What ships SHOULD they have used in the Dominion War?

[Tarek71]

The Relaint was a redress of the Enterprise bridge. I don't know about the battle bridge; it is the one used for the Lantree, but it's a much smaller set. Anyone know?

You were wrong in universe AND out. That is the same set. Enterprise and Reliant bridge was made into the battle bridge which became the Lantree bridge. It might seem like a smaller space, but it is not different set.

It had to be changed back from looking 24th century with LCARS to looking like the Ent-A 23rd century bridge again in time for the next TOS cast movie. Which was done. After being used in ST V and those few episodes of TNG, it was destroyed in a freak storm. The Trek VI TUC bridge is an almost totally new set.

Again, just like out universe, in universe means that they can make upgrades that fit the existing spaces. Anything more on this seems like going over the same ground I already covered on this. They upgrade where they can even as new ship classes, nacelles, weapon configurations, etc are also developed. They do both, which is also what happens in the real world. More than one high performance configuration can exist simultaneously. But in real vehicles, aircraft and ships, engines of similar size can be as much as 2x, 5x or >10x more powerful than another engine of similar dimensions.

Maybe future redo's of older FX and other scenes will be altered to take out the Mirandas and add more Steamrunners. etc? Yeah, Could be. I dont think it's needed, but people can prefer whatever they like.

 

[Ithekro]

As for thoughts about the USS Voyager being "twice as fast" as USS Excelsior. That is true at the very top end of the warp scale. But if the Excelsior could break the old USS Enterprise's speed record (last known to be Warp Factor 14.1), than the Excelsior can push up close to Warp 9.9 in the new scale. USS Voyager pushing Warp 9.975 is twice that fast because the warp scale goes up absurdly after Warp 9.9 as it goes closer to Warp 10. If the old Mirandas can push Warp Factor 12, than they can make about Warp 9.2 for a couple of hours. They might not be the fastest things in the fleet, but they should be able to comfortably move with the fleet operating at Warp 8 in wartime.

 

[Tarek71]

In my view, I don't think this is a real world issue as much as it is a "show" issue. There is significant evidence, due the way that models were rendered, and new classes were made through kitbashing that the Excelsior-era modules are scalable in-universe. The Galaxy-class modules almost certainly must be scalable in order for the New-Orleans, Cheyenne, and others to work. However, if we start to assume that the Excelsior components are scalable (which I would really like to do), then there is almost no way to know how big the Centaur and Curry are.

In a similar fashion, if we start to assume that a Miranda-class ship can look essentially identical but have a totally different onboard system, it is hard to really know what we are seeing onscreen in terms of the fleet. Would NCC-1899 and NCC-47258 be similar or different if they both use the same Miranda-class model? Sure, you could believe you could put a newer warp-drive system into the same nacelles, but then that brings up whole new questions about what happened during the TMP refit. It's hard to imagine that would NOT be significant upgrades to the Mirandas in DS9, and there were some very minor differences, but I don't think that we should assume they can be brought or Galaxy, or even Excelsior capabilities, as that breaks the ability of the audience to know the power levels of what they are looking at.

If it were not a show, meant to convey a story, the above paragraph might be fine, but it confuses the story when there are no present day ships of that exact kind to compare with. The same idea done with a war using current military equipment would not have that problem.


The one that I have a concern with, other than the nacelles, is the phaser design. The yellow ball turrets look like weapons from the movie era. If they had been able to add phaser strips it would make the idea that these are upgrade ships more plausible.

Then there is the question of whether the Mirandas and Excelsiors are old ships still in service or new ships built from an old design, but with upgrades. I like the idea that many Excelsiors were built, but Ambassadors were a version with updates, and that is why we see few of them, even though they are a design that I very much like. The Mirandas would have a similar history: many, many of them were made, and Centaurs were only made as they needed replaced, so not many Centaurs got built until the Nebula was put into service, and so on.

Some Mirandas can be new(er) builds while others are older and then retrofitted with later upgrades, including during refits. The real world examples are important because we see exactly that. They wanted to upgrade the F-16 radar to have capabilities like the F-22 and F-35. So a radar was created that has similar capabilities, but that is made to fit inside the existing spaces of the F-16.

