Star Trek questions -- please help?

[edenfalling]

I am working on a Star Trek: AOS (i.e., the new movie) request fic for valles_uf, which is currently at 3,700 words. The thing is, it involves a lot of world-building. Among other things, I am attempting to insert the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies into the Star Trek world, on the theory that no matter how good Starfleet Medical is, a volunteer-based NGO is probably still useful and less likely to be distrusted as an arm of the military and/or government. (On that note, I am troubled to learn that the main medical regulatory agency in the Star Trek universe is part of the military. Yes, Starfleet is not solely a military agency, but when all is said and done, they are the Federation's military.)

Anyway, I am having trouble finagling some details out of the internet. So I ask the collective widsom of lj and dreamwidth: has anyone established a generally accepted location and extent of the Orion Congeries, and their border with the Federation? I am not sure if I am going to bother being too specific, but it would be nice to know what sector of space I am dealing with (and what other fictional political entities are in the neighborhood).

Also, is there any generally accepted consensus about the how big a starship can be and still make a planetary landing rather than needing to stay in orbit or at a space station and send shuttles (or beam crewmembers) down to the surface? Because my Red Cross ship has a fairly small crew -- it's a simple ship -- but it carries a lot of cargo, because its mission is emergency first response. And right now, I do not have a clear picture of its size or layout.

Comments

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

I don't know about any kind of fandom consensus on the AOS setting, but Voyager could make planetfall, and ships like modern supertankers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batillus_class_supertankers) are able to support themselves structurally in drydock and survive storm-stresses in a seaway. Given the assumption of working antigravity and the implied power loads needed for warp travel, there'd be no reason that an equivalent vessel - or one much larger - couldn't be designed for planetfall.

The thing is, though, that that ability'd have a major influence on the design and layout of the ship - its structure would need to be laid out to accept gravity loading while landed and powered down, it'd need landing gear, re-entry shielding, heatproof design features, and the like. Mechanically, it'd be simpler to design a large cargo ship with warp and sublight ability and use specialized surface-to-orbit shuttles to handle the transfer to planetside - that is, from a builder/buyer's perspective, not having to hassle with the 'landing' features for the mothership would save more money than buying the shuttles.

OTOH, depending on the cost of operating the antigrav and the 'maintenance costs' of running through a re-entry, de-and-re-orbiting the interstellar 'deadweight' equipment of the combined function design might be cheaper than the labor/handling costs of shifting cargo to the shuttles, which'd be telling for a commercial carrier like might be converted for 'Red Cross' work.

The Atomic Rocket Project (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/) is more aimed at hard sci-fi work than Star Trek's space opera conventions, but I've always found that it still had a lot of useful things to say about some of the less flashy aspects of spacegoing, including logistics and this very design question.

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

Bah, meant to mention but forgot to - if your goal is to have something relatively large on the surface rather than the actual starship, there's no reason there wouldn't (and quite a few reasons there would) be shuttle designs much larger than the relatively tiny things we see Starfleet using as auxiliary craft for their starships.

[edenfalling]

Thank you for the link! I am not committed one way or the other; I am just trying to figure out what my most practical options are. Also, while I am losing a bit of the David-vs.-Goliath element by using a cargo ship, it em basically unarmed (Red Cross, after all), so there's that.

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

If it were me, I'd want that mothership to stay in orbit.

First of all, it's easier to maintain quarantine in cases of epidemics that maybe aren't quite totally as under control as you might like, plus you don't have to worry so much about things like the local civil war heating back up and some of the local guerrilla forces (or just random criminals/desperate people/corrupt government officials) deciding to just walk onboard and seize all of your supplies.

Second, air travel to remote locations will be far more easily done from a ship in orbit than from one that's grounded. Natural disasters don't just hit big cities, plus big cities are also generally more able to deal with said disasters than the remote areas. A shuttlecraft from orbit is a far more efficient method of getting large amounts of goods from the ship to where it's needed than dropping down into that gravity well and then having to haul it overland - and any society capable of space travel is going to know the value of making gravity work for them, not against them.

Third, not everything is going to be needed in every emergency, and stuff that isn't used is going to have to be hauled back out of that gravity well again. That means extra fuel, which means money that isn't going towards trying to get more supplies.

