I think you answered your own question. Fan rationalizations aren't canon. ENT is.
Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard
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I think you answered your own question. Fan rationalizations aren't canon. ENT is.
So we, the fans, just accepted Klingons between TMP and ENT? If so then I see no issue with the ships either.
Well, it's all fake anyway, so anyone is welcome to interpret what they see however they want. As I said, I choose to believe those ships are new late 24th century vessels that just happen to look like mid-23rd century vessels from a different show/universe/timeline/whatever.
Sure. Same here.
I see no reason why shuttlecraft from the 2250s can't still be in civilian service in the 2390s. It's not like carriages looked that much different from the 1500s to the 1700s.
I mean, Picard was literally trying to assemble the largest evacuation fleet in history, so why not use any ship that's still spaceworthy, even if it's a 140 years old?
I would have loved to see Defiant-class ships in the fleet, yeah.
You're comparing carriages to spacecraft?
That's not what he was doing. He was overseeing the construction of a brand-new fleet of ships for the evacuation. He wasn't assembling a fleet made up of older ships. And once that new fleet was destroyed, Starfleet wouldn't even allow him to use older ships with reserve crews. So there was no point in time where old ships would have been rounded up for this.
Do we have a registry number established yet for the USS Zheng He?
(Looking at my copy of @Christopher 's novel Ex Machina here...which counts one of that ship's namesakes among the behind-the-scenes casualties of the TOS era. Page 13.)
(Looking at my copy of @Christopher 's novel Ex Machina here...which counts one of that ship's namesakes among the behind-the-scenes casualties of the TOS era. Page 13.)
Yes. Specifically, I'm comparing shuttlecraft to carriages. More broadly, I'm suggesting that when a given type of technology has matured, it may well become static for long periods of time. If shuttlecraft designed in 2255 get the job of transport from one side of an M-class planet to another done with sufficient efficiency and timeliness, I see no reason to imagine that the design "must" change or even that the particular craft "must" not be in service decades later if they receive sufficient maintenance.
I mean, hell, the United States Air Force is planning to use the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress design into the 2050s -- literally a century after it was first introduced!
Where was it established that he was not doing both?
How does that preclude him from having been also rounding up older ships? The Federation abandoned the evacuation effort for political reasons, not material ones.
When Picard berated Clancy for Starfleet abandoning the Romulans after the evacuation fleet was destroyed, she specifically mentioned Starfleet not having enough ships to continue the effort.
See above.
None of the ships had names or registry numbers, and no one mentioned any in dialogue. Chronologically, registry numbers should be in the 90000's or 100000's by now, so I would hope that Starfleet has come up with a new scheme by now, like NCV-25 (a nod to the 29th century Relativity's NCV registry.)
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A line which I interpret to be her proclaimed assessment of Starfleet's capabilities after the Mars Attack. Nothing about that precludes the possibility that Picard was both building new ships and refitting old ones before the Mars Attack led to the fleet's destruction.
(And, I'm sorry, but to say you're not gonna rescue anyone because you don't have enough ships to rescue everyone, means that you're not actually abandoning the effort for material reasons. You're abandoning it for political reasons.)
The entire tone of the show is that Picard feels remorse that his efforts to save the Romulans came to nought after that fleet was destroyed, and that he wished he could have done more to save them, while at the same time being bitter and resentful at Starfleet and the Federation that they simply stopped the effort, political reasons or not. Whether there were older ships mixed with the new doesn't matter: they were all destroyed.
And to play devil's advocate: Okay, let's say he did find some extra ships to continue the evacuation effort after the first fleet's destruction. This whole line of thought started because of those two 130 year old DSC ship designs seen in CoM. If Picard did find some ships, I find it hard to believe that he couldn't have found some Mirandas or Excelsiors before he ever found Magees and Zimmermans.
Quite frankly, if the VFX people from CoM had had more time to show those Wallenberg transports in orbit of Mars instead of being forced to use DSC production assets, we wouldn't even be debating this.
Er, no. If you don't have enough ships, you don't have enough ships. There's nothing political about it. And it's not like Picard corrected her about that fact.
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The "fact" was that the ships couldn't be allocated. Allocation would be a political decision all right: just ask the Klingons pretty please not to invade while these 4,000 ships go save a few million Romulans, say.
But it's not the loss/shortage of ships, it's the loss/shortage of production capacity that has all these grave implications.
As for Magees and Zimmermans, well, a logistical effort would have more use for tugs and transports than for combat vessels. Although which ones would be more likely to survive a century of hard labor is unknown. As is which ones would see more production to compensate for wear-and-tear or combat losses. I could easily see a tug remaining in production for several centuries, though, there being no evolution in her "threat environment"; a combat starship might always find peers to combat in a wide galaxy, even if her tech was centuries old, but the organization operating her would probably still be better off introducing new ships, even for handling the Primitiveites and the Cavemanians.
