Commodore Decker

[Scott Kellogg]

At least in the original show, I really don't see any evidence of anything larger than the Constitutions lying around waiting to defend anything.

Commodore Decker describes the Rigel system as "The Heart of our Galaxy" and yet there's nothing there to defend it from the Doomsday Machine.

Heck, in "Amok Time", Starfleet is scrambling around, ready to sacrifice crew members lives just to get Four starships to a diplomatic function, so the idea of 7000 ships all ready at a moment's notice...? I just don't see it.

My impression of the TOS Starfleet was that they were in the strategic situation of sailing ships in the Napoleonic Wars (Think Hornblower Novels that Roddenberry was enamored of.) Ships that were weeks or months away from their bases allies and reinforcements. The idea being, that when you've got no reinforcements coming, you can have a much more dramatic story.

If the Cavalry is just over the next ridge, does it really matter when you're surrounded by the Indians?

Scott

 

[Timo]

At least in the original show, I really don't see any evidence of anything larger than the Constitutions lying around waiting to defend anything.

Or of anything smaller. Or of anything, period.

But this was always an artifact of TPTB not being able to afford to show us anything. This never stopped them from telling us, though: a "star ship status" chart has registries all over the map, suggesting dozens upon dozens of such ships at the very least, and also a continuum of ships, with old ones bowing out and new ones coming in. The Enterprise was never alone, except in terms of VFX. And that got remedied in the first movie that could afford it, and has now been remedied for good.

(Even there, the writers were on the ball: meeting a fellow starship, the heroes are flabbergasted at the astronomical odds of this happening.)

Commodore Decker describes the Rigel system as "The Heart of our Galaxy" and yet there's nothing there to defend it from the Doomsday Machine.

It is also right next to the rim of the galaxy. So there's something weird going on there; perhaps one of the characters is... crazy as a cuckoo?

Heck, in "Amok Time", Starfleet is scrambling around, ready to sacrifice crew members lives just to get Four starships to a diplomatic function

...And the Enterprise is the worthless one in the lot, easily let go.

So the idea of 7000 ships all ready at a moment's notice...? I just don't see it.

How could you? There are lightyears between each of the 7,000.

We always knew it was not just about the Enterprise. We now have confirmation: it's about the Voyager, the Defiant and the Discovery as well. In English, hero ships aren't special.

Except when they are, that is, when this is specifically pointed out. It never was with Kirk's ships. It only ever happened to Picard's (presumed) second, the Famed Flagship of Everything.

My impression of the TOS Starfleet was that they were in the strategic situation of sailing ships in the Napoleonic Wars (Think Hornblower Novels that Roddenberry was enamored of.) Ships that were weeks or months away from their bases allies and reinforcements.

And in that model, a lone frigate out in the ocean is proof positive of at least fifty ships of the line floating at anchor somewhere else.

The idea being, that when you've got no reinforcements coming, you can have a much more dramatic story.

And that's what you explicitly have with a fleet of 7,000, in the 2250s. Which is understandable in light of the precedent from the 2260s where we see how Starfleet works. And nothing really changes for the 2360s, either.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Maurice]

Heck, in "Amok Time", Starfleet is scrambling around, ready to sacrifice crew members lives just to get Four starships to a diplomatic function, so the idea of 7000 ships all ready at a moment's notice...? I just don't see it.

Kirk wouldn't tell Starfleet why he wanted to divert. That's unsurprising.

 

[Timo]

In that regard, Starfleet scheduling is an interesting conundrum in TOS. Kirk is always in a hurry to complete the next mission in his itinerary, having only a limited time to complete the adventure of the week even when lives are at stake. Yet most of Kirk's missions appear impromptu, being responses to emergency calls or chance encounters with excitement. Is Kirk's "tight itinerary" actually a series of overlapping emergencies, many of which are created by Kirk himself, and none of which can be put on hold for long enough to properly deconflict the itinerary?

(That is, perhaps Starfleet manages its missions much like an operating system manages the execution of processes in the computer, via constant compromise bordering on chaos?)

It is quite the miracle that Starfleet would manage to schedule four ships for a ceremonial function and in fact manage to have three arrive!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[J.T.B.]

At least in the original show, I really don't see any evidence of anything larger than the Constitutions lying around waiting to defend anything.

Agreed, but absence of proof is not proof of absence, as the saying goes. I also feel Starfleet is relatively small in TOS, but IMO it could have several multiples of the "twelve like her" and remain relatively small.

Heck, in "Amok Time", Starfleet is scrambling around, ready to sacrifice crew members lives just to get Four starships to a diplomatic function, so the idea of 7000 ships all ready at a moment's notice...? I just don't see it.

