Steamrunner class

[Bill Morris]

I guess this needs a few tweaks, but . . .

 

[Timo]

This is one of those ships where a side image does little justice, what with the warp engines blocking interesting parts of the main hull, and with the primary hull having an apparent major central structure that may be functionally different from the side structures.

Also, there are those two big square openings on the lower part of the aft slope of the main hull, below the wide rolling door... Possible secondary shuttlebays or holds beneath the ginormous main one?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bill Morris]

I'm sure I could do a better job if I had a model to hold in my hands and examine from every angle.

I'll add the engineering computer core next to the warp core. Now, I suppose I should move the antimatter storage aft a bit and put a forward torp launcher below the main deflector.

Most of the cutaways I've seen didn't even show the forward shuttlebay. But I noticed those big doors there. I'm sure I've got the impluse engine properly positioned, but I'm not sure about the aft shuttlebay.

And how do people travel between the engineering hull (pod) and main hull? A water slide?

 

[Timo]

I'm not sure this ship really needs a forward torpedo launcher. Or an aft one, for that matter. Not every ship need be capable of everything, and a Steamrunner has never been shown firing torpedoes. Nor does the model have suitable openings for such.

...You might use the two small square boxes atop the main hull for launchers, though, if you wanted. They could each pack two or four very small launchers, perhaps more for defense than for offense.

Personally, I like to think of this weirdly shaped ship as a special purpose vessel whose design reflects her purpose. Little or no ship-to-ship weaponry? Gigantic aft door plus two smaller ones, and then forward doors as well? Warp engines forming a "bay" aft of the ship, with the actual machinery seemigly added as a dangling afterthought? Not too different from this:

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Reverend]

I was actually thinking the Steamrunner would be a good platform for carrying large numbers of hoppers...do we have a reliable scale for this design? Or is it a little more ambiguous than usual?

 

[Timo]

Various DS9 fleet scenes put it in the same broad brackets as Akira, lengthwise. That is, somewhere around 350-450 meters. I'd rather go for 350ish for Steamrunner and 440 for Akira, by porthole and lifeboat sizes and such, but those details are more ambiguous on the Steamrunner, and certainly there's no absolute scale.

As for the "hopper" thing, that's another pet peeve of mine. Why aren't they called shuttles? Probably because they have a different mission profile and performance. And IMHO "hopping" sounds more limiting than "shuttling". We also hear of the "water hopper" once...

Could it be that these future vehicle things fall in broad categories going something like

roller
skimmer
flitter
hopper
shuttle

with increasing prowess in reaching for heights? That is, wheeled vehicles might be the lowest rung on the ladder, while the commonly used scifi terms (also prevalent in Trek literature) "skimmer" and "flitter" indicate hovercraft/aircraft of low ceiling, and "hopper" is something that can go transatmospheric with effort, while a true "shuttle" can move effortlessly back and forth.

It would then make sense for infantry to use "hoppers" as a lower-tech, cheaper and more rugged alternative to "shuttles".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Reverend]

That's basically my thinking on hoppers too (see my thread over on trek art) in that they're for short "hops" across a planet's surface, or from orbit to surface and back again. I see their propulsion being mostly built around powerful anti-grav emitters, with some kind of advanced magnetically enhanced scram jet system.
A shuttle on the other hand is a true interplanetary craft (though some have limited interstellar capability) since with impulse engines they can travel more or less anywhere within a solar system.
Hoppers are planet bound and need transports/carrier vessels to take them elsewhere.

I don't recall a "flitter" ever being mentioned, so I'd be inclined not to include it...unless of course you classify the airtram from TMP as a "flitter".
As for Skimmer, would that just be another word for hover car?

 

[Bill Morris]

I'm not sure this ship really needs a forward torpedo launcher. Or an aft one, for that matter. Not every ship need be capable of everything, and a Steamrunner has never been shown firing torpedoes. Nor does the model have suitable openings for such.

Timo Saloniemi

But the picture below does seem to show openings that might be for aft torpedo launchers (I don't remember the source). And the canon MSDs for both the Nova class and Intrepid class show torpedo launchers high and to the side of the main deflector dish, even though that isn't obvious from exterior views of those ships. So I've moved the aft launcher up one deck and am considering showing a forward launcher that fires through the deflector opening, as seen in those two examples of canon MSDs.

Also, Timo, I saw read the transcript of your interview with Mike Okuda about the Nebula class, and I'm wondering if you can spot anything to fix on my Nebula schematic at the bottom of its recent thread in this forum.

So maybe like this:

 

[Bill Morris]

All done, hopefully.

 

[Tigger]

Very slick.

 

[Bill Morris]

Thanks. I've got 18 Starfleet vessels and a few NASA things covered in my LCARS schematics library.

