Superships

[Magellan]

I was kinda wondering how everyone felt about Federation superships. More specifically the three classes which are always assumed to be above and beyond everything else. (and whether or not theyre a little fanboyish)

1. The Defiant - The ship is really small. I know that size isnt necessarily indicative of strength but in Trek terms total power output to the shield and phasers should play a pretty big role in determining how powerful a ship is. The Defiant never seemd to bad to me because it was supposed to be new and advanced and as far as I can remember the never really gave a really great direct comparison to other ships in a firefight. We know it fought an upgraded Excelsior to a draw but how powerful that would be compared to say a Galaxy class is uuclear. The basic Excelsior was like an 80 year old design by that point.

2. Enterprise E - The sovereign is always assumed to be the ultimate weapon of the feds but I always had some trouble buying it. Sure the ship is new but it isnt that new. Given that ship designs last 50-100 years in Trek they arent being made obsolete very fast but most fans believe the E-E to be multiple times as powerful as the E-D. The E-E was onnly about 7 years newer, and only has a fraction of the internal volume to boot. I guess I just feel that any weapon that could be mounted on the Sovereign class could probably be mounted on the much larger Galaxy as well. Not that a new hull couldnt have some advantages but to be head and shoulder above another recent, larger design?

3. Prometheus - I have a couple of the same issues with this ship. Personally, I think the MVAM is silly but thats just my preference. Again we have a much much smaller ship that really isnt that much newer than the Galaxy class but is depicted as being able to take on Nebulas and Romulan Warbirds with ease. How did the Feds manage to advance their weapon tech so quickly? And if they did why the heck are they still flying Mirandas?

 

[Timo]

1. The Defiant

Never had anything against her. Just against the idea that she'd be a supership...

She fought all right against most adversaries, and really triumphed against the wussy Cardassians who always were portrayed as underdogs. But just because the Defiant can kick the forked ass of a single Cardassian ship doesn't mean much, when the Enterprise-D was supposed to kick the ass of fifteen ships like that in "Chain of Command"!

2. Enterprise E

I'm not sure this ship was ever intended to fit in the same operational niche as the previous Enterprise. In the sense of Starfleet strategic thinking, I mean - not in the sense of Paramount/CBS logic. She looks quite unlike her preceding namesake, and quite a bit what the Excelsior class would look like if built of modern components.

The Galaxy did all right in the Dominion War, so perhaps she was always supposed to be a Starfleet super-battleship. OTOH, she also explored a lot, whereas the Excelsiors of the TNG era mostly did dull military work. Perhaps the E-E was optimized for "dull military work", too, then? Not as a supership, but more as the biggest and baddest ship Starfleet could afford to field in decisive numbers - a "workhorse" rather than a thoroughbred.

Since the ship did seem to sprout new armaments as time passed, we could argue that she at the very least wasn't a good supership to start with...

3. Prometheus

A failed experiment. 'Nuff said.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[C.E. Evans]

IMO, the Defiant-class isn't really all that powerful. It definitely is for a ship of its size, but I think its biggest asset are those pulse phaser cannons and the ablative armor--without 'em, though, it's probably comparable to a medium-sized starship but with better maneuverability.

Personally, I never saw the Sovereign-class as being some kind of bombad battleship, but as a more efficient version of the Galaxy-class. I think lessons learned from the Galaxy-class were incorporated into the Sovereign-class, but a lot of the improvements are also due to it simply being a newer design.

I do tend to think of the Prometheus-class as an experiment primarily to test the validity of the MVAM and improved automated systems. I can see the design eventually going into mass production, but without the MVAM feature.

 

[STR]

I look at the Sovereign as what you get when you take a Galaxy, strip out all the unnecessary stuff, and stick in an over-sized warp core so you can redline every offensive and defensive system on-board. Not a supership, but a more focused one which trades endurance (Galaxy's had a 10 year mission in deep space in mind, this thing would be more in the way of 6 months per outing), high maintenance (since it will be visiting a starbase once a year or more) and less research capabilities for firepower.

It comes down to roles, and despite a roughly similar size, the two ships are for completely different roles.
Galaxy=Deep space explorer and flying starbase. Is heavily armed out of the fact it will likely be out of range of any reinforcements, so it might have to fight its way out.

