Saturn Probe Mission.

[ZeroArmour]

In "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (TOS 121) we learn that Colonel Shaun Geoffrey Christopher will command Earth's first manned mission to Saturn... And that's about all we learn. If we digabout in a few non-canon sources we get a bit more info, but it's still vague.

We can guess the date is about 40 years after the Ep, so now-ish. In fact "Star Trek Chronology" put it in 2009, though "Spaceflight Chronology" says 2020 (unlikely, given how old Colonel Christopher would be by then... Yeah I know 50ish isn't that much older than 40ish, I'm just going with my gut on that) The ship is the "Aventeur class" UNSS Lewis and Clark.

As the DY-100 series is the space shuttle of it's day, this (I guess) is the "Discovery" of ST's alternate history.

Here's what stats I can find for it.

Length: 125 m
Beam: 28.5 m
Draught: 28.5 m
Mass: 2.81 million kg (2810 tons)

Compliment:
Officers: 3 (Captain, First Mate, Engineer)
Crew: 12
Passengers: 94
Total Capacity: 109

Propulsion
6 Amjet-II Fission rockets
1 Emergency LH2/LO2 rocket in the detachable primary life support module

Performace
Sustainable Acceleration: 0.2 g
Maximum Thrust: 135,000 kg per fission engine
Cruising velocity: 700,550 km/hr
Standard range: 150 million km (Earth-Mars)
Maximum range: 2.57 million km (Earth-Saturn)
Duration: 288 days @ a crew of 15

So, does this fit into Trek? Does it need tweeking? Opinions?

[somaticon]

Nice looks like it fits well and shouldn't be to hard to make into a playable ship for either Fasa, Spacedock or Coda. I think it might be interesting to run a pre trek game some time.

[ZeroArmour]

I wish I still had my copy of "Spaceflight Chronology", it had side and top views of each ship that could be used to work out if it could really hold that many people or not.

How fast is it? C is 1,079 million km/hour, divided by 700,550 km/hour, = 1/1540 of C... That's real slow.

From what I can work out, this design (along with DY series ships) should be the norm of pre FTL Earth ships.

[ZeroArmour]

Got hold of my mates copy of "Spaceflight Chronology" and scaned the page on this ship. Here's the side view.

The large forward sections, 12 stacked in two sets of 6, appear to be cargo or mission moduals. The ship proper (command, habitat & engineering) is just the long central spar.

Interestingly, the ship uses a constant reaction drive that generates a .2 gravity... This means the ship has to be built vertically with the drive modual as the "bottom".