Timo Saloniemi
But it's not the loss/shortage of ships, it's the loss/shortage of production capacity that has all these grave implications.
As for Magees and Zimmermans, well, a logistical effort would have more use for tugs and transports than for combat vessels. Although which ones would be more likely to survive a century of hard labor is unknown. As is which ones would see more production to compensate for wear-and-tear or combat losses. I could easily see a tug remaining in production for several centuries, though, there being no evolution in her "threat environment"; a combat starship might always find peers to combat in a wide galaxy, even if her tech was centuries old, but the organization operating her would probably still be better off introducing new ships, even for handling the Primitiveites and the Cavemanians.
Timo Saloniemi
That's not what Clancy said. She literally said that Starfleet did not have enough ships.
.... yes, and all that is besides the point that I am making, which is that the presence of 23rd Century ships from DIS among the fleet being assembled at Utopia Planitia in "Children of Mars" is not a continuity problem if one assumes that Picard was both constructing new ships and retrofitting old ones to join the Rescue Fleet.
... again, you seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding my point. My point was that there's no reason to think that the rescue fleet Picard was assembling before the Mars Attack could not have included 23rd Century ships if they were still spaceworthy. I was not claiming that those ships must have been part of a hypothetical fleet he would have been trying to construct after the Mars Attack, because canonically no such attempt was ever made: Starfleet refused and Picard was forced to "retire."
Well, fucking duh. I'm talking about why the existence of the DIS ships in the rescue fleet is not a major implausibility, but if they hadn't included them the idea wouldn't have come up.
The distribution of resources is always a political act.
Carriages are not a good analogy. The history of ship building before the Industrial Revolution might be a better analogy. Designs lasted for centuries. What changed was the way the ships were built. The Industrial Revolution saw the introduction of ships made of metal, being propelled by propellers. It seems though that ship design has slowed down since, with advances being made in how the ships operate and not so much in how they look.
We can always find sub-segments that best serve our analogies: ship shape is changing a lot in those types of ship where the shape is actually a major design criterion (a cruise liner needs to look both good and distinct), say.
Starship design is something we have to approach empirically, as we are not entitled to the in-universe engineering rationales and the like. We can see that there is no single preferred design within Starfleet, but that there is a general configuration or two that are adhered to - whilst many competing cultures make no use of such configurations and go their own different ways. So we can't really get a grip of any limiting factor or driving factor, since "anything goes" is an empirical fact...
Can we nevertheless divine something from this material, as regards whether it's a good idea to keep on producing a given design, or better to hop onto something all-new? Well, we see "recurring" and downright "retro" often enough, with specific elements or general configurations repeating time and again. We don't know why boom hulls with turbocharger caps on top are good for starships built centuries apart but not for ships in between; we might decide this feature is only useful in special cases and speaks against protracted production of such a type. But while we likewise don't know why ships like NCC-1701 and ships like NCC-1864 both get successors and predecessors in general configuration, we can decide both configurations are good for all eras and all mission profiles, since Starfleet sure seems to think so...
But as said, anything goes. And we can thus find analogies in surprising places, and apply them until something gives. Say, carriages: side-by-side draught animals as an analogy to nacelle pairs, ship propeller pairs, jet engine pairs? Sure works: side-by-side gives steering authority and unobstructed "thrust lines"!
Timo Saloniemi
Starship design is something we have to approach empirically, as we are not entitled to the in-universe engineering rationales and the like. We can see that there is no single preferred design within Starfleet, but that there is a general configuration or two that are adhered to - whilst many competing cultures make no use of such configurations and go their own different ways. So we can't really get a grip of any limiting factor or driving factor, since "anything goes" is an empirical fact...
Can we nevertheless divine something from this material, as regards whether it's a good idea to keep on producing a given design, or better to hop onto something all-new? Well, we see "recurring" and downright "retro" often enough, with specific elements or general configurations repeating time and again. We don't know why boom hulls with turbocharger caps on top are good for starships built centuries apart but not for ships in between; we might decide this feature is only useful in special cases and speaks against protracted production of such a type. But while we likewise don't know why ships like NCC-1701 and ships like NCC-1864 both get successors and predecessors in general configuration, we can decide both configurations are good for all eras and all mission profiles, since Starfleet sure seems to think so...
But as said, anything goes. And we can thus find analogies in surprising places, and apply them until something gives. Say, carriages: side-by-side draught animals as an analogy to nacelle pairs, ship propeller pairs, jet engine pairs? Sure works: side-by-side gives steering authority and unobstructed "thrust lines"!
Timo Saloniemi
In the prequel novel, it says Starfleet were refitting existing ships as well as building new ones so I don't see any problem.