New F-16s built with it in the first place, but can be retrofitted into much older F-16 airframes. This is normal engineering.

We dont know how fast a 2370s Miranda is vs. a 2280s Miranda. It might be 2x as fast, 10% faster, 50% faster. IDK. That it fits in the same nacelle housing, or a largely similar one doesnt really tell us which one it is. Some 1960s interceptors are faster than the F-35.

Yes, we have Janeway saying the ships of the TOS/TOS Movie era are "not half as fast". But IIRC she was saying that about Sulus Excelsior. I take "half as fast" to mean that VOYAGER is twice as fast as the Excelsiors of the 2290s. That's it. Not that ALL latter 24th century ships are 2x faster than ALL 23rd century ship designs. Maybe 2370s Excelsiors are much faster than Sulu's.

All I say is that both older models can be upgraded, sometimes even matching performance of new builds, while also designing very clearly new classes and models. They do both, not either/or.

 

[Tomalak]

Here's where I disagree, but not because I'm happy with that we got. Far from it. But logic dictates that the starships we saw in all the different fleets, both in DS9 and the end of Voyager, which show only the Galaxy, Nebula, Excelsior, Miranda, Defiant, Akira, Saber and Steamrunner classes (with a Prometheus thrown in in Endgame), represent the bulk of Starfleet's active vessels. Sure, we could postulate that some Cheyennes, Ambassadors or Renaissance class ships were just 'offscreen,' but that's not really realistic. There's no reason why those ships wouldn't have been equally interspersed with all the other vessels on screen. Logic dictates that those ships were simply not available, for whatever reason.

That's fair. I guess it depends how you approach it. You could also argue that it is logical to group ships into fleets with similar types to make repairing and resupplying easier, and also crew swaps, tactical interoperability etc. This is obviously taken to the extreme with the Inquiry fleet in PIC.

But I'm not precious about it. I don't think Starfleet ever had hundreds of Cheyenne or Challenger class ships flying around, and we can clearly extrapolate that the bulk of Starfleet in the 2370s was comprised of the ships we saw in DS9.

 

[Dukhat]

Based on what we saw, I got the impression that for most of the 'Lost Era' (2290-circa 2350), Starfleet was mainly using TMP-era ships such as the Excelsior, Miranda, Constellation, Sydney, Constitution and Oberth class ships, with possible variants of those classes like the Curry, Raging Queen, Centaur, Jupp, Hutzel, Bradford etc., which might have represented some of the conjectural classes. There was also the Ambassador class, whose design was completely unlike a TMP-era ship or a member of the Galaxy class family of designs represented by the Nebula, New Orleans, Cheyenne, Springfield, Challenger, Freedom, Niagara and Olympic classes, whose build dates I would conjecture at being around the 2350's. It's kind of the black sheep of starship designs: We only saw it a few times, it doesn't seem to have any variants, and we're not even sure when it started or ended production, despite one of its number being an Enterprise. As for the Galaxy family, I don't see those ships being produced in mass numbers like the Excelsiors or Mirandas were. Then there's the FC ships whose design attributes seem to indicate they were built alongside the new Sovereign class but have registry numbers indicating they were built far earlier.

The end result is a completely skewed representation of Starfleet consisting of two outdated classes which make up the bulk of the fleets, two large TNG-era ships of extremely small numbers, three FC ships of dubious production times padding out the far background, and one Defiant class ship.

All of this, of course, was because of the limited number of models they had at their disposal to make CGI versions from, the lack of time and budget to create new designs or even to just tweak the CGI models they did have, and whatever dictates they had preventing them from using more logical models like the Sovereign, Intrepid, Prometheus and Nova classes.

It is my fondest wish that, if DS9 ever gets a remaster, that they have the time and willingness to create a bunch of new ship designs for those fleets (Klingon and Romulan included) to pad out the fleets more and give a more realistic impression of Starfleet. But deep down, I know that this is just wishful thinking. They will not care about the ships like I do, and they will probably just try to recreate what was there before.

 

[Arpy]

Fair enough. Bridge interiors matching starship exteriors have never been really consistent unless it's the same type of ship (Ent-D bridge was the same as the Nagilum Yamato bridge, etc.) They just use what they have available.

