Dreadnought-Class Production Line (Spoilers?)

As "Contact" taught us: why build just one, when you can build two for twice the price?

 

The design had certain similarities with the anti-time future Enterprise from "All Good Things" as well I thought.

 

Sorry, we can't all agree on that.

I thought it was ugly and fanboy-ish and hope we never see anything like it ever again.

 

Politics.

With the exception of a few nutjob admirals, Starfleet and the UFP don't want a war with the Klingons. With anyone really. So, here's a ship designed by a rogue admiral, packed with BFG's and a warpdrive that can run circles around the Enterprise, one of the newest ships in the fleet. A ship made for war.
How the heck would the Klingons react when you actually put that ship into active production?
It would be something along the lines of the Cuban missile crisis. The Klingons would start arming themselves more, things would escalate pretty quickly, and before you know it.... BOOM!!

Starfleet has always been about steering away from war, but being prepared for it if need be. The Vengeance is neither, it's steering towards war, imo.

 

I'm not a huge fan of the design either - but I think it would actually look a lot better with an extra 3rd nacelle. I don't know why, but I think, at the least, it would make the ship look less...generic. Less like a Connie on steroids with Transformer armor...

Unfortunately I don't have good Photoshop or rendering skills (actually I don't have *any*)..but I'd love to see someone else tackle the design of a 3-nacelled Big V...

 

That's exactly how 31 would be thinking, too.

That there won't be a negotiated or reasoned way out, just peace through superior firepower.

 

There's no reason the Klingons would ever need to see that ship - unless war has already broken out. Once that happens, THEN you deploy Vengeance-class ships to the front lines. But until that time, keep them well within the Federation's borders, ideally within a secure facility, where the Klingons won't even know they're there. Keep them there until war already breaks out. Only then do you let them out.

 

CLICK!

 

The starship equivalent of a pack of attack dogs? I like it.

 

Secrets can come out, through spies or just a stupid mistake. Hell, in a way that's what happened to the Vengeance. It was supposed to remain secret.....then kinda crashed into one of the biggest cities on Earth. So yeah, would Starfleet take that risk? And before you answer yes, Marcus wasn't acting under Starfleet's orders.

 

^ Remember, Robocop had a model of Vengeance sitting out on his desk for all to see. What did he do when other officers or officials asked about it? I'm surprised there weren't rumors all through the fleet about it. Unless Enterprise was the only ship that never got any of the gossip?..

 

Well, he was the head of Starfleet, so who exactly in Starfleet would have been giving him orders anyways?

 

Yeah, but as the head of a military you don't simply dictate how that military works. A military serves under the ruler(s) of a nation. So even as head of Starfleet, he wasn't the Supreme Ruler of the UFP or something like that, and couldn't dictate policy.

 

Entirely possible that the Vengeance's design wasn't secret, just sold as being something other that what Marcus ended up making.

 

One of the problems here is that, when the ship pops up for the first time, our heroes indicate they do not recognize it - meaning they don't recognize its shape. That makes it a bit less likely that the design would be in common use, with the Vengeance reflecting either standard production or a special modification. Or then it makes our bunch of heroes ignorant.

Which is perfectly excusable if they have indeed been out in deep space for a few years. But if that were true, why would a five-year sortie be such a big deal for Kirk? They can't have been gone for as long as it takes to produce a ship like that out in the open (we get an idea of the timescale from the previous movie showing us the NCC-1701 construction timeline in some detail).

Perhaps the heroes aren't ignorant at all, and actually do recognize the shape, and Kirk merely swiftly asks Khan for additional, in-depth information he knows Khan possesses...

Whether Marcus would have control over ship procurement policy, it's difficult to tell; in some militaries of the past, a man like him would have had that exact control, but in modern ones it would be uncommon. But the clearance to launch assassination missions and destroy fellow starships as situation warrants could be well within his grasp, as many modern militaries would provide that sort of leeway in a comparable high-tension situation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The Vengeance was likely first named USS Excelsior, it had transwarp drive after all.

 

When were the words transwarp ever uttered during the movie? Just because it was faster then Enterprise, doesn't automatically mean it has transwarp.

 

When Scotty showed up with Cumberbatch's portable transwarp beaming device. But "transwarp drive" was never uttered as far as I know.

 

Carol tells Kirk in a hurry that Vengeance has "an advanced warp drive" which I think some people misheard as a Britishy "a trans-warp drive"

 

I agree.

Also - I thought that maybe that lineup on the desk represents key starship design evolution - and that perhaps the Vengeance was there as a symbolic nod to the future of starfleets direction (ie: a model of the next generation of Starfleets ships) - not necesarily of what was understood to be current designs (after all, starship creation could take a long time from conception to fruition - and perhaps the Vengeance was being advanced at a much faster rate than was anticipated by the general public...)

I liken it to a display of car models on a desk, all being significant milestones in the motoring history, with a model of some kind of futuristic car design (not yet made) but at least designed on paper.