Funfact, transparent aluminium is now a real thing: Aluminium oxynitride. It is optically transparent, yet still able to block out some forms of radiation. When lead mesh is added, it is still transparent, but capable of blocking out a lot more radiation. And when it is made ino a one way mirror...well, that changes everything. It essentially becomes a starship window.
@@johnw7722 well, management using statistical improvement is nothing new, and I think it's a neat concept. And in space age where data is abundant, statistics and data driven management and implementation would be much streamlined. I even think about how the Utopia Planitia shipyard would be benefitted from 6 sigma methodology. Also, if you think hard, the conception, prototyping and testing and finally production of Defiant and later mass produced Akira and Steamrunner class had benefitted from 6 sigma because how fast and efficiently Starfleet mass produced those ships.
The Klingon Bird of Prey Haynes Manual has a really interesting part about how Klingons build their ships. Basically, The Klingon Defense force, (Federal Government) owns all the shipyards. But the houses own all the individual ships for the most part. All these different ships can be outfitted quite differently depending on the houses' preferences. So there is a guy call the Renwl' or architect. When a house decides they want a new ship, the Renwl' gets assigned to manage the project and negotiates the fit and specifications of the ship with the houses' representative. They help reign in the excessive and sometimes ridiculous requests of the house to produce a good ship that will function well when the KDF calls it to service. "No you can't have isruptors that powerful on a B'rel" "No, you can't strip 70% of the armour off a Vor'Cha." "Yes, you can have extra Bunks on your Bird of prey, but that will reduce the cargo bay." "Sure we can fit an extra Transporter in, but you'll have to reduce the size of the Targ pen." That sort of thing. Sometimes, the arguments and demands turn violent, and can even lead to bloodshed. As such Renwl' are quite skilled fighters and good with a Blade. It's also a very well respected position, as it is one of the few jobs where a 'mere civilian' can tell a Noble Warrior that they are wrong and to accept their terms.
I was a maintenance supervisor in a school district. I went through exactly the same thing. “No, a parent can’t cut out part of the wall to install an air conditioner”.
Klingon Academy (the ST6 prequel game that Christopher Plummer and David Warner reprised their roles in) has interesting, alternate lore (seemingly using SFB as inspiration) about how ships were made in its instruction manual. Much like in-screen Trek and STO, it's unclear where the difference is between ships of the KDF and the hordes of house ships that split off into factions in their many civil wars. At the very least, the biggest battleships seem to belong to the Empire.
Real ships follow the standard pattern for their class, but no two are exactly alike, each one is customized and configured in slightly different ways. To specifically optimize equipment for intended roles or missions or operating areas. To accommodate the preferences of individual ship captains, engineers, pilots assigned to them. To incorporate the latest and greatest new design refinements (often developed on older ships of the same class). To make best use of whatever special talents or resources are available at the particular construction yard. People come and go, administrations (and budgets) come and go, supply (and cost) of raw materials or manufactured components always change ... while a ship can take years to build and many ships can take decades. I imagine that Starfleet vessels are just as variable. And that Klingon vessels are even more variable.
The captain taking control of an incomplete ship is absolutely done today, see precommissioning unit, or PCU. The idea is that ca0tain and crew get hands on experience with the ship before they actually have to sail her.
It also means repairing the ship should be easier to train if you know how it was put together. Plus its a good way for the officers and crew to form a working relationship, and also to gauge a new Captain's ability to lead
Was hoping someone would point this out. US navy always assigns a crew to every new ship under construction long before it’s even close to being complete. Officers & NCOs (chief engineer & so on) are generally present during construction the moment the keel is laid at least part time then full time on site once the engine is installed/ the ship is floated in the dock. It’s for the very reasons mentioned. To ensure the ship’s quality meets navy standards, the department heads / specialists are fully aware & trained on all equipment & to help the crew practice ships maintenance at sea of all the equipment. May not be that way for civilian vessels but starfleet is part military so ya kind of obvious why at least a captain is assigned while under construction
The US Navy (and I assume most others) actually assign a Pre-Commissioning Crew to the ship as it's still being built. Its not something just in Star Trek. Most of this crew, including the CO, will stay with the ship at least through its Sea Trials and maybe its first deployment.
