Or, probably worse, the following was heard I a science lab one day: “well… we’ve managed to contain a micro black hole in this corrugated tube. Does anyone know what we do next?”. I mean it’s not as if you can just flush it down a sink and run for it or leave it to the grad student is it, someone’s gonna notice….
it is their power scource that is actually more stable than a warp core but if it goes wrong well that instance it will be 5 times worse when a warpcore breach
There's at least one other Sci-Fi property that uses black holes... The Commonwealth/Humanx/Flinx books by Alan Dean Foster. In that canon, the black hole serves as the propulsion, inertial compensator, AND defensive shield, all in one. The theory is that the ships PROJECT a black hole in front of them, turn it off, turn it back on at the original distance from the ship, repeat millions of times per second... In effect, the ship is always "falling into" a massive gravity well... which EATS... ANYTHING it runs into. Massive accel, without the "squishies getting squished", because they and the ship are always being pulled in the same direction at the same rate at the same time. I don't think it's actually mentioned in any of the books, but just for shits and grins... It even cleans up after itself... no pollution. Of course, it's a little "problematic" being able to see where you're going. IIRC, this wasn't their method of FTL travel, just their way of getting around at sub-light speeds... but it's been a LONG time since I read any of those books... Hmm... I may have to go back and read them again...
The D'Deredex class was the most advanced starship in the alpha quadrant in the TNG days. Then the dominion and the borg put a bug up the federations ass and they decided to put "offensive" weaponry on their ships instead of "defensive" weaponry. The D'Deredex class also lit a fire under the Klingons, because NOBODY is supposed to outgun them and they took that personally.
so the moral is never tell a Klingon you have a bigger gun?? wait that sounds more like lesson 75 of life.... never brag to any woman that your gun is bigger than the other guy's......and you know what I mean by gun right?? lolz
And the Federation militarizing had a very subtle threat too. They didn't class their offensive ships as war ships, but as escort ships. If I understand it correctly, an escort ship is a smaller, weaker version if a warship designed to protect civilian ships. So even after militarizing, the Federation was warning their enemies that this isn't what the Federation looks like on a war path, and you don't want to see what they would be.
@@thomasjenkins5727 the first hint the entire galaxy got that the Federation were NOT to be fucked with was the discovery that they did not, in fact, classify their ships as "Cruisers" or "Battlecruisers" or "Frigates" like the klingons or other species did. they were classified by their mission role. hell, the Enterprise in TNG was one few exceptions, they were straight up classified as "Constitution-Class Cruisers." fun fact, the Klingons did in fact take note of this and were rightfully wary, as a Constitution could quite handily fuck over the D7 Battlecruiser and make it look easy---itself was actually an import FROM the Klingons, TO the Romulans, because they at the time didn't actually have too many heavier ships. (they were working on that.) Cue the Defiant, which the klingons noted REALLY DAMN FAST was a warship designed from the keel up for a fight, and more importantly it didn't go unnoticed that it was designed to KILL BORG. not fight borg. KILL borg. those quad phaser cannons? every single shot that comes from every single barrel fires on a different frequency to screw over adaptation. this has the other effect of screwing over shield modulation on other people as well. in STO, everyone in the alpha quadrant found out the hard way what really happens when you piss off the federation enough that THEY, declare war, on YOU. the klingons were getting the shit beaten out of them for the longest time, and the ships only got worse and worse until the Federation unveiled the Odyssey-Class Dreadnaught. those things are **absurdly** armed and well equipped and not an inch is wasted on a ship over 1 KILOMETER long, capable of maintaining (or combining) three phaser beams in the front and aft arcs due to it's insane power output. most folks that "Upset" one found out the hard way it's capable of engaging no less than 6 targets at once via Broadside, or one unfortunate victim was getting six barrels compressed into 2 and getting slammed like a redheaded stepchild. in the current prologue to STO, you're put in charge of a retrofitted Miranda class. the game notes that these are something of a meme, but also points out the thing carries a whopping 6 dual phaser banks on the primary hull, the twin Heavy Phasers on the "Roll Bar", and the torpedo launcher is forward and aft which isn't always the case for a ship that small. now mechanically gamewise it's the first ship, and you only have 1 aft weapon slot and 2 forward ones, but lore-wise? the Miranda is literally designed to just unload on something. the Federation doesn't make warships? my ass!
I can’t help but feel any Defiant-class that goes up against one of these takes one look at that gap and goes ‘haaaaaang on a minute, what if we just park in there and send insulting messages about poking the black hole with the phaser-brrrrrt to her Captain until they surrender’. In fact I have a very dim recollection of one such ship slipping in that gap, extending shields and rotating to gut her in one of the Kirk back from the dead Shatner novels….
Haha that happens in Star Trek Armada, but just the intro. Worf's commanding the Pimp Slap, going up to a Romulan double Ds warbird and goes into the giant gap, drops mines into and peaces the hell out as it blows up.
Tuvok from Voyager paid for it and directed it, if I remember correctly. It was supposed to have a pt2, but CBS went extra Authoritarian after the Axanar lawsuit
You would have to get inside the Romulan's shield bubble, after surviving disrupter fire to get there, and surviving disrupter fire while there. I only watched TNG back in the 90's but I loved the D'didderedoo and wondered about protecting the hole. Then one episode Picard convinced a Romulan to blast something small approaching the D'deridex. They fired a disrupter from the top inside of the cavity near the engineering section.
I always liked the idea of the Romulan ship having a black hole to power it. What is more Romulan than making sure that your ship will destroy itself if it was disabled for any reason? You can't study a derelict ship, if that ship was sucked into a black hole.
Actually yeah, that is a good rationale for it. Like outfitting an operative with a poison tooth. Very Romulan. Safety of ship and crew?👎 Keeping the jumbo mollusk recipe secret at all costs? 😘
I figure instead of sucking it in the uncontained quantum regularity would be like a constant atomic bomb because of the Hawking radiation producing petawatts of energy. Part of the containment would involve feeding part of this energy back into the singularity which is why it can't be shut down.
There was a scene in which the Enterprise D was staring down 2 of these things and it was noted that while 2 could probably take out the Galaxy Class, theyw ould know they were in a fight, and then 3 Klingon Birds of Prey decloacked shifting the balance more toward the Galaxy Class. What I love about that scene was the placement of the reinfocements. 1 behind each warbird and 1 above and behind the enterprise.
Well, the gravity from the black hole is pretty much a non-issue; it's too small. If it gets loose, however, you've got a lot of gamma rays flying around sections of the ship that aren't designed for it... and little power to put up any internal shields.
The D'Deridex is perfect for long-range, long-lasting intelligence and infiltration missions. The forced quantum singularity can power the ship forever producing all the power and supplies the ship would need, coupled with it's cloaking device it can remain on station monitoring Federation or Klingon targets for years.
I pointed out the same thing in my mini essay above, it's just that I started writing before you posted, and finished after you posted … as I added in a lot of extraneous crap as I tend to overwrite and be too wordy and just go on and on about a … … _I'm doing it again, aren't I ?_
Great. Sit there and watch for years as your crew slowly turn into quivering bowls of paranoid jelly because they know there is a freaking black hole 3 decks down from their bedroom. Seriously though, if the darn thing had the firepower to turn a Galaxy class into scrap right quick it wouldn’t be so silly. Instead it’s the equivalent size of a super tanker with the firepower of a Corvette.
The empty space within the Dideliduha would be much cooler if it was used as a shipyard, housing and repairing a fleet of smaller warbirds. That would turn it to a versatile heavily armed mobile base, suited for planetary invasions or long range patrols along the empire's borders.
As others have mentioned, the reason for the space was because some versions of warp tech require that there be an unobstructed path between the nacelles. Unfortunately, Start Trek suffers from some writers and designers really caring about having reasons that make sense for their cool designs and those that don't care.
@@arthurmoore9488 It doesn't really "require" free space between the nacelles (since it doesn't actually require two nacelles at all) but it's much easier to not deal with the ionizing radiation that is created when the warp field is forming by having it occur in empty space than it is to build systems to deal with it inside the vessel.
@@andrewmalinowski6673 Fighters are generally not a viable option in trek. Even the fighters we do see in TNG and DS9 are pretty huge. Phasers are just that good at self defense you need a fairly large powerplant and shield generator. Then again modern jetfighters are also way bigger than you expect and may actually be bigger than the Runaboats and fighters.
The massive negative space: I've always thought of the ship like a puffer fish that was always puffed up. It was intended to be a weapon of intermediation and terror. Even if the Galaxy is its equal, a captain would have second thoughts about going toe to toe with something that damned big. It avoids fights and imposes its will because no one wants to try their luck.
Kind of like the Empire from Star Wars, big and intimidating to scare people into not wanting to fight. Do not think I have ever scene an example in any media where that actually worked.
I imagine the Romulans would probably use the black hole as either a weapon of last resort or as a deterrent. Have one of those things park over a population center and see who has the balls to try and destroy the thing keeping a black hole contained. Great vid as always, Dockmaster! Cant wait to see what you do next!!
Mostly depends on how massive the singularity is. If it's a hyper-compressed Buick, the planet in question can pretty much ignore it, but if its closer to a planetary mass (the Ceres to Pluto range for instance) that sucker could do some real damage. With the infinite density of a singularity it could punch right through a planet and not even slow down ... and if it has enough mass of its own it could take some of the planet with it as it passes.
In the instances where we see these go up in video games, they basically eat themselves and then spit out a puff of Hawking radiation, so they're small.
@@Reddotzebra Yeah, I love watching that in STO. Sadly the physics of it are kind of hand-wavy. To wad up the ship you'd need a considerable gravitational force, which requires mass, but to just blow up and not pull in everything around it for the next few millennia requires the singularity to be very low mass. I generally chalk it up to the singularity cores being ultimately unstable and some of the crunch effect coming from their own containment systems as the whole mess goes critical.
I figure the Romulans did not have a large supply of dilithium crystals so they developed their own energy source that did not need them as much. As for the size it's a war ship so it's probably made to deliver an army like the ISD in Starwars.
My headcannon is that Romulan agents got word of the Galaxy class when it was still on the drawing board, Romulan command freaked out and demanded a ship that was larger than the planned Galaxy class be rushed into production. Cue the budget office having an fit, the office of supply having a fit, and the shipyards having a fit about actually building the damn thing. So a poor designer created a large but hollow ship with several A/M reactors to power it, then the propaganda agency got involved and wanted the ship, which was now the largest in the quadrant to also be the most advanced, so the Romulan Science academy threw together this unstable prototype power generator and everyone patted themselves on the back. Except the actual navy who looked at the giant white elephant their political masters had delivered to them when they really wanted the twenty or so smaller vessels they could have built for the cost of ONE of these things. There's a reason we only see these vessels along the neutral zone, they are show pieces.
Yes you could do it but by the rulles the D'Deridex's warp drive and power plant work under that would not be very healthy. Shince all the warp sheire of the enginse is funnled into that gap and into the micro singularity. so you would fly in and then get sucked into the ships black hole..... wow non-weapon kill there for the big D.
Having your ship crushed into a singularity would very effectively prevent any data recovery which could be a valued feature if you're up against a technologically superior foe, although building such a massive ship on the presupposition that it's going to be defeated is a little strange, surely there's smaller/cheaper ways of achieving the same outcome.
Regarding pronounciation: Data in one episode calls it the "Dee-deri-dex" class. I'm not sure if anyone else in canon has referred to the class by name. But, most of the trek-lore youtubers call it the "Dih-deri-dex" class.
I think the writers had a rule that the first time someone pronounces a name is the canon pronunciation, for instance Data will always be "Day-tuh" because Patrick Stewart said it first and he's British.
ironically enough... the D'Deridex class having very little automation and relying more on manpower than the Galaxy class would help explain the size difference in part... after all, you need living quarters, systems to run basic necessities, etc for each person which is going to take up a LOT more space than a computer. In regards to the black hole generator... I can think of one upside: you don't have to worry about fuel nearly as much, making it better if you are trying to find alternate fuels, lol. but honestly... a lot of this sounds like what we all know deep down; the Romulan D'Deridex should have absolutely outclassed the Galaxy class (and by extension 2 intrepids) by a tremendous amount... but was forced to be portrayed way weaker than what really would make sense so it would fit the stories being told, lol. It is unfortunate... but you know it's true.
Re: Power levels. If _TNG_ had somehow come after _B5_ and the CGI was there they would've been able to have more than one model of Romulan warship. Instead, no matter what the story called for, the _D'deridex_ is what showed up on screen.
The idea behind usesing the black hole as an energy source is that you dont have to refuel it, you just have to throw matter into it. Not Antimatter, wich is harder to come by. In combination with their cloak in theory a singularity powered warbird can go for a long time without needing to resupply, meaning sth like deepstrikes onto production plants or spacestations are achievable without being noticed. Thats the idea behind romulan strategie and for that the D'deridex is a purposebuild ship. Basically dont compare it to battleships, rather think of it as an atomic submarine
Antimatter is darn reactive and so in reality it would be way easier to contain artificial black hole than the amount of antimatter needed for long range travel. Any battle damage to antimatter containment would lead to a very bright flash that leaves nothing behind...
That... that explains so much about Romulan ship design. No matter how powerful the ship is, it's not meant to be used for a prolonged battle. It's meant for surprise strikes and covert reconnaissance. The battleship-grade weapons and shields are just the right tools for what they're meant to pop out of stealth and kill.
I love the D'Deridex with the passion of a thousand burning suns (or one quantum singularity) and yes, it is a hill I will die on. To be fair, in pretty much every encounter between a Galaxy class and a D'Deridex that I can recall, the Federation has absolutely soiled its breeches at the mere thought of going head to head with that beast.
Not alone it didn't, it had two Defiant class and at least one other Federation ship helping @@andrewmalinowski6673. If memory serves, the quantum singularity is "only" a micro black hole, so when the drive explodes the resulting destruction really isn't any more widespread than a warp core breach would be before it annihilates itself.
I remember reading a ST novel, written by Shatner. A Defiant-class was going against a Romulan warbird, both took serious damage and the warbird decides to ram the Defiant. At the last second, the Defiant cloaks, uses it’s thrusters to slide out of the collision course and right in-between the nacelles. To which, it then decloaked and opened fire, destroying the warbird from within...
You should break down the Victory Class Star Destroyer the ship that the Republic was supposed to be using as it's mainline warship while the Venator was just an Aircraft Carrier
Technically, the Venator is the oversized space carrier, hardly any of the craft aboard are actually aerial (unless in-atmosphere). The great Venator of "come kick my ass while I stand ominously and launch all the rubber bands I have" (sorry, but there was a Geetsly's or EckhartsLadder video about how badly used they were). Would actually love to hear the breakdown given how badly designed and used the Venator was, despite it's air support role
Star Wars does have a weird habit of the "do everything ship" but alas they usually suck at the "jack of all trades " but excel at the "master of none." Honestly the Victory Class being the mainline slugger while the Venator served as fighter and bomber support and maybe some long range fire would have probably worked great since it could sit behind the defensive screens of the other ships and focus on its job instead of trying to play Battlestar without the shields, armor, offensive or defensive firepower to do so. Imperial Star Destroyers went too far in the opposite direction struggling terribly in the quality and capabilities of being a carrier and the TIE line in general being woefully inadequate. Weirdly the only ships that get worse decent balance are some of the Mon Calas, the First Order Resurgent Class and the Star Destroyers built by the New Republic in the Expanded Universe.