Sovereign=Ship of the Line. Its job is to show the flag during peace and bring the hurt during war. It is heavily armed to bring the pain, and will likely have reinforcements not too far away as it will generally stay closer to home than a Galaxy.

You may notice that the Enterprise-D was used a lot more like what my spec is for Sovereign. As an in-world rationalization, I suggest the Enterprise-D was not used like a typical Galaxy Class ship, which is why they made the 1701-E a Sovereign. A better suited ship for its intended role.

 

[blssdwlf]

Dunno - the only supership for its timeperiod I ever saw in Star Trek was the 3 engined, spinal mounted super cannon Enterprise-D in All Good Things.

The Defiant shows what a dedicated small warship could be and given how effective the pulse phasers were against the Jem'hadar, Starfleet should've mounted copies of pulse phasers on all their ships fighting the Dominion. Sadly they did not

The E-E fell victim to what plagued the E-D (lazy writers). It always seemed to be easily crippled or ineffective against the bad guy of the movie resulting in the crew using very desperate measures to win (except for in its first outing in First Contact.)

The Prometheus just seems to be a bad gimmick. It was fortunate that the pursuing Nebula didn't blow it apart as it was separating into the 3 piece attack mode. To some extent, I don't think any of the Fed pursuers intended to blast it to bits (yet.) They might as well just automate three individual ships and have them operate as a Task Group (like the ships that ended up chasing the Prometheus in the end)

 

[SWHouston]

Timo,
In your Post #2 Paragraph 3,
You said that the Prometheus was a failed experiment. From what I saw in Voy 4/14 Message in a Bottle, it appeared as though it did quite well, even with limited crew operations (The Dr's) inexperience included.
Is there some other reference of which you speak?

Have a good Day !
S.W.

 

[sojourner]

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=94334&highlight=prometheus

 

[T'Girl]

Galaxy's had a 10 year mission in deep space in mind, this thing would be more in the way of 6 months per outing)

There has to be a balance. If you give a ship more of something, say weapons, then you need to remove something else. The exception would be the Enterprise D, the ship that has everything simultaneously. But for that reason it's very large.

1. The Defiant -- is a weapons platform, I've alway seen the Defiant as a (comparatively) short range ship, limited duration, weeks not decades. Much less capacity as a galactic explorer, useless as a multi-role starship.

2. Enterprise E -- Kind of looks like a scaled up Voyager, perhaps reflecting a new warp field design philosophy. While more of a multi-role ship than the Defiant is, the Enterprise E like the Defiant is less of a starship than the Enterprise D. In exchange for it being a better fighting machine than the D, some of the D's capacities have been removed, the E is tougher, leaner and it's warp core doesn't go off-line every time someone spits at it.

3. Prometheus -- Last summer there was a thread where it was proposed that the Enterprise D should have had two or three Defiants docked to it's hull in case of combat situations, this is what the Prometheus is. Of the three ships being discussed it is the closest, in terms of combat ability, to being a supership. Saying that it should just be three ships operating independently is the same old argument that the Enterprise D should have had a warp engine attached to it's saucier so it could operate independently of the battle section.

What the Prometheus is is a starship with three battle sections, in comparison to the Enterprise D's one. In it's joined configuration, unlike most starships, it's weapons and shields are powered by not one but by three independent warp cores. It possesses six warp engines, for battle field redundancy. Triple the torpedo launchers, triple the sensors, triple the life support. It makes sense that in the docked configuration the systems would be able to interconnect.

The Prometheus would be superior for commerce raiding, while the two big cruiser sections keep the escorts busy, the smaller frigate section destroys the freighters and transports.

Why not just send three ships in the first place? Because you can do the job with one. Prometheus is the super(war)ship.

