/STG/ - Star Trek General

Engaging an experimental engine is not an environmental hazard. Even Voyager, which did it several times, never called Blue Alert for that.

You're going to have airlocks all over the ship anyway.

>making your bridge more easy to board when it's landed on a planet and getting swarmed
That has got to be one of the dumbest complaints I've heard in a long time.

Do you reckon that happens often? Or ever?

So I looked over the spaceframes Veeky Forums provided me with for my TOS-themed game - the Perseus, Ranger, and Pioneer classes. Together with the Constitution they form a splendid little fleet, but it occurred to me that it's lacking something: a dedicated science vessel, a TOS analogue to the Oberth-class or Nova-class. Theoretically the Pioneer or Constitution could fill that role, but neither of theme really seem like "science" ships to me. The Oberth-class itself is a bit too Movie-era for my tastes as well. Plus I kind of wanted to try my hand at coming up with my own starship.

Thus, the Ampère-class, a ship class designed in the wake of the initial set of Five Year Missions conducted by the original Constitution-class vessels to serve as a follow-up ship. I stole art for a TOS-era Oberth, but worked that into the ship's background design as well - the Ampère is already slated to be replaced by the Oberth-class thanks to innovations that Starfleet's Five Year Missions plus the Ampère's own follow-ups have landed on. The fact that they're dedicated science ships (or SCIENCE! ships, really, since I'm going for a TOS feel) even excuses the nacelles not looking quite right for the TOS-era.

Even if my players don't decide to cruise around in an Ampère-class, I rather like what I've put together for it and will probably have one or two pop up in the campaign.

What does /stg/ think?

It'd happen at least once if I was running an STA game with such a vessel. But that's part of the fun.

>So I looked over the spaceframes Veeky Forums provided me with for my TOS-themed game - the Perseus, Ranger, and Pioneer classes.
>it's lacking something: a dedicated science vessel
The Daedalus exists.

True, but the Daedalus is a pre-Federation design that would be more than 100 years out of date. Even Starfleet's endless supply of Mirandas would raise thier navigational deflectors at the idea of the Daedalus being the go-to science vessel of Starfleet in 2269.

You're already using STO designs, so just go with STO's explanation that they retrofit it.

The museum offers the Aryabhatta class for an early 23rd century (but ending service in Pike's era) dedicated medium-range survey vessel. Andorian built and styled, fills the same sort of space as the Oberth.

>Nacelles can't see each other

That's a mark against it...can I see it from the front? Or preferably can I see it alongside a Constitution or something else so I have a reference for how big it is? Although if I'm going to use a fan-made ship anyway I might as well use my own.

In truth, the main reason why I'm using so many STO designs is because there's existing write-ups for them; as well, the STO designs tend to get a few things "right":

1) Two nacelles that can "see" clearly forward, backward, and each other
2) Deflector dish isn't simply hanging down but instead is in-built into a hull (my main problem with Technical Manual ships) - those things are supposed to put out a lot of power, after all.
3) Easy to find extant art for.

Directly following that is more of a direct lead-in for the Oberth (if you take the idea that the Oberth primary hull is more of a general small utility ship and secondary hull is a modular pod thingy) is the Capella class, a dull, workhorse ship that is mostly there to have useful tools bolted on to it like planetary survey modules or bigass cargo pods or a half-decent weapons package.

I like it, not enough people design utility ships and the like cos they're not exactly fancy and something you'd want to imagine working on, but helps flesh out stuff.

...

No deflector dish at all, which is worse than not having it inbuilt.

You must hate about 80% of all canon designs then, including the Oberth.

In general? Not generally, as long as something vaguely resembling a deflector is visible (which it isn't on the Oberth, so, no, I do not like the Oberth's design - although I find it amusing that the TOS-style Oberth art from above incorporates TWO dishes, almost like an an apology).

But for a game where I'm trying to have a TOS aesthetic? Yes.

Oh hey, they're doing this again

arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/10810274-3d-print-your-star-trek-online-ship!

Who wants to take bets on how long before this new company implodes?

That's neat. Now if only I was flush with cash, I might actually make use of that.

...

I'll give it until pre-orders happen and they realise they can't meet demand.

I appreciate the STO team's attempt to get this kind of thing out there, but I really wish CBS would license a nice big line of proper scale model kits that covers a wide range of designs from the franchise. Preferably at a rather small scale so I can go nuts buying a bunch of them to kitbash into all the vidya designs that'll never get models at all because of licensing issues.