Funny how the features that make for a good exploration vessel that's capable of defending itself also make for a good cruiser-class warship. Particularly when a couple of your early enemies make heavy use of cloaking devices, and sensors capable of gathering detailed information about strange phenomena also happen to be good at detecting strange phenomena that happen to be imperfections in a cloaking field. I think everyone in-universe knows that Starfleet is structured so it can become a military in the time it takes to recall all the exploration ships, but the ships being designed as long-distance exploration vessels means they can have a large fleet without other powers assuming that the only reason they'd have so many is to attack someone. Which helps to avoid self-fulfilling prophecies that lead to war (like what happened with the British and German navies in the leadup to WW1). Particularly if everyone else can see that everything that Starfleet has that isn't required for peacetime security operations is out exploring the edges of known space rather than massing for a surprise attack. Which means that the Federation can make itself a polity with a large enough military that nobody wants to attack it, while reducing fears that the Federation is planning to use that fleet against anyone else without provocation.
@@boobah5643 I think it's actually implicit in the show. Starfleet still have military ranks. They're obviously trained to fight, even if they're also not trained to view it as a first resort. And they've been in enough wars to know they need a combat fleet in being - they might be idealists, but they're not stupid. But building it as an exploration fleet first has double value - it allows the Federation to have one of the biggest fleets in the quadrant while minimising the chance of it being interpreted as an aggressive move, and they genuinely are interested in exploration. Even in the Original Series, there are episodes where the Enterprise has clearly been seconded to the sort of mission you'd normally send a warship on in a cold-war-esque political environment, before returning to the exploration mission.
I think the hole is easily explained - it's to screw with people's aimbots, which go for center of mass. If there's nothing in the center of the ship, the firepower goes right through, leaving the Romulans on comms laughing at the scrubs on the other side :)
Well, in theory, the smaller the black hole, the more energy it gives off, meaning that it should be able to produce far more power than a MAM reactor. On the scale of theoretical power plants, the only thing that would beat it is a plank reactor/vacuum energy and the various methods of turning an entire reality into your battery, as was seen in Stargate SG1's ZMPs, and David Webber's Core Tap. Isaac Arthur has done a number of videos on the subject that make for interesting watching, if you're into science, futurism, and/or speculative fiction.
A smaller black hole evaporates at a higher rate than a bigger black hole. That is all. It still wouldn't give off that much energy due to its small mass. A bigger black hole would still radiate more energy than a smaller one even if it does so at a lower rate. A 1kg black hole can never give off more energy than 1.01kg of antimatter+matter.
@@zephyrprime And that evaporation is in the form of energy/radiation, specifically and predominantly, Hawking radiation. If you know how to turn that into electricity, the smaller your black hole, the more electricity you can generate per second and per unit of mass fed to that black hole to keep it from dissipating entirely and continuing the "reaction." You wind up getting more energy out of a black hole reactor than you do out of a matter-anti-matter reactor, but not as much as a zero point/vacuum energy generator.
The "two plates" don't necessarily NOT make sense for a couple of reasons. 1. Targeting Computers aren't infallible or perfect: if someone is shooting at you, which would you rather be in...a big ole brick that's going to catch every shot (whether on target or not) or something with a slim profile with a bunch of empty space presenting for less-than-accurate shots to harmlessly pass through? 2. Romulans are Paranoid. Like...EXTREMELY Paranoid. As in "half a ships crew are Intelligence Officers and Loyalty Police watching the rest of the crew to ensure that no one is betraying their commanders or The Empire" Paranoid. As such I've read (and sadly I forget where) that one "plate" of the Warbird is for the Navy Crew that mans and runs the vessel, and the other "plate" is for Intelligence gathering and housing of Military Intelligence/Tal Shiar personnel and equipment. The design intentionally isolates the two groups from each other...and the crew from themselves (since isolated individuals cannot Plot Treachery.)
On a positive note, if somebody leaves a Diddly Doo-Wop in the docks for too long, you can spare the cubifiers. Just push the button, and it'll cubify itself.
The other thing the Romulans could be doing with these reactors is collecting what's called Hawking radiation coming off of (relatively) low mass singularities. Basically to create a singularity you have to squash every particle of a body into a single point, overcoming quite a few resisting forces in the process, and they don't want to be there. Gravity is all that's holding them in. This results in the very, very slow evaporation of the singularity over time as quantum physics (theoretically) pops particles outside the event horizon every so often. This effect speeds up as the singularity evaporates, i.e. it gets faster and puts out more energy the less mass is in the black hole and it can't hold on to itself as well. Normal, stellar-mass black holes have projected lifespans in the billions of years and will probably be the last things to burn out in the known universe. Teeny-tiny ones, which don't occur in nature, would burn out much faster. Now, the math for this is over my head so I sought out a few calculators on the interwebz and it looks like a measly 600k metric ton singularity would (theoretically) spew out something like 1 million GW of Hawking radiation and evaporate away in ~300 years.
Well, particle/anti-particle pairs pop into existence everywhere, all the time. The catch is that when this happens next to the event horizon of a black hole, sometimes one of these particles hits the black hole before they can collide and annihilate each other, leaving the other one intact. The one that's absorbed has negative mass, making the black hole smaller, while the survivor zooms off as a gamma ray.
If there are intruders on the ship I believe it will be designed specifically to confuse the enemy of how to get to parts of the ship. Like a real life navy vessel it’s not just a straight shot to the bridge or the engineering section of the ship. They probably have pride in that it’s design itself is hard for a lowly human to navigate or something like that.
Putting on my nerd cap (this is all from memory), the Romulans create the micro singularity at a giant space station, using a _large_ amount of energy [cannon, from an official supplement]. The advantage of it was that it didn't need refueling once it was up and running, so for example being stuck in the Delta Quadrant wouldn't be a issue as they could run on full power without looking at the gas gauge. They could even have stayed cloaked and proceeded _slowly_ back to the Beta Quadrant (fortunately Romulans have a long lifespan). So a D'deridex could remain cloaked for say a year or more, while casually _cruising_ through Federation space undetected (as long as it stayed away from Tachyon sweeps). But as for the singularity, it wasn't big enough to be a actual Black Hole, and would eventually evaporate from radiating energy unless it was fed more mass or kept in the containment field to somehow keep it stable. So it wouldn't just keep going on forever as a real Black Hole, should the ship be destroyed (it would apparently radiate all its energy away when the containment field failed - which was fortunate for any nearby Planets, Stars, ect [I don't know if it's canon except that a destroyed D'deridex doesn't create a local Black Hole - like Voyager did with a subspace relay network in order to mess with a Hirogen ship, but then they messed with the singularity power plant via technowiazardry to cause it to fail by ramping up the gravermetric levels whatever … go watch the episode]. *It was a "Black Holette".* It also would occasionally cause weird space phenomenon of the week, by being a beacon across subspace and causing unusual temporal radiation - which makes it suprising that Starfleet didn't use them … they love barely controlled techno wizardry that risk giving you a five dimensional wedgie at any moment.
I was going to point out the _Line of Sight rule_ with regard to nacelle design back then, but @Spartan X92 already posted something about that. And the reason that later ships (like the Defiant) don't obey that rule is because of *in universe* technological breakthroughs. They have dual warp nacelles in each "nacelle" so they still maintain line of sight, and there's new alloys that prevent the crew getting irradiated in the case of the Defiant. But a lot of "winged" ships still have the line of sight rule, it's just that they have them off centre on the vertical plane, and somehow counterbalance it out so the ship doesn't pitch up or down. So if you accept the Line of Sight Rule as a absolute necessity [BTW Gene Roddenberry was still alive when the D'deridex was designed, so he had final say … and did you notice how TNG improved soon after he died?], then the D'deridex is a very logical and well laid out design for a two separate warp nacelle ship in that it's reasonably well balanced with the Warp nacelles on the centre mass line, and held securely to the ship by more than flimsy pylons that require structural integrity fields to keep from flying off.
Black holes don't sustain themselves forever, either. It's just that the bigger the black hole, the slower they evaporate (in both relative and, as I understand it, absolute terms.) A black hole the mass of the entire Milky Way would take... something like millions or billions of times longer than the current accepted age of the universe to evaporate completely.
Maybe the reason the Romulans used a Black Hole as a power source... is if one of their ships buys it in your system, the mini black hole stays as a sort of gift that keeps on getting/Taking/ eating ... whatever,
Imagine having to do a "man overboard" type drill where you have to muster in person, no transporters allowed. I'm where and have to get to WHERE... IN TWO MINUTES?!?!
And again my face is aching from smiling to much while watching this :-) Also the D'deridex just screams "designed by committee" to me, to many people in charge that were not speaking to each other leaving the construction crews to do their best... On a side note I hope that on day we get to hear the Dockmaster's opinion on the Emperor-class Battleship's from Warhammer 40K, just hope the shipyard is large enough to handle one of those...
i disagree it is an amazing warship and could wiped anything in the quadrant based on what they knew . and they were right till the Galaxy arrived and since it took way too much Research to just replace warbirds and they werent that bad they stuck by them and refitted them a bit till the dominion war showed them their age and weaknesses
In the game Star Trek Bridge Commander, the weapon placements made sense. The front hole was the torpedo launcher, the disruptor beam was above it, close to the top, and the 4 disruptor cannons were on the sides in front of the warp engines (the glowing green things in front, 2 on each side).
There's no *obvious* advantage. Maybe you want the shield emitters close to the warp bubble envelope all around the ship. Maybe having the artificial gravity mcguffins at that distance is best. Maybe the cloaking of the singularity is improved by having the cloaking field emitters paired on opposite sides of the thing that's hardest to cloak. Maybe it's for modularity. Except that building two half hulls that are ALMOST identical (ever so slightly off in shape, and also aligned with gravity pointing in opposite directions) offers no manufacturing advantage (except for the kitbashers in the studio, who can just slightly melt the underside and bend it into shape). The only advantage of having two almost identical modules would be in the designing stage. Which informs my new head canon: Someone was given the amount of crew this would have to acomodate, did all the deck layouts based off of that and structural calculations to suit and then got told: "Oh, by the way, that was the amount for a single one of the 2 shifts". So instead of redesigning the whole thing from scratch, they just took their finished deck layouts, stacked them in the opposite order, and flipped the hull plating and internal structure that hold them together. Which doubled up the amount of living quarters they could provide.
It doesn't make it easier to hit...in the type of engagements they like to get into. Romulans don't present the back or belly of their warships (not the D'deridex, anyway) and fight in head-on confrontations (at least after they uncloak in your blind spot and try to kill you outright first.). This means the Warbird has a surprisingly small forward profile with a lot of empty space for shots to pass through (Tactical Computers are by no means infallible in the Trek Universe...ships miss literally all the time.) It's no different than the long necks on Klingon ships making a nearly impossible target as they fight in their preferred style of making passes and coming about for another attack.
@@Pystro Actually, the reason I read somewhere for the design is that Romulans are Paranoid and half a ship is Military Intelligence; the hull style allows for the Navy to be separated and isolated from Intelligence (and each other) to prevent plots, schemes, and betrayals since the points where individuals can pass from one section of the ship to the other are extremely limited and easily surveilled.
The primary intent of having a huge power source is for cloaking and shields. It is exactly that big to contain their power source and keep it finely tuned to prevent an enemy from tracking it. That is the advantage. It can cross into federation space with near impunity. It might be slower but it can go farther while being undetected. Can't hit a ship when you can't lock on to your target. If the Romulans ever figure out how to shoot while cloaked, then the Federation, the Klingons, the dominion and maybe even the Borg are defenseless
Star Trek, especially TNG Starfleet ship firepower never made consistent sense. Best example was Starfleet was willing to let Cardassians do an obvious offensive build up on their border because they could not afford another war with them. Yet in the episode “The Wounded” both the Galaxy Class and Nebula class would wipe out Cardassians fleets if they sneezed in their general direction.
one of the main reasons i dont do Starship comparison with other franchises because star Trek fans tend to treat the whole "only screen is canon" and cherrypick. for example the supposed accuracy that is godly can hit small fighter craft very fast but somehow has troubke hitting macquis raiders that are ten times bigger or dominion bug ships that are 100 times bigger. the multiple times a phaser has come out of torpedo tubes or the mary sue ship of them all the voyager with entire wings of shuttles and more torpedos than ds9 has on board
@@laisphinto6372 The 'fighter craft' that I always see talked about were warships from a race that barely had warp; the whole point of the _Enterprise_ swatting them like flies was a clue to the brainwashed crew that no, they weren't actually in a war to the knife with these guys. I don't like the idea of fighters in _Star Trek,_ but that really doesn't serve as an example of why they don't use them.
I still haven't figured out why the only people in the Star Trek universe who use a logical starship design, is the Borg. Everyone else makes ships that have ZERO understanding of moving through a microgravity 3-dimensional environment.
In response may I direct your attention to NASA trying (and as of the time of writing failing) to reuse old shuttle engine tech on their latest firework-to-be because of… reasons. I will guarantee you that every single engineering & design department of every species / political force with space travel in the alpha quadrant has a small soundproof room in which to scream out their frustrations at the latest enforced decision by Thos Who Must Be Obeyed (for they control the budget).
@@smiddlehurst1 All too True, but Let us remember that outside of their version of space elves in B5 Human shups are VERY simple yet functional in design. Even when they did get artificial gravity, they still continues to build and I quote "Flying bricks" And let me tell you this an ICN warship is exactly that with rounded ends. Simple efficient and holy hell do we pack the guns and missle tubes into it.
@@iclisious ah but there’s one critical difference…. B5 Humans are broke. The one time they ticked all the option boxes the damn station vanished into a time warp doohickey before they even got to use it! Style costs money which means less turrets and that just don’t make sense!
The designs are strictly for the audience to be able to easily identify which ship is who's. All purpose built designs tend toward conformity. That's why all toasters look alike. There is one optimal design for something that toasts bread. All purpose built war ships should end up looking alike. But watching a space battle where the audience would have to identify small details to figure out which ship is which would be boring and confusing.
My mother used to sing this song to me when I was little. Thus why I'm still so excited by it. I loved the video by the way, thank you for putting out such a wonderful video. (As always)
You actually feed a black hole more mass to turn it down. They evaporate faster the less mass they have. All the empires probably use quantum singularities in generating antimatter. The Romulans just use a portable version because it enables cloaked vessels to stay cloaked for prolonged periods of time without needing to return for supplies. Just pull up to an asteroid and beam material on board. Literally any matter can fuel it.
