Spacedock Idea

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Graham Kennedy
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Graham Kennedy »

I always had the impression that the big dock area of Spacedock was pressurised, or at least able to be pressurised. What's the point of enclosing it otherwise?

If so then there are, perhaps, practical limits on how big you could make the doors and still maintain atmospheric integrity. The doors we see in STIII may be the biggest doors they can make.
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Re: Spacedock Idea

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BigJKU316 wrote:
Not entierly true. By the end of WWII several ships existed that could not use the Panama Canal in the form of the Midway Class carriers and the proposed Montana Class Battleships. You could just cram an Iowa in there. None of the carriers built since can fit in the locks and they have to go around.

I would expect there is some advantage in having the ships in an interior environment for work being done or you would not build such a thing you would just build something on which all the ships can dock externally. Once you accept that as fact then you have to conclude at some point they would build a new station to handle the new ships they project putting in service. That either means a bigger station or bigger doors.

You can do without the Canal, you can't build a ship without having a drydock in which to service the thing.
Note that I didn't say "all naval vessels."
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by BigJKU316 »

Cpl Kendall wrote:
BigJKU316 wrote:
Not entierly true. By the end of WWII several ships existed that could not use the Panama Canal in the form of the Midway Class carriers and the proposed Montana Class Battleships. You could just cram an Iowa in there. None of the carriers built since can fit in the locks and they have to go around.

I would expect there is some advantage in having the ships in an interior environment for work being done or you would not build such a thing you would just build something on which all the ships can dock externally. Once you accept that as fact then you have to conclude at some point they would build a new station to handle the new ships they project putting in service. That either means a bigger station or bigger doors.

You can do without the Canal, you can't build a ship without having a drydock in which to service the thing.
Note that I didn't say "all naval vessels."
No, I was not saying you did, just point out that when bigger ships are needed they are built, and they figure out the rest later.
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Captain Picard's Hair »

It would seem that one of the chief benefits of having such a structure would be the ability to house the army of workers, along with a great volume of parts, supplies, and equipment in a central place close to the ships being serviced -- and provide facilities for the crews of those ships while in dock. This justifies much of the bulk of the things but not the need to have an enclosed space by itself unless as Graham indicated there is some utility to being able to pressurize the volume enclosed. Otherwise, it would seem simpler to keep the core containing all of the support facilities but let the ships dock in external frames.
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Mikey »

Tyyr wrote:The GCS is triple the Connie's beam and double it's height.
So? I even said that I wouldn't expect it to accomodate TNG-era ships-of-the-line. But the thing was from within a generation of the Excelsior, so it was basically built to just barely accomodate th largest contemporary ship. That's not a shortened forward compatability; that's none at all.
GrahamKennedy wrote:I always had the impression that the big dock area of Spacedock was pressurised, or at least able to be pressurised. What's the point of enclosing it otherwise?

If so then there are, perhaps, practical limits on how big you could make the doors and still maintain atmospheric integrity. The doors we see in STIII may be the biggest doors they can make.
I'd tend to agree. We've seen all sorts of open drydocks/Earth Station McKinleys/whatever. The only reason I can think of readily to switch from that to an "indoor" facility is to have it, well, indoors.
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Re: Spacedock Idea

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Tyyr wrote:Given the size of the facility it'd be quite strange for their to only be a single entrance/exit. I'd imagine it would have several. The issue isn't that, it's that why would Starfleet build a facility like that with doors so much larger than anything in the fleet at the time?
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Tyyr »

Coalition wrote:Clumsy drivers?
Given that there are no currents to deal with and the ships can take their time leaving I don't think you can blame it on that. Look at the Panama canal. Some of the ships that transit it are only meter narrower than the canal's locks.
Mikey wrote:So? I even said that I wouldn't expect it to accomodate TNG-era ships-of-the-line. But the thing was from within a generation of the Excelsior, so it was basically built to just barely accomodate th largest contemporary ship. That's not a shortened forward compatability; that's none at all.
And you completely missed the part where I pointed out that a TOS era facility had the capacity to handle ships half again as large as the biggest ships of its time. You can't blame the people who designed Spacedock if the guys who designed the Excelsior went for such a massive increase in the size of the ship so that it could just barely squeak out of Spacedock.
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Mikey »

No, I addressed that part. Remember when I said that the Excelsior is contemporary with Spacedock, within a generation? I'd like to think that Spacedock was designed to its dimensions because of thecnical limitations, but then those same limitation would naturally apply to starships.
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Tyyr »

Except that Spacedock was an established functioning station when the Excelsior was still a prototype. Spacedock is at least a generation younger than the Excelsior, more likely to be contemporary with the Connies or Connie refits than the Excelsior.

That means when they were designing Spacedock they were designing the Connies or the refit Connies. Take a look at the jump from the Connie to the Excelsior. The Excelsior is 50%+ longer and 33% wider and taller than the Connies. Internal volume from rough scaling is up at least 300% and that's being conservative because the Excelsior is a "bulkier" ship than the Connies. A 50% increase in length and a 300%+ increase in displacement is unprecedented in a single generation of design. Look at the progression of the Enterprise designs. The jump from the Ent-A to the Ent-B is the biggest of the bunch. A single generation of design.