Yup..Voyagers shake down was obviously with a different crew it didn't even have a captain. I think it was a Yard superintendent who oversaw it. The man who oversaw Voyagers construction. It was a disaster she ended up dead in space and had to be towed back the yard. When Janeway finally boards her to take formal command the ship has just barely finished a crash course shakedown they ran out of time. That's how it was in one of the novels. Given the state of the ship when she came aboard just days before her maiden mission Voyager was clearly not ready.
@@paulgrattan3885 there was an episode where Seven of Nine is transported through time repeatedly to intercept someone attempting to bomb Voyager. In one of the scenes, you see that Janeway is clearly the captain of Voyager before it was finished and spaceworthy.
A point of historical interest, you talked about Starfleet assigned a captain and crew to the new ship before construction is completed. I am 90% sure that in the late 20th and early 21st centuraries the US frequently did the same.
As a USN veteran I can personally attest to this. A number of my shipmates from the USS Eisenhower transferred to the Pre commissioning crew of the USS Lincoln. They serve a number of functions: Installing subsystems that do not required large scale fabrication, fire watches for yard welders, testing completed systems, outfitting living quarters, painting and corrosion mitigation and security watches to name a few. These Crew earn the title "Plank Owner" and the right to attend the ship's decommissioning when it occurs.
The Royal navy does the same thing, Like with HMS Glasgow currently being built in Scotland for example, It"s not in the water yet and is still covered in sheeting, But crew are being assigned to the ship, Often in such circumstances they will be training and learning the new ship and it's systems, As well as over seeing the construction while quartered ashore nearby.. 👍
Don't forget that by the time of the construction of the Galaxy class the shipyards had reached the point where major sections of the ship, notably the various quarters and other interior compartments, would actually be transported directly into their position. During the early sections of internal construction many sections would have "dummy" compartments installed for structural reasons, then during the final stages of construction the actual internal compartments would be transporter swapped for the dummies.
One of the reasons I like the TOS Enterprise the best is because it doesn't have visible hull plates. It looks like it's made from huge one-piece sections. The only reason the refit has visible hull plates is because it looks better on film, and thats how ILM built stuff (Star Wars). I think it would have been better to differentiate the franchises by having Star Trek ships be smoother, more advanced. If you look at modern naval ships, they don't have visible hull plates for the most part to defeat radar.
Your forgot to mention that Capt. Harriman also had to oversee the remaining construction of the Enterprise. Unless you’re making a separate video for that, next Tuesday.
🤔 don't they use a material called tritanium for starship hulls ??? definitely duranium but could've sworn I've also heard em talk about tritanium starship hulls
7:57 actually, that happens with navies in Real Life; the officers and crew of a ship under construction is designated as a Pre-Commissioning Unit (PCU) and is trained on the ship's various systems in shore based training centers before reporting to the actual ship when it is completed and launched for its Sea Trials.
I was going to say, in reference to the Kelvin Enterprise being built in Iowa: if you have antigravity and powerful, efficient engines, building in the ground makes a ton of sense for safety and ease of maneuverability of the construction crews
Sisko and April don’t work as examples of that. Sisko was part of the team designing the Defiant and didn’t take command until it was out of mothballs. And as for April, depending on the Apocrypha he may also have been part of the Enterprise design or construction team before getting command
Just a point of order, replicators require raw materials in a state of suspension like the transporter buffers or base materials like carbons and proteins. Thank you
Like everything in Star Trek, they're very inconsistent with how replicators function. Sometimes they mention such storage bays, other times dialogue only makes sense if they create it from nothing but energy, E=MC^2 be damned.
@@patrickmccurry1563 It's inconsistent at a nit picky level, but the general handling seems more consistent with the idea that they're extremely capable molecular engineering devices rather then literal alchemy machines. The extent of mining done and the constant inability to replicate exotic substances don't make much sense unless some kind of feed stock is necessary, and these are pretty consistent factors that come up repeatedly. There really aren't many instances honestly where straight energy to matter conversion would be a required to explain what they do in a story. I also think it's just better from a plot and story telling perspective. Much like transporters true alchemic replicators can break a lot of plots or conflicts, the "you need the basic elements to replicate a complex object/substance" interpretation significantly alleviates this and gives you a reasonable out for being unable to just replicate unusual items.