What happens when you spike the engineering section will largely depend on just how massive that forced singularity is. It's got to be pretty massive since, as I understand it, the Romulans generate their warp plasma by shooting matter past the singularity ... with presumably lots of X-ray emissions since that's what you get from a normal black hole's accretion disk. Since it was massive enough to cause some pretty serious temporal disruptions that one time, yeah, it'd eat the ship and then just kind of sit there for a few millennia until it evaporated. Because, of course, this is a FORCED singularity which means that the Romulans took something really big (maybe an asteroid the size of Ceres or maybe a Pluto sized planetoid, planets are too useful for doing planet-y things) and used enough artificial gravity to squish it down to a single point in space.
IIRC the singularity isn't stable and a containment breach would result in it rapidly devouring all matter around it (aka the ship) shortly followed by a explosive collapse.
@@bjoernusw5195 Small black holes (well, any black hole, really) aren't stable. They produce Hawking radiation, and that process converts black hole mass into gamma rays. The smaller the black hole, the more radiation it produces and the faster it evaporates. Nobody is quite sure what happens when the mass gets too low to be a black hole anymore, just that it gets really hot just before then.
I remember hearing an excuse one time about Star Trek ships needing their nacelles to have line of sight to each other. If that's true, it could explain a lot about the different ways that different species might design their ships.
The Romulan Star Empire did have a cybernetics science division, and were very interested in taking Data apart to find out how he worked, but that is beside the point. The most interesting thing about the D'Deridex is that in the future timeline of Discovery, it was just about the only starship that could go to warp after "Thd Burn". And yet even failed at being the new standard in ship tech design with everything that used dilithium being next to worthless.
I would hope the gaping hole in the ship is designed such that small debris or fighters will simply go right through it, or that torpedos would do the same. Though, if that’s the intent wouldn’t shields work better?
Fun fact: the sculpture of the She Wolf is a Bronze Age creation. The statue of the brothers were Renaissance add ons. Not really ship related, but a fact nonetheless.
Starfleet wasn't a full on military, it's just that they were actually more advanced¹. When they designed their own Klingon Bird of Prey counterpart (the small Bird of Prey with a crew of a few dozen) they made the Defiant… which eats Birds of Prey for breakfast and has Jem'Hiddar Bug ships as brunch. Even the Sovereign, which was still a multirole ship (just more combat focused, and smaller than a Galaxy class) still put in a good showing against the Scimitar, a pure Battleship many times it's size with a massive amount of weapons - and that was after being strafed in a ambush. If Starfleet ever did make a pure large Battleship without any multirole bits at all (basically a giant Defiant), it would be terrifying. ¹except in messing with quantum singularities, but that just might be because Starfleet is more environmentally responsible, and don't want to risk wiping out entire regions of space if they make a mistake _(again - See Omega)._
What also amusing is how whole the cloaking field technology has been compromised for several races like the klingons, cardasians and even those black hole using elven space romans.
@@SacredCowShipyards I have yet to see Romulans worshipping a machine spirit or the Omnissaiah. Therefore, the Mechanicus angle might not really be viable.
@@Schnittertm1 I didn't think the implication was that they'd joined the Omnissiah's cult, but rather that the xenophobic and technophilic Mechanicus left an unfavorable impression.
There might be a small benefit to having two struts leading to the warp nacelles, in that if the upper is taken out, the lower will still keep the engine on the ship and vice versa. Somewhat of a redundant design, although likely unnecassary considering the power of phasers, photon torpedoes and other weapons in the ST universe.
Thought: Exploration craft spend large amounts of time without backup or reinforcements, hence you would want a ship that can protect itself against a decent fleet until they can escape. So yes, if I wanted a deep space exploration craft, it would be, at minimum, a heavy cruiser, not a frigate.
I mean depending on what definition your using a Frigate could be second only to full fledged battleship. Frigates were originally lower rate ships of the line (battleships) and meant to slug it out on the front lines of formations.
@@vonfaustien3957 I'm using the Templin Institute definitions as they seem the most thorough. Granted, frigates were ships of the line in the 17-1800s but that was also a time when the largest ship was roughly equivalent to a modern destroyer and those things are tiny. I would never use a carrier group or dreadnaught for an exploration mission, simply too big, slow, and expensive for lengthy, unsupported missions. Unless we are dealing with a seedship/colony ship, at least. Battleships are also generally too big and slow to be able to jump in and out of firefights. Cruisers, though, have decent armaments, good armor, and are generally still agile and fast enough to get out of trouble. For example, the BC-304 Daedalus class from Stargate: mid-sized, has a fighter complement, the railguns are a good point defense grid, and the Asgard plasma beams are excellent anti-capship weapons. Add in the ability to beam nukes, subspace comms, and the small crew complement and you have an excellent exploration ship. The only thing missing is to convert a nacelle into a factory/refinery to replace fighters and repair battle damage.
@@nathanaelspurlin2234 Frigates of the Age of Sail weren't ships of the line; they were the big, square-rigged warships that were _not_ in the line of battle, roughly equivalent to the cruisers of the World Wars.
Personally, I think the designer, fresh off of designing or hearing about the saucer separation of the galaxy class, started thinking how to ships in a tandem could be redesigned, but that part got dropped by the writers out of wanting good guy trump cards(per their writing anyway). I think that this romulan handbasket makes it have not one but several achilles heel issues, being the connecting points of two of those joints are nacelles, which if you don't know to shoot at a weapon emplacement, propulsion is the next, if not first, because disable is pretty damn good in space. The way some beam animations have been done over the years, a phaser almost hitting on of them would likely slice the connection clean off, and then any movement shear and you have multiple objects in space anyway. Looking at our own designs, pyramids and octahedrons tend to be the design path to take, because if you can turn the gun mount independent of the ship. its good to have a broad sweep in which to do so. Yes, a bicycle frame has holes all over, and does fine, but all war based uses of the shape would have an engine there and if it can be afforded, like the lightcycle from tron, an armor body around that. Would have been more sense to be a bird with two heads, than two bodies. a swapping bridge/detachable attack craft or pair of them would be more feasible. Mirror the thing onto its spine flipped dorsal, remove that belly plate from both, and you have the base for this real easy.
In addition, the matter-antimatter drives consume more fuel than a stable singularity. A properly managed black hole can last indefinitely without a refuel of dilithium or special substance like matter antimatter.
Irl you could feed it anything, so it would be the most versatile engine possible - able to use literally anything as fuel, which it will convert 100% to energy, even just give it the waste from the ship. Perfect for exploring and long-duration missions without support (which kinda sounds like it would be most ideal for Starfleet actually).
It doesn't consume less fuel. It's just that is can be fueled by literal trash while antimatter has to be manufactured via a presumedly expensive process.
@@zephyrprime You're assuming antimatter fuel doesn't cost any more to create than the matter fuel fed into either the black hole or the anti-matter reactor. This seems unlikely.
@@boobah5643 I KNOW it cost chump change to fuel the black hole because you can literally just piss into a black hole to fuel it. The only cost would be the upfront creation cost which might be high.
I believe the advantage of the singularity in lore is that for operational purposes it's effectively got infinite endurance, compared to anybody else's ships that need antimatter for their reactors. And with replicators and everything, you can turn the energy from your singularity into food and medicine and shit, so your crew is THEORETICALLY not a problem for endurance either, at least so far as supplies. So as long as you don't do anything that disrupts the cloak, you can cruise under cloak at medium speed anywhere you want, for example right up into the middle of your oppositions' shipyards, or fleet bases, or civilian population centres, or whatever, lay waste to them, fight their way out until they can break contact, and disappear into the void to do it again. Might also be another reason they're so huge, same as Galaxy-class 'exploration cruisers' *cough BATTLESHIPS cough*, to allow them to do those kinds of long-duration deep-penetration missions without the crews going insane, since afaik they eschewed such crew amenity luxuries as holodecks and so on that their Federation counterpart fitted. And while they're slow compared to a Galaxy, at the time of early TNG just about EVERYTHING is slow compared to a Galaxy, and I've seen fan theories that the... INTERESTING choice of design might have been an attempt to replicate the Vulcan-style 'ring' warp drives that according to lore because of bullshit-bullshit 'warp geometry' reasons are slow to start but have absolutely AMAZING straight-line speed as long as you let them get a run-up, but have absolutely TERRIBLE manoeuvrability. SUPPOSEDLY the warbird's weird design was an attempt to get the straight-line speed (after run-up) of a Vulcan ship, but without the massive penalties to manoeuvrability. Did it work? No idea. But it's at least A reason for them to do... THAT.
D'Deredex ( Dee- Dare- edex). Also STO fixed the weapon placement area thankfully. Also in TNG most of the D'deredex is automated it's equal to federation computers in function. It's just the ships are designed as mobile bases for Romulan army groups. The singularity cores are equal in power to standard warp cores but can run longer so the ship doesn't have to refuel as often as federation or Klingon ships. They are designed to Cruise not sprint in Romulan territory. Also about the federation and it's exploration ships it's not a smart idea to go into the unknown without the ability to defend yourself it's just the federation can make the ships hide their weapons easily.
Yeah, Starfleet's doctrine was that they knew very well that their ships made effective enough warships based on the need to defend themselves, just that their policy of exploration being the primary role meant that their ships tended to prioritise speed, endurance, and sensors (but since these are all useful things in warfare as well, they still made suitable warships as long as they also had sufficient firepower and durability). The main thing that distinguished the Defiant-class as a purpose-built warship was that it was too small to be suitable for long cruises and therefore couldn't be repurposed back to an exploration mission after the conflict was resolved.
The void between the plates is because the quantum singularity (not black holes necessarily as singularities have multiple designations, some temporal and act more like wormholes, technically portals such as those used by species 8472 are singularities etc.) may need to be purged and it's easier to turn a couple degrees and the singularity tech may have been only a couple months to years old by that point. Also the singularity mostly provides power for the stealth module the rest of the reserve power is stock standard fusion and antimatter matter mix.
Despite everything, I love the D'Diddlydooha. I still remember the goosebumps when I watched it decloak the first time. Sure, if you over analyze it, it does resemble a plucked turkey, but if you let yourself roll with it there is a feeling of ominous dread in the design. It has one hell of an alpha strike, built around a core of "Fu*k you, you are all comin' with me!" Respect.
The ship was based on a romulan myth of a skeletal bird that takes the souls of the dead. it is a dumb idea for why it looks the way it does, but that is the basis for the design in universe.
This may be old lore (2012), but it's telling that the Romulan's next class of warbirds didn't use singularity generators. I don't know that the Romulans ever used that again. I like the idea that the Praetor at the time was a little nuts like some of the Roman Emperors. He insisted on a black hole generator because it doesn't need much fuel once it's on. And, as a dictator, he just gets a fleet of them. Then his successor isn't an idiot or is at least a little more sane, and they replace the D'deridex class with a class that uses more conventional power systems. Also, the Romulans love to meet new species. Then conquer them. You know, like Romans.
there was that incident with those time displacement aliens that tried to use the singularity generator as an incubator. it may also just be cheaper to use regular warp drives if you are mass building an upgraded fleet.
The biggest advantage of the singularity core is essentially infinite range - with replicators and cloaking devices, a D'deridex can operate stealthily for an indefinite period of time (provided nothing too big to replicate gets damaged and it doesn't suffer excessive crew casualties). In terms of the hull design, that could be explained by making the D'deridex into a type of carrier (not my original idea, another channel I follow has suggested this). Having a capital ship which can operate almost anywhere without the need for a supply chain is useful, but as seen when the Obsidian Order and the Tal'Shiar attacked the Dominion, the big Galor's and D'deridex's are vulnerable to swarms of smaller attack ships. As the Romulans escort ships haven't got singularity power cores, they lack the range to operate independently everywhere the D'deridex's can go. But smaller ships like the Winged Defender or Whitewind (from FASA) or the little scout ships seen in TNG are able to operate effectively as escorts against the swarms of attack ships (especially with fire support from their mothership) and could easily fit into the space between the upper and lower hulls, where they are inside the shields and the field of the cloak. The Romulans just need to fit a few docking ports and clamps to hold the escorts in place. And the D'deridex has the excess energy to generate plenty of anti-matter to refuel its escorts - especially as they could be powered off of the mothership as long as they are docked, and only move over to their own power supply when launched.
There have been many fandom and canon explanations. Most around the cloaking device, warp engines, cultural tendancies (akin to moncal ships in starwars being unique even in the same class...)
To be fair a advantage of the singularity drive is that it can run off of any matter and doesn't need a antimatter supply. That makes it ironically more suited for exploration ships (that are not supposed to see combat) because it doesn't need a logistics tail supplying it with antimatter.
Did we forget that Klingons died believing their cloaks to be inpenetrable but it turned out the exhaust from their (matter-anti-matter) engines could be homed in on by a torpedo? It's likely the singularity was an answer to that. If the Klingon Warbirds were U-Boats, the D'deridex were more like Boomers, big because they carry weapons intended for a different scale of combat than mere ship-on-ship, but still capable of engaging on that level, and burning a fuel-less and therefore exhaust-less fuel to be more stealthy. I'm pretty sure we see more anti-matter cores explode than singularities but it's hard to say if that's Romulans not getting enough screen time vs. their ships' safety records.
From what I recall the singularity that powers the Romulan ships are created artificially using the same artificial gravity projectors that pretty much all races uses. The use the AG to get the heavy matter they start with to collapse into a singularity and then siphon off the excess energy generated when it is fed matter (or proto-matter maybe). The actual singularity was not that large, having been collapsed from a large chunk of dense matter, usually heavy metals like tungsten or iridium, so when it stopped being fed the singularity collapses in on itself and dies out pretty quickly usually with minimum to no damage to the ship, mostly because the event horizon of the singularity didn't extend past the limits of its containment chamber. Now the real danger is the gravitational shielding collapsing and the singularity being fed a lot of matter all at once- that could cause the event horizon to extend much further, limited only by the mass of the material it was consuming.
Actually the Valdore (the Warbird in Nemesis) still has the voidspace though it's a lot smaller then with D'deridex, I was took it as means of making the ship look bigger without actually building a ship that big, for intimidation purposes.
@@SacredCowShipyards It's there but it's so small it's only visible from the back or the front. it's mostly covered by the impulse drive but there's a pair of panels (one per side) that go from the main hull to the wings leaving a small void space there that seems to have no purpose other then to tie the Vardore to the double D. EDIT:When you start looking for design similarities the Valdore starts looking like a D'deredex that ended up in a press and got flattened.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty sure those are more intakes (which... well, I'm not sure the Romulans have Bussard scoops, so they might need literal intakes) rather than... weird-assed holes in their ships. Dunno, though. Not sure we ever got a clear enough shot at it.