I don't think anyone was claiming that every ship would be ready for any assignment at any time, that's not realistic. It's more likely that Starfleet Operations (or whatever you want to call it) took a look its needs and which ships were doing what and decided which ones to send. Enterprise pulling out of the assignment would cause more scrambling around, because it wasn't planned for.

My impression of the TOS Starfleet was that they were in the strategic situation of sailing ships in the Napoleonic Wars (Think Hornblower Novels that Roddenberry was enamored of.) Ships that were weeks or months away from their bases allies and reinforcements. The idea being, that when you've got no reinforcements coming, you can have a much more dramatic story.

But that's not the whole picture. While Hornblower is off having adventures and being his own boss in a frigate, there are dozens of ships of the line in the Channel and Mediterranean fleets sailing back and forth on the same station, day after day, in all seasons for months at a time, waiting for the enemy to make a move. With a commander-in-chief and a few other admirals in flagships running the show.

 

[Scott Kellogg]

Well, try thinking about it this way:
The TOS Enterprise, usually doesn't have another Federation ship within 1000 light years of it's operating area.

(We see that in some episodes where the Enterprise has to travel 1000 light years to accomplish a mission, and it does so without calling ahead or calling someone to make a substitution. In "Obsession" they put off a crucial rendezvous with the Yorktown while they run off 1000 light years to destroy an alien cloud monster. In "That Which Survives" they have to travel 1000 light years to rescue a landing party because there's nobody closer.)

If there were 7000 ships with their feet up somewhere, you'd think they'd call for help from Somebody within 1000 light years.

The Early episodes of TOS were pretty much based on Cruiser type missions. Go somewhere, do something, do some gunboat diplomacy... After all, if the TOS Enterprise had been a Battleship instead of Heavy Cruiser, it would have some escorts assigned to it. But, the writers wanted it to be a Lone Cavalry type operation, run by a young gun. That's what gave Kirk the command instead of some Stuffy Admiral.

Scott

 

[Timo]

Actually, a couple of TOS episodes are based on the concept of there being several starships with overlapping operating areas - without Kirk knowing about this!

It almost seems as if the Constitutions (and indeed all starships of the day) are like WWII submarines: hopelessly lost in the middle of vast oceans, without a means to establish the whereabouts of either fellow or enemy vessels unless home base can radio this information - but nevertheless sometimes encountering each other by sheer (and unwelcome!) chance. Perhaps Starfleet operates a bit like Nazi Germany in said war, being afraid of broadcasting coordinates even if this means failure to coordinate? Or then it simply acknowledges that starship skippers will do their own thing and sometimes will go silent for months at an end, to the ultimate benefit of the UFP.

Calling for help generally isn't viable if help takes more than a day to arrive. Even "Obsession" allows for this timescale, although any hurry there is Kirk's artificial making; most other adventures get resolved even quicker, and would in fact not benefit much from having another ship meddle.

Nothing about TOS is different from TNG here, mind you. Picard didn't call for reinforcements from his Starfleet which assuredly had more than a dozen ships. Unlike Kirk, he sometimes was the reinforcement, what with flying a truly superior ship; but even Picard often had to do what Kirk ended up doing, arriving to investigate an incident where a starship had failed previously but a bigger and better starship (or a larger number of starships) didn't really enjoy an obvious advantage. Starfleet just doesn't believe in sending multiple ships unless it absolutely has to...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Neopeius]

If only they'd used that as his excuse for exiting the show, instead of offing him like a punk.

The show went from being an A- show to a straight C in one jump. So disappointing.

 

[Neopeius]

Which is?



Yes, IIRC he was chief of staff at the Bomber Command and was sent to take temporary command of the group after its CO was relieved over unusually high losses.

Exactly. What can fathom that Decker was a in charge of a squadron, maybe assigned at a base, and then put in temporary command of a single ship for a particular reason. Or perhaps he normally commanded a squadron, but the rest of his ships were detailed elsewhere for an emergency, so he continued on as skipper of his flag vessel.

 

[Neopeius]

Well, try thinking about it this way:
The TOS Enterprise, usually doesn't have another Federation ship within 1000 light years of it's operating area.

If there were 7000 ships with their feet up somewhere, you'd think they'd call for help from Somebody within 1000 light years.

It really does boggle the mind how BIG the Federation is. It takes up a decent chunk of the Milky Way. The Technical Manual says it's a circle 20,000 light years wide (well, effectively a cylinder of radius 10,000 light years and thickness of 1,000 light years.

20,000 is about the circumference of the Earth in miles, so lets pretend that the Federation is like the British Empire. The British Empire had 200 cruiser class ships in 1860 (that's the book I have -- I recognize that's a little different from the Hornblower era, but it's probably on a close order of what we're talking about). Now maybe double that to account for the thickness factor -- 1,000 light years is not much compared to 20,000, but it's not negligible either.

