Posted by Lindsay Bayes in Specification Review: Nightingale-class Cruiser (Medical) - Review OPEN Until October 24, 2020

Posted by Fleet Captain Russell Watt (Assistant Engineering Director) in Specification Review: Nightingale-class Cruiser (Medical) - Review OPEN Until October 24, 2020

Posted by Ben Simons in Specification Review: Nightingale-class Cruiser (Medical) - Review OPEN Until October 24, 2020
Posted by… suppressed (5) by the Post Ghost! 👻
CHANGELOG
* reassigned the psychiatry ares to its own deck (Deck 7) and developed a concrete layout, delineating the ward from the crew therapy space
* amended and described modules more where necessary
* reduced offensive capabilities in the ship itself, and the combat module
* reduced science labs and made many of the more multipurpose
* CSO office space and crew quarters on Deck 7 moved to Deck 8
* Adjusted Shuttlebayes to be two decks tall
* added back in the tactical station to the bridge that was accidentally deleted
* added a list of common Codes
* adjusted crew size and complement to fix previous counting error and expanding it slightly according to feedback
* added command system interface for GALEN to computer section and elaborated on basica repairs that can be done from the bridge

NIGHTINGALE-CLASS

CATEGORY: CRUISER
VARIANT: MEDICAL
DESIGNER(S): Lindsay Bayes, Cale Reilly
SECONDARY DESIGNER: Nicholas Villarreal
Mark I
Draft 2
DATE: 7 October 2020

<SNIP>

Please accept my apologies for the mess I made of the specs.

Russell

One thing that confuses me. Some decks are numbers and some are letters. And reading it some areas appear to be on both a number and a letter deck. I found this hard to follow.
Jenn

In the description of the structure, this is explained: “The bottom three decks of the primary hull connect to the top three decks of the engineering hull. Due to the nature of the Nightingale, the design team used numbers to identify the decks of the primary hull and letters to identify the decks of the secondary hull. Thus, the primary hull has Decks 1 through 10 and the engineering hull has Decks A through H, even though the overall vessel is only fifteen decks in height.”

Think of the ship as being constructed in two pieces and connected along that seam line. While this class doesn’t do a saucer separation, treating where they join up as a place to add in extra protections, allows the engineering area and secondary medical area to protect the rest of the ship from issues originating lower down, and the primary medical area to keep issues higher up on the ship from affecting things lower down.

If it helps to have a visual, look at the ship image that has the deck labelling (https://imgur.com/4tA1m7B) you can imagine walking down the corridor on Deck 10 and the bulkheads will be labelled Deck 10. But then you pass through a door and you are now in the engineering hull and on Deck C.

Does that help?

~Linds

Linds/Cale/Nick Can I ask why you dont just have a description saying decks 1-8 encompass both hulls while decks 9-whatever encompass only the secondary hull?? seems less confusing that way to me. It’d also fit the numbering scheme used canonically in tng, the letter thing fell out of favor come tng anyhow

Robert Archer

As I read it, I also took a moment to work out the letter/number deck-listing and was initially confused by it, but as that’s already been covered I have a few other things I’d like to ask/mention.

HISTORY AND MISSION OVERVIEW

The history is covered well, but I didn’t see a mission profile here other than “that of a medical ship,”

Thinking of this from a command point of view, what missions would it be suitable for? Would it be suitable for mass evacuation if there’s some sort of virus that requires it, for example? What about interplanetary pandemics, or would it focus on more long term care? What about its role as a combat hospital? In this situation would it work more on transporting and treating the injured, or like a triage ship? Considering its combat module, that may be something that would need consideration.

I believe we covered this quite well in this section:

”…the Nightingale is capable of providing long-range medical support, long-range rescues, and medical support for frontier vessels, outposts, and colony establishments. It is also capable of civilian mercy operations.”

and

“The primary goal of the Nightingale was to provide a detailed mobile medical facility for onsite treatment and for transport.” (we then explain getting people on the ship in the event the ship has to land on a planet- because it can do that too)

WARP PROPULSION SYSTEMS

Just wanted to clarify how long can it travel at max warp of 9.8 - if it needs to get far fast, the amount of time it can travel at this speed could be important, especially in a medical emergency.

TACTICAL SYSTEMS
“…the Nightingale has six Type-9 Type-7 phaser arrays with 60 emitters each.” - I believe the Type-9 here may have been left behind from the previous draft?

Ben
Dockmaster

Yes, my delete button clearly wasn’t hit hard enough when I was getting rid of the old bits. It’s supposed to be Type-7.

Thanks to the people who have so far posted comments on the specs so far.

I must also admit to being confused by the use of letters and numbers of Decks in the ship.
Is there a reason why you went down the path of using letters and numbers for the Decks?
Do floor number in hospitals follow a similar system?
With the medical ship captained by Beverly Crusher in All Good Things, was there any indication that lettering and numbers were used for Decks?
Would you be open to considering Rob’s suggestion regarding the numbering of the decks?

Russell
AEDir

The idea of having the secondary hull labelled with letters was (in part) to make it more clear during RP when something happened on one of those overlapping decks whether it was in the Primary hull or the Secondary hull. The shape of the ship is less elongated like ships we see like the Galaxy, so this was our way to convey there was a point where you physically stepped from the Primary hull to the Secondary.

That being said, my goal as a designer here is to make a ship that is interesting and fun to roleplay on. The technical nitty gritty becomes noise for a lot of RPers, so we want the layout and facilities to make sense from an RP perspective. If the deck naming system is too complicated, even with the description and the image (which makes it easier to understand in my opinion), then fine, we can change to numbers. We wanted to try something a little different because our ship is unique in the club and not (likely) to be used anywhere else outside of an NPC ship.

~Linds

As someone who works in the Acute Care setting in RL and having been involved in Mass Casualty events, and knowing how big a starship can be, the medical facilities actually seem somewhat small. How much expansion of the medical space is it capable of? Can cargo bays be converted into additional medical space or accommodation for evacuees? Just remembering what it was like during the tornado here many years back. Our 30 bed ER, 24 bed ICU, 12 OR suite, and 200 medical ward bed city hospital was very quickly overwhelmed and we are not even considered a large center.

Amie (aka Casidhe)