Cochrane-class Colony Ship INCOMPLETE

[jkb-1]

The Cochrane-class, a cool ship, it must look like an airport when all the shuttlebays on the different levels go into action at once. It transports colonies, or anything else that needs 2400 people and 240 kilotons of material.



Do those numbers make sense? (Sometimes it seems FASA numbers don't.) A transport pod can carry 110 kilotons OR 500 people (in more luxury). I've superimposed one over the schematics. Maybe. More so than the Aakenn freighter, which is said to carry about as much as a pod, but doesn't seem to have the room. (I was going to save https://home.comcast.net/~ststcsolda/ind ... STSTCSOLDA the bandwidth and scan these, but I had to check the site, anyway, to see if he mentioned any problem reconciling the three views. The Aakenn in particular looks like three different ships in each of the three different views.)



The nacelle of the Cochrane is 173.615 meters long, or 113% longer than the ones we're used to. The Aakenn's is 123.243m, or 80.2%. That means using a Polar Lights Pilot Version nacelle, the Cochrane will be in a "box scale" of 1/1130th. On the other hand, a 1/2200th nacelle would be the right size for a 1/2500 kit! I know I ruined one "Enterprise Incident" kit and had to buy another, I'll have to see what pieces I can find. (Going the other way, a 1/650 AMT nacelle would fit the smaller Aakenn in Movie-era 1/537th, but I don't build that big.)

[jkb-1]

Wasted too much time on a tangent: I have a 3-D program that creates height fields; take any 2-D picture and treat the color of each pixel as the height to create mountains or shorelines or whatever. I colored in the three outlines of the Cochrane pure white to create three "tubes" of the shapes.



The program treats these as solids. Not in the sense of not letting them slide through one another, but in the sense of knowing what is the "inside" and what is the "outside" of each. So if I line them up:



I can then tell it to make a shape only from what is inside all three of them.



Better than the "https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_ ... C193,Gödel, Escher, Bach" type block I expected, but a little crude. The port & starboard shuttlebays should be little extensions sitting on the landing apron, but the top view only cuts out the apron shape, and the forward view defines the top and the bottom. The shape of the roof in the top view and the walls in the side view are lost against the background. (Hmm... if instead I colored the background parts of the ship a gray to correspond with its distance... the program has a procedural texture, so setting pure white and maximum height and pure black at minimum should allow me to pick off the proper gray... No, that way madness lies.)

For actual progress, I scanned the Federation Reference Manual drawings, both to get an image I can print the proper size without being too pixelated, and to make sure any deviations from the true ship are my own fault. Gee, it's big:



The shuttlebays are cavernous, too. There's a 1/1000 shuttlebay dome sitting next to it. (Remember, this'll be a 1/1130 model.) A Sacred Scale would be about 45% the length, that makes the drawings about 1/5 the area, so all three fit on one sheet of paper. When (IF!) I complete the "braille scale" model, I should know any problems If I want to make the smaller version.

[Kratok]

Interesting read. I like the concept, and the research/thought you are putting behind it. Will be interested in seeing your work progress.

[Moongrim]

I agree with Kratok.

Yes the shuttle bays are indeed cavernous; but I would imagine that a Colony ship would have shuttles of a different nature than the Constitution class exploration ship.

[jkb-1]

Thanks! Prototyping this weekend: traced the flat shapes onto thin cardboard, now to see how much I've bitten off when it comes to the curved parts!



I'm almost scared into going to the simpler FASA Liberty freighter!

[jkb-1]

Oops, forgot my report.

Looking at the diagrams closely, I thought I'd found a detail the artist put on the main hull then partially hid under the shuttlebay overhang:



However, cutting a piece of cardboard only to the length of the widest part of the top of the bay left it short running down the midline piece. I went with STSTCSOLDA and included that little detail in the rest of the bay's roof.

What would that detail have been? If this were an earthly building I would say drainage for the rain flowing down the two slanted roofs there. Of course, if it were an earthly transport, I would call that overhang an air dam; put a fairing over it and get better gas mileage. Even in space, I wonder why they don't fair over it for more space, even just to store air, water, or batteries. Hmm... if that aft shuttlebay were emptied, then detached from the ship and tractor beamed to the ground for a quick structure, you'd have a protective overhang, and maybe entrances on the opposite side from the big doors.

One thing I have found is a fifth shuttlebay! Down below this aft shuttlebay. While the other four are huge, holding bus-sized personnel shuttles and truck-sized cargo shuttles, this one is more the size of the standard shuttle we've seen. Probably for use by the crew.



An aft and an underside drawing would be useful. I cut out a half circle as the floorplan of the crew shuttlebay, but a more elongated shape for the forward underside one.

[el gato]

Wow, this ship's design looks really interesting. Looking forward to seeing what you do with it

[zookman]

wow that lower 5th landing bay looks a lil tight height wise lol .. definatly wanna come in slow in that landing bay

[Moongrim]

Or perhaps that fifth landing bay is meant for workbees....

[jkb-1]

Thinking about shuttles this weekend. (I'm trying to avoid the trap of thinking about this ship without actually working on it, but -- due to foreseen circumstances -- I had access to data but not to materials this weekend.)

The first Cochranes were launched just after the early Constitutions, probably when they "broke the Time Barrier" as they say in "The Cage". The may have carried older and smaller shuttles -- tho they'd be replaced with newer models over time.



Scaling the men in Matt Jefferies's first and later sketches, I get his early shuttle to be 2.1 meters high, a bit less than the 2.7m I get for the standard shuttle (Jefferies's drawing here has it shorter than the 24 feet (7.2m) Kirk calls out in "The Galileo Seven"; I suppose there could be sedan and coupe versions.) There are also concepts for service vehicles for "early workbees" if the workbee design doesn't stretch back centuries. Alas, these concepts are taller than 2.1 m, but that platform would work well without that open dome bubble. The space-suited pilot could even duck as he comes in!

It is entirely possible those parallel lines don't even represent a hangar door. But I want them to. If worse comes to worst, I'll build it a bit bigger.
(Lets' see: the parallel lines atop the main hull under the big aft hangar are cargo bays, those beside the port and starboard hangars are markings and possibly something to hold shuttles to that surface so they can "park" even if they can't use the hangar for some reason and Flight Control won't have to keep track of them, the horizontal lines around the bow and stern are sensor arrays, those on the pylon near the nacelle are vent/radiator/decoration.)