Archive through January 28, 2011
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Captain's Log: New Fiction:
Need Fiction to match art:
Archive through January 28, 2011
Ah, yes, showing the flag...
Lieutenant, activate the starboard smoke generators and let's give them a show!
How about making it into the CVA McArthur about to crash into the Romulan Capital?
Quote:How about making it into the CVA McArthur about to crash into the Romulan Capital?
How about NOT.
... or, you could flush the fighters and make this during the Early Years. At that point the Warspite is not a GCA, but rather a YCA.
Or, instead of flushing the fighters, make them skiffs. That way you can keep them in the mix, but make them more appropriate to the Early Years.
Regardless, the ship has apparently suffered from a (D8.2)-12 warp engine critical hit. It has lost power from half of its warp engines (now dark and blowing smoke), and cannot use the other for movement. As such, it is a sitting duck and decided to use (P2.423) atmosphere flight for the incredibly nominal 1 ECM benefit (P2.51). (Sure, it is only one point, but that is better than zero, and the ship isn't going anywhere, anyway.)
At that point, any of the other scenarios outlined above can take place. The critical hit was a result of [Romulan,Orion,other] sabotage, and their allies are pressing in to take advantage of the ship's disadvantage. Or, maybe the attacker got in a "lucky shot". Whichever, it is obviously pre-scenario. The scenario is the Warspite's fight for survival.
One wonders if the "smoke" would be there at all if there were no atmospheric oxygen to make the fire burn?
I am not "inspired" by early years stuff, but if it could be modified for that, it could become the Y4 cover, where no story is really needed.
If it were to become a Y-era piece of art, one could replace the Fed fighters with a squadron of inbound Gladiator fighters (or Legate heavy fighters or Maniple bombers) launched from a base on the surface.
(It could be a ship that was "lost" during the events of Y110; though in that case, the fighters might be from a carrier instead, unless some sort of anomaly displaced the ship across the Neutral Zone and "above" some Romulan colony.)
Or you could replace the fighters with shuttlecraft.
Yup, replacing the fighters (or changing them) is easy as pie. I've been meaning to draw a shuttlecraft (such a thing would obviously be very re-usable...sitting on the ground in maps done for an RPG, sitting in the hangar bay for other drawings, etc. Definitely something I need to do, some time.)
But there are definitely a lot of possibilities, there. Don't look at the fighters as a critical part of the drawing. As I'd noted earlier, in a much earlier draft with the ship 'shot to pieces' a lot more, that area of the drawing was just flaming debris.
Drawing entirely new BIG things would be a bigger task, of course (IE., another whole ship or something). But smaller things, changing or moving things, etc...easy!
Quote:One wonders if the "smoke" would be there at all if there were no atmospheric oxygen to make the fire burn?
There may be enough oxygen venting from the ship to keep the fire going. It's only really "burning" right by the front of the engine, too. There is a huge plasma trail behind it, though, but plasma is not really 'burning'. Kind of.
Heck, realistically, it doesn't even need to be true that the engine is completely destroyed. What would, in SFB, be two or three boxes of damage could possibly cause a smoke trail like that just moments after the causal event...until the appropriate valves are shut down.
Xander: I wouldn't do any more major work until we know where this is going. We don't have to have an answer this month, or even this year. If a story shows up, and it's workable (I will let you know, don't guess) then we'll do fixes then.
BTW, you may have "added color" but it is still VERY monochromatic, something to avoid in future works.
BTW, guys, I deleted the entire "you-know-what on the surface" discussion as it was confusing new arrivals. Jean promoted this topic on facebook and I don't want them coming in cold, reading 20+ messages, and then figuring out that they boil down to "never mind".
==========
One wonders if the "smoke" would be there at all if there were no atmospheric oxygen to make the fire burn?
==========
There are many things that will "burn" and give off smoke without requiring the presence of oxygen, and things besides oxygen that will act as a oxidizer for "burning" a fuel. Given that we really have no idea what sort of "handwavium" materials are contained in a warp nacelle, it doesn't seem too unreasonable to suppose that there are materials in there which, when mixed, will combust without the presence of oxygen.
Alternatively, the warp drive's cooling system might have been sabotaged, leading to a catastrophic thermal event. The resulting insanely high temperatures are pyrolyzing various components in the nacelle, producing the trailing smoke without requiring there to be an actual fire.
One thought: if it wasn't usable as a front cover for something like Captain's Log, could it still be put on a back cover?
Say, if a given issue had a different piece of art (and corresponding fiction work) as its primary focus, and there was a secondary story which this image could service.
It might not be an ideal use of it, but would still be better than nothing.
One suggestion is that whatever is going on with the starboard warp nacelle, the reason the ship is in atmosphere is because the atmosphere will dampen the fire.
What I am trying to say is something like "the fire in the starboard warp engine can only continue burning if it remains in the vacuum of space, but the material feeding the fire will 'bind' with oxygen rather than continue to burn". So the ship had to enter atmosphere to avoid the problem becoming worse.
It is a reason why it is in atmosphere with a flaming engine at least, and why doing so is a good move on the part of the Captain. It might even be a problem peculiar to the older upgraded warp engines (perhaps even something that is a result of upgrading a Y series engine to G status).