@@SacredCowShipyards Not in the movie no, there's no shot from a good angle on a light background and since the ship is dark green minor details get lost but the ship in question has been used in official materials so the there's plenty of shop of it online and they're not in-takes as you can see thru them. And those secondary "wings" are a consistent design feature. Also the Valdore has Bussard scoops it's the green section at the tip of the Nacelles.
the d´deridex comes in different sizes, from a few hundret meters in lenght up to more then a kilometer. ich love these ship. in the series the warbirds are displayed very weak and easy to kill, but in the lore they are some of the most powerful ships out there
What's funny is that the same actor, Marc Alaimo, who played one of the first Romulans for "TNG" (and later Cardassians) played an alien guest aboard the _Enterprise D_ called *Badar N'D'D* . Happy Trek Day Sept 8, 1966 - 2022 🖖
At least the romulans didnt put the engines on a single barely reinforced stick way the hell out from the main hull on an almost right angle granting maximum leverage and shearing force for the trusters to rip the Nacelles off the engineering deck. It's like someone looked at star wars Nebulon B and said how can I make that engine configuration worse and aplie to an entire fleets design doctrine? Say what you will about the big ol hole but at least the engines don't look they'll rip themselves from the rest of the space frame well under thrust. Shit the reason the USS Siskos Pimp hand was so durable for its size is proably because they employed a sane engine placement its also likely how Voyager took on whole borg fleets well normal federation ships got slaughtered by the hundreds against one cube. And yes I aware the enterprise and this design style predates star wars by a decade
Don't quote me on this but I think the thrusters or the things that make the ship move in space or on the back of the saucer section the pylons are just for the warp engines and that just creates the warp bubble so there's no actual Force being applied
It's not clear that the nacelles impart force or rather create the warp bubble that the ship lives inside of while at high speed, but... yeah. ... yeah.
Theoretically, antimatter fuel is far worse than a proton sized black hole. If the power ever gets shut off from the containment, the black hole will just fall out, maybe swallowing a few electrons along the way, while the antimatter will happily react with anything it touches. Kugelblitz engines are fun!
The power source, the "quantum singularity" could be a white hole. The opposite/other side of a black hole, which emits all the energy that is absorbed by the black hole. That at least makes more sense than generating energy from a gravitational sinkhole.
I can’t get any of it together anymore more but I‘ve come across a theoretical way energy could be harvested from a black hole by feeding it matter. I mean no has a black hole or the equipment to test said theory but there at least appears to be a theoretical way to get energy from a black hole
You can get energy out of a rotating black hole by firing light through the ergosphere; a region of spacetime near the black hole that rotates extremely quickly. Some of the rotational energy of the black hole is conferred to the light, causing it to gain energy. By surrounding the singularity with mirrors, this light would continue to bounce around the black hole and siphon off more and more energy. Kurzgesagt has a great video on the effect.
@@Jenozie99 There are two ways to get power from a black hole, one is Hawking radiation (Which we are unsure if it exists.), the other we know for sure that would be technically possible, is by throwing matter into that spot where only part of it would be absorbed, the remainder would shoot out with more power as it was sent in. I do not have the exact numbers, but the energy efficiency you could theoretically get from that, is way above fission of fusion for the same mass. (But it should not be above matter-antimatter annihiliation.)
It is no wonder that you look at that thing and go "WHAT THE HELL?!?!" That is sort of the whole point of it. You see, while the Romulans hated the Vulcans, and were worried about the Klingons, they were reasonably certain they could defeat both in a stand-up fight. And everyone else was of secondary concern to them. But when the humans suddenly burst forth to the stage of Alpha Quadrant politics, and then founded the Federation, the Romulans were abso-fucking-lutely TERRIFIED! The SPEED at which these aliens were advancing, expanding, and making alliances, made them a huge threat. They were already overtaking, and absorbing the Vulkans, the Romulans could ... WOULD be next! The Romulans saw in the humans someone that not only could play their game, but play it better, so they tried to squash the humans BEFORE they could get too strong for them to deal with, starting the Earth-Romulan War. But it was already too late, and they lost the war, badly. Now the humans didn't know just how badly, or they might have followed up and just permanently crippled the Romulan Empire, and that is when the Romulans decided to take a page out of Sun-Tsu's book, and become un-knowable. They took their already considerable xenophobia and talent for secrecy, and just dialed that shit up to 11! And the D'deridex class is in many ways the pinnacle of that policy. It's primary purpose is not to FIGHT the Federation, but to SCARE the Federation, to make them want to NOT attack the Romulan Star Empire, because they took one look at it and went "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING?!?!". They don't understand it, they do not "know" it, and so they can not be sure they can defeat it. What does that thing do? Why is it like this? How many of them are there? Where are they? What dirty tricks does it have up it's sleeve? Can we be reasonably certain we can take 'em in a fight? From the Romulan perspective, this worked! The Federation didn't attack. But we, the audience know that the Federation didn't attack, not because they feared the Romulans, but simply because they didn't want to. So was the D'deridex class a successful design? Who knows! But it is interesting to compare and contrast it to the NEXT major Romulan starship design, after they learned about both the Borg and the Dominion. A straight up fighter, designed for only one purpose, to hunt down and kill the enemy! TL;DR WOO POSTURING!
Ok yes, while I am a giant Romulan fanboy, and this is my favorite ship design of the entire series based on looks alone, it is very very goofy to make a warship like this. Especially since it's such a huge vessel, if they just made the thing to pop out of cloak at point blank range and shove plasma torpedoes up the enemy's aft poop chutes it wouldn't matter so much. But this thing is actually supposed to be able to tractor grapple the enemy and face tank retaliatory fire... It does not look capable of doing that, even with an artificial black hole powering its shields, this does NOT look like a tanky ship. Edit: If you actually moved all the disruptor cannons to their original positions then the two plates would make slightly more sense, although I've always wanted there to be a refit that also sported disruptors on the inside edges of the plates for more coverage, they have more than enough juice to power those and it's a MASSIVE blind spot.
When you take away the prop and effect departments and draw more from the lore the D'Deridex is perhaps much stronger than we realize, we should not try to stack it up as a battleship like we do with the Galaxy Class, rather, we should compare its capabilities as a spacial submarine, it's highly advanced core would allow it to operate almost anywhere within the Alpha, Beta, and Delta Quadrants whilst still keeping its cloaking device operational, with its size too it could also transport a well-sized army into a potential combat zone along with all the usual military necessities food, pre-fab bases, relay bouy's, etc. But no matter how much I try to type I can only give you the following video link just to show you the awesome power that the ship holds, from there you can draw your opinions. ua-cam.com/video/4lDXboVCpFI/v-deo.html
As I recall, there was an early ship design rule that warp nacelles had to have clear line of sight to each other, and that's responsible for this weird design, but that rule was later abandoned. Also, in TNG 5x24, The Next Phase, it's mentioned specifically that the power source is an _artificial_ singularity.
The empty space in the middle makes sense from a "I have enough power to drive enough weapons, shields, and sundry space-gizmos to outfit a small planet, but I don't want to haul the actual mass of a planet around." The offensive bit is that main engineering (and presumably the ship-eating singularity) is on the outer hull. Smart sapients would hang that shit near the center, where it's slightly more protected, and where the superheavy object is closer to the center of mass of the rest of the ship. Doing otherwise requires large stockpiles of handwavium to both negate the thrust/mass misalignment and to contain the singularity when the ship makes any maneuver at all.
We're talking teeny tiny black holes, as in atom sized. It's just not that massive. The real problems are from the Hawking radiation powering that powers the ship, not the gravitational effects that are negligible as long as you don't eat it (which you can't, because the radiation would toast you first.)
Hey Sacred Cow, if memory serves there is cannon (I'm not sure if it was alpha cannon or beta cannon) that the Galaxy was a controversial ship at launch. Not just because it makes for a very powerful warship in wartime, but also because it's capable of acting as a forward Starbase. The thing has powerful defenses, sensors and logistical capability (3 shuttle bays, a high cargo capacity, communications, transporters, etc). In effect, during TNG Era, the Galaxy would be the center of any serious war effort.
The real reason Didlydoo loses to Galaxy class is that Romulans were so backstaby and secretive that they locked most of their weaponry behind codes it's own captain doesn't have access so it's constantly running on similar low level of power to max output that Galaxy has crew to max capacity.
The in universe technical reason for the negative space, is the need for a clear line of sight between the warp nacelles. The Federation uses pylons to raise them above the engineering hull, the Klingons hang them below the engineering hull. Given the size of the D'Deridex, it's at least plausible that the design engineers were working against the limits of their warp coils, and this design allowed for a more efficient warp bubble.
I think the 'Double D' makes sense given what the Romulan's primary strategic objective is. That objective is to liberate Vulcan. The Double D matches the best the Federation at the time produced but also had massive internal hull volume so they could spacelift an occupation army to pacify Vulcan; plus it has a massive volume of space between the two "wings" which gives space for transporting large amounts of cargo or prefabricated sections of say an orbital battle station to bring to Vulcan.
Fun fact about black holes: the smaller IT is the quicker IT colapses and evaporates into hawking radiation a.k.a explodes like nuke but mutch mutch stronger (obviously) so bring some 7bil. Factor suncream and gas giant when killing this ship.
The Galaxy Class is just a warship with a luxury hotel built in, along with a Mini airport like shuttle bay also built into the aft of the saucer section which is never seen on screen or TV.
Its worth mentioning that, at present, every remotely workable (that is, currently thought to be workable if energy requirements can be drastically reduced) design for an actual FTL engine, features some sort of toroidal structure, largely away from the main body of the vessel.
I think the whole reason behind the black hole as a power source, and you kind of touched on it just by saying it's the Romulan Empire's design, is that technology can be salvaged from an exploded starship when it suffers destruction via battle, self-destruct, non-annihilative damage (loss of entire nacelles, chunks of saucer, etc.) or accidental warp-core breach. There are pieces left over that can be scanned, collected, and thoroughly studied for reverse-engineering purposes. The Romulans on the other hand, being the stupidly secretive space-Romans that they are with their technology, have ensured a perfect fail-safe against this. It's kinda hard to scan and study starship debris if there's no debris left floating in space. Especially when there's a conveniently placed black hole that just sucks it all up into nothingness.
To be fair to all the dangerous engineering things that can happen if the singularity drive gets damaged - the warp cores their rivals are using aren't much better. If the antimatter touches any part of the ship it isn't supposed to, it'll annihilate with whatever it touches and kaboom. It has to be contained at all times by strong magnetic fields. With cloaks vs sensors (and transporters vs shields) - the writers should've just called it a technical arms race. The Romulans made a cloak in TOS, then Starfleet stole one, reverse engineered it, and developed sensors to defeat the cloak. So then the Romulans built a better cloak which defeated the sensors Star Fleet had, causing Star Fleet to develop better sensors, etc. Then if the plot needed the Romulans to sneak up on the Enterprise just say they recently upgraded their cloak and if the plot needed the Enterprise to track a cloaked ship just say they upgraded their sensors.
Which explains why the Romulans know things about cloaked warfare nobody else does and the Starfleet has sensors that are patently ridiculous in their range and comprehensiveness.
Romulans were so focused on catching a blackhole for power that no one asked if they *should* catch one at all.
Or, probably worse, the following was heard I a science lab one day: “well… we’ve managed to contain a micro black hole in this corrugated tube. Does anyone know what we do next?”. I mean it’s not as if you can just flush it down a sink and run for it or leave it to the grad student is it, someone’s gonna notice….
it is their power scource that is actually more stable than a warp core but if it goes wrong well that instance it will be 5 times worse when a warpcore breach
I mean, if properly utilized a black hole is the perfect power source. But the Romulans didn't do it right at all.
There's at least one other Sci-Fi property that uses black holes...
The Commonwealth/Humanx/Flinx books by Alan Dean Foster.
In that canon, the black hole serves as the propulsion, inertial compensator, AND defensive shield, all in one.
The theory is that the ships PROJECT a black hole in front of them, turn it off, turn it back on at the original distance from the ship, repeat millions of times per second...
In effect, the ship is always "falling into" a massive gravity well... which EATS... ANYTHING it runs into.
Massive accel, without the "squishies getting squished", because they and the ship are always being pulled in the same direction at the same rate at the same time.
I don't think it's actually mentioned in any of the books, but just for shits and grins...
It even cleans up after itself... no pollution.
Of course, it's a little "problematic" being able to see where you're going.
IIRC, this wasn't their method of FTL travel, just their way of getting around at sub-light speeds... but it's been a LONG time since I read any of those books...
Hmm... I may have to go back and read them again...
@@Nyet-Zdyes I have a new favorite for "Ridiculous Yet Awesome Way to Use Blackholes".
The D'Deredex class was the most advanced starship in the alpha quadrant in the TNG days.
Then the dominion and the borg put a bug up the federations ass and they decided to put "offensive" weaponry on their ships instead of "defensive" weaponry.
The D'Deredex class also lit a fire under the Klingons, because NOBODY is supposed to outgun them and they took that personally.
And it still lacks guns it could have had.
so the moral is never tell a Klingon you have a bigger gun?? wait that sounds more like lesson 75 of life....
never brag to any woman that your gun is bigger than the other guy's......and you know what I mean by gun right?? lolz
Oh, I didn't say that their "most advanced" medal lasted long.
Just that they had it.
Arguably briefly.
And the Federation militarizing had a very subtle threat too. They didn't class their offensive ships as war ships, but as escort ships. If I understand it correctly, an escort ship is a smaller, weaker version if a warship designed to protect civilian ships. So even after militarizing, the Federation was warning their enemies that this isn't what the Federation looks like on a war path, and you don't want to see what they would be.
@@thomasjenkins5727 the first hint the entire galaxy got that the Federation were NOT to be fucked with was the discovery that they did not, in fact, classify their ships as "Cruisers" or "Battlecruisers" or "Frigates" like the klingons or other species did.
they were classified by their mission role. hell, the Enterprise in TNG was one few exceptions, they were straight up classified as "Constitution-Class Cruisers." fun fact, the Klingons did in fact take note of this and were rightfully wary, as a Constitution could quite handily fuck over the D7 Battlecruiser and make it look easy---itself was actually an import FROM the Klingons, TO the Romulans, because they at the time didn't actually have too many heavier ships. (they were working on that.)
