Excelsior class

[Bill Morris]

How many decks on the Ent-B? Memory Alpha says 38. The MSD shows 34 plus bilge. No, thanks. The ship is only 78 meters high. So with deck pitch of approx. 4.3 meters (Galaxy class: approx. 4.6) it would be 17 decks plus bilge, like the upper schematic below. If the pitch is approx. 3.7 meters, then we get 20 plus bilge (lower schematc below).

 

[Griffworks]

I don't have the link to any of the MSD's for Excelsior or Enterprise-B, but think that should give a decent enough idea of the "canon" number, or close enough. Otherwise, I think you're logical approach of 17 to 20 decks is likely the best answer.

BTW, WTH does a starship need with a bilge...? That's like God needing a starship, innit?

 

[Bernard Guignard]

I'd go with the 3.7 meter deck height and make the bottom deck a cargo type deck

 

[Timo]

Why not go for something like 3.0 m? The decks as seen from the inside aren't particularly high, and we don't have any reason to think there would be Jeffries tubes between the decks or anything. And the window rows don't fit any particular constant deck height scheme anyway.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bill Morris]

There are various sets of dimensions given on the Web, but I think the height of 78 m is favored. Notice that both deck pitches I tried out above seem to be in the ballpark with regard to the saucer rim, assuming that represents one deck. If it's two, then I don't know.

This page at Ex Astris Scienta has a detailed discussion on this but doesn't quite answer my question. It also has a screencap of the MSD, as well as a reproduction of it.

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/excelsior-size.htm

The Ent-D has a deck pitch of about 4.6 meters (height: 195 m). My house in Japan has a floor pitch of 3 meters, less than that of the average American house. The canon MSD shows a deck pitch of 2.195 meters--way less than a Japanese house, with two decks shown snug between the saucer rim. Erase every other deck line from the MSD and you get 4.39 meters, giving it nearly the deck pitch of the Enterprise-D. I measured all this stuff precisely. The version I showed with 20 flat decks would probably come out looking nicer than the one with 17, but math is math, and some number of decks (one or two) has to fit snugly into that saucer rim. Whatever it ends up being, of course there will be some short decks here and there between the hull and a floor, some accessible enough for storage.

I suspect that the canon MSD was originally drawn with 17 decks and later modified, perhaps when the extra impulse engines were added.

 

[sunnyside]

Personally I rationalize things by considering there to be two classes with similar make (similar to the bird of preys). You have the later 600-700m ship that the MSD goes with and that we see in "Paradise Lost" and there is the earlier 467m ship.

At least that seems to be how the writers treated things.

A MSD for the smaller ship would be cool.

 

[Bill Morris]

I checked the Sears Tower on Wikipedia: 4 m per floor. So 4.39 per floor within the 72 meters from bridge ceiling to inner hull surface of the keel of the Ent-B is making 17 flat decks is looking more and more reasonable.

 

[Timo]

...some number of decks (one or two) has to fit snugly into that saucer rim.

But that isn't the case with the E-nil. Or with the Galaxy class, for that matter; the original deck layout was completely contradicted with the introduction of Ten-Forward and its placement on the lower half of the rim rather than across both the upper and lower windows on that rim.

The rim of the Excelsior saucer has seven equal-thickness stripes. There are tiny portholes on stripes 3 and 5 from atop. Does that indicate 3½ decks on the rim, perhaps? Or 1.25? If it's just one deck, the upper portholes could be approximately at face height, the lower ones at belly button height. If it's two decks, the lower one (with the fewer holes) has face-height openings, while the upper one has knee-height ones.

Since there are no other windows on the saucer, and no docking port on the bridge module to establish scale; and since the secondary hull window rows aren't evenly spaced; I just think that we have complete freedom in deciding how the decks are laid out within the confines of the hulls.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bill Morris]

Hm. But the MSD seen in Generations (on the wall behind Tim Russ) and published in Sketchbook The Movies: Generations and First Contact, if that's the right title, does show two decks fitting snugly into the rim. But my problem is that it means those decks would indicate a deck pitch of 2.195 meters, while double that is just about right, close to what is well established for the Ent-D.

On top of that, someone who has done a lot of MSDs is arguing that canon is canon, regardless of math or common sense. But I'm not sure it's canon just because it was shown in a movie out of focus.

By the way, I changed that aft torp launcher, putting it far stern below the shuttlebay. You can see it on the Ambassador thread. There was a hint of that on the filming model.

 

[Newtype_A]

LCARS 24 said:
Hm. But the MSD seen in Generations (on the wall behind Tim Russ) and published in Sketchbook The Movies: Generations and First Contact, if that's the right title, does show two decks fitting snugly into the rim. But my problem is that it means those decks would indicate a deck pitch of 2.195 meters, while double that is just about right, close to what is well established for the Ent-D.