I kind of want a miniature of my Defiant with all the Borg and MACO shit on it.

>CBS
>doing anything intelligent ever
Good luck with that one, friend.

All the spaceframes in the book have a total of +3 to its different Departments, not +4.

As for the ship itself, it might be heresy, but I think I'd go with a few of the ships from Discovery rather than some fan created TOS ships. I love the TOS movie era aesthetic, but the designs from the series itself (and fanmade ships made look like them) are just way too cheap looking to me.

Although, it would be kind of interesting to see the Discovery designs re-imagined with the retro look.

I noticed that, but the Pioneer class Veeky Forums provided (from continuingmissionsta.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/starship-sunday-pioneer/) has a total of +4 (+1 in each of Command, Engineering, Science, and Medicine) so I thought it might be kosher; I suspect it does this because its Systems only add up to 45 instead of 46 like the Constitution (and I did the same thing with the Ampère). If pressed I'd rather drop the +1 to Medicine, personally, and leave it as just a super-dedicated science ship.

>just way too cheap looking to me

It's part of the charm, along with the uniforms. I can hook you up with a TOS-style Crossfield class, at least. I suspect this one spins less.

Yeah, I know. Currently debating just buying some of the Eaglemoss ships and chopping them up for parts, but they're all non-scale so it's a crapshoot as to whether the parts will fit well together.

>kitbash
There's always 3D
3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/7d84dc3e-6492-460c-96f9-b79d7ae87087/Excelsior-class-variants-WIP
3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/57dcea96-ba9f-4dff-b6d3-c5fddc0265c8/Sovereign-class-variants-WIP
It took me all of 30 seconds per ship and it shows, but with separately printed hulls/saucers/nacelles you could work wonders...modelling putty is your friend!

Models look to be higher quality than the last attempt, at least

So if your ship travels into an atmosphere while under attack, do you use Blue or Red alert?

What if you spore jump into an atmosphere while under attack? Which alert do you use then?

Purple and Puce, respectively.

For real though, you go to Red Alert and inform damage crews to prepare for atmospheric entry.

Red alert, because the ship being under attack is the biggest priority

12"? That's pretty big. They'll get my money.

It's because some memelord on production staff wanted to make "nigger alarm" jokes.

Spacedock.

Blue alert is landing on a planet on purpose and in a controlled manner. Voyager did it a bunch.

> a bunch

Twice.
They also crash landed while on Red Alert once.

We also see Blue alert used for the Prometheus’ MVAM, the Enterprise docking and that time Data turned off life support on the bridge. There might be other instances but I don’t remember them.

Defiant did it in The Search when they tested the cloak.
Voyager also invented memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Gray_mode

Blue alert has always been the enabling of a ship's specialized features, be it planetary landing, saucer separation, cloak and multi-vector assault mode.

Ah, so Blue Alert is "Gimmick Mode."

Sometime around the 2300s it becomes that, anyway.

I’m not sure “oh fuck, the life supports broken” would count as a gimmick, now.

It makes sense. What would really make sense is to have everyone go to spacesuits and completely decompress the ship (save a couple sections, like Medical) when you know you're going into combat.

That one honestly doesn't fit the rest of the blue alert conditions. They're all "what's happening right now isn't normal operations but isn't inherently dangerous, be aware of it and act accordingly."

You expect that kind of thinking from people who send their kids to a daycare on the same ship?

Maybe not on a Galaxy, but on a Sovereign or Defiant?

It could do, in context. They were moving full command functions to another location.

I still think "oh fuck, the life support's broken" calls for a red alert, though.

Red Alert is reserved for Battle Stations.

What good does pre-emptive decompression do?

It doesn't free up significant power for shields or weapons (nor does it increase the range of torpedoes, which in any planned engagement should be the decider long before phaser range), and it cuts avenues of escape for unshielded crew, forcing the captain to decide ahead of time to either have literally the entire ship's complement change clothes at a mission-critical juncture (and waking the swing shift to do so, meaning you're either breaking the general quarters rule or having them rush to battle stations in their underwear through, er, vacuum). On top of that it won't stop a plasma fire and, you know, those plasma conduits run through every system on the ship.