Cue the Defiant, which the klingons noted REALLY DAMN FAST was a warship designed from the keel up for a fight, and more importantly it didn't go unnoticed that it was designed to KILL BORG. not fight borg. KILL borg. those quad phaser cannons? every single shot that comes from every single barrel fires on a different frequency to screw over adaptation. this has the other effect of screwing over shield modulation on other people as well.
in STO, everyone in the alpha quadrant found out the hard way what really happens when you piss off the federation enough that THEY, declare war, on YOU. the klingons were getting the shit beaten out of them for the longest time, and the ships only got worse and worse until the Federation unveiled the Odyssey-Class Dreadnaught. those things are **absurdly** armed and well equipped and not an inch is wasted on a ship over 1 KILOMETER long, capable of maintaining (or combining) three phaser beams in the front and aft arcs due to it's insane power output. most folks that "Upset" one found out the hard way it's capable of engaging no less than 6 targets at once via Broadside, or one unfortunate victim was getting six barrels compressed into 2 and getting slammed like a redheaded stepchild.
in the current prologue to STO, you're put in charge of a retrofitted Miranda class. the game notes that these are something of a meme, but also points out the thing carries a whopping 6 dual phaser banks on the primary hull, the twin Heavy Phasers on the "Roll Bar", and the torpedo launcher is forward and aft which isn't always the case for a ship that small.
now mechanically gamewise it's the first ship, and you only have 1 aft weapon slot and 2 forward ones, but lore-wise? the Miranda is literally designed to just unload on something. the Federation doesn't make warships? my ass!
I can’t help but feel any Defiant-class that goes up against one of these takes one look at that gap and goes ‘haaaaaang on a minute, what if we just park in there and send insulting messages about poking the black hole with the phaser-brrrrrt to her Captain until they surrender’. In fact I have a very dim recollection of one such ship slipping in that gap, extending shields and rotating to gut her in one of the Kirk back from the dead Shatner novels….
wasn't that exactly how in ds9 they managed or at least tried to take on a jen hodor warship ?
Haha that happens in Star Trek Armada, but just the intro. Worf's commanding the Pimp Slap, going up to a Romulan double Ds warbird and goes into the giant gap, drops mines into and peaces the hell out as it blows up.
Watch Star Trek Renegades (fan film)
A defiant exploits that gap
Tuvok from Voyager paid for it and directed it, if I remember correctly.
It was supposed to have a pt2, but CBS went extra Authoritarian after the Axanar lawsuit
You would have to get inside the Romulan's shield bubble, after surviving disrupter fire to get there, and surviving disrupter fire while there. I only watched TNG back in the 90's but I loved the D'didderedoo and wondered about protecting the hole. Then one episode Picard convinced a Romulan to blast something small approaching the D'deridex. They fired a disrupter from the top inside of the cavity near the engineering section.
I always liked the idea of the Romulan ship having a black hole to power it. What is more Romulan than making sure that your ship will destroy itself if it was disabled for any reason? You can't study a derelict ship, if that ship was sucked into a black hole.
Actually yeah, that is a good rationale for it. Like outfitting an operative with a poison tooth.
Very Romulan.
Safety of ship and crew?👎
Keeping the jumbo mollusk recipe secret at all costs? 😘
I figure instead of sucking it in the uncontained quantum regularity would be like a constant atomic bomb because of the Hawking radiation producing petawatts of energy.
Part of the containment would involve feeding part of this energy back into the singularity which is why it can't be shut down.
There was a scene in which the Enterprise D was staring down 2 of these things and it was noted that while 2 could probably take out the Galaxy Class, theyw ould know they were in a fight, and then 3 Klingon Birds of Prey decloacked shifting the balance more toward the Galaxy Class. What I love about that scene was the placement of the reinfocements. 1 behind each warbird and 1 above and behind the enterprise.
Well, the gravity from the black hole is pretty much a non-issue; it's too small. If it gets loose, however, you've got a lot of gamma rays flying around sections of the ship that aren't designed for it... and little power to put up any internal shields.
I don't know if it would be be primarily Gamma. but you likely wouldn't have time to care with megatons worth of of energy being emitted.
The D'Deridex is perfect for long-range, long-lasting intelligence and infiltration missions. The forced quantum singularity can power the ship forever producing all the power and supplies the ship would need, coupled with it's cloaking device it can remain on station monitoring Federation or Klingon targets for years.
I pointed out the same thing in my mini essay above, it's just that I started writing before you posted, and finished after you posted … as I added in a lot of extraneous crap as I tend to overwrite and be too wordy and just go on and on about a …
…
_I'm doing it again, aren't I ?_
@@casbot71, it's good to meet a fellow Romulan among Starfleet and Klingon fan boys.
@@enoughothis romulans are pretty damn cool
Which is why they should have added additional disruptors along the inner edges of the wings. If there's one thing the Double D has, it's power.
Great. Sit there and watch for years as your crew slowly turn into quivering bowls of paranoid jelly because they know there is a freaking black hole 3 decks down from their bedroom.
Seriously though, if the darn thing had the firepower to turn a Galaxy class into scrap right quick it wouldn’t be so silly. Instead it’s the equivalent size of a super tanker with the firepower of a Corvette.
"..then collapses it down to a really tiny sphere, which offends my sensibilities..."
I know, it should be a cube right?
The empty space within the Dideliduha would be much cooler if it was used as a shipyard, housing and repairing a fleet of smaller warbirds. That would turn it to a versatile heavily armed mobile base, suited for planetary invasions or long range patrols along the empire's borders.
As others have mentioned, the reason for the space was because some versions of warp tech require that there be an unobstructed path between the nacelles. Unfortunately, Start Trek suffers from some writers and designers really caring about having reasons that make sense for their cool designs and those that don't care.
Making it a ST version of the Venator would be impressive, carry all the fighters it can and keep the smaller ships protected
@@arthurmoore9488 It doesn't really "require" free space between the nacelles (since it doesn't actually require two nacelles at all) but it's much easier to not deal with the ionizing radiation that is created when the warp field is forming by having it occur in empty space than it is to build systems to deal with it inside the vessel.
@@andrewmalinowski6673 Fighters are generally not a viable option in trek. Even the fighters we do see in TNG and DS9 are pretty huge. Phasers are just that good at self defense you need a fairly large powerplant and shield generator. Then again modern jetfighters are also way bigger than you expect and may actually be bigger than the Runaboats and fighters.
The massive negative space: I've always thought of the ship like a puffer fish that was always puffed up. It was intended to be a weapon of intermediation and terror. Even if the Galaxy is its equal, a captain would have second thoughts about going toe to toe with something that damned big. It avoids fights and imposes its will because no one wants to try their luck.
Just like that race of tacticians that have not known war because everyone is to scared to even try.
picard himself said a few shots and we're ashes in a episode
Kind of like the Empire from Star Wars, big and intimidating to scare people into not wanting to fight. Do not think I have ever scene an example in any media where that actually worked.
I imagine the Romulans would probably use the black hole as either a weapon of last resort or as a deterrent. Have one of those things park over a population center and see who has the balls to try and destroy the thing keeping a black hole contained. Great vid as always, Dockmaster! Cant wait to see what you do next!!
Mostly depends on how massive the singularity is. If it's a hyper-compressed Buick, the planet in question can pretty much ignore it, but if its closer to a planetary mass (the Ceres to Pluto range for instance) that sucker could do some real damage. With the infinite density of a singularity it could punch right through a planet and not even slow down ... and if it has enough mass of its own it could take some of the planet with it as it passes.
In the instances where we see these go up in video games, they basically eat themselves and then spit out a puff of Hawking radiation, so they're small.
@@Reddotzebra Yeah, I love watching that in STO. Sadly the physics of it are kind of hand-wavy. To wad up the ship you'd need a considerable gravitational force, which requires mass, but to just blow up and not pull in everything around it for the next few millennia requires the singularity to be very low mass. I generally chalk it up to the singularity cores being ultimately unstable and some of the crunch effect coming from their own containment systems as the whole mess goes critical.
WE'RE TAKING YOU WITH US.
I figure the Romulans did not have a large supply of dilithium crystals so they developed their own energy source that did not need them as much.
As for the size it's a war ship so it's probably made to deliver an army like the ISD in Starwars.
My headcannon is that Romulan agents got word of the Galaxy class when it was still on the drawing board, Romulan command freaked out and demanded a ship that was larger than the planned Galaxy class be rushed into production. Cue the budget office having an fit, the office of supply having a fit, and the shipyards having a fit about actually building the damn thing. So a poor designer created a large but hollow ship with several A/M reactors to power it, then the propaganda agency got involved and wanted the ship, which was now the largest in the quadrant to also be the most advanced, so the Romulan Science academy threw together this unstable prototype power generator and everyone patted themselves on the back. Except the actual navy who looked at the giant white elephant their political masters had delivered to them when they really wanted the twenty or so smaller vessels they could have built for the cost of ONE of these things.
There's a reason we only see these vessels along the neutral zone, they are show pieces.
i could see that happening.
Certainly more reasonable than "deliberate design".
The D'Deridex is older than the Galaxy. Enterprise-C died to four of them. It may have been a panic response to the _Ambassador_ class, though.
13:11 space Mediterraneans hate AI. Given the humans in BSG are space greeks and the Romulans space romans.
"Am I, a corrugated pipe, really enough to hold a black hole?"
Not with that attitude. . .
In the novel Federation by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens the Enterprise does fly into the space between the two plates of a D'Deridex warbird.
Called it!
Yes you could do it but by the rulles the D'Deridex's warp drive and power plant work under that would not be very healthy. Shince all the warp sheire of the enginse is funnled into that gap and into the micro singularity.
so you would fly in and then get sucked into the ships black hole..... wow non-weapon kill there for the big D.
Having your ship crushed into a singularity would very effectively prevent any data recovery which could be a valued feature if you're up against a technologically superior foe, although building such a massive ship on the presupposition that it's going to be defeated is a little strange, surely there's smaller/cheaper ways of achieving the same outcome.
Regarding pronounciation: Data in one episode calls it the "Dee-deri-dex" class. I'm not sure if anyone else in canon has referred to the class by name. But, most of the trek-lore youtubers call it the "Dih-deri-dex" class.
I think the writers had a rule that the first time someone pronounces a name is the canon pronunciation, for instance Data will always be "Day-tuh" because Patrick Stewart said it first and he's British.
ironically enough... the D'Deridex class having very little automation and relying more on manpower than the Galaxy class would help explain the size difference in part... after all, you need living quarters, systems to run basic necessities, etc for each person which is going to take up a LOT more space than a computer.
In regards to the black hole generator... I can think of one upside: you don't have to worry about fuel nearly as much, making it better if you are trying to find alternate fuels, lol.
but honestly... a lot of this sounds like what we all know deep down; the Romulan D'Deridex should have absolutely outclassed the Galaxy class (and by extension 2 intrepids) by a tremendous amount... but was forced to be portrayed way weaker than what really would make sense so it would fit the stories being told, lol.
It is unfortunate... but you know it's true.
Re: Power levels. If _TNG_ had somehow come after _B5_ and the CGI was there they would've been able to have more than one model of Romulan warship. Instead, no matter what the story called for, the _D'deridex_ is what showed up on screen.
The idea behind usesing the black hole as an energy source is that you dont have to refuel it, you just have to throw matter into it. Not Antimatter, wich is harder to come by. In combination with their cloak in theory a singularity powered warbird can go for a long time without needing to resupply, meaning sth like deepstrikes onto production plants or spacestations are achievable without being noticed. Thats the idea behind romulan strategie and for that the D'deridex is a purposebuild ship.
Basically dont compare it to battleships, rather think of it as an atomic submarine
Antimatter is darn reactive and so in reality it would be way easier to contain artificial black hole than the amount of antimatter needed for long range travel. Any battle damage to antimatter containment would lead to a very bright flash that leaves nothing behind...
That... that explains so much about Romulan ship design. No matter how powerful the ship is, it's not meant to be used for a prolonged battle. It's meant for surprise strikes and covert reconnaissance. The battleship-grade weapons and shields are just the right tools for what they're meant to pop out of stealth and kill.
On the upside, the sigularity will make the Dock Master's job of compressing it to a cube very much easier.
I love the D'Deridex with the passion of a thousand burning suns (or one quantum singularity) and yes, it is a hill I will die on.
To be fair, in pretty much every encounter between a Galaxy class and a D'Deridex that I can recall, the Federation has absolutely soiled its breeches at the mere thought of going head to head with that beast.
Didn't a prototype Prometheus rip one to shred? How the hell didn't the black hole cause issues?
Not alone it didn't, it had two Defiant class and at least one other Federation ship helping @@andrewmalinowski6673. If memory serves, the quantum singularity is "only" a micro black hole, so when the drive explodes the resulting destruction really isn't any more widespread than a warp core breach would be before it annihilates itself.
I remember reading a ST novel, written by Shatner. A Defiant-class was going against a Romulan warbird, both took serious damage and the warbird decides to ram the Defiant. At the last second, the Defiant cloaks, uses it’s thrusters to slide out of the collision course and right in-between the nacelles. To which, it then decloaked and opened fire, destroying the warbird from within...
actually, it's worse. it whent into station keeping..then rotated. Causing the warbird to rip itself apart.
Haha no way, I love his novels, can you remember which one?
@@ricardioscarbonara102 "The Return" by William Shatner, Judith Reeves-Stevens & Garfield Reeves-Stevens
@@WhiteScarsEmo why thank you :-)
I read the same book and will concur.
You should break down the Victory Class Star Destroyer the ship that the Republic was supposed to be using as it's mainline warship while the Venator was just an Aircraft Carrier
Technically, the Venator is the oversized space carrier, hardly any of the craft aboard are actually aerial (unless in-atmosphere). The great Venator of "come kick my ass while I stand ominously and launch all the rubber bands I have" (sorry, but there was a Geetsly's or EckhartsLadder video about how badly used they were). Would actually love to hear the breakdown given how badly designed and used the Venator was, despite it's air support role
Star Wars does have a weird habit of the "do everything ship" but alas they usually suck at the "jack of all trades " but excel at the "master of none." Honestly the Victory Class being the mainline slugger while the Venator served as fighter and bomber support and maybe some long range fire would have probably worked great since it could sit behind the defensive screens of the other ships and focus on its job instead of trying to play Battlestar without the shields, armor, offensive or defensive firepower to do so. Imperial Star Destroyers went too far in the opposite direction struggling terribly in the quality and capabilities of being a carrier and the TIE line in general being woefully inadequate. Weirdly the only ships that get worse decent balance are some of the Mon Calas, the First Order Resurgent Class and the Star Destroyers built by the New Republic in the Expanded Universe.
@@lordfrostwind3151 I like the Harrower Class from the Old Republic
Romulan Empire's moto is "fuck with it, because we are Romulans"
@@spartanx9293 No, I don't.
@@spartanx9293 no.
As to who Starfleet was trying to fool with its "not a military organization," line. I think it was obviously citizens of the federation itself.
Funny how the features that make for a good exploration vessel that's capable of defending itself also make for a good cruiser-class warship. Particularly when a couple of your early enemies make heavy use of cloaking devices, and sensors capable of gathering detailed information about strange phenomena also happen to be good at detecting strange phenomena that happen to be imperfections in a cloaking field.