Why use the Enterprise-D as a point of comparison? Try worknig forwards from he deck height of the Enterprise-A, which is also about 72 meters high and has 21 decks, giving a deck height of about 3.4 meters. It's entirely possible the Excelsiors used smaller deck spaces, maybe down to 2.4 meters or something to that effect, and moved all the machinery that would otherwise be packed BETWEEN decks into independent modules elsewhere on the ship, concentrating machinery behind a couple extra feet of shielding so as to favor protection over redundancy.

As it happens, at 2.4 meters per deck, you'd get about 30 decks on the ship. And considering it is a SHIP and not a skyscraper, that seems to make sense. Considering most Starfleet officers aren't going to be more than 1.9 meters tall, that's more than enough room for cieling widgets, plumbing, electronics and and grav plating (and on Enterprise-A, the plumbing wasn't even BETWEEN decks anyway).


Another thing to mention: I'm not certain, but I beleive it was implied on a few occasions that the big bulge on the bottom of the ship is supposed to contain either cargo bays, or a shuttlebay, or both. Judging by the glow, I'd say a shuttlebay is more likely.

 

[Timo]

Well, NCC-2000 had that glow in ST6:TUC. Other Excelsiors on other occasions have not displayed it.

The physical model originally apparently had just the big cavity in there, and it might have been a shuttlebay, or then perhaps some doodad related to transwarp. Later on, the cavity received a complex latticework greeblie that would make the volume pretty useless as a shuttlebay.

So I'd argue that NCC-2000 originally had a transwarp streamer coil there (we didn't see the volume in ST3/4 - no stern shots there!); it was removed and a shuttlebay installed instead for ST6; and all later models had the cavity filled with that strange greeblie, which might be for example a self-repair crane of some sort. Their shuttles would be concentrated in the stern hangar, which would also receive this upgrade wherein the original "observation lounge" facing forward was replaced by a far blockier structure. (Sure, that blocky thing was there in ST6 as well, but again we lacked shots that would have revealed it.)

However, the E-B variant might very well have had auxiliary torpedo launchers there in the cavity, as shown in the MSD, to complement the main ones below the fantail and at the bow of the secondary hull. These could also have been of lower caliber than the main units, explaining why they would not be fired all that often. Similar auxiliary launchers could exist within the neck in that particular model, again as per the onscreen MSD.

In general, the Excelsior is such a huge ship that the designers might have had lots and lots of extra room to play with, once the original transwarp interiors were abandoned. Different models would just use the available space differently.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Well, my 2cents re: the "lower aft cavity."

I would tend to agree that this originally held some portion of the transwarp support hardware package. And I also tend to agree that it's not really suitable as a hangar in most cases.

When I did my "Vega" class design, I needed a place to store my ship's towed array. I put it into that basic location, and that's a big part of why some people originally claimed that I'd just done the Excelsior.

When I look at the Excelsior, I see that cavity as being a "modular mission module" space. And the "latticework" that you mention, which we see on occasion, is a folded up towed sensor array. It deploys from there, unfolds, is "dragged" behind the ship at a significant distance.

It's not canon, exactly, but it makes sense to me and is consistent with what we see (where I can't seem to come up with any other logical rationale for what we're looking at there).

 

[Newtype_A]

^ Just wanted to be annoying and ask: what, exactly, would a starship want with a towed array?

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Newtype_A said:^ Just wanted to be annoying and ask: what, exactly, would a starship want with a towed array?

The same thing that a sub or an aircraft would want with a towed array.

Basically, you get two primary advantages from doing this.

1) You get a second sensing position, significantly offset from the center-of-mass of your main vehicle.

2) You get the ability to pick up readings at a significant distance from your main vessel, and as such can dramatically reduce the interference with reception of signals that would inevitably be caused by the electromagnetically noisy (and presumably also "otherwise noisy"... vibration, acoustics, thermal transients, high-energy particles from the reactor, yadda yadda...) environment.

Additionally, MY "towed array" is a bit unique... it's a net. The idea is that it's a big passive sensor array that's stored on a reel. You feed it out, and then energize the "structural integrity forcefield" in the strands to create a very LARGE array... my explanation of size is that if the Vega was the size of a pea, the array would be about the size and shape of a bullhorn.

The idea is that this gives the ship the ability to perform extremely high-resolution passive sensing of actions in possibly contested or otherwise hostile space. Run silent and drag the sensor net... and know what someone's having for breakfast on a nearby planet without anyone knowing you're there.

Anyway, that was MY idea. And that's what's stored on in the big bay on the aft underside of the Vega. (see my thread...)
http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/showflat....rt=all&vc=1

 

[Timo]

I love the towed array idea, even though I imagine half of that job would be done with "virtual apertures" in the Trek future (that is, the "second sensing position" would simply be where the ship used to be moments ago, and the sensor feeds from the two locations would be integrated).

