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.