Gorn Battle Cruiser deck plans = work-in-progress

[Sgt_G]

I have started a project to create deck plans for a Gorn ship. Technically, this is deck plans for six ships: the Gorn CA, CA+, BC, CL, CL+, and CLF. All of these ships are very similar, so by drawing one I end up drawing them all.

I decided to open this topic to let you follow along, watch my thought process, perhaps give advise, and see where this goes. To be honest, I did not set out to build an entire set of plans, and I do not know how long it might take or even if it will ever get finished.

When I did the Federation Police Cutter plans, I had an idea worked out in my head of what I thought the final design should look like. I do not have that for this project. I only started the Gorn ship to give advise to Steve Z. as he in creating the Shapeways model. I drafted the bubble to figure out how thick it should be, and just kept going.


Before I begin, let me tell you about the program I am using. It is called FloorPlan Plus for Windows version 2.0 by IMSI, the same company that produces TurboCAD.



You may ask, "Why are you using such an ancient program?" I do have TurboCAD v20 (upgraded from v18), but the learning curve is just sooooo very steep, every time I play with it I end up running "home" to FP+. There's very little that TurboCAD does that I can't do in FP+, albeit occasionally with a long workaround.

For example, my program only does snap-to-grid. Ergo, if I need to connect this line to the midpoint of that line, I have to manually find the midpoint and then connect to it. TurboCAD has a tool to do that in one step.

The one drawback of my program that comes to light while drafting Federation or Gorn ships is that it does not draw a true circle, but rather a 32-sided polygon. Usually close enough, but sometimes it shows up.

[Sgt_G]

Okay, so you want to draft a set of deck plans? Step One: which ship are you going to do? Here, we're doing the Gorn Battle Cruiser, and by extension all her little sisters. The first thing I do it draw the top-plane view.



Okay, so I cheated a little. This is the fourth or fifth edition of this view. Pretty much the same as when I started, but I did go back and tweak things several times.

This does NOT perfectly match the 3D-model that Steve Z. is working on.

The bubbles are 90-meters in diameter, set 60-meters apart, making the ship 240 meters long (sans Warp Drive). The neck is 87-meters long at the centerline, 70 meters along the side, by 40 meters wide.

Steve said the early draft of his model has 88-meter bubbles.

[Sgt_G]

The next step is to figure out how thick the ship is, how many decks it has. When I built the Federation Police Cutter plans, I gave her crew ceilings of 275-cm. Gorns are about a half-meter taller than Humans, so I decided on 325-cm ceilings. I had an early draft of 375-cm ceilings but decided that was too much headroom.

Based on previous Gorn minis, it appears the BC/CL bubbles are about 1/3 as thick as they are wide, or about 30-meters thick. First, I tried to make a true-oval and found eight decks fit closely to that size:



That might be a little hard to read, so let me zoom in:



Alright, that works. But I didn't like it. So, again, I did something that is a little different from the 3d-model. I flattened the oval. Or to be more exact, I split an oval in half and added a straight section, making a 24-meter diameter disc for the top/bottom of the bubbles.



I was happy with that. It works for me. I do have a Plan-B with only seven, taller, decks per bubble. I'll post that if you want to see it. (edit: https://i.imgur.com/qyE5E1G.gif)

I also sliced the ship's neck into six decks thusly.

[Sgt_G]

Okay, now that I have the ship sliced into decks, I can transcribe the limits of each deck to the top-view.



The grey circle is Decks 1/8, blue is Decks 2/7, green is Decks 3/6, and red is Decks 4/5.

Next I made eight copies, side by side, with Deck One (top) on the left and Deck Eight (bottom) on the left. (Just showing Decks One-Four here as Decks Five-Eight are same-same.)



I also cut the aft bubble off and trimmed the wings slightly to make the CL outlines.

[Sgt_G]

The next step is to pencil in all the items that are locked in as to where they go on the ship. For example, if this was a Federation ship, the bridge would be up on Deck One, exposed and vulnerable. The Gorn ships will have the bridge in a safer place.

Most of the weapons are on the wings, as are the impulse engines, so no issue there for now. The warp drive has been marked.

