Uses of the Reliant studio model in Trek

[Timo]

And...those are two entirely different things.

Not particularly different. If anything, portable weapons would have a greater excuse for being put out of production when they grow outdated. But there is no motivation for ceasing the production of "primitive" revolvers, so there certainly shouldn't be a motivation for doing major changes for a "primitive" starship which is a much more complex industrial effort to begin with and would require much more effort to redesign. Not unless something about the threat environment changes - and nothing should change for a science vessel, as its "threats" have stayed constant for billions of years already.

The Oberth could well be the revolver of the starship world, facing a stable threat environment, while the Akira would be the assault rifle, always in the need of tinkering to meet the evolving opposition.

built to specifications acquired from battling the Borg

Only a single starship type is known to have been built to such specs - the Defiant.

There might be huge disadvantages to making a ship "Borg-compatible". Such a vessel might be an inferior combatant in a fight against the Klingons, who do not stand still behind a square target three kilometers on side, without conventional shields, just waiting to be boarded by transporter.

Timo Saloniemi

[Avro Arrow]

Dukhat wrote:

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Yes, that would have been fantastic. Instead, we see Starfleet fighting a war with the Dominion with fleets primarily composed of out-of-date ships. No wonder they almost lost.

All the newer designs kept getting assigned to the Seventh Fleet, where they continued to get destroyed off-screen...

Maybe it's the other way around... we saw those older ships more because they had better survivability. In TWoK, the Enterprise and Reliant traded weapons fire while unshielded, and generally came out OK until the Reliant was finally overwhelmed at the end. Compare that to the Galaxy class, where if you happen to get a lucky shot on the starboard power coupling... boom!

[137th Gebirg]

^^^ And destroyed by a relatively outdated and underpowered scout-sized Bird of Prey, no less.

[USS Firefly]

^^^ And destroyed by a relatively outdated and underpowered scout-sized Bird of Prey, no less.

Well that didn't make any sense off the writers, that was just really bad writing.
The only thing they had to do was fire a couple of torpedo's too the BOP en killed them with minor damage

[throwback]

The script was badly written. Why wasn't Geordi's VISOR appliance not scanned for bugs? I would think that after the Romulans had discovered a way to use the VISOR against Geordi and the Enterprise, that the first thing would be to scan that thing ASAP. Yet, that didn't happen. Huh?

Another thing - wouldn't the crew realize that their shield frequency was known to the Klingons, based on the effectiveness of the torpedoes, and, knowing this, wouldn't they change the frequency? And, why was the starship fighting the BOP in a planet's gravity well? Wouldn't it better to fight the BOP outside the planet's gravity well?

I hate it when I am smarter than the fictional characters or the writers who wrote this dreck.

[publiusr]

Well we see that today. I have never bought a cell phone. Computer-ease escapes me. But I can't help but wonder that good old fashioned pick-pockets would get the better of folks who love immersive tech.

[Dukhat]

Timo wrote:

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Not particularly different. If anything, portable weapons would have a greater excuse for being put out of production when they grow outdated. But there is no motivation for ceasing the production of "primitive" revolvers, so there certainly shouldn't be a motivation for doing major changes for a "primitive" starship which is a much more complex industrial effort to begin with and would require much more effort to redesign. Not unless something about the threat environment changes - and nothing should change for a science vessel, as its "threats" have stayed constant for billions of years already.

Sorry, I'm not quite buying that logic. A gun is a gun. You put bullets in it and you shoot. A starship is an advanced piece of engineering allowing its occupant to travel at FTL speeds to other planets, while also containing a multitude of systems such as computers, life-support, matter/antimatter engines, artificial gravity, weapons systems, sensor systems...the list goes on. Your comparison isn't even remotely similar.

[B.J.]

I understand the metaphor he's driving at. It's a little strained, but still works.

