Starfleet border patrol ship

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Graham Kennedy
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Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Since I've been in the mood for Starfleet ships of late...

Intended to be a contemporary of the Constitutions. Designed to be small, fast, used for relatively short-duration missions. Can deal with pirates and raiders, act as a scout, patrol disputed areas, etc. Specs below.

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AFFILIATION
United Federation of Planets - Starfleet

TYPE
Border Patrol Ship

CLASS
Sentinel

UNIT RUN
19 built

DIMENSIONS
Length 77.54 m
Beam 43 m
Height 27.67 m
Primary Hull DIam. 21.5 m
Nacelle Length 35.5 m

CREW
8 Officers, 76 Enlisted

STL PROPULSION
2 x Mk 18 Impulse engines

FTL PROPULSION
3 x TBR-9 Matter/Antimatter Warp Nacelles
Cruise speed : W/F 7
Maximum cruise : W/F 9.5
Design Limit : W/F 11

ARMAMENT
4 x Type VIII phasers in two banks
2 x T-6 photon torpedo tubes

AUXILIARY CRAFT
1 x Class F shuttlecraft

NOTES
Designed for border patrol and scouting in disputed zones, the Sentinels are small, fast, highly agile craft. They are capable of holding warp 7 indefinitely, and can accelerate to as high as warp 11 for short periods. Although not heavily armed compared to the Constitution class cruisers, the Sentinels do pack a powerful punch for such a small vessel with two Type VIII phaser banks and two full sized photon torpedo tubes. Shielding is light, however.

The interior fit of the Sentinels is designed to be "sparse". Only the Captain and Executive officer rate private berths, with the other officers sharing twin cabins; senior Enlisted personnel are in quad cabins, and all others in barracks-style accomodation. There are two small messes, one for officers and one for Enlisted personnel. Food synthesiser stocks are limited to thirty days with a full crew, though food endurance can be - and often is - extended by carrying stocks of emergency rations. The ship has no diplomatic facilities or scientific laboratories.

A single Class F shuttlecraft is carried in an internal garage at the rear of the engineering hull.
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by McAvoy »

Super small ship. I like it though. Small and resource cheap and probably easier to make compared to the larger ships.
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Yeah, I often find myself fascinated by the small low-end ship designs lately. The Starfleet equivalent of the Australian Armidale class patrol boats or the World War II Flower class corvettes. They may not have the glamour of a battleship or a Starship, but they're interesting little ships. I can just see one of these things playing hide-n-seek with a Klingon Bird of Prey in some disputed system. And the crew, not "Starfleet's Finest" but rather those who came low in their class, or had some disciplinary issues in their career... people on their last chance before being drummed out of the service, nursing a little resentment at the job they have, spending more time out on patrol than the ship is designed for, risking their lives with no glory, no real recognition.

It practically writes itself. :)
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by McAvoy »

That and they could be the equivalent of the early submarine crews too.

I think it makes sense to have these types of ships patrolling systems and borders using starbases as a base of operations.
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Teaos »

Fuuny you should design this, while re watchng some trek recently, I got to thinking that they would actually be much better off making many smaller ships, having Voayger being a large ship, than few big ones, due to the amount of space they cover and the vast array of missions.

Smaller specialised ships would be more practical for them.
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Typically in the "battleship" model of combat (i.e. no aircraft carriers), the major reason for having great big battleships is to fight other people's great big battleships. Under that logic, Starfleet only really needs the Constitutions because the Klingons have the D-7s. But a Constitution is frankly overkill for a lot of the missions Kirk was given. Transport an ambassador or a kid? You need a ship with one spare room for that. Mapping missions? A scanner rig. A crew of 430 to check in on a 2 person science survey team, for Pete's sake!

About the only things I can think of where you need a big ship for something other than taking on another big ship are transporting/hosting big conferences (Babel One), or founding colonies.

I guess you could also argue that a large ship gives you endurance for a five year mission (though the Enterprise stopped off at Starbases and friendly planets pretty often on that mission for resupply and personnel exchanges, as did the E-D).

And of course there's the rule of thumb that seems to apply in Trek that bigger ships are faster. I don't see what that's necessarily so, though; I always assumed that the bigger ships were faster because they were best-of-everything "prestige" ships and hence designed to be fast. Kind of like how fast battleships like the Iowa were built to be among the fastest ships in service, even though it's perfectly possible to make a destroyer faster still if you really want to.