It does not, however, as noted, explain the cause of the fire or why the ship is shooting at something.
Perhaps that could be a combination of a simple maintenance failure (a crewman signing off on a maintenance check he did not in fact perform)?
At that point, cue the Orion pirate who arrives to raid the colony, and at first, on sighting the GCA, was going to disengage, but when the GCA went to "full power" (trying to go to WS-III in a hurry, the second part of the combination mentioned in the preceding paragraph), the starboard engine suffers a "critical casualty". The Orion decides maybe he can take out the ship, the planetary defense fighters are scrambled . . .
It gets rid of a "planned act of sabotage", gets you an attack, makes the problem with the engine just one of those random elements of chance that turns up, and so history is made.
It also explains why the ship otherwise appears undamaged.
The ship might have been there just because an Orion had made raids on the colony, and "now this".
Yes, I am imagining a futuristic material that burns in vacuum, but not in atmosphere. And obviously a problem with the engine design that would quickly be fixed so that the problem did not reoccur. Perhaps the problem is even unique to this one ship, the first to get some interim upgrade that was to be added to all GCAs, which is why the problem did not turn up when YCAs were first upgraded to GCAs?
It is, however, the best idea I have come up with, and it may not pass muster with SVC.
I make no assertions that I can write a story, but I do like to plot one every now and then. Try this for size,
Say that the Warspite was shielding an unprotected colony deep inside Federation space from a fragmented comet/asteroid that had collided with the planets moon. The F-4's were the colony's only defense of the planet and the Warspite was the nearest ship able to respond to the impending disaster. The ship being within the atmosphere could be the result of of making a last ditch effort in actually physically blocking any debris that it wasn't able to deflected or shot down by the colony's defenses.
Perhaps it received damage from a near-strike that had damaged the ship's "Bussard" collector (the part that collects hydrogen in space for it's thruster fuel) and that is what is causing the engine to burn.
Also those clouds could actually be rising smoke from earlier strikes on the planet.
[edit: You can tell I watch too many of those 'B'-class movies the SyFy channel has been putting out these last 5+ years 
]
Quote:Yes, I am imagining a futuristic material that burns in vacuum, but not in atmosphere
Well, assuming the ship is going a few times the speed of sound in the atmosphere (1 hex side a turn is pretty •••• fast), that material could just be any known metal. Assuming oxygen (in gas or liquid form) in the warp nacelle or warp strut for some reason (maybe they were pressurized for maintenance work?), it will keep a fire going quite easily and well in space. By dipping into the atmosphere, the volume of air going by could have a chance of 'blowing out the fire'.
Well, that said, if you're going to go on the "have to go into the atmosphere to put out the fire" it could be as simple as "fire suppression not working, we have to 'blow it out' which you can't do in a vacuum". What movie was it where the bomber put out an engine fire by diving? That way you avoid the handwavium technobabble.
See, great minds think alike. (I think that's the second time today I've just been a bit behind you... Gotta eat my wheaties!)
Memphis Belle, IIRC.
Actually, the "dive the bomber (or other aircraft) to blow out the flames" has been used in a number of movies. It is a fairly common plot point.
Hmmm. Something Petrick said earlier in the thread gave me an idea - RE: the refit itself may be partially to blame for the effect.
The Y-era ships were not designed for overloaded weapons. The national guard ships ARE refitted to overload their weapons. That's twice as much power going into the photon torpedoes as the ship was intended to allow for...and since these designs have no AWR...it's twice as much power as they were designed for coming from the warp engines.
Combined with some casual maintenance inefficiency or oversights due to these being reserve units...
Xander,
There is a problem with that idea, in that the engines were upgraded with models found on the more modern cruisers; if a system were to blow as you described then shouldn't it be the photon tubes, considering that is the system that is RECEIVING the extra power.
Besides it wasn't that the Y-era ships were not designed for overloaded weapons. They could overload their weapons, they just weren't efficient enough to travel at the higher combat speeds while doing it.
Hmmm - George, do you have Y1 or R8?
The GCA got some upgrades over the YCA, but the engines weren't one of them. They are still 12-box warp engines.
And EY-era ships very definitely could NOT overload their weapons. No special weapons modes are available - prox fuses, Klingon UIM or DERFACS, plasma envelopers, etc.
Idea inspired by Petrick's post:
A plasma feedback overload. Entering the atmosphere causes it to flame out but in the vaccume of space would have lead to an overload and explode. In the atmosphere the plasma actually lowers in temperature and only a regular fire is left. Once the plasma overload is averted the ship will go back to space and the O2 fueled fire will flame out.
Sure. The engine is still out of commission, though. And whatever it was that [insert my idea] caused them to decide they needed to start overloading the torpedoes is still out there.
(And, judging by their decision to fire from the atmosphere...it's close)
They're overloading torpedoes becausethey can since they can only be going speed one max in the atmosphere, the whole other engine available.
I wouldn't say the right engine has to be completely out of commission. Maybe the damage (again could be sabotage that sets up the plasma overload) was destroying one point per impulse. Maybe the plasma overload wasn't destroying anything but was about to destroy the whole ship once it exploded but a bright, fast thinking engineer told the Captain to "take her into the atmosphere" where they could cool the engine and break down the plasma. The engine might only be heavilly damaged (50% or so).