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That Works posted:My distant memory of it was they were launching ships full of people into the sun or something Yeah, that was one of the bad guy plans; they did NOT shy away from the genocide aspects of the bad guys (as appropriate to their blatant fascism), though they did make a point of how human bigotry had helped build said beliefs among them.
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Dec 14, 2023 02:36
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Been looking at Ratchet and Clank lately. It's a fun setting with a lot of space travel, a lot of jumping around between planets. Very cartoony. I like the green ship best. Has a nice vibe, interesting looking but utilitarian, not a fancy go-fast look to it like a lot of ships try to be.  The first ship in the game is also kinda cute. Real bugeyed look to it.  There's a whole thing where Ratchet needs Clank to serve as a robotic navigation system for all his ships that is only relevant in the first game and never again.
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Jan 8, 2024 05:45
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 The Balth class was a blurry minor CGI shape in the background of big fleet shots in Discovery S1, but it got promoted to playable and a name in Star Trek Online. I've come around on it being kind of charmingly dumpy and ugly, like a freighter (in-game it's a science vessel) or other civilian workhorse.
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Jan 24, 2024 13:32
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SlothfulCobra posted:
This has such a fun Calvin and Hobbes kind of look to it, real neat.
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Jan 24, 2024 16:48
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Cythereal posted:
I don't know if there is a real answer for this (I'm sure there's at least some sort of answer, there always is in franchises with extensive fan bases). Does Star Trek even have freighters? Do they just use replicators for most things? I guess if it was something really big, that makes sense. Otherwise wouldn't it be easier to just ship a replicator than a bunch of manufactured goods? I guess it might make sense for the people who want "real stuff" (like the real booze the Trek crews always seem to be jonesing for). Or illegal stuff, but that's a bit more clandestine, not something you would mass purpose build ships for. So, are large freighters even a thing in Star Trek? I don't mean "we put a few big boxes of stuff in the cargo hold in the back, here's your storage unit full of smuggled disruptors, some rare art items, and a few cases of blood wine" or whatever, just ships entirely dedicated to moving freight. If they aren't shipping specific items, would the freighters basically just be giant garbage trucks, taking raw materials to places where they aren't easy to get? I really don't know, never thought about it until now due to the above post, but I'm guessing someone here has an answer or a few.
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Jan 24, 2024 23:20
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Yes, there are freighters. They show up in several TNG episodes (alien species, to be fair, but the Federation must have them too). Transporters have distance limitations; you can’t transport stuff between planets for example. I assume the power requirements also go up based on distance. Edit: thinking about the rules as I understand them you should be able to make a giant transporter relay though; basically a telegraph in space but you’re sending matter encoded as energy. You would need A LOT of intermediate buoys though; space is big. Maybe it’s feasible for planet-to-moon transport. david_a fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Jan 24, 2024 |
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Jan 24, 2024 23:27
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in the TNG era transporter range is usually around 50,000km or so. Edit: Also teleporters aren't just sending energy either. It's energized sub-atomic particles. Also replicators can handle most things anyone would need or want, but they still take a fair bit of power and there are some things it just can't replicate. Complicated crystaline formations, living thing, stuff like that. Also replicators take a fair bit of infrastructure setup. They're not just printing stuff out of energy. So some frontier colony might have them for a lot of things, but durable goods they're going to want shipped out to them.
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Jan 24, 2024 23:46
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Twenty Four posted:So, are large freighters even a thing in Star Trek? I don't mean "we put a few big boxes of stuff in the cargo hold in the back, here's your storage unit full of smuggled disruptors, some rare art items, and a few cases of blood wine" or whatever, just ships entirely dedicated to moving freight. Yup, they show up a lot in DS9. DS9 strongly implies that industrial scale replicators require a lot of power and trained crews to operate, so freighters haul stuff wherever local replicators aren't available at whatever scale is needed.
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Jan 25, 2024 01:23
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Cool, thanks!
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Jan 25, 2024 01:52
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Cythereal posted:Yup, they show up a lot in DS9. DS9 strongly implies that industrial scale replicators require a lot of power and trained crews to operate, so freighters haul stuff wherever local replicators aren't available at whatever scale is needed. I'm picturing a Starfleet acapella group working in shifts to make those crates you see in the shuttle bays.
