This is why the Borg uses cubes and spheres.
And whatever that shape from Picard was.
That was the Mass Effect Citadel, obviously. These Citadel ships are the borg’s perfect artistic form . . or something (?)
Lmao. I thought it was a flower, but it totally looks like the Citadel, ngl.
For a ship that never needs aerodynamic control, any shape at all will do so why do they all look like airplanes?
The Borg are the only ones who seem to get this.
Realistically their does need to be some consideration but the medium they travel isn’t air, but the occasional speck of dust, hydrogen atom, and other small stuff. It’s not much but for interstellar travel there are still considerations needed, namely reducing your cross sectional area in the direction of travel. Long and thin gives you less drag since it hits less stuff.
Regardless the airplane looks doesn’t make much sense anyway :)
Isn’t this due to the warp field? They ummm, have less warp drag?
Not a trekkie, do they ever land in atmosphere on these ships? You would want aerodynamics for that to reduce drag and thus heat, but I’m not familiar enough to know.
I guess they probably have good thermal protections with their future tech, though.
Voyager does a few times. The Enterprise D did…once.
There are some alternate timeline shenanigans I will not speak of here.
If you’ve got shields and antigravity, do you still need aerodynamics?
The ships can land and take off at least some of them can but they don’t fly around in the atmosphere they just go up and down they’re either on the ground or they’re in space but they can’t really manoeuvre.
Except for that one episode of Voyager where they just kind of forgot about that, but I think that was hand-waved away by saying that they just made the shields into a bubble and so essentially from the air’s perspective the ship was a sphere. That’s apparently what the shuttlecraft do too, which is why they fall like a brick whenever they’re shot down.
I was thinking more about atmospheric entry and exit than flying around in the atmosphere itself… but a bubble would be weird because fast-moving spheres would create pretty unstable drag and induce spin, iirc.
They don’t even need to fly nose-forward. The Enterprise could exit warp at any damn orientation it wanted. Blasting across the alpha quadrant nacelles-first, like Powdered Toast Man.
They actually do need to fly nose first, believe it or not! The warp bubble created by the nacelle has a front side and a back side. Essentially it bunches up space behind the ship and thins it out in front of the ship, turning space itself into a sort of wave that the ship surfs forward on.
This is what I remember from the TNG Tech Manual anyway
This is why I appreciate the scene in Undiscovered Country where Kronos One glides into view, seeming to align itself to the Enterprise’s orientation.
I’m not following. Ships would travel along the galactic plane, therefore they’d generally be in the same orientation.
Depends on the distance being traveled by both ships. The Milky Way is 1000 light years deep, so there’s a lot of vertical room to maneuver. Mentioned locations at real star systems, like Wolf 359, are definitely not all on the same plane in any way. Possibly more relevant, though, is that ‘up’ isn’t really much of a thing. Star systems can (and do) have their axis tilted significantly off of the galactic axis, so even if you define ‘up’ within a star system and orient your ship that way, you may wind up tilted weird when you arrive at the next system due to it having a different ‘up’. You could define ‘up’ by the galactic axis, but that would still only apply to the one organization; there’s no reason for the UFP, Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, and Dominion to all agree that one side of the galaxy is the top and the other is the bottom, but they do anyway. Humans couldn’t even agree on which way to orient maps of our own planet for centuries.
You guys keep this up and I might delete all my other subs.
Well the guy is wrong, we can’t just believe it.
I can argue the metaphysics of 3rd or 3.5 edition D&D magic for aeons if you’d like. That was damn near the point of most of the sessions of a couple campaigns that I played in. We ended up deciding that a level 1 Cleric, level 1 Wizard, and a level 5 engineer would be a damn near unstoppable force because the Engineer could tell the Cleric where to use a Summon Water cantrip, and tell the Wizard what form to hold the water in using the Shape Water cantrip.
We also ended up discussing the ramifications of a spell that could turn your target into a black hole. Here’s a hint, unless you have used at least the “Nailed to the Sky” Epic Spell, or what we developed, namely, “Nailed to the Star” as the first part of your spell, (this puts you in a stellarsynchronos orbit around the nearest star at a distance of 1,000,000 miles above the surface of the stars atmosphere. ≈2,000,000 KM.) you’re going to blow yourself, and a significant portion of the world around you to smithereens. Nailed to the Star allows one to use the magic to transport every bit of even a God, Elder God, or Titan to a single place as long as that place isn’t going to be a Prime Material for even the next turn, which they won’t. In a Gods case, they, their soul, their avatars, their “phylactery,” (aka magic items that could allow them to be resurrected) and anything else that could have ever been part of that being, are instantaneously teleported into a dimensional anchor. That dimensional anchor prevents magical or psionic beings from leaving with any teleport or plane shift like ability. As soon as ALL of the target has been shifted into a place that is almost guaranteed to be empty space, a wall of force that is spherical and 1,000 miles in diameter forms, and instantly collapses everything in it down below the Schwartzchild radius, creating a black hole that will explode in less than a second.
