Trek Facts- The Starship Classes Of Wolf 359

[McAvoy]

The warp core size was never an issue for me. So you put a warp core of similar size to a Galaxy size but shorter on a ship a fraction of the size, you still would have more than enough energy to do what you need from them.

After all, the ship is smaller, not powering multiple phasers strips, two of which are very long. The shields would only have to cover a fraction of the size than a GCS.

For all we know there could be super chargers too.

As far as I thought about the pulse phasers. I felt they are set up much different than phaser arrays. That alot of what goes on to make those pulses are inside and what we see is just the emitter (not a barrel). Like the warp core directly powers those phasers and due to the short distance and the nature of the weapon they can be powerful. But they are bulky and not well suited to the larger ships without taking away space from other things Star fleet likes.

[Coalition]

Two key advantages of smaller ships:
1) Surface area for its volume is much higher than for a larger ship
2) Smaller ships can be built in smaller shipyards, meaning you don't need as much orbital infrastructure

For #1, the surface area issue is related to heat dissipation, and improvements there allow a ship to stay in a fight longer:
S3E63 - Yesterday's Enterprise:
Tasha: Deflector shield technology has advanced considerably during the war. Our heat-dissipation rates are probably double those of the Enterprise-C, so we can hang in a firefight longer.

So a smaller ship can use a reactor with higher power levels, since it is easier to dissipate the heat. This would help prevent the problem of a smaller ship having much more surface area, meaning it needs more shielding per unit of volume. (Darn square-cube effect)


For #2, It means that smaller systems can build something that will help slow down the Borg (once all the bugs are worked out). A Borg ship could be sighted in one location, and Defiant class vessels start gathering, like orcas hunting a whale. Once there are enough present, they engage the Borg vessel, hoping to deal enough damage to it that other ships can make it on time. If the Borg ship tries to pursue the swarm, the ships can scatter, so the Borg vessel has to decide which one to pursue.

[Atekimogus]

The warp core size was never an issue for me. So you put a warp core of similar size to a Galaxy size but shorter on a ship a fraction of the size, you still would have more than enough energy to do what you need from them.

After all, the ship is smaller, not powering multiple phasers strips, two of which are very long. The shields would only have to cover a fraction of the size than a GCS.

For all we know there could be super chargers too.

As far as I thought about the pulse phasers. I felt they are set up much different than phaser arrays. That alot of what goes on to make those pulses are inside and what we see is just the emitter (not a barrel). Like the warp core directly powers those phasers and due to the short distance and the nature of the weapon they can be powerful. But they are bulky and not well suited to the larger ships without taking away space from other things Star fleet likes.

Depends....if you could do that, why not use multiple smaller warpcores on larger ships? For the same internal space? I do not think it works that way tbh.

As for powering multiple phaser strips........I am also not sure this is how it works either. Considering we literally NEVER see the E-D maneuvering after shooting its phasers to bring one of the other 10+ phaser strips into the line of fire........I would assume that ALL phaser strips are powered from a central "battery" (Starfleet Command calls it a phaser capacitor, which makes total sense imho but is strictly speaking non-canon).

That would mean that the E-D has full 360° phaser coverage at full power, the only advantage of the longer strip maybe being a higher rate of fire due to more efficient cooling.

As for pulse phaser...afaik phaser are powered from the warpcores ever since TMP, no?

[AlexMcpherson79]

personally, I think with the warp drives is that, in terms of power produced to "internal volume used for the power plant", the bigger the power plant (aka core in this case), the higher power DENSITY. However, the Defiant 'bucks' this trend for some highly classified reason that present a limit, perhaps non-replicatable materials used that allow for a higher power generation for its size? or rather, if they can be, theres a far bigger power draw to making said materials etc? The kind of draw back that made starfleet and politicians go "so for this one ship, we spend x amount of finite resources that we have to gather when we can just replicate resources to our hearts content building these other normal ships that aren't useless outside of wartime?

[McAvoy]

personally, I think with the warp drives is that, in terms of power produced to "internal volume used for the power plant", the bigger the power plant (aka core in this case), the higher power DENSITY. However, the Defiant 'bucks' this trend for some highly classified reason that present a limit, perhaps non-replicatable materials used that allow for a higher power generation for its size? or rather, if they can be, theres a far bigger power draw to making said materials etc? The kind of draw back that made starfleet and politicians go "so for this one ship, we spend x amount of finite resources that we have to gather when we can just replicate resources to our hearts content building these other normal ships that aren't useless outside of wartime?

Well look at it this way, look at how small the Defiant is, look at how large the Galaxy is. Offhand, the Defiant is probably 20 times smaller in volume that the Galaxy class. Could be even more. So if the core is shorter, but utilizes a let's say a core meant for a much larger ship you can argue that the power density is much more for the Defiant class.

You can also say the Defiant is short ranged which does change things as well. A core designed around high end power versus a core designed around endurance can be different.

The pulse phasers never bothered me in how powerful they were. I always viewed them as phaser equivalents to alien disruptors, but seems to be obviously amped up.

[Graham Kennedy]

If you read the TNG TM, the upper and lower sections serve to transport the matter/antimatter streams to the reaction chamber. I always presumed that longer sections = more precise streams, maybe more stream capacity too, and so more power.