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Jan 25, 2024 02:30
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In the Earth's earlier days in Star Trek, before they had faster warp drives, there were long-term freighters that travelled at like warp 1.5 and transit took so long that families grew up on the ships as their own little isolated communities. There was a guy who grew up on one of those ships in Enterprise. Barely anything is done with them in the show, but it was a neat idea.
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Jan 25, 2024 04:05
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Twenty Four posted:So, are large freighters even a thing in Star Trek? And later during the war she was liaison between freighter convoys and their military escorts, which shows that shipping real stuff was still significant enough. Kasidy Yates, captain of the SS Xhosa. Industrial scale replicators destined for new colonies were a notable cargo in her episodes.
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Jan 25, 2024 10:05
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In TOS there was entire class of starships that were designed to move around Starfleet standard container pods (which could contain cargo or people).
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Jan 26, 2024 21:33
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SlothfulCobra posted:In the Earth's earlier days in Star Trek, before they had faster warp drives, there were long-term freighters that travelled at like warp 1.5 and transit took so long that families grew up on the ships as their own little isolated communities.  Presto posted:In TOS there was entire class of starships that were designed to move around Starfleet standard container pods (which could contain cargo or people). Ptolmeys. Basically locomotives.  The tubes could be cargo pods, tankers, or 'starliners' with windows and stuff. Never actually shown in the show, but from the expanded stuff. Resurrected in recent later-era stuff with the Wallenbergs in Star Trek Picard.  The hero ship from Picard Season 1 was a civilian cargo container tow-er, although we never saw that onscreen    That said, most of the freighters we've seen on screen in trek aren't train-type. In part because usually for a freighter they'd just modify a preexisting generic ship model. So they just look like scrungly box ships. Like Kassidy's freighter Xhosa on DS9  
MikeJF fucked around with this message at 10:46 on Jan 28, 2024 |
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Jan 27, 2024 09:38
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Star Trek Online also has a playable ship that's explicitly supposed to be a militarized freighter, the Seneca class. Those boxy things in the midsection between the saucer and engineering section are supposed to be detachable, modular pods that let the Seneca serve as a multipurpose ship, with the fluff noting that most Senecas are Starfleet military freighters. The version available to players, however, had the pods exchanged for hangars, turning the Seneca into an escort carrier. It's loosely based on the Hiawatha class from Discovery and the London class (which explicitly was a freighter) from Star Trek: Armada. 
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Jan 27, 2024 14:58
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I liked the Clydesdale-class freighter from Klingon Academy
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Jan 27, 2024 19:36
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Cythereal posted:Star Trek Online also has a playable ship that's explicitly supposed to be a militarized freighter, the Seneca class. oh i love that! drat, what a cool ship. I love a good freighter, and I rarely see one that looks both very Starfleet and very freighter. That design communicates both very effectively.
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Jan 28, 2024 02:42
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For some reason I want to see one of those full of animals that they're bringing somewhere. Then they land and open the doors and all the animals wander out.
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Jan 28, 2024 03:33
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Brawnfire posted:For some reason I want to see one of those full of animals that they're bringing somewhere. Then they land and open the doors and all the animals wander out. Yeah, that's a cool ship! Now moving livestock is a pretty sensible use for a Star Trek space freighter I didn't think of. I don't think you can just replicate a cow or whatever. The "but replicators take a lot of energy and are hard to operate" makes less sense, but it's okay for a cop out excuse I guess. They might be hard to maintain, I can buy that, but the operation is just some doofus going "tea, earl grey, hot" so I'm pretty sure if you can either talk or press some buttons you're covered unless it breaks. The power part, okay they take a lot of energy, but I'm assuming building, crewing, and maintaining a starship freighter does too. Maybe less overall, since it can service more places, but even with warp speeds it's going to be slower than a replicator. I'm thinking of like the whole premise of Voyager being it was going to take them their entire lives to get home, then doing that over and over (though probably on a smaller scale) as part of a supply chain. I would guess you would want at least some sort of replicator manufacturing outpost every so far for distribution of stuff even with freighters, supplementing the "can't be replicated stuff". It still all made me think of other funny stuff, like replicators replicating more replicators like how people use cheaper (in comparison) 3D printers to make themselves better 3D printers. Also, I still like the idea of space freighters being giant garbage trucks hauling literal trash to places so they have raw materials for their replicators to use, lol.
