Topic: SFC Technical Manual

[Bernard Guignard]

   A question on the starship modeler forum  has got me thinking. The individuals question was what are the dimensions
of a Mirak DD.  I went into the various SFC Manuals that I have on hand and realized most of the ships materal have no
basic technical specifications for modeling purposes.
  Perhaps we as a community could correct this matter by creating a tech manual sectionto the dynaverse.
 If I imported the Mirak DD model into g-max are there tools that I could use to determine its length width and height.  I don't use g-max too often
so I'm pretty clueless to its abilities. 
I remember back when I was a Heavy SFB Player I tried to create a system to calculate ship mass by  counting the number of  boxes on an
ssd and assigning specific mass numbers to specific systems. It worked to a point but you had to fudge the numbers at time to make some
of it make sense.  I think that I still have some of the basic premises that I worked with on paper some where.

[Starfox1701]

Well modern tech manuals discribe the Miranda as weighing 655,000 tons with 25% of that being the warp necelles. D7 K'T'inga masses 760,000 tons, the B'rel class BOP masses 236,000 tons, and Excelsior masses 2,350,000 tons the necelles tacking 35% of that. Thats 4 well known and documented TMP era ships. Could be a great base for exstrapalating other tonage estamates.

[Bonk]

I am interested in this idea. Makes me think physics engines... Not sure I could actually use it, nor would it be traditional SFC (re:existing turn-modes), but maybe someday. Regardless, that level of detail is perfect for SFC grognards however it might be presented.

[762_XC]

That is way off from the Franz Josef tech manual, which SFB is based heavily off of. That has a Constitution class at 195,000 MT IIRC.

[FoaS_XC]

Franz Joseph has it at 190,000 MT - close enough. *Keeps a copy right next to his desk ^_^*

Back when I tried making my own version of SFB-lite (which turned out to be not so lite), I had used SFB ships as a basis. I had tried calculating some important values from what we knew about SFB ships. Values like mass, Maximimum angular acceleration and speed, things like that. I might still have the excel file somewhere.

[Bernard Guignard]

With the Federation ships there is not much of a problem we have enough examples that we have a good base
line to develop overall system masses. its when you deal with  Gorn and Kzin who are larger than typical humanoid
and races Like andromedan who we have no idea what they look like come issues with ship masses and sizes
though for Gorn and Kzin I'd say an over all increase of 5% should cover it they are not much larger than typical
Humanoid.
             

[762_XC]

The overall mass should be roughly similar for similarly classed ships. Hydrans are about half the size of Gorns, but their heavy cruisers are not half sized.

Counting boxes on the SSD will probably give you as good an approximation of relative mass as anything else.

[FoaS_XC]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm........

[Starfox1701]

I like the newer numbers better cause the work better with the Galaxies stated mass of 4,500,000 tons and the Venture refit's 5,100,000 tons

[762_XC]

Like them or not, SFB's source material is Franz Josef.

[Terradyhne]

i think the size of a ship depends on the average deck height and the size of all the equipment aboard. A Gorn ship must not be bigger than a Federation one, only because a Gorn is bigger, look at the Enterprise Mirror episode where the Gorn Slaar is not even filling a whole "Human" floors height and in the SFC manual is stated that the Gorn males are at a average height of 2m and the females at a average of 2,5m. Why depending so much on SFB stats, SFC is not a overall copy of SFB it uses settings and those weapons and systems stats but not the complete design characteristics.

[Bernard Guignard]

I'm glad that theres some discussion going.    I searched for the paper work  that I put my premises down but only found some
draft material regarding the mass calculations for some klingon Vessels the B1 battleship and N6 based on primitive SSDs that
I did up    I'll have to go through some other items to see If I kept any of that material. 

[Klingon Fanatic]

This is a good topic.

I never understood why ships using identical warp, impulse and (weapon) systems varied so wildly in Trek.

I think FASA learned from this with its Trek game and actually applied those lessons to Battletech.

I like the idea of having a standard yardstick for all these Trek ships...

[Bernard Guignard]

Well the whole idea in the Starfleet universe is that  while the Klingons  Romulans Kzinti etc are using Different Technologies
for Beam weapons. The Damage effects and Transmission are similar known federation weapons technologies IE Phasers.
hence they use the different Phaser classifications for all beam weapons.  Heavy weapons seem to take a different tact.

By the way I pulled the Mirak ZDD into gmax and read the Little measuring grid below its telling me that the ship
is either 420 Meters or ft long    with comes in at approx 150 meters or ft    I tried applying the Mod size
class of 5.34 to the model but its not making any sense to me.  I'm going to need some help.  perhaps I should pull out
the Kzinti SFB Technical manual  materail based on the Starline 2200 miniatures that I have and work off of that for some
of these ships

 Thanks

[FoaS_XC]

Like them or not, SFB's source material is Franz Josef.

