So many Mirandas/So few Constitution-refits?

Discussion in 'Trek Tech' started by SicOne, Aug 4, 2013.

  1. Nightfall to-Ennien

    Nightfall to-Ennien Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    It may seem a bit boring, but I always attributed the relative abundance of Miranda class ships to simple upkeep and logistics reasons. The closest we saw to the Miranda in her prime was the Reliant, doing surveys of planets within Federation territory, within reasonable proximity of Regula 1, while the Constitution was an all-singing all-dancing long-duration explorer with a crew of more than four hundred, more than a dozen science labs onboard, AND all the speed records. I surmised that as time marched on, and that generation of technology was withdrawn from front-line service, they found the less elaborate Miranda was more economical in resources to send on generally uneventful milk runs. And this is all without mentioning the two enormous shuttle/cargo bay doors on her aft that seem ideally suited for if you wanted to, say, gut one and turn her into a freighter, or even do a flexible new-build variant leveraging a proven spaceframe and propulsion systems.
     
  2. YJAGG

    YJAGG Captain Captain

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    I would guess that next gen wanted to distance themselves from TOS, but ther budgets screamed reuse what we have so they looked around and saw four good studio models Refit Enterprise, The great experiment, the Reliant and BOP- so not wanting to show the old Refit jobbies they went with the other three. I am surprised they did not just do some scratch building a Reliant with excelsior nacelles or somthing, but when budgets are tight they are tight
     
  3. Unicron

    Unicron Boss Monster Mod Moderator

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    Sure we did. The USS Brattain in "Night Terrors" was a straight reuse of the Miranda model with no visible modifications. The USS Trial also appeared in "Way of the Warrior" and was recycled as stock footage for other Mirandas docked at DS9, although it had the rollbar flipped around. Whether that was a goof or an intentional variation isn't entirely clear to me.
     
  4. blssdwlf

    blssdwlf Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    @Crazy Eddie and Unicron - Ah I forgot about the Brattain and Trial. Hmm, nevermind about the rollbar theory then :D

    The bad character who asked the question doesn't invalidate the question or answer given the answer came from a higher-up. As far as we know the military program got cut while the science and exploration programs lived on in Starfleet.

    Perhaps or perhaps not, but without the rollbar phasers the Reliant's initial broadsides attack would've required the port-side ventral saucer phaser beams to come awefully close to their own nacelle.

    Literally, no. I was just trying to keep within Forbin's metaphor. Phasers are the primary variable-power energy gun used in TOS. There isn't a good equivalent to WW2 terminology other than it was their "big guns".

    Yes for those times when the bow tubes couldn't be turned in time for an attack run and it makes a handy weapon to discourage pursuers. Still, in terms of offensive firepower, the 2 aft tubes on the Reliant would've made more sense mounted facing forward, IMHO.

    Correction noted above :)
     
  5. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I'm not "just now" saying it. I said it two posts ago in response to you.

    Try to keep up.

    Possibly true for the relatively new build NCC-1701. Not so much for the (probably much older) NCC-1017.
     
  6. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    When a complete asshole asks a loaded question like that, it's probably not a legitimate question.

    Who was interrupted mid-sentence by the aforementioned asshole before he could actually give it.

    As far as we know "the outposts along the neutral zone" WAS the military program in its entirety.

    Or they could have just rolled ten degrees to port so their ventral phasers had a shot. They only had, what, two and a half minutes to reorient themselves for that? :vulcan:

    There's no rule that starships have to be perpendicular to each other's deck level at all times; realistically, they usually WON'T be.

    I don't know that the World War-II analogy is or was ever all that appropriate since large warships rarely if ever engaged with torpedoes. And for good reason, too; if you could get close enough to a heavy cruiser to shoot a torpedo at it, you were either close enough to get eaten alive by its main guns, or you were in something too small for its guns to actually aim at without overshooting.

    Here's something to consider, actually: at the time that Star Trek actually went on the air, the most prominent cruiser-type vessels of the day were Guided missile cruisers converted from WW-II vessels. USS Galveston and similar types would have been examples of the "standard" type of warship at the time. Moreover, the nuclear-powered USS Long Beach, armed mostly with missiles with only a token gun arament (like modern ship types) had been in service for over ten years when Star Trek came out.

