Topic: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....  (Read 6341 times)

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Offline Raven Night

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UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« on: June 21, 2007, 09:56:52 pm »
Ok, here is the Leopard, again directly from a drawn concept of mine. I think it turned out reasonably well, though I still have to tweak the nacelle struts some.

This ship sits around the size of the intrepid, and is intended as it's replacement within the 3rd fleet. It carries some of the internals of the intrepid, nova, and the defiant. Not the quickest ship in the fleet...top warp speed is Warp 9.2...but very fast at impulse, with good armor, decent sheilding and excellent firepower for it's class. This ship can take on vessels in the destroyer class and can survive the encounter.

This is not, however, meant as a scout...more like a general patrol craft, or a ship to round out a battle group and provide escort to weaker vessels. This vessel rarely operates on it's own, and does have a cloaking device, though it is not as effective as other ships of this class in the fleet...more attention was paid to the sensor cloak system, making this ship the best ship in it's class in attack-avoidance. This ship is tough to hit, and can outrun a torpedo at impulse.

Armor is concentrated on its fore quarter. Now on to the pics.
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Offline Rod ONeal

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #1 on: June 21, 2007, 10:47:26 pm »
Nice design, but what happened to the last one you were working on here? It was looking good and then nothing :huh:
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Offline Norsehound

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #2 on: June 22, 2007, 01:22:55 am »
Looks like an excellent aerodynamic escort to cover your saucer when it makes ground assaults. Other than voyager, I don't know of any federation starships designed specifically for atmospheric flight.

See my comments in your other thread about the cloaking device(s). Is this for your own continuity?

Regardless, like the Ares, I like this design despite my dislike for most TNG designs. I'm interested to see what she (and the ares) look like finished. :)

Offline Raven Night

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #3 on: June 22, 2007, 03:39:59 am »
Nice design, but what happened to the last one you were working on here? It was looking good and then nothing :huh:

I'm still working on that one....right now I'm stuck on whether or not I want it to be a sep ship....im leaning toward no.
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Offline Star Dragon

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #4 on: June 22, 2007, 04:55:14 pm »
Oh man, that designs screams "Fighter!" at me for some reason... ;D

  If so inclined, how about succumbing to my madness and stock your ARES with a varient of this as a (small) Marine Fighter compliment?

Regardless, sweet!!!
 

Offline Raven Night

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #5 on: June 24, 2007, 04:21:02 pm »
Oh man, that designs screams "Fighter!" at me for some reason... ;D

  If so inclined, how about succumbing to my madness and stock your ARES with a varient of this as a (small) Marine Fighter compliment?

Regardless, sweet!!!
 

I could maybe incorporate this into the saucer somehow, to expand further on the sep concept ala Prom, but I think that some of the other meshes I am working on would work better for the Ares.
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Offline Adonis

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #6 on: June 24, 2007, 09:11:30 pm »
This ship is tough to hit, and can outrun a torpedo at impulse.

Isn't that a bit of an overkill?
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Offline Raven Night

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #7 on: June 25, 2007, 02:55:54 am »
This ship is tough to hit, and can outrun a torpedo at impulse.

Isn't that a bit of an overkill?

I dont think so....mainly because its a design requirement. This ship has to avoid being hit in order to match ships one class higher than its own...if you take out its impulse engines, it is in trouble.
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Offline Adonis

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #8 on: June 25, 2007, 03:11:46 am »
This ship is tough to hit, and can outrun a torpedo at impulse.

Isn't that a bit of an overkill?

I dont think so....mainly because its a design requirement. This ship has to avoid being hit in order to match ships one class higher than its own...if you take out its impulse engines, it is in trouble.

Ok, but it still doesn't make sense. In order for it to keep speeds that high, the ship needs to have a constant warpfield to counter the relativity paradox since she'll have to do near warp factor 1 in order to achieve that. You don't even need to take out the impulse engine on her, the warp coils (which we all know how fragile are) are enough, and the crew will have a time paradox trouble coupled with enemy ship fire. I'd rather take a slower, but maneuverable ship personally (like the Defiant for instance).
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Offline darkthunder

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #9 on: June 25, 2007, 04:30:54 pm »
Indeed. The closer you get to the speed of light, without actually traveling at the speed of light, causes a higher risk of a temporal paradox. While mere moments would seam to pass for the people on the ship, outside the ships warpfield minutes, if not hours might pass by depending on how long you travel at such high velocity. No ship in Trek was designed to go at the speed of light (or even close to the speed of light) without crossing over into subspace, where the laws of physics dont apply in the same manner.

OK, that sounded a bit too much of Technobabble, but it sounds reasonable to me.
// Darkthunder

Offline Raven Night

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #10 on: June 25, 2007, 05:59:16 pm »
I see your point, and im open to making changes in the bio....ill just make a final point.

This is assuming that torpedos travel at close to the speed of light.

Here is a quote from EAS (A site I like to use often)...

As it looks on screen, most notably in "Star Trek: The Final Frontier", the photon torpedoes always need several seconds from the launch to the impact. If the target is several kilometers away, their speed would be only a few thousand kilometers per hour, not faster than a present-day missile. Well, we have to take into account the "dramaturgic" close distance of the fighting ships too (see further below). Still, the time of several seconds to the impact remains, enough in my opinion to target the approaching torpedo with the phasers and destroy it. It seems we have to accept both the facts that the target is usually shown closer than it actually is and, in addition, photon torpedoes are slower than they should be.

