What ships SHOULD they have used in the Dominion War?
- Thread starter Arpy
- Start date
Interesting. I wondered where that saucer design came from since it didn't seem to match the Galaxy particularly, except in general silhouette. Ex Astris Scientia just lists it as a "custom-made part" in their Wolf 359 ships reconstruction article without giving any more details.
One of the things that I don’t much care for in kitbashes of Galaxy Era ships is that they undercut the idea of the “technology unchained” philosophy. You could now more or less design and build anything without being limited by or in need of modular and interchangeable parts.
In my head canon Galaxy Era ships are far more organic, diverse, and bespoke than previous ones. You’d never reuse a Galaxy saucer’s shape for a smaller ship or for any other. Each class of the era (each ship?) would be almost “grown” to fit the needs of the class or the mission.
…and, well, there’s another problem with Trek, using bolted plating like that would even be a thing among these ridiculously advanced people. Frankly I much prefer the fuzzy look of an SD screen showing me an Enterprise that looked like it was made of some strange futuristic organic crystal or something. But I digress…
I love how organic and different the Galaxy, Narendra, Olympic, Akira, and other ships look. And I think designers especially in the Galaxy Era should task themselves with not doing the Franz Joseph thing. I mean, hell, he only did kit bashes because he thought it would be easy for fans at the time to make more Trek ships with Enterprise model kit parts, but I’m sure at the time he also dreamed of more original designs for its era too.
In my head canon Galaxy Era ships are far more organic, diverse, and bespoke than previous ones. You’d never reuse a Galaxy saucer’s shape for a smaller ship or for any other. Each class of the era (each ship?) would be almost “grown” to fit the needs of the class or the mission.
…and, well, there’s another problem with Trek, using bolted plating like that would even be a thing among these ridiculously advanced people. Frankly I much prefer the fuzzy look of an SD screen showing me an Enterprise that looked like it was made of some strange futuristic organic crystal or something. But I digress…
I love how organic and different the Galaxy, Narendra, Olympic, Akira, and other ships look. And I think designers especially in the Galaxy Era should task themselves with not doing the Franz Joseph thing. I mean, hell, he only did kit bashes because he thought it would be easy for fans at the time to make more Trek ships with Enterprise model kit parts, but I’m sure at the time he also dreamed of more original designs for its era too.
The saucers weren't a 1:1 match with the mold. They were basically just the outer saucer, but with cosmetic differences using other molds. For example, the Princeton's saucer was made from the 2-foot Ent-D mold, but with the bridge section from the Enterprise-C mold turned backwards. Likewise, the Firebrand's saucer, also from the 2-foot Ent-D mold, used 3/4 of the Enterprise-C bridge section with the end cut off and turned into a shuttlebay like the Ent-D's.
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For example, I did these doodles a while back of some ships larger than the Galaxy Class and some much smaller. Some of them are kitbashable, others definitely not.
Here's a cut-&-paste for a smaller ship (probably a Galaxy Era scout or clipper) I just slapped together using the Freedom nacelle upthread and an Asari dreadnought from Mass Effect lol
Here's a cut-&-paste for a smaller ship (probably a Galaxy Era scout or clipper) I just slapped together using the Freedom nacelle upthread and an Asari dreadnought from Mass Effect lol
I LOVE the "Single-Nacelle" Alternate Universe variant of the California Class.A single nacelle like this would be easy to swap out as a test module without needing to worry about having a balanced pair, or having to customise two units. Maybe the Freedom performed so well that Starfleet saw no reason to decommission them once the Galaxy-class design was finalised. Or they decided to keep the basic design around for testing future nacelles, and there's some really strange post-Wolf 359 variants of the Freedom-class. (This might also explain why the Lower Decks version of the Freedom-class looked quite different... it would be a 2380s refit versus the 2360s "classic" design.)
I have to say that as the Freedom-class is my favourite Wolf 359 ship along with the Cheyenne-class I've had a bit of a headcanon around it for a while and this conversation is helping me crystalise it. I might have to go write and draw something later on...
That's a thing of beauty for Single Nacelle Ships.
The Freedom Class really needed it's "Main Gun" to have a proper matching pair on the other side and a proper turret to allow it to "Rotate & Adjust Angle"
I can't speak for FJ, but I'm pretty sure Matt Jefferies' original intent was not to kitbash parts from the TOS Enterprise to create other ships. He was clear that the Enterprise and her other sister ships represented the absolute pinnacle of Earth/Federation technology, and that all other ships would be lesser vessels (support craft, freighters, etc.) and would not be referred to as 'starships.' Only the 'Starship Class' vessels would have that honor.
