The Prometheus Problem (& Solution!)

[Pholin Duyzer]

I recently started doing research into my favorite ship/class: the Prometheus. It is my long-term goal to captain one, and I've recently picked up doing vector graphics and I'm trying to make deck plans for this beauty. However, I ran into some problems.

The ship is supposed to have 15 (according to SB118 and Star Trek Magazine) or 16 (according to STexpanded; ignoring this) decks. According to our wiki and Memory Beta, the ship is 113 meters high. This immediately causes problems. The ship has the same amount of decks as the Intrepid class, which is only 64 meters high, so in theory the Prometheus should be about as high. The average height of a deck on the Prometheus would be 7.53 meters, which could be two decks on any other ship. So calculating with a standard height of four meters per deck the ship should have about 28 decks.

So I realized the ship either has way more decks or is way less high. I reached that conclusion very quickly using Paint, because all sources state a length of 415 meters. Please compare these two (link to original picture, which is slightly out of the Voyager height proportion)

The top one is with a height of 64 meters and 15 decks. The bottom one is with a height of 113 meters and 28 decks. Both with a length of 415 meters. If you don't recognize it immediately, the left one depicts the original prometheus waaaay better. So I think the 64 meters should be taken as the height, or a value close to that. Another way of calculating height solely using this picture would be to count pixels. The (original; not scaled by me) picture is 600 pixels wide and 80 high, so using the 415 as a length we can calculate a height of 55 meters. Not sure what to do with this, and I'd like to hear y'all's opinion on this matter.

Rant over.

Edited November 20, 2018 by Pholin Duyzer
formatting & typo's

[Rahman and Rivi Vataix]

Would you like to join the ASDB team?

https://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=Advanced_Starship_Design_Bureau

Send me or @Oddas Aria a PM.

With regards to the Prometheus, the 113 number along with the ship's other specs on our wiki come from the licensed book Starship Spotter. But clearly, the authors didn't actually check to see if that made sense. Probably the easiest way to find the "true" height is to just do an analysis of the CGI side image.

[Jordan aka FltAdmlWolf]

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but isn't the reason it has so many fewer decks is because the hulls within take up so much room? The ship splits into three parts, and therefore each part needs to have a "top" and "bottom" hull somewhere in there, which takes up quite a bit of room. 

[Pholin Duyzer]

@Roshanara Rahman Thanks, I'll look into it!

@FltAdml. Wolf That could be an explanation, indeed. But as seen in the image in my original post, the ship is out of the proportion that we see on TV if we keep the length of 415 meters and height of 113 meters. So we could fill the height with hulls indeed, but that would leave us with a ship that looks like this.

[Ayiana Sevo]

On 11/20/2018 at 4:37 PM, FltAdml. Wolf said:

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but isn't the reason it has so many fewer decks is because the hulls within take up so much room? The ship splits into three parts, and therefore each part needs to have a "top" and "bottom" hull somewhere in there, which takes up quite a bit of room. 

This could be one reason. Another is automation. Remember, the Prometheus was designed to be crewed with a minimum of 4 people, with the rest of the ship completely automated. It's possible a lot of space between walls and decks are set aside for extra machinery to accomplish this goal - extra cores, processors, ODN networks, etc.

Also, join the Advanced Systems Design Board!

[Mei'konda]

On 11/20/2018 at 5:37 PM, FltAdml. Wolf said:

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but isn't the reason it has so many fewer decks is because the hulls within take up so much room? The ship splits into three parts, and therefore each part needs to have a "top" and "bottom" hull somewhere in there, which takes up quite a bit of room. 

The Prometheus is kind of an odd ship in a few different ways, IMO, and having a roughly Voyager-sized ship that can do that would require Starfleet to be able to miniaturize a whoooole lot of things aside from the hull sections.  Every essential system, for example, needs to be duplicated in all three sections.  Warp core and associated systems, impulse engines, shield generators, weapons, logistics, and so on.  If I was designing the ship, I'd probably write it as being very Defiant-like on the inside, just on a larger scale - absolutely no room for large and comfortable quarters, holodecks, science capabilities, or anything of the sort.

Like @Ayiana wrote, having a minimal crew complement and a very small amount of crew quarters would free up a lot of space.  It'd be interesting to see what sort of things people could come up with for the Prometheus' drawbacks to compensate for its strengths.  And that's exactly the sort of thing we talk about in the ASDB, @Pholin Duyzer