Delta Quadrant Technology

[All Seeing Eye]

A bit like the Borg, then. But probably no existing Starfleet vessel could really carry all those weapon types simultaneously; the Feds would have to start building giant cubeships in order to mount all the goodies at the same time...

Timo Saloniemi

I would have to disagree.

The Voyager crew was able to implement the ablative armour generators and the Transphasic torpdeoes into Voyager within mere hours or days without the need to build a new launcher and they're just a tiny ship. They even managed to improve sensors using Borg technology and also had Borg systems they left in the ship to improve efficiency.
A new ship built from scratch and predesigned could easily implement the armour generators and torpedoes into it more effectively.
Each Torpedo launcher could be made capable of firing either Photon Torpedoes, Quantum Torpedoes or Transphasic Torpedoes at the touch of a button.
Along with the phaser arrays the newly built vessel would really only require maybe two phased polaron beam emitters and two dampening weapon emitters allowing for both a fore and aft firing capability.
The Dominion Bug ships managed fine with just one forward facing beam weapon and the Breen only ever required a single shot of the dampening weapon.

As already mentioned above Voyager was even able to implement the isokinetic cannon. Somehow they found the room to build it.

So it would be quite easy to build a new Federation vessel designed to utilise several different weapons.

Let's look at the deflector dish also, it's capable of creating multitudes of different beams and particles. With a new design of defelctor dish it could be made to have the capability of firing phased polaron beams and the dampening weapon.
These extra weapons could prove useful and valuable should the Phasers and Photon torpedoes prove useless.

You could fire phasers and photons/quantums at a ship and if they were ineffective it's a simple case of firing the other backup weapons to see if they are more effective which they likely would be.

 

[Bertie]

Of course, following this line of thought to its conclusion, about every other episode of TOS left our heroes in possession of (or at least access to) some incredibly advanced piece of tech that ought to have led to major scientific revolutions...if only the rules of episodic television would allow such a thing .

 

[Wes-Cutting]

Again the rest button of doom comes into play when looking at Voyager.
Just read my signature...

 

[Timo]

To be sure, transphasic torpedoes and Batman armor were technologies specifically chosen by the future Admiral Janeway because they could be quickly implemented on a starship stranded in the Delta Quadrant. They were refined products, specifically designed to be fitted onto a Starfleet vessel. The same would not be true of most of the other technologies encountered by our heroes.

And the "let's carry every sort of weapon in case the enemy is vulnerable to a specific sort" approach would mean that the ship might have just one of each type of gun, never reaching the "critical mass" needed for effectively employing that kind of gun. Probably Starfleet would pick and choose, and wouldn't for example fit three different kinds of transwarp drive on a single vessel.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[All Seeing Eye]

To be sure, transphasic torpedoes and Batman armor were technologies specifically chosen by the future Admiral Janeway because they could be quickly implemented on a starship stranded in the Delta Quadrant. They were refined products, specifically designed to be fitted onto a Starfleet vessel. The same would not be true of most of the other technologies encountered by our heroes.

I really don't see why not, most of the technology was already implemented by Voyager. If Voyager could implement an Isokinetic cannon i'm sure there would be room for a couple of phased polaron beams and a couple of energy dampener weapons and we're really talking about building a new ship from scratch so it'd be even easier.

And the "let's carry every sort of weapon in case the enemy is vulnerable to a specific sort" approach would mean that the ship might have just one of each type of gun, never reaching the "critical mass" needed for effectively employing that kind of gun.

If a tiny Dominion Bug ship can employ a Phased Polaron beam and a tiny Breen warship can employ a energy dampening weapon i'm sure a Federation Starship built from scratch would be capable of finding somewhere to fit them in.

Probably Starfleet would pick and choose, and wouldn't for example fit three different kinds of transwarp drive on a single vessel.

Timo Saloniemi

Who said anything about 3 different transwarps?? the new ship would really only need standard warp drive and Slipstream which Voyager alone managed to accomplish (and keep in mind the Slipstream as 7of9 stated was already similar to Borg Transwarp). Imagine what Starfleet would accomplish fitting these into a new ship.

The fact of the matter is that Starfleet could quite easily build a ship incorporating all this technology, the problem is that (TV wise and entertainment wise)the Federation would become the most powerful "empire" in known space and the Klingons and Dominion etc would be possibly decades even centuries behind.

It would be very very short sighted of the Federation to not implement all this technology. We've seen many times how ineffective Federation weaponry (Phasers and Photons/Quantums) is against other species. If the Federation bumps into a hostile race that's more powerful they wont have time to implement the new technologies by then and they will likely get wiped out.
It's idiotic to ignore the new tech and stick with what they currently have.