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Jan 28, 2024 10:03
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Twenty Four posted:The "but replicators take a lot of energy and are hard to operate" makes less sense, but it's okay for a cop out excuse I guess. They might be hard to maintain, I can buy that, but the operation is just some doofus going "tea, earl grey, hot" so I'm pretty sure if you can either talk or press some buttons you're covered unless it breaks. Per STO's fluff for some side missions, one of the main uses for freighters is colony support, hauling supplies and goods to new colonies that aren't yet self-sufficient. This game, at least, posits that it does take a while before a fledgling colony develops to the point where it can cover its own basic needs, so freighter convoys are endlessly busy supplying the frontiers of the galactic powers with resources and finished goods from the developed core worlds.
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Jan 28, 2024 13:59
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Twenty Four posted:Yeah, that's a cool ship! I hope the cargo pods are outfitted as holodecks to keep the cows happy and stress free during the trip. like they think they're still just in a field somewhere. edit: have realised that's basically what the Enterprise crew did to the primitive villagers in the episode with Worf's human brother. Cerv fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Jan 28, 2024 |
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Jan 28, 2024 14:02
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I thought I remembered something about livestock in the Franz Joseph Technical Manual’s blueprints for the tug pods, but nope, nothing in there. The_Doctor fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jan 28, 2024 |
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Jan 28, 2024 17:16
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Cythereal posted:Star Trek Online also has a playable ship that's explicitly supposed to be a militarized freighter, the Seneca class. And the one we saw that it's based on, the earlier Hiawatha from Discovery, is a medical ship, with some of the containers able to drop to surfaces as field hospital facilities. But yeah the general design is very much leaning into the idea of a generic ship where you can outfit the pods with whatever function you need.  They built a kitbashed tanker for DS9 but that never made it on screen:  And there's been a bunch of depictions of the Kobayashi Maru (neutronic fuel carrier) but all the recent ones are pretty similar, here's STO's - the main body of the ship is a common starship layout with extra cargo bays, and then there's external pods to carry the hazardous neutronic fuel below.   MikeJF fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jan 28, 2024 |
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Jan 28, 2024 17:34
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Also in the original series, there are the Antares type freighters, which pop up a few times: crewed version, with a little habitat pod on the front  And fully automated version, without the front pod.  
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Jan 28, 2024 17:53
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MikeJF posted:And the one we saw that it's based on, the earlier Hiawatha from Discovery, is a medical ship, with some of the containers able to drop to surfaces as field hospital facilities. But yeah the general design is very much leaning into the idea of a generic ship where you can outfit the pods with whatever function you need. And the ship that is based on, the London from Star Trek: Armada, is a mining ship/freighter. In motion in the game, the bottom of the saucer section contains the mining equipment, which then moves the excavated ore into the cargo holds (which visibly light up in the game as the ship fills).
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Jan 28, 2024 18:03
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My headcanon for Klingon ships is that they have to keep a lot of livestock onboard so that they can have fresh meat for long journeys. Although presumably smaller ships can probably make do with smaller bloodworm vats.
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Jan 28, 2024 20:46
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Twenty Four posted:Also, I still like the idea of space freighters being giant garbage trucks hauling literal trash to places so they have raw materials for their replicators to use, lol. CW: This is still funny, but it's badly dated in women's and trans representation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOhOWuooYVY
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Jan 28, 2024 21:03
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Twenty Four posted:Yeah, that's a cool ship! The term "industrial scale" really does make a difference, it's like being able to have a small fabrication shop in the neighborhood that can put together some products vs. a full on factory. Granted, replicators can make that little neighborhood shop incredibly capable but for something like a colony (or a small town) you run into bandwidth issues even if that little shop can make almost anything. "Tea, earl grey, hot" takes maybe ~30s to create so using that as a metric then you can realistically get only 2880 cups of tea per day per replicator and that's with it running all out with no downtime for moving tea, repairs, refilling feedstock, etc. Fine for a household, but unreasonable for a colony to rely on for their sole source of materials. So that's a good use for a freighter to bring enough stuff in one go to a colony that's just getting its infrastructure up and going. Sure you could use a replicator to make more replicators, but you need to power those machines and energy is definitely NOT a limitless resource even in Star Trek. And replicators are apparently real pigs when it comes to power consumption. Yeah the Enterprise just replicates things left and right, but those are