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Does Starfleet only use Galaxys Now?

Those points for the Miranda may or may not be true. Material science may have much improved building materials since these ships were launched just as the 20th century had better metals and construction processes than the 19th. You also have to consider how stress fatigue wears down metallic structures as it did Galactica. The old computer and warp cores may also be hard to replace with modern ones. There eventually comes a time when overhauling a design or structure requires so much work, it is better to built something new. And just because a ship is spaceworthy, doesn't mean it won't be easy canon fodder.

The c-130s are old but not THAT old compared to Mirandas. Such planes are also typically not placed in harms way and without a substantive military adversary competing with new designs, the