Toronto PD uses option A.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 11:28 pm: Edit

I'm fairly sure that Huntsville PD uses option A

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 11:43 pm: Edit

I went with "To Serve & Protect" with the ampersand. I put it on the sloped top-sides of the forward hull right down in the forward corner.


Garth L. Getgen

By Kosta Michalopoulos (Kosmic) on Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 03:36 pm: Edit

Yup, exact match to the motto on Toronto police cruisers:

https://www.toronto.com/news-story/7512939-toronto-police-unveil-new-cruiser-design/

By Steve Cain (Stevecain) on Sunday, December 01, 2019 - 04:09 am: Edit

Garth re July 29, moving cargo.

Warships have hatches descending from the main deck to the magazine. Carriers have hatches running down from the hanger. Tours and shows I have scene tend to highlight that these are often through corridors or working spaces. So periodic cargo transfer without the turbo lift could be justified yet still avoid the Gorn shuttle assault squadron.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, December 01, 2019 - 10:03 am: Edit

Good luck, Steve.

I tried to convey the importance to Garth of being able to internally access the cargo bay from the shuttle bay.

Message not received.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, December 01, 2019 - 03:23 pm: Edit

Not true, Jeff. Message WAS received. I'm just not sure yet how to fix it without blowing up the entire back half of the ship.


Garth L. Getgen

By Michael Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Sunday, December 01, 2019 - 06:07 pm: Edit

Also those cargo movement shafts are where the RedShirts hide.

Scalzi wrote an entire book on it!

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, December 01, 2019 - 06:21 pm: Edit

Message received but it still needs to be fixed.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, December 01, 2019 - 08:03 pm: Edit

I wonder if the fix the U.S. Navy did with the Langley and Lexington carriers would work?

Both classes had cargo holds underneath the hanger decks. Not sure of the exact procedure, but it must have included lifting up deck plates of the hanger deck to access the cargo hold under neath.

Yes, it's a pain, and no, you would not interrupt flight operations unless you really really needed the aircraft.

In this case, just put a box with dash lines indicating a removable panel in the deck the size of a cargo pallet (or a bit larger.). When transferring cargo, pop open the panels, move the cargo with portable tractors (as seen in TOS.) I know the shuttle bay is on decks 1 and 2 and the cargo bay is on decks 7 and 8. Just means the pop out panels are going to be added on decks 2 to 6, preferably overhead in the cargo bay over deck 7.

Just avoid intersecting turbo tube lifts, structural girders and plumbing lines. Simple!

And NO, I AM NOT going to draft a schematic of the plumbing supply and effluent systems of a POL hull!

Grin.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, December 01, 2019 - 08:14 pm: Edit

Historical note:

The cargo hold idea for U.S. Carriers started out as a requirement the naval war college wanted. Attrition of early naval aircraft was horrific, (in excess of 25% of aircraft damaged in any given mission were mission killed due to normal flight operations.)

The cargo hold idea was to provide fast replacement aircraft to maintain full strength squadrons. In practice the idea was found to be impractical and not repeated in the Ranger, Yorktown, wasp or Hornet designs. The Essex class carriers had hanger decks with 4 inches of armor which eliminated the possibility of cargo holds.

Information from WARSHIP articles. Details available upon request.

By Steve Cain (Stevecain) on Sunday, December 01, 2019 - 09:16 pm: Edit

Jeff- the problem is that the "plumbing" puts walls half in some halls and not in others for what the lifts would need to be based on the mirror N/S idea. It isn't a problem that is confined to the Pol hull either. A look at trying to make a Fed FF(any) into a FFD one will note that if the drone racks "replace" the photon area, then you are going to have to find a way to Kzinti weightlift the drones up to deck 2.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, December 01, 2019 - 10:04 pm: Edit

Steve, understood.

But there is a need to be able to move cargo between the shuttle bay and the cargo hold.

Unless you are willing to take the turbo lift off line and use the tube access, you are going to have to make some sort of accommodation.

Even with the FF/FFD thing, you can move single drones through regular passages and companion ways as the size of a drone can fit. Cargo pallets are a different animal.

Garth has positioned pallets that contain mobile surgical sets that are supposed to be loaded on shuttles or transporters for emergency operations... if those have to get on a shuttle, it will take time. Same with anything else stored in the cargo bay... it's just not accessible.