There are no canon facts established for the speed of photon torpedoes, except for the bits of technononsense crammed into tech manuals. The formulas do not work, and that is actually intentional, since they are just there for show. Instead, we have screen evidence....though simplified, this is how it goes....

Torpedos can miss, ships can move out of the way from the line of the torpedo and avoid impact. Even if the speed was only half of the speed of light, this would make a torp, on average, about twice the normal impulse speed (impulse speed is usually one quarter of the speed of light, and this has been established). An argument against high speed.

Torpedos can sustain warp travel when LAUNCHED at warp....and this has been established to explain whey they were used at warp in the show. So this means, if you conjecture, that a torpedo can at least sustain the speed of the launching ship. Conjecture supported by evidence.

Dramatically speaking, torpedos seem to travel only slightly faster than the ships they are attacking, otherwise we would never even see them on screen. Case in point, however, torps have been shown to travel both slow (Wrath of Khan) and fast (First Contact).

So here was my conjecture....A ship can avoid impact in three ways.......

1) At warp, increase to a warp factor beyond the speed multiple capability of the torp. This ship cannot do that, since its max warp is limited. A weakness.
2) Increase impulse speed to a factor above the speed multiple capability of the torp, depending on the speed of the launching ship. In general, any ship has the capability of outrunning a torpedo, but at max impulse for most ships (.25 SoL) torpedos can increase to, say .35. This ship can increase, temporarilly to .351, say in a straight line away from the torpedo. You could say the Defiant could do the same, perhaps. This would be only sustainable for a short period....one could say that the warp bubble sheilds the crew from the time parallax, since that has never been specifically stated on screen. Only in modern science.
3) Have a RCS system capable of instant menuvers, coupled with a burst strength for the IDF usually only reserved for Warp initiation. Gel packs could perhaps help with this, but does not explain why other lesser ships in the shows could menuver out of the way of torps.......one could argue that the lock was not conclusive, but we see ships move out of the way quite a few times.

I am contending that this ship has both 2 and 3...but if you disable the impulse drive, you remove its primary strength....menuverability.
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Offline Starforce2

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #11 on: June 26, 2007, 02:17:33 pm »
Allegedly hyperimpulse (from the aeon) allows warp manuvers much like impulse manuvers.

Torpedoes have sustainer coils. However, once they crossed into the warpfield of the targeted ship, any acceleration of said ship would also accelerate anything else inside the warpfield... (The Ent-D saucer also has sustainer coils, or atleast that's how one of the novels explained how it could coast at warp during separation, which can be infered as canon because we've seen it do that one screen, though I am not sure if sustainer coils were ever specificly mentioned on the shows as the technobabble term.)

Offline Raven Night

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #12 on: June 27, 2007, 12:33:54 am »
Right. But I still contend that the speed is limited to the speed of the ship when it launches it (which is one of the reasons you hear "accelerate to attack speed"...I think this facilitates easier menuvers, bringing impulse engines up to full power, and also gives maximum speed for the launch of torpedoes). Now, perhaps the torp could use some of it's internal fuel or workings to increase speed slightly (it would have to, otherwise it would never leave the tube after all), but overall it only goes as fast as the ship launching it.

Now, if you have a ship that can do one of two things...either travel at a faster impulse speed factor, or accelerate faster than the torpedo can compensate for, you can outrun it, or at least avoid impact.

I contend that larger ships have a harder time doing this. Smaller ships can do it much easier, and if you design a vessel properly, you can make it extremely menuverable and capable of burst speeds in the range of .35 to .5 SoL. I say the Defiant is capable of this, and so is this ship, though it is much larger...in the Defiants case, mass makes the difference, in this ship, it is massive impulse engines and the shape and configuration of the hull.
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Offline Starforce2

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #13 on: June 27, 2007, 06:33:20 pm »
you should spend as much time fixing BCU as you do on your technobabble ;D

Offline Raven Night

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #14 on: June 27, 2007, 11:54:08 pm »
Hehe, actually, I have a good fix coming up...we are looking into SMF I believe it is called. Its time to get away from PHPbb.
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Offline Raven Night

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #15 on: June 28, 2007, 04:35:23 am »
I've heard alot of good stuff about it, but also that is it subject to hacking. I just need to make sure it is reasonably secure, and I could port over all of the posts and such from PHPbb.
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Offline Shadowfleet

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #16 on: June 28, 2007, 04:25:21 pm »
Wow - I like this design a lot. I think the warp structs could be bend lower to bering the nacelles closer together. It would make her look even meaner and faster. Looking forward to gvivng her a play in SFC3. 

Offline Raven Night

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #17 on: June 29, 2007, 07:27:43 pm »
I could try that....perhaps drop them down a little more and shorten the struts a bit. I made them longer than usual per the design, but the front view does look a bit odd....maybe out of scale.
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Offline Starforce2

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #18 on: July 01, 2007, 12:22:48 am »
have you tried attaching the bottom of the nacelles to the struts instead of the side?

Offline Raven Night

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Re: UFOP Leopard class heavy cruiser WIP....
« Reply #19 on: July 01, 2007, 02:01:37 am »
I could try that........you mean "galaxy-like"?
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