You sir, are very good at what you'r doing. I mean, ship design from the standpoint of material aquisition, transportation and assembly. It apeals to my inner nerd. Well done.
A few remarks: - The thing with replication is, that it is not 100% efficient. You always put in more power, then just what you need to transform the materials. If that inefficiency is high enough, it can be cheaper to mine it conventionally, slow-transport it conventionally and process it conventionally. If you need more power for a Dilithium using reactor to produce it, then you would get out of the Crystalls - then making them is always at a loss. It can work if you can substitute simpler fusion reactors, but that is rarely the case. Even if they do not use money, thermodynamics and limited energy are still a thing! - I am 90% sure you do not use Impulse drives in Atmopsheres. Something about irriating the surface and air, I think? Usually Maneuvering thrusters and stabilizers are enough to get a ship off the ground. - You talk about construction, the framework and the hull. Yet not a single image of the USS Ceritos stripped of it's plating?
@@kaitlyn__L I think the Anti-Grav Thrusters basically keep gravity from taking complete hold of the ship allowing them to keep their descent speed steady or maintain their altitude, but they need Impulse to actually climb
Reading your point on thrusters being used in-atmosphere made me think of what happens when a fighter jet flys supersonic too low... and then imagine the carnage wrought by a Galaxy class approaching 0.5 c, assuming the vessel wouldn’t be atomized by the ungodly wind resistance. (Resistance forces are geometrically related to velocity.)
the thing about each ship having its own quirks is a really neat detail that carries over from the real world. Ive worked on cruise ships that are supposed to be identical but there are always small differences, like a pillar in a different place.
from a personal lore POV, i've always been more interested in the whole "this class of starship is being designed to do .........what exactly?" would love to see a series canon ASDB type call for a ship design. perfect to get Miles O'Brien back in the series.
Even if you could replicate everything, you still need the energy to run the replicators. The fuel has to come from somewhere, so replicating everything instead of mining resources just moves the problem elsewhere.
I never thought about how the Kelvin Enterprise was build on Earth's surface, but thinking about it nw, it actually kinda makes sense, as it would immediately certify the starship for Atmospheric flight, as well as save on material costs as Starfleet wuldn't need to spend as much on fuel or DiLithium to keep a dry dock operational in orbit, so the ship would use it's own power to obtain orbit and beyond
For small ship it's good, but when the ship is too large, it will definitly be difficult to assemble then in gravity environment. Unfortunately, the Kelvin Enterprise is obviously "too large".
It may not be the case with all navies, but, in general, navies have long assigned the ship's first captain during construction. It's a good thing for a commander and key crew to be familiar with every nut, bolt, line, wire, rig, and rivet possible. Sometimes, a captain and his Engineer will even be present when the keel is laid. It's unusual, but not uncommon, for a new captain to choose his Engineer* before even selecting the First Mate. Especially if it's his first command. It's also common to have certain crew be a part of the installation of the station or equipment they will be assigned to. Though, this is usually done during the final stages of construction. These particular crew are almost always involved in the Shakedown, working closely with the Technicians and Shipwrights for tweaking and further familiarization and customization. My grandfather was a Supply Chief in WWII and was ordering provisions and supplies before he even saw the ship for the first time. The kitchen wasn't even half completed when he was selected for the post, and he oversaw the final installation of much of the equipment he would use. This even included the loading gantries and ammunition storage compartments. During Shakedown, he was testing everything from the kitchen (the Head Chef was part of the Shakedown crew and cooked several days of meals to run the full range of equipment)** to the Offshore Loading System. The goal is to launch with an initial crew that can operate straight out of the docks, and to smooth out the intake and training of the final crew. * Note: Before the introduction of engines, this would be the Ship's Carpenter, who would often join, or be selected from among the Shipwrights building the vessel. ** As a long time Restaurant Worker, I can attest to the fact that each and every oven, fryer, griddle, toaster, etc, etc, has its own quirks and personality that you must get familiar with to use effectively. Even when brand new and from the same line in the same factory. A good Chef will spend DAYS playing around in a new kitchen just to familiarize themselves with things like "Okay, oven A took five minutes longer than oven B to produce the same results. And the griddle runs a little cooler in this spot than everywhere else." and adjust their cooking habits accordingly.