Plus as soon as the Klingons or Breen or Kazon or whoever figure out that's what you do, they'll start targeting those sections that retain life support on the basis that they're probably mission critical systems, or at the very least high-value targets of opportunity.

Per TNG (and the deployment of the Enterprise-B, though that wasn't shown until later) emergency forcefields can easily preserve life support in even a critically damaged section.

What does NCC stand for?

New Cheesy Crust
>USS Digiorno

No clue, cuz.

Nothing. It's just a "registry number" that they thought looked cool because they saw it on civilian aircraft. Star Trek writers have never understood how actual an actual military works.

Nothing; canon has never touched on it. Star Trek Blueprints posits that it stands for "Naval Construction Contract", but it's apocryphal at best.

The designer of the Enterprise model, Matt Jefferies, said he came up with it in 1964 because American civil aircraft had a registry prefix of NC, and Soviet ones had a prefix of CCCC, so he more-or-less combined the two. His philosophy was "If we do anything in space, we [Americans and Russians] have to do it together." (though on other occasions he claimed that the second "C" was added to NC just for fun).

Well Starfleet isn't an actual military, so that's not the worst thing in the world.

You guys think they continued celebrating Captain Picard Day on the E despite there not being any kids on it?

I'm certain that Riker would have arranged for it at least once, as a mixed joke/memoriam, when the next Captain Picard day would have been. Maybe with cards and gifts and stuff sent from the kids who had been on the Enterprise D.

I'm pretty sure that Picard Day was an elaborate practical joke that went too far.

You just know Riker was going to continue to make it a thing as long as he served. Even after he moved to the Titan..

>Maybe with cards and gifts and stuff sent from the kids who had been on the Enterprise D.
Aww. I'm going to choose to believe this happened because it's too great not to.

...an actual military works by having specialized craft with individual registrations, but those registrations are incrementally-rising numbers just as in Starfleet, whether oceangoing or airborne.

The US uses N (and several variants, due to the high number of civil craft in service) as a civil aviation prefix, and is the only country to begin with N; given the origins of much of Star Trek as analogy for the Cold War, it's hardly surprising they chose a familiar, US-centric prefix; but in line with Gene's ideals, they also made it a unique, fictional prefix.

As far as modern militaries go: ships don't use that type of prefix code at all (being defined either by country or nominal owner in the case of military vessels, such as "USS" or "HMS"), but are the closest analog to a starship, being multi-role vessels with considerable size and power. But since they're starships, they're also considerably similar to modern air forces in role, and the use of an easy prefix identifier in addition to the proper-name prefix ("USS") isn't that surprising.

I'm pretty sure that describes 90% of human history if you examine it closely enough.

Like, which sounds more likely: A bunch of Colonials got dressed up as Indians and threw tea into the sea when the whole thing they were angry about was the price of tea (why not just steal the tea?)...

...or...

...a British cargo ship, having put into port after a months-long sea voyage, has its crew have a nice drink to celebrate aboard the ship while the officers go stay at fancy ins...and the crew has another drink...and another...and another...and then at some point one the crew, very inebriated, decides to make some tea, but can't find any water, but then figures there's plenty of water right there...

...and then the next day the captain shows up and demands to know what happen, and one crew member says "Colonists!" and another at the same time says "Indians!", and then somehow the two (very hungover) crew manage to pass the blame onto the Colonists.

I've been to Britain. I've met the English. Trust me, option #2 is super-likely to be the truth of the matter.

>Starfleet isn't an actual military
I've always called bullshit on that. Starfleet is most definitely the Federation's military whether they claim it is or not.

Starfleet serves a military role when necessary for it to do so, but it isn't a military, it's something else that doesn't have an easy analogue to our time because we don't live in the kind of society who can support it.

Non-Starfleet characters in the shows even refer to Starfleet as a military all the time

I think some of the children would have sent messages to him.

>As far as modern militaries go: ships don't use that type of prefix code at all
Actually, the US Navy does use hull classification codes and has done so for over a hundred years. These prefixes are based on the ship's intended role, similarly to the same prefixes used by aircraft. For example, the IRL Enterprise, recently retired, was CVN-65, CVN meaning it's a nuclear aircraft carrier. Of course, the US uses literally over a hundred individual prefixes instead of just NCC.

