractor emitter as part of its organic design if the option exists to temporarily bolt onto its exterior an emitter and power package when it needs one.
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Laughing at that.
Trouble is, why have any pilot at all?
If you can do it all in a shoe box, where's the need for human interface much less a 400 cubic foot spacecraft?
In that world, the worker shuttle is the size of a softball, operates with no physical contact and no human interconnection, and never needs refueling or service maintenance.
Humans sit in a heated room on a chaise lounge eating grapes and getting obesely fat, and just wait endlessly to be needed for anything.
In the ST movie, Into Darkness, that friggin dreadnought ship was massively larger than the Enterprise and yet required 1/5, 120th?, 1/100th? the operations personnel.
REALLY?
"The USS Vengeance was a 23rd century Federation Dreadnought-class starship operated in secret by Starfleet via Section 31.
Unlike other ships operated by the Federation and Starfleet, the vessel was created specifically for combat and was completely unmarked with no registry number or nomenclature visible on the hull.
The ship was launched in 2259 from the Io Facility, a spacedock in orbit of the Jovian moon Io.
The ship's commanding officer was Admiral Alexander Marcus.
As of 2263, it was by far the largest ship operated by Starfleet and was, unofficially, the Federation's true flagship."
This was a really bad idea on the part of Abrams and I'm calling Bull Shit! on this and this is why...
How could you POSSIBLY run a starship of this size with 9 people for any extended period of time much less in a combat situation where damage is both given and taken?
AND
Even if you bypass all the obvious idiotic crap like 500,000 square feet of empty, conditioned space, if you support the premise that it can be run with only 9 people, a why would you need it that big anyways?
To carry 50,000 photon torpedos?
If so, why not build it like an automatic pistol clip (1m wide, 3 meters deep and 500 meters high) that fires them out the top from a totally useless, over sized clown head?
Unless it's a cruise ship manned by a small compliment and 98% of the people on board are merely passengers, it's friggin STUPID to make it that big if it can be run by 9 people.
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The problem with hindsight is that it is exactly that, hindsight. Although rudimentary steps were being taken towards what we refer to as ‘drone technology’ were being taken even when TOS was being produced, it often takes uncommon, neigh uncanny levels of near-prophetic forethought to envision just how deeply such technology once available spreads.
The communicator is oft regarded as presaging the modern cell-phone, yet when one considers how relatively little use a cellphone seems to get as an actual PHONE (🤔 in retrospect, how hilarious would it be to see someone playing Candycrush on a communicator or tricorder..., “that bridge officer is playing Galaga; thought we wouldn’t notice...”).
Sorry, mental tangent...
Now, practically speaking, is it reasonable to use drones for some work when constructing a starship? Sure it is. Is it very dramatic? Not really; what’s practical is often quite boring, even mundane.
Now, show that constructing a starship involves the use of drones, perhaps for simple, repetitive tasks like bolting hull playing into place, but I do still think it reasonable that a person (I won’t say human, don’t want to be accused of speciesism) would still be there for other tasks, say mating for mating major space-frame or equipment components because, well, what’s the point of having billions or even trillions of people if no one has a job anymore? We like to imagine how wonderful it would be to not have to work, but I think a good number of people these days (thanks to the real experience of these quarantines) would agree; not having something to do but sit around, staring at walls and learning to hate every little idiosyncrasy of the person staring at the same walls next to you is little short of a form of living hell.
Plus, as a species, we tend to enjoy that aspect, the satisfaction which comes from doing something ourselves. We can be lazy, but at some point, most of us can point to at least one moment where we painted a picture, changes an oil filter, fixed a cabinet and basked for a moment in the incomparable glory of that accomplishment, declaring with puffed chest and smug grin, “Yes!, I did that, I, without any help, not even from YouTube, I changed the windshield wipers on my car!”.
At our core, we want to feel useful, and because we want to feel useful, there will always be those who’ll stand and declare “Drone? Screw that drone; give me a screwdriver and a socket wrench and I’ll get it done right now!”.
Plus, never forget the M-5, it did everything a sentient humanoid crew could do, but better, even misidentify and attack other Federation starships and kill their crews. Would you want M-5 ver 2.0 putting your next starship together unsupervised?
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Interference?
In the world of perfect, shoe box sized tractor beams, there is no such thing as interference.
The same technology that made the tractor beams, apparently unlimited ability's possible, should also make it flawless as well.
What a boring show huh.
60 minutes of CGI things happening and ZERO dialog, ZERO PEOPLE.
Machines are flawless. It's people that fuck things up and without people screwing up the soup, why watch it?
Abrams side stepped everything that ST stands for to make a fast, low budget, stupid sequel.
It's no wonder the ST series is floundering.
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For me, it’s a bit more Grunt minded; if it works, why change it?
Or, to quote Montgomery Scott, “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”
Sometimes, so-called ‘low-tech solutions’ are superior to ‘technobabble space magic’ because they’re more believable; it’s why drydocks that assemble ships piece by piece still make sense rather than enormous replicators that make ships at the push of a button. Because, let’s face it, if Star Trek space magic can convince us that the infinitely complex body of a person can be disassociated into energy and reassembled perfectly elsewhere, with enough energy and computer power, conceptually, replicating an entire starship ought to be relative child’s play...but it’s also not as interesting or believable.
