What ships SHOULD they have used in the Dominion War?

I'm thinking 1% of UFP might be more likely to be part of SF given its an attractive option for exploring space with trained people who can keep you safe (such safeguards aren't always present on civilian ships who mostly DO rely on SF to keep them safe).
Having 1% of UFP citizens in SF would equate to 10 billion individuals.
But, even with only say 5 billion people in SF, those are quite the fun numbers to work with, so let's explore that:

This is why SF can EASILY have at least over 70 000 ships in active service in the late 24th century... and that's a fairly small number actually, considering the fact that even if you had 1200 SF officers [not including civilians] per starship, it would mean almost 90 million people working on starships alone leading up to USS VOY (and those are inflated numbers actually given the fact not every ship has the population of a Galaxy class [which in itself has a mixture of SF officers and families] - most starships would have half that population size I think in terms of SF officers).

74656 starships leading up to VOY seems fairly small too... given limitations of Warp drive and long journey times contrasted to 8000 ly's of space.

Starbases such as spacedock 1 could house a large contingent of people.
It was said by some sources that Spacedock 1 is capable of housing 60 000 SF officers and 40 000 civilians (but otherwise could house about 150 000 people in total).

We've seen that DS9 had a much smaller number of SF officers onboard - over 900 (but I'd round it up to 1000 for something that size).

Even if we assume one spacedock mushroop type starbase per UFP member planet... that's at least about 150 starbases and 9 million SF officers.
That's quite literally nothing (and don't think it would be good enough of a coverage for something the size of UFP which would in turn have a very large fleet).

Double up the number of starbases (at least 2 per UFP major solar system), and that number increases to 18 million SF officers.
And if we quadruple the number of starbases from say 150 to 600 - 3 per each UFP major species home system, and extra 3 in various nearby sectors equals 36 million SF officers on Mushroom type starbases throughout UFP space alone (we could even increase that 1000 mushroom type starbases for example and the numbers would only increase to 60 million SF officers on those bases).

In fairness, given how huge UFP is (stretches across 8000 Ly's and has over 150 member planets in late 24th century - aka, home systems of Warp capable species with fully developed infrastructure for ship building, etc - I would imagine that each UFP member planet home system like SOL would have similar SF presence and ship building capabilities around the main planet of origin after joining UFP, and possibly another planet like Mars that would have something akin to Utopia Planitia in the same star system).
We know that both Earth and Mars have a lot of ship construction facilities (aka drydocks) and support stations.
SF could easily assign 10 drydocks per UFP solar system to build a given class of ships... and they could easily build 1500 ships of the same class in a short span of time (say a month or less - it takes less time to build a ship than it would to design one [spend time on a drawing board]).

As such, UFP only building 12 Galaxy class ships never made sense to me. Given the size of UFP, the fact we're talking about fully developed member planets and SF presence having to be in each and every one of them with adequate starbases and ship construction facilities similar to SOL, not to mention highly advanced automation, replicators/transporters and a whole bunch of other technology that makes ship construction extremely easy (or at least vastly simplified).

So, even with UFP having lets say 74656 ships leading up to VOY and each ship having 1200 people (which is an inflated figure), it would give us about 90 million SF officers on Starships in 2371, with another 36 odd million on major starbases throughout UFP space.

That's only 126 million SF officers on all UFP ships and major starbases (not counting planets).

Lets say that UFP member planets have each about 1 million SF personnell... that would be at least 150 million SF personnell stationed on planets.

Even if we add 1000 outposts the size of DS9 that can each have about 1000 SF officers onboard, that would equate to only 1 million SF personnell right there. If you recall, DS9 at the start of the show was considered an outpost (it became a starbase later on after SF upgraded it heavily between S3 and 4).

So, now we have 150 million (stationed on planets), 90 million (on ships), 36 million (on starbases), 1 million (on outposts), totaling to about 277 million SF personnel (those are tiny numbers compared to the size of UFP).

If we add separate number of personnell stationed on drydocks (and presuming SF has at least 300 drydocks in each UFP member planet solar system), even with packing 300 people per drydock, you get an extra 13.5 million people assigned to ship construction across the entire UFP space (and lets be fair, with automation, you wouldn't be doing assembly of ships manually or welding stuff... thats what robots/automation would be doing).

So that's 295 million people - again, really tiny number compared to the size of UFP.

Side Note: SF could easily have 1.8664 million starships and SF personnell count would increase to 2.239 billion on starships alone... totaling to about 3.425 billion people (and we're still having just under 1.6 billion personnell to go to reach 5 billion people in SF).

