Starship construction

[CaptainKirkFan]

How long does it take to build a starship? Construction methods would have advanced, but by how much? Also, do you think they use replicators to manufacture large chunks, or do they build it from scratch?

What do y'all think?

 

[Finn]

Well, we all know the Intrepid Class starships can replicate shuttlecraft.

I'd imagine it would take several years. The bigger/more complex it is, the longer.

 

[Red Ranger]

We don't know how many months or years it took to build either the Galaxy-class or Intrepid-class starships.

The first time frame that comes to mind that I can remember of a starship's construction time -- and that was refit time, actually -- was of ole 1701 in TMP. As I recall, it was maybe 18 months to 2 years. Maybe refits take longer than building a ship from scratch.

Another more concrete hint comes in Best of Both Worlds, Pt. 2. Commander Shelby's put in charge of the task force to help rebuild Starfleet's ship strength, and she says to Picard, "We'll have the fleet back up in less than a year, sir." So from that, you can guess that it takes under a year or about a year to complete one starship, let alone dozens being built simultaneously.

Red Ranger

 

[SeerSGB]

Well to be fair, Shelby's statement could have referred to reactivating older decommissioned ships, ships already in various stages of construction, or on the slate for the mothballs, not necessarily to building nothing but new ships.

And Scotty's line in TMP is "18 months redesigning and rebuilding" the Enterprise.

I'd say 18 months is reasonable for most ships, with 2 to 2 1/2 years for the larger "Capital" ships.

 

[CaptainKirkFan]

Well to be fair, Shelby's statement could have referred to reactivating older decommissioned ships, ships already in various stages of construction, or on the slate for the mothballs, not necessarily to building nothing but new ships.

And Scotty's line in TMP is "18 months redesigning and rebuilding" the Enterprise.

I'd say 18 months is reasonable for most ships, with 2 to 2 1/2 years for the larger "Capital" ships.

What do you think about the Defiant class?

 

[SeerSGB]

Well to be fair, Shelby's statement could have referred to reactivating older decommissioned ships, ships already in various stages of construction, or on the slate for the mothballs, not necessarily to building nothing but new ships.

And Scotty's line in TMP is "18 months redesigning and rebuilding" the Enterprise.

I'd say 18 months is reasonable for most ships, with 2 to 2 1/2 years for the larger "Capital" ships.

What do you think about the Defiant class?

Starfleet coul probably pop them out a little faster than the average-ship, after all their not the complex when you get into the nuts and bolts, just mobile weapons platforms for the largest part.

Then again, I also see the Defiant's becoming the "Miranda Class" of the later 24th century going into the 25th. A small, "cheap" to produce ship, that can be reconfigure for multiple mission roles.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Well to be fair, Shelby's statement could have referred to reactivating older decommissioned ships, ships already in various stages of construction, or on the slate for the mothballs, not necessarily to building nothing but new ships.

And Scotty's line in TMP is "18 months redesigning and rebuilding" the Enterprise.

I'd say 18 months is reasonable for most ships, with 2 to 2 1/2 years for the larger "Capital" ships.

Good explanation for all those Miranda class ships in the Dominion War. Instead of building one brand new Galaxy or Nebula they build 3 or 4 Mirandas to get their numbers up more quickly. At the same time designing new classes (Akira, Souvereign, etc) which appeared a few years later.

 

[The Wormhole]

Hey, according to a thing I saw in theatres a few months back, welders build starships for Starfleet.

 

[robjkay]

Well to be fair, Shelby's statement could have referred to reactivating older decommissioned ships, ships already in various stages of construction, or on the slate for the mothballs, not necessarily to building nothing but new ships.

And Scotty's line in TMP is "18 months redesigning and rebuilding" the Enterprise.

I'd say 18 months is reasonable for most ships, with 2 to 2 1/2 years for the larger "Capital" ships.

Good explanation for all those Miranda class ships in the Dominion War. Instead of building one brand new Galaxy or Nebula they build 3 or 4 Mirandas to get their numbers up more quickly. At the same time designing new classes (Akira, Souvereign, etc) which appeared a few years later.

The Miranda's were already built a long time ago, like 50 or more years ago. The Akira and Sovereign were already around when the Dominion war started.

 

[SeerSGB]

It's probably safe to assume that most, if not all, of the classes that first got a appearance in "First Contact" were around or in some from of development/testing long before the first time we saw them. It was just that until the Dominion War rapid production and deployment of the newer classes wasn't high up on the to do list for Starfleet-- who was likely happy to piss around and test, redesign, test, redesign, test, redesign, till the cows came home.

 

[Lt. Trull]

Well to be fair, Shelby's statement could have referred to reactivating older decommissioned ships, ships already in various stages of construction, or on the slate for the mothballs, not necessarily to building nothing but new ships.

And Scotty's line in TMP is "18 months redesigning and rebuilding" the Enterprise.

I'd say 18 months is reasonable for most ships, with 2 to 2 1/2 years for the larger "Capital" ships.

well there is 75-80 years betwen scotty and shelby and dont forget the replecator technology is extremely more advanced then in scotty's time...
which would make it a lot easier making parts....

i'll stick with shelby... a year for a capital ship.

 

[SeerSGB]

Getting the fleet back up doesn't necessarily mean capital ships, especially when smaller frigates and cruisers could fill in a lot of the roles. As for replicator tech and the like, we've seen ships under construction a couple of times in TNG and Voyager, and in both cases we saw large drydocks and framed construction techniques. Which is going to take a lot longer than just push a button replicate a ship.