So it seems to be that, to get a frequency of ships similar to that you'd find in the mid-19th Century British Empire, you'd need around 400 vessels. Just the cruisers, mind you -- we're not talking about Home Fleets of Battleships and Dreadnoughts. Nor the support vessels.

I don't think there's ever any time in the show when they tell how many ships are in Starfleet, just that there are 12 ships in the Enterprise's class. So I'd say that around 500 cruiser-class ships would work.

(interestingly, per the Technical Manual, once all the Connies are built, there are 141 of them. That suggests that they are one of the most successful of the cruiser class, though they may not be the most numerous. Perhaps the Connie, being a "Heavy Cruiser" is a 1st Class ship and there are several hundred 2nd and 3rd Class ships out there.

 

[Timo]

In the Technical Manual universe, we might assume the Federation is fairly young, or at least experiencing a growth spurt so big that it in practice counts as a rebirth. Investing in massive numbers of a standardized cruiser design would make sense, then, as a symptom of the spurt.

Otherwise, 141 ships would be a big chunk of the 1800+ ones implied by the range of registries seen. OTOH, if the UFP were old, 1800 "full starships" would represent a dozen generations of such chunk acquisitions, meaning real old vs. the TM universe assumptions.

Then again, in the TM-verse, NCC registries go to all sorts of ships, not just "full starships", and the registries go to the 3900s at least. Possibly there would exist ship categories that meet the "properly patrolled empire" requirements for numbers without touching upon the full starship question at all. (And perhaps the likes of Decker would command these numerous lesser ships from aboard cruisers, while the likes of Kirk would use the cruisers for other tasks calling for less brass and authority on the CO.)

In the end, it's perhaps for the best that fairly little of the TM interpretation of things came to be. Although it unfortunately was a big influence on ST:TMP, and probably the prime reason every ship out there got the NCC prefix, aircraft style, rather than varying code letters more appropriate for the naval feel of things.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[johnnybear]

Kirk said that there were twelve ships like his in the fleet to Captain Christopher in Tomorrow is Yesterday. So that means there could have been thirteen constitution starships out in space covering all that area! Some patrolling hotspots like the Romulan Neutral Zone or the borders of Klingon space (before they got their own Neutral Zone that is) or they were benchmarking regions never travelled into by other earth or Federation vessels? But then the Constellation, the Exeter (crew anyways) the Excalibur (crew again) and the Defiant were lost during the show! Yet in Errand of Mercy Sulu returns to Organia with a fleet of ships. What they were we don't know? Starships, maybe but if they were wouldn't Decker, Tracey or Bob Wesley have commanded the group instead of Sulu?
JB

 

[Timo]

Kirk said that there were twelve ships like his in the fleet to Captain Christopher in Tomorrow is Yesterday. So that means there could have been thirteen constitution starships out in space covering all that area!

...And then 47 Declaration starships, and 19 Amendment starships, and 23 Taxation Form starships, and 129 Attachment starships and so forth, to a grand total of 6,982 starships if need be.

Nothing about Kirk saying there are a dozen ships like his is logically equivalent to there only being a dozen starships in existence. Kirk doesn't make the announcement in this spirit, either. If anything, Kirk is taking pride in that his own model of starship is one of the least numerous in the Fleet, and therefore all the more special to him.

Some patrolling hotspots like the Romulan Neutral Zone or the borders of Klingon space (before they got their own Neutral Zone that is)

We never heard of anybody patrolling the Klingon border. Or any other border besides the RNZ for that matter.

But when Kirk did the RNZ gig, it was as part of a string of really diverse duties. There was no starship there for him to relieve, either. Starfleet dedicating Constitutions, or ships of any design, to such patrol duty is dubious to begin with - and it doing so for months or years at a stretch for a given ship sounds quite unlikely, considering how Kirk never did anything for months at a stretch.

The Constitutions might be the special dedicated General Errand Ships of Starfleet. Or then just about any ship is exactly that, considering that the ships of the spinoff shows do not generally have mission profiles that would be at all narrower.

Yet in Errand of Mercy Sulu returns to Organia with a fleet of ships. What they were we don't know? Starships, maybe but if they were wouldn't Decker, Tracey or Bob Wesley have commanded the group instead of Sulu?

Nothing suggests Sulu commanded the group, though.

Kirk specifically contacts his ship, rather than the entire fleet. Sulu is still the guy who gets to answer, not having been thrown out of the center chair in favor of the more experienced Captain Newman for some reason. But Sulu doesn't mention anything about the fleet, and Kirk doesn't ask. He doesn't need to, since Kor is in contact with his forces and can tell what's happening up there.

We don't know if the Klingon fleet is commanded by somebody who vastly outranks Kor, or by a bunch of typically quarreling peers, or a bunch of cowering underlings, and we don't need to. Also, there's little need to talk to Commodore Veteran or Admiral Pompous, as it's the Organians who run the show at that point, the fleets being powerless.