Needless to say, we ended that campaign with our party deciding who the next pantheon would be.
well, if they are all using the galactic plane, but have different standards, maybe we just didn’t know that they’re always showing klingon ships upside down.
Sure but there are star systems that are above and below the exact ecliptic of the galactic plane. We’re not on the ecliptic that’s why you can’t see the milky way as well in the southern hemisphere because we’re kind of below it.
If a ship was travelling from Sol to Arcturus it would travel up (relative to the galactic plane) because we’re slightly below it and it’s considerably above it. The galaxy is very thin compared to its width, but it’s still of thousands of light years high.
I thought of that. Ships would also be traveling great distances, and account for elevation enroute. It’s not like you’d get to the Enterprise then hang a hard up turn to meet their elevation. You’d travel at an angle.
I can travel the galactic plane with my spaceship oriented any of 360°. Straight is straight.
What I don’t understand is why they were even close enough for the image. If subspace comms are a thing, a solar system length may be just fine.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen combat in Star Trek that takes place over a distance of more than a couple of hundred kilometres.
What’s the range on a phaser or a torpedo, can it even go that far.
Long range weapons are so rare in Star Trek that when they do turn up they’re basically what the whole episode is about.
If you were, say, across a solar system from a ship that fired a torpedo at you, you’d have that much more time to maneuver (or fire phasers) to destroy it. So for those maybe it’s really about effective range - you have to be pretty close to the target simply because they’d just step out of the way.
Also, I think it’s a reasonable possibility phasers would lose energy over distance. Otherwise, those missed shots would travel across the galaxy and blow up someone in the Gamma quadrant or something.
Don’t forget about orbital mechanics. For a rendez vous between two ships you need a lot of maneuvers in opposite directions, it’s not like shown in movies where the fly like airplanes. If two ships are close to each other they will likely be in different orientations and it would be a waste of energy to face each other since communications still happen at thens of thousands of kilometers of distance
Bingo, ships travel in a specific way so their paths are more or less predictable.
Actually, space in general is mostly 2 dimensional, in that all the interesting stuff generally takes place on some sort of almost flat plane. A star system is generally on a plane, so is the galactic system, and for most planet+moons too. They just tend to be different planes so for ease of communication you will probably just align your idea of down with whatever the most convenient plane is. This of course is ignoring what gravity down is, as that changes as thrust does.
And as for ship alignment, yeah no one is going to worry about that till its time to dock, at which point the lighter vessel will likely change their orientation since its easier and takes less energy. Spaceships are not going to be within human sight range of each other most of the time, even being in relatively the same are. Space too big and getting ships close to each other is dangerous!
But in media that fucks with people’s idea of meeting and seeing each other so for convenience of not confusing the audience you don’t see that level of realism often.
The galactic plane is 1000 light years deep.
Computer, zoom in and enhance on that vessel.
I guess that’s implied in the command “on screen”
You beat me to it.
“You guys are the worst”
We know
I knew this would be here
Their pattern indicates two dimensional thinking…
I think in this context no ship would ever approach nose-to-nose. That’s just for the viewers to see. I’d wager no two ships would come into less than around 1-5 km of each other if they weren’t lining up flight paths for shuttles or docking. It’s not like they need to “stand up” next to each other and “talk”.
They would probably have formations they would assume while in transit or stopped, so it would probably be normal to cross paths with a formation flying upside down or in a perpendicular axis.
In case of just meeting and talking, they’d probably do it from wherever they happen to be, very far from each other, flying towards different destinations.
Have you all forgotten that they directly addressed this in the show? https://youtu.be/Q9W7pvOLxmQ
Right, so, let’s talk naval ships from the age of sail. There’s no need for two sailing ships to face each other also, but that’s inevitably how ships will meet on the ocean. The HMS Enterprise spots the HMS Defiant. They plot a course towards the Defiant. Defiant will eventually spot the Enterprise, and will alter its course. Both ships will meet with their bows facing each other. Same logic applies with spaceships, with two issues:
- There’s actually no need for two spaceships to meet in order to talk or transfer people. I’ll hand wave that away saying that’s standard procedure, as the cost in time and energy to go from the beaming range to visual range is negligible, and even in the 24th century it’s a good idea for ships in the middle of the vastness of space be as close to one another as possible in case of emergency.
- While both ships will change their pitch and yaw to face each other, there’s no need to change the roll. This can also be hand waved - while there’s probably a standard, absolute “up” (say, using the spin axis of the galaxy) altering the roll will allow both ships to use the same subjective “up”.