While building a starship on a surface looks cool in the Kelvin universe, it makes sense to assemble most of the ship until the gravity plating and life support systems are operational. Then you can haul it into space for the finishing touches. This way your workers won't have to wear space suits and requiring transport for the first stages of construction. The final touches like installing a warp core would be safer in space in the event of an anti-matter breach that way it wouldn't harm anything on land.
Starfleet also Contracts out component construction and assembly to Federation member worlds too and ship those parts wherever. When the Enterprise D got a new warpcore it came from a world that had won the contract to construct warp cores and dilithium Chambers for the fleet. So not everything is built at Utopia Planita, San Francisco and the Antares shipyards.
I love learning the details on all this stuff that's normally just sorta brushed over most of the time in the shows. Thank you for this. Stay well out there everybody, and God be with you, friends. ✝️ :)
I've always wondered why doesn't starfleet, just create ships using giant industrial replicators, same as they did with the wormhole self replicating mines 🤔 .
I believe Federation ships use tritanium, the Cardassians use duranium in hull construction. Hirogen use monotanium. Duranium appears harder than tritanium, and monotanium harder again. O'brian in DS9 once complained that cutting through an airlock door was difficult as it was made from duranium. Monotanium was impervious to phaser fire by Voyager. Verterium cortenide is what warp coils are made from. It creates the warp fields when energised by warp plasma.
I'm sure there are several senior members of Starfleet who are deeply concerned about using prisoner slave labor to get most of their dilithium. DEEPLY concerned. Well, not THAT concerned...
Star Trek is American made, and slavery is still technically legal here when discussing prison labor, so I can see why many writers don't count it as really evil. Also Qo'noS isn't beholden to Federation laws.
i think the Replicator is like the magic juvenation and curing teleporter: a neat idea for a Plotpoint, only not well thought out how the work to make sense, but that it stayed there instead of the other teleporter uses got forgoten the next week so we need to ask why you can't beam out illness or foreign substances or how trade is still not collapsed
The shows added canon explanations for why it wasn't always available as a solution, and many of them make sense scientifically. Regular replicators only replicate materials at the atomic level, but there's a lot of things that need sub-atomic accuracy for proper functionality. For example, _Voyager_ mentioned specialized medical replicators that could do that, but took more time and energy. Things like dilithium probably fail because there's extra-dimensional aspects to the material that are poorly understood, much less something a replicator can duplicate.
I assume the bio-filters in transporters are doing what you suggest. But anything smaller than parasites are too fiddly to screen out. Viruses in reality integrate themselves into your DNA. So fully transporting out even the common cold would require fully body genetic engineering.
why would you need to do that? take a 1kg item from earth to orbit, increase artificial gravity aboard the ship until the scale shows 1kg. having to build a ship on the surface of a planet to calibrate gravity is an idiotic concept.
4:18-4:40 In one of the DS9 Books, there was a planetside shipyard on Bajor that was once famed for their marvels of engineering, that was shut down during, then was reopened after the Bajoran occupation, and their First contract with an outside entity after reopening was to build a Starfleet ship from the ground up, the USS Hannibal, what was special about the Hannibal was that it wasn’t some small Craft that could easily be built on the ground, It was a 524 meter long Ambassador-Class Starship, The exact same class as the USS Enterprise-C, and I mean Literally from the ground up! The ship was Built on the surface of Bajor and was Launched from it in the year 2370, The book involved some attempted sabotage of the Hannibal’s Construction, but in the end she was launched and was Space-borne.
I Can Remember Watching StarTrek:TNG as an 80's Kid & Thinking... "I Wonder if One Day There Will Be Hand-Held Touch Screen Devices, Just As TheCrew Uses in TheShow?" & Three Decades Later, I Got One in My Hands!