Anyway, I am perfectly happy to believe that ships like this were pretty common in TOS and we just never saw it. I know TOS-R did give us the new Antares and Courier, but I really, really wish they had been able to squeeze a few new Starfleet designs in there. We saw new space stations once or twice - how cool would it have been to see a Saladin class destroyer sitting next to one, or a Ptolemy class tug?

And for me, the biggest missed opportunity of TOS was the Klingon "small scout ship" from Friday's child. They gave us a D-7, which is sure better than the "orange blob" of the original episode, but how cool would it have been to see a TOS precursor of the Klingon Bird of Prey in that scene?
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Teaos »

Speed being a aspect of size was thrown out with the Intrepid and Promethius.

I'd have a fleet deployment be 1 GCS (or equivilant) per sector (I am under the impression that a sector is fairly large, several systems together at least, the whole federation being made up of a few dozen at most. The dozens of Intrepid size ships along with hundreds of support craft.
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Allegedly, a sector is a cube 20 light years on a side. Around here that would have about 50 or 60 stars in it.
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Jim »

With the scale of the image with people in the windows and such... it seems like that ship would be VERY crowded with 84 people on it.
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Yes and no. It would absolutely be crowded as hell compared to something like the Enterprise, say. But compared to a present day submarine it would actually be rather roomy. Sci fi writers continually underestimate just how much people and stuff you could fit on a given sized ship.

My estimate is that the Sentinels have about 41,000 square feet of habitable deck space (that's not including nacelles). Around 488 square feet per person.

In comparison :

Type VII U-Boat, about 3,000 square feet for about 50 men, roughly 60 square feet per man.

World War II Fletcher class destroyer : About 32,000 square feet for 329 men, roughly 100 square feet per man.

Modern Astute class submarine, about 20,000 square feet for 100 men, about 200 square feet each.

Arleigh Burke class destroyer, about 100,000 square feet for 320 men, about 312 square feet each.

So this ship would not be nearly as cramped as a modern day destroyer, and positively luxurious compared to a modern submarine. But to people used to Constitutions and Starbases, they would seem extremely cramped and lacking in facilities - no gym, no chapel, no conference rooms, no nice roomy science labs, etc.
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Mikey »

Just taken on living space and basic necessities - kitchen, basic storage, utility closets, etc. - that figure of 488 sq. ft. per person isn't too far off from a typical American lower-middle class home. Figure a family of four, typical living square footage of 1400 - 1600 square feet...
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Jim »

It just seems like when you look at this image and the scale of the people in the window... There are what, 3 decks (plus the bridge on top)? 1-where the people are standing, 1-the middle donut through the engineering section, 1-the mirror of where the people are standing under the middle. Then you remove space for the core, for the shuttle bay, for the phaser support, the torpedo launchers and storage, shield generators, etc etc etc... that 41,000 seems to be an extreme over estimation.

Image

As a side, I know that the defiant has a lot more tech, but it is considerably larger (much higher volume), has only 50 crew, and is said to be extremely uncomfortable for the crew.
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Captain Seafort »

Jim wrote:Then you remove space for the core, for the shuttle bay, for the phaser support, the torpedo launchers and storage, shield generators, etc etc etc... that 41,000 seems to be an extreme over estimation.
No - all that's part of the habitable space, just as all the weapons/engineering/bridge/etc spaces of modern warships are part of their habitable space.
As a side, I know that the defiant has a lot more tech, but it is considerably larger (much higher volume), has only 50 crew, and is said to be extremely uncomfortable for the crew.
The reason the Defiant is considered extremely uncomfortable is because its crew quarters consist of two bunks, a desk, and replicator in about a ten square metre space, instead of something resembling a good-sized hotel room per one or two people. Modern warships would have half a dozen bunks in about two thirds the space, screened off with a curtain.
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Jim wrote:It just seems like when you look at this image and the scale of the people in the window... There are what, 3 decks (plus the bridge on top)? 1-where the people are standing, 1-the middle donut through the engineering section, 1-the mirror of where the people are standing under the middle.
As a matter of fact, including the bridge there are five decks in the saucer section. Look :

Image
Then you remove space for the core, for the shuttle bay, for the phaser support, the torpedo launchers and storage, shield generators, etc etc etc... that 41,000 seems to be an extreme over estimation.
Actually when I say I estimated it, I calculated it pretty accurately based on the sizes of the decks; the only fudging involved was estimating the size of the decks in the engineering hull, and I was pretty conservative there - 41,000 is on the low side if anything.

