The 2340s - 2350s are going to see a mass activation of Excelsior class ships with reserve hulls being fitted out en masse. (This is partly to explain the high registry number Excelsiors.) It'll help equalize the numbers a bit, I think, but it's also worth noting that a good chunk of the Mirandas on the list aren't the standard roll bar type, but "support cruiser" variants that are as suggested, configured to serve as economic aid ships of one stripe or another. (And thus wouldn't be seen during the war)
Which Antares variants? Isn't that one of the most overused names in Star Trek? Are we referring to the civilian freighters like Kassidy Yates's ship?
These are just the bees' knees. I find this whole project of yours wildly enjoyable and helpful in conceptualizing my fanfic. Keep it up!
Yes it is, sorry I was so vague. I refer to these, briefly seen as Miranda variants in background shots on DS9. There was recently a thread that revealed that there's an AWACS-type pod atop her, made from two Excelsior kit stands, as seen here.
Thanks for the clarification. Yes, I'll be working that into the descriptions. The next chapters are going to be a bit longer winded, simply because I'm trying to figure out how the procurements for the newer ship classes will work out.
Perhaps the most long-winded one yet. Chapter 6: Starfleet of the 2350s and a side-bar describing Starfleet classification schemes.
I like it! I particularly like how you've used political changes to explain the Ambassador's limited runs, and I think the "old school" thinking of Landau and company also helps explain why Excelsior and her friends seem so favored. I also quite enjoy the way you have the classification system being reorganized. Using the "shrink" of practical warp technology as the catalyst seems quite right. One thing I questioned was Exploration Directive 902.3. I know this is from the TNG TM, but would you elaborate about the limit you mentioned? I don't recall hearing of it before.
I'm probably going to change that when I get to editing this section again, but 902.3 would have (chronologically) been issued during the later part of the Landau Admiralty. Now there is some precedent for even conservative minded administrations to build enormous ships (HMS Forte of 1804), but I may have it that Directive 902 was the initial order, and 902.3 was a revision that allowed for the hugeness of the Galaxy.
Cool. I like that notion. Do you have any feelings as to why later administrations didn't turn back to Ambassador? Was it simply that by the time they would be able to consider it, the Galaxy would be almost fully designed, so it makes more sense to wait for those?
From the way I have the timeline going, Ambassador production basically stalls out at the end of 2340, with Laundu and co. basically scuttling the programme. By the time Mehdi takes over in 2345, production's been paused for 5 years, and he's got the huge mess of ships piling up in dockyards and surplus depots to deal with. Given that Starfleet dockyards (as opposed to civilian yards) are the ones used for refitting/modernization, having that huge backlog precluded starting new hulls in the only yards that could build Ambassador class ships. Basically it made more sense from a fleet strength pov to build/fit out new Excelsiors and Mirandas en masse in civilian yards while the precious Starfleet yards focused on keeping up with refits and modernizations of ships deemed too important to retire. That plus the fact that the first generation of Ambassador-class ships would be coming in for refits/rebuilds (pretty extensive ones if the changes between Enterprise and Yamaguchi are any indication), the facilities weren't there until well into the early 2350s. At that point Nebula production was only a couple years off and Galaxy would be ready in less than 5 years anyway, so there wasn't any real point in tying up the dockyard slips with building new Ambassador-class ships.
It's late yet, but it's occurred to me that the development and proliferation of small warp-capable support craft like the runabouts would make sense if it coincided with the Ambassador class rollout. That would explain the appearance of starships with the saucer-mounted shuttlebay behind the bridge: that "main shuttlebay" could very well be designed SPECIFICALLY for those larger runabout types and leave the short-range craft to use the smaller bays further below decks.
One of the assumptions was that proliferation of small "starship" qualified warp capable craft (as opposed to smallcraft) was that ships were finally large enough to actually carry a fair number of them, the growing size of Starbase facilities, and the fact that shipboard industrial replicators might allow starships to modify/customize them to their own satisfaction. We know that Sisko referred to runabouts as "starships" at several points. So maybe they can in fact go at at least warp 5 (old scale) and have dilithium reactors. I'm partly basing that by the by, on the fact that NX-01 being a warp 5 ship and being a "starship" seemed to be a big deal. Perhaps dilithium reactors went out of style for a while after NX-01 and were only revived around the time of TOS.