The appointment of a captain before completion of the ship might even have a nice side effect of making the captain get emotionally attached to their ship encouraging them to treat it with care and to keep it properly maintained
What you said about starship captains being named before their ship is finished? In at least one fanfiction, this also happened in the Galactic Empire from Star Wars. Possibly canon, too.
Sisko was responsible for overseeing the defiants design and construction, or pats of it. But its never said that he was the commanding officer at that time only that he worked at the ship yard and of course an officer is going to be assigned to supervise construction and shakedown. Based on where he was in both his career and personal life then I highly doubt there was ever any intention of Sisko assuming active command and then the Defiant never completed shakedown anyway and was put on pause until years later.
Shuttlecraft were designed to travel between a ship and a planet's surface. You often see them traveling through a planet's atmosphere from place to place at speeds far too slow to stay aloft, even if they had wings. They can create gravity. If you can create gravity you can negate gravity (i. e. anti-gravity clamps and sleds to move heavy objects around by hand). If you can create gravity on a ship wide scale you can also negate gravity on a ship wide scale. Large ships generally are not designed to land on a planets surface, but if you had a cradle designed to support the ship that it could land in then they could land on and take off from a planet's surface as long as it had a cradle available. But space docks look lots neater.
I thought that as part of the replication process, you still needed some base mass to start with. The replicator can change things around to make the various materials involved, but you still needed something to be there to make the change. In theory I guess it could just be a mass of Hydrogen that could then be processed up the periodic table, but I am not sure if that would be the best choice.
The replicators as matter-rearrangers rather than energy-to-matter converters would make a lot more sense. Otherwise, even the most trivial replicator operation involves a _terrifying_ amount of energy. Picard's "tea, Earl Grey, hot" creates the beverage, saucer, and cup, which all together weighs about 20 ounces. Going by e=mc^2 to convert energy into matter, that cuppa would need about 51 megajoules of reactor output to create particle-by-particle. Converting that energy into TNT equivalent, that's a bit less energy than the "Little Boy" Hiroshima bomb. To be sure, getting stuff into orbit takes a lot of energy, and a starship would need a fair amount of space to store months' worth of food for a thousand people. But when the alternative starts at needing _atomic bomb_ levels of energy for each cup of tea, a replicator that creates matter is a hideously energy-expensive solution. If they had that much energy on hand to play with, then a lot of problems they had to work around shouldn't have been problems in the first place.
@@tba113 Well, there is also the matter that things like the dishes would go back into the replicator to be broken down and used again. I assume that... other waste would also be reprocessed, so that would save a lot on how much would have to be packed along.
@@rogerw5299 Yeah even a replicator that can 'merely' perfectly arrange matter at a molecular level should also be a functionally perfect recycling machine as well. It would save more then 'a lot' IMO. Really basically besides any weight put on by the crew in terms of food and cutlery each member of the crew would probably only need a few pounds of material, simply rearranged and recycled over and over.
Fusion reactors can take hydrogen and other space gases and fuse it into heavier elements. That process releases power. The transporter can then rearrange it into appropriate modular shapes.
8:14 In the ST: Voyager episode "Relativity" Janeway toured Voyager while it was in the Utopia Planitia Shipyard and undergoing the final stages of construction.
It does make sense to have the Captain and Chief engineer present watching over the construction of the vehicle they will be in charge of, after all no one wants to trust someone else's work.
I always wanted to see either by design or by accident a ship gain Data like status as a living being. There was an episode I thought we would see it, but ship was only being used to reproduce.
Arguably the most important step of the whole process! I would hope that Starfleet learned from this and after the disastrous Enterprise-B maiden voyage made a rule that no ship is to be sent on a maiden voyage or shakedown crew without everything in place.
Yeah, if I lived in the Star Trek Universe This is where I'd want to be. Balls deep into the construction of new Starfleet vessels. With all the opportunities available to a citizen of the federation to do essentially whatever you wish.. id still desire to do really cool shit with my hands. Engineer for Life.
