Archive through April 08, 2013

Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Prime Directive RPG: DECK PLANS PROJECTS: Fed Police ship: Archive through April 08, 2013
By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Saturday, August 04, 2012 - 07:17 pm: Edit

This topic has inspired me to re-engage with the Federation Police Cutter project. I made a ton of progress in the past couple weeks.

Normally, I would wait until I have major features such as engineering and sick bay sketched in before I would attack the crew quarters. The other night, I was just checking to see if I had enough room in the area I planned for quarters, or if I had to take some space from another section of the ship. Next thing I knew, I had most of the crew quarters hardened in.

Here's where I'm at right now:

DONE: Turbo-Lift system, stairwells, HVAC vertical shafts, Main Bridge, Emergency Bridge, AuxCon, forward Phasers and control room, Shuttle bay, spare shuttle, shuttle control and passenger waiting area, Transporter rooms, T-bomb storage, Drone launcher, Battery rooms, APR/AWR, cargo bay, food locker, 2x 10-cell brigs, gym, locker room w/ showers, theater/chapel/briefing room, 46x one-plus-one (two bedrooms/one lav) enlisted crew quarters, 8x one-man (private lav) Chief's quarters, 8x two-plus-two (four beds/one lav) spare crew quarters, 2x eight-man barracks (no lav, use gym locker room).

Sketched in / space allocated: 12x two-room (bedroom, living room, private lav) suites (Officer's quarters), Sick Bay, Mess Hall, Galley/kitchen, aft Phaser control, Main engineering control area, engine room sub-systems (Dilithium chambers, power generator, curcuit breaker panels etc).

Need to do: Main computer server farm, engineering computer room, Two Laboratories, armory (small arms locker), six to ten offices, laundry, break rooms / day rooms, conference rooms, machine shops / fabrication shops, general maintenance areas, HVAC & water recycling & waste processing equipment, and other various odds & ends.

The space I have left to work with includes half of Deck 4-forward, most of Deck 5-forward, one-third of Decks 4/5/6-Aft, half of Deck 8-Aft, and half the tail cone on Deck 3, 5, and 6, plus a few small areas here and there.

I'm guessing I'm about 40% done. It looks like more than that, but being about to copy/paste 100 crew quarters filled in a lot of the boat very quickly.


Garth L. Getgen

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Friday, August 31, 2012 - 05:18 am: Edit

Hey, I just noticed this topic. Not sure what we're supposed to talk about here, but I figured I'd answer some questions about my project.


How long have I been working one this? Too long. I think I initially started in 1998 or so, but it's been on the back-burner (and in the freezer) more than in actual work mode.


Why did I start it? I was writing a fiction story set on a police cutter, and I e-mailed Steve Petrick with some questions. After some back-and-forth, I sent him the first draft of the story. He said I had put too many limits on myself because I had named every officer on the boat and described too much of its layout in detail. I sent him the crew manifest I had drafted up, and he came back with a laundry list of things I had wrong, such as putting two people to run all three phasers instead of two per mount. At the time, I only had a rough sketch on paper of what the bridge and such looked like. I thought it would be fast and easy to knock out the deck plans. Little did I know ....

By the way, it was these conversations between Petrick and I that caused ADB to increase the crew size from 6 to 10 with the Y2K printing of SFB.


What other ships have I designed? I did something for a friend's HERO-Space campaign (and I'm glad I didn't put my name on the print-out, as ugly as that one was), and I did a "space truck" as a one-man trader for a Cyrano Jones / Harry Mudd type character. This was the ship that was stopped and boarded in my story. I started an Orion LR, but dropped that as Nick Blank was doing one.


What ever became of the story? It was never published. Well, it was pretty long, at least compared to most Captain's Log fiction. And Petrick rejected it because there were no combat scenes. It was written more like a typical Trek / sci-fi story, not action/combat of SFB. Now that SVC has published more Star Fleet Universe background, a huge part of my story no longer works.