Well, that idea/plan went out the door pretty quickly.
Kit-Bash parts from TOS & other generations are the norm now-a-days.
And the "Absolute Pinnacle of Earth/Federation Tech" being called the "StarShip" like a (Celebrity / SuperStar) certainly didn't happen.
Funny how life & fandom changes well laid out plans.
And keeps changing. DSC showed us a fleet mostly devoid of kit-bashes. Brave new world of easy modeling. No excuses.
You can thank the advent of 3D modeling & CGI along with the state of the 3D Animation industry.
That’s just the 3-nacelled Excelsior kitbash Gary Hutzel built that wasn’t used, with some minimal changes.
The original intent certainly.
“Frankly I much prefer the fuzzy look of an SD screen showing me an Enterprise that looked like it was made of some strange futuristic organic crystal or something. But I digress…”
That was Babylon 5
Well, it did, it was just mostly forgotten, sadly.
Claudius: "Merikus was a spaceship captain. I've observed him thoroughly. Your species has no such strength."
Merik: "{Kirk} commands not just a spaceship, Proconsul, but a starship. A very special vessel and crew. I tried for such a command."
Later, "starship" still tended to be used for large multirole vessels, compared to freighters and the like. However, by the time DS9's runabouts were being called starships, it seems size no longer had any relevance.
Starship
A starship was any manned spacecraft that was capable of viable interstellar travel, i.e. any manned spacecraft that could transport and support a crew across interstellar distances. Most starships accomplished this via the employment of some form of faster-than-light spacecraft propulsion...
memory-alpha.fandom.com
Here I thought "StarShip" stood for SpaceCraft capable of traveling InterStellar distances in reasonable amounts of time.
Not like previous SpaceCraft that was only useful for local jaunts around your planet or Star System.
Merik implied he was captain of a spaceship, not a starship. Indeed, McCoy and Kirk both identified the Enterprise as "United Spaceship", the latter as confirmed with the "Assignment: Earth" script.
So, at the time, "spaceship" wasn't limited to subwarp or intrasystem craft.
So, at the time, "spaceship" wasn't limited to subwarp or intrasystem craft.
Hope I'm not necro posting but I thought I'd just mention that I'd recently made a model of what I thought the Renaissance Class ship would look like. The one feature here, the USS Hornet, was specifically mentioned in an episode of DS9 during the Dominion War. Here's a link to the post with all the images. https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/renaissance-class-starship-uss-hornet.320103/
I enjoyed this thread. It assumes that there were rational reasons, based on in-universe canon, of why things are the way they are in TNG / DS9.
This list of suggested craft types makes sense.
If we were to design a slightly-better TNG Starfleet, perhaps we'd throw in some more light frigates for "we need a ship there to investigate," and courier missions that don't require much capability.
The role would be similar to a Miranda, but it would be faster in order to traverse the larger TNG Federation. A ship like that accompanying the Enterprise would have changed the plot. The Centaur kind of fits this idea.
For the warships, if we want to be economical, maybe you get a Galaxy-class battleship early-on by relieving it of the bulk of its saucer. Make available a much-smaller, combat-oriented saucer.
Then, you could have an interchangeable fleet of Galaxy "explorers" and Galaxy "battlecruisers."
(Alternatively, you could have a bunch of different Galaxy saucers for different missions. Keep the other powers guessing what they are.)
Some large warp scouts, similar to what we see in Insurrection, would have been great in the Galaxy/Nebula shuttle-bays. Maybe there was some safety or servicing issue that prevented that.
We could be generous and assume that the Cheyenne fulfills the long-range warp scout role in early TNG. I can see why "Attack Ships" were not present in the above "Golden Era" list of class-requirements, but ships like that would have been very useful in DS9.
If they were armed for self defense, that would explain why they were thrown at a Borg cube.
On short notice, Starfleet scrambled to throw together a task force, and those ships happened to be available.
Those ships may have served dual purposes. Used as test beds for Project Galaxy technologies; then used for other, specialized tasks.
In a Venom Geek video, it was suggested that the original California ship was built as a test bed. And proved promising as a utility craft, leading to a sizable production run.
yes and no.
Discovery season 2 established that Constitution class ships were indeed special, even getting their own uniforms, or at least getting the color combo uniforms before anyone else did.
The design language of the Constitution class ships is likewise different from every other Starfleet ship seen in that series. Obviously that changes a bit , Post-Klingon War and even with ships like the Farragut and the Archer. I wish they'd kind of stuck to some commonality but we can't have that, can we.
