Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Beginning Deck 4

With the finishing touches of the docking port an decontamination room for deck 3, I finished that one. Next up is deck 4. My main challenge with this is to make it at least the width and height of the previous deck. I laid down the outlines for the crew quarters on the left side and the total length brings it to about 20 blocks short. What hasn't been added to that are the grasers which have their bottom halves on this deck. Also include the upper half of the impulse engine/fusion reactors, which should add around ten blocks. Length should not be a problem. My other concern is width. Again, the placement of grasers (and the hydrogen collector, aka "Bussard ramscoop") will sort of dictate a minimum width. I shouldn't have a problem with that, though.

This is also the deck where the warp coils appear. I wonder how long those should be. My original plan did not call for very many but given the size of the ship already, it doesn't seem like a small group of coils could envelop an entire ship into a pocket of warped space and propel it forward. I may need to increase the count of those.

In related news, I've already briefly considered a successor project to this, probably done in Beta: the Ruah class fighter carrier. It's like Battlestar Galactica meets Nimitz-class aircraft carrier meets my imagination. I want to throw in like TNT cannons and lava arrow dispensers. Maybe even redstone-wired TNT blocks for a self-destruct mechanism? It would possibly also be kind of more comfortable a place to live in for the thousands of people on it. The Ruah would be more like a flagship that the builders put a lot of money into.