Primary Hull :

Deck A, the bridge : 26 feet in diameter, so 530 sq ft
Deck B, a circle, 86 feet in diameter, so 5,800 sq ft
Deck C, a circle, 136 feet in diameter, so 14,500 sq ft
Deck D, a circle, 122 feet in diameter, so 11,690 sq ft
Deck E, a circle, 76 feet in diameter, so 4,530 sq ft

That's 37,050 square feet just in the Primary Hull. And excluding a bit that would be added by the deflector pod at the front and the impulse engine pods at the rear of the primary hull.

Secondary Hull;

Deck B has some space but there's little there that you could walk around in; it's just tankage for water and stuff.
Deck C is an oval, roughly 75 feet long and 30 feet wide. Area approx 1,700 sq ft
Deck D is an oval, roughly 75 feet long and 35 feet wide. Area approx 2,000 sq ft
Deck E is where the antimatter pods are. It's not a full deck height, and there's not much useable space there.

So about 3,700 sq ft in the engineering hull.

Which gives a total of 40,750 square feet. Rounded up to 41,000.

And that's the deck area of the entire ship (sans nacelles); of course most of it is taken up by equipment and whatnot, as it is in any ship - you think most of a Type VII or the others I used for comparison don't devote most of their deck space to machinery, stores, weapons, etc?

In terms of actualy room for accomodation, read the blurb; the Captain and XO have a modestly sized cabin each. Say 10x12 feet, for 240 square feet. Other officers are two to a room, so three rooms of equal size with bunks in place of a bed; another 360 square feet.

Senior Enlisted share four to a room - the same sized room but with two double bunks instead of one. Eight of those for the top sixteen enlisted guys, another 960 square feet.

The rest are in barracks. Call a barracks room 10x42 feet, with seven double bunks in it for fourteen guys. Five of those is another 2,100 square feet, and gives us about ten spare bunks for emergencies.

That's 3,300 square feet for accomodation, or only 8% of the ship's space.

Throw in an officer and enlisted mess - those are the big windows you can see people in. Each one is about 17x24 feet, so 800 square feet for both5,850 . Throw in another 800 for kitchens serving the messes. And another 800 for some communal washrooms and showers. Put five 30 square foot toilets around the ship.

Total space devoted to living and comfort, 5,850 square feet. Or 14% of the ship's total deck area.

And this gives every man and woman and tentacled slime creature on board his/her/its own bed, regular access to a sink and shower, a nice place to eat, and a toilet for every 17 people on board.

The other 86% is for cargo bays, phaser support rooms, torpedo tubes and magazines, warp core, machine shop, airlock, life support sickbay, deflector support, transporter room, an armoury, shuttle garage, main computer banks, gravity generator, shield generator, structural integrity field generator, etc, etc, etc.

Like I say, it's certainly crowded by Constitution standards. My intent with the design was that the ships are not popular exactly because there are no gymnasiums, no theatres, no nice roomy briefing rooms, no recreation deck, and definitely no swimming pool or bowling alley (both of which the TOS Constitution allegedly has). But it would be at least as good as any modern warship and significantly better than the conditions Navy crews put up with in the surface fleet in World War II, let alone what Submariners lived like back then. You could probably quadruple the crew before you were hitting anything like what the U Boat crews endured.
As a side, I know that the defiant has a lot more tech, but it is considerably larger (much higher volume), has only 50 crew, and is said to be extremely uncomfortable for the crew.
Which really goes to illustrate something I've harped on before, that sci fi writers are notoriously bad at comprehending just how gigantic their ships really are. Defiant is MUCH larger than any present day Destroyer. In World War II ships a tenth of its size carried crews in the hundreds, easily. Voyager is bigger than an American Nimitz class supercarrier, a class that devotes a massive proportion of their volume to massive great hangar decks and huge fuel and weapons storage areas... yet one of those ships carries well over five thousand crewmembers whilst Voyager carries 150. Christ, you should be able to walk around these ships for hours on end without ever even seeing another person!
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Re: Starfleet border patrol ship

Post by Jim »

Not including the bridge, saying that there are 4 decks leaves basically no hull skin. Are you saying that the hull of this ship is like the body of a car? Just the "metal" skin, not structure? There is no way there are 4 decks in the saucer. 3 decks (plus bridge)
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