1/1 Approximate (and oh do I mean approximate this time) NX-74205 USS Defiant

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No, I did not make an interior. The reason why is that I was originally trying to make this thing able to take off and land from a planet's atmosphere. Needless to say this didn't work, namely because of the square/cube law and the fact that gravity generators don't work in a planet's gravity well (even though I wish they did work in a planet's gravity well; Keen, you could have just made gravity generator components hard or impossible to make early-game. That way you'd still need hydrogen thrusters early on, but then could graduate up to a gravity drive later).










The sad excuse of my engineering that is the bridge:






At warp:




I used rocket launchers in place of photon cannons:




Now then, the ship weighs a around 12.6 million kilos, so like I said, getting this thing off a planet on its own just doesn't seem possible at this point, unless I really work at it.

This ship is fairly nimble though, just like the one in DS9. I even pulled off Nog's evasive maneuvers just to mess around with it and test the gyros' responsiveness.

As goes the paint job, well, I tried an accurate replication of the Defiant's paint job from DS9... it ended up looking terrible.

To be honest, I'm not really satisfied with how this whole project turned out in the end; that nose piece in particular doesn't seem right to me.

As goes the hydrogen thrusters in the back, again, I was originally trying to make this atmospheric in nature, but that didn't pan out, but I left those things there anyway just for the sake of having some extra power there when accelerating. I also stuck them there in place of the Defiant's impulse engines.

Speaking of impulse engines; this ship has a gravity drive, something that I used to stick into my large ships all the time in the days before the jump drive came about. I'm trying to bring that back in my more modern designs.

 

The nose is a bitch to get right; i haven't seen a single non-small ship grid Defiant that got it right yet. The downward angle is just too faint in my book.

If the ship is empty you should have ample room for internal thrusters.

 

As goes internal thrusters, I usually side against them because I'm not sure exactly what distances are used for thruster damage. In short, I don't trust it because I don't want to burn a hole in the hull. In addition, I can see Keen nerfing internal thrusters in the future. Why? Simple: increased realism and challenge. The fact is that if you try to put a thruster inside a spacecraft in real life, the escaping gasses or ions won't have anywhere to go, and so as a result you won't move and you'll just fill your ship with toxic exhaust and/or burn a hole in the hull. It'd be a pretty simple thing for Keen to nerf too; just write a conditional statement that says that if there are any blocks on the same grid directly behind the thruster, at any distance, and the thruster was in a sealed environment, then the force of the thruster would be negated completely.

Besides, the gravity/impulse drive that I have set up generates more positive delta V and uses less power than an array of internal thrusters (although I'm constantly worried that Keen will outright eliminate the gravity drive too; they'd make it so that an artificial mass block won't be affected by a gravity generator on the same grid).

Ugh...

Engines and nose bit aside, how did I do on this build?

In total it took me around 3 days, not counting the days where I didn't do any construction.



On an unrelated note: I thought about TRYING to do a 1/1 scale Borg Sphere/Unimatrix 01 Long-Range Reconnaissance Vessel, and sticking a projector on it that would cycle between several different blueprints, the blueprints in question being variations of a borg drone's head with different visemes (or mouth movements). They'd be keyed in such a way that, when I played audio over it, would make an animated image of a borg drone saying the phrase, "We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

I was also thinking of making Locutus' head, and having him say the phrase that became infamous across all of Next Generation, "I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life, as it has been, is over. From this time forward, you will service us."

 

They actually nerfed Thruster Damage when they nerfed the thrust; it seems to be slightly bugged every now and then but generally everything further than 3 blocks away is generally safe. It's an odd arangement and might change at any time which is why i usually try to put as much free space in front of my Thrusters as possible.

She looks a bit flat to me, the Bridge Dome is quite tall, the pig nose deflector could do with a slight rework and she's, all in all, a bit on the hard-edged side but it's quite readily indentifiable as a Defiant.

 

Also, I was thinking of something, just in regards to Trek lore; Star Fleet ships seem to be mostly held together by structural integrity fields to the point where I'm wondering if the ship would just fall apart like a pile of tin foil if the power went off.