Doesn't mean we should throw out everything else - Gotta take it all in, assign weights to certain points of data, and see what fits best.

[Bernard Guignard]

I found the sheet that I used for calculating  ship mass    One thing I noted was lack of warp engine masses but I think what I did for that was use
FASA's warp engine chart's and find the Nearest Equivalant warp engine with similar power output to get a mass reading
I'll have to recreate the sheet in some form.  Here's what I was using for weapons  all numbers in Metric tons  note that there are no
X-ships weapons  I didn't get that far in refining the process
Weapons:
Phas 1 (old)       450         Photon Torp   160 / bank of 2         Disrupter  -22      600 per bank of 1    DIS/DEV     550
Phas 1 (New)     300         Plasma   R      750                         Stasis Field Gen   190                        Hanger      500
Phas 2               180                      S      350                         OPT-Wea-MT      10                          P.P.D         650
Phas 3               150                      G      400                         Hellbore              500
Phas 4               1000                    F      225                          Fusion beam       450
Phas G               170                     D      10                            EXSPHGEN          200
Phas M****       600        Disrupter +22  800 /bank of one      TRAC/REP           250

**** Mega phaser of my own making

I even found the sheets that I did calculations for ship Mass on various ships Like the Hydran DN, Ranger, Horseman, Lancer and Hunter
this stuff was worked on back in the Late 1980's   

Too much time has gone over the bridge

[Starfox1701]

Nice a good start

[FoaS_XC]

Here's the problem I had, maybe you can have fun with it.

First a couple of assumptions:
1) SFC propulsion is not Warp, but rather with Impulse engines that the Warp Core powers (which is represented by Warp boxes).
2) The Franz Joseph number for mass of the enterprise is correct: 190,000 metric tons
3) According to SFB: 1 hex is 10,000 km
4) IIRC SFB says: 1 turn is 1 minute
5) ships in SFB have an acceleration of 10 hexes per turn.
 - meaning that the ship can increase its speed by 10 hexes per turn per turn.
6) An impulse drive is essentially an efficient Ion Engine

walk through the math with me here.

FCA can get up to top speed (30 hexes per turn; dropping the last 1 for ease of math for now; or 300,000 km/t or 5,000 km/s) in 3 turns, or 180 seconds.

Acceleration = ( desired Velocity - Initial velocity ) / time
Acceleration = 5,000 km/s / 180 seconds.
Acceleration = 27,778 m/s/s (or 27.8 km/s/s)

So...

Thrust  = Mass * Acceleration
Thrust = 190,000,000 kg * 27,778 m/s/s
Thrust = 5,277,820,000,000 N (or 5,277,820 Meganewtons)

That's really damn high.
Let's put this into real-world terms.
A hypothetical fusion reactor puts out about 1000 MW (using theoretical numbers from ITER)
VASIMR, a real-world plasma drive, puts out 1N of thrust for every 100 kw it gets. I'll even assume that Impulse drives are 10 times as efficient as VASIMR and put out 1N for every 10 kw it gets.

Assuming that the Thrust to Input curve of the VASIMR (and by extension our theoretical Impulse drive) is linear, if we put it one Fusion Reactors worth of power, we get about 100 KN worth of thrust.

Since one "point" of power from an Impulse reactor is the same amount as one "point" from the warp reactor, we can assume that each Warp Box produces a similar amount of energy (the increased number of boxes represents both higher output and how resilient it is to damage).
So lets dump all 36 "points" of power the F-CA produces into the impulse engine - an amount coming out to about 36,000 Megawatts (30 warp boxes, 4 impulse boxes and 2 AWR boxes; this even ignores the SFB rule that only Warp power can be used for movement).

with all 36,000 MW thrown into our theoretical impulse drive we get a thrust of 3,600 MN - only about 0.0006821% of what we established as the required impulse engine output as.

and thats when I said "enough of trying to figure this out today" >.<

Perhaps Tus, who is an actual rocket surgeon, can come in and see if I've screwed the pooch in my math.

EDIT: Even if we technobabble handwave stuff by using some sort of sub-warp coil to reduce apparent mass in the impulse deck, I don't like the numbers that it would have to tweak the mass by, we're talking having to multiply the mass by 0.00001 or so for it to start to work

[Strat]

I read that and was in awe of all the thought you put into that.

And then my head hurt..

[FoaS_XC]

Welcome to my brain....