If we increase the amount of SF personnell on planets from 1 million to 10 million per planet... that would give us at least 1.5 billion SF officers for all UFP member planets.

Ok... so with 74656 ships, 1000 large starbases, 1000 outposts, 150 member planets, and personnell for starship construction... would give us about 1.664 billion people in SF in 2371 (that might be a bit more sensible number - but its still nowhere near 5 billion mark).

Fun fact, if we actually allow SF to have 1.8664 million ships (with each vessel having 1200 officers - crewmen, ensigns, LT's, cmmdr's, etc), that would be 2.239 billion people on ships alone and the 'total' figure go up to 3.813 billion (that's a lot closer to 0.5% of people from UFP being in SF).

Would it be possible for SF to have 1.8664 million ships? Of course.
Going back to figures of having 300 drydocks per solar system, and taking a month or so to construct a ship (with automation it would likely be faster than this, but I'll make allowances for 1 month tops for something the size of galaxy class)... SF could build 45000 ships in 1 month throughout UFP.
If the shipyards are working for a full year, they would produce 540 000 ships. In 3 years, SF would be able to build 1.62 million ships (and 1.94 million ships in 3 years and 6 months).

Automation and technology can construct ships extremely fast (especially with transporters, replicators, tractor beams antigrav and forcefield tech) and with the process of technical efficiency (doing more with less), making new ships with less material (and maintaining them) would be perfectly doable (similarly SF would be able to upgrade older ship designs by disassembling their older hw and hull and recombining new materials/hw with replicators and put them into place).

Since most ships in UFP come with high levels of automation, would be capable of self-repair and self maintenance, servicing ships in drydocks every 4 years or so (if something can't be done in the field) would be doable.

I'd actually decrease the amount of SF officers on planets from say 10 million to say 6 million.
That way, you can have 600 million extra people on more starbases (about 8000 major mushroom type starbases each with 60 000 SF officers) and 120 000 outposts (each with 1000 SF officers).

 

You can have 1.8 million SF ships with each having 1200 people on board and the number of SF personnell on ships reaching 2.16 billion people in total.
The rest could be spread out across planets, starbases, etc... only counting 150 member planets (and UFP has over 150 member planets during late 24th century).

Check out my post with some numbers.
Arguably... I'd increase the number of starbases and outposts by several times and slightly reduce the amount of SF officers on planets from 10 million per member planet to say 8 million.

That leaves about 300 million extra SF officers for about double the amount of additional starbases and outposts.
Heck, we can increase that amount by another double... so, spreading about 600 million people to about 8000 major starbases (60 000 Sf offciers per each) and about 120 000 outposts (each having about 1000 SF personnell).

 

I have mentioned that I can imagine that Starfleet may have come to a point between the TOS movies and TNG where they increased the size of the fleet in a process where there basically only decommission ships that cannot continue to serve, but also replace lost ships with a given role, and build ships for that role, in a newer design.

In the TNG tech manual Rick Sternbach identified at least 6 roles, Explorer Cruiser, Cargo Carrier, Tanker, Surveyor and Scout. So assuming these 6 roles, if ships from multiple generations are still filling those roles then the number of classes we see onscreen could work, even if it seems like the money-saving measure that the designers have said it was.

For example The Constellation has a similar layout to some of the Excelsior concepts and the Cheyenne. I don't know what a four-nacelled ship would do in terms of role, but it could be a pattern.

The Oberth has a similar layout to the Springfield, not to mention the 3-nacelled Excelsior model that apparently did not get show onscreen in DS9. (I would argue that this is a significant missed opportunity and Springfield-class ships used in places where Oberth-class ships were used would have been helpful to understanding plot of some TNG episodes).

Even if the Borg did know too much about the Galaxy-family of ship classes from Captain Picard, and yet kept the Galaxy and Nebula because they were too big to retire, it seems strange that Starfleet would not still have more of those.

So having more ships classes could work, but I think that the Dominion War scenes would have benefited from showing more of the designs they already had. The issue with that is that new Freedom, Niagara, Challenger, Springfield, Cheyenne and New Orleans ship models would have to be made. We know that they were not averse to taking model kits and combing parts, so at least the last 4 of my list could have been re-made. The DS9 effects teams had even figured out how to use UV responsive paint to get models to look lit without internal lighting. It seems like even if a model had to be built and then only used as CGI reference, including these classes should not have been hard.

 

I really have no issues with a "Big Fleet" per say. In terms of raw # of ships. Hell, I can accept a StarFleet with literally Billions of ships in total.