I think everyone in-universe knows that Starfleet is structured so it can become a military in the time it takes to recall all the exploration ships, but the ships being designed as long-distance exploration vessels means they can have a large fleet without other powers assuming that the only reason they'd have so many is to attack someone. Which helps to avoid self-fulfilling prophecies that lead to war (like what happened with the British and German navies in the leadup to WW1). Particularly if everyone else can see that everything that Starfleet has that isn't required for peacetime security operations is out exploring the edges of known space rather than massing for a surprise attack. Which means that the Federation can make itself a polity with a large enough military that nobody wants to attack it, while reducing fears that the Federation is planning to use that fleet against anyone else without provocation.
@@Draxynnic I like this explanation, even if it smells like something you put _far_ more thought into than the show's writers.
@@boobah5643 I think it's actually implicit in the show. Starfleet still have military ranks. They're obviously trained to fight, even if they're also not trained to view it as a first resort. And they've been in enough wars to know they need a combat fleet in being - they might be idealists, but they're not stupid. But building it as an exploration fleet first has double value - it allows the Federation to have one of the biggest fleets in the quadrant while minimising the chance of it being interpreted as an aggressive move, and they genuinely are interested in exploration.
Even in the Original Series, there are episodes where the Enterprise has clearly been seconded to the sort of mission you'd normally send a warship on in a cold-war-esque political environment, before returning to the exploration mission.
I think the hole is easily explained - it's to screw with people's aimbots, which go for center of mass. If there's nothing in the center of the ship, the firepower goes right through, leaving the Romulans on comms laughing at the scrubs on the other side :)
Well, in theory, the smaller the black hole, the more energy it gives off, meaning that it should be able to produce far more power than a MAM reactor. On the scale of theoretical power plants, the only thing that would beat it is a plank reactor/vacuum energy and the various methods of turning an entire reality into your battery, as was seen in Stargate SG1's ZMPs, and David Webber's Core Tap. Isaac Arthur has done a number of videos on the subject that make for interesting watching, if you're into science, futurism, and/or speculative fiction.
Can't recommend Isaac's channel enough btw, everyone who loves sci fi you won't regret checking it out
A smaller black hole evaporates at a higher rate than a bigger black hole. That is all. It still wouldn't give off that much energy due to its small mass. A bigger black hole would still radiate more energy than a smaller one even if it does so at a lower rate. A 1kg black hole can never give off more energy than 1.01kg of antimatter+matter.
@@zephyrprime And that evaporation is in the form of energy/radiation, specifically and predominantly, Hawking radiation. If you know how to turn that into electricity, the smaller your black hole, the more electricity you can generate per second and per unit of mass fed to that black hole to keep it from dissipating entirely and continuing the "reaction." You wind up getting more energy out of a black hole reactor than you do out of a matter-anti-matter reactor, but not as much as a zero point/vacuum energy generator.
The "two plates" don't necessarily NOT make sense for a couple of reasons.
1. Targeting Computers aren't infallible or perfect: if someone is shooting at you, which would you rather be in...a big ole brick that's going to catch every shot (whether on target or not) or something with a slim profile with a bunch of empty space presenting for less-than-accurate shots to harmlessly pass through?
2. Romulans are Paranoid. Like...EXTREMELY Paranoid. As in "half a ships crew are Intelligence Officers and Loyalty Police watching the rest of the crew to ensure that no one is betraying their commanders or The Empire" Paranoid. As such I've read (and sadly I forget where) that one "plate" of the Warbird is for the Navy Crew that mans and runs the vessel, and the other "plate" is for Intelligence gathering and housing of Military Intelligence/Tal Shiar personnel and equipment. The design intentionally isolates the two groups from each other...and the crew from themselves (since isolated individuals cannot Plot Treachery.)
On a positive note, if somebody leaves a Diddly Doo-Wop in the docks for too long, you can spare the cubifiers. Just push the button, and it'll cubify itself.
To be fair the galaxy class has a daycare and park who in their right mind would ever put that on a warship
The other thing the Romulans could be doing with these reactors is collecting what's called Hawking radiation coming off of (relatively) low mass singularities. Basically to create a singularity you have to squash every particle of a body into a single point, overcoming quite a few resisting forces in the process, and they don't want to be there. Gravity is all that's holding them in. This results in the very, very slow evaporation of the singularity over time as quantum physics (theoretically) pops particles outside the event horizon every so often. This effect speeds up as the singularity evaporates, i.e. it gets faster and puts out more energy the less mass is in the black hole and it can't hold on to itself as well. Normal, stellar-mass black holes have projected lifespans in the billions of years and will probably be the last things to burn out in the known universe. Teeny-tiny ones, which don't occur in nature, would burn out much faster.
Now, the math for this is over my head so I sought out a few calculators on the interwebz and it looks like a measly 600k metric ton singularity would (theoretically) spew out something like 1 million GW of Hawking radiation and evaporate away in ~300 years.
Well, particle/anti-particle pairs pop into existence everywhere, all the time. The catch is that when this happens next to the event horizon of a black hole, sometimes one of these particles hits the black hole before they can collide and annihilate each other, leaving the other one intact. The one that's absorbed has negative mass, making the black hole smaller, while the survivor zooms off as a gamma ray.
If there are intruders on the ship I believe it will be designed specifically to confuse the enemy of how to get to parts of the ship. Like a real life navy vessel it’s not just a straight shot to the bridge or the engineering section of the ship. They probably have pride in that it’s design itself is hard for a lowly human to navigate or something like that.
"Goddamnit, WHICH PLATE am I IN?"
Putting on my nerd cap (this is all from memory), the Romulans create the micro singularity at a giant space station, using a _large_ amount of energy [cannon, from an official supplement].
The advantage of it was that it didn't need refueling once it was up and running, so for example being stuck in the Delta Quadrant wouldn't be a issue as they could run on full power without looking at the gas gauge.
They could even have stayed cloaked and proceeded _slowly_ back to the Beta Quadrant (fortunately Romulans have a long lifespan).
So a D'deridex could remain cloaked for say a year or more, while casually _cruising_ through Federation space undetected (as long as it stayed away from Tachyon sweeps).
But as for the singularity, it wasn't big enough to be a actual Black Hole, and would eventually evaporate from radiating energy unless it was fed more mass or kept in the containment field to somehow keep it stable. So it wouldn't just keep going on forever as a real Black Hole, should the ship be destroyed (it would apparently radiate all its energy away when the containment field failed - which was fortunate for any nearby Planets, Stars, ect [I don't know if it's canon except that a destroyed D'deridex doesn't create a local Black Hole - like Voyager did with a subspace relay network in order to mess with a Hirogen ship, but then they messed with the singularity power plant via technowiazardry to cause it to fail by ramping up the gravermetric levels whatever … go watch the episode].
*It was a "Black Holette".*
It also would occasionally cause weird space phenomenon of the week, by being a beacon across subspace and causing unusual temporal radiation - which makes it suprising that Starfleet didn't use them … they love barely controlled techno wizardry that risk giving you a five dimensional wedgie at any moment.
I was going to point out the _Line of Sight rule_ with regard to nacelle design back then, but @Spartan X92 already posted something about that.
And the reason that later ships (like the Defiant) don't obey that rule is because of *in universe* technological breakthroughs. They have dual warp nacelles in each "nacelle" so they still maintain line of sight, and there's new alloys that prevent the crew getting irradiated in the case of the Defiant.
But a lot of "winged" ships still have the line of sight rule, it's just that they have them off centre on the vertical plane, and somehow counterbalance it out so the ship doesn't pitch up or down.
So if you accept the Line of Sight Rule as a absolute necessity [BTW Gene Roddenberry was still alive when the D'deridex was designed, so he had final say … and did you notice how TNG improved soon after he died?], then the D'deridex is a very logical and well laid out design for a two separate warp nacelle ship in that it's reasonably well balanced with the Warp nacelles on the centre mass line, and held securely to the ship by more than flimsy pylons that require structural integrity fields to keep from flying off.
Ditto, black holes are like stars, unless they are scaled way up, they can't sustain themselves at all.
Black holes don't sustain themselves forever, either. It's just that the bigger the black hole, the slower they evaporate (in both relative and, as I understand it, absolute terms.) A black hole the mass of the entire Milky Way would take... something like millions or billions of times longer than the current accepted age of the universe to evaporate completely.
Maybe the reason the Romulans used a Black Hole as a power source... is if one of their ships buys it in your system, the mini black hole stays as a sort of gift that keeps on getting/Taking/ eating ... whatever,
Imagine having to do a "man overboard" type drill where you have to muster in person, no transporters allowed. I'm where and have to get to WHERE... IN TWO MINUTES?!?!
"Fuckit. I'm the man overboard. Fuckoff."
And again my face is aching from smiling to much while watching this :-)
Also the D'deridex just screams "designed by committee" to me, to many people in charge that were not speaking to each other leaving the construction crews to do their best...
On a side note I hope that on day we get to hear the Dockmaster's opinion on the Emperor-class Battleship's from Warhammer 40K, just hope the shipyard is large enough to handle one of those...
or a Fortress Class Vessel or the sheer MADNESS that is a Xeelee Nightfighter
Oh, it'll fit, you just need to leave it parked for 24:01. After that, it'll fit in a broom closet.
@@blackc1479 very true. All cubes even the borg cubes get compressed.
i disagree it is an amazing warship and could wiped anything in the quadrant based on what they knew . and they were right till the Galaxy arrived and since it took way too much Research to just replace warbirds and they werent that bad they stuck by them and refitted them a bit till the dominion war showed them their age and weaknesses
I do absolutely love me some DockMaster on a beautiful weekend afternoon. One of the best channels in our little corner of the Internet.
Glad you enjoy it!
In the game Star Trek Bridge Commander, the weapon placements made sense. The front hole was the torpedo launcher, the disruptor beam was above it, close to the top, and the 4 disruptor cannons were on the sides in front of the warp engines (the glowing green things in front, 2 on each side).
The biggest flaw with this ship is the fact that the design actually makes the ship *easier* to hit; but, with no advantage gained to compensate.
There's no *obvious* advantage. Maybe you want the shield emitters close to the warp bubble envelope all around the ship. Maybe having the artificial gravity mcguffins at that distance is best. Maybe the cloaking of the singularity is improved by having the cloaking field emitters paired on opposite sides of the thing that's hardest to cloak.
Maybe it's for modularity. Except that building two half hulls that are ALMOST identical (ever so slightly off in shape, and also aligned with gravity pointing in opposite directions) offers no manufacturing advantage (except for the kitbashers in the studio, who can just slightly melt the underside and bend it into shape). The only advantage of having two almost identical modules would be in the designing stage.
Which informs my new head canon:
Someone was given the amount of crew this would have to acomodate, did all the deck layouts based off of that and structural calculations to suit and then got told: "Oh, by the way, that was the amount for a single one of the 2 shifts". So instead of redesigning the whole thing from scratch, they just took their finished deck layouts, stacked them in the opposite order, and flipped the hull plating and internal structure that hold them together. Which doubled up the amount of living quarters they could provide.
It doesn't make it easier to hit...in the type of engagements they like to get into.
Romulans don't present the back or belly of their warships (not the D'deridex, anyway) and fight in head-on confrontations (at least after they uncloak in your blind spot and try to kill you outright first.). This means the Warbird has a surprisingly small forward profile with a lot of empty space for shots to pass through (Tactical Computers are by no means infallible in the Trek Universe...ships miss literally all the time.)
It's no different than the long necks on Klingon ships making a nearly impossible target as they fight in their preferred style of making passes and coming about for another attack.
@@Pystro Actually, the reason I read somewhere for the design is that Romulans are Paranoid and half a ship is Military Intelligence; the hull style allows for the Navy to be separated and isolated from Intelligence (and each other) to prevent plots, schemes, and betrayals since the points where individuals can pass from one section of the ship to the other are extremely limited and easily surveilled.
The primary intent of having a huge power source is for cloaking and shields. It is exactly that big to contain their power source and keep it finely tuned to prevent an enemy from tracking it. That is the advantage. It can cross into federation space with near impunity. It might be slower but it can go farther while being undetected. Can't hit a ship when you can't lock on to your target. If the Romulans ever figure out how to shoot while cloaked, then the Federation, the Klingons, the dominion and maybe even the Borg are defenseless
@@shimata17 It's been a while since I've seen the final Next Generation movie; but, wasn't the Scimitar able to fire while cloaked?
Star Trek, especially TNG Starfleet ship firepower never made consistent sense. Best example was Starfleet was willing to let Cardassians do an obvious offensive build up on their border because they could not afford another war with them. Yet in the episode “The Wounded” both the Galaxy Class and Nebula class would wipe out Cardassians fleets if they sneezed in their general direction.
one of the main reasons i dont do Starship comparison with other franchises because star Trek fans tend to treat the whole "only screen is canon" and cherrypick. for example the supposed accuracy that is godly can hit small fighter craft very fast but somehow has troubke hitting macquis raiders that are ten times bigger or dominion bug ships that are 100 times bigger. the multiple times a phaser has come out of torpedo tubes or the mary sue ship of them all the voyager with entire wings of shuttles and more torpedos than ds9 has on board
And then when they /do/ try to add numerical values to the weapon outputs, they're... interesting.
@@laisphinto6372 The 'fighter craft' that I always see talked about were warships from a race that barely had warp; the whole point of the _Enterprise_ swatting them like flies was a clue to the brainwashed crew that no, they weren't actually in a war to the knife with these guys.
I don't like the idea of fighters in _Star Trek,_ but that really doesn't serve as an example of why they don't use them.
I still haven't figured out why the only people in the Star Trek universe who use a logical starship design, is the Borg. Everyone else makes ships that have ZERO understanding of moving through a microgravity 3-dimensional environment.
In response may I direct your attention to NASA trying (and as of the time of writing failing) to reuse old shuttle engine tech on their latest firework-to-be because of… reasons. I will guarantee you that every single engineering & design department of every species / political force with space travel in the alpha quadrant has a small soundproof room in which to scream out their frustrations at the latest enforced decision by Thos Who Must Be Obeyed (for they control the budget).
@@smiddlehurst1 All too True, but Let us remember that outside of their version of space elves in B5 Human shups are VERY simple yet functional in design. Even when they did get artificial gravity, they still continues to build and I quote "Flying bricks" And let me tell you this an ICN warship is exactly that with rounded ends. Simple efficient and holy hell do we pack the guns and missle tubes into it.
@@iclisious ah but there’s one critical difference…. B5 Humans are broke. The one time they ticked all the option boxes the damn station vanished into a time warp doohickey before they even got to use it! Style costs money which means less turrets and that just don’t make sense!
oh come on the borg just didn't pay the dockmaster his fees and were cubed.
The designs are strictly for the audience to be able to easily identify which ship is who's.
All purpose built designs tend toward conformity. That's why all toasters look alike. There is one optimal design for something that toasts bread.
All purpose built war ships should end up looking alike. But watching a space battle where the audience would have to identify small details to figure out which ship is which would be boring and confusing.
because it looks cool.
You seem to have issues with it collapsing down into a sphere. Would it sit better if it was a cube?
Only if it was at the Romulan Empire's expense.