I put phaser bumps on for the FA+L/FA+R Ph-1, but I haven't' decided if that's the final location. I have them at 45-deg off-center, but I think they should be closer to 30-deg.

Really, the only big item to pencil in at this time is the shuttle bay.




Note to self: Need to make new icons for Gorn shuttles.

[Sgt_G]

I should have posted this already. This is a legend for the various plate thickness that I use.



My program allows me to make custom wall widths. One trick I came up with was to make a 3-meter wide "wall" to pencil in the turbolift horizontal shafts, and a 2-meter "wall" for walking corridors. At some point later, I'll have to go in and replace these with the narrower side walls.

Given that I have a pretty much blank slate to work with, I can start mapping out the turbolift path. One thing I dislike about many Federation designs, something I want to avoid, is having the turbolift cutting off portions of the ship, making it hard to walk form here to there. (Yes, the Police Cutter suffers form that issue as it has a turbolift shaft running right down the center of the ship, making it hard to get form the left side to the right.)

I decided to run the turbolift around the edge of the ship, with Deck Six as the connector for to aft.



If you're wondering why there was extensions on the for/aft shafts, it's so they can reach the point where the vertical shaft will connect to Deck Seven.



I put purple circles in to show where the next deck edges are. I put the 325-cm and 300-cm head-height edges of Deck Eight on Deck Seven, as I think I'll allow the turbolift to run into the lower area. I copied Deck Seven to Deck Two, and Deck Six to Deck Three (and then cut the for-aft shaft for the shuttle bay).

So, that's all I have done so far, and I'm not sure when I can get more posted. I want to try to spend at least 15 minutes per day, every day, working on this project. Some days, I'll be able to work on it for a few hours, but I know if I don't add "something" every day, it will go on the back-burner.

[Jack Bohn]

A few thoughts:
When the CL loses the rear bubble, they also lose two wing phasers and one spare shuttle. I suppose this represents some items in the rear bubble moved into the aft hull (formerly center hull) and crowding them out.

If I scaled the plasma-G from the Snipe deckplans right, it takes up most of the corner of the wing, not even counting that this should be a plasma-S and probably larger. (The components should be similar, though the Gorns might arrange them differently. My preference is that the plasma-G is the "sweet spot" for size versus power: the S is even larger than the proportion of their damage ratios would suggest, and the R is almost too big, but it does give that satisfying crunch. The F is not as small as it might be, and has that stasis "freezer" attachment.) Add the impulse engines, phaser(s) and some balcony and track machinery in the overhead, and the wing is probably mostly equipment and access passageways for the engineering crew. Sssscotty's office probably doesn't overlook the impulse engines. (In the CA, it could be in the aft bubble, and [used to] overlook the warp engine cross connect. In the CL it could be moved the the corresponding part of the forward bubble, displacing the junior officers' lounge, or something.) Similarly, the phaser control room and plasma control room are not in the wing, and adding a phaser-3 and plasma-F crowds the machinery in the wing but just jams another control panel and seat into that control room.

One thing I wonder about is the Commando Transport: somehow they found extra room in the aft hull of a CL for three Cargo and three Barracks. Each of these holds about the volume shuttle ready for launch (and access space) or 50 persons (D7.12 says it's no hard and fast rule that four Gorns equal a boarding party of 5 humans, and we are probably better off building barracks for five to make sure we aren't building too small for Gorns.) Could the COM be an extended CL hull, say by five meters or so? It can't be discerned from a CL until Intelligence Level D, for what that's worth. That's also where a PFT variant can be detected, or the PF seen: could the COM have camper/RV pushout sections for the extra room?

[Sgt_G]

Jack, good catch on the spare shuttle. For some reason, I had it in my head the CL had three, but you're right in that it only has two. It does have three flight-ready shuttles per side but only two balconies per side. My idea was to use the parts storage (indicated by a bunch of shuttle engines) as their parking spaces. Given it only has two spare shuttles, I can use the middle hold has the spare parts room. Thanks! P.S> Please notice I did trim the CL/s wings, moved the trailing edge by 3 meters.

