Friday, January 28, 2011

Enterprise and Elohim

I spent this morning and part of this afternoon on the server that the Enterprise project is hosted on. Actually, I tried getting on it last night but none of the Classic servers would function, even when I tried using World of Minecraft (which is also being quite uncooperative). I did some studying up on the Enterprise schematics and got in the ship itself. It really is quite astounding.

They have a wiki for the project and one of the things I noticed was that, in the list of decks they have completed, they include deck 7, which as 220 rooms. There's also an invitation in parenthesis to choose one as your own. I don't know if that's sarcasm or not, but it gave me an idea. If/when the Elohim is completed and put on servers, people will be allowed to pick one out for themselves. Their own little chunk of the ship. The Elohim has twenty relatively large officer room, 25 two-man crew rooms, and 20 four-man rooms. Officer rooms are more complex in design and larger, whereas the other two types of rooms are smaller and more like what you'd find on a modern naval craft. Although designing the smaller rooms would be less feasible, getting an officer's room would mean you can design it however you want.

Along with that, each ship would have a roster of crew positions ranging from the obvious like commanding officer to the obscure like computer specialist. A person could pick one of those for themselves, preferably one that coincides with their housing. It would be a little strange for the chief surgeon to be in a bunk designed for enlisted crew, no? For each copy of the ship out there, I would initially serve as the commanding officer until someone took that position. I would have the ceremonial rank of Admiral and, although I wouldn't have much control over the ships except perhaps requesting server owners to ban certain people or do things with the ship itself, it's still kinda cool to have that level of recognition.

Currently, the ship is still well in the prototyping stage. I've barely put together the main engineering section and there are many other areas left to design. Integrating them all will be a heck of a time, but I'm sure I can do it!

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Elohim's Internal Arrangements

Although I haven't laid down any final plans, I do know a little about what will go where. Rooms related to ship command and control will be placed together. Living quarters will be near that. Environmental control will be near the quarters, perhaps by the science department. Medical will be somewhere between the crew quarters and the engineering section. The security section will be near the meddeck but not as close to crew quarters (for good reason - would you feel comfortable knowing a criminal is on the opposite side of the wall you're laying by?).

As said before, Elohim is composed of three subhulls. This means that some things will need to be seen in all three of them, while some things will only appear in one. The shuttlebay will be in the back of Cain, like you'd find on Star Trek starships. Cain will also sport the main engineering room with the matter/antimatter reactor. The other two subhulls will have fusion reactors and banks of massive capacitors which are used as batteries. The primary meddeck will be in either Abel or Babel, but the other two will have smaller areas for medical purposes. A rather tricky part is going to be with their computer cores. I want to see if they can be lined up to form one core when connected, and not three scattered somewhere in the ship.

In a Classic file that I have on my hard drive, I've been making models of the ship's various rooms. It will indeed be a big ship, and maybe a little ugly at first. Deck 1, which has the main control center and briefing room, is 20x25 in size. Deck 2, which currently has the captain's and executive officer's offices along with another briefing room, currently doesn't look like it'll have to be quite as big. However, I've just barely begun making tentative deck layout plans, and that doesn't include larger constructs such as sublight engines, graser turrets, warp coils, etc. This ship will indeed be something when it's finished.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Elohim Gets More Details

I worked on plans for the Elohim a lot today. I've concluded the ship has a crew of 180, with several decks amongst the three subhulls (Abel, Babel, and Cain). I've yet to organize them into what will be found where. I am drawing inspiration from schematics I saw for the Sovereign class starship and the Enterprise-A model that I have as one of my world saves. The Elohim itself will likely be shaped somewhere between the saucer section of the Sovereign class and the sideways-pyramid shape of the Prometheus class's forward part. (Just Google those if you don't understand.)

The design of the starship is not going to be finalized as soon as I complete it. Instead, I'm going to build the prototype and call it version 0.1. As people walk through it and come to understand it, I will be open to any suggestions they have. If it seems good enough and practical enough, it will be included. The revisions may be minor or major, and the final version of the Elohim may look quite differently than what it started off as.

Now that I have made a good list of what rooms and components will be on the ship, I need to figure out what goes where. I'm going to borrow from the Enterprise-A model and stick things like crew quarters and command section near each other, while the engineering section and the shuttlebay will be toward the bottom of the ship.

There is another challenge that doesn't exist with the Sovereign and Enterprise-A ships. Remember, Elohim splits into three subhulls. This means that some things will appear more than once while others won't. Like, each subhull is going to need its own computer core (and I may try to find a way so, when the ship is in one piece, they all connect into one big core but are modular for when separated) but in likelihood only Cain will sport a shuttlebay.

I'm not new to designing starships. When I was younger and had the free time to unleash my nerdy creativeness I fashioned several fictional races and types of ships they had. I once even managed to identify certain parts of a ship according to what section they belonged to. But never until now have I ever plotted out a ship specifically... much less construct one!