So, why's the deck plans project taking so long? Ah, how many excuses do you want? Things got in the way, like real life, two deployments and a year tour to Korea. I got bored with it (I almost gave up on SFB and Trek in general) and got too lazy to work on it. Mainly, I got frustrated with myself because I kept running into dead ends and brick walls, and even had to scrap the project a couple of times and start over. Something that kept me going was Nick Blank's deck plans. I remember telling him about this project, and the next thing I knew, he had the Romulan SkyHawk and Federation Frigate plans done. It was a little disheartening, in a way, how insanely fast that guy can spin these out. But it made me want to finish mine with such precision and detail that it'll blow his mind.

The first edition, I took the clip art in SFB Scenario Book 1 and measured it at 82mm long. Using a 1:1000 scale, I created the initial design that really hasn't changed all that much thru all the versions since. I got about half-way done when I realized I didn't have near enough room for all the crew. I "might" have been able to make it work with a crew of sixty (but not with one hundred) by using open-bay barracks, but that didn't feel right for a Federation ship.

I went thru three or four version at different sizes before settling on making it a 90-meter boat. By increasing the ceiling heights, I kept the same number of decks, so it was only 10% longer / wider (21% more deck space). I still have that version; the plans are about 90% done. In fact, I'd kind of like to keep that as the Early Years WDD Federation Warp-refit destroyer and/or first series Masterson-class POL. However, with the release of the new to-scale Starline 2500 minis by Mongoose, it's the wrong size. To match the mini, I had to increase the plans to make it a 108 meter boat. Not only is the ship another 20% longer, it also gained a whole extra deck.

So, last fall, I started over. I got the outline of done, sliced it up into decks, and sketched in the big features (bridge, impulse, etc). Real life got in the way, so I only dabbled at it every few days at most. A couple months ago, I got back into it a lot more frequently. At this point, I'd say I'm about 80% done. Of course, SVC may provide heavy feedback that will set me back a lot.


What program am I using? I have tried a couple different versions of TurboCAD and ViaCAD, but I keep going back to a very old, near obsolete program called Floor Plan Plus, version 2. This was written for Windows-95, but it still runs under Windows-7 / 32-bit (but NOT 64-bit). I might consider moving up to TurboCAD-19 for my next project. However, if TurboCAD's learning curve is ten feet tall, FPP's curve is about an inch. It has just enough features I can do almost anything I want with it, but not so many it takes me five minutes every time I want to find a particular tool.


Can I show you the plans? No, not until it's done. With luck, ADB will publish it. If not, I'll try to talk SVC into letting me post it on-line. In very general terms: there are eight decks in the aft section, and four in the front. The shuttle bay is on deck one; and deck two has the transporter and gym. Deck three has the bridge, forward transporter, tractor, sickbay, and brig. Deck four has phasers, offices, APR, and engineering. Deck five has labs, main computer, emergency bridge, and more engineering & life support stuff. Deck six has the photon, probe, AuxCon, and life-support machinery. Deck seven has the cargo high-bay and mess hall, and deck eight has the cargo bay, phaser, and yet more machinery. Not mentioned above, I do have more than enough bunk space for the normal crew roster. I didn't draw them in, but I do know where the "+" refit phasers/drone will go. I also figured out how to do most (but not all) of the variants.


Garth L. Getgen

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Friday, August 31, 2012 - 10:26 pm: Edit

As my program has a "measure area" feature that allows you to trace the outline and it will give you the square footage, I went ahead and measured the POL decks. The total deck area is 12,410 m^2, but the useable area (2-meter headroom) is 10,515 m^2. These numbers do not include the cargo high-bay, impulse high-bay, or crawl space under the shuttle bay.

Unless Nick Blank already has the numbers on file, I can measure the FFG to see how they compare.


Garth L. Getgen

By Nick G. Blank (Nickgb) on Saturday, September 01, 2012 - 12:18 am: Edit

I don't have them precalculated, so go ahead and measure it out on the printed plans.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Saturday, September 01, 2012 - 04:03 am: Edit

FFG deck area:

Okay, anyone who wants may feel free to double-check my work, but I came up with ~ 19,457 m^2 for the FFG's total area, with ~16,555 m^2 of usable headroom.


