The age of Starships, how old can they get?

Hi all!
Reading through some sites, came across a reply that had the line in ST3 about the Enterprise being 20 years old. Now we know they were going off the 2265-2285 time that they thought was the ships time, but now its been established that the Enterprise was commissioned in 2245, so by 2285 it was actually 40 years of age, and by 2293 when the Ent-A was decommissioned, and if the previously named "Yorktown" was originally built around 2245 would make it almost 50 when it was decommissioned. ( That's to take as fact that the Enterprise A was a recommissioned Connie class. Maybe the "Yorktown" was being decommissioned after the Whale probe incident, but decided to to a refit and rename it Enterprise and given to Kirk for saving there but.)

So that brought a question to mind of the Age of ships, and when they could be decommissioned. Now if we go by our own experience of the 20th century ships and planes, and when they came in and were let go, we have some basic timeline of how it might go.

In my mind, In the early, founding era of the Federation that there would be a plethora of new ship classes as new technology came to fruition. Lets take for example the early jet age of planes after WW2. We have a plethora of designs coming off the drawing board, some designs last for awhile, but some may have less than a decade in service from being outdated and replaced, or just not working out, or there reason for existing goes away.

Now Early starships would have new technology's being integrated and tested, Andorian shields, vulcan warp cores, Telerite grav plating, etc. Some of the tech can be integrated into older designs, or put in as a different new build "Block" of existing designs, like adding a warp 6 engine to an intrepid type that is a new build. Now as technology is being integrated and refined for federation ships, Ships lives would be short, maybe 10, 20 years because it wouldn't be worth it to do a major refit, and only kept in service that long to pad the number of ships in the fleet incase of an emergency.

Lets take a look at the Daedalus, the last ship was decommissioned in 2196 ( give or take) so lets say the class participated in the Romulan war of 2156-61, that would make early builds 40 years old, though those pre war ships were probably decommissioned after the war, and new builds from 2161 on were better ships with new technology, so lets say it was built till 2166, that would make it 30 when taken out of service. That was the age of the Connie when it was uprated to the Tmp version, so it was probably not worth doing a major refit, and that new designs were bigger, better, faster, etc.

now by 2245, a ship going 50 years would be a good run, and by 2285 when the excelsior class came in, a 80+ run would be an excellent run as the ship would be more modular and easier to upgrade than previous classes.

So thoughts on ships and there potential ages? when they would be decommissioned, refit, why?

 

I know that it's not really canon, but the autobiography of Jean Luc Picard discusses that topic. In the book, Picard is put on trial because he (accidentally) destroyed his ship, which was pretty old. The prosecutor tried to convince the court that he had been negligent by not informing command about the age of his ship, which was 63.7 years. This was considered very very old. The average ship life, according to the book, was 16.2 years.

 

Depends on the ship's purpose.

Given that many technologies didn't really change much between the 22nd and 24th centuries (warp drive, impulse drive, phase cannons/phasers, photonic/photon torpedoes), an old ship could still serve its purpose. And remember, they're IN SPACE, so they're not degraded by the elements. As Geordi said, Scotty's 75-year-old vessel could easily have remained in service in the TNG timeline.

 

Read some books, in some of them, some ships can last for century's .. But the species is thousands of years old, with the design not changing for centurys. But in the same book it mentions near constant maintenance from the radiation, deep cold, very hot eroding the hull. A ships tour of duty is related to how long maintenance can keep her going without a base refit. Which isn't long, maybe a year.

 

The emergence of new technology would also because factor. With Warp 7 engines being a thing, ships with Warp 5 engines might wind up in mothballs.

 

Sticking a new warp engine onto an old space frame might not be feasible. Ex. try to install a Excelsior-type engine (and supporting power source) onto the Enterprise-A. Might not work out to well.

 

I've always subscribed to the idea that how long a starship lasts depends on how hard of a life she had. Ships named Enterprise--even those that somehow lived long enough to be decommissioned--likely have a shorter lifespan than most vessels, IMO. Frequent space battles, exposures to dangerous space phenomena, and hard rides at high warp can probably shorten the lifespan of a ship considerably.

You can probably have two vessels from the same class, launched at almost the same time, but one could be in service for a century while the other (which suffered more wear & tear) could be ready for the breaker after only twenty-five years...

 

Maybe the size of a reactor limits the power it produces. After so long, miniaturization would hit a wall, and couldn't get smaller,

so then lets say a 5 meter reactor produces 5MW and that's the limit, you put that reactor in a ship, and it does well, but after 25 years new technologies come to pass and the new stuff is more energy intensive. ( this happened on the Los Angeles / Ohio class subs, not enough power produced to run everything)
They can't install a larger reactor, and can't squeeze out more power from the current, so it's taken off front line, maybe decommissioned due to obsolescence.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress
First Flight was 1952
They're expected to serve till the 2050's.