I LOVE THE TITLE. THANK YOU!! Now on to the video.
My mother used to sing this song to me when I was little. Thus why I'm still so excited by it. I loved the video by the way, thank you for putting out such a wonderful video. (As always)
Glad it all worked together :).
I asked for a video of how terrible the Galaxy class is as a design...this is better.
Yes the fact that nature likes to claps things down to sphears and not cubes of ends my platoic sense of perfection to.
Makes me wonder what a war conversion Galaxy would look like? All that excess space converted to weaponry, defenses, space marines, etc.
like Ent-d in "Yesterday's Enterprise?"
You actually feed a black hole more mass to turn it down. They evaporate faster the less mass they have.
All the empires probably use quantum singularities in generating antimatter. The Romulans just use a portable version because it enables cloaked vessels to stay cloaked for prolonged periods of time without needing to return for supplies. Just pull up to an asteroid and beam material on board. Literally any matter can fuel it.
Apparently the Federation uses quasi-dyson-spheres (nowhere near that scale, but same general idea) to collect the power necessary to make AM.
What happens when you spike the engineering section will largely depend on just how massive that forced singularity is. It's got to be pretty massive since, as I understand it, the Romulans generate their warp plasma by shooting matter past the singularity ... with presumably lots of X-ray emissions since that's what you get from a normal black hole's accretion disk. Since it was massive enough to cause some pretty serious temporal disruptions that one time, yeah, it'd eat the ship and then just kind of sit there for a few millennia until it evaporated.
Because, of course, this is a FORCED singularity which means that the Romulans took something really big (maybe an asteroid the size of Ceres or maybe a Pluto sized planetoid, planets are too useful for doing planet-y things) and used enough artificial gravity to squish it down to a single point in space.
IIRC the singularity isn't stable and a containment breach would result in it rapidly devouring all matter around it (aka the ship) shortly followed by a explosive collapse.
@@bjoernusw5195 This is exactly what we see every time they are destroyed in expanded lore.
In Timescape the temporal distortions were caused by the aliens whom decided to put their eggs into the core, so that's hardly a good example.
@@Reddotzebra True, I had forgotten that the time distortion was caused by the aliens and not the reactor going wibbly.
@@bjoernusw5195 Small black holes (well, any black hole, really) aren't stable. They produce Hawking radiation, and that process converts black hole mass into gamma rays. The smaller the black hole, the more radiation it produces and the faster it evaporates. Nobody is quite sure what happens when the mass gets too low to be a black hole anymore, just that it gets really hot just before then.
"Why would they do that? What's the benefit?"
Easy closet storage between battles. Packs right up, very space efficient!
I remember hearing an excuse one time about Star Trek ships needing their nacelles to have line of sight to each other. If that's true, it could explain a lot about the different ways that different species might design their ships.
The Romulan Star Empire did have a cybernetics science division, and were very interested in taking Data apart to find out how he worked, but that is beside the point. The most interesting thing about the D'Deridex is that in the future timeline of Discovery, it was just about the only starship that could go to warp after "Thd Burn". And yet even failed at being the new standard in ship tech design with everything that used dilithium being next to worthless.
I would hope the gaping hole in the ship is designed such that small debris or fighters will simply go right through it, or that torpedos would do the same. Though, if that’s the intent wouldn’t shields work better?
Fun fact: the sculpture of the She Wolf is a Bronze Age creation. The statue of the brothers were Renaissance add ons. Not really ship related, but a fact nonetheless.
Starfleet wasn't a full on military, it's just that they were actually more advanced¹. When they designed their own Klingon Bird of Prey counterpart (the small Bird of Prey with a crew of a few dozen) they made the Defiant… which eats Birds of Prey for breakfast and has Jem'Hiddar Bug ships as brunch.
Even the Sovereign, which was still a multirole ship (just more combat focused, and smaller than a Galaxy class) still put in a good showing against the Scimitar, a pure Battleship many times it's size with a massive amount of weapons - and that was after being strafed in a ambush.
If Starfleet ever did make a pure large Battleship without any multirole bits at all (basically a giant Defiant), it would be terrifying.
¹except in messing with quantum singularities, but that just might be because Starfleet is more environmentally responsible, and don't want to risk wiping out entire regions of space if they make a mistake _(again - See Omega)._
What also amusing is how whole the cloaking field technology has been compromised for several races like the klingons, cardasians and even those black hole using elven space romans.
Given the Romulans' views on AI, is it possible we've found where one of the "missing" ships from early days of the Spacing Guild ended up?
Or from Mechanicus.
Either way.
@@SacredCowShipyards I have yet to see Romulans worshipping a machine spirit or the Omnissaiah. Therefore, the Mechanicus angle might not really be viable.
@@Schnittertm1 I didn't think the implication was that they'd joined the Omnissiah's cult, but rather that the xenophobic and technophilic Mechanicus left an unfavorable impression.
They had no problem with the AI doctor in Voyager, and apparently more than a few Romulan scientists wanted more than a look at Data's schematics.
Singularity is the perfect solution to keep your weapons from falling into enemy hands.
There might be a small benefit to having two struts leading to the warp nacelles, in that if the upper is taken out, the lower will still keep the engine on the ship and vice versa. Somewhat of a redundant design, although likely unnecassary considering the power of phasers, photon torpedoes and other weapons in the ST universe.
I love how you went the whole episode not saying the name... and then at end, you said it. 10/10
Gotta make it interesting, yo.
Thought: Exploration craft spend large amounts of time without backup or reinforcements, hence you would want a ship that can protect itself against a decent fleet until they can escape. So yes, if I wanted a deep space exploration craft, it would be, at minimum, a heavy cruiser, not a frigate.
I mean depending on what definition your using a Frigate could be second only to full fledged battleship.
Frigates were originally lower rate ships of the line (battleships) and meant to slug it out on the front lines of formations.
@@vonfaustien3957 I'm using the Templin Institute definitions as they seem the most thorough. Granted, frigates were ships of the line in the 17-1800s but that was also a time when the largest ship was roughly equivalent to a modern destroyer and those things are tiny.
I would never use a carrier group or dreadnaught for an exploration mission, simply too big, slow, and expensive for lengthy, unsupported missions. Unless we are dealing with a seedship/colony ship, at least.
Battleships are also generally too big and slow to be able to jump in and out of firefights.
Cruisers, though, have decent armaments, good armor, and are generally still agile and fast enough to get out of trouble. For example, the BC-304 Daedalus class from Stargate: mid-sized, has a fighter complement, the railguns are a good point defense grid, and the Asgard plasma beams are excellent anti-capship weapons. Add in the ability to beam nukes, subspace comms, and the small crew complement and you have an excellent exploration ship. The only thing missing is to convert a nacelle into a factory/refinery to replace fighters and repair battle damage.
@@nathanaelspurlin2234 Frigates of the Age of Sail weren't ships of the line; they were the big, square-rigged warships that were _not_ in the line of battle, roughly equivalent to the cruisers of the World Wars.
@@boobah5643 Thank you for the correction. I often get frigates and galleons confused, not really sure why.
Personally, I think the designer, fresh off of designing or hearing about the saucer separation of the galaxy class, started thinking how to ships in a tandem could be redesigned, but that part got dropped by the writers out of wanting good guy trump cards(per their writing anyway). I think that this romulan handbasket makes it have not one but several achilles heel issues, being the connecting points of two of those joints are nacelles, which if you don't know to shoot at a weapon emplacement, propulsion is the next, if not first, because disable is pretty damn good in space. The way some beam animations have been done over the years, a phaser almost hitting on of them would likely slice the connection clean off, and then any movement shear and you have multiple objects in space anyway. Looking at our own designs, pyramids and octahedrons tend to be the design path to take, because if you can turn the gun mount independent of the ship. its good to have a broad sweep in which to do so. Yes, a bicycle frame has holes all over, and does fine, but all war based uses of the shape would have an engine there and if it can be afforded, like the lightcycle from tron, an armor body around that. Would have been more sense to be a bird with two heads, than two bodies. a swapping bridge/detachable attack craft or pair of them would be more feasible. Mirror the thing onto its spine flipped dorsal, remove that belly plate from both, and you have the base for this real easy.
In addition, the matter-antimatter drives consume more fuel than a stable singularity. A properly managed black hole can last indefinitely without a refuel of dilithium or special substance like matter antimatter.
Irl you could feed it anything, so it would be the most versatile engine possible - able to use literally anything as fuel, which it will convert 100% to energy, even just give it the waste from the ship. Perfect for exploring and long-duration missions without support (which kinda sounds like it would be most ideal for Starfleet actually).
It doesn't consume less fuel. It's just that is can be fueled by literal trash while antimatter has to be manufactured via a presumedly expensive process.
@@zephyrprime You're assuming antimatter fuel doesn't cost any more to create than the matter fuel fed into either the black hole or the anti-matter reactor. This seems unlikely.
@@boobah5643 I KNOW it cost chump change to fuel the black hole because you can literally just piss into a black hole to fuel it. The only cost would be the upfront creation cost which might be high.
I believe the advantage of the singularity in lore is that for operational purposes it's effectively got infinite endurance, compared to anybody else's ships that need antimatter for their reactors. And with replicators and everything, you can turn the energy from your singularity into food and medicine and shit, so your crew is THEORETICALLY not a problem for endurance either, at least so far as supplies. So as long as you don't do anything that disrupts the cloak, you can cruise under cloak at medium speed anywhere you want, for example right up into the middle of your oppositions' shipyards, or fleet bases, or civilian population centres, or whatever, lay waste to them, fight their way out until they can break contact, and disappear into the void to do it again.
Might also be another reason they're so huge, same as Galaxy-class 'exploration cruisers' *cough BATTLESHIPS cough*, to allow them to do those kinds of long-duration deep-penetration missions without the crews going insane, since afaik they eschewed such crew amenity luxuries as holodecks and so on that their Federation counterpart fitted.
And while they're slow compared to a Galaxy, at the time of early TNG just about EVERYTHING is slow compared to a Galaxy, and I've seen fan theories that the... INTERESTING choice of design might have been an attempt to replicate the Vulcan-style 'ring' warp drives that according to lore because of bullshit-bullshit 'warp geometry' reasons are slow to start but have absolutely AMAZING straight-line speed as long as you let them get a run-up, but have absolutely TERRIBLE manoeuvrability. SUPPOSEDLY the warbird's weird design was an attempt to get the straight-line speed (after run-up) of a Vulcan ship, but without the massive penalties to manoeuvrability. Did it work? No idea. But it's at least A reason for them to do... THAT.
D'Deredex ( Dee- Dare- edex). Also STO fixed the weapon placement area thankfully. Also in TNG most of the D'deredex is automated it's equal to federation computers in function. It's just the ships are designed as mobile bases for Romulan army groups. The singularity cores are equal in power to standard warp cores but can run longer so the ship doesn't have to refuel as often as federation or Klingon ships. They are designed to Cruise not sprint in Romulan territory. Also about the federation and it's exploration ships it's not a smart idea to go into the unknown without the ability to defend yourself it's just the federation can make the ships hide their weapons easily.
You just drop out of cloak, grab them with the tractor beam and light them up!
@@Reddotzebra they tried that, its just made the federation mad and the feds sicked james kirk on them.
Yeah, Starfleet's doctrine was that they knew very well that their ships made effective enough warships based on the need to defend themselves, just that their policy of exploration being the primary role meant that their ships tended to prioritise speed, endurance, and sensors (but since these are all useful things in warfare as well, they still made suitable warships as long as they also had sufficient firepower and durability). The main thing that distinguished the Defiant-class as a purpose-built warship was that it was too small to be suitable for long cruises and therefore couldn't be repurposed back to an exploration mission after the conflict was resolved.
Did STO ever fix the enguagement range issue (as in waaaaay to short).
@@Krahazik yes engagement range is 10 Km( twice ship full length in diameter).
The void between the plates is because the quantum singularity (not black holes necessarily as singularities have multiple designations, some temporal and act more like wormholes, technically portals such as those used by species 8472 are singularities etc.) may need to be purged and it's easier to turn a couple degrees and the singularity tech may have been only a couple months to years old by that point. Also the singularity mostly provides power for the stealth module the rest of the reserve power is stock standard fusion and antimatter matter mix.
Despite everything, I love the D'Diddlydooha.
I still remember the goosebumps when I watched it decloak the first time. Sure, if you over analyze it, it does resemble a plucked turkey, but if you let yourself roll with it there is a feeling of ominous dread in the design.
It has one hell of an alpha strike, built around a core of "Fu*k you, you are all comin' with me!"
Respect.
The ship was based on a romulan myth of a skeletal bird that takes the souls of the dead. it is a dumb idea for why it looks the way it does, but that is the basis for the design in universe.
This may be old lore (2012), but it's telling that the Romulan's next class of warbirds didn't use singularity generators. I don't know that the Romulans ever used that again.
I like the idea that the Praetor at the time was a little nuts like some of the Roman Emperors. He insisted on a black hole generator because it doesn't need much fuel once it's on. And, as a dictator, he just gets a fleet of them. Then his successor isn't an idiot or is at least a little more sane, and they replace the D'deridex class with a class that uses more conventional power systems.
Also, the Romulans love to meet new species. Then conquer them. You know, like Romans.
there was that incident with those time displacement aliens that tried to use the singularity generator as an incubator. it may also just be cheaper to use regular warp drives if you are mass building an upgraded fleet.
The biggest advantage of the singularity core is essentially infinite range - with replicators and cloaking devices, a D'deridex can operate stealthily for an indefinite period of time (provided nothing too big to replicate gets damaged and it doesn't suffer excessive crew casualties).
In terms of the hull design, that could be explained by making the D'deridex into a type of carrier (not my original idea, another channel I follow has suggested this). Having a capital ship which can operate almost anywhere without the need for a supply chain is useful, but as seen when the Obsidian Order and the Tal'Shiar attacked the Dominion, the big Galor's and D'deridex's are vulnerable to swarms of smaller attack ships. As the Romulans escort ships haven't got singularity power cores, they lack the range to operate independently everywhere the D'deridex's can go.
But smaller ships like the Winged Defender or Whitewind (from FASA) or the little scout ships seen in TNG are able to operate effectively as escorts against the swarms of attack ships (especially with fire support from their mothership) and could easily fit into the space between the upper and lower hulls, where they are inside the shields and the field of the cloak. The Romulans just need to fit a few docking ports and clamps to hold the escorts in place. And the D'deridex has the excess energy to generate plenty of anti-matter to refuel its escorts - especially as they could be powered off of the mothership as long as they are docked, and only move over to their own power supply when launched.
While the "carrier" aspect would make miles of sense, there's no official documentation I could find to support the notion.
There have been many fandom and canon explanations. Most around the cloaking device, warp engines, cultural tendancies (akin to moncal ships in starwars being unique even in the same class...)