But having that many "Different Models/Types/Classes" is a logistical nightmare.
That's why I stated the limits on the # of "Different Models/Classes/Types/Roles" per major Division.

It makes logistics far more manageable than STO where everybody gets their flavor of the moment with literally thousands of classes in co-existence.

In my head canon @ the start of the 26th century:
- By 2501, the UFP has 224 Members & 74,648 Affliates with a domain of 32,767 ly³ for Member Worlds, and much MUCH more when you count Affiliates.
- There are 9,007,199,254,740,992 ~= 9 Quadrillion Federation citizens
- That makes the UFP a KS (Kardashev-Sagan) Scale =1.5 level society
- This allocates about 40,210,710,958,666 ~= 40.210 Trillion Citizens per Member Species with constant expansion
- Post Dominion War; there was a huge Population Boom by all citizenry due to replenishing lost family members.
- Most Earth sized planet has their population capped to 1 Trillion (1,000,000,000,000) due to having too many eggs in one basket along with not over using the land and taking away from natures by converting it into city.
- The cap can be shrunk if the planet is too small to sustain the planets supporting capacity resource wise.

 

A trillion Earthlings does not work with what we saw on the show. Where is everybody?

 

There aren't 1 trillion Earthlings.
There are 1 trillion UFP citizens (comprised of over 150 member planets of different species by the late 24th century).

 

Add in however many colonies and outposts not yet considered fully self-governing...?

 

Most people aren't sitting there, posing for the camera. You see what the director wants you to see.

Who said the Trillion Humans were all on Earth?
There's a population cap for a planet, but not everybody on that planet has to be from the same species.

Everybody is spread out across the UFP territory and mixed in with other member species.

This allows for better redundancy & cultural melting pot.

Earth has ALOT more surface area that isn't populated and needs people there.

There are easily over 1 Trillion Humans in my head cannon, WELL over 1 Trillion.

But Planetary Population Caps & Cultural integration means not all citizens of Earth are human.

A high percentage of the UFP citizens on Earth aren't even Human anymore, they're member races of the UFP who originate from other parts of the UFP.

Just look at ST:Picard and the Species diversity they showed near StarFleet HQ, just walking around, living their daily lives.

e.g. Andorians love the cold climate, Earth has plenty of Cold territories that Andorians would love to populate where most Humans don't prefer.
Alaska, Northern Canada, Siberia, etc.

Plenty of Humid Jungle Biomes for some Cardassians to live in on Earth.

etc.

 

I’m inquiring about the trillion Earthlings, not humans. You’re suggesting there are a trillion people on Earth, yes? That doesn’t work with the lights on the planet seen from space.

Definitely more aliens. I see Earth as maybe 3/4 or 2/3 human by the 24th Century, given its status as capital.

TMP suggests the opposite. Less sprawl, more ecological reclamation. Roddenberry suggested there would be more people living beneath the surface and in space.

Is your Earth Coruscant? Or worse, a giant strip mall, the thinnest film of concrete and monotony covering the globe?

That’s a fascinating concept, larger population densities of aliens on different parts of Earth. Same with humans on alien worlds. Little Vulcan outside of Phoenix, Arizona. New Anchorage on Andor.

 

I very much doubt it. Particularly given that the largest figure given in canon for Earth's population is only nine billion.

I would consider it far more likely that the trillion (even if qualified as Human) referred to the total population within the Federation as a whole. Memory Beta lists a more specific figure of 985 billion but gives no citation so the veracity and timing of that figure cannot be assessed.

 

Yes, but that would result in an ecological disaster.
Nothing says you cannot have say 9 billion (or 10 billion) humans on Earth with a smaller environmental footprint than what we have today (it can definitely be done - without packing people like sardines on top of that)... it just takes better planning and upgrading methods of production, removal of unnecessary (capitalist) practices that are a waste of resources, etc. (aka, use of science and technology to adequately provide everyone with what they need with minimal environmental impact).

We can easily reduce our environmental footprint (and similarly resource expenditure) today with fully automated vertical farms by 10x at least - ideally, we would want to return all of this space (or most of it) back to nature and rewild it (restore lost biodiversity).

I don't think we would want to turn Earth into Corruscant or eradicate most of its flora and fauna... that would be less than desirable.

However, as technology and science improve, you can probably increase the population on the planet WITHOUT increasing your footprint.

But for now, we can cap the planet to say 10 billion within the scope of Trek.

In the mid 25th century perhaps, but probably not before then.

