Archive through April 16, 2011
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Captain's Log: New Fiction:
Federation Police Cutter -- Crew Roster:
Archive through April 16, 2011
Garth,
I know that you've been thinking about this a long time, it shows in the quality of information that you have presented.
If no one else has said it yet, Good Job! you've pulled together a huge amount of information, nicely done buddy! 
Now, just to play devils advocate for a moment. 
lets say you have prepared tray meals (like MREs) for all means that the ship will use during a normal cruise... you've indicated above that a "normal cruise" would be 90 to 120 days with a maximum of 180 days.
you've just indicated above, that you figured up to 4 meals a day (B/L/D/midnight snack).
that translates to 412 tray packs per day for 180 days (maximum duration) or 74,160 tray packs.
(staisis? frozen, cold storage?) in some sort of store room (or possibly store rooms).
if each meal (excluding beverage) weighs an average of 1 pound, oh lets say a 8 oz meat or protein portion and 8 oz of rice, potato, noodle and assorted vegetables and or fruit) your looking at 74,160 pounds of Food to store for up to 6 months at a time.
further, if you can pack 24 meals in a case, each case would weigh about 24 pounds. if you store them on pallets at 9 cases per layer, and (at a guess 6 inches per layer of cases) thats what? 12 layers? that is 2,592 meals per pallet. (pallet being 4'x5'x6'), which also happens to be 2,592 pounds of food (excluding the pallet and the weight of packing material of the cases).
Bottom line, you would need store rooms able to hold atleast 9 pallets of food trays or (at a guess), just under 14,000 cubic feet of volume.
seems like an aweful lot of food.
Jeff,
You're probably off by a 1/3 on your meal counts. Everyone will be asleep for one of those meals since it will be during thier sleep time.
Based on expierence at 24 hour operation shops in Iraq. Working 16 hour days in Iraq we all missed one meal because of needed sleep.
Ryan
Food storage on the ship when leaving for patrol might also be somewhat like food storage on a nuclear sub leaving for patrol: you cram the food into every available stray nook and cranny.
Also, I'm assuming that there would be 4 meal _services_ per day, but each crewman would only _eat_ 3 meals. The 4-meal schedule ensures that all watches on a 24-hour rotation get 3 opportunities to eat.
That gives us ca. 56000 meals for a 180-day patrol. If you assume 1 kg per meal for the food and packaging (8 oz entree, 8 oz sides, 4 oz dessert, 4 oz snack, 12 oz packaging - educated WAG, and probably overestimates the amount of packaging necessary) that works out to 56 metric tons of food and packaging. Even if the total meal package has an effective density equal to that of water (which is almost certainly a gross under-estimate) this works out to 56 cubic meters, or about 2000 cubic feet, of required storage space.
Terry,
Replicators? Ick. That's so TNG. No thanks. Semi-automated food processors, yes. Food ports all over the ship, to include in the transporter room? No.
Jeff,
I have two 10 x ~3.5 x 2.5 meter spaces already set aside for food storage. I have eight 17,500 liter water tanks already drawn in. {grin}
Garth L. Getgen
Back in the day, for six months I was the Mess Deck Master-At-Arms on my DD.
My duties during that period included supervising the "mess cooks", who were the untrained E-1-2-3's who did the grunt work related to food preparation.
For any given meal we prepared food for 2/3s of the crew, not everyone always ate the 3 out of 4 meals that they were entitled to.
The fourth meal was/is called Mid-rats. Short for Midnight Rations, on a USN ship under way, the entire crew would be split into several different "shifts".
We had both refrigerated and un-refered storage compartments, and 90% of the time we would take on food at the same time we took on fuel, which would be every 2 weeks on average.
My point is that carrying food for six months would be impractical along with the impossibility of finding room to store it all.
Any program on The Military Channel or any good book on the subject will tell you that the limiting factor on a ship's endurance was the food carried aboard, you can always conserve fuel,
Quote:Terry,
Replicators? Ick. That's so TNG. No thanks. Semi-automated food processors, yes. Food ports all over the ship, to include in the transporter room? No.
