Spoilers 31st/32nd Century Ships Revealed

[Timo]

We know there was at least one Excalibur that wasn't a 1664 in the 24th century, so even if the next Excalibur after that was NCC-1664-A (and not, as in the novels, NCC-26517-A), that would mean the Enterprise had already gotten up to D or E.

I wouldn't worry about keeping up with the Joneses: the Enterprises went on a decades-long hiatus between C and D, say.

But the idea of "honoring" NCC-1664 after there has already been an Excalibur that did not "honor" the earlier one is the intriguing bit. Today, "honoring" is done by naming - but one ship named USS Hornswoggle may honor the 19th century sea captain, while another ship of the very same name may honor the captain and his grandson (even if the offspring didn't shine quite as brightly), and a third one the grandson only (since the old man was a slave-whipping bastard or had the wrong political opinion on the Belgian Question), this being specified in the dedication plaque or other "background material" only. Quite possibly something NCC-1664 did was considered Good only in a century of retrospect, having originally been Humdrum or even Objectionable.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Markonian]

The Kirk-subclass of the Constitution class. I love it.
Its size appears to match what Shipyards published, a length of 1400 meters.

It appears that the volume of the suspended bridge module matches the entire Enterprise-subclass Connie's volume.

 

[LazyReader]

32nd Century Ships to scale

 

[Markonian]

Thank you, that really puts things into perspective!

Once all those ships are playable in Star Trek Online, my 26th century Universe-class USS Excalibur-J will still be the biggest Starfleet ship.

Wow, think of all the amendments it'd take to make a Constitution that big

Lol, "amendments" to embiggen the "constitution".

 

[Tuskin38]

Wow, think of all the amendments it'd take to make a Constitution that big

It’s not a refit

 

[Deks]

With enough Dilithium around plus recrystallization techniques, why wholesale try to convert to a new propulsion method?

Because new (or rather already witnessed faster than Warp) propulsion methods and power sources (as seen in late 24th century) actually work and are (mostly) compatible with pre-existing SF hulls for the most part, not to mention the fact that switching to better power sources reduces your reliance on destructive mining for dilithium and generating antimatter in the first place and creates a far better source of power - and also reduces your chances of suffering through another potential Burn (as another person mentioned).

 

[Timo]

DIS writers already made it pretty clear through Book's expository lines that this isn't so: most if not all of the alternate methods are actually woefully inferior, being too expensive or risky or relying on resources that are even more difficult to come by than dilithium, if not all three at the same time. They look good on paper, or when introduced - but stormtroopers looked scary for the first three minutes of Star Wars, too...

And this is pretty consistent, since if those alternate methods actually were worth the while, everybody else would have been using them already, back when primitive humans and their vassals were toying with silly dilithium. We have yet to learn of a star empire that would not rely on dilithium, though. (No, we never learned that the Dominion would rely on it, but we never learned otherwise, either.)

Spore power is fine as long as you don't destroy the multiverse with it. But nobody knows of spore power, presumably because it's in everybody's interest to keep close watch over those who dabble in it, and to eliminate everybody who gets too close to that multiverse-terminating thing.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

Agreed. I think that the Burn showed the flaw in the methodology of not exploring further alternatives more, but I don't think it is bad writing either that they kept using dilithium. But, now, the Burn exposed a potentially fatal flaw and exploring alternatives would be appropriate.

Stamets and UFP as a whole in the 23rd century knew Dilithium was a finite resource and in the long run, (aka not sustainable).
We would need a pretty good explanation as to why alternative sources of power were not integrated after VOY returned (even though it brought back a trasure trove of technologies for UFP to work on - in both power generation and faster than Warp propulsion). A handwave of 'none of them panned out' (when we actually saw them in use over 800 years earlier) was pretty lazy or just plain decided to ignore most of VOY encounters and the fact that TNG UFP was already engaged in alternative methods of power generation and propulsion research.

Besides, the writers kept going back and forth between Warp and Dilithium.
Also, Quantum slipstream was mentioned (v2 which was reliant on Benamite crystals) by Booker, but benamite crystals are used inside the quantum matrix... it wasn't stated the matrix itself was used as a power source - so, if the primary source of power generation was M/AM via dilithium, why would Booker be able to use QS even if he had benamite crystals?