The Odyssey was a completely different set too. It really is about what's available in the moment.

Different bridge modules is fine, but I doubt that an older starship would have a newer bridge module but zero upgrades to the rest of the ship.

Right, I don't for a moment think, as some fans here do, that they're the same ships without upgrades, churned out the assembly line or hauled out of mothballs because "Dominion." That would be silly and suicidal, and things weren't that dire.

But just as we see changes to the interiors, in a remaster, there should ideally be changes to the exteriors. Including, where possible, entirely different ships. Again, as in the canon.

Here's where I disagree, but not because I'm happy with that we got. Far from it. But logic dictates that the starships we saw in all the different fleets, both in DS9 and the end of Voyager, which show only the Galaxy, Nebula, Excelsior, Miranda, Defiant, Akira, Saber and Steamrunner classes (with a Prometheus thrown in in Endgame), represent the bulk of Starfleet's active vessels. Sure, we could postulate that some Cheyennes, Ambassadors or Renaissance class ships were just 'offscreen,' but that's not really realistic. There's no reason why those ships wouldn't have been equally interspersed with all the other vessels on screen. Logic dictates that those ships were simply not available, for whatever reason.

It is where we disagree because it's less realistic that they're not offscreen. We didn't see the charred hulls of the Sutherland variant Nebula Class and the Yamaguchi variant Ambassador Class starships from DS9's depiction of Wolf 359 in "The Best of Both Worlds" either, yet we know they must have been there. Likely others as well.

Also, and I think we covered this earlier in this thread, the makeups of those fleets changed episode to episode in the series, maybe within the same episode if memory serves, so there really is no way of knowing which ships were more or less prevalent throughout them or the greater Starfleet.

You were wrong in universe AND out. That is the same set. Enterprise and Reliant bridge was made into the battle bridge which became the Lantree bridge. It might seem like a smaller space, but it is not different set.

Again, there are pieces of the set reused from storage but it's not the same set design. The filmmakers were not going to spend the extra time and money to get it just so, and that's the same point I'm making in-universe. Starfleet would not spend years of R&D to figure out how to not change the appearance of century old starships while updating them to current specs. They'd be better off building new ships or developing whole new technologies (so as to not fall behind their adversaries) than getting stuck there.

The principle here is what's most cost effective for a TV show. New set designs, existing ship models. That's inescapable to me as a viewer, and I credit them when they surpass those limits (the D bridge in PIC sIII), not when they cheaply adhere to them (outdated starships in the Dominion War scenes).

Some Mirandas can be new(er) builds while others are older and then retrofitted with later upgrades, including during refits. The real world examples are important because we see exactly that. They wanted to upgrade the F-16 radar to have capabilities like the F-22 and F-35. So a radar was created that has similar capabilities, but that is made to fit inside the existing spaces of the F-16.

New F-16s built with it in the first place, but can be retrofitted into much older F-16 airframes. This is normal engineering.

We dont know how fast a 2370s Miranda is vs. a 2280s Miranda. It might be 2x as fast, 10% faster, 50% faster. IDK. That it fits in the same nacelle housing, or a largely similar one doesnt really tell us which one it is. Some 1960s interceptors are faster than the F-35.

Eh, I think there are a lot more differences and a lot more time between an F-16 and an F-35, and a Miranda and an Akira or Steamrunner.

Yes, we have Janeway saying the ships of the TOS/TOS Movie era are "not half as fast". But IIRC she was saying that about Sulus Excelsior. I take "half as fast" to mean that VOYAGER is twice as fast as the Excelsiors of the 2290s. That's it. Not that ALL latter 24th century ships are 2x faster than ALL 23rd century ship designs. Maybe 2370s Excelsiors are much faster than Sulu's.


All I say is that both older models can be upgraded, sometimes even matching performance of new builds, while also designing very clearly new classes and models. They do both, not either/or.

Agreed.

 

[Dukhat]

It is where we disagree because it's less realistic that they're not offscreen. We didn't see the charred hulls of the Sutherland variant Nebula Class and the Yamaguchi variant Ambassador Class starships from DS9's depiction of Wolf 359 in "The Best of Both Worlds" either, yet we know they must have been there. Likely others as well.