Garth, food replicators are SFU canon, mentioned in Prime Directive. I don't think you'd see food ports all over the ship, probably some slots in the wall in the refectory area. Something like you saw in TOS when they were eating. A machine that spits out coloured "stuff". Probably highly automated, and since replicators can turn anything into anything else with enough energy, they can turn biological waste back into food...
G:PD 3rd establishes that replicators are available at the same tech level as tactical warp, so they're decades-old technology before the first POL is ever built.
To quote G:PD 3rd on replicators and food:
"Replicated food is as nutritious as fresh or canned food but not as tasty. It is also more expensive since converting energy into matter is harder than simply opening a package. However, ships have limited storage facilities and while the crew prefers fresh food, it cannot always be provided. When suitable food is available for purchase at a port of call, the ship will stock its pantries and cargo bays as much as it can afford in space, time and cost."
. . .
"It is efficient [to replicate] food since the storage requirements of food are often considerable in order to avoid spoilage. Replicators in the galley can produce any of a pre-programmed series of menus. Hundred of other menus are available but will take a minute to retrieve from a databank."
Terry, my snarky comment about food ports all over the ship was targeting that silly scene where the transporter guy offered chicken soup to the Air Force security guard they beamed up.
Steve, thanks for that full quote. The part I needed to see was "the ship will stock its pantries ..." As I said, I have space allocated for food storage (two 20x4x2.5 meter spaces) that would have been hard to fill with anything else.
Here's what the Police Cutter looks like. Kind of. This is an OLD version. I scrapped it and started over. Twice.
http://members.cox.net/garth.getgen/FPP_screen-shot.gif
In that version, the ship was 82 x 22 meters (not counting warp drive). I was running into several issues, so I started over and scaled up to 100 x 27.5 meters, but that added another deck. I quickly concluded that was going to be too big, so I "fudged" it back down to 90 x 24 meters. I also figured out how to do the tail right. I'm getting to the point where I'll (hopefully) be able to post better images of the newer design.
Garth L. Getgen
Jeff Wile,
Quote:Bottom line, you would need store rooms able to hold atleast 9 pallets of food trays or (at a guess), just under 14,000 cubic feet of volume.
Funny. I just ran the calculations. 20x4x2.5 = 200 cubic meters, by two such spaces is 400 m^3 of storage.
There's a bit over 35 cubic feet per m^3. 400 x 35 = ... wait for it ... 14,000 cubic feet. Ta-dah!
Garth L. Getgen
Garth,
nice to have confirmation of the calculations!
Without food replicators -- you should start calculations on waste management --
One item that all the series glossed over --
I figured that was part of life support, and they (the series) just left it to the engineering staff to handle it as needed!
What do you think goes into the starting end of the food processers?
I would think that food storage and waste management would be trivial with transporters. When transporting supplies aboard, interrupt the transport, and transfer the pattern to hard storage. All the food for the entire cruise shouldn't take up over a few exabytes. Once the stores are information, they don't take up space, don't require refrigeration, etc. Then, when they are needed, move the appropriate file/s back to the transporter and materialize what you are going to need for the next week or so. Granted, this means transporting the supplies aboard in relatively small batches, because I don't think you could materialize 5% of a file, while returning the rest to hard storage, but that shouldn't be insurmountable.
As for waste management, if you are not recycling it with replicators, you must have all the supplies you need for the entire trip, so you are faced with what to do with the 'left overs' after they have been processed by the crew. Transport them, interrupt the transport, move them into hard storage, and delete the file.
Please note: The above has been written with tongue firmly in cheek, and I am in no way suggesting it as the way such things are actually handled
Already thought of that sh... er, stuff. With a tail pipe (and ignoring the obvious comments), the boat only needs holding tanks to a certain size.
The problem with storing all your food in the transporter buffer is what happens if the files get wiped?
We're drifting away from the topic of the crew into the topic of the boat's design. I know some of that goes hand-in-hand, but I'd rather hold off on getting too far into the weeds about the boat until I'm ready to post new images. I'll open a new topic at that point.