The maximum sustained growth of human populations would be about 10x increase every 100 years.
Assuming, for example in Trek there were about 8 billion humans remaining after WWIII in 2063, of which say 1-2 billion left Earth to populate other planets... even with a steady/uninterrupted rate of migration (which probably wouldn't have happened until AFTER UFP was founded - circa 2161 [because prior to this Earth just didn't have many colony ships going out to be fair unless it was in their own solar system and there's a limit to how many people those ships can transport - plus relatively long travel times] - that would mean about steady Earth population of around 8-9 billion, and 10-20 billion humans living off world on various colonies by 2261, and 100-200 billion humans living off Earth by 2361... even if we double this figure and say that roughly 4 billion Humans left Earth at one point or another (who would have been replaced of course by other alien species from UFP coming to live on Earth)... you max out to about 400 billion Humans living off world by 2361.

You can get of course get 4 Trillion Humans living off Earth by 2461 (second half of 25th century) - assuming continued rates of uninterrupted reproduction (but even with 22nd century medicine, it wouldn't be much of an issue).

Early migration would have been slow to say the least given what we know of what happened in the 22nd century.

At least a certain % of Earth's population even by the mid 23rd century would already have various aliens living there.
If we assume 10 billion sentient individuals on Earth by that time (and a desire to keep the population numbers in that range so as to not occupy too much space on the planet), and assuming about 2 billion humans left already by that point... then about 20% of Earth's population would be comprised of UFP alien species by 2261.

Of course... but the % value will depend on the era you're talking about.
23rd century could have about 20% of Earth's population comprised of aliens. 40% by the 24th perhaps.

Arguably a proverbial handful just to fill the bacgkround for the camera... not anywhere close numbering to 150 different alien species.

There would have to be a limit on populations in those areas as you don't want to cause ecological disasters. But I'm guessing it can be safely done with evolving technology - heck, even today with the technology we have already, it would be fairly doable to populate those regions without having a high environmental footprint.

I suspect Cardassians wouldn't even consider moving to Earth en-mass soon after the Dominion War. Perhaps in the early 25th century, you'd start seeing more migrations (assuming of course Cardassia joined UFP by that point - but as we saw, you don't have to be a member planet of UFP to live there).

 

I could see a number of humans on Earth that would by today’s standards be disastrous (say 25 or 50 Billion) but have them both occupy less space and have a far lesser ecological footprint, allowing for human an animal enjoyment of the non-human dominated parts of the planet. 25 or 50 being conservative, even pastoral, figures in the numbers of people remote future technology could make very doable.

No landfills, air and sea pollutants, infinitesimally small farm animal grazing, and fewer roads in the hovercar and transporter future. Sky and earthscrapers jutting hundreds of stories (or more) into the sky and beneath the surface. Floating on and under the seas, in the skies. And cities in space as unique and diverse as those on the surface.

EDIT: oh, and then there’s the New Atlantis project Picard’s friend Louis was working on, raising a new continent, and the Atlantropa project from TMP novelization with the dammed Mediterranean. Could there also be flying cities on safe & clean antigravs?

 

They were already portraying that in ST:Picard.

Spoiler: Floating Arcology like building @ the Daystrom Institute in Okinawa.

If they already had these types of buildings floating on Anti-Grav, imagine how many larger Anti-Grav Arcology like facilities could easily exist over the water while using local water de-salinized & split into Hydrogen to be used for Fusion to power the Anti-Grav repulsors for the facility.

Imagine how many more people a planet can easily support with so many "Floating Arcologies" near the coast line that float above the shore line.

This isn't even counting the Stationary Arcology facilities on land.

 

Arcologies for the win. Was glad to see them in Star Trek.

 

I think we are getting away from the topic.

 

How big do you think those were? I thought they were smaller, floating Daystrom Institute labs.

There could be huge cities floating on the water like ships, no antigravs necessary. Could you imagine future, say, Athens with the ancient city on the surface, an opulent subterranean level, a floating expansion on the Aegean, a level hovering in the sky above, and one in orbit above that as well? Is it all Athens?

It would be really cool I think if we saw new cities that were founded or rose to prominence after WWIII. I imagine most of BosWash and other megalopolises lost and refugees from radiation and whatnot settling far from current population centers/targets.

But yeah, it would be cool for some new cities out there. Triton City on the sea, Avalon in the sky, Khazad-dûm underground, what have you.

 

I forgot to ask what that hovering facility over Okinawa is for.

 

Fuck yeah.

 

I recall a book which displayed a design for a floating city. Using OTEC, I believe. Don't recall title or author, though.