FFGMaxUsable
DeckDiameterAreaDiameterArea
11078.51078.5
215 x 28329.915 x 28329.9
3643217.0491885.7
4957088.2926647.6
5906505.7886226.1
6441520.535962.1
734716.828424.6
TOTAL1945716555
Deck 5 includes 6x24 space for Impulse Engines
Deck 6 includes minus 191 m^2 for Shuttle high-bay


I used the side-view measurement for Decks 6 & 7 because I got different numbers for the top-view images. The area values were rounded to the nearest one-tenth / whole number.


Garth L. Getgen

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Thursday, April 04, 2013 - 06:25 pm: Edit

I have been putting off work on this project because every time I played with the Engineering Section, I made it worse and not better. I just could not shoehorn everything in and make it look right. Last week, I sorting a stack of papers and found printouts of the now-obsolete 90-meter boat, and that gave me an idea how to fit the Emergency Bridge in on the 108-meter boat (by combining the Warp Drive / Impulse Engine control stations into it), and suddenly I was able to get everything else to drop into place. It took me only, what, about twenty tries starting from scratch each time before I got Engineering right.

I just sent SVC a GIF image of the engineering sections, and if he likes it, I'll be that much closer to completing this project. I still need to do the layout of Sick Bay, one of the Labs, and the Mess Hall & galley/kitchen. Those are the last major items that still need to be done, but I also have about twenty other smaller rooms (admin office, etc) that are empty. I've been holding off on those in case I think of something I missed.


Garth L. Getgen

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Thursday, April 04, 2013 - 10:38 pm: Edit

Second lab is done. It went together a lot faster than I expected; took me 20-30 minutes. I had to get the main computer room set in stone first, so I could place the wall shared between those two rooms.

The lab spaces are 11x11 and 10x11 meters. I wanted to make them the same, but it just didn't work out, so they're close to the same. One is the astrophysics / planetary science lab, and included the stellar cartography holo-projection table. The second one is the forensics lab, which doubles for geology / botany studies. Anything dealing with micro-biology is normally done in Sick Bay, but this lab is equipped to handle the basics.

I doubt Sick Bay will go together nearly as easy, but hopefully it won't give me fits like Engineering did.


Garth L. Getgen

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Saturday, April 06, 2013 - 01:09 am: Edit

I had an idea last night how to arrange the mess hall, so today I spent about an hour and a half playing around with it. When I showed my wife, she points to another area and asks "Is that the galley?" Yep. "How do people get into the galley?" Oh, crud. I need to move some walls in order to put a door in, and that forces me to move tables, which forces me to move something else. {sigh} But the basic idea will work.

I did some calculations on something else. I have four bio-waste processing vats (septic tanks); each is three meters diameter by two-&-quarter meters tall, which is about 15 cubic meters / 15,000 liters, or four-thousand gallons each. I would hope that sixteen thousand gallons is enough bio-waste processing for ship with about a hundred crewmen. The water will be extracted and purified to go back into the fresh water supply tanks. The solids would be purged out into space or (more likely) packaged in sealed rip-proof bags for delivery for commerical use.


Garth L. Getgen

By Terry O'Carroll (Terryoc) on Saturday, April 06, 2013 - 03:53 am: Edit


Quote:

"Is that the galley?" Yep. "How do people get into the galley?"




Transporter. :)

By Lawrence Bergen (Lar) on Saturday, April 06, 2013 - 10:47 pm: Edit

four bio-waste processing vats...

I would hate to see that critical hit...eeewww.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, April 07, 2013 - 01:57 am: Edit

No real progress today; had errands to run. I did take a few minutes to do a minor tweak or two. We stopped for lunch while we were out (Red Robin "Yum!"), and I couldn't help to sneak a peek in their kitchen to get some ideas for designing the galley in my ship. Yeah, I have OCD.

About ten minutes ago, I had an idea. As it is now, I have "borrowed" the bridge from Nick's FFG plans. I'm going to leave that alone, but I'll make an early version using a square room and using work station consoles that I have in the AuxCon & Emergency Bridge instead of the continuous wall of controls the "new" bridge uses.

I wasn't going to, but I think I'll go ahead and design the drone rack. I already have Type-I & Type-IV drones made up (from when I did the F-18 fighter), so it's just a matter of creating the rack. I hae a room marks "excess storage" that will become the drone room. And I'll have to convert a room to the Phaser-3 control station, but that's easy done.