By Steve Cain (Stevecain) on Sunday, December 01, 2019 - 11:45 pm: Edit

Totally saw that Jeff. Just saying the redesign of a base class that is already published also faces cargo handling challenges.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Monday, December 02, 2019 - 06:13 am: Edit

Not asking for a redesign, just a notation that there is provision for moving cargo in an orderly and expeditious manner. I would prefer that the deck panels all line up, but if that's impossible, then staggered is fine.

Just so you do not have to form a bucket line and pass the individual items hand to hand up Six decks. Hard to to with a crated fighter or a APC.

By Steve Zamboni (Szamboni) on Monday, December 02, 2019 - 04:27 pm: Edit

Form factors change over time, and I don't recall seeing stacks of pallets in storage in most of the shows. Lots of plastic drums and containers, but not pallets.

If the standard pallet is an antigrav drone - no handle and no wheels - then it doesn't need a lot of space to move around and just a hatch to get from deck to deck. Make it a 50-gal drum and it's a very small hatch.

Make it a big drum - say the size of a turbolift car - and you can shove it into a turboshaft and have it delivered anywhere on the ship.

(The loading bay of a cargo ship may just be a row of turbolift doors that whisks cargo drums off their destination as fast as you can shove them through the doors.)

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Monday, December 02, 2019 - 04:57 pm: Edit

TNG had anti grav (for lack of a better name) cart that carried barrels. IIRC they were two rows of 4 barrels. Odd because it was longer than the interior space Of a standard turbo lift tube.

The simplest solution just might be a pallet jack that could fit in a standard turbolift.

By Steve Cain (Stevecain) on Monday, December 02, 2019 - 05:42 pm: Edit

The simplest solution is what the script writers did. "Scene note: materialize the following from props department... ...and make me happy." Aka, they used the transporter. It could be a little expensive though.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Monday, December 02, 2019 - 07:34 pm: Edit

Intra-ship transporter operations are not really viable simply because the rule establish that you can move a drone from cargo to a drone rack to load on the rack, or to the shuttle bay to load on a shuttle (either as cargo or as a scatter-pack), or onto a fighter (using the Kzinti weight-lifting team rule).

I really hate to say this, because it might be opening a proverbial "can o' worms" (tm), but to get cargo into a cargo bay one might assume a cargo hatch from exterior of ship to interior (the bay) of ship. Hatch could be used by an HTS (or HFS, or etc.) to dock to the ship and slide the pallets (or a whole tank, the usual maximum cargo of an HTS or HAS) shuttle into the bay).

Yes, it is the future, so you can imagine technologies like very weak tractors that do not require the amount of energy needed by a ship to grab another ship and so are not noticeable energy expenditures (subsumed into the life support) and even "original Trek" had anti-grav things you could slap onto something to enable it to be moved (watch "Changeling" and see how Kirk and Spock move Nomad to the transporter room).

Moving cargo around a ship that is not really designed as just a cargo hauler, and has needs for things to go various places, is why the shipwrights get paid the big bucks. When you are planning a warship you have to think about moving casualties form upper decks down to sickbay, how to move the AA ammo to the gun tubs, where the fire fighting equipment is going to connect up and hot to protect the fire fighting material from damage (embarrassing as hack, and frequently fatal when you have all the hoses in place, but the enemy's shiellfire/bombs have knocked out the pumps that were not sufficiently protected, or vice versa).

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Monday, December 02, 2019 - 08:14 pm: Edit

Okay, just to point it out, I did put a cargo transporter on Deck Eight next to the cargo hold. (Background text says it can't be used simultaneously with either of the two six-pad personnel transporters.)

I was just checking the rules to see exactly what I need to allow to happen, and I found something interesting in (G25.135) "Shuttles can only carry cargo which can be divided into units of 4 cargo points or less." Presumably, I don't need to account for moving items larger than that, no?

I would think that such items, 4-points or less, should be able to fit into a turbolift. Another option is to blow a hole from the tom of the ship to the bottom. Lo and behold, I do have such a hole: I have a pair of spiral stairwells and adjacent vertical shafts. What if I changed these to two 1.50 x 2.25 meter lifts from Deck One to Deck Eight? I can move them forward 2.125 meters to give better access to the cargo transporter room and shuttle bay. However, that means I'll have to modify the Mess Hall service area on Deck Seven and tweak the transporter room on Deck Two.