The issue is that we see the fleet pretty much in its entirety, and the only ships we see are the Galaxy, Excelsior, Miranda, Akira, Steamrunner and Saber classes (with one or two Nebulas and the sole USS Defiant.) That's it. Even in scenes where we see ships getting destroyed, it's always the same ones. Every single shot of the fleet, from A Call to Arms, to the Dominion war, to the rescue fleet at the end of VOY, showed the exact same ships. If you want to argue that other classes of ships were just out of frame, or that other fleets that we didn't see contained these other classes, that's your purview. But logic dictates that what we saw in those fleets were what Starfleet had available at that time, no more, no less. It makes zero sense, but there it is.

Also, and I think we covered this earlier in this thread, the makeups of those fleets changed episode to episode in the series, maybe within the same episode if memory serves, so there really is no way of knowing which ships were more or less prevalent throughout them or the greater Starfleet.

Again, there were only eight ships total in those fleets, and one of those (the Defiant) was only used for one ship during the war. I saw no others. Again, I do not like it, but that's what we saw. That was the reality and limits of Trek TV production at that time. In TOS, all we ever saw were Connies, because that's all they had available. So in the context solely of TOS, the Connie was all Starfleet had.

Now with that said, the Dominion war fleets were made knowing that Starfleet had many, many more ship classes than what was seen on screen, and that what we saw wasn't really a realistic portrayal of Starfleet as a whole. Same with the Klingons. Unfortunately, Stipes could only use the resources he was given. But sure, feel free to think there's some Cheyennes or Renaissances or Apollos out there somewhere. I won't stop you. I wish I could see them too.

 

[Tarek71]

Again, there are pieces of the set reused from storage but it's not the same set design. The filmmakers were not going to spend the extra time and money to get it just so, and that's the same point I'm making in-universe. Starfleet would not spend years of R&D to figure out how to not change the appearance of century old starships while updating them to current specs. They'd be better off building new ships or developing whole new technologies (so as to not fall behind their adversaries) than getting stuck there.

The principle here is what's most cost effective for a TV show. New set designs, existing ship models. That's inescapable to me as a viewer, and I credit them when they surpass those limits (the D bridge in PIC sIII), not when they cheaply adhere to them (outdated starships in the Dominion War scenes).

No, it's the same set. Not just "pieces". They redressed the 1701 Enterprise/Reliant bridge set to become the Battle Bridge and then to look like the Lantree. Later, it had to be redone as the 1701-A bridge. Which was done. It's not new sets. They redress the existing ones. It's not cheaper to build entirely new ones from scratch, and they dont when it can be avoided. They would have reused it for ST:VI had it not been destroyed by a freak storm during a period when it was stored outdoors.

 

[Cyfa]

It is where we disagree because it's less realistic that they're not offscreen. We didn't see the charred hulls of the Sutherland variant Nebula Class and the Yamaguchi variant Ambassador Class starships from DS9's depiction of Wolf 359 in "The Best of Both Worlds" either, yet we know they must have been there. Likely others as well.

The issue is that we see the fleet pretty much in its entirety, and the only ships we see are the Galaxy, Excelsior, Miranda, Akira, Steamrunner and Saber classes (with one or two Nebulas and the sole USS Defiant.) That's it. Even in scenes where we see ships getting destroyed, it's always the same ones. Every single shot of the fleet, from A Call to Arms, to the Dominion war, to the rescue fleet at the end of VOY, showed the exact same ships. If you want to argue that other classes of ships were just out of frame, or that other fleets that we didn't see contained these other classes, that's your purview. But logic dictates that what we saw in those fleets were what Starfleet had available at that time, no more, no less. It makes zero sense, but there it is.

~ I'm somewhat torn between the points you both make. I want to believe that other ship classes make up the fleets but are way off in the distance or just out of frame, but the overwhelming evidence - i.e. all those scenes of fleets made up of the eight ship classes that Dukhat mentioned - makes me think it's very unlikely.
However... There is some (admittedly flimsy) evidence that other starship classes make up the fleets. There's a display in "Favour the Bold" that shows the Norway-class along with seven of the eight listed classes above (no Steamrunner). And even flimsier, there's also a display on the bridge of the Defiant during battle (in "Sacrifice of Angels") that shows an Olympic-class ship (and, apparently, a Sovereign and a Vulcan long-range shuttle from TMP!).