That's nearly 100 years of service on the same core Air Frame with upgrades.

And that's on Earth, in Atmosphere, with Environmental Effects.

 

I think it has more to do with the amount of time it takes to disassemble and strip a StarShip down to it's bulk-heads, reassemble it with new parts, and do a shake-down cruise to validate everything.

Even with Automation, it took several weeks for Discovery-A to come into service.

 

If it costs more to maintain a ship versis replace it,that would be one reason. How hard an existanc woul be another.

 

^^^
Yep. Even a "post-scarcity" society, there still comes the issue of practicality. As the Galaxy- and Sovereign-classes get older, it may become more efficient for Starfleet in the future to build newer designs than hold on to the infrastructure for those aging designs. That becomes especially true if the newer designs are smaller, easier, and less resource-expensive to build.

 

It may also depend on how easily a class can be reassigned to other duties. Mirandas have been seen as survey ships, transports, patrol ships, etc. Connies were really only intended as explorers and cruisers, which they are now heavily outclassed at and wouldn't really serve well as anything else.

The Miranda also has a more compact design, which may increase the ease of upgrading the warp engines and shields (smaller field profile).

 

If we go by established on-screen canon... over 80 years (at least) for 23rd century ships.
For 24th century ships... maybe 200 years.

We know that for the first 100 years of Starfleet's existence, 22nd to 23rd century ships were decommissioned relatively fast.
The NX-01 was mothballed (according to last episode of ENT) after 10 years of service.

I suspect that as time went on (after UFP was established), the operational lifespan of ships grew.

Up until the late 23rd and mid 24th century, ships were 'expected' to last a few decades with upgrades.

It wasn't until the Miranda and Excelsior class ships came onto the scene we started seeing SF ships lasting about 100 years.
However, this was probably in part due to more advanced AI and more advanced replication technology (and I suspect that older designs like the Constitution were largely decommissioned BEFORE those technologies became available).

The USS Lakota was upgraded before the Dominion War to match and surpass the USS Defiant in almost every way (matched it in Tactical, and probably surpassed it in engine capability given O'Brien's worry about what they could have done to the Lakota's engines).

We've seen a Prometheus class in an alternate timeline where the UFP was fighting the Sphere Builders in the 26th century... and there's no reason to think the prime timeline would be any different (assuming any Prometheus class ships survived that long).

Then there's the USS Discovery.
It predates both Miranda and Excelsior class ships, but it travelled through time 931 years into the future and got upgraded with modern 32nd century technology.
As we've seen, programmable matter can modify molecular structure of existing matter on the go, and can be used to replicate objects much like replicators do (although this version does it without converting energy into matter - its more like a vastly improved process of matter to matter conversion - 24th century replicators convert actual energy into matter).
But USS Discovery was practically brand new (only about a year or two into active service) before it went to 32nd century.

I suspect that any SF ship can survive for hundreds of years with large upgrades in between them. Adaptive algorithms and AI can easily use replicators (in the 24th century) to restructure the insides of the ship, or adapt modern tech to integrate into older designs (modern tech can be made with harvested old technology which would be first recycled into energy, and then that pattern would be reshaped into modern tech and replicated back) - heck, I wouldn't be surprised if older ships even get more room on the inside as a result.

The early to mid 24th century was potentially a 'focal point' for SF upgradeability programs which allowed radical life extension of older ships.

Though I suspect that after sufficient amount of time has passed, existing/old hull design would be 'modified' pretty much like how Disco was modified as well.

We've also seen Owoshekun refer to an unknown 32nd century ship as 'is that a new Constitution?'. While I agree that she was in all likelihood merely trying to 'connect the dots' with what she already knew, its possible that it WAS indeed a Constitution class starship (albeit of 32nd century make).
Its also possible Starfleet still has Miranda's, Prometheus and Galaxy class ships which underwent radical design alterations over hundreds of years (depending on how long they were in service).
It is also doable that Starfleet may have retired those classes for a while, then went back to them hundreds of years later and designed 'contemporary' classes of ships with the same designations as their predecessors with some design similarities (much like the Voyager-J - albeit here, it was alluded that it could be the original 24th century USS Voyager - Intrepid class which went through some design modifications and overall upgrades over 800 odd years).

I worked it out that Starfleet may be producing a new class of ships for the first 5-10 years or so (and they'd produce anywhere between hundreds to over a thousand of those classes of ships in that time frame - each UFP member world has hundreds [or more] of drydocks and ship-building facilities in their home systems, so SF can easily allocate 10 per each solar system to make a given class of ship - spread that out through at least 150 member planets, and voila, you have 1500 ships of a given class built throughout UFP).