Garth L. Getgen
One has to remember that some times things go wrong on ships... be it battle damage, poor repairs or deferred maintenance etc.
the Ship needs emergency supplies in some quantity... and even the shuttles need to have enough emergency supplies to support survivors in the event of the loss of the ship.
and what about air locks and space suits and POIS capsules? there would need to be enough for the crew and any number of extra passengers that might be on board at any given time... sort of asking how many life boats were on the Titantic before she sailed on her maiden voyage. such details could mean life or death for a lot of people.
Ryan,
I was trying for a conservative (i.e. worst case scenario) estimate of the food storage capacity for the POL, I absolutely understand and agree with your assessment and experience on probable participation in meals.
Its just that Garths choice to use prepackaged meals comes with some other implications and choices.
If he had elected to have a full kitchen/bakery with a staff (executive chef, sous chef, baker, etc) he might have been able to procure food in bulk (bags of coffee, rice, potatos, flour surgar etc) and cook the number of meals daily for expected number of users... but he didnt elect to go that route.
It might have resulted in some volume economies of scale, but I guess there is no point in pursuing such 'might have beens'!
Garth Getgen:
Trying again, computer glitch erased earlier attempt.
Station time is not "weapon status" but rather the amount of time the ship can spend patrolling its assigned area. During that time you have the proverbial "six months of boredom and six minutes of stark, screaming, terror".
An LR for example does not clear port and head directly to a freighter that it will loot before heading back to port. (Okay, sometimes the Crimelord will provide very specific information on a very specific target, but that might happen while you are already in your patrol area also.)
The LR clears port, spends time and resources moving to a patrol area where it hopes it will encounter a freighter or three. Due to vagaries of markets and schedules, the LR might loiter in one area for a month or more. During that time it might stalk several freighters unsuccessfully. (The freighter crew was alert and got an S.O.S. and the LR captain determined that there was not enough time to run the freighter down, disable it, loot it, and escape the scene before something big and nasty from the local fleet showed up. Or the freighters encountered were traveling in convoy, or were simply traveling at the wrong angle requiring such a long chase at high speed that there was no doubt they would spot the LR, or etc.) So the captain moves to another location.
Eventually the LR will use up its "station time" and have to return to base or some other facilities to restock.
All military ships have a "station time" determined by their endurance and which may be modified by orders.
Are there any if the details in the WIP deck plans which would be inherited from the Terran early warp destroyers shown in Module Y1, or would the "modern" POL be assumed to have been wholly re-built (on the inside, at least)?
Also, whatever way the deck plans end up, it would be interesting to see how much room they will leave for further modification, in terms of showing how they were turned into these.
(That said, I'm not trying to suggest that the FF has to be kept in mind when drawing up the POL plans; if there have to be some workarounds in that later conversion, so be it.)
Jeff,
@ 02:02-PM ... Good points, most of which I've considered. But please let's hold off on ship stuff for now.
@ 02:15-PM ... What do ou mean "might have been"? As this is all still a draft, albeit a well edited draft, I can always change my mind about something. (Or SVC/SPP can change my mind for me.)
So far, the only change that I've made was to move one person (the Assistant Engineer) from Emer to AuxCon during battle. I haven't been convinced that I should remove the Messmates and give them different jobs. Even if they don't cook, and even if the ship uses food processors, I still think there's a need for someone to oversee the equipment.
Garth L. Getgen
Gary,
I've never seen that one before. The basis of my plans is the clip art in SFB Scenario Book # 1, page 7.
I see a couple minor and one MAJOR problem with the "Federal Republic of Aurora Frigate, art by Richard Smith". The minor issues are the placement of the phasers and where the warp drives attach to the hull.
The MAJOR issue is the bridge. If he made the bubble on top of the forward hull the entire bridge, as in it sits on top, then this ship is HUGE. My first design was 82 meters long by 22 meters wide. I tried three other sizes before I settled on the 90x24 meter version I'm working on. The largest one was 100 meters long. I just did some rough measurements, and guessing at the scale based on the size of the bridge, I'm coming up with 130 to 155 meters long by 40 to 45 meters wide. That's half again larger than my deck plans call for. Of course, it could be that both ships came off the same engineer's desk, the POL is the "little brother" to that one.