At sublight, it might suffice (and be more useful) for the "towed" array to simply be a free-flier, a largish probe launched to fly in formation with the mothership. But it would be interesting to have a warp-towed sensor platform, so that one avoids the supposedly high energy cost and complexity of a warp engine in the formation-flying probe. And an active warp field could indeed be a major source of noise, one that could be compensated for by using a towed sensor either for principal sensing, or then as a reference by which to correct the readings of the shipboard sensors.

I doubt the array is still there in the CGI Excelsiors or even the Jein "Flashback" model, so we could nicely say that the technology got outdated by the 2360s (which is why we don't see it in action despite seeing a lot of ships of that class in TNG and DS9) and was never part of NX/NCC-2000.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Newtype_A]

Cary L. Brown said:

Newtype_A said:^ Just wanted to be annoying and ask: what, exactly, would a starship want with a towed array?

The same thing that a sub or an aircraft would want with a towed array.

Basically, you get two primary advantages from doing this.

1) You get a second sensing position, significantly offset from the center-of-mass of your main vehicle.

2) You get the ability to pick up readings at a significant distance from your main vessel, and as such can dramatically reduce the interference with reception of signals that would inevitably be caused by the electromagnetically noisy (and presumably also "otherwise noisy"... vibration, acoustics, thermal transients, high-energy particles from the reactor, yadda yadda...) environment.

Yeah, I get all that. I think what's confusnig me is the need for the array to be TOWED. In submarines and naval vessels, it's because it's difficult to send elecronic signals underwater at any great distance (the Mk-48 torpedo drags a cable behind it too, for the same reason). The towed array from the Virginia class, for example, sends its data back through the cable to the sonar operators. In an environment where subspace signals propagate faster than light with little interference, what does a towed sensor array get you that a self-propelled array (or, a probe, or a remote-pilotted scout) doesn't?

I could see some sort of elaborate sensor device; given the Excelsior's presence on the Klingon Border they might be responsible for the gravitic sensor nets that detect cloaked vessels, in which case that little bulge would be equivalent of the space shuttle's cargo bay and the Excelsior has a mission role as a gigantic satellite deployment vessel (a composite of an AEGIS cruiser and a coast guard's bouy tender).

 

[Timo]

There are towed arrays in airborne use, too, mainly as magnetic sensors or jammers. Three basic rationales for that: 1) no need for separate propulsion, 2) stealthy and uninterceptable communications between mothership and drone, and either 3a) good clearance from a major source of noise, that is, magnetic signature, or 3b) good clearance between the jammer and the mothership that doesn't want to get self-jammed.

We know that shuttlecraft can basically perform as well as large ships at impulse, but we have little evidence that they could match a capital ship at warp. Kirk runs out of endurance in "The Menagerie" even at what must be a fairly low speed. And the highest dash speed quoted for a shuttlecraft other than the transwarp experiment is warp four, for that unseen Type 9 craft in VOY "Resolutions". Small torpedo-style warp probes are unlikely to perform better in formation flying even if they have greater dash speed.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[LiChiu]

I always thought the ship was much bigger judging by the window pattern. On the edge of the saucer you can clearly see two decks.

 

[Timo]

As said, you can also see those on the edge of the Enterprise-refit and -A saucers, which supposedly only have one deck behind the two rows. And the comparison shot from ST6:TUC shows that Kirk's ship and Sulu's were of basically identical height. Better still, both fit through the same doorway in ST3:TSfS!

But there's little to say that both Sulu's and Kirk's ships weren't some 20% larger than we thought. There are few scale-establishing features on either vessel, and a 20% difference in the docking rings we can see on Kirk's ship might be ignorable in the close-up shots we get of a shuttlepod docking with those. Certainly there is no canon basis as such for the mere thousand-foot length for Kirk's ship, as opposed to something like 1,200 feet.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[LiChiu]

Timo said:
As said, you can also see those on the edge of the Enterprise-refit and -A saucers, which supposedly only have one deck behind the two rows. And the comparison shot from ST6:TUC shows that Kirk's ship and Sulu's were of basically identical height. Better still, both fit through the same doorway in ST3:TSfS!

But there's little to say that both Sulu's and Kirk's ships weren't some 20% larger than we thought. There are few scale-establishing features on either vessel, and a 20% difference in the docking rings we can see on Kirk's ship might be ignorable in the close-up shots we get of a shuttlepod docking with those. Certainly there is no canon basis as such for the mere thousand-foot length for Kirk's ship, as opposed to something like 1,200 feet.

Timo Saloniemi

Where do you get the idea there is one deck behind the two rows of windows? In the TMP you can see it is two decks when they are in the recreation room.
http://home.comcast.net/~woozletrek/enterprise/recdeck01.jpg

You can tell that rec area is on the edge of the saucer because you can see the starboard warp engine outside of the windows.