My initial though about Main Engineering is it will double as the Emergency Bridge. Thus even tho the SSD puts it just behind the front bubble, it should probably go more in the tail under/above the Warp pylons.

I haven't even begun to think about the Plasma torps. I did notice that the PL-Fs are LS/RS, not LP/RP, and thus shouldn't be on the PL-S swivels but rather be tacked on the bottom of the wing (like the Ph-3s will be) or maybe as a smaller semi-circle on the edge behind the PL-S mounts.

Speaking of wings, the SSD shows the Impulse engines on the inboard of the trailing edge, but I have seen art that pushes them more to the outboard.

Cargo: When I made the Police Cutter plans, I made the two-box cargo hold 10x20 meters, or 100 m^2 per box. I would find it acceptable to go down to about 8x8 meter per box.

For the variants, I'd have to look at the Tactical Intelligence chart to see if sensor can pick up the difference. We'll know more after we get some rooms sketched in, but I just had an idea to maybe extend the neck wider under the wings ... well, opps, I have the Turbolift running thru there.

As to crew quarters, that just happens to be the next item on my to-do list: figure out how big rooms have to be. The BC has a crew of 480, and the CL has 320. Does that mean each bubble has quarters for 160 crew, which means the neck has 160 crew as well?? I suspect that logic won't work once I check the CM/HDD, etc.

Out of time right now .... need to get off the computer to go to lunch "or else". Later!

[Sgt_G]

Didn't have much time to work on it today, so all that I did was move the for/aft phaser bumps from 45-deg to 30-deg off center, to be more inline with their FA+L/FA+R arcs. I also made a dent on the front of Deck Four where the deflector dish will go. I will have to copy that to Deck Five, and to the CLF.

[Sgt_G]

Got a little bit done today. This is by no means set in stone, just trying to visualize how I might be able to lay out the rooms. These rooms are roughly 5x5 meter. The green is the turbolift, and the dark purple is the corridors.



Here's a closer look:



The outside ring has eight rooms per quarter. I figure the next ring will have six rooms. The next smaller ring will have four or five rooms, and the smallest three. Just depends on how the dimensions come out. We'll see how it goes.

EDIT: So, doing the math, that's about 80 rooms for Deck Two - Forward. Deck Seven and the aft will be same-same === 320 rooms total.

I figure Deck Three / Six will have between 100 and 120 rooms per bubble, so another 400 to 480 rooms. Decks Four/Five will be the same or more. I was worried that I'd run out of room trying to fit quarters for 480 Gorn, but I'm not so concerned anymore.

[Jack Bohn]

Less concern about rooms in the bubbles gives me less concern about rooms in the center hull. I kept thinking that the obvious 160/160/160 crew split be weighted more towards the bubbles, and had been trying to diplomatically compose a request that the CL deckplan be slightly -slghtly- different to sleep more. You may not need to.

[Jack Bohn]

I can see wanting the impulse engines on the outboard to direct the exhaust past the aft bubble, but, considering ships can go backwards on impulse, there are probably force field tricks that make that a lesser concern.

I've been reading this on my phone, and missed scrolling sideways to see your CL wing. Also missed seeing the individual shuttle doors on the Shapeways model for the mini. Wasn't there art with the tracks radiating from the center of a shuttle hatch to the balconies?

[mjwest]

Also missed seeing the individual shuttle doors on the Shapeways model for the mini. Wasn't there art with the tracks radiating from the center of a shuttle hatch to the balconies?

That is a really good point. There likely should only be one bay door on either side, with the two/three pads on a side all sourcing from that single door.

(Which, when you think about it, is the entry point of the balcony system. If each shuttle has its own door, there is no point for balconies. The balconies are used because there is only a single door.)

[Sgt_G]

Well, bonk. That's going to be a PITA fitting everything in the narrow space allowed.

If anyone has an idea how to make it happen, feel free to explain it. Or better yet, sketch it up in MS-Paint or some such and post the GIF to this topic. Thanks!

[Sgt_G]

I think I have it. I'll move the spare parts forward and the spare shuttles aft, which should give me plenty of parking space for the ready-launch shuttles.

I'll bring one track out and "+" to into three balcony pads. For the CL, I'll just "T" it.