To be fair a advantage of the singularity drive is that it can run off of any matter and doesn't need a antimatter supply. That makes it ironically more suited for exploration ships (that are not supposed to see combat) because it doesn't need a logistics tail supplying it with antimatter.
Did we forget that Klingons died believing their cloaks to be inpenetrable but it turned out the exhaust from their (matter-anti-matter) engines could be homed in on by a torpedo?
It's likely the singularity was an answer to that. If the Klingon Warbirds were U-Boats, the D'deridex were more like Boomers, big because they carry weapons intended for a different scale of combat than mere ship-on-ship, but still capable of engaging on that level, and burning a fuel-less and therefore exhaust-less fuel to be more stealthy.
I'm pretty sure we see more anti-matter cores explode than singularities but it's hard to say if that's Romulans not getting enough screen time vs. their ships' safety records.
From what I recall the singularity that powers the Romulan ships are created artificially using the same artificial gravity projectors that pretty much all races uses. The use the AG to get the heavy matter they start with to collapse into a singularity and then siphon off the excess energy generated when it is fed matter (or proto-matter maybe). The actual singularity was not that large, having been collapsed from a large chunk of dense matter, usually heavy metals like tungsten or iridium, so when it stopped being fed the singularity collapses in on itself and dies out pretty quickly usually with minimum to no damage to the ship, mostly because the event horizon of the singularity didn't extend past the limits of its containment chamber. Now the real danger is the gravitational shielding collapsing and the singularity being fed a lot of matter all at once- that could cause the event horizon to extend much further, limited only by the mass of the material it was consuming.
Actually the Valdore (the Warbird in Nemesis) still has the voidspace though it's a lot smaller then with D'deridex, I was took it as means of making the ship look bigger without actually building a ship that big, for intimidation purposes.
From what I've seen of the design, I'm not seeing what you're referring to. It resembles a far more streamlined Vor'Cha in the end.
@@SacredCowShipyards It's there but it's so small it's only visible from the back or the front. it's mostly covered by the impulse drive but there's a pair of panels (one per side) that go from the main hull to the wings leaving a small void space there that seems to have no purpose other then to tie the Vardore to the double D.
EDIT:When you start looking for design similarities the Valdore starts looking like a D'deredex that ended up in a press and got flattened.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty sure those are more intakes (which... well, I'm not sure the Romulans have Bussard scoops, so they might need literal intakes) rather than... weird-assed holes in their ships. Dunno, though. Not sure we ever got a clear enough shot at it.
@@SacredCowShipyards Not in the movie no, there's no shot from a good angle on a light background and since the ship is dark green minor details get lost but the ship in question has been used in official materials so the there's plenty of shop of it online and they're not in-takes as you can see thru them.
And those secondary "wings" are a consistent design feature.
Also the Valdore has Bussard scoops it's the green section at the tip of the Nacelles.
the d´deridex comes in different sizes, from a few hundret meters in lenght up to more then a kilometer. ich love these ship. in the series the warbirds are displayed very weak and easy to kill, but in the lore they are some of the most powerful ships out there
The D'deridex class!!!
Edit.
You ended up saying it right anyway in the end!!!
I suspect it was troll bait to see who commented before watching to the end. :)
@@PromptCriticalJello Turns out: damned near everyone.
What's funny is that the same actor, Marc Alaimo, who played one of the first Romulans for "TNG" (and later Cardassians) played an alien guest aboard the
_Enterprise D_ called *Badar N'D'D* .
Happy Trek Day Sept 8, 1966 - 2022 🖖
At least the romulans didnt put the engines on a single barely reinforced stick way the hell out from the main hull on an almost right angle granting maximum leverage and shearing force for the trusters to rip the Nacelles off the engineering deck.
It's like someone looked at star wars Nebulon B and said how can I make that engine configuration worse and aplie to an entire fleets design doctrine?
Say what you will about the big ol hole but at least the engines don't look they'll rip themselves from the rest of the space frame well under thrust. Shit the reason the USS Siskos Pimp hand was so durable for its size is proably because they employed a sane engine placement its also likely how Voyager took on whole borg fleets well normal federation ships got slaughtered by the hundreds against one cube.
And yes I aware the enterprise and this design style predates star wars by a decade
Don't quote me on this but I think the thrusters or the things that make the ship move in space or on the back of the saucer section the pylons are just for the warp engines and that just creates the warp bubble so there's no actual Force being applied
It's not clear that the nacelles impart force or rather create the warp bubble that the ship lives inside of while at high speed, but... yeah.
... yeah.
Theoretically, antimatter fuel is far worse than a proton sized black hole. If the power ever gets shut off from the containment, the black hole will just fall out, maybe swallowing a few electrons along the way, while the antimatter will happily react with anything it touches.
Kugelblitz engines are fun!
That's assuming they're using a tiny one, and didn't "force" a large one into a small box to exploit its accretion disc for power.
Day -5 of saying that SCS should make a video on avatar the last Air Bender
in the episode TimeScape (S6 E25). One of the thing said about the Romulan warp core's singularity is that its artificial
The power source, the "quantum singularity" could be a white hole. The opposite/other side of a black hole, which emits all the energy that is absorbed by the black hole. That at least makes more sense than generating energy from a gravitational sinkhole.
I can’t get any of it together anymore more but I‘ve come across a theoretical way energy could be harvested from a black hole by feeding it matter. I mean no has a black hole or the equipment to test said theory but there at least appears to be a theoretical way to get energy from a black hole
You can get energy out of a rotating black hole by firing light through the ergosphere; a region of spacetime near the black hole that rotates extremely quickly. Some of the rotational energy of the black hole is conferred to the light, causing it to gain energy. By surrounding the singularity with mirrors, this light would continue to bounce around the black hole and siphon off more and more energy. Kurzgesagt has a great video on the effect.
@@Jenozie99 There are two ways to get power from a black hole, one is Hawking radiation (Which we are unsure if it exists.), the other we know for sure that would be technically possible, is by throwing matter into that spot where only part of it would be absorbed, the remainder would shoot out with more power as it was sent in. I do not have the exact numbers, but the energy efficiency you could theoretically get from that, is way above fission of fusion for the same mass. (But it should not be above matter-antimatter annihiliation.)
It is no wonder that you look at that thing and go "WHAT THE HELL?!?!"
That is sort of the whole point of it.
You see, while the Romulans hated the Vulcans, and were worried about the Klingons, they were reasonably certain they could defeat both in a stand-up fight. And everyone else was of secondary concern to them. But when the humans suddenly burst forth to the stage of Alpha Quadrant politics, and then founded the Federation, the Romulans were abso-fucking-lutely TERRIFIED!
The SPEED at which these aliens were advancing, expanding, and making alliances, made them a huge threat. They were already overtaking, and absorbing the Vulkans, the Romulans could ... WOULD be next!
The Romulans saw in the humans someone that not only could play their game, but play it better, so they tried to squash the humans BEFORE they could get too strong for them to deal with, starting the Earth-Romulan War.
But it was already too late, and they lost the war, badly. Now the humans didn't know just how badly, or they might have followed up and just permanently crippled the Romulan Empire, and that is when the Romulans decided to take a page out of Sun-Tsu's book, and become un-knowable. They took their already considerable xenophobia and talent for secrecy, and just dialed that shit up to 11!
And the D'deridex class is in many ways the pinnacle of that policy. It's primary purpose is not to FIGHT the Federation, but to SCARE the Federation, to make them want to NOT attack the Romulan Star Empire, because they took one look at it and went "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING?!?!".
They don't understand it, they do not "know" it, and so they can not be sure they can defeat it.
What does that thing do? Why is it like this? How many of them are there? Where are they? What dirty tricks does it have up it's sleeve? Can we be reasonably certain we can take 'em in a fight?
From the Romulan perspective, this worked!
The Federation didn't attack.
But we, the audience know that the Federation didn't attack, not because they feared the Romulans, but simply because they didn't want to.
So was the D'deridex class a successful design? Who knows! But it is interesting to compare and contrast it to the NEXT major Romulan starship design, after they learned about both the Borg and the Dominion. A straight up fighter, designed for only one purpose, to hunt down and kill the enemy!
TL;DR WOO POSTURING!
WOO POSTURING!
@@SacredCowShipyards You know ... that is a great "Too long, didn't read".
Thanks!
I mean, I did read, and that seemed to be your point.
Was I wrong?
@@SacredCowShipyards Nope, you nailed it! I even edited it in.
I was not being sarcastic or anything.
Ok yes, while I am a giant Romulan fanboy, and this is my favorite ship design of the entire series based on looks alone, it is very very goofy to make a warship like this.
Especially since it's such a huge vessel, if they just made the thing to pop out of cloak at point blank range and shove plasma torpedoes up the enemy's aft poop chutes it wouldn't matter so much. But this thing is actually supposed to be able to tractor grapple the enemy and face tank retaliatory fire...
It does not look capable of doing that, even with an artificial black hole powering its shields, this does NOT look like a tanky ship.
Edit: If you actually moved all the disruptor cannons to their original positions then the two plates would make slightly more sense, although I've always wanted there to be a refit that also sported disruptors on the inside edges of the plates for more coverage, they have more than enough juice to power those and it's a MASSIVE blind spot.
T'varo forever....
This is why I prefer the Valdor/Mogai warbirds, no negative space just one massive wing.
When you take away the prop and effect departments and draw more from the lore the D'Deridex is perhaps much stronger than we realize, we should not try to stack it up as a battleship like we do with the Galaxy Class, rather, we should compare its capabilities as a spacial submarine, it's highly advanced core would allow it to operate almost anywhere within the Alpha, Beta, and Delta Quadrants whilst still keeping its cloaking device operational, with its size too it could also transport a well-sized army into a potential combat zone along with all the usual military necessities food, pre-fab bases, relay bouy's, etc. But no matter how much I try to type I can only give you the following video link just to show you the awesome power that the ship holds, from there you can draw your opinions.
ua-cam.com/video/4lDXboVCpFI/v-deo.html
That was a great watch. Thanks.
As I recall, there was an early ship design rule that warp nacelles had to have clear line of sight to each other, and that's responsible for this weird design, but that rule was later abandoned. Also, in TNG 5x24, The Next Phase, it's mentioned specifically that the power source is an _artificial_ singularity.
Heck, that rule was abandoned while Roddenberry was still in charge.
The empty space in the middle makes sense from a "I have enough power to drive enough weapons, shields, and sundry space-gizmos to outfit a small planet, but I don't want to haul the actual mass of a planet around."
The offensive bit is that main engineering (and presumably the ship-eating singularity) is on the outer hull. Smart sapients would hang that shit near the center, where it's slightly more protected, and where the superheavy object is closer to the center of mass of the rest of the ship. Doing otherwise requires large stockpiles of handwavium to both negate the thrust/mass misalignment and to contain the singularity when the ship makes any maneuver at all.
While true... why no make it wee-er?
We're talking teeny tiny black holes, as in atom sized. It's just not that massive. The real problems are from the Hawking radiation powering that powers the ship, not the gravitational effects that are negligible as long as you don't eat it (which you can't, because the radiation would toast you first.)
Hey Sacred Cow, if memory serves there is cannon (I'm not sure if it was alpha cannon or beta cannon) that the Galaxy was a controversial ship at launch. Not just because it makes for a very powerful warship in wartime, but also because it's capable of acting as a forward Starbase. The thing has powerful defenses, sensors and logistical capability (3 shuttle bays, a high cargo capacity, communications, transporters, etc). In effect, during TNG Era, the Galaxy would be the center of any serious war effort.
The real reason Didlydoo loses to Galaxy class is that Romulans were so backstaby and secretive that they locked most of their weaponry behind codes it's own captain doesn't have access so it's constantly running on similar low level of power to max output that Galaxy has crew to max capacity.
The in universe technical reason for the negative space, is the need for a clear line of sight between the warp nacelles. The Federation uses pylons to raise them above the engineering hull, the Klingons hang them below the engineering hull. Given the size of the D'Deridex, it's at least plausible that the design engineers were working against the limits of their warp coils, and this design allowed for a more efficient warp bubble.
I think the 'Double D' makes sense given what the Romulan's primary strategic objective is. That objective is to liberate Vulcan. The Double D matches the best the Federation at the time produced but also had massive internal hull volume so they could spacelift an occupation army to pacify Vulcan; plus it has a massive volume of space between the two "wings" which gives space for transporting large amounts of cargo or prefabricated sections of say an orbital battle station to bring to Vulcan.
Fun fact about black holes: the smaller IT is the quicker IT colapses and evaporates into hawking radiation a.k.a explodes like nuke but mutch mutch stronger (obviously) so bring some 7bil. Factor suncream and gas giant when killing this ship.
The first fight between Kirk and the original romulan warbird is forever ingrained In my mind. That was a good episode.
The Galaxy Class is just a warship with a luxury hotel built in, along with a Mini airport like shuttle bay also built into the aft of the saucer section which is never seen on screen or TV.
Ahh, the costs of set construction...
One power cut to the containment and those romulan engineers would experience the longest minute of their lives until they get crushed to death.
The design is around the warp field and stability to help with the cloaking device not be detected
Its worth mentioning that, at present, every remotely workable (that is, currently thought to be workable if energy requirements can be drastically reduced) design for an actual FTL engine, features some sort of toroidal structure, largely away from the main body of the vessel.
I think the whole reason behind the black hole as a power source, and you kind of touched on it just by saying it's the Romulan Empire's design, is that technology can be salvaged from an exploded starship when it suffers destruction via battle, self-destruct, non-annihilative damage (loss of entire nacelles, chunks of saucer, etc.) or accidental warp-core breach. There are pieces left over that can be scanned, collected, and thoroughly studied for reverse-engineering purposes.
The Romulans on the other hand, being the stupidly secretive space-Romans that they are with their technology, have ensured a perfect fail-safe against this. It's kinda hard to scan and study starship debris if there's no debris left floating in space. Especially when there's a conveniently placed black hole that just sucks it all up into nothingness.
SFIA has a great episode about black holes as power sources. It's a good watch.
To be fair to all the dangerous engineering things that can happen if the singularity drive gets damaged - the warp cores their rivals are using aren't much better. If the antimatter touches any part of the ship it isn't supposed to, it'll annihilate with whatever it touches and kaboom. It has to be contained at all times by strong magnetic fields.
With cloaks vs sensors (and transporters vs shields) - the writers should've just called it a technical arms race. The Romulans made a cloak in TOS, then Starfleet stole one, reverse engineered it, and developed sensors to defeat the cloak. So then the Romulans built a better cloak which defeated the sensors Star Fleet had, causing Star Fleet to develop better sensors, etc. Then if the plot needed the Romulans to sneak up on the Enterprise just say they recently upgraded their cloak and if the plot needed the Enterprise to track a cloaked ship just say they upgraded their sensors.
Which explains why the Romulans know things about cloaked warfare nobody else does and the Starfleet has sensors that are patently ridiculous in their range and comprehensiveness.