The first captain I thought of that oversaw a ship's completion was Decker for the _Enterprise's_ movie refit. Admittedly, not an _entirely_ new ship, but it's the same idea.
3:05 what about specially commissioning a ship of a certain class? M'Trasi is the captain of the U.S.S Fuzzball, which is an ambassador class (T6 Narendra with Ambassador parts) that he specially had built for his needs in a ship, choosing the class because it was his favorite design. Before that, he had a strange ship that resembled both a miranda class, a ShiKahr class, and a Clarke class. Many federation members called the ship "Miniprize" because the overall look was similar to that of a miniature constitution class.
Replicators do not "synthesize out of nothing" they draw from a matter store which is replenished by the recycling of items no longer needed or waste. That's why Starfleet maintains a scrapyard of retired ships.
You forgot tritanium. In the TNG episode "Where Silence Has Lease" Riker was using a tricorder to scan the bulkheads of a fake U.S.S. Yamato. He said "This isn't a Federation ship. These walls aren't tritanium. It's close but it's material beyond our technology." So we can assume the Galaxy class ships are made out of tritanium.
An excellent video! Horrah for you! But there is one tiny mistake you made. Replicators do not make something out of nothing, that is physically impossible. Instead, raw materials are transported into the replicators like as in a teleporter, and when the part is created, it does so by joining the raw material together to make the device. This is how it is done with most food replicators on board ships and that is how it is done with non-food replicators.
It always made sense that Prometheus was built in several spaces, in mean star fleet had four t+d shipyards. With four teams it makes sense. ( with four pilots trained) the ship finished first gets class name , i believe galaxy and enterprise were built at the same time , intrepid and Voyager, sovereign and enterprise. Ect
FYI real alien craft are not made this way. There is no direct translation but they are grown/fabricated for the task they are to perform with or without intites on board. So there are no seams, its very organic and down to the molecular level perfect. Amazing stuff. This is just how we would build ships from a 21st century human viewpoint. It is very human. But now you have additive manufacturing so its closer! From a humans perspective in this timeline you should be "printing" out ships. No human interaction.
In the reboot movies, it was made reasonably obvious, if not clear, that Starfleet vessels warp drives could be used as lift engines. Because of Warp's warping of space time, and so manipulating gravity in a local area, they can lift the ship via literal anti-gravity. This was however brought into some question during the ending sequences fighting the Vengeance Class in "Into Darkness", where the Enterprise was able to save itself from falling to Earth with JUST its thrusters? This is however NOT the case for the Original Continuity where, despite no semblance of actual thrust is being used, warp capable shuttles and warp capable starships, usually those capable of make planetside landings, are NEVER said or say they are using their warp engines as lift engines in some capacity. Especially since these ships have little to NO aerodynamic functionality AT ALL.
Also remember that the Enterprise in Into Darkness had suffered major system failures due to the vengeances' attack at warp. The vengeance is a huge ship designed to find weaknesses and exploit them so it is logical to assume that the only sytsems that were still fully operational were the thrusters.
Of course, the laws of physics make it reasonably obvious *and* clear that if you can build a spacecraft in zero-g instead of a planetary gravity well, you should probably go ahead and do that so you don't waste amounts of energy measurable in Hiroshimas getting it out of said gravity well when you didn't need to in the first place. 😛
I watched a video of a ship being assembled by a 3D Printer, and can help but think that in the future, replicators would be used to assemble ships like that, essentially a transporter-based 3D Printer.
0:30 Ive put some thought into this. I believe to have the power of replication is not enough. For instance i can give you a 5 axis CNC machine and i can say make me a rocket sleeve. To which you would say to me "umm how" I think a replicator would function in the same way. You need instructions on how to use the machine first. But then you need instructions for the part or in this case energy to mass conversion. You need a recepie for that conversion. So i think these higher level materials like polyduranide and perhaps latinum have a composition that as of yet cannot be replicated. Id then put into cannon R&D facilities working on these efforts. I think that's how replicators will work once we break energy to matter conversion. Once you get that you need to tell the machine how you want the energy converted to mass and that will be another trick.
