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You'd be surprised how small it is, actually. I ran up a non-fighter-carrier version with the holes filled in, and the Ark Royal is just slightly over one half the volume of a Connie.

There's no reason I know of that you couldn't hang lots of weapons on it, but that goes for all Trek ships. Their weapons are absurdly small for the size of the ships, so you're always left to wonder why they couldn't fit like 50 phaser banks to them. There's easily enough space.

The limiting factor seemed to be, in TOS, power transfer capacity.

Could be. Yet the warp cores in all Trek ships is tiny, fitting into a single room. Not even a particularly large room. Why not have a few extra ones?

I said "transfer," not "generation."

You think the limiting factor is how thick the power transfer conduits are?

Nope. I never said anything about any particular dimension. It just seems to me that whenever there's an acutely PITA technical problem in TOS, it has something to do with relays, or conduits, or some other type of energy transmission within the ship. I don't think the term "EPS" was used until TNG, but I may be wrong in that.

Graham Kennedy wrote:You'd be surprised how small it is, actually. I ran up a non-fighter-carrier version with the holes filled in, and the Ark Royal is just slightly over one half the volume of a Connie.

There's no reason I know of that you couldn't hang lots of weapons on it, but that goes for all Trek ships. Their weapons are absurdly small for the size of the ships, so you're always left to wonder why they couldn't fit like 50 phaser banks to them. There's easily enough space.

We see the outside of the ships, but do we ever see the size of the weapon systems inside the ships? I'm thinking ST6, where Spock and McCoy work on a photon torpedo inside the loading rail before firing it.

Similar to the Mark 13 and Mark 26 missile launchers on a navy ship, the surface portion of the launcher could be small, but the missile storage, prepping, fueling/arming, safeties, and launch system on the inside of the ship could be much larger.

We know, obviously, that in TOS, phaser control rooms were large enough to have three people working comfortably simultaneously.

Coalition wrote:

Graham Kennedy wrote:You'd be surprised how small it is, actually. I ran up a non-fighter-carrier version with the holes filled in, and the Ark Royal is just slightly over one half the volume of a Connie.

There's no reason I know of that you couldn't hang lots of weapons on it, but that goes for all Trek ships. Their weapons are absurdly small for the size of the ships, so you're always left to wonder why they couldn't fit like 50 phaser banks to them. There's easily enough space.

We see the outside of the ships, but do we ever see the size of the weapon systems inside the ships? I'm thinking ST6, where Spock and McCoy work on a photon torpedo inside the loading rail before firing it.

Similar to the Mark 13 and Mark 26 missile launchers on a navy ship, the surface portion of the launcher could be small, but the missile storage, prepping, fueling/arming, safeties, and launch system on the inside of the ship could be much larger.

Yeah, it's possible that those little tiny phaser banks have huge inner workings underneath them. 'Course no set of internal blueprints ever shows any such thing, but maybe they're all wrong.

There is the cannon we see used in The Cage, mind. They never specify that it's one of the ship's main weapon banks, but they do say it's powered by ship's power, "enough to blast half a continent" if I remember right. No big support equipment and no trouble sending down power from the ship, even though a wireless connection.

It just never looks right to me. Same for the photons, and with those we actually do see at least some of the internal workings.