Having to drag out the mothball reserves and slavage and upgrade old wreck s and hulks might explain 90% of the "Frankstein fleet" ships we see in DS9.

 

[Timo]

It's probably safe to assume that most, if not all, of the classes that first got a appearance in "First Contact" were around or in some from of development/testing long before the first time we saw them. It was just that until the Dominion War rapid production and deployment of the newer classes wasn't high up on the to do list for Starfleet-- who was likely happy to piss around and test, redesign, test, redesign, test, redesign, till the cows came home.

Or it could be that those ship types were geared for war - since there was no onscreen war in TNG, those ships remained off camera, either mothballed somewhere or then engaged in offscreen wars or war drills.

Looking at the range of ships in the DS9 fleets, I don't really see much evidence of wartime construction there. No ship besides the Defiant class ones seems to sport a "recent" registry - all have numbers lower than the definitely prewar USS Voyager, many considerably lower. No new designs emerge for the war: VOY offers us two glimpses to the Prometheus class, but neither of those relates directly to the war effort. And no ship is explicitly said to be a recent build.

This would be understandable if it took three to five years to construct a typical TNG era starship: few or none would be completed during the war, then.

Having to drag out the mothball reserves and slavage and upgrade old wreck s and hulks might explain 90% of the "Frankstein fleet" ships we see in DS9.

To be sure, nothing really requires us to believe that the "Frankenstein" ships were specifically related to the war. They could all have been perfectly regular Starfleet types, most dating from the early 24th century as suggested by their Excelsior style components and registries, rather than hasty responses to the 2370s crises.

Hey, according to a thing I saw in theatres a few months back, welders build starships for Starfleet.

Or then tear them apart. Perhaps we're seeing the future Alang Beach where sleazy contractors use manual labor to cut old starships to pieces at lowest possible cost?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[nx1701g]

While not canon the TNG Technical Manual and the novels say that work began on the Galaxy Class in 2343 and that the first ship of the class (the USS Galaxy) was not launched until 2357.

 

[Deks]

SF would be extremely behind if it takes years for a single ship to be constructed.

And a refit of the original Constitution class probably took up to 2 years because of several reasons:
No one was in a particular hurry to get her done, and you also have to take into consideration that the crews working on her would have to extensively modify/upgrade existing systems, not to mention adapt the space-frame to suit the new/larger design (which would be more time consuming in comparison to constructing a completely new ship).

And of course, starship construction between Kirk's era and TNG era is over 80 years.
One would think that with the advances of replicator technology, crews would have a far simpler time constructing not just internal, but external parts of the ship.

How long did it take for the Voyager crew to construct the Delta Flyer exactly?
Several days ... but let's extend that to the original time-frame that Paris proposed ... a week And it was what ... 21 meters long).
It was also done using resources on board and not having access to facilities of a star-base or a dry-dock.
So assuming a dry-dock would be able to get the job done a bit faster with it's available personnel, a Defiant class would take approximately a month and a half time for construction (which probably makes sense for such a small ship).
The Intrepid might take about 4 or 5 months, while the Galaxy about a year.
That would be with techniques/technology available before Voyager went to the DQ.
And who knows what kind of advances SF made during Voyager's absence because we could take into consideration the war and how it might have gave SF ideas of constructing their ships faster.

 

[Timo]

SF would be extremely behind if it takes years for a single ship to be constructed.

So NASA is "extremely behind" when it takes years for a single shuttle orbiter to be constructed (even when the prototyping stage is long past)? Clearly, a shuttle is smaller than a skyscraper, which may be erected in months. And a bicycle can be constructed in a matter of hours. So yes, obviously NASA is "extremely behind"...

We don't have good points of comparison to estimate the complexity of building a starship. It might be that today's tooling could achieve the feat in five decades or five centuries, so five years is actually pretty good going.

And it's not as if the time to build a capital warship has ever varied much. What has been won by adopting metal hulls that don't require long seasoning has been lost in the lead times required for producing key steel elements such as gunbarrels; what has been won by adopting powered cranes and welding is lost in the increasing bulk of items to be lifted and the increasing precision required of the joinings.

So it would be perfectly justifiable to argue that 24th century dockyards can only do a starship per five years even when they could do five thousand of today's warships in the same time, if we assume that the work is correspondingly more demanding. Or, alternatively or in addition, that it is impossible to build a 24th century starship in any time shorter than five years regardless of construction resources, just as it would be impossible to build a wooden sailing warship any faster today than two centuries ago, because of the basic nature of the construction process.

If starships really could be built in a very short time, an obvious question would then arise: why is Starfleet short of ships, and using old ones? If it only takes half a year to churn out an Intrepid, Starfleet should by all rights already have a thousand of them, and zero Mirandas.

If, OTOH, the technology dictates slow and painstaking construction, then it would be worthwhile to adopt a culture of nurturing one's old ships for as long as possible. It's difficult to say what the breaking point would be: should a construction time of two years favor constant newbuilding or sustaining of existing assets? But we know that Starfleet does favor sustaining of existing assets, so the higher our guesstimate for the construction time, the better.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CaptainKirkFan]

While not canon the TNG Technical Manual and the novels say that work began on the Galaxy Class in 2343 and that the first ship of the class (the USS Galaxy) was not launched until 2357.

Doesn't that also include the time designing the class and field testing every component?

 

[shatastrophic]

IMO in DS9, those Miranda's were not that old. I also agree that it could take a couple of years to build a starship. The construction is one thing, but testing is another.