I wish I could see them too.

~ When I close my eyes, I can see a Norway-class zipping along, cutting through Dominion ships with great gusto! (I love the awkward Norway-class )

 

[Tarek71]

I think it's both. There are more than just the 8 classes and ships of other classes were there AND they used all 8 of those classes. There were lots of Miranda's and there were more Cheyennes, Norways, more than one Defiant class, etc. Older, reliable, proven designs that are upgradeable are a good thing. And some of the very new designs are too.


There are factors we dont know. Different companies/contractors build many rival designs today. Some go into mass production and many others dont make it that far. There are pros and cons to any design. Not sure how that is done in Trek. Many competing ideas must exist from different engineers and designers. And we cant test the "real" ships to see how much more you are getting vs how much cost for each design idea. I know people who buy a 1950s Beechcraft because they are $40,000 when a new one from 2024 might be $1,000,000. Some real downsides to that too though. But they are upgradeable.


If we didnt see more of a ship, there might be good reasons for that. It didnt work out as well as hoped when the design was approved years earlier, so different leaders later decided to end production on them when not that many were made. That certainly happens in our world. Maybe upgraded Mirandas could still do most of the jobs a New Orleans class can do for cheaper? IDK. We dont have the practical data that would show why some of these ships might have had short production runs.

 

[Dukhat]

I think it's both. There are more than just the 8 classes and ships of other classes were there AND they used all 8 of those classes. There were lots of Miranda's and there were more Cheyennes, Norways, more than one Defiant class, etc. Older, reliable, proven designs that are upgradeable are a good thing. And some of the very new designs are too.

Where were they, then? 'Cause I didn't see any.

(To be fair, there was only one Defiant because the producers didn't want the audience to be confused as to which Defiant was Sisko's Defiant. But I didn't see any of the other 60+ Starfleet vessel classes that should technically have been in operation at the time and interspersed throughout those fleets along with the 8 classes that we did see. 60 classes are a freaking ton of ships. You just don't assume that 52 of them were all offscreen while only 8 of them were actually visible.)

If we didnt see more of a ship, there might be good reasons for that. It didnt work out as well as hoped when the design was approved years earlier, so different leaders later decided to end production on them when not that many were made. That certainly happens in our world. Maybe upgraded Mirandas could still do most of the jobs a New Orleans class can do for cheaper? IDK. We dont have the practical data that would show why some of these ships might have had short production runs.

In wartime, you use whatever you have available. If they had tons of Excelsiors and Mirandas available, they should have had tons of other older classes available as well (and classes that were older but still newer than the Excelsior.) Even if Starfleet scrounged all those Mirandas out of a surplus depot or junkyard, it stands to reason that other ship classes would have been there to scavenge as well. But that didn't seem to be the case. So the only logical way that what we saw on screen would make any sense is if at some point in time pre-Dominion war, Starfleet made an active purge of most of their ship classes, and only these 8 ships remained, however implausible that might be. The only other option would be the idea that certain fleets only contained certain classes of vessels, and that we inconveniently only ever saw the fleet that had those 8 classes. That doesn't make sense either, but it is what it is.

 

[Arpy]

The issue is that we see the fleet pretty much in its entirety, and the only ships we see are the Galaxy, Excelsior, Miranda, Akira, Steamrunner and Saber classes (with one or two Nebulas and the sole USS Defiant.) That's it. Even in scenes where we see ships getting destroyed, it's always the same ones. Every single shot of the fleet, from A Call to Arms, to the Dominion war, to the rescue fleet at the end of VOY, showed the exact same ships. If you want to argue that other classes of ships were just out of frame, or that other fleets that we didn't see contained these other classes, that's your purview. But logic dictates that what we saw in those fleets were what Starfleet had available at that time, no more, no less. It makes zero sense, but there it is.