[Timo]

Indeed, a machine is a machine, regardless of complexity. And even that is probably too specific: a product is a product. Either it needs to change, or it doesn't need to. And the layman cannot tell the difference from looks alone.

There may be very good reasons why a paperclip doesn't need to evolve but the key to your door absolutely must; why the bicycle is just fine the way it is but the roller skate was shit before it got better; why the hull of a dry cargo vessel from a hundred years back is fine but the hull of a container ship from ten years back is hopelessly outdated for meeting the current demands of most economic movement through water; and why a howlizer from WWI would still serve while a cannon would be useless. Sometimes the reasons can be found by googling, sometimes not. With starships, we can but guess.

It isn't even a metaphor. It's more like a universal law of nature. Except you replace nature with the artifacts of civilization, and insert intelligent design where nature has none.

Timo Saloniemi

[Dukhat]

B.J. wrote:

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I understand the metaphor he's driving at. It's a little strained, but still works.

Yes, I understand the metaphor as well. As for the reality...not so much.

[t_smitts]

Dukhat wrote:

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True, but probably not right up to TNG, which is what is implied with the Oberth class.

It's vague when they got up to registries in the 5xxxx range, but regardless, Oberths aren't combat vessels. They're science vessels and maybe some other light duties, like ferrying people between starbases (i.e. the Cochrane in "Emmisary"), or testing new technologies (the Pegasus) etc. There's no reason older ones couldn't have been upgraded with new computer systems and warp drive and there's no reason newer ones couldn't have been built with those upgrades.

Dukhat wrote:

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Agreed that ships were built to last. But that wasn't quite what I was arguing. My point was: Why continue to construct outdated ship designs when other, more advanced ship designs were being constructed and built at the same time? One doesn't build Ford Model-Ts and Ford Focuses concurrently.

There are actually two instances of Excelsiors being used in place of more advanced ships: the aforementioned Melbourne, and the Crazy Horse (listed as a Cheyenne class ship in the Encyclopedia, but later shown to be a Hood-stock footage-Excelsior, and the 5XXXX registry was not changed).

The Ford thing's a bit of an exaggeration, but some designs may simply work really well, even after several decades. Starfleet may simply stick with designs when it finds a good one, something that clearly applies to the Excelsior.

(Clearly the Klingons have the same attitude, given the lifespan of the BoP and battle cruiser designs, and these are ships that probably see combat far more often than 24th Century Starfleet did pre-Dominion War)

Dukhat wrote:

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Actually, the original rationale for not building other Starfleet ship models was that the producers didn't want to spend any more money on them if the show ended up getting cancelled after one or two seasons. That's a bit different than saying that they just didn't have the money. They certainly had the money to build things like the space jellyfish ship, the Edo God, the Ferengi Marauder, the Terellian ship, the Atlec ship, the Romulan Warbird, and the Pakled ship. As for the Bozeman, see next quote.

The Connie refit in BoBW wasn't a kitbash - it was the actual feature film model used for the Enterprise's destruction in Star Trek III. And your "hero ship" hypothesis notwithstanding, I'm still not sure why the VFX guys didn't simply use the refit as the Bozeman, if they originally wanted to use a Constitution class ship anyway.

My mistake regarding the Connie, but I suspect they may not have wanted to use the "hero" design from the movies on TNG, just as we never saw a Sovereign on-screen fighting the Dominion.

Pretty much all of the alien ships got reused. The Ferengi were supposed to be the main badguys originally, so giving them a distinctive ship would've been considered a good investment. The Romulans actually were the main badguys. They got a great deal of use out of that Warbird design. (Perhaps a bit too much, if you ask me).

All the other ones got modified and recycled as other alien ships-of-the-week on TNG and early DS9 and Voyager eps.

Dukhat wrote:

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I wouldn't put too much stock in those Conspiracy displays. The diagrams used were just random images that had no connection to the text. Two other diagrams, completely different from the Excelsior, also appear under the Atlantis entry. Plus, the ship's registry on the Starship Deploy Status chart is 32710.