That actually made me think of something; if shields and structural integrity fields are what hold their ships together, and the metal itself wouldn't even be able to hold together if the power went out, then why not just have the only actual, material parts of the ship be the engineering room, warp core and its antimatter containment tanks, the warp nacelles leading away from it, and a series of very powerful hologram emitters wired directly up to the power supply? The rest of the ship, when the ship is active, would just be a Star Fleet standard hologram (reconfigured photons held in place by force fields) the same kind you'd find on a holodeck. Yes, if the power went out the ship would just cease to exist, but the fact is that this is more or less what happens when the power goes out on these things, completely, on Star Fleet ships if I'm right with their paper-thin hulls and nothing to power the structural integrity fields.

But that's the idea; a holographic ship whose only physical components are its power supply, said power supply's fuel and fuel tanks, the computer and hologram emitters, and the propulsion system that makes it move. The rest of the ship would be a hologram.

This would possibly be beneficial, as the fact is that a hologram has no mass, or can be configured to have no mass. As a result, it would take far, far less power to move the ship at superluminal velocities, potentially even being able to reach transwarp speeds with only conventional Star Fleet propulsion systems (imagine a ship with the power supply of a Galaxy-class with only the mass of a Defiant-class, or perhaps only a handful of runabouts). The mass of the ship, being so low, would potentially enable a massive amount of force to be transferred to the vessel in order to have it achieve transwarp, and the main material that the ship would be made out of is reconfigured light.

There'd be very few complex systems to break, and if any of the actual material systems did break, the result would be the same as if they broke on any other Star Fleet vessel; total destruction of the ship.

 

@ZeroCore Not immediately, no, but you most definitely wouldn't wanna go to high impulse speeds or, Molestia forbid, enter a gravity well without the SIFs running. I'd hazard a guess that sturdy ships like the Defiant or Voyager could do their landing without it but by the time the SIF craps out it's most likely more of a crashlanding ("We survived the crash. The decks 15 through 17 are now part of deck 14.") anyway. If you look at the (precious few) screenshots of ships under construction you'll see their inner skeleton, which is quite sturdy in the important areas. If, say, a Galaxy was to lose it's SIF and somehow still went to Impulse or fell into a planet i'd say there's a decent chance the pylons would be the only truly endangered parts. Maaaaybe the neck would snap but Primary and Secondary would probably survive. I'm mostly surprised that fragile things like the Constitution ever left the design stage, but that's just the ape brain talking.

 

Physics would suggest that, no, it wouldn't work like this.
Either the holograms would take so much power to keep active that you'd be using the same end power output anyway or you'd have a very massive battery / power core that'd still = the mass of the ship anyhow. Conservation is a bitch.

By logic, one could just make hologram drones to do most of the dirty work of fighting in the ST universe. Hologram something as large as Borg cubes so you can totally pull of Protoss Hallucination micro against Romulans or Klingons, but... that's one science feat Gene apperently didn't see coming or just ignored because of course, it'd be boring.
I feel it's asinine that they send so many ships who need "integrity fields" just to operate, that are clearly meant for more mundane uses like scientific study or exploration and just... warp them into battle like it's what they're built for.

Star Fleet military arm - most inept bunch of retards since North Korea.

Almost every vessel star fleet uses is a conceptually anyway - bad idea. The displaced mass is so uneven on all of these Saucer + Engineering Hull + Nacelles design that it's a miracle they even change vectors naturally.

Also, the whole Hull Integrity Field thing is like... huh? They measure things in "Dynes" which I never used in my entire career when working as a Quality Engineer. Dynes is from the old CGS system. Everyone uses SI now and has for awhile. Perhaps it was just a lack of field knowledge thing on the creator's part.
You get some odd numbers though when you try holding ST's lore about their performance.

For example, Voyager apparently had a warp core that produced 4,000 Teradynes of force. Holy Mother of Taco Trucks! So that had to have a system that with held 4,000 Teradynes of force? And they also magically produced extra Teradynes to resist the acceleration of said propulsion power? Good god. Good to know that apparently 4k Teredynes can get a vessel to warp 7 to 9.

On the topic of structural integrity, the Enterprise D in TN had a situation where the hull was experiencing 28 million kilodynes worth of force. To put that into perspective, that's 184,343.4 ft pounds of force or, 2,212,120 PSi.
Most hardened steel will bend at 120,000 psi. That's one strong ass field.

And on Voyager, The Doctor can apparently regenerate your cells and make you go back in time with only .67 of a ft lb of force. WTF?

 

Yeeeeaaahhhhhaarp....