Garth L. Getgen

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, April 07, 2013 - 02:00 am: Edit

Oh, yeah, I got a reply back from SVC regarding the engineering section: "Looks very interesting!"

I guess that's a good thing. ;-)


Garth L. Getgen

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, April 07, 2013 - 10:23 am: Edit

Garth,

Concerning the post you made earlier quote: "four bio-waste processing vats (septic tanks); each is three meters diameter by two-&-quarter meters tall, which is about 15 cubic meters / 15,000 liters, or four-thousand gallons each."

Just wondering if it is really necessary to use an interior room with cylindrical vats. Does it really matter if the vats are round? As I look at the POL minature, it appears to me that there are sections of the hull with rounded curves (not to mention the tail cone...)

Have you considered mounting the "vats" in near the exterior of the hull in those areas where the hull curvature wont allow you to have flat deck space or other void areas?

So long as you have access to one side of the vats and can pump effluent into or out of them, wouldnt that be good enough?

That way if the vats get hit by enemy weapons fire, most of the stuff will get blown out of the hull and not into it.

just a thought.

Jeff Wile

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, April 07, 2013 - 04:03 pm: Edit

Jeff, those aren't locked in-done yet. As of right now, I have them in the tail cone on Deck 6 (of 8). I may move them (limited to where I can) and/or change the size/shape or number of vats.

I looked up building code and found that a typical house (family of five) will have a one-thousand gallon septic tank. That suggests with a crew of a hundred, this ship should need twenty thousand gallons of bio-waste processing. I have sixteen thousand gallons right now, but I think I can get two, three, or maybe four more vats in no-problem. Even at sixteen thousand, it should be enough considering it'll have a separate water filtration & purification system. And, yes, I have OCD.


Garth L. Getgen

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, April 07, 2013 - 05:14 pm: Edit

Check-list for what I still need to do:

Deck One (aft-only): Fill in aft storage area that becomes drone room with refit, design the drone rack itself, convert one of the shuttle-bay control rooms to Phaser-3 control room (adds a workstation console) for refit.

Deck Two (aft-only): Minor details in Gymnasium.

Deck Three (forward): Design pre-refit Bridge, design Tractor Beam room, figure out use for pair of triangle-shaped rooms at front-corners of the ship (size: 4.75x4.75x6.72 meters).

Deck Three (aft): Design entire Sick Bay (12x19 meters), design security offices (pair of 5x8.875 meter areas) --Brig holding cells are done, design HVAC / CO2-scrubber hardware in tail cone.

Deck Four (forward): Design admin offices (four rooms 4x4.5 meters, eight rooms 3.625x4.5 meters, two rooms 4.75x4.5 meter) or find other purpose for some of these rooms, figure out use for pair of triangle-shaped rooms at front-corners of the ship (size: 4.5x4.5x6.36 meters).

Deck Four (aft): It's done --- leave it alone!

Deck Five (forward): Design targeting sensors (two triangle rooms 5.625x5.625x7.95 meters), design astrophysics sensors (two triangle rooms 6x6x8.5 meters).

Deck Five (aft): Finish designing Fabrication / Machine Shop work area, maybe convert spare parts storage room and fill area with O2 tanks for emergency air supply.

Deck Six (forward): Assign purpose and design hardware for eight rooms (3.125x6.5 meters each); ideas include lateral sensor array equipment, CO2 scrubbers, forward power supply subsystems, or Damage Control tools/parts storage.

Deck Six (aft): Finish crew support / recreation rooms (half are done), finish bio-waste processing and storage equipment in tail cone.

Deck Seven (aft-only): Design kitchen/galley, finish mess hall / dining area, design water filtration/purification/recycling equipment in tail cone.

Deck Eight (aft-only): Finish cargo transporter systems, design trash compactor/storage hardware.

Overall: Add minor details, add O2 tanks for emergency air supply wherever there's any unused space, clean up sketch lines, add text labels.