I have no trouble imagining that the designers of Spacedock created it thinking they'd given the doors plenty of margin for growth in starfleet's ships and then being totally blindsided by top end ships of the fleet tripling in size in a generation.
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Mikey »

Tyyr wrote:Except that Spacedock was an established functioning station when the Excelsior was still a prototype.
I get what you're saying, but the above means that a ship the size of Excelsior was a possibility for the concrete, and relatively near, future when Spacedock was built. I find it much harder to believe that someone assigned to the new Excelsior project all of sudden came running out of the men's room screaming, "Hey! Forget everything we know about shipbuilding! I just created a way to make our ships half-again as long!"
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Tyyr »

Except that the way design projects work Spacedock's plans were likely finalized and construction well underway before the Excelsior was beyond the "Wouldn't it be cool?" stage of design. By the time the Excelsior's dimensions were finalized the station was likely well under way on construction. In fact I think that the Excelsior just squeezes out of Spacedock to be circumstantial evidence of this. The design team limited themselves in the ship's beam to make sure it could still get out of Spacedock.
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Mikey »

But wouldn't the idea of ship the size of the Excelsior be considered a possibility when Spacedock was being built? Like I said, I can't give credence to the idea that the ability to build a ship the size of Excelsior came as a complete surprise only when Excelsior was halfway done in R&D. If they built Excelsior to fit the extant Spacedock, wouldn't they have built it with more clearance?
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Tyyr »

Why? As I've stated before ships designed to sail through the Panama Canal are built to the point where there is only a foot or two of clearance on either side. In space you don't even have to deal with water currents causing problems.

Once the design of something is finalized and construction begins redesigns are frowned upon, and by frowned upon I mean people who suggest them get strung up by their own entrails. Design changes during construction are very difficult and very expensive and most damning they futz up the schedule royally. Changing something like the door size would require a major strutural redesign of the dock and is something I'd have trouble believing would happen.

Now here's my time line. In STIII we see Spacedock. At this point it is fully functional and no one makes any mention of it at all. They treat it like a given. At the very least I'd assume that at the time of STIII it's been operational for a few months at a minimum. Remember everyone Ohhh's and Ahhh's about the new Excelsior but doesn't even make mention of the titanic structure that houses it. I'd strongly suspect that it was years if not a few decades old at this point but that's speculation on my part. Back on track. Now assuming that Spacedock is fully operational now and Excelsior is the brand new prototype and assuming that they both took an equal amount of time to design and build that would mean Spacedock's design predates Excelsior by at least several months. I think we can all agree that given the massive size of Spacedock that it's design and construction probably took considerably longer than Excelsior's. What this means is that it's very likely that Spacedock was conceived at a time when the Excelsior's final form, dimensions, everything was not set or perhaps not even conceived of. Operating off the assumption that Starfleet's ships would continue their trend of enlarging they designed the dock's doors, expensive components in and of themselves, to accommodate the then largest ships in Starfleet, the Connies, plus 50% which should have given them two or three generations of ships worth of room to grow. I think it's also worth pointing out that you have to design for likely hoods. You can't design for every conceivable possibility. Right now if the US wanted to we could build warship's 2,000 feet long. We could do it. Right now there's no reason we could think of doing it. So would the people who design drydocks for the Navy be idiots for not designing their docks to accommodate a potentially 2,000 foot long ship? No, they're being reasonable and rational designers. Supersizing things cost money and it's not viable to over build things to such radical degrees.

So plans are finalized, checks are written, the ball starts rolling on building Spacedock.

Then the over achieving guys on the Excelsior decided to build the biggest damn ship they can. As they get started they look at what could constrain the size of their ship. Spacedock's doors. Well by this time Spacedock is under construction already, or at least parts and material are ordered.

Now you've got a show down. On one side are Excelsior's designers who are building the biggest damn ship they can, more than tripling the gross tonnage of the current largest ship in the fleet. Again I have to point out what an incredible increase in size that is for a single generation of design. On the other side are the guys in charge of the Spacedock project. They've got finalized prints, parts on order, construction started. So now the question is do they halt the construction, deal with the incredible number of delays and cost overruns that will incur, redesigns a large portion of the station, go through reapproval of the plans, order new doors, and all that, or do they tell Excelsior's designers "Make it fit," and worry about the size of the doors later? Having worked in these kind of situations I'll tell you I have yet to see a project get called to a halt for something like that.
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by BigJKU316 »

I agree with that timeline. It makes sense with what you see with Starbase 74 as well. As soon as Excelsior is designed you know the next ships will be even bigger, so you would start work on something else which turns out to be the scaled up Starbase we see in TNG.
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Re: Spacedock Idea

Post by Atekimogus »

GrahamKennedy wrote:I always had the impression that the big dock area of Spacedock was pressurised, or at least able to be pressurised. What's the point of enclosing it otherwise?
That seems rather inpractical to me considering the huge area you would need to pressurize. If this would be an option the interior of the thing would most likely consist of compartments so you wouldn't need to create an atmosphere everywhere when you really need it only around one ship.
Also what woult be the advantage apart from some dockworkers maybe beeing able to float around the dock without a space suit? When carrying out ship repairs one could even argue you wouldn't want an inflammable atmosphere anywhere near the nearest leaking plasma conduit.


As for the doors, I still don't understand why they couldn't just enlarge them. Making a bigger hole in it and covering it up with another set of doors seems incredibly simple to me.
But if you still don't like it, a closer look at the model reveals that the spacedock consists of approx. 7 modules which I guess are readily switched out for new ones if the need arises. So altough it is a only a really lousy scaling error oou there are plenty of very plausible iu reasons why the e-d still might fit in.
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