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The Next USS Enterprise?

Spock's Barber

Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
I was watching an episode of TOS and began to wonder about the prospects for extended space travel and exploration. Specifically, do you think that the design of a Starship from a 1960’s television show would be a suitable, practical and feasible example for the first actual Starship to be built by aerospace engineers in the near future?
 
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At the risk of sounding extremely like a downer the initial answer is no. Largely because, unless current engineering can solve the artificial gravity problem, the ship's direction of thrust is not suited for generating gravity for the crew.
 
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Nope. The Enterprise was designed to be weird and impractical (a point lost in all subsequent incarnations which have gotten more and more streamlined), possible through magical future technology... which does not exist.
 
Nope. The Enterprise was designed to be weird and impractical (a point lost in all subsequent incarnations which have gotten more and more streamlined), possible through magical future technology... which does not exist.

...yet!

I do hope we have a starship one day that, while not a full-on replica of the Enterprise, at least is inspired by the general shape of the profile. It may prove to be a wrong step in the evolution of technology, but it would be cool. Of course I think there will be several spacecraft named Enterprise between now and then, just like in Star Trek.
 
Of course I think there will be several spacecraft named Enterprise between now and then, just like in Star Trek.

Enterprise-recreation-room-768x512.jpg


Like the progression of vessels named Enterprise as shown in TMP recreation room. Just ignore that short skirt in the foreground. :whistle:
 
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I'll wager that it's extremely likely that we'll one day have a ship that looks like the Enterprise. Not because it's practical or efficient but simply because once space travel be cheap and artificial gravity be perfected, we can make a ship look like anything we want -- and I'm pretty certain the Enterprise has become embedded in our pop culture such that someone will want to reproduce it.

There will also be ships shaped like Star Destroyers and maybe the Discovery.

As for whether or not ship design would have evolved to include an Enterprise shaped ship in a world where Trek did not exist, it all depends on the contributing factors. Assuming a ship need two big engines, and that distance from the ship be desirable, then having them on nacelles makes sense. Designs that incorporate circles are more volume efficient so cylinders and saucers are appropriate (though spheres can be better). Symmetry is always nice where thrust vectors are involved, but with artificial gravity and energy shielding, one doesn't needs an armored chunk as the base hull -- delicate bits are fine.

In other words, the Enterprise is a plausible design. And for the time, a rather revolutionary one. Up to then, the V-2 was still inspiring TV ship designs. It was rockets and flying saucers (Lost in Space; My Favorite Martian; Forbidden Planet).

An inevitable one? Not pre-1966, but almost assuredly post-1969!
 
The damning fault of the Enterprise shape is the back-and-forth. Quite regardless of the fictional functionality of the four pieces, joining them with the three thin supports we see makes no sense. The "engine" cigars are almost touching the saucer, so why not bolt them onto that? Why first go down to the "engineering" cigar and then back up?

Timo Saloniemi
 
Nope. The Enterprise was designed to be weird and impractical (a point lost in all subsequent incarnations which have gotten more and more streamlined), possible through magical future technology... which does not exist.

Yep. Real space travel is incredibly challenging, and it's not clear that the laws of physics will allow us the following things the Enterprise depends on:
• Artificial gravity would spare us some health injuries. This technology would also give us the luxury of a tractor beam.
• Deflectors would serve as light-weight solar radiation shields.

And interstellar travel requires:
• Faster than light propulsion, obviously.
• Inertial damping fields for acceleration and deceleration. This would probably be based on the artificial gravity technology, so it doesn't count as another whole invention.
• A source of tremendous energy that's practical to build into a ship.

If we had those four things, and they were light-weight enough to fly, we'd be in business.
 
…magical future technology... which does not exist.
Yet. Strictly speaking all advancing technology looks magical compared to earlier generations. Introduce a citizen of the 19th or earlier century to a contemporary jetliner or fighter jet or even a tablet, smartphone or flatscreen television and they would instantly think it was witchcraft. Our contemporary world is one of pure science fiction to those of centuries, or even a few decades, past.
 
Yet. Strictly speaking all advancing technology looks magical compared to earlier generations. Introduce a citizen of the 19th or earlier century to a contemporary jetliner or fighter jet or even a tablet, smartphone or flatscreen television and they would instantly think it was witchcraft. Our contemporary world is one of pure science fiction to those of centuries, or even a few decades, past.
19th century is stretching it. Verne was already incorporating holograms, solar sails, air travel, streaming news feeds in his books. Tsiolkovsky was working on ideas for rocketry, space stations, even a space elevator. Edison perfected the stock ticker, which was essentially an automated data router.

Some might have thought such technology was magical. There were peasants who attacked some of the early French balloons the century previous, but on the whole, while amazed, I don't think most people would have found the devices magical. To put it in perspective, Native Americans on the plains had been living for thousands of years with stone age technology, no wheels, and no pack animal larger than a dog. They took out Custer on horseback, some of them armed with repeating rifles. In other words, people adapt quickly. I think the threshold for Clarke's Law is very steep.
 
Yet. Strictly speaking all advancing technology looks magical compared to earlier generations. Introduce a citizen of the 19th or earlier century to a contemporary jetliner or fighter jet or even a tablet, smartphone or flatscreen television and they would instantly think it was witchcraft. Our contemporary world is one of pure science fiction to those of centuries, or even a few decades, past.
Perhaps to the common person, but we are also in an age where technology is growing exponentially, where things considered only for the rich are more commonly available. People adapt a lot more quickly than we think. Current humans are not better than past humans at this.
 
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