Doesn't necessarily mean much. Gene Roddenberry's novelization of The Motion Picture made it pretty clear that as far as the average Federation citizen is concerned, Starfleet is made up of far-right militarist nutjobs.

Again, it has military features to it, and functions as a military when necessary, but it isn't quite a military in the modern sense.

It is bullshit, but is it really still a military when defense and such is a secondary function. I always thought of Starfleet as scientists on science ships, who for the sake of keeping everything smooth they use military ranks on the ships. In case they run into a dangerous situation on the unknown, they have military discpline and combat training, and the ships have weapons.

Enterprise (and early TOS) would seem to support that. "United Earth Space Probe Agency" doesn't sound like a military branch.

Starfleet is an organization that uses violence (although more typically the threat of violence, whether overt or subtle) to enact the political directives of the Federation, and to protect the state and it's citizens from other actors. They're a military. The only reason various flavors of Trek try to keep up the pretense that they're just "armed scientists" is because Trek writers a) don't know how a military actually works and b) are firmly lodged in the anti-war culture that spawned the show to begin with. Much like every other gaggle of utopianist assholes that think they've discovered a moral high-ground from which none can assail them, their ideals don't actually hold up in practice.

Starfleet is a military organization focused on non-aggressive roles. A military doesn't exist solely for combat. The US Army uses the Corps of Engineers for contributing to civil infrastructure, the US Navy operates hospital ships on humanitarian missions. Starfleet is just more heavily focused on those endeavors.

Why? Red Alert is generally reserved for combat and other significant external threats. If the problem is with the ship itself, what good will powering up shields/weapons and calling battlestations do?

You were fine until you went full edgetard with your last sentence.

>The only reason various flavors of Trek try to keep up the pretense that they're just "armed scientists" is because

that's the kind of show it is, and is a stance held by literally everyone in-universe and everyone who works on the show, who have far more authority to make such statements than your Anonymous ass.

>don't know how a military actually works

Gene Roddenberry enlisted with the United States Air Army Corps in 1941, graduated in 1942, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He was posted to Oahu to join the 394th Bomb Squadron, 5th Bombardment Group, of the Thirteenth Airforce, and himself flew Boeing B17 Flying Fortresses. During his military career he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal.

I say all this to point out that Gene Roddenberry knew full well how a real-world military functions. Starfleet's differences from real-world military aren't the result of a civilian not getting the military, they're the result of a man who enlisted and served in the military, knew perfectly well how it functioned, and so any differences from a real military are a deliberate choice on his part.

(Also I'm certain plenty of other Star Trek writers and directors and so on had military service behind them as well - my point is you're a dumbass).

>Roddenberry was an officer in the soon-to-be chair force
now it all makes sense

You just had to go and open that can of worms, didn’t you?

I honestly wonder if I did have to open in, in a psychological sense (same way that a pyromaniac "has" to start fires). I'm sort of an argumentative bastard.

He was in three plane crashes, two of them with him at the wheel, and survived all three.

Yup, pretty much this. We even see that, during wartime, the focus of Starfleet realigns as needed. And back again, once the war is over.

True, true. Apologies for the oversight.

>at the wheel
Well, that explains why he crashed. How are you supposed to pitch up with a wheel?

Earth Starfleet is clearly a successor org to NASA if you count ENT. NASA uses a military ish rank structure, with mission leaders called Commander and so on. We see the ISS in the intro too.
>which actually makes ENT and anything referencing it a distinct timeline from TOS since the ISS presumes our own history rather than the TOS backstory

Starfleet can also be compared with the NOAA, which has its own fleet of scientific research ships crewed by uniformed officers commissioned under authority of the President, with the same rank structure and chain command as naval officers, and can in fact be militarized by the President under emergency situations. Obviously Starfleet isn't entirely like that, but it could probably describe a good chunk of the science department in terms of how they view their job and the role of Starfleet.

It also fits the "science vessels are spookshit" meme, since NOAA vessels were often instructed to investigate or retrieve sunken Soviet naval equipment.

That would be accurate if the NOAA had carriers, cruisers, etc fully armed all the time and we had no other military. Unless the Federation has some other military I'm unaware of.

I literally just said in the post you quoted that Starfleet didn't operate entirely like the NOAA, just there being some influence. Starfleet could be thought of as a weird love child between the NOAA, NASA, and actual military.

Why couldn't there be an International Space Station in Star Trek's timeline?