I don't understand why you're quoting a point to ignore it. We did not see the BoBW ships ever again and we did see DS9 ships at 359 that weren't in BoBW. Does that mean DS9 retconned the battle? It would make sense given that the study models used in the scene were not used in the series in their undamaged forms and were only approved to be seen as destroyed impressions of ships. You see "logic" is a tool, not an answer. And to me it suggests there's more going on than meets the eye. Hell, just the numbers of ships we saw in some fleet shots don't make sense. And why did the Enterprise-D fire full phasers from its main torpedo bay in "Darmok"? Not so fast, they fixed it in the HD remaster. Remember, this is a TV show and that logic should be incorporated into one's experience of it. Especially when taking it at its most basic surface level interpretation makes it a worse TV show. If we want to be super anal about it, we can increase our scrutiny by orders of magnitude and discuss makeup, lighting, music, camera, filming equipment in shots and a lot lot more, and then come up with in-universe explanations that, and get even further away from the show. Knock yourselves out. I’m just thinking there are more ships around. And as @Cyfa notes, there were on the displays as well.

 

[Tarek71]

Where were they, then? 'Cause I didn't see any.

(To be fair, there was only one Defiant because the producers didn't want the audience to be confused as to which Defiant was Sisko's Defiant. But I didn't see any of the other 60+ Starfleet vessel classes that should technically have been in operation at the time and interspersed throughout those fleets along with the 8 classes that we did see. 60 classes are a freaking ton of ships. You just don't assume that 52 of them were all offscreen while only 8 of them were actually visible.)



In wartime, you use whatever you have available. If they had tons of Excelsiors and Mirandas available, they should have had tons of other older classes available as well (and classes that were older but still newer than the Excelsior.) Even if Starfleet scrounged all those Mirandas out of a surplus depot or junkyard, it stands to reason that other ship classes would have been there to scavenge as well. But that didn't seem to be the case. So the only logical way that what we saw on screen would make any sense is if at some point in time pre-Dominion war, Starfleet made an active purge of most of their ship classes, and only these 8 ships remained, however implausible that might be. The only other option would be the idea that certain fleets only contained certain classes of vessels, and that we inconveniently only ever saw the fleet that had those 8 classes. That doesn't make sense either, but it is what it is.

I usually dont make alot of in universe sense of them beyond what I said above. That the others had very short production runs. Maybe they stopped production on the Cheyennes after 6 or 8 and thats all that was built. Same on several other classes. Only a few were ever built of them, so not many to show.

We arent watching war footage. These are FX scenes, so the real world production explanation is the one I go with mostly. So we can just pretend they are there. Im ok with that.

 

[Dukhat]

I don't understand why you're quoting a point to ignore it. We did not see the BoBW ships ever again and we did see DS9 ships at 359 that weren't in BoBW. Does that mean DS9 retconned the battle? It would make sense given that the study models used in the scene were not used in the series in their undamaged forms and were only approved to be seen as destroyed impressions of ships. You see "logic" is a tool, not an answer. And to me it suggests there's more going on than meets the eye. Hell, just the numbers of ships we saw in some fleet shots don't make sense. And why did the Enterprise-D fire full phasers from its main torpedo bay in "Darmok"? Not so fast, they fixed it in the HD remaster. Remember, this is a TV show and that logic should be incorporated into one's experience of it. Especially when taking it at its most basic surface level interpretation makes it a worse TV show. If we want to be super anal about it, we can increase our scrutiny by orders of magnitude and discuss makeup, lighting, music, camera, filming equipment in shots and a lot lot more, and then come up with in-universe explanations that, and get even further away from the show. Knock yourselves out. I’m just thinking there are more ships around. And as @Cyfa notes, there were on the displays as well.

I'm going by what I saw on screen. In BoBW we saw the aftermath of the battle, with 8 or so wrecked ships out of 40. In Emissary we saw the start of the battle, with 5 ships out of 40. The other 30-odd ships might have been offscreen and/or completely pulverized, or simply not arrived yet, but we don't know what ships they were or what classes they belonged to.

In every single DS9 and VOY fleet scene, we see a multitude of ships flying around, at all angles and different locations in the fleet. We see the fleet from a distance and then close up. And in every instance (unlike the Wolf 359 battle), they are the same 8 classes. When we see them get blown up, they are the same 8 classes. When we see them in orbit of Starbase 375 or Deep Space Nine, they're the same ships.

