Navigation Console Overview

[Matt Wise]

I have created the attached document to help facilitate what panel controls and system read outs will be available on the navigation console for the simulator. This document has a brief explanation of all the systems involved and some explanation of what the controls do and what the readouts mean.

Please review this document and let me know of any additions, corrections, or deletions. I followed the Doc#04 Modelling the Enterprises Systems ver 1, TNG: Technical Manual, and Memory Alpha for the explanations.

Once the documents have been completed I will start to work on vector "sketches" of what each screen of the panel "could" look like and submit those for review and then we could use those as a guide. I won't start any development on the functionality of the panels until the simulator is a little bit more concrete.

[Peter Cotton]

As I mentioned before, my problem with all of the navigation screen usually boils down to speed. I would love to discuss this and how we handle it.

 

My two main problems are slow to fast speed differences and speed relative to objects.

 

For example. On the show, when two ships engage in combat we see them swoop past each other. This would make for an excellent strategic simulation as the captain turns his port side to the attacker because those shields are at full strength and the port phasers are fully charged. However the Enterprise is capable of 0.25c (quarter of the speed of light) which is about 1 billion kilometers an hour (honestly that's the right figure - unless you use British billions in which case it's a measly 1,000 million kilometres per hour).

 

Which basically means that combat should consist of two ships blinking in and out of each other weapons range. That isn't they way it was in the show. However in order to move between planets in a solar system we do need to move at these sort of rates. The show conveniently omits to tackle this problem so we will be forced to come up with our own solution. Is it that the shields draw so much power that the ship can only do a few thousand km/hr when they are online?

 

My next problem is relative. When the Enterprise drops out of warp near a planet, that planet is actually moving (orbiting around a sun) so the ship itself is moving (relative to the sun). This is much easier to tackle. We will have a read out of the speed relative to the nearest/heaviest gravitational object. This will be the current speed of the ship. So although the Enterprise may be travelling at 88 km/second through space, it is only doing 3 km/second relative to the planet (which is doing 85 km/second in it's orbit). If the Enterprise drops out of warp in the middle of nowhere (no gravity) then it will stop relative to the galactic plane. Now, with all of this I am introducing a cheat factor. When the Enterprise comes out of warp it magically halts relative to the nearest large gravity source. We know this isn't how space works.... but hey look a butterfly... nothing to see here...move along.