2010-03-02

Volumetrics - Scimitar

Model Source

Reading:  15,016,739 cubic meters.

UPDATE:

One must be a bit careful using the SketchUp plugin.  Be very sure to check the volume slices to make sure nothing is missed.  In this case, gaps existed in the center section of the ship, requiring a little modification and some flipping (to sit on her tail) to get the volume to calculate correctly.  So:

Updated reading:  19,949,862

I'm also working on fixing the D'deridex, which I recently dropped to 18 million and change based on a model I thought to be more accurate, but which I didn't realize was more leaky.


5 comments:

Ilithi Dragon said...

Interesting... It's a tad smaller than the measurements I did myself a couple years ago, which came out at ~17.5 million m^3. That could just have been the model I used, though, which I think I've since lost between restores and computer replacements...

Author said...

You might be right. I just started to really notice the SketchUp plugin's limitations, so I'll have to double-check a few figures.

In any case, ships like the Scimitar or the Klingon Bird-of-Prey can have significant volume differences based solely on the thickness of the wings, a testament to the inefficiency of such a design.

Ilithi Dragon said...

Yes, indeed. At least the Scimitar's wings had an actual purpose, as they contained the majority of the thalaron weapon's hardware (aside from the core of the weapon).

I do suspect that the scout- and cruiser-BoP's wings actually do serve a purpose, though.

Those massive cannons on the wings are just absolutely ginormous, even for the scout-BoP, they're still massively huge for the ship's size, and the cruiser-BoP's guns are the biggest disruptor cannons the Klingon Empire has ever fielded on a ship.

Given the energy ranges of Trek weaponry (the calculations of myself and some friends put Trek weapons outputs in the high terawatt to low petawatt range, which syncs relatively nicely with 40+ megaton photon torpedoes and the damage-magnifying nasty factor of the disruption phaser and disruptors have on the nuclear forces, which means getting hit with a phaser beam is like getting hit with a laser AND anti-matter), it would not take a very high percentage of the energy dumped into the weapons to generate massive amounts of waste heat, which is hard to get rid of in a vacuum.

As such, I suspect that the BoP wings aren't there for decoration, but instead serve a very specific and vital role: They're giant heat sinks.

Author said...

That would be plausible from a real-world perspective, yes, and would make the ship look awesome in IR. But why stick things on the end of the fins like weapons, necessitating additional structural support and thus mass, if all you really needed was a radiator fin?

In any case, it seems that Trek technology does not generally have to deal with waste heat in the same way we might think necessary.

For instance, Reed's little phase cannons were rated for 500 gigajoules each, and we hear in "Proving Ground" that 94% efficiency was quite supreme. If we assumed this referred to thermal efficiency, this would require that 30 gigajoules of heat were being unleashed with each shot, or the equivalent of a 7 ton bomb. I don't recall seeing any indication of that on any occasion. Indeed, there's never been any indication of phasers ever getting too hot to handle at all.

So yeah, I dunno . . .

Ilithi Dragon said...

Well, there were a few mentions of phaser coolant in TOS (most notably in Balance of Terror), plus coolant for the warp reactor has been mentioned repeatedly, and there was at least one instance in which Geordi was overloading the phaser emitters in which them getting too hot was stated as a concern (though it could have just been a figure of speech, given the context of the statement).

They could also be mounting points for the shield grid, I suppose.