 

[sojourner]

Sigh, looks like I need to post it here as well:


Engineer - "Admiral, I'd like to show you our latest in Multi-Vector Assault Mode"
Admiral - "Excellent! What have you got for me?"
Engineer - "Well, we came up with a new method that reduces cost, improves tactical options, and also increases peacetime functionality"
Admiral - "Wow! That's great! How does it work?"
Engineer - "Well, we start with 4 hull elements -"
Admiral - "Not 3 like the Promy? Now you have me excited!"
Engineer - " - um, yessir. Anyway, we build them out as fully capable independent fleet units that in peace time would be able to function purely on their own, similar to ships we have today"
Admiral - "Intriguing. Go on, go on"
Engineer - "Now this is the key part - during times of need these 4 units would form what we are calling a squad and would work together in fleet actions - "
Admiral - "Wait, this sounds familiar"
Engineer - " - much as our ships do currently"
Admiral - "OK, I think I understand how this works, but tell me, how does this differ from the Promy?"
Engineer - "Oh, sorry sir. I guess I didn't make that clear. These units don't interface into a single ship. They are in essence (and reality) 4 separate starships."
Admiral - "What!?!"
Engineer - "Yessir, from a practical standpoint we could not come up with a logical reason to have 3 ships interlock into 1. It compromised too many systems on the ships, complicated construction, and gave no tactical advantage that we could find."
Admiral - "..... . ."
Engineer - "Sir, what do you think? Sir?"
Admiral - "Get out of my office!!"

 

[The Badger]

... given how effective the pulse phasers were against the Jem'hadar, Starfleet should've mounted copies of pulse phasers on all their ships fighting the Dominion. Sadly they did not

That is a good idea, and I've been racking my brains as to why they didn't. From what we've seen the pulse phasers seem, perhaps for technical reasons, to be locked straight ahead of the Defiant. They cannot be independently aimed. As such they may only be suitable for small, fast, maneuverable vessels. You aim the ship at the target, not the guns.

 

[Mister_Atoz]

Though not a federation starship, I've never liked the Scimitar. That one just SCREAMS supership. It is bigger than the Sovereign Class, seems to be as fast and maneuverable and has three times the number of weapons PLUS it can fire while cloaked.

 

[Londo]

Defiant, its a bit over-powered and wasn't that supposed to be a problem with it at the beginning of its active use. The small size has obvious advantages in keeping the amount of ablative armor needed to a minimum and probably helps shield strength. I like the Defiant, starfleet needed a warship design.

Enterprise-E, Did starfleet need another large starship design? probably not, it would have made more sense if it was a second generation Galaxy class imo. However the threats in the trek universe have completely changed in the decade or so since the Galaxy class came out.
Im not sure whether this really holds up as we can assume Ent-E was built in 2372, the cold war with the dominion has been going on for more than a year and the klingons attack DS9 in that year but it takes many years to develop a starship class really the sovereign should be on the drawing board in the mid to late 2360's and are the discovery of the Borg and/or the return of Romulan activity enough to push Starfleet away from its scientific based fleet towards a war-fleet. The Borg are certainly an issue but the Defiant shows Starfleet was thinking small was the way for that issue.
It is possible that Starfleet has always been caught between the exploratory and combat sides (STVI shows this) and this may show itself in the development of two separate design lineages depending on the bureaucratic turf wars' current king of the hill. So converse to what I said about the Defiant, Im not sure starfleet needed Sovereigns at the point they were designed. I still quite like it tho

Prometheus, yes its silly. I think it was an experiment that started out quite reasonable and went off the rails, and probably came out vastly over budget.
It started as "U see what happened to the Ent-D when it crashed? That could have been avoided if the saucer could go to warp" "right a ship with two warp cores" "but the second core will hardly be used, is it justifiable?" "They can both fight at warp, call it Dual vector assault mode, it prevents a single ship optimizing their shields against attack from one direction" "Wouldn't that be even better from three angles?"
It just grew and no-one on the political side killed it before it could be made.

 

[SWHouston]

I have over the years (quite a few now) gotten SO tired of hearing...
"Uoops, you're bigger and badder than we are" !
What are these producers thinking, did they have a lapse in Hard Drive or something. We have encountered SO many good technologies, which somehow were just forgotten to be added to the designs of newer ships. Let's forget The Treaty of Algeron and tell the Romulans to shove it, and get some ships out there that are highly "competitive" !

I love the big classes (Galaxy/Excelsior/Nebula) which can hold from 9,000 to 15,000 people. But as far as I can remember, they've only used one Cargo Bay a couple of times for about Forty people (TNG 2/18 & 7/20) I don't understand why they continued to make such large vessels. Even with the Prometheus at 1.35 MMT, even it seems a LOT larger than is really needed.