Garth L. Getgen
Petrick,
Maybe I'm not tracking, but it seems to me we're saying the same thing in different ways. I'm saying that, by policy, the POL goes out on three to four month patrols, but can go out for about six months or so at a time with no real problems. If they should have a mission requiring them to stay away from port longer than that (and I really can not think of a good reason why, unless they get swept thru a wormhole to the far side of the galaxy), they would need to plan ahead and take on extra fuel/supplies.
In your example of the LR, it would seem to me that they, too, generally partol for three to six months at a time. Not saying that's a "hard and fast RULE." Or am I still missing something?
Garth L. Getgen
Garth,
That pic is the art Rick used for the playtest Ship Card of the FRA Frigate for Federation Commander, as seen in Captain's Log #42; which in turn is derived from the SSD published in SFB Module Omega 3.
According to the background for the Federal Republic, a number of POLs (and CLs and other units, such as a construction yard for POLs and a maintenance dock for CLs) were in the Aurora system, where they were set to take part in a planned coreward expansion drive.
Those plans came a cropper in Y130, when the entire system was transplanted over to the Omega Octant. Instead of being simply one more colony among many, Aurora III was forced to become the capital of a new, independent Republic.
As part of the many efforts the Aurorans put in to build up a new navy, they took the police ships they had and converted them into the FRA Frigate (and re-tooled their minor yard in order to build more). The prow photon is replaced with a pair of light photons (the FRA developed light and heavy photons, as well as using standard types), the forward hull has three phaser-1s, while the secondary hull has two phaser-1s and three phaser-3s.
There are a couple of variants in Omega 3, too; namely the Frigate Scout and Frigate Escort.
I can't speak for some of the artistic choices made by Rick, but the FF is meant to be a refitted POL, not a whole new hull. (Bear in mind that the main purpose for that art was to act as an outline for use with the Ship Card, not to provide a definitive answer as to what the POL/FF design should look like.)
Garth Getgen:
All I am really saying is that the length of time warships can stay in space without docking to a base is a subject that you need to leave to SVC and not try to define. Federation & Empire largely establishes that in a six month period WITHOUT using strategic movement any given ship, whether a B10 battleship or an E4 escort (or a Fed Pol) can move as much as fifteen Federation & Empire hexes. (On the owning player's turn, move six hexes by regular movement to attack a target, retreat one hex from that target, move six hexes to a base by retrograde movement, then during the enemy turn react two hexes from that base.) That is 15x600 parsecs, or 9,000 parsecs. That is admittedly during a period of "intense" operations, and again is not the same as moving by strategic movement which could go farther during that same six month period.
But your Cutter is not spending only three or four months. It is moving as part of the fleet, and the fleet is not breaking up every three or four months for the cutter to get resupply.
So I strongly suspect that even a cutter has the space legs needed to operate for a year.
That does not mean that it does not visit port when it can during that year, but space is big and there is a lot of emptiness that needs a ship THERE (ON STATION) to answer the distress call, not only there two months out of three (one month on station, one month getting to station, and one month heading back to port).
If the boats can only stay on station a month at a time (again, one month to get on station and one month to get back to the port) you would need way too many of them to maintain a single station ship. They would not be "cost effective" to operate except as garrison ships directly at the supported planet.
It would make sense to me if starships had maximum station times something short of maximum survivability time and that resupply would be very short of maximum station time. (But that there might be some ratings for command to base decisions on.)
This would be because every time you resupply you reset the maximum station time clock and strategic command never knows when that will be needed.
It's like when you live in California it is best to keep a full tank of gas. So, you fill up at a half tank instead of when you are empty. That way when something comes up, or the state gets the shakes, you are not needing to fill up at a bad time.
So, I'd think that different ships would have different normal resupply intervals factoring in cargo space and crew size and mission (so this is what a Captain does, eh?). A small cutter and large cruiser might well then have similar resupply times whereas a survey ship might have longer resupply intervals.
Also, in SFB it is well defined that speed matters; that high speed is rapidly less fuel efficient. Therefore a ship could only have a specified cruise range (not counting factors such as weapon use and emergency crew supplies).
I would think.