Battle Ship With No Crew

[All Seeing Eye]

I was thinking recently about future aircraft of the world and how in order to have them go faster they would need to become unmanned and controlled by a computer like in the film Stealth.
Then I began thinking about this in Star Trek and how there was the Cardassian Dreadnought missile.

So then I thought well it would make sense that if you're going to war you don't want to risk peoples lives and you don't want to waste any space by having a bridge and crew quarters etc etc
For every room you have less on-board that's space for a shield emitter, a torpedo launcher, a phaser emitter or a power generated.

You could basically build the most powerful warship ever, more powerful than any ship ever constructed by Starfleet.

From what I gather though the Federation seems to be unable to create a decent AI. Data seems to be a very unique piece of technology and is the result of centuries of work from the Soong family. If you recall work on AI/Androids/Data began way back in that episode of ENT.

Well this brings me to my question.

Do you think it might be possible to build a battle ship without a crew and completely controlled by Data? He would sit in a chair and plug his positronic neural net into the ships interface giving him control and command over every function on the ship.

In my opinion it would be no different than him sitting at a console, reading the read out and pushing buttons.
The connection to his neural net would be nothing more than an interface allowing him to give commands and working in conjunction with a ship computer. Since Data thinks faster and has faster reflexes than a mere Human and the interface plugs directly into his mind he could IMO have the capability to control the ship unlike a Human.

The ship could also comprise of jeffries tubes and a small main engineering giving room for emergency repair holograms to activate in-case of any ship damage.
I don't see how the ship would even receive damage anyway, it would be the most heavily armoured, armed and defended vessel built, more than a match for a crewed vessel.

I know Data is dead now but I'm speaking as though he were still alive or B4 becomes the new Data.

 

[Colonel Midnight]

Why would you need passageways? If the thing is unmanned, just make it as large as necessary, crammed full of the electronics/tech needed, and there you go.

Macabre aspects aside, all you would really need is Data's brain -- just pull it out of his head and plug it in for the ship's master CPU.

Best make sure the emotion chip is turned off first, though... otherwise he might get a bit weepy. Or worse, try to be humorous.

Cheers,
-CM-

 

[SpyOne]

Why would you need passageways? If the thing is unmanned, just make it as large as necessary, crammed full of the electronics/tech needed, and there you go.

Spoken like a man who has never done maintenance on his own vehicle.
You don't just need room for the engine under the hood, you need enough room for a mechanic to remove the starter if the starter breaks. (see footnote)
Starfleet tech needs care and feeding, too. How many times did we see Chief O'Brien taking apart some piece of the transporter. How often did we hear Worf talking about "calibrating the phasers". How many times did Scotty have to crawl into a crawlspace and adjust something in the middle of combat. If there was a way to adjust that from a panel somewhere, wouldn't he have done it?

Starfleet seems a little shy about automation, and I can't really blame them: the only time we've seen on screen an attempt at fully automating a ship, it killed a whole lot of people trying to prove how awesome it was. Of course, that episode was really about the pressures of high expectations and the perils of taking shortcuts, but ....
Starfleet does seem to endorse a similar approach to automation to the current US Army: anything too difficult, too dangerous, or too dull to be handled by humans is given to machines. But they also believe in keeping a person in the loop as much as possible: they could send unmanned probes to study everything, but they see advantages in having people do the study, both to the results of the study and to the people. People find serving in Starfleet rewarding, so Starfleet will always have a place for people.

If Starfleet got over its phobia of automation and decided to build a minimum-crew warship, .... why use Data? You could make a copy of the program for Moriarty and have a purely software Captain.

(Footnote: I have heard a story of engineers designing a car about 1970. They were trying to make the car as small as possible, which meant squeezing the engine in. They designed it, they built prototypes and tested them, and the car went into production. It was only at this point that someone realized that they had been pulling the engine out of the car for examination every couple of days in the testing, and had missed a significant problem because of that: there was not enough clearance to remove the oil filter if the engine was in the car. They had never tried to remove the oil filter while the engine was in the car, and hadn't noticed that the frame, while leaving plenty of room for the engine to sit in the engine compartment, was too close to the oil filter.)

Postscript: as was pointed out in TOS A Taste of Armageddon, there is danger in removing horror from war. Perhaps the Federation has made a conscious decision that choosing to use force should always put lives at risk, to ensure that it will never be easy.

 

[Colonel Midnight]

^ Well, not to make it personal, but I've done my own maintenance on my cars from Day One. Plus, I have 9 years of sea time in RL engine rooms on various types of ships. And, I'm a naval architect by trade.

If you design it properly, you wouldn't need to "get under the hood" -- if anything, you'd open up a hatch or cover-plate to get at any particular LRU (Line Replaceable Units) that would need to be fixed.

In short, if its an unmanned vehicle, then make it unmanned all the way. Basically, nothing much more than a big missile, with weapons and some means of propulsion. That's it -- that's all you need. (Well, plus the software, which would probably be the biggest headache of anything. )

Cheers,
-CM-

 

[Timo]

Indeed, it might be a good idea to build the ship to be unrepairable. If you omit the repairmen and the ability to recover from battle damage, you may gain such a huge advantage in terms of firepower that you don't need to worry about repairs or battle damage at all.

Or then you might not get that big an advantage, which means you're stuck with a ship that can't take much enemy fire without getting crippled, for no good reason. Without knowing more about Treknology, we can't really tell.

Timo Saloniemi