I agree about the "Conspiracy" graphics. These were made during a time when there were no HD screen caps and no one who's name wasn't Okuda was expected to see it.

Besides having some ship names that are just plain silly (USS Heart of Gold? Really?), we had registries as low as NCC-42 and as high as NCC-85183, much higher than the not-yet-built Defiant or Voyager.

There was. ILM was ordered to give up all their CGI models used in First Contact to Paramount for remapping. This included not only the three new designs (minus the Norway, as the CGI mesh was lost), but also Nebula and Miranda low-poly models used in the film, which was why we see them in the DS9 fleet scenes. As to why we also see the Excelsior, that was because they had easy access to Greg Jein's model built for VOY's "Flashback" and could scan it into a CGI model (which is also why we don't see any Ent-B-type refitted Excelsiors as CGI models).

So it was easier to remap all the FC models and scan Jein's Excelsior than to create all new CGI designs. However, this brings up an interesting thought: If DS9 is ever remastered in HD, will all those CGI fleet scenes have to be redone? And if they are redone, will the same ship designs be used?

They'll likely have a bit more time than they did when making episodes, but the question is if Paramount is willing to shell out the $ to update those battle sequences. Personally, I'd be less interested in introducing new designs than I would be in just making those battles BIGGER! More ships! More explosions! More death, destruction, and mayhem! (What a twisted little f__k I am! )

throwback wrote:

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I think the starships were subject to the demands of plot. The Voyager, one of the Federation's newest ships built to specifications acquired from battling the Borg, was consistently bested in combat by less advanced ships in the Delta Quadrant.

I don't have an issue with the older classes being used in the Dominion War. I do have an issue with them being used in the front line. And, I do have issues with Starfleet having to kitbash ships.

Those ones seen in "A Time to Stand" were nasty (except for the Centaur). I don't think about those.

And Starfleet likely sent EVERY ship fit for combat to the front lines, given the scope of the Dominion threat.

Dukhat wrote:

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Sorry, I'm not quite buying that logic. A gun is a gun. You put bullets in it and you shoot. A starship is an advanced piece of engineering allowing its occupant to travel at FTL speeds to other planets, while also containing a multitude of systems such as computers, life-support, matter/antimatter engines, artificial gravity, weapons systems, sensor systems...the list goes on. Your comparison isn't even remotely similar.

Indeed. A ship is a collection of those things. Which means you can probably replace most of the interior systems while still retaining the outer design.

[Dukhat]

t_smitts wrote:

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It's vague when they got up to registries in the 5xxxx range, but regardless, Oberths aren't combat vessels. They're science vessels and maybe some other light duties, like ferrying people between starbases (i.e. the Cochrane in "Emmisary"), or testing new technologies (the Pegasus) etc. There's no reason older ones couldn't have been upgraded with new computer systems and warp drive and there's no reason newer ones couldn't have been built with those upgrades.

The Ford thing's a bit of an exaggeration, but some designs may simply work really well, even after several decades. Starfleet may simply stick with designs when it finds a good one, something that clearly applies to the Excelsior.

Again, I agree that older ships can be upgraded (at least up to a point). And again, that wasn't my point. My original point in the Oberth essay was that the Oberth class is a bad design, and there's absolutely no reason why it should have survived for 80 years of continuous builds when other ships were being designed and built. Why didn't the Constitution class last that long? Why not the Constellation? Why not the Soyuz? They were contemporaries of the Oberth class, and much better designs, yet they were being decommissioned even before the start of the 24th century.

(Clearly the Klingons have the same attitude, given the lifespan of the BoP and battle cruiser designs, and these are ships that probably see combat far more often than 24th Century Starfleet did pre-Dominion War)

Oh, don't even get me started on Klingon designs that never change...right along with their costumes and weapons that never change either

Pretty much all of the alien ships got reused. The Ferengi were supposed to be the main badguys originally, so giving them a distinctive ship would've been considered a good investment. The Romulans actually were the main badguys. They got a great deal of use out of that Warbird design. (Perhaps a bit too much, if you ask me). All the other ones got modified and recycled as other alien ships-of-the-week on TNG and early DS9 and Voyager eps.