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REALISTICALLY SPEAKING
I'm seeing lots of tugs, work pods and containers in a Starbase, resupply facility and even more in a drydock facility.
A starbase "resupply" would be a lot like an airline resupply.
A drydock would be more like an over sized, repair garage.
A salvaging operation would be alot like stripping a car on the side of a road. Then factor in if you're trying to avoid detection.
A starbase would be equipped to handle any type of ship but there would be no "garage" style convenience. Park your ship anywhere and we'll send out the stuff and people you need.
All infrastructure would be contained within the base facility and individually transported to the ship.
Only light repairs would be done there. Stuff where a repair or resupply crew would not require EVA suits at all.
A pod slides out of a bay equipped with such supplies as are needed, docks with the child vessel and a cargo crew transfers suck materials as required.
The vessel would be in and out quickly.
A drydock on the other hand, would have only what was needed to supply the repair crew housed there plus specialized, repair parts, tools and experience necessary for the task at hand.
It might also include an incorporated, recreation and entertainment facility but most likely it wouldn't as it would be based near a starbase for security reasons.
The vessel would be in for a much longer duration than a starbase resupply.
In these conditions, tugs, worker shuttles and cargo container boxes would be in high demand and use because every project no matter how small requires materials as well as tools to remove and or (re)install (R&R). It's either that or you keep a transporter staff, on demand, all working period for a duranium, 1/2" pipe fitting.
A space faring vessel would be no less than 6 meters (+/-) from the support pods at its closest point and unless both the port and starboard pods of the drydock are identical in setup and equipment, you might have to cross the vessel itself for what you need. Hundreds of meters?
Without containers on site and within easy travel distance from the working crew, even with replicators, unless you could bring the replicator directly to your work site (within a short travel distance) for EVERY work crew, getting parts for the repairs would be like working on a house and every time you needed a part, you had to:
Stop what you were doing,
Secure the project,
move to your car,
Start your car,
Drive to Lowes,
Make you way inside,
Find the part,
Log the part out (register clerk),
Make you way back to your car,
Drive back to the project,
Make you way back to the work site,
Unpack your part,
AND THEN discover it's not the right part.
With containers (trailers), you have everything you need including parts, tools and even personal affects to accomplish the job and the container can be replaced (as the parts dwindle down) with new, resupplied containers without work interruption.
Plus the containers can act as emergency relief pods (with an environment) as necessary.
Salvaging would be a horse of a completly different color.
Salvaging of derelict or forcefully defeated vessels would have to be done on the spot, under what ever circumstances the two vessels were in.
Virtually no combat vessel would be equipped for this function and tractoring it back to friendly space would take days, weeks months or years without warp capability enveloping the second vessel as well as the primary vessel. Then there's the time and exposure in disassembly.
Logically and realistically speaking, the answer would be un armed or lightly armed, cargo vessels equipped with worker vessels (drones/manned) that would disassemble the incapacitated vessel, store the pieces in containers and then transport (tractor or tow) the containers to a transport vessel which would then warp the parts back to friendly space leaving behind the unneeded framework.
You would have to send out a corp of engineers and support vessels as well, including the laborers, officers, management, and support staff necessary to accommodate the salvaging work effort for an unknown duration (would speed be necessary?) plus a freight vessel with enough capacity to transport the empty containers going out and full ones coming back.
If that freight vessel was large enough to envelope the target vessel you might be able to just bring it in, secure it and then warp back to friendly space but it would have to be a PDB ship to transport a frigate, battle or larger sized vessel, in warp, back home.
Then there's the need for protection or defense consideration. A defense perimeter might be necessary so small, heavily armed perimeter protection might be necessary as well.
As far as tractor beams...
The trouble with "tractor beams" is the third dimension in space.
How does it compensate for the "z" axis? Roll?
The larger the cargo, the greater the mass. The greater the mass the greater the force required to not only start it moving but alter its trajectory and then stop it's movement as required.
Seems to me and current physics states that would be a lot of work on any system, magic or otherwise thus requiring large infrastructures and power demand to support them.
No tractor beams in warp because the envelope won't support it so it's all impulse travel.
If you're using a tug to move stuff, it's totally different in space than on a gravity based plane.
On a gravity based plane, all your couplings are engineered for is secure, x and y connections. There is no z consideration because gravity rules out that plane.
Your tug coupling in space on the other hand, needs to be engineered to account for that "z" plane.
A standard, gravity based coupling would need to be replaced with a ball and socket style coupling which would probably work best as it would allow the tug to rotate, compensating for thrust and momentum independently of the payload it's towing.
Then you need to factor in the momentum of the payload.
One containers momentum is relatively easy to compensate for but two or more....
A single shuttle could spend hours just maneuvering the containers around much less the crew shifts.
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Your reasoning is impeccable.
It has often been said that beyond the feats of combat which brought the Axis powers to defeat in the Second World War, the far more important and difficult accomplishment was in the logistics of the war; the battle of resources and infrastructure. When one looks at a picture of an aircraft carrier, it is easy to forget or overlook the colossal efforts which took place to just assemble that ship, to provision it, to make it what it was long before it ever sailed into harm’s way.
Likewise, when we look at the a Federation starship, we must assume that no less Herculean efforts are undertaken to bring that one ship to life and to support it once it gets underway.
This is how manuals are written, the understanding and experiences of our contemporary world being adapted and reinterpreted to explain what is not or what simply cannot be explained within a narrative.
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