    We should consider that "Enemy Below" ripoffs aside, Star Trek may have been less about emulating WW-II era warships and more about emulating MODERN ones contemporary with the actual show. Phasers would be a good "dual purpose" weapon good for close quarters combat, light shore bombardment and plinking at enemy fighters, but the ship's OFFENSIVE weapon remains the photon torpedo launcher. By the time the Navy started getting more interesting launcher designs like the VLS tubes and the Armored Box Launches for the Tomahawks the "Torpedoes fire from a single launcher in location X" meme had been grandfathered in and Starfleet stopped emulating the navy altogether.

    That is, until STID when we suddenly discover the Enterprise has over a dozen lateral torpedo tubes in addition to the big neck launcher.:bolian:

    I'm not the almost-expert I used to be when I was younger, but I am about 100% sure that the only thing a WW-II submarine could do about pursuers was to dive like hell and PRAY FOR A FUCKING MIRACLE. There's almost no record of a submarine shooting its aft torpedoes at pursuing destroyer escorts mainly because 1) since you have to stay at periscope depth long enough to get a firing solution, you practically guarantee the enemy will kill you and 2) since your pursuer is heading DIRECTLY AT YOU, your torpedoes are equally guaranteed to miss.

    Those submarines did not use those torpedoes against pursuers. What they did was, they fired the bow tubes in spread at their first target(s) then while those tubes were reloading, turned away and aimed the rear tubes at a second set of targets; by the time the rear tubes were empty, either the bow tubes were reloaded or the escort ships were zeroing in. If the latter, your attack run is over: dive as deep as you can, shove a cork in your ass and hope they run out of depth charges (or mortars, or both) before they hit you.

    It wasn't until the invention (and actually, perfection) of wake-homing torpedoes that shooting at a pursuing escort ship even BEGAN to make sense. Nowadays, submarines don't even bother with torpedoes; if you're unlucky enough to figure out where they are, they pop six harpoons in your general direction and then slink away laughing (silently) at your panic.

    I don't see how, considering starships in the TMP era only ever launch torpedoes one at a time.:p

    OTOH, if Trek had kept pace with the times as well as it did in the 60s, Reliant's Terrier-inspired torpedo pod would eventually have been replaced by a more versatile multi-tube launcher like the one we later see in Into Darkness, something with a dozen less complicated tubes that each be loaded with a single weapon. The nature of scifi space battles means that if your ship launches a Macross Missile Massacre, it doesn't really matter what direction you're facing: your missiles/torpedoes are going to home in like a swarm of bees and your target is either going to doge/shootdown all of them, or he's going to be annihilated.
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2013
  7. YJAGG

    YJAGG Captain Captain

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    but think about it and I am rolling my eyes as I write this they did nto want to refit Enterprise in SFS "Jim...she's 20 years old..." ok closer to 30 I would think with the April Pike back stories
     
  8. C.E. Evans

    C.E. Evans Admiral Admiral

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    No, this came after what I originally said. You accused me of ignoring something you hadn't said yet.
    Try to stay on track.
    For all intents and purposes, the Constellation was a either a ship from an earlier design that was later upgraded to Constitution-class specifications or was simply a vessel that was assigned a lower hull registry than the Constitution if hull registries aren't always consecutive.
     
  9. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Actually, Morrow is slightly breaking the forth wall there: he really means to say that STAR TREK is 20 years old and is echoing the view of the studio that says "We fell her day is over."

    Otherwise, backstage sources indicate Enterprise was 20 years old when Kirk first got his grubby little hands on her. By this time, she's pushing 40 to 50.
     
  10. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    You have me confused with cooleddie; I DO NOT possess a time machine.:mallory:

    Except we don't canonically know the registry of USS Constitution; for all we know they gave it "NCC-911" and concurrent with a dozen other starship classes who shared the 900 and 1000 series for the next twenty five years.
     
  11. C.E. Evans

    C.E. Evans Admiral Admiral

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    You could have fooled me.
    :vulcan:
    I once speculated that NCC-1700 was not necessarily the hull registry for the Constitution, but the basic diagram of a Constitution-class ship with that registry popped up onscreen more than once in Trek (first on a monitor screen Scotty was looking at in "Space Seed," but more clearly for us to look at in Star Trek III and TNG's "Datalore").
    http://images.wikia.com/memoryalpha/en/images/5/57/Constitution_class,_NCC-1700,_Datalore.jpg

    It's not unreasonable that repeatedly-shown diagram is a base schematic of a Constitution-class ship featuring the first vessel of the design.
     