After that point (first 5-10 years or so), no more new ships of that class will be made (unless its necessary), and those that survive in active service will be provided with needed upgrades internally and externally to extend their lifespans and keep them on par with modern ships of the eras they inhabit.

In that sense, a Galaxy and Sovereign class are easily still in active service by ST Picard time, and with upgrades on the same level (tactically, egnine, etc.-wise) as the Sheng He that Riker commanded (I see no real reason why they wouldn't be able to do that).

At any rate, ships that exist in mid/late 24th century can probably be kept in service indefinitely with upgrades if SF allows them... but its possible they retire designs after about 200 years of service... and if they want to keep it, then they would need to alter its design (which would be a piece of cake for their computers and replicators - not to mention programmable matter once it enters the scene).

 

Enterprise NX-01 was decommissioned after 10 years, though it could last for 120 with the right refits.

Daedalus class were late 2150s to mid-2190s. And if you follow the books, then have been around since the early 2140s.

USS Enterprise NCC-1701 lasted 40 years, and considered old after 20 years of service. The Constitution design was brought out during the Battle of Wolf 359 and the Dominion War. The Constitution design was also in use in the mirror universe for over a century.

Miranda class and Excelsior class are 80+ years old, and received refits to last that long.

The anti-time future in AGT depicted a Galaxy class vessel still in service after 30 years and with a refit.

The Defiant was retired by 2422 – 50 years after coming into service – in the timeline of “The Visitor”.

Nova class, Prometheus class, and Dauntless class vessels were introduced in the lasted 24th century and were still being used in the 26th century.

Then there are Klingon vessels, where the D7/K’tinga design is reused for 200 years from ENT to VOY, and Vorcha are used from TNG to 26th century. And the Romulan BoPs that were still functional in 2399 over 130 years after first being seen in TOS.

It depends on the ships and its structural integrity. But Starfleet aims for 10-50 years on average, but have no problem with a vessel being in service past 80 years. While the Klingon and Romulan vessels are more durable and can last over 130 years.

 

It would be interesting to learn why Starfleet designs new ships in the first place. What is to be achieved by varying certain shapes? Especially when the previous ones are not immediately banned from use as inadequate or dangerous. All sizes would apparently be available in the 23rd century at the latest, too. Why not go the Larry Niven route, with exactly four ship hulls available in the market since time immemorial, and with the option of fitting new doodads within as the customer pleases (possibly ten thousand times over per hull, since those hulls have reached durability standards close to perfection)?

In our reality, ships great and small may be scrapped within a year of their launch when the need for them goes away, even when recycling the scraps yields little: it would be far more costly to keep operating a useless ship, and possibly even more costly to first make her useful again and then keep on operating her. Trek is bound to have some of that, too: Defiants might become useless they day after "What You Leave Behind..", and best abandoned en masse. We haven't seen whether scrapping is worth the while in the Trek universe yet. We see mothballed ships, and we then see such ships back in action, possibly after 50-100 years, but we don't get a good picture of the reasons of mothballing or the degree of effort required in reactivating.

All sorts of combinations of reasons and possibilities are possible, then, and we can pick and choose some real-world ones if we want to. Yet the "stealing a museum piece" shtick lends support to the idea that starships in general are not only capable of serving for a century or several, but also are capable of being reactivated and operated with relative ease "out of time". In comparison, reactivating a museum piece today would require massive resources and manpower: possibly an operating crew several times larger than originally intended, due to wear and tear and to loss of skill, plus a reactivating effort vastly greater than what was needed to build the ship in the first place, plus reactivating a whole industry or fifty to provide for the ship. In the foreseeable future, that hill is only gonna grow higher and steeper, and the costs of reactivating HMS Victory fifty years from now might well be hundredfold to what it would take today. But then we get to the era of replicators...

Timo Saloniemi

 

I've long assumed that by the end of the movie era ships were being considered to be pretty modular, at least internally. If you've got a successful space frame design, it can and will be upgraded in line with new technology and requrements. The Excelsior being a prime example.

Eventually the continual upgrading will fail to accommodate the very latest developments - slipstream appears to require some designed in physical characteristics, but the older designs are still in great demand, despite not being state of the art long distance or front line ships.

Every single light year that exploration goes, every treaty with others or expansion of the federation will bring unimaginably vast areas of space within reach and a commensurate increase in the amount of run of the mill ships required for day to day travel, for supply, for trade, for security and policing, for maintaining contact.

I'd think sturdy and serviceable ships would be a valued commodity, not something to be casually discarded.