So the logical conclusion to this discrepancy is that sometime between the Wolf 359 battle and the Dominion war, Starfleet went from having New Orleans, Challengers, Springfields, Cheyennes, Freedoms, Niagaras, Rigels, Ambassadors and any other 50-odd ship classes, to having Excelsiors, Mirandas, Galaxies, Nebulas, Akiras, Sabers, Steamrunners and Defiants as what Starfleet had available at that time. We don't know why the 50-odd other ship classes weren't available, because they didn't tell us. So we can only speculate. You say they were there but just offscreen. And you're entitled to your opinion, because we can't prove otherwise. I say that what we saw onscreen represented exactly what Starfleet had available, for whatever reason that was, because my logic dictates that other classes wouldn't be offscreen but instead would be interspersed with the other ships flying in formation. But that's not what we saw.

 

[Arpy]

I'm going by what I saw on screen. In BoBW we saw the aftermath of the battle, with 8 or so wrecked ships out of 40. In Emissary we saw the start of the battle, with 5 ships out of 40. The other 30-odd ships might have been offscreen and/or completely pulverized, or simply not arrived yet, but we don't know what ships they were or what classes they belonged to.

Convenient they didn’t use any of the BoBW ships on DS9. Or anything like TOS ships on DSC. Or any TOS Klingons in TMP. Realistically these are visual reboots. It’s only us diehards to hold onto making these things fit for our own sport.

In every single DS9 and VOY fleet scene, we see a multitude of ships flying around, at all angles and different locations in the fleet. We see the fleet from a distance and then close up. And in every instance (unlike the Wolf 359 battle), they are the same 8 classes. When we see them get blown up, they are the same 8 classes. When we see them in orbit of Starbase 375 or Deep Space Nine, they're the same ships.

Multitude but not all.

And nearly every shot in the finale was a reuse of other shots, with other stars in the background.

So the logical conclusion to this discrepancy is that sometime between the Wolf 359 battle and the Dominion war, Starfleet went from having New Orleans, Challengers, Springfields, Cheyennes, Freedoms, Niagaras, Rigels, Ambassadors and any other 50-odd ship classes, to having Excelsiors, Mirandas, Galaxies, Nebulas, Akiras, Sabers, Steamrunners and Defiants as what Starfleet had available at that time. We don't know why the 50-odd other ship classes weren't available, because they didn't tell us. So we can only speculate. You say they were there but just offscreen. And you're entitled to your opinion, because we can't prove otherwise. I say that what we saw onscreen represented exactly what Starfleet had available, for whatever reason that was, because my logic dictates that other classes wouldn't be offscreen but instead would be interspersed with the other ships flying in formation. But that's not what we saw.

“Logic” dictates that you take more into consideration than you are. Your logic is limited and therefore flawed.

This thread is about the ships they SHOULD have used, not the ones for budgetary reasons they did. The effects they clip-showed into the finale.

That is my opinion, thank you very much.

 

[Dukhat]

“Logic” dictates that you take more into consideration than you are. Your logic is limited and therefore flawed.

It's only as flawed as your logic is. I see no reason to take the idea that there were other ships offscreen into logical account based on what we saw.

This thread is about the ships they SHOULD have used, not the ones for budgetary reasons they did. The effects they clip-showed into the finale.

Yes, and I've given my $0.02 about that several times previously in this thread. But you can't talk about the ships they should have used without talking about the ships they actually used.

That is my opinion, thank you very much.

And as I keep mentioning, you are entitled to your opinion.

 

[Ithekro]

It is also possible that several of those designs were transition designs between the Ambassador style and the Galaxy style and thus fewer were built before the Galaxy-class started coming out of the yards. Or Starfleet found it easier to refit older ships like say the Excelsior-class USS Fearless rather than build as many midsized starships. Freeing up yards for the larger and more intensive Galaxy-class ships. They did have an engineer going around tweaking older starship engines early in the Enterprise-D's career.

 

[Dukhat]

It is also possible that several of those designs were transition designs between the Ambassador style and the Galaxy style and thus fewer were built before the Galaxy-class started coming out of the yards. Or Starfleet found it easier to refit older ships like say the Excelsior-class USS Fearless rather than build as many midsized starships. Freeing up yards for the larger and more intensive Galaxy-class ships. They did have an engineer going around tweaking older starship engines early in the Enterprise-D's career.