  12. blssdwlf

    blssdwlf Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The question and answer is legitimate as we're not lead to believe these two were lying.
    MILITARY AIDE: Bill, are we talking about mothballing the Starfleet?
    C in C: I'm sure that our exploration and scientific programs would be unaffected, Captain, but...
    Sure but part of the phaser coverage discussion was that with the rollbar phasers you wouldn't need to.

    It's not that appropriate. Like I said, I was working within Forbin's question.

    However, TOS did rip off "Enemy Below" and alternated between gun and torpedo with specific constraints that did not emulate 1960's contemporary naval combat. Phaser guns were their first go-to weapons to attack their targets but was power-intensive and photon torpedoes were used when the ship was power-limited and couldn't fire full phasers.

    U-85 fires stern tube in attempt to sink pursuing destroyer.

    USS Tang fires stern torpedoes at pursuing tanker and transport attempting to ram it.

    Netherlands O-21 sinks pursuing U-95 with stern torpedoes.

    Spadefish failed to sink destroyer with stern torpedoes.

    etc, etc.

    I was thinking of TOS Enterprise's 6 forward tubes that could be emptied rapidly although still "one at a time". The only different I can tell between the TOS and TMP launchers is that we see the TMP ones fire multiple times indicating either a quicker reloading or holding multiple torpedoes to fire beyond the oval hatch where they are loaded. In either case, more tubes facing forward just means more torpedoes to be fired forward (without having to wait for the ones fired aft to swing around.)

    Unfortunately Trek never kept up with the times, even their own, IMHO. Even AbramsTrek doesn't really make a change as it still keeps phasers and torpedoes.
     
  13. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Admiral Premium Member

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    What was the question again?
     
  14. The Badger

    The Badger Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Im in ur Tardis, violating ur canon.
    That's an ad hominem fallacy. And totally irrelevant. Both Admiral Cartwright* and the military aide refer to a possible 'mothballing' or 'dismantling' of the fleet. If they were wrong, the Commander In Chief would have said so there and then.

    MILITARY AIDE: Bill, are we talking about mothballing the Starfleet?
    C in C: Nope, not going to happen.
    MILITARY AIDE: Oh, good.

    No. Instead the aide asks his question, and gets the reply

    C in C: I'm sure that our exploration and scientific programs would be unaffected, Captain, but...

    Only exploration and science are mentioned. And that 'but' at the end of the sentence suggests that other programs, perhaps including defence, will be affected.


    *And is there any reason to believe Cartwright is a member of the conspiracy at this stage? Or that the conspiracy even exists? At the briefing he shows no knowledge of the situation, having to ask what the proposed negations will be for. Believing, correctly or not, that the Fleet was about to be weakened may well be his motivation for joining the conspiracy in the first place.
     
  15. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Admiral Premium Member

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    ^^^ I'm pretty sure Cartwright was deeply in it by this point. Someone heard Kirk tell Spock "Let them [the Klingons] die" after everyone left the conference room, to filter it down to Valeris. A lowly Lieutenant would likely not have been allowed to come anywhere near that room full of top brass - but an Admiral would. And I doubt that was something that Spock would have told Valeris off-screen - too personal a moment between the two old friends. But it would be the perfect thing for a senior officer to use to manipulate a junior officer into doing "her patriotic duty" for the "greater good" of the Federation.

    Also, Cartwright's odd, almost forlorn, expression on his face when Kirk spoke up and said the Admiral was right, indicated to me that Cartwright knew exactly what was going on. He knew he was complicit in setting up one of Starfleet's greatest heroes (and the only one in the room to verbally agree with his assessment of the Klingons, augmenting his guilt over the plan) to be thrown into a faked attack on an enemy vessel flying a diplomatic flag, one or more murders, and a BOP that can fire when cloaked, sparking a massive interstellar war, swallowing the entire Alpha Quadrant, that could potentially kill millions, possibly billions. The fact that the Klingons had the time to prep an offensively-cloaking BOP for this mission means that certain members of Starfleet also had the time to set things up on their end.

    Spock's mind meld on Valeris also basically implied that Cartwright was a part of the conspiracy from the get-go. There is no question, in my mind, that such was the case.
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2013
  16. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    They did, actually. Through the 1960s, guided missiles were unreliable enough that gunfire was still used in close quarters against surface and shore targets almost exclusively. Antiship missiles were available, but expensive and difficult to use, and beam-riding missiles like Tartar and Terrier could be used against surface targets only with a direct line of sight (basically, just outside gun range).