There's a lot left to do, but I feel like I'm in the home-stretch now. The thing that kept slowing me down was the whole engineering section. The biggest hurdle left is Sick Bay, followed by the galley/mess hall. Once I get those done, everything else will be pretty much just fill-in-the-blanks.


Garth L. Getgen

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Sunday, April 07, 2013 - 05:33 pm: Edit

Garth; keep in mind that a septic tank and sewage processing plants function differently, you may not need the extra space, particularly since each residence has an excess capacity to cover non-standard usage, the excess capacity needed would be less for a combined system.

By Richard Wells (Rwwells) on Sunday, April 07, 2013 - 09:59 pm: Edit

Garth: The recent set of This Old House episodes spent some time covering modern septic systems. Current technologies suggest that the septic tanks could be reduced to one fifth of the proposed size. Future technologies might be better.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, April 07, 2013 - 10:18 pm: Edit

Cool. Looks like I'll have more than enough capacity. I just want to be able to say, "Yeah, we ran the numbers" if anyone asks "is that enough food/water/air/septic for a ship that size." Gotta keep the OCD-side of me happy. ;-)


Garth L. Getgen

By Gary Plana (Garyplana) on Monday, April 08, 2013 - 09:02 am: Edit

Garth, don't forget this is the Future we're talking about ... better Tech Levels will improve recycling and so forth, especially if some future contractor throws money at this problem in order to win a contract. :)

By Jack Bohn (Jackbohn) on Monday, April 08, 2013 - 10:32 am: Edit

I finally pulled down a 1956 volume I have on sewage treatment, and they estimate an average of 250 grams domestic solids per capita per day (655 mg/liter in 100 gallon/day/person flow). Call it 0.3 kg per person and assume a density of water (the stuff you're thinking of mostly sinks, but there are greases, too), you can plan for quite a patrol, or take on a lot of prisoners or evacuees before we're telling everyone to go potty before we leave.

That 100 gallon a day is giving me pause. Even with "Navy showers" and other efficiencies, we probably need a peak handly capacity above 500 gallons an hour. (The sewage book says the water is only half-cleaned of solids by the relatively quick methods of skimming, settling, filtering and floccing (chemical precipitation), so are at our less-than-municiple volumes, and access to power, is it better to remove the water from the waste -- boiling it out? Somewhere around 10 gallons a minute?

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Monday, April 08, 2013 - 01:59 pm: Edit

JAck, just out of curiosity...

what kind of plumbing services would you need (in terms of pipes diameter, pumps, auxiliary tanks) would you need to handle crew quarters for a normal POL crew?

I imagine that you cant start with a 1/2 inch line and feed off all of the various fixtures (sinks, urinals, toliets etc...) could you supply enough water off of a normal 2 inch main water supply line, or would it have to be bigger?

You know, this might not be good information for Garths OCD!

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Monday, April 08, 2013 - 03:20 pm: Edit

Jeff, I am NOT going to map out the plumbing!!!!


Garth L. Getgen

By Jack Bohn (Jackbohn) on Monday, April 08, 2013 - 03:43 pm: Edit

I don't mean to give the wrong impression; I'm not a qualified plumber or a civil engineer. All I know is what I'd read in that book, which had been donated to a local charity book fair. [The last day of which all books went to a dime each, or a grocery bagfull for a dollar. It struck me that any volume I'd never seen before was likely to become a volume I'd never see again, and the only time to stop picking up books of even slight interest would be when the weight pulled my arms out of their sockets.]

In other words: I am NOT going to map out the plumbing!!!

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Monday, April 08, 2013 - 05:13 pm: Edit

Joke! I tell you it was A Joke!



And for the Record, I too, will not be mapping out the plumbing!



(What do you want? oh, no you can't drag me down to the booth unless sentence has been passed by some legitimate authority.)

(No, you can't have a bannana.)

(Web Mom ordered no feeding you or your squad of slirdarians years ago, and never rescinded the orders.)

Sigh, I do miss the old squad of Klingon Marines. Atleast they could play a decent game of chess.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Monday, April 08, 2013 - 06:59 pm: Edit

No, Jeff, you get to do all the electrical and comm-cable wiring. {grin}


Garth L. Getgen

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