Posted by Captain Nicholas Villarreal (Engineering Director) in Specification Review: Nightingale-class Cruiser (Medical) - Review OPEN Until January 17, 2021

Posted by Joe P in Specification Review: Nightingale-class Cruiser (Medical) - Review OPEN Until January 17, 2021

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.

That’s supposed to say “rotate”, not “swivel”. Basically, think of the orientation of the Bussard collectors on certain late 24th century Starfleet vessels - Sovereign, Nova, Intrepid, and Curiosity specifically. The nacelles just change their orientation in relation to the pylon in order to always have the bussard collectors in the same relative position.

I think I see what you mean, but please correct me if I’m wrong here with this example I’m using to illustrate it to myself…

The Intrepid class nacelles do not have this rotating ability, so its Bussard collectors change their orientation relative to the rest of the vessel when the pylon geometry changes, e.g. the tiny red bits on them that sit on either side of the nacelle look like they are on the left and right of the nacelle at sublight speeds, but look like they are on the top and bottom of the nacelle at warp speeds (at least that’s what I remember from the show). The Nightingale class has a rotating ability, so that this would not be the apparent behavior of its Bussard collectors. If it had the same type of collectors as the Intrepid did, the tiny red bits would always be on the left and right of the nacelle no matter what the pylon was doing.

Is that right?

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).

Good catch with the placement. “Each is mounted at the rear face of one of the horizontal pylons.” They probably could just be called impulse engines, but I’ve seen the terms used interchangeably in the past.

Yeah, I don’t think the fusion engine thing matters; I was just curious about it.

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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?

I think it’s a deck listing error. The idea was definitely to have the M/ARA below Main Engineering.

Good to know.

1. 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?

I think this probably is a view port. The addition of an access hatch is definitely a necessity.

Ok. We can also presume it exists, I guess… though someone might assume it’s a hatch if it isn’t explictly said not to be…

1. 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.

Yeah, I think we were probably just going to let the whole ship go down if the core breached, because core ejection is for ships that actually do things that could breach the core. DUNDUNDUN! Okay, actually, I just forgot to include a core ejection mechanism. I’d probably have it go aft horizontally.

Cool.

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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-v of 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.

19 years of SSSF and we’ve never caught that? Good lord. Okay, that’s an easy change as far as m/sec instead of m/sec^2. However, the tractor beam does have a range solely because of a limited ability to exert energy on any given object.

Yeah, a range limit is fine. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if the mistake on Delta V came directly from the TNG tech manual… (haven’t read it in many years).

The main tractor emitters use a pair of 16 Megawatt graviton polarity sources, for a total of 32 Megawatt graviton displacement power.

Transporters
Four 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…

Do we know what a graviton actually is in comparison to literally anything? If not, it’s just a fictional unit, and the combined power is a direct linear relationship instead of any sort of comparison to, say, adding cylinders to an engine for increased horsepower.

A “graviton” is a hypothetical particle, but a “megawatt” is a real physical unit to represent power transmission, which is defined as a kilogram meter^2 / second^3 or a Newton meter / second. So… yeah, you could make a real comparisons on what that does if you actually wanted to sit down and do all of that math. Actually, 1 horsepower is around ~750 Watts, and mechanically is the amount of power required to move 550 pounds 1 foot in 1 second, so you could hypothetically push 42,666 pounds 1 foot in 1 second with this both emitters operating at maximum capacity. Which is slightly less mass than the Apollo Command Service Module.

You know… we should probably not go down this road. It’s probably whatever is in the Tech Manual, and we’re uncovering silly things with the underlying canonical setting that people don’t usually think about.

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Included in the initial construction contract were:

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USS Ptah, NCC -99205

The Egyptian god of craftsmen?

Well, Isis is kind of a taboo name to use. Not sure why it’s not Sekhmet instead, but hey, not my call.

NPC Ships
USS Pulaski, NCC - 99206

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

I think I had the same question, and yep, basically, if we’re naming ships after Ogawa and Chapel, then we can certainly name a ship after Pulaski.

USS Quinn, NCC - 99207

Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman?

Well, it’s certainly not Harleen Quinzell

USS Thackery, NCC - 99208

The fictional character?

USS Drakken, NCC - 99209

The bad guy from Kim Possible?

He’s a Doctor. I think this is a bit of whimsy.

USS Hunt, NCC - 99210

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

I definitely wouldn’t have chosen him, given other options from the show. On the other hand, he was a military surgeon, so service record and all that.

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

Thank you for your feedback, Joe.

Nicholas

You’re welcome Nick.

Joe