personal level so it's like worrying about a bunk's temperature control on a nuclear aircraft carrier, the vessel is definitely over-powered enough to handle that load since it has to power much bigger draws. We never get to see the computer say "replicator usage is restricted at this time" but I bet hit happens for folks other than Picard. Lieutenant-JG Bucky is gonna have to wait for his nachos until the current crisis is past and power distribution is normalized. But even for an established colony that's just not very big, I could see them just not having the population to run infrastructure big enough to power an "industrial scale replicator" which sounds like something with a pad large enough to replicate big things like a loader bucket or an ATV or something. Them being hard to operate makes sense too because IRL big CNC machines are pretty tough to operate even if once it's all set up a rando could push the 'go' button. Aside from the actual replicating (harvester combine, john deere, blue) of an object there's programming it in if it isn't in the library, customizing the production run for the recipient (even like, I want 30 standard farm equipments vs 80), facilities are ready to handle the power draw, making sure that the logistics for managing the output is ready, etc. That's a lot going on and maybe a colony in core-ish settled space that can't run a big replicator is like small town that just can't run a factory so a semi delivers goods to the local store and so freighters stop by to deliver bigger, more complex things that aren't feasible to locally produce even if it's technically possible. Also I bet that a lot of 'freighter' traffic in developed (i.e. non-frontier colony) space is passenger traffic and moving people around. And with people comes their belongings so stowage. I like the idea of space freighters too, and I think it's fun to think through the reasons that a society with something like replicators would still cart stuff around even if those reasons are more soft and societal vs. hard technical reasons. Even in Star Trek, resources are not evenly distributed.
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Jan 29, 2024 16:27
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El Spamo posted:But even for an established colony that's just not very big, I could see them just not having the population to run infrastructure big enough to power an "industrial scale replicator" which sounds like something with a pad large enough to replicate big things like a loader bucket or an ATV or something. Them being hard to operate makes sense too because IRL big CNC machines are pretty tough to operate even if once it's all set up a rando could push the 'go' button. We actually see a small-scale vehicle replicator in Prodigy. (That one's pretty automatic but it's made very clear that the Protostar and everything on it is cutting edge in both tech and control systems.) It doesn't even vwomm the whole thing in at once, it draws a supportive scaffold and then spends a while with replicator emitters moving around the vehicle layout on arms creating elements piece by piece.
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Jan 29, 2024 16:38
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It makes sense that replicators have their limits because the post-scarcity of the Federation clearly has limits from what we see in the shows. It's strongly post-scarcity when it comes to basic necessities, fairly solidly post-scarcity when it comes to most things people could want, and not at all when it comes to things like starships and industrial replicators. Those are clearly scarce and valuable. Can't just go "Starship, Galaxy-class" to a big enough replicator, because that kind of post-scarcity would break the setting.
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Jan 29, 2024 19:17
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MikeJF posted:We actually see a small-scale vehicle replicator in Prodigy. (That one's pretty automatic but it's made very clear that the Protostar and everything on it is cutting edge in both tech and control systems.) It doesn't even vwomm the whole thing in at once, it draws a supportive scaffold and then spends a while with replicator emitters moving around the vehicle layout on arms creating elements piece by piece. Which was a kickin' rad decision, from a fight choreography perspective 
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Jan 30, 2024 01:37
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I'm a huge fan of the Andy Chambers and John Blanche work on the spaceships of Battlefleet Gothic. The designs released in this book immediately became the iconic look of spaceships in the grim darkness of the far future. Besides a unique and imposing look, there's a lot of reasons why they were and have continued to be received so well. First, the Imperial ship design is full of design elements that are doing work explaining the society and attitudes of people who built them. In the John Blanche cover art above, we can see a behemoth covered in pre-modern gun deck broadsides, with a massive armored steel prow, and a Romanesque cathedral perched on top as a bridge. It's got a huge ramming spike and a massive gilt angel figurehead. Judging by the size cues from the guns and searchlights the figurehead is at least 100 feet tall on its own. The ship is covered in greebles and spires and devotional artwork that suggest enormous size. Overall this look has been described as a flying cathedral with a cow catcher on the front and that just about sums it up. What's so great about this is the storytelling it is doing. This is not a warship design that a modern human would ever seriously propose. It is however a perfect summation of the dystopian Imperium of Man's view of the world and the purpose of a warship. It's ludicrously huge, totally unsubtle, wears its dedication to religious violence proudly, and the designers have clearly made provisions for plowing the entire thing directly into the enemy. Like the cathedrals its design deliberately emulates, this ship is a culmination of decades or hundreds of years of labor from a large community in service of a holy mission. In this case, violence against the enemies of mankind. The whole ship, from its layout to its decoration, screams that it was built by a bunch of imperialist religious fanatics.  