 

[Gagarin]

The Defiant didn't make sense to me as a stand alone ship. Seems like they would have been more effective in squadrons - and each is relatively expendable.

 

[C.E. Evans]

The Defiant didn't make sense to me as a stand alone ship. Seems like they would have been more effective in squadrons...

This.

I really didn't buy into the idea that the Defiant could take on a Borg cube all by itself (it obviously couldn't in First Contact), but an entire taskforce of Defiant-class ships could be a different story, and that might have been what Starfleet originally intended for the design, IMO...

 

[Timo]

But Starfleet knows that "more of the same thing" is never a good approach for bringing down the Borg... A squadron would probably do no better than a single ship.

Unless we assume something like each pulse in the pulse phasers having a different, Borg-confounding frequency - and every ship in the squadron having different settings, too. I guess this would be treknologically possible.

You said that the Prometheus was a failed experiment. From what I saw in Voy 4/14 Message in a Bottle, it appeared as though it did quite well, even with limited crew operations (The Dr's) inexperience included.
Is there some other reference of which you speak?

Only the lack of evidence - that is, Starfleet doesn't seem to be trying to install this MVAM thing in any of its other starships, new or old... A fully equipped starship has been built and launched, supposedly indicating that her technologies are proven and working well enough that no partially equipped prototypes are needed any more - yet this production-ready design is not put into production AFAWK.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

The Dominion War writers failed to deliver in creating the very Federation battle-fleet Sisko talked about in S3.
If we've seen swarms of Defiant-class ships fighting in the war for example, there is a good possibility the casualties suffered by the Federation would not have been as high.
But who am I kidding here?
The writers were going for the DRAMA ... so whichever route would have been taken, the DW would have likely happened in the same manner.

 

[C.E. Evans]

But Starfleet knows that "more of the same thing" is never a good approach for bringing down the Borg... A squadron would probably do no better than a single ship.

Unless we assume something like each pulse in the pulse phasers having a different, Borg-confounding frequency - and every ship in the squadron having different settings, too. I guess this would be treknologically possible.

It's normally how Starfleet fights the Borg, by constantly rotating weapon frequencies.

The Dominion War writers failed to deliver in creating the very Federation battle-fleet Sisko talked about in S3.
If we've seen swarms of Defiant-class ships fighting in the war for example, there is a good possibility the casualties suffered by the Federation would not have been as high.
But who am I kidding here?
The writers were going for the DRAMA ... so whichever route would have been taken, the DW would have likely happened in the same manner.

The only thing I can think of is that Starfleet really didn't start mass-producing the Defiant-class until very late. There just wasn't very many of them. Maybe Defiant and Valiant were the only ones in service at the time...

 

[Timo]

The Dominion War writers failed to deliver in creating the very Federation battle-fleet Sisko talked about in S3.

Yet that was an anti-Borg fleet. It's uncertain if it would have been of any use against conventional enemies. Today, navies are floundering under the strain of scrapping their relatively modern Cold War gear which is useless for guarding national interests in a more fractured world; for example the Royal Navy's Type 23 frigates are lacking in everything needed of a modern British warship, even though they represented the best bang for buck in the nineties and in the next half a century foreseen in the nineties...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Gagarin]

for example the Royal Navy's Type 23 frigates are lacking in everything needed of a modern British warship, even though they represented the best bang for buck in the nineties and in the next half a century foreseen in the nineties...

Timo Saloniemi

And that right there is why I'm not an Enterprise-A/Constitution-class survivalist. It's of no surprise to me the ships were retired by 2300... and the Enterprise-A was NOT an old ship, because Scotty says 'new ship', 'don't build them like they used to', and it's on it's 'shakedown cruise'. Anyway, not to derail... =)


The Defiant was way manueverable in combat. Visually a swarm of Defiants would have been very interesting VFX, and I think in-universe it would have made sense - The Borg would find it hard to adapt from the crazy attack vectors and the changing weapon frequencies. And they're small. Defiant-type ships would be perfect to station uncrewed until needed and then powered up to intercept threats when needed. Like on DS9. Imagine instead of Runabout of the week there were 4 Defiant starships.

Then it would be Defiant-of-the-week, alas...