However, I think a significant advance happened. The GCS core has a single matter and antimatter stream. But the Defiant's core :



It seems obvious that there are multiple streams - four of them - alongside one another. This, I suspect, is how Defiant gets the power it does from such a short core - the upper and lower sections are basically 'folded up', so the effective length is four times as much as the actual length.

My impression is also that Defiant's reaction chamber is significantly larger than a GCS one, which may also be a factor.

[McAvoy]

If you read the TNG TM, the upper and lower sections serve to transport the matter/antimatter streams to the reaction chamber. I always presumed that longer sections = more precise streams, maybe more stream capacity too, and so more power.

However, I think a significant advance happened. The GCS core has a single matter and antimatter stream. But the Defiant's core :



It seems obvious that there are multiple streams - four of them - alongside one another. This, I suspect, is how Defiant gets the power it does from such a short core - the upper and lower sections are basically 'folded up', so the effective length is four times as much as the actual length.

My impression is also that Defiant's reaction chamber is significantly larger than a GCS one, which may also be a factor.

Good point. Didn't really think about that. Offhand does any other ship have this feature?

[bladela]

Good point. Didn't really think about that. Offhand does any other ship have this feature?

I noticed that the reaction chamber is as large (more or less) as that of the GCS, so my idea like yours is that the output power is roughly similar, at the price of a much lower efficiency.

[Graham Kennedy]

Good point. Didn't really think about that. Offhand does any other ship have this feature?

The Sovereign :

[bladela]

Good point. Didn't really think about that. Offhand does any other ship have this feature?

The Sovereign :

to the contrary the Intrepid got only one flux if i remember correctly...

[Atekimogus]

If you read the TNG TM, the upper and lower sections serve to transport the matter/antimatter streams to the reaction chamber. I always presumed that longer sections = more precise streams, maybe more stream capacity too, and so more power.

However, I think a significant advance happened. The GCS core has a single matter and antimatter stream. But the Defiant's core :



It seems obvious that there are multiple streams - four of them - alongside one another. This, I suspect, is how Defiant gets the power it does from such a short core - the upper and lower sections are basically 'folded up', so the effective length is four times as much as the actual length.

My impression is also that Defiant's reaction chamber is significantly larger than a GCS one, which may also be a factor.

Well...that might be but on the other hand....why do we not see something similar (if such a breakthrough in technology happend) on ships which are newer than the Defiant Class, (Sovereign, Intrepid).

Despite the stated "flaws" of the Defiant (which never really materialize anyhow) it seems that the Warp Core reactor was never really the problem. Now out of universe it is of course because they don't think about these things and hence every ship as a warpcore which happens to fit exactly how many decks are available....but in-universe...it does create certain problems.

Again...if it would be basically a ship the size of the GCS Drive Section, e.g. a battleship starship class without all the unnecessary stuff located in the Saucer.....then it would make more sense imho. Sadly it is a Runabout-Plus with the power of a battleship.

[Graham Kennedy]

Well...that might be but on the other hand....why do we not see something similar (if such a breakthrough in technology happend) on ships which are newer than the Defiant Class, (Sovereign, Intrepid).

We do see it on the Sovereign, as shown above.

Intrepid appears to use a different type of warp core. It's a copy of the TMP core, obviously; as I recall the word on that is that the M/AM mixes all the way along the core, which may make multiple streams within the core impossible, perhaps?

Despite the stated "flaws" of the Defiant (which never really materialize anyhow)

I'd have loved it if they had taken their time with this. Imagine a situation where they have to push the ship to high warp, and the whole thing is shaking like crazy and making weird howling noises, maybe even cracks appearing in the hull, panels flying off, etc. Then after a season or so it's gradually fixed. Instead we get a line like "oh, I recalibrated whatever and it was fine". Makes Starfleet look like dumbasses for not working it out in the first place.

Again...if it would be basically a ship the size of the GCS Drive Section, e.g. a battleship starship class without all the unnecessary stuff located in the Saucer.....then it would make more sense imho. Sadly it is a Runabout-Plus with the power of a battleship.

Yeah, that's similar to what I was going for with my reimagining of it - a good sized ship loaded with bigass guns. If you look into how they developed it, they pretty much started with Runabout-Plus and developed it from there. This was one of the early concepts :



And even as the design evolved towards the end product, it was clearly meant to be a small ship, much smaller than what we wound up with :



It's pretty obvious to me that they virtually finalised the design as something two or three times the size of a Runabout and then said "this really needs to be a proper ship, scale it up". In fact discussions with Rick Sternbach back in the day showed that they didn't even know how big it was 'supposed' to be, even when the finished version was on screen. The official length of 170.68 metres was pretty much plucked out of the air as "big enough to be a proper ship, but still small for a ship". IIRC, Bernd's analysis on Ex-Astris indicates that it's more like 120 metres if one goes by the features on the model, possibly smaller than that.

It's a shame, because it's such a great concept and such a popular ship, but whilst the finished product certainly does look cool, it's actually objectively quite a bad design in many ways.

[McAvoy]

Never liked that line 'recalibrate so and so'. Recalibration anything is a easy fix to anything. Yeah a uncalibrated something could throw something off, but I'd imagine a ton of things on starship are either calibrated or checked with a calibrated tool.

Or the thing is broke or not useful what you need to do.