Second, slapping cathedral and spaceship parts together creates a surprisingly big design space to play around in. As long as you've got the iconic bow, gun deck and cathedral elements, you can kind of do whatever you want with the rest of the design as far as fins, vertical arrangements, engine tubes, artwork, etc. All of the ships above are clearly part of the same fleet while not actually being the same shape. Third, Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 have perfected the art of stealing historical references in order to fill in fantasy worldbuilding, and the spaceships are no exception. BFG draws on both Age of Steam and Age of Sail references to set its looks and tell you the background of its ships.  Look familiar? While the cathedral-ship concept is pure 40K, the iconic prow and transverse bridge shape is lifted directly from pre-dreadnought battleships of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These ships were slow and carried heavy broadsides of short-ranged firepower. Just like the Imperial ships do in the game. Oh, and they have decorated ram bows.  Chaos ships, canonically older and more capable Imperial ships that were captured by the enemy, are reminiscent of the more technologically advanced dreadnought battleships. They have tall blocky, towering bridges rather than the broad pre-dreadnought-inspired cathedral bridge. They focused on a small but ultra-heavy long-range battery, just like the Chaos ships in the game. In 40K of course the more advanced ships are older, since the themes are all about decline and dystopia. The Chaos ships lack the incredible number of greebles on the Imperial designs, suggesting a more armored hull like the one below.  Andy Chambers didn't confine himself to cribbing from more recent history. The Eldar ships notably borrow shapes from Mediterranean ships, often encountered as pirates in the 16th-19th century European navies and merchants marine.   It's no coincidence that the Eldar usually show up as pirates in the space adventures of the setting, though nobody has actually proposed what they might be interested in stealing from the primitive humans. As before the design elements of the ship tell us what the people who built and operate it are like through historical references.  When the designers want to propose a ship is very old indeed they give it the tubby lines of a Spanish galleon. And then call it a galleon. Because it's old and it hauls stuff.  So as usual for the guys in Nottingham in the 1990s, they are very very good at stealing historical references from all over their favorite wargames in order to synthesize iconic designs from different eras into the second-most-popular space fantasy amalgam setting. While Lucas pretty much confines his references to the modern era, Blanche and Chambers (and no doubt Jes Goodwin also did some work for this) range much further afield to steal references for their far-future setting.
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Jan 30, 2024 02:00
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That pre-dreadnaught had a crazy gun arrangement too. Arglebargle III posted:When the designers want to propose a ship is very old indeed they give it the tubby lines of a Spanish galleon. And then call it a galleon. Because it's old and it hauls stuff. Also as a complete and total aside, I'll be sailing the NAO Trinidad south from Fernandina Beach this February. 
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Jan 30, 2024 02:48
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Is that something you can just sign up to do?
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Jan 30, 2024 04:53
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They needed crew and I happened to see their ad and, yeah I basically just volunteered
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Jan 30, 2024 05:03
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Careful you don't go aloft and furl the mainsail in a blow.
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Jan 30, 2024 07:45
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I love the lore and design of Warhammer 40k but shouldn’t the rams on their ships be angled the other way? I know it’s fantasy but the current plow shape would seem to through debris into the cathedrals/bridge.
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Jan 30, 2024 10:14
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HAmbONE posted:I love the lore and design of Warhammer 40k but shouldn’t the rams on their ships be angled the other way? I know it’s fantasy but the current plow shape would seem to through debris into the cathedrals/bridge. Everything about the way the Imperium build ships is wrong from any rational perspective. I get why people like them, but they offend my soul.
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Jan 30, 2024 11:03
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HAmbONE posted:I love the lore and design of Warhammer 40k but shouldn’t the rams on their ships be angled the other way? I know it’s fantasy but the current plow shape would seem to through debris into the cathedrals/bridge. wow sounds like someone doesn't have faith.
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Jan 30, 2024 11:04
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HAmbONE posted:I love the lore and design of Warhammer 40k but shouldn’t the rams on their ships be angled the other way? I know it’s fantasy but the current plow shape would seem to through debris into the cathedrals/bridge. Hit the debris downward? Where I can't see it? And more importanly, lose any chance of hitting it with my chainsword on the way past?
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Jan 30, 2024 11:50
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