That's not what we're talking about. Dukhat thinks the California class registries are all easter eggs, but there's no evidence of this. But he is right about the range of numbers not making sense USS Cerritos (NCC-75567) USS Merced (NCC-87075) USS Rubidoux (NCC-12109) USS Solvang (NCC-12101) Mike said that the California class has been around for a long time, so the ones with lower registries could just be old ships that have been refitted over the years. Except the Franklin pre-dates the NX-01 so no.
No. The Solvang was a brand-new ship as of 2380, with a registry of 12101 (which is even lower than the previously destroyed Rubidoux 12109, which also makes no sense chronologically.) And there has been a precedent lately for ship registries being based on real people's birthdays. So that's evidence for the 'easter eggs' I'm referring to.
Small ship doesn't necessarily mean science vessel. Multitude of ships in service of varying sizes (practically all of them) perform science duties at any given point. Look at USS Discovery (Crossfield class). In the 23rd century, that ship was huge (bigger than the 1701) and was considered to be a dedicated science vessel at the time (plus it seemed to have had decent armaments too). Science vessels can still be decently armed. I mean, given the multitude of dangers in space, you never know when you might need defensive/offensive systems in larger quantities. As such, I don't think sensor arrays and dedicated labs would be occupying that much space to prevent installation of sizeable armaments (should they be needed). The Nova class in particular has a decent amount of phaser strips which seemingly cover the entire ship well, but I'm not sure about its compliment of torpedoes (those are small and can presumably be packed in huge quantities even on small ships - the USS Defiant was at one point left with about 40-ish torpedoes after expending some of them in previous battle - granted, that was a dedicated 'warship', but my point is that if the Defiant can hold a stupid number of torpedoes, there is no reason to think the Nova [which has a size advantage] couldn't pack a similar number. But, in the 24th century, it was implied that ships are modified according to their mission profiles (and I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case for the 23rd century too). Take the Nebula class with its different pods for example. One pod contains more torpedo tubes (and possibly torpedoes themselves), the other pod contains a massive sensor module. The Equinox (Nova class) was predominantly used as a planetary survey ship in the 2370-ies and it gave Voyager a somewhat hard time in combat... and then in the alternate future from which Admiral Janeway came in 'Endgame', the Nova class (as commanded by captain Kim) was modified and managed to subdue 2 Klingon Negh'Var class ships fairly quickly. So, I don't think science class ships are necessarily of a certain size. Even a medical ship from the final TNG episode (the USS Pasteur) was of fairly decent size and had pretty tough shielding.
Medical Ships are just flying Hospital Complexes, given how large some of the biggest & best Medical facilities are, you probably expect a Medical Ship to be pretty large in general. Especially a Medical Ship that is designed to cover all aspects of Medicine. You need ALOT of room for everything. Science ships will obviously vary based on their mission profile and what they're expected to do and how deep of a assignment / research they're expected to do. Everybody's favorite Oberth Class Planetary Survey vessel is optimally designed to map Planetary Bodies and Stellar phenomena. The standard Pontoon sensors was optimally designed for mapping large Spheriod objects by making multiple passes around the planet.
Regardless, it was a dedicated hospital ship (with really large size) and pretty powerful shielding to have been able to hold out against Negh'Var class ships. Not necessarily. As time goes on, technology advances and occupies less space. Same amount of space can be used for multiple other things of same nature. There is no reason a dedicated hospital ship couldn't also be decently armed on top of everything in say the late 24th century - then again, that class of ships probably wasn't meant to go unacompanied into potential enemy territory, so its possible SF just never installed weapons on it even though it could have. It wouldn't be the first time SF messed up something that the crew later on had to fix themselves. The USS Defiant for example had many issues, the primary one being with maintaining high warp velocities because its SIF's couldn't bear the brunt of it - but otherwise, O'Brien managed to 'patch up' other things more or less. Even with energy transfer from weapons into SIF, it resulted in a 'bump up' at best at maintaining higher speeds. Sounds to me like the Defiant class should have prompted SF to also design a more powerful/advanced SIF generator (which it may have well done too, we just never got to see that as it could have happened near the end of/after the Dominion war). To my recollection, we have only seen the Oberth performing this duty in ST II, but we have no conclusive evidence that's the only thing it was designed for. In regards to science ships variations... I agree it will depend on their mission profiles... but its also a bit of a waste of time to expend resources refitting a ship every time its mission changes. Sure, in the 24th century, this could conceivably be done on the fly without dedicated facilities... in the 23rd though, a bit more difficult (but not impossible to do on the fly). Although, I am reminded of the fact we had the NX-01 enineers equipping the ship with two phase canons in 2 days vs 2 weeks that were said would take the team back at Earth. Though to be fair, the NX-01 crew had to bypass a lot of things in order to get things done that way... and even found ways to handle the recoil better than expected. In short, it worked pretty well, and I'm betting this may have also paved the way towards SF perhaps learning something in the process and integrated in its ship construction moving forward (to at least cut the time needed to finish and launch a ship). Was it ever mentioned canonically what kind of sensors Oberth used though? Planetary surveys can probably be done with a single pass around the planet... but the Genesis planet was an oddity given it was created out of Nebula matter.
One could imagine that it takes longer to do construction/repairs at a SF Facility because they wouldn't be able to cut corners and improvise on the fly. They also would have multiple checks that have to be run and approved.
Real time simulations and tests that can be carried out by the computer by just uttering a few words can reduce those time frames to virtually nothing. Its ridiculous SF doesn't implement things like that. Sure, things would be more thorough in a space dock, but not using resources that are widely available is just plain stupid. Besides, its not cutting corners if the method of implementation demonstrated it worked and continues to work reliably (which it did). And, SF should have prepared contingencies for installing new systems in smallest possible time frames while on the fly where dangers could be near. Granted, this was at the time of NX-01 which was the first real deep space ship from SF, but SF had to know of the potential hypothetical dangers.
I wouldn't mind one bit if LD arranged with Sony/Columbia to put Adam Quark's garbage scow into a shot. Then again, as far as allusions to Quark (the one-season wonder, not the Ferengi bartender) are concerned, I also wouldn't mind seeing a Vegeton couple pollinating in the background ("Bee bee bee bee bee bee bee bee BEE BEE BEE! BEE! BEE!").
I would have loved to have seen included the image of the Federation starships at Pakled Planet. It was wonderful to see the Olympic-class starship again. At the theme park, we see the Defiant-class and Constitution-class as balloons. New ships included: * Phoenix replica (ship number 5) * Pinnacles (named after the national park in California) * Yosemite II (a replacement for the destroyed Yosemite) * Contra Costa (named after the county in California)
Was this the first time they showed them actually using one of those small, saucer based shuttlebays?