Dilithium helps regulate M/AM reactions... specifically for power generation (surpassing Fusion). FTL propulsion is a side-effect which is enabled due to resulting power generation.
Enter SB-19 from the Vulcans which made little sense...it was portrayed as a method of propulsion (similar to the spore drive), not a power source.

Warp as such doesn't need Dilithium and M/AM to run... as other power sources can power that too, but species which use different power sources typically don't use Warp as such it seems... they appear to use other FTL propulsion methods (which are usually faster).

We know the spores can both provide a power source and propulsion... but we were never told one is dependent on the other - so, again, SF could have at least transitioned to power cores which use Spores (but without using the propulsion component).

 

[Deks]

DIS writers already made it pretty clear through Book's expository lines that this isn't so: most if not all of the alternate methods are actually woefully inferior, being too expensive or risky or relying on resources that are even more difficult to come by than dilithium, if not all three at the same time. They look good on paper, or when introduced - but stormtroopers looked scary for the first three minutes of Star Wars, too...

And this is pretty consistent, since if those alternate methods actually were worth the while, everybody else would have been using them already, back when primitive humans and their vassals were toying with silly dilithium. We have yet to learn of a star empire that would not rely on dilithium, though. (No, we never learned that the Dominion would rely on it, but we never learned otherwise, either.)

Spore power is fine as long as you don't destroy the multiverse with it. But nobody knows of spore power, presumably because it's in everybody's interest to keep close watch over those who dabble in it, and to eliminate everybody who gets too close to that multiverse-terminating thing.

Timo Saloniemi

Bookers description of QS drive being useless without Benamite crystals is not really viable because VOY already had the ability to synthesize them in the 5th year of their journey... at the time though, it would have taken years to make more benamite crystals... and as I said, before, it makes no sense that this would continue to remain the case 800 years from then... besides, programmable matter was EVERYWHERE... programmable matter already allows you to make pretty much anything (actually, no, 24th century REPLICATORS already allow you to make pretty much anything).
Why couldn't programmable matter be programmed to make Benamite Crystals on demand? It would be a breeze by the 32nd century.

VOY managed to create a v2 of QS technology within 6 months of encountering QS technology with limited resources on board. And the whole UFP with over 150 member worlds assigning adaptive algorithms to research on how to synthesize benamite crystals in a fraction of the time wouldn't occur to them?
Come on... again, that's just lazy writing. SF would be ALL OVER that technology in late 24th century and the method for synthesizing new benamite crystals in a fraction of the time would have likely been perfected by the time PICARD series events started taking place and ships would have used QS v2 for propulsion already by then.

But, Benamite Crystals aren't necessarily used as a power source... in fact, VOY still relied on M/AM and dilithium when it used QS v2 and was able to use QS v1 without benamite crystals for an hour.

So, QS has little (or nothing) to do with power generation. Its a method of propulsion. Unless addition of Benamite Crystals changed this... but again, synthesizing them in years is still better than having to rely on finite mines to mine them... and any method of synthesizing a compound ends up being inevitably improve extremely shortly after its first invented.
What VOY had was a prototype at best... give SF a year or two (heck, a decade if you must) and it would have a far superior version... but Trek writers obviously chose to discard that.

 

[Timo]

Stamets and UFP as a whole in the 23rd century knew Dilithium was a finite resource and in the long run, (aka not sustainable).

And they were wrong. It seems to be a simple matter of expanding to those places that have dilithium, and if the peanut-gallery Federation of the 2250s still had enough to run its ships till the foreseeable future, bigger outfits would only have more.

Until they ran out - but So'kal's little nursery of a planet was considered a "dilithium nursery", too, establishing that the material is actually a renewable resource after all. Folks since the time of DIS S1-2 may have been aware of the existence of such things, just not of their whereabouts. Now that at least one has been found, dilithium will not only last a bit longer again: the secret of making more may be uncovered.

This assuming that other, smaller nurseries haven't been discovered earlier on, and the secret nevertheless eludes UFP scientists. But we don't hear of such a thing.

We would need a pretty good explanation as to why alternative sources of power were not integrated after VOY returned

And we got a pretty comprehensive one, in "That Hope Is You pt I". Shortcuts are unreliable, or then contested. Many wonderdrives rely on unobtainium, and the implication of Book's dismissal of trilithium seems to be that people have tried out a whole range of methods that end up blowing their ships to pieces more often than not. What about this is not good enough?