Here's the ISS:

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y247/LCARS24user/ISS-L24.png

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Ahh, I remember that one. But how accurate is that meant to be/ it's not the final ISS configuration, but not the current one either. As for the station's current configuration:

-Pirs is hanging off the bottom, not the top. It'll be relocated to the top when the new Russian lab module arrives in 2-3 years.
-The "up" port on Node 2 currently doesn't house anything, and with the cancellation of the Centrifuge Accomodation Module it never will; this year though it temporarily linked to the Japanese ELM-PM (as you have it) before it was relocated to the main lab module this month.
-PMA-2 is upside-down. The "sloped" side should be facing the other way - it's needed to clear the upper deck of the shuttle when it docks.
-PMA-3 is on the "bottom" of Node 1 at this time. Eventually, Node 3 should be there, with PMA-3 hanging off its end and the cupola pointing "forward".
-Minor nit, but currently ISS has the ESA Jules Verne supply ship hanging off its ass, not a Progress.

References:

http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-124/hires/s124e009973.jpg

http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-124/hires/s124e005526.jpg


Mark

 

[backstept]

is that the filming model?
yikes! it's really low res!

here's a link to the Scifi Art steamrunner . . . it might even be more detailed than the movie model
http://shipyard.scifi-art.com/steamrunner.html

 

[BolianAuthor]

Various DS9 fleet scenes put it in the same broad brackets as Akira, lengthwise. That is, somewhere around 350-450 meters. I'd rather go for 350ish for Steamrunner and 440 for Akira, by porthole and lifeboat sizes and such, but those details are more ambiguous on the Steamrunner, and certainly there's no absolute scale.

As for the "hopper" thing, that's another pet peeve of mine. Why aren't they called shuttles? Probably because they have a different mission profile and performance. And IMHO "hopping" sounds more limiting than "shuttling". We also hear of the "water hopper" once...

Could it be that these future vehicle things fall in broad categories going something like

roller
skimmer
flitter
hopper
shuttle

with increasing prowess in reaching for heights? That is, wheeled vehicles might be the lowest rung on the ladder, while the commonly used scifi terms (also prevalent in Trek literature) "skimmer" and "flitter" indicate hovercraft/aircraft of low ceiling, and "hopper" is something that can go transatmospheric with effort, while a true "shuttle" can move effortlessly back and forth.

It would then make sense for infantry to use "hoppers" as a lower-tech, cheaper and more rugged alternative to "shuttles".

Timo Saloniemi

No way can the Steamrunner be that massive... the Akira is analogous to an Excelsior-Class in size... at best, a Steamrunner may be on par with an Intrepid-Class.

 

[Manticore]

is that the filming model?
yikes! it's really low res!

Quite possibly. But for a model that's motion-blurred up the wazoo and rarely takes up more than a tenth of the screen (if that), it serves the purpose.

 

[Bill Morris]

The Steamrunner class (at 315, not 350 meters in length) is 29 meters shorter and has fewer decks than the Intrepid class but is 105 meters wider, with nearly the same volume and therefore mass (despite a lot of empty space behind the main hull): 688,000 metric tons to the Intrepid's 700,000.

 

[Reverend]

Just going by windows, escape pods and the bridge module, the Ex-Astris figure of 355m looks about right. Which makes me happy since that makes it big enough to fit three or four of my hoppers in that rear shuttlebay structure alone. More if you presume that most of the interior of the saucer is take up by hanger and cargo decks. Which might actually give a pretty good reason why the deflector and possibly the warp core is way off in that outboard pod.
ALso, I've done a quick scale check (again for the Hopper) and the Steamrunner's aft shuttlebay door is actually slightly large than the Galaxy's. So it stands to reason the ship is built for large payloads, in relation to it's overall size.

 

[Bill Morris]

The Steamrunner class has 14 decks (counting the top two decks of the pod and bottom two of the main hull as decks 9 and 10). Even at 315 meters overall length that's 3.6 m deck to deck, with 7.2-meter ceilings for shuttlebays. Isn't that high enough for hoppers or whatever? At 355 m overall length, decks would be 4.5 m apart, or you would have to have more decks and therefore probably more escape pods.

 

[Reverend]

Well in my head, most of the interior of the saucer is essentially hollow, so having a 4.5 meter deck height is not a bad idea as it allows for allot of the machinery like life support, the ODN & EPS conduits to be pushed into the in-between spaces around the "outer shell" that is the crew/habitat sections of the primary hull.
Also I would conjecture that the uneven nature of the outer hull is in part due to the crew sections being constructed in modules around the cargo sections, as opposed to a normal ship where the cargo areas are fitted in and around the habitats.

 

[Bill Morris]

Okay, here's what happens when you match up Steamrunner at 355 m and Galaxy at 642.5 m total length at 2 pixels per meter. The windows? Yeah. Escape pods? Out of proportion, unless you make the Steamrunner bigger. But the design doesn't seem to go with a such a large ship, and 3.5 m deck to deck (after figuring in the extra space at the curvature of the hull and bridge. in the 315 m scenario does sound reasonable. The Nova class measures out nicely to 3.5 per deck, as demonstrated at Ex Astris Scientia.

And here's something in the LCARS 24 library I got from David Kleist in Switzerland, who has contributed various artwork to the package.