Orientation in space?

[sunnyside]

In fairness, even with gravity control you can argue that skyscraper decks make more sense.

Think about what the Enterprise systems have to do. When the ship is stationary, they apply 1g towards the deck. But when accelerating, they have to nullify the acceleration to the side and apply one g downwards as well.

With a skyscraper design, when you're stationary you have to apply the downwards 1g as before. But when you're accelerating all you have to do is nullify the acceleration except for the last 1g. You both save a bit of power on nullifying that extra g, and you save the power you would need to create a g downwards. And if you're accelerating at less than 1g, you only need to generate a little bit of additional gravity to top it up.

You'd think that would be a slightly more efficient system.

True, but we might be talking small potatoes at that point since they imply extreme gs are handled by the dampers.

However more importantly is that once you've advanced to a Trek level of technology you're going to want to be able to have stories where the ship operates within a planets atmosphere (or a Sun) and now you care about operations and orientation within a gravity well again so you're back to "airbus" for those reasons.

[Jim]

In fairness, even with gravity control you can argue that skyscraper decks make more sense.

Think about what the Enterprise systems have to do. When the ship is stationary, they apply 1g towards the deck. But when accelerating, they have to nullify the acceleration to the side and apply one g downwards as well.

With a skyscraper design, when you're stationary you have to apply the downwards 1g as before. But when you're accelerating all you have to do is nullify the acceleration except for the last 1g. You both save a bit of power on nullifying that extra g, and you save the power you would need to create a g downwards. And if you're accelerating at less than 1g, you only need to generate a little bit of additional gravity to top it up.

You'd think that would be a slightly more efficient system.

It would probably depend on the size of said decks. Why not just have something like the saucer but have it fly flat side forward?

[Graham Kennedy]

Yeah, to ships that can do a couple of thousand gees or more it's pretty negligible difference. But what engineer deliberately does something in a less efficient way when there's really no reason to do so?

[Tholian_Avenger]

What T_A (I believe) called "space fantasy magic" may in fact be so, but that in no way invalidates it as a form of fiction.

Quite true, for example the original Star Wars trilogy.

One may as well say that George R. R. Martin is a mediocre hack, because dragons never really existed.

Well...

[Mikey]

Well...

Hey now, I sure don't know anything about the Game of Thrones TV series, but as a novelist he's very talented.

[McAvoy]

Well...

Hey now, I sure don't know anything about the Game of Thrones TV series, but as a novelist he's very talented.

Blasphemy. He is the best. Ever read Tolkien?

[Mikey]

I've read almost everything by Tolkien, except some of the childrens' poetry; I'm also well-versed in Dunsany, et. al. I don't consider Martin to be "the American Tolkien," like some have said - but I assure you that once I read the first short story "Sandkings" (which is not a SOIAF story) I was hooked.

P.S. BTW, he's a Jersey boy, too.

[Vic]

HA! I remember Sandkings, OMNI was such a great magazine, brings back fond memories. I'm still disappointed that nobody built a migma reactor......

[Coalition]

One advantage for orientation plane style is that travel from one location to another is faster. You just have to walk from one area to the next, instead of climbing a ladder. Assuming the ship has to keep a narrow profile to the direction of flight, and you have sufficient artificial gravity/acceleration control, making the ship arranged like a plane means you don't need to climb as many ladders (or use as many turbolifts) to get from one location to another.

So efficiency with regards to crew movement, rather than acceleration dampening.

[Tholian_Avenger]

If you have an inertia management system, yes.
If you don't then you will be sliding down the floor towards the engines whenever the ship accelerates.

Did you ever see that episode of Stargate SG1 where Ba'al is torturing Jack? Imagine being in his slip-n-slide jail cell.

[Atekimogus]

I don't know.....the argument about acceleration creating gravtiy seems a pretty flimsy reason to build a ship starscraper style.

Assuming the ship would indeed accelerate with 1g they will never get anywhere so you have to compensate the much greater acceleration anyhow, the same is true for the decceleration phase. Now I am no expert, far from it, but it seems no matter how you build a ship the amount of time it actually spends producing a perfect 1g artifical gravity through acceleration is rather negligible.

[Graham Kennedy]

I don't know.....the argument about acceleration creating gravtiy seems a pretty flimsy reason to build a ship starscraper style.

Assuming the ship would indeed accelerate with 1g they will never get anywhere so you have to compensate the much greater acceleration anyhow, the same is true for the decceleration phase. Now I am no expert, far from it, but it seems no matter how you build a ship the amount of time it actually spends producing a perfect 1g artifical gravity through acceleration is rather negligible.

Sure. But even if it's doing 1,000g, a skyscraper design has to cancel 999g whilst a sailing ship layout has to cancel 1,000g and generate 1g at right angles. I grant that it's not much of a difference, but the skyscraper design IS more efficient in that respect.

Whereas the reason to build it the other way is... what? What's the advantage of NOT doing a skyscraper design?

[Atekimogus]

I don't know.....the argument about acceleration creating gravtiy seems a pretty flimsy reason to build a ship starscraper style.

Assuming the ship would indeed accelerate with 1g they will never get anywhere so you have to compensate the much greater acceleration anyhow, the same is true for the decceleration phase. Now I am no expert, far from it, but it seems no matter how you build a ship the amount of time it actually spends producing a perfect 1g artifical gravity through acceleration is rather negligible.

Sure. But even if it's doing 1,000g, a skyscraper design has to cancel 999g whilst a sailing ship layout has to cancel 1,000g and generate 1g at right angles. I grant that it's not much of a difference, but the skyscraper design IS more efficient in that respect.

Whereas the reason to build it the other way is... what? What's the advantage of NOT doing a skyscraper design?

That's true, my feeling though is that we cannot predict today what technologies will be available in the future to make an informed choice. Now let us assume that we can manipulate gravity in a way that let us cancel out 1000g forces and that the ship is built like a skyscraper.

Would we really only cancel out 999g during a rather short acceleration phase (which is probably only a small part of the overall journey anyhow) to save on one unecessary g? Or is it more likely that the system cancel sout all accelaration and maintains a cosy 1g throughout? (Again, hard to say since we don't know how much of an energy-drain such assumed systems would have but letting "bleed through" 1g seems......unnecessarily complicated to set up...or at least not being important enough to be the main-design-point).

Other scenario, the g-forces are much smaller, comparable to normal rocketships. In that case it makes no sense to built a sky-scraper ship since......it won't go anywhere anyhow.....why built a relativly big ship?

Or it travels at FTL speeds somehow. In that scenario maybe there aren't even any g-forces involved when folding space. In which case you can again build it like you want.


Ultimatly the ship-hull will thake the form it needs to have to handle the stresses it is supposed to experience.....I am not opposed to a sky-scraper design but I wouldn't be surprised if such ship ultimately do not look like that either.