And again, newer Starfleet vessels could have been re-used just as much as the Ferengi, Warbird, and alien-of-the-week designs. They chose not to build them because they chose to use the movie models instead, just like they reused the BoP and K'T'inga stock footage for Klingon ships, even though they also were quite out-of-date designs for the time period.

They'll likely have a bit more time than they did when making episodes, but the question is if Paramount is willing to shell out the $ to update those battle sequences. Personally, I'd be less interested in introducing new designs than I would be in just making those battles BIGGER! More ships! More explosions! More death, destruction, and mayhem! (What a twisted little f__k I am! )

If the original CGI VFX are not up to HD standards, then CBS will have to update the effects for a BluRay release. So it's more a question of if they're going to put DS9 on BluRay at all. (Although I'm sure they will; the heavily CGI space scenes were only in the last two seasons.)

And Starfleet likely sent EVERY ship fit for combat to the front lines, given the scope of the Dominion threat.

So tons of out-of-date Excelsiors and Mirandas were fit for combat, but only a relatively few Galaxies, Nebulas, Akiras, Sabers, and Steamrunners were as well? Not to mention ZERO Ambassadors, New Orleans, Freedoms, Niagaras, Challengers, Cheyennes, and the 20-odd conjectural classes?

Indeed. A ship is a collection of those things. Which means you can probably replace most of the interior systems while still retaining the outer design.

Try using the case from a 1980's VCR to install the inner components of a 2013 BluRay player. See how that logic doesn't quite make sense?

[B.J.]

Dukhat wrote:

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Try using the case from a 1980's VCR to install the inner components of a 2013 BluRay player. See how that logic doesn't quite make sense?

It makes perfect sense, but not for the example you use. A couple of good examples would be the B-52 and the Space Shuttle. The B-52 is over 50 years old and is constantly being upgraded and retrofitted to extend its service life. Its purpose hasn't changed at all. As for the Space Shuttle, they basically ripped out the entire flight deck and installed brand-new computers and a glass cockpit, upgrading it over the '70s and '80s tech that was previously there.

Also, I visited the museum ship USS New Jersey (BB-62), which was commissioned in 1943, but was full of 1980s-era technology, so obviously they upgraded that ship quite a bit over the years.

I'm sure you can find other countless examples of aircraft and ships that have been upgraded over time, but you can't say that it's illogical.

[Dukhat]

B.J. wrote:

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It makes perfect sense, but not for the example you use. A couple of good examples would be the B-52 and the Space Shuttle. The B-52 is over 50 years old and is constantly being upgraded and retrofitted to extend its service life. Its purpose hasn't changed at all. As for the Space Shuttle, they basically ripped out the entire flight deck and installed brand-new computers and a glass cockpit, upgrading it over the '70s and '80s tech that was previously there.

Also, I visited the museum ship USS New Jersey (BB-62), which was commissioned in 1943, but was full of 1980s-era technology, so obviously they upgraded that ship quite a bit over the years.

I'm sure you can find other countless examples of aircraft and ships that have been upgraded over time, but you can't say that it's illogical.

I'll concede that point; however, I still don't believe that there was anything special about the Oberth class that allowed it to be continually produced for 80 years.

[Unicron]

I suppose I might be in the opposite myself, as the Oberth hull seems to be one of the few that looks specifically modular and also cheap to produce. I can easily see where it would have led to a number of different variants that could perform specific missions. It's hard to judge timetables for construction and how long an "average" lifespan is. 80 years might be a stretch, but I know of one other franchise (Battetech) where it's not uncommon for some designs to see decades or even centuries of service, in different models and variants.