It is too bad that we never get to see the fleets for real. The remastering shows a big part of the Klingon fleet (but not quite all of it), and a glimpse of the Enterprise but nothing else on the Starfleet side, allowing us to imagine what we want...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[johnnybear]

We may not have heard of or seen any ships patrolling the edge of Klingon space, but you know they're there! Sherman's planet is in a sector where ownership is disputed by both sides, so they sure aren't going to be not watching in case a Klingon fleet moves in and takes over, entrenching it's troops for a long, hard battle! Station K-7 may give the alert if need be but that's all!
JB

 

[Scott Kellogg]

In the "Trouble With Tribbles" Kirk describes the priority one distress call as having put
"an entire quadrant on defence alert."

If that were the case, and there were thousands of Fed Ships out there and 1/4 of them were now alerted?
I'd expect more than just the Enterprise to show up.

Scott Kellogg

 

[ChallengerHK]

Kirk said that there were twelve ships like his in the fleet to Captain Christopher in Tomorrow is Yesterday. So that means there could have been thirteen constitution starships out in space

"Only twelve like her" is sufficiently vague to leave all sorts of wiggle room. My favorite theory, which I can't take credit for, is that there is a very popular, standardized hull form that the Enterprise is built on. What fills that hull, however, varies a lot, although is still standardized into different groups. The Enterprise is a Deep Space Explorer, possibly, may even probably, the best outfitted of all, meant to be able to survive all of the unknowns that they'll encounter. Other types would have different configurations and standardized missions. So when Kirk says twelilve like her in the fleet, he's not referring to the hull form, but saying that there are twelve Deep Space Explorer-configured ships, but what he's not saying is that there are X ships which, with a cursory glance look identical while having very different capabilities.

 

[Neopeius]

Then again, in the TM-verse, NCC registries go to all sorts of ships, not just "full starships", and the registries go to the 3900s at least. Possibly there would exist ship categories that meet the "properly patrolled empire" requirements for numbers without touching upon the full starship question at all. (And perhaps the likes of Decker would command these numerous lesser ships from aboard cruisers, while the likes of Kirk would use the cruisers for other tasks calling for less brass and authority on the CO.)

4000 ships feels right for a navy that has ~500 cruisers.

 

[Timo]

The USN had some 40 cruisers in a 800-strong force when going into WWII; in those terms, the DSC-established 7,000 active ships would be jus' peachy for half a thousand cruisers.

We don't know how many cruisers Starfleet has in the TOS timeframe, but we also don't know the requirements Starfleet tries to meet. A couple of years later, the USN consisted mostly of amphibious warfare vessels, there being more of every type but an ever-shrinking percentage of cruisers or battleships or carriers. Perhaps Starfleet mostly consists of terraformers? Or of surveyors?

We never got good data in TOS or TAS about where in the spectrum the hero ship lay. DSC suggests she's a mediumweight in a fleet that has numerous mediumweight classes and brings few if any lightweights or heavyweights to a fight; in that sense, it basically supports the TOS setup where Kirk is a bluecollar space worker who simply does his paid day job when saving the universe, only it takes him down a peg or two for being one out of, oh, 500? rather than one out of twelve. But we knew that much already: "Charlie X" first introduced to us the concept of "the other vessel" and "the other skipper", and Commander Ramart saved a life where Captain Kirk saved millions. Perhaps a Commodore saves billions. Perhaps the CO of a ship bigger than Kirk's does, regardless of rank. Or perhaps cruisers indeed bear the brunt of frontier heroism while other ships accomplish other things. Such as saving trillions from starving, or getting ill, or lacking basic schooling.

We know a lot more about Starfleet now than we did forty-fifty years ago. We still don't know squat, though. And until modern Trek returns to Jim Kirk and puts him in his rightful place, we can choose to believe he's one of just a dozen people who really matter - or that he's one of 1,150,072, thus indeed literally doing a job "one in a million" could do - out of the trillion out there.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Noname Given]

The situations in "Arena" and "Balance of Terror" lead me to believe that the frontier is very sparsely defended.
In both episodes, The Enterprise is all there is.

"The Enterprise is the only protection in this section of the Federation. Destroy the Enterprise, and everything is wide open."

Scott Kellogg

And it's worse in the feature films. I mean come on Earth is the capital of the United Federation of Planets; yet when something like V'Ger appears, Earth has only one starship within interception range as that thing heads from the Klingon/Federation border directly to Earth?

It always struck me as somewhat insane that there's no "Home fleet" of any type to protect the capital of a major Star empire like the Federation.

 

[BK613]

^^I chalk that up to the UFP using the Klingons as a shield, thinking that they'd handle anything that came from that direction (and the Feds by monitoring would well aware of a Klingon build up before the Klingons themselves could act.)