I prefer Starfleet to be relatively small (a few hundred ships during the 23rd-Century, a few thousand ships during the 24th-Century).
Do you prefer a "small" or a "large" starfleet?
- Thread starter GotNoRice
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Much more a fan of a small Starfleet. As BillJ said above, it's just better for dramatic purposes. And really, a Starfleet of a few dozen to a few hundred ships is plenty for pretty much any story you could care to tell.
A small Starfleet is one of the many reasons why TOS still works better for me than the other shows after all these years.
A small Starfleet is one of the many reasons why TOS still works better for me than the other shows after all these years.
Well, I guess my questions, then, are: what is meant by "ship" in this context?
I think everyone (or pretty much everyone) here is thinking in terms of Connies, Excelsiors, Galaxys, Sovereigns, and the like. But the Federation has over 150 member worlds, and the idea that each full member world wouldn't have at least a tug or two, a couple of transportation runabouts (which, remember, have their own hull registries) or similar, and two or three system cutters for performing customs and ship inspections and debris clearing (asteroids and the like) is just kinda silly. And with just a very minimal Starfleet presence such as that on each world, you're already at at least 750 Starfleet ships. And you might be tempted to say, well, those don't really count - but that would belittle the loss of the brave fictional men and women crewing those Bic razors, er, I mean, system cutters that we saw go out of meet the Borg in BOBW, which hardly seems appropriate.
And even then, hundreds or thousands of ships were still insufficient 80% of the time due to plot requirements.
With that said, I like my Starfleet "large" (which is a matter of perspective, really. Even at its most numerous, the Founders thought they were puny). And I'd like to think that, at peace time, a good chunk of Starfleet is out there exploring, cataloging, running into their own anomalies, getting lost and coming back, keeping the peace, fighting mad scientists, and all the things we would associate with our hero crews. One of the nice charms of TOS, early DS9 and VOY is that they're supposedly just another crew in "one big happy fleet," getting by on their wits rather than rank or importance like Picard or Archer's crew.
I was taking it to mean ships that Starfleet has produced, i.e. Starships and the like. Assuming that every ship of a Federation member world counts as part of Starfleet seems like a big leap to me.
And sure, I'll go ahead and belittle the sacrifice of those fictional characters. What the hell are those stinkin' fictionies going to do about it?
I generally assume Starfleet to be large, though its Dominion-War size is probably atypical, just as the United States' military swelled in size during World War 2.
...But the USN in the 1940s didn't expand by introducing more Clemson destroyers and Omaha light cruisers from the 1920s. The USN built modern types of destroyers and cruisers to meet the demand. In contrast, Starfleet doesn't appear to introduce any modern types to the battlefields near DS9. Was all the new construction going to other combat theaters, and if so, why?
My vote still goes for a "large" fleet that is fundamentally inflexible and incapable of swelling. If it were possible to swell Starfleet, then the Federation would be criminally negligient in not having done so already long before the Dominion War; after all, we witness acute starship shortages during TNG, shortages that cost lives. The borders leak like sieves, the colonies lack disaster relief or key supplies, and a ship in distress can only be helped by diverting a starship from some other pressing mission.
Timo Saloniemi
My vote still goes for a "large" fleet that is fundamentally inflexible and incapable of swelling. If it were possible to swell Starfleet, then the Federation would be criminally negligient in not having done so already long before the Dominion War; after all, we witness acute starship shortages during TNG, shortages that cost lives. The borders leak like sieves, the colonies lack disaster relief or key supplies, and a ship in distress can only be helped by diverting a starship from some other pressing mission.
Timo Saloniemi
Yup, that's essentially how I see it. What we've seen of Starfleet supports this version of a massive, mostly fixed number fleet - spread very, very thinly in because of the sheer size of the Federation.
Oh, I wasn't - that 750+ I was talking about would be what seems to me to be the minimum just to support the Starfleet presence there. If each member world of the Federation doesn't have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands (depending on the population of that member world) of its own cargo vessels, transit ships, stellar cruise ships, civilian research ships, etc, and in some cases, their own independent defense forces, I would be very surprised.
Politics? Maybe the most populated worlds of the Federation were demanding those new ships for system defense. (Still doesn't seem to have worked out too well for Betazed, though, does it?)
Sure they did. The Akira class and the Defiant class were both new designs that saw plenty of action. Others like the Galaxy class and Nebula class I'd classify as pretty darn new also.
Consider the Nimitz class aircraft carrier in the US Navy. The first one was commissioned in 1975, the last one was commissioned in 2009. That's over 30 years of production!
You're referring to why we didn't see more Sovereign class ships maybe?
Even when things with the Dominion were starting to heat up the Galaxy class was still a design less than 10 years old. Compare that with the service life of an Excelsior class and it seems extremely young in comparison. We did see a lot of Galaxy class ships in the war, which makes sense as it would have been one of their most recent (yet proven) designs.
I'm sure its more practical to build some kind of planetary wise defense systems and some kind of detection sensor network throughout the border to warn them of hostile invasion forces. And if I thought war with the neighboring countries or empire, was eminent I wouldn't have spent all that resources building what appear to be luxury exploration ships, which also serve a double purpose as war ships. War cause money and the more you can cheaply build ships the more you can build and rebuild to replace the ones that were destroyed in action. It's all about budgeting, but it seems like they made it appear that the Federation has unlimited resources, which doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, the vastness of the Federation and the richness of its resources. No poverty, no money, no material desires that cannot be met. It would make sense that the Star Fleet would be big enough to accommodate anyone fit to join.
Dramatically though, you can't beat the bigness of space and the lonely plight of a ship alone.
Dramatically though, you can't beat the bigness of space and the lonely plight of a ship alone.
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Not as rare since Star Trek 4, when they found a way to recrystallize dilithium.
Which makes perfect sense, because at the rate we're going, aside from the stuff like warp drive and transporters that might be totally impossible, our technology in the 2300s will embarrass that of Star Trek. Also, today's audience and sci-fi fan is a lot more scientifically literate than the in the 1960s. We have arguments about why the don't pilot ships with their minds and still use keyboards for Pete's sake. Not to excuse technobabble, bullshit plotlines.
Yes! And even then these ships only cover a small percentage of the Alpha Quadrant and a fraction on the boundaries of the Beta (although this is because of Klingon and Romulan territory being the dominant powers here).
Yes, and even then the Enterprise is always "the only ship in range".
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