Posted by Fleet Captain Russell Watt (Assistant Engineering Director) in Specification Review: Nightingale-class Cruiser (Medical) - Review OPEN Until January 17, 2021
Greetings all,

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WARP PROPULSION SYSTEM
‘You think I want to go to the stars? I don’t even like to fly! I take trains!’
Dr Zefram Cochrane - Star Trek
The Nightingale-class is equipped with a Class-8 warp core, with a Cochrane rating of 1909+. It is capable of a cruising speed of Warp 6.0, a maximum sustainable speed of Warp 9.2, a maximum velocity of Warp 9.6 for 12 hours, and a maximum emergency speed of Warp 9.8 for 3 hours. The ship’s warp nacelles are capable of variable geometry and move in a 90-degree arc between 45 degrees y-negative from horizontal to 45 y-positive from relative horizontal. The nacelles themselves can swivel during motion so that they are always parallel with the vertical axis of the vessel. By default, the nacelles are at 45 degrees y-negative from horizontal when the vessel is not at warp speeds.

I don’t understand what is meant by saying that the nacelles can swivel to “always [be] parallel with the vertical axis of the vessel.” A nacelle is typically in a fixed orientation, which means that if the vessel has a change in attitude, the nacelles change right along with it with no additional independent change on the part of the nacelles needed to maintain the parallelism. Even in a variable geometry setup as described, its not clear what sort of movement would be necessary to maintain the orientation you’re talking about.

IMPULSE PROPULSION SYSTEM
‘Please wait for the Danger Room to come to a complete stop. And use caution while checking the overhead compartments, as luggage may have shifted during travel.’
Dr Hank McCoy - X-Men

The Nightingale-class has two fusion engines to provide sublight propulsion. One is mounted at the rear face of each of the horizontal pylons. Combined, they are capable of a maximum impulse speed of 0.27c. The vessel can reach this velocity in 5.8 seconds and can come to full stop from this velocity in 7.3 seconds.

Instead of saying “One is mounted at the rear face of each of the horizontal pylons”, I would say “The engines are mounted on the rear faces of the horizontal pylons, one engine each.” Or something. Starting off with “One is mounted…” makes the reader briefly wonder where the other fusion engine is.

(Nitpick: Are they typically called fusion engines? I mean, impulse engines are fusion engines, but not usually called that explictly).

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Main Engineering
“I know engineers. They love to change things!”
Leonard McCoy - Star Trek
Engineering is located across Decks 10B and 11 of the Engineering hull on the Nightingale class, with main engineering taking the majority of Deck 11.
The room was constructed around a Class-9 warp drive. The warp core is horizontal instead of vertical. The reaction chamber can be seen via a hole in the deck before the main console. The reaction chamber is equipped with a compositor, which allows for dilithium recrystallization. In front of the warp core is a large monitoring area which features the master situation table, main warp core monitoring system and power transfer conduits. Also located on this deck are engineering labs with industrial replicators and the bio-neural gel pack nursery and bio-neural systems maintenance section. Engineering also houses the Chief Engineer’s Office, an open work area for special projects or situational analysis, system monitoring stations, warp core and cooling assemblies, assorted power and systems trunking, the holographic mainframe cores and holographic system maintenance and an inter-level lift.

So… as someone who has to roleplay in this particular room, and know how to handle failures that happen within it, I have some practical questions about this space and about the core setup.

The core is horizontal instead of vertical, which itself is fine. But, with the Nightingale’s atypical structure, this poses a number of issues that very unusual and need addressing:

1. The reaction assembly is viewable through a hole in the deck before the main console. Great. Is this hole in the ceiling or the floor? “The deck” usually refers to the floor, but the deck plan indicates that the core is on Deck 10B, e.g. it is above Main Engineering. If it’s in the floor, is the core actually on Deck 11, or Deck 12?

2. Is the hole a maintenance hatch? Like, suppose I need to… I dunno, pop the lid on the front of the reactor assembly and look at how the dilithium crystals are doing, for whatever reason. In the Galaxy class, this is easy, cause there’s a hatch right there on the front of the thing. Other ships don’t have this sort of thing, but with the core in the room, you can imagine that they can climb around the thing and figure it out. If the core is in the ceiling or floor, what do I need to do to gain access to it?