It is do-able, if that's what SVC wants done.

~~~

The only other option is to nuke the entire design and move the Cargo Hold up to Deck One, aft of the shuttle bay. However, comma, that causes all sorts of problems.

First, it could allow direct access from the cargo hold to the shuttle bay, opening the possibility of someone trying to claim they have four extra spare shuttles they can ready to fly on short notice.

Second, all previous published data (clip art / minis) show the drone rack firing out the top of the ship. There would be no room to place it as the shuttle bay and cargo hold would eat up all the available deck space.

Third, it would force all sorts of changes to the overall design of the ship. I would basically lose Deck Two, so I'd have to move the transporter and T-bomb storage. But that has to be close to the shuttle bay so that they can roll a T-bomb out the hatch. I'd lose the Gymnasium, which as I'm mentioned on several occasions is actually a multi-use room. I feel that it's too important to give up. Sick-bay and/or the Brig would be forced to move as well. And I'd have a huge 10x20 meter hole to fill on both Decks Seven and Eight.

Personally, and somewhat selfishly, I don't think it's worth it for so little gain.


(Cross-posted with Petrick.)


Garth L. Getgen

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Monday, December 02, 2019 - 10:54 pm: Edit

A thought.

If I am not mistaken the Fed Pol started life as the Terran DD. Perhaps the unfortunate layout is a forced legacy from the original design, conversions often have a less than ideal layout.

Perhaps they created an outside collapsible tunnel to move things between the cargo and shuttle bays, and this was the precursor to the collapsible repair bays on the later PFTs.

By Steve Cain (Stevecain) on Monday, December 02, 2019 - 11:42 pm: Edit

SPP- I agree about the transporter. It was a. Cheap shot at the show writers not having to live in what they portray.

Garth- I think the vertical shaft is the only thing that can be justified. Note on the write ups that at least deck two and eight have hatches of a much larger than normal size. SVC's blessing and between SPPs pallet note and your shaft use....I would be happy to call it fixed.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Tuesday, December 03, 2019 - 06:14 am: Edit

I would have to check, but IIRC the original location of the shuttle bay of the Terran Destroyer was the after right side tractor beam location.

I could see having a freight / cargo handling shaft oriented to the side of the ship as a legacy system.

Yes, it would be inconvenient, but disrupting one deck is better than having to tear up all six decks between deck 2 and 7.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Tuesday, December 03, 2019 - 11:47 am: Edit

The other possibility is that transporters are not economically viable for mass movement of cargo. In the SFU transporters are cheap to power but it could be that the maintenance from excessive use is cost prohibitive. In other words if you run it every turn for 100 turns in succession you have to give it a costly overhaul so it is restricted for low volume cargo transfer and small quick movements of personnel and, of course, for boarding and other combat functions while most cargo movement uses shuttles and antigrav sleds.

A little freight elevator at the edge of the hull makes sense. If it is damaged in combat it does not impair combat functioning at all.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Tuesday, December 03, 2019 - 02:15 pm: Edit

Jon, not arguing with you, but a little freight elevator at the exterior of the hull leaves a exterior access to the cargo bay that Garth wanted to eliminate... (that is, if I understood correctly. Garth, please tell me if I am wrong...) if the freight elevator (with a maximum capacity of 4 cargo points?!?) can be made to work so cargo could be moved internally, fine.

We need to set some parameters... how much weight can a turbolift move? Let's say a 55 gallon barrel of fuel (in this case, heavy water for antimatter energy production in say a POL warp drive... at a guess that's what? 9 pounds per gallon? A 55 gallon drum would thus weigh , (9*55=495) pounds. Let's say the 8 barrel cart talked about above from TNG is a standard load for moving on a turbolift. That's 3,960 pounds, not counting the cart or its operator.

That's just short of 2 tons of cargo, and probably over 2 tons if the operator and cart are included.

Let's say a turbolift could hold 10 passengers, at an average body weight of 200 pounds each. That again gets us close to a maximum capacity (at normal capacity) for an admin shuttle (yes, over crowding is possible, but 10 passengers, plus a pilot and gunner crew is also close to the 1 crew unit limit capacity of a admin shuttle. (Which is normally assumed to be 14 at most and 5 at the lower end.)

None the of this is official, but it puts the task of moving cargo in context.

Just saying it's not so small a job that can just be assumed easily completed.

SFBs has not defined what exactly a cargo box capacity is in terms of volume, weight, but if the 3,960 pound burden quoted above equals the 4 cargo point rate in the G25.135 rule... it means using humans to move cargo is not going to be a popular option among the crew.