    Which means guided missile cruisers of the early/mid 1960s operated the same way as starships: guns at close range, missiles at longer range. This is very much UNLIKE the WW-II analogy, where guns are used at medium range and torpedoes -- which are one-shot kills for anything smaller than a heavy cruiser -- are used at suicidally close range.

    And is sunk for her troubles. Desperation tactic is desperate.

    Because they cannot dive to escape like they're supposed to. Desperation tactic is still desperate.

    U-95 had been closely following O-21, trying to figure out who they were; O-21 shot the torpedoes at them as soon as they made challenge.

    Not a desperation tactic, but part of the pattern that submarines only use the stern tubes "defensively" (if you can call it that) when on the surface. And a submarine that can't dive is a submarine that's just BEGGING to get sunk.

    Only because her forward tubes were empty.

    Much more to the point: this is not what the stern tubes were INTENDED for, nor was such use either common or particularly successful.

    And again, by the 1980s the stern missile launchers on guided missile warships were supplemental on a ship that basically aims its main weapons by turning itself until said weapon is pointed in the general direction of the enemy.

    But if the forward tube has some kind of autoloader or a quick-launch magazine, it doesn't matter whether you have one tube or twelve, you still launch all twelve torpedoes one at a time until your target dies.

    Think of it like the Mk-26 launchers on the old Tico cruisers. Load two missiles, fire them off, reload, repeat. There's no real advantage to moving the other Mk-26 to the forward section of the ship (like they did on the Long Beach) because 90% of the time the ship is only going to fire one or two missiles and rarely needs more than that to get the job done. The VLS system we use now has the advantage of enabling a possible Macross Missile Massacre, but can just as easily fire missiles one or two at a time, and can do either job with identical efficiency.

    The only disadvantage to the VLS system is that it cannot be easily reloaded. The NuEnterprise clearly doesn't have this problem.

    OUR ships still have 5" guns, do they not? And again, the broadside launchers in STID would count as a timeline update to the design IMO.

    ETA: Thought back to this thread and suddenly this image popped into my head:
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2013
  17. Praetor

    Praetor Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The fine line between continuity and fanwank.
    Not to belabor a point, but how do we know that those prototypes and other ships weren't at Wolf 359? We have a few moments of battle footage from "Emissary" that pins down by visual evidence only a few ships: Yamaguchi, Melbourne, Saratoga, and Bellerophon. The encyclopedia speculated about names for others based on some of the wrecked models that were built... but how do we really know that the unnamed Excelsior prototypes did not participate? The Memory Alpha article on the battle pins down 16 ships, two unnamed, and one from the presumed present mothership of a wrecked shuttlecraft (USS Liberator.)

    I have always remained dubious about there only being 40 starships present in the final count as well.

    At any rate, the Constitution class seems to have at least one present, in addition to the one confirmed Miranda class. There really seems to be no "class bias" when it came to this battle.
     
  18. Roboturner913

    Roboturner913 Commander Red Shirt

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    LOL at the fat guy macking on the chick in the turbolift
     
  19. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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    We don't know that those ships participated any more than we know that the rest of the fleet was composed completely of Nebula class ships. Some people seem to think that because they were seen at the surplus depot, they were from the battle because other ships form the battle were there as stock footage. So does that mean that the two spacedock study models, the two Talarian freighters, the two Talarian warships and the 'V" miniseries saucer were at Wolf 359 too?:p

    Based on what I can see (8 Galaxy family ships, one Ambassador, one Excelsior, one Miranda (with updated interiors), one Oberth, one shuttle from presumably another Galaxy family ship, and what hasn't been conclusively proven to be a fully intact Constitution), it appears that if this sample is a representation of the entire fleet, then it was probably composed mostly of more advanced ships from the 2350's and '60's, while the older designs tended to be less, but still hardly "antiquated."
     
  20. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Admiral Premium Member

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    Somewhere I got the impression that the Connie that was present at W359 had nacelles that were situated perpendicular to how they normally appeared, pointing outward sideways, rather than the usual straight up-and-down, with Constellation-style endcaps. I vaguely remember a pic of this from many years ago, and it looked like this (discovered this one back in early 2006).