A handwave of 'none of them panned out' (when we actually saw them in use over 800 years earlier) was pretty lazy

The fuck it was. Book's lines featured a ton of references to Trek lore, covering all the bases with a couple of examples.

Besides, the writers kept going back and forth between Warp and Dilithium.

What does that mean?

Dilithium helps regulate M/AM reactions... specifically for power generation (surpassing Fusion). FTL propulsion is a side-effect which is enabled due to resulting power generation.

Or then all power generated without dilithium is useless in tickling the vertenium cortenide coils to warp. Nothing so far said would dispute that interpretation.

Warp as such doesn't need Dilithium and M/AM to run...

As far as we can tell, it does. That is, it absolutely needs dilithium, even if the power itself comes from busy gerbils. We might have thought otherwise before, based on a number of incomplete descriptions of how warp works, but now we know better.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[137th Gebirg]

Stamets and UFP as a whole in the 23rd century knew Dilithium was a finite resource and in the long run, (aka not sustainable).

People seem to have forgotten Scotty's method of recrystalizing dilithium using nuclear isotopes that was established as far back as TVH, a method that was said to have since been adapted for all Federation starships by the TNG era in Sternbach's/Okuda's Technical Manual (IIRC). Granted, this event happened after Stamets' time and neither he nor the Federation could have anticipated that innovation at the time they aired such a sentiment of sustainability. After the tech was placed in all ships, it made dilithium 100% sustainable and "no longer a thing" for dramatic storytelling. Now, if "The Burn" destroyed the ability for dilithium to recrystalize, then that might be a problem. However, this was never mentioned on-screen, as I'm pretty sure the DSC writers forgot about that small, yet critical, detail in Trek historical lore.

Therefore, end of problem. The whole dilithium-goes-boom thing was silly anyway, IMO, and I was quite disappointed at how it was handled.

 

[Timo]

The ability to recrystallize was another of those things neatly and not-lazily covered in Book's little outburst...

Book had a recrystallizer aboard his ship, but it was broken in the incident with the Angel Suit. Apparently, having one helps, but not all that much. The implication being, you only stretch out the useful lifespan of a crystal to a finite degree, not to infinity.

How come this thing is being discussed as if the episodes themselves never happened?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

The ability to recrystallize was another of those things neatly and not-lazily covered in Book's little outburst...

Book had a recrystallizer aboard his ship, but it was broken in the incident with the Angel Suit. Apparently, having one helps, but not all that much. The implication being, you only stretch out the useful lifespan of a crystal to a finite degree, not to infinity.

How come this thing is being discussed as if the episodes themselves never happened?

Timo Saloniemi

Here's my problem with the episode and explanation in question: programmable matter. It was pervasive throughout the galaxy despite the Burn and apparently on par with 24th century replication technology that it could make ANYTHING... except that it would not be based on energy to matter conversion and extremely perfected process of shaping matter to any other known form.

Booker should have been able to repair his recrystalization technology pretty much instantly with programmable matter: I mean, considering all the fancy things it does on board in a fraction of the time, you would think repairing the ships systems would have been seen as a priority and more than doable.

On top of that, MAKING new dilithium crystals from scratch using programmable matter would also technically be possible by that time frame... or at the very least, making benamite crystals with programmable matter would have been more than possible by the 32nd century in a few seconds at most (considering that they CAN be made synthetically).

Bookers outburst had merit as such and is technically valid, but it was also simulatanously idiotic because of existence of programmable matter.
Now, if it was said his ship doesn't have programmable matter capable of that, it would have been different, but we know this wasn't the case... therefore, it doesn't really work.

As for dilithium recrystalization tech being able to extend the use of a crystal to a finite point and not infinity... I agree, but by the 32nd century, again, the technology would have undergone massive improvements and efficiency modifications to the point where even usage of proverbial dilithium 'chips' would have been able to sustain Booker's M/AM core for incredibly LONG periods of time... and also, even if a Starship was previously using dilithium, over time, how much dilithium each ship has to use would diminish over time due to inevitable efficiency improvements... coupled with the fact that upon the ship being decommissioned, its dilithium would be moved onto another vessel.