Delta Flyer et al AFAIK, Sisko only referred to them as "vessels" although I initially thought the same thing until recently. I'm agree that the use of Yachts/runabouts/Aerowings on exploration vessels is both the combination of compact warp drives becoming more feasible and a starship's greater ability to support one. OTOH, part of me thinks that similar types of vessels must have existed before they were attached to starships; the Vulcan shuttles of the 22nd century seem quite a bit bigger and more capable than anything Earth Starfleet had, as was the survey ship from "Carbon Creek." There's also Goroth's shuttlepod in "Bounty" which appears to be equipped with a photon torpedo launcher and a tractor beam. I think the CONCEPT of such vessels was always around, but it wasn't until recently that anyone thought to attach them to starships on a regular basis. What makes you think dilithium even went out of style?
Yeah, the Delta Flyer and the whole infinite shuttles on Voyager (not to mention the silly need for all shuttlecraft to look like their mothership, ranging from the Chaffee on Defiant to Picard's in Insurrection made me wonder how the actual logistics actually works) On the runabouts, I did go back and check the transcript. You're right, it does simply say "runabout class vessels" which makes me think he meant "runabout class" as in being a size class, rather than the ship class name like people assume that dialogue to mean. It does seem like moderately sized ships aren't super rare, but I'm also curious if they were actually as capable as they're made out to be or as small. Goroth's ship is actually decently big compared to an Archer sized escape pod...say about ~35-50m in length and substantially beamier than a 24th century runabout, and certainly large enough to have a payload volume in the ~1500 m³ range. The Captain's Yachts are all around that size, which means maybe they weren't rare even in Starfleet use as executive transports of one sort or another. What seems to be the difference with something like a Danube is that they're in a size range that's right in between those 1500 m³ range light vessels and the much smaller sub-100 m³ auxiliaries, which make them roughly analogous to advice boats, pilot boats and similar craft which were bigger than ship's boats but smaller than say a cutter or schooner. Except what's interesting is that these sub-1000m³ designs are capable of being used in ways that the previous 1500m³ designs used to fill. It's a good combination of the mother craft increasing in size and the vessels increasing in capability vs. volume. Could you give me your thoughts on the classification scheme itself? Tried to go with as much a combination of payload types and endurance as much as anything else. Some of the classifications were required out of dialogue. For example TNG's Conspiracy established there were still heavy cruisers and frigates.
My impression is that the system works, but again seems to fall into the trap of classifying by size. The mission payloads of different craft will tend to determine size a lot more than the reverse, and this should be reflected by what the ship is meant to do. The Intrepid class, for example, could fit various definitions depending on what the ship actually has aboard it; it could just as easily be a cruiser, a frigate, an explorer or a surveyor. There's a bit of an arbitrary cutoff there that seems to assume something about a size difference between two ships that might otherwise have the exact same payload. So I'm thinking the classification should go a bit more "under the hood" as such. The "scout" class, for example, would be a vessel that carries powerful sensors as well as probes and/or shuttles but doesn't carry a lot of laboratory equipment or analytical hardware; it's more about gathering information than processing it. Likewise, it's tempting to think of cruisers as being "multirole" platforms, but this is not necessarily the case; it could very well be that "cruiser" tends to be a ship with a large deflector dish and enough fabrication equipment to replace its food and/or equipment in the field. Frigates would differ from cruisers in that they lack the big deflector dish and the fabrication equipment and instead pile on the firepower. In the end, it's going to come down to trying to examine some of the nuances in how Starfleet technology actually works, and that will require some educated guesses (mainly because Star Trek is wildly inconsistent in this regard). I volunteer the possibility that a starship's "main deflector dish", in addition to functioning as a gigantic sonic screwdriver (e.g. a device that can do just about anything if you need it to) is probably indispensible for long-range subspace communications and scanning. A ship that lacks such a dish (or is in a position where it cannot use it for some reason) would have a time delay of several days or weeks between transmission and receipt of his message; those same ships would have very limited FTL sensing ability and would have to move much closer to an object to scan them at all. The big dish makes a lot of things on the ship possible, but it is also probably the most expensive component on the entire ship, which would explain why not all starships even have them and only very special ones have a small "secondary" dish to back it up.
I guess I was a bit unclear that size in itself doesn't have any bearing on the classification. It's simply the combination of payload that defines a classification. That combination of payload naturally includes things like supplies and fuel hence the inclusion of mission endurance in the classifications. An Intrepid could easily be configured as a frigate rather than a light explorer by swapping out her enhanced sensor suite for a standard one and upgrading her weapons capabilities at the expense of mission endurance.