[edenfalling]

All very good points! Okay, I think what I am going to do is add two or three more crew members, up the size of the ship, and have them establish a sort of base camp down near the colony's main settlement. I think they will be doing a lot of research on the surface (since that is where the patients are available to be scanned and to give samples), but they will probably beam data and samples onto the main ship as well, so they have two labs working on multiple lines of inquiry.

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

In theory, the structural loads placed on a Star Trek ship sitting on the ground or preforming a powered reentry are nothing compared to the ones inflicted by normal and warp travel. Remember that even half built, Enterprise was apparently supporting its own weight under 1g in drydock. The question isn't how big can a starship be and make a planetary landfall, but at what point to people delete that requirement from the design specifications? It's not so much a question of can it stay in one piece without falling apart, but more a question of can it land safely without lithobraking (Aerobraking taken to the next logical step, but basically crashing into the ground to stop your ship.) and then take off again. Preferably using some sort of engine that doesn't inflict massive damage on the surroundings every time you take off.

If you want to know what you ship can do, it's important to first define what you want it to do. How fast should it be, as a first responder? How much cargo is the design target, in mass and in volume? What surfaces is it supposed to land on, and how much cleared area will it need? For instance, a spaceship that carries 100,000 tons of cargo and is designed to make water landings by design must either constantly support its mass with some kind of engine or be less dense than water so it can float.

As for the location and size of the Orions I've got no clue, other then general notions that they don't have Klingons in the area but Boarders are even more complicated. Remember, space is three dimensional, so the border in this case isn't a line but a plane. And if the Federation has put the squeeze on a particular sector, you may actually wind up with a bubble of Orion administered space completely surrounded by Federation space. It's rare for obvious political and practical reasons-Mahn was never more relevant than he was on the interstellar stage, but it can happen. It all depends on how planets are related to each other, how much defensive depth you can afford, and how much pressure the neighbors are putting on your territory.

[edenfalling]

I think I am just going to have to be vague about the exact space location, then, since not even Memory Alpha has much to say about where the Orions are based. *sigh*

The ship has to be fast, and it has to carry a lot. Interstellar distances are so vast, and (at least in the 23rd century) the Federation seems so loosely knit near its frontiers, that the Red Cross has taken to having ships patrol various sectors to extend their reach; the ships check several times on each colony in their area, and listen for any emergency transmissions. The Red Cross wants those first response ships able to handle a lot, since they are generally dealing with colonies that have not yet achieved self-sufficiency, and may not have adequate infrastructure, funds, or medical facilities to deal with natural disasters, diseases, or outbreaks of violence. I think that once a colony gets up to speed, the Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies encourages the formation of a planetary Red Cross, and takes that world off the regular patrol list. But anyway, rurounitriv makes some good points about why you wouldn't want to land the main ship on most worlds that are likely to need such a ship's intervention.

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

Vagueness generally works for star Trek. Especially NuTrek which has incredibly fast warp drives when you think about how quickly Enterprise's fleet made it to Vulcan.

Ok, the ship needs to make long unsupported patrols, cruising from one star to the next and putting loads on its engines the whole time. I see two possibilities for this in terms of maintenance. They can either have a large store of spare parts and significant space for replicators and machine tools or they can stand down at the end of a patrol, give he crew time with their families and turn the ship over to a dockyard who work it over. The first one presents a problem-it requires people or robots to operate the machines and conduct repairs. The matching problem of the other method is that if something breaks while you're out there and you can't fix it, which is likely, you'll need to limp back to a spacedock or call Starfleet for a tow. If they can provide one.

Since you've stated that you want a small crew, it's the second option for you! This also helps keep the costs down when building the ship, although it might make it a pain to have to head home when a circuit breaker on C deck gets stuck and you can't bypass it because there's no way to access the part outside a ...what the hell do you call a drydock for a spaceship anyways?

[edenfalling]

They do have some self-repair capabilities (including lots of technical manuals! *grin*), and one of the crew is generally an engineering and maintenance specialist (who also keeps the lab equipment in shape), but yes, if something goes badly wrong they will need to call for help, just as many other starships probably need to do. I think there are probably Federation laws mandating aid to any stranded starcraft, becauese to ignore a call for help is tantamount to murder.

IIRC, the generally accepted term for space drydocks is, straightforwardly enough, 'spacedock.'