3. Outside of combat, a warp core breach is the most likely emergency to cause a catastrophic failure of the entire starship. This is why the typical design elements of a Starfleet vessel include a distinct primary and secondary hull, with the warp core in the secondary hull; if there’s a core breach, you can separate the two of them and save most of the people from a big explosion (even the original Enterprise could do this, but it was with explosive bolts in the neck, e.g. a big disaster totally-irreversible the-ship-is-getting-wrecked-anyway situation).

There’s no core ejection assembly described in the specification, nor any means to separate the primary and secondary hull in an emergency. So… there’s no survivable abort mode for this spacecraft; if there’s any problem in engineering, everybody on the ship is going to die and the whole thing is going to blow up.

I see four possible solutions to this:

A. Just ignore it, under the theory that warp core breaches are rare and there isn’t much you could do about one anyway. This is the approach preferred by NASA with the Space Shuttle, so it’s not actually implausible that someone would take this path. It lead to 14 people dying because 2 shuttles blew up, and was basically engineering hubris, but hey…
B. Add an ejection system to the warp core assembly. You’d have to put a hatch on the back of the ship if you want to keep the horizontal core design, because the forward of the warp core is a bunch of living space, and the security office, right? I don’t think you want a big tunnel exposed to vacuum going through those spaces.
C. Add some sort of primary and secondary hull separation capability, even if it is for use in an emergency only. This would be really hard to do with your current design, because all of your engines are connected to the secondary hull… so you couldn’t actually ensure you get enough clearance between the two of them.
D. A combination of B & C for extra redundancy.

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Tractor Beams
The Nightingale is fitted with fore and aft tractor emitters located on the exterior of Deck 8. This position allows for access to both the shuttlebays in the engineering hull and the cargo bay. It is capable of hauling cargo and towing disabled vessels. At a nominal delta-vof 5 m/sec^2, the main tractor beam emitters are capable of handling a mass of 7,500,000 metric tonnes at less than 1,000 meters. For a mass of one metric ton at the same delta-v, the effective range is 20,000 kilometres.

“Delta V” is an actual thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v) that is usually expressed in units of distance over time, not distance over time squared. Distance over time squared would be “Delta A”, because it would be describing a change in acceleration, not velocity. Also, even though Delta V is expressed as a unit of velocity, there is no “range” associated with it because there is no friction in space; once you change an object’s velocity, it doesn’t change again unless something else changes it.

The main tractor emitters use a pair of 16 Megawatt graviton polarity sources, for a total of 32 Megawatt graviton displacement power. TransportersFour transporter rooms allow the Nightingale to transport injured personnel directly to either the Medical Center or the Triage Deck. Transporter Rooms One and Two are located on Deck 3. Transporter Rooms Three and Four are located on Deck 13 of the engineering hull. Each pair shares a pattern buffer for space efficiency. All transporter rooms contain eight transporter pads and have a nominal range of 40,000 km.

The units of displacement power present are inviting me to actually do some math to see whether or not those values make sense given the definition of delta V is actually thrust over mass, but I don’t feel like doing integral calculus…

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Included in the initial construction contract were:

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USS Ptah, NCC -99205

The Egyptian god of craftsmen?

NPC Ships
USS Pulaski, NCC - 99206

Did she really rate that high? Well, actually, I guess if Nurse Ogawa did…

USS Quinn, NCC - 99207

Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman?

USS Thackery, NCC - 99208

The fictional character?

USS Drakken, NCC - 99209

The bad guy from Kim Possible?

USS Hunt, NCC - 99210

… you know… I googled this and I decided not to ask.

CONCLUSION
The Nightingale-class is a state-of-the-art mobile hospital that is not only adaptable but can provide other essential services as a front-line Starfleet vessel. Its ability to be flexible allows it to provide vital emergency response across the Federation (and beyond) and serves as a responsive training environment.

SUBMITTED 18 December 2020
Lindsay Bayes, Cale Reilly, Nicholas Villareal

This is pretty good.

Joe