There are 18 conjectural Starfleet classes from the ST Encyclopedia. At least 5 of them are canon based on their class names being listed on Okudagrams (Apollo, Bradbury, Korolev, Merced and Renaissance.) The others are:

Andromeda NCC-6XXXX-7XXXX (only two known ships of this class)
Antares NCC-1XXXX (only one known ship of this class)
Chimera NCC-5XXXX (only one known ship of this class)
Deneva NCC-6XXX (only one or two known ships of this class)
Hokule'a NCC-1XXXX (only one known ship of this class)
Istanbul NCC-3XXXX-4XXXX (only three known ships of this class)
Mediterranean NCC-4XXXX (only two known ships of this class)
Rigel NCC-6XXXX (only two known ships of this class)
Sequioa NCC-7XXXX (only one known ship of this class)
Surak NCC-3XXXX (only one known ship of this class)
Wambundu NCC-2XXXX (only two known ships of this class)
Yorkshire NCC-5XXXX (only one known ship of this class)
Zodiac NCC-6XXXX (only one known ship of this class)

And of the 5 above ships:

Apollo NCC-1XXXX (only four known ships of this class)
Bradbury NX-7XXXX (only one known ship of this class)
Korolev NCC-5XXXX (only one known ship of this class)
Merced NCC-3XXXX (only one known ship of this class)
Renaissance NCC-4XXXX (only four known ships of this class)

Then we have the BoBW ships:

Challenger NCC-5XXXX (only three known ships of this class)
Cheyenne NCC-7XXXX (only one known ship of this class)
Freedom NCC-6XXXX (only two known ships of this class)
New Orleans NCC-5XXXX (only four known ships of this class)
Niagara NCC-5XXXX (only two known ships of this class)
Springfield NCC-5XXXX (only one known ship of this class)


So when we extrapolate this info based on what we saw in DS9 and VOY, it appears that while Starfleet had lots of ship classes, almost none of them seem to have been built in large numbers. The only ones we saw in large numbers were Excelsiors, Mirandas, Akiras, Steamrunners and Sabers. We also saw Galaxies, Nebulas and Defiants in the fleet, but again only in small numbers.

Conclusion: It appears as though the Excelsior and Miranda classes were the primary two vessels being heavily constructed between the 2280's and the 2340's (with other classes with registry numbers between 1XXXX and 4XXXX being produced in much smaller numbers, and possibly resembling the Excelsior and Miranda classes), and then around the 2350's-'60's production changed to the Akira, Saber and Steamrunner classes being heavily constructed with other classes from the Galaxy family being produced in smaller numbers.

And, of course, none of this takes into account the Ambassador class.

 

[David cgc]

Would anyone like to explain why Admirals are always the last to get the new uniforms, too?

 

[Arpy]

But you can't talk about the ships they should have used without talking about the ships they actually used.

I mean you can? Hell, you could be more creative and come up with 40 completely other ships than they did. Or look at DS9’s fleets and say it should have been closer to 140 ships. Or consider that we’re talking about a Federation of trillions of people (if not more) and come up with a fleet of 14,000 ships that could have defended the capital on short notice.

I’d be interested to see what some good artists could come up with for some of the ships we only know in the canon by name only. Most of the fan designs I’ve seen don’t pass muster.

I wonder what some good artists could do with the wreckages of ships we did see—if they could reconstruct them into better versions than the distressed originals ultimately unused onscreen.

And I wish we had more alien names among the fleet/classes, as most of these are predominantly of Earth origin. Maybe some species are more humble than others but the Andorians and Tellarites especially might want greater representation. Glad to see the Surak in there though, and nods to “Antares” and “Rigel” at least.

But yeah, a ship named after the Andorian capital or their largest colony, a Tellarite mythological beast, the Vulcan word for grace, the legendary battle that brought peace to the skies of Aurelia, the legendary expedition that first connected the mysteriously populous Rigel system, the Nasat captain who saved their ship from the ambush that started the first Cardassian War, the Deltan Federation President who brought peace to the last Tzenkethi War, the Ancient Tkon credited with discovering artificial gravity, and the Ancient Aldean prayer that parents across the Galaxy still send their children to bed with telling them to explore the stars within as well as those without. And more.