Also, a UFP the size of 350 planets wouldn't really be huge to the point where all known sources of Dilithium would have been exhausted.
And, if UFP was able ot make war casualty projections as far back as DS9, they would have been able to make reasonable extrapolations that they would encounter severe dilithium shortages over time... and its not like UFP was not interested in new power sources.
We saw on both TNG and VOY that creating new power sources not reliant on dilithium and M/AM would have been of great use to UFP... which is why it doesn't make sense that none of the technologies which VOY brought back from the D.Q. never worked out (especially because they were portrayed as fully functioning on other species ships... and to be honest, even if they were not viable on existing designs, SF comes out with new Starship designs frequently... so again, by the early/mid 25th century, I could see the fleet transitioning to something new in terms of a power source and faster than Warp propulsion - heck the fact SF was able to build a whole fleet worth of 1 starship designs by PICARD series shows that SF may have in fact done something like that).

 

[Timo]

I don't see progress happening as a thing. I mean, it hasn't happened yet, so why would it ever happen?

It would be different if only one set of eggheads were dreaming up these things, starting with A and proceeding to B. Or if the Joneses were the only competition. But in Trek, it's also the Robinsons and Browns, and the former were at it two thousand years already, the latter fifty thousand. And the UFP assimilates them all.

Thinking forward a thousand years isn't really a plausible human thing, either. Or alien thing, as long as all the aliens are humans with specific and pronounced faults. All 350 member cultures of them, with a thousand planets per member as in TOS, or perhaps more now that the ships are a tad faster and more economical and whatnot...

...I mean, they might be. But they also might not. Here on Earth, propulsion at sea did not make progress in a thousand years, and didn't pick up speed when science or industrialization or computer modeling kicked in, either. And thus probably never will. (Sail propulsion, that is - and current alternatives to it are our equivalent to quantum slipstream, shortsighted and destructive and inefficient to the extreme.)

But assuming they are better, no doubt they will be exploited to the max, meaning they still burn just as much dilithium as their predecessor designs.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

I had thought that programmable matter just rearranged the form of an item. It is not a replicator device. Even if it were, some things like Dilithium still might not be replicable.

 

[Tuskin38]

It is not a replicator device.

Well it created a device for Tilly from scratch.

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

Obviously the programable matter just re-arranges itself into tiny little replicator bots.

 

[fireproof78]

Obviously the programable matter just re-arranges itself into tiny little replicator bots.

Oh, no. Now we're getting replicators as the bad guys next season!

 

[Deks]

Obviously the programable matter just re-arranges itself into tiny little replicator bots.

Not quite. Its matter which can be programmed to shape itself into whatever structure is necessary or we have data on exact composition of (so similar to nanotechnology but on a different scale)... and already by the 24th century, sensors were accurate to the subatomic... so when it comes to exactness, even 24th century replicators which convert energy into matter could easily produce anything (as long as you had the power to do so and enough information on it - the computer can also extrapolate from incomplete data too pretty much instantly).

Hence why programmable matter should be able to make itself into anything the UFP probably has on record and has understood well (at least things it had on record for the past 930 years - some newly encountered technology might be difficult to understand at first, but for 32nd century tech, I wouldn't give it more than a few hours or days until it understood its exact composition what with all the knowledge, technology and automation it has) ... dilithium and benamite crystals included... and by the 32nd century, there would virtually be no limit to how much you could make practically instantly because the processes which use dilithium and M/AM would be perfected to such a degree where they would need little to run on, so every ship would have adequate amount of programmable matter (with ability to make more) so it can make whatever is needed in adequate amounts.
The programmable matter can be literally stored throughout the entire ship in every nook and cranny.

 

[Timo]

I'm not sure why stuff that rearranges it into a couple of observable gadgets should be likened to replicators. I can't make edible sandwiches out of Lego bricks, even though Lego is great for building an automated sandwich-making machine that just requires bread and butter and ham and cheese as input. And programmable matter looks pretty much like a big helping of small Lego bricks. Not necessarily atomic or subatomic, though (dialogue makes mention of molecules).

None of the heroes treat programmable matter as equal or superior to replicators specifically - probably because they never saw a replicator in their lives. But the audience can tell the matter can produce clumsy 2250s transtators when in expert hands, which does not yet a replicator make...

Programmable matter isn't particularly interesting, though, because we already know of replicators, and there is no indication that replicators would not be available in the 32nd century, or be unable to make X, for any value of X. It's just that there are always excuses, so that making Y is not possible in the current dramatic situation. And it's implicit that replicating dilithium is one of those things that doesn't pay off, not in the 24th century and presumably not in the 32nd, either.

Timo Saloniemi