I generally don't try to run the numbers and keep myself at the demonstrated abilities instead, on the grounds that calculating the writers' nonsense leads only to tears, potentially mostly mine.
I like to believe that errors in TNG and DS9 were done by well-meaning amateurs who just tried to tell good stories (except in Season 1 of TNG, which is really just TOS Season 4). TOS is of course the drunk, crazy and slightly racist uncle you don't like to mention but endure because he's part of the family, but by the time Voyager came around they simply stopped giving a ship. And started shooting anomalies with their phasers.

 

Don't be sadz!

Just try to remember that if you go past warp 10, you start evolving into a Newt! That should make anyone smile as to the hilarity of such a plot, much less the fictional science. I tend to look past that and instead admired Tom's custom shuttle and... still wished that Tuvak (s?) wasn't such a logical butt hole as he was meant to be and kept Tom from adding that sexy tail fins.
That's where the real drama lies. Screw the technical crap - it's about as founded as Mecha Anime + Power Rangers. But designing nonsense ship styles and hulls? YEAH! I love the D'deridex and the Vor'cha in particular.

 

Unfortunately I don't know much about engineering (even though in real life I'm always trying to invent things) but yeah, most of the calculations in Star Trek are total nonsense.

I'm a computer science major currently (might go for a minor in computer engineering if I can find a place to go to for it), but I'm no physicist. I've also studied biology and made dean's list for it at college but that's another story entirely.

I do know this about physics, however; you + very high velocities != NEWT.

Yes, I've seen that episode.

This is why, since over the course of the last few days I've been trying to think up my own Trek story, I personally prefer to try to use something akin to real-world physics.

Speaking of which, I was looking into a few things. I read up on an article about NASA's Gravity B probe and gravitoelectomagnetism. While I don't have a full understanding of what it is yet, I am looking into it and trying to understand it to try to use it to explain some of the things that go on in Trek in a way that actually makes some sense from a physics perspective. I've also read somewhere else, I think NASA again, that gravity can/does travel as a wave.

Well, waves can be created through multiple means. Mechanical motion going through a substrate in a repetitious pattern can generate a wave in said substrate. Also, waves in something can be generated from sources that can interact with them.

If, through gravitoelectromagnetism, a set of equations can be found that show that gravity and magnetism can generate waves in a similar way, and if these waves can interact, then you might be able to use one to influence or generate the other.

The idea that I had was this; warp drive would be explained by equations resulting from a combination of gravitoelectromagnetism as well as the phsyics of waves themselves.

The base concept is this: specially directed and pulsed electromagnetic waves ---> gravity waves which follow a similar pattern ---> warp fields/deflector shields/disrupter cannons/ect...

This then leads into this;

warp coils and deflector shield emitters are essentially just big, powerful solenoids that are designed to generate extremely powerful magnetic fields. These fields are pulsed and rotate in such a way that it generates a ripple effect in space-time around the ship and enables the formation of a warp field which constantly expands behind the ship and contracts in front of it, essentially using a fluid current of space itself around the ship as a propulsion source.

Yes, the power requirements would be astronomic; that's what antimatter is for. Needless to say if you convert all of the mass of a physical object into an energy state through an almost zero-loss reaction then you're going to wind up with quite the large amount of power.


Let me guess; I'm probably dead wrong and this wouldn't even work on paper.

Ugh...

Anyway, what I'm on about is this; if I were to write a Star Trek story, and with this idea I just might, I'd do away with all the technobabble and actually have the engineers and scientists on these ships state stuff that's either already proven physics, or at the very least something that's possible in concept using sound mathematics.

And the only reason I'd even have anyone start going off on a tangent about physics and whatnot in the story (IE like how Trek usually does it) is so that the person sitting next to them can interrupt and say, "in English, damn it!" for the sake of a comedic effect.



Also, speaking Trek tech; for some reason there's one thing that I can't get out of my head:

Self-sealing stem bolts.

I don't know why. They're just stuck in my head.

Self-sealing stem bolts.

I'm not even entirely sure what they're supposed to do other than be bolts.

The whole "self-sealing stem" bit makes me think that they're bolts that are designed to create a hermetic seal inside the threaded hole they're supposed to go into without the need of any kind of outside sealant being placed into the hole before the bolt is inserted.

As goes the prop used for them on DS9, they don't even look like a bolt; it's essentially a trapezoidal prism or some odd shape similar to that with two cylindrical rods sticking out of either end at differing heights.

Ugh...

But seriously, I'm actually trying to figure out how to make a working warp drive at this point with at least fringe science that seems somewhat possible within the realms of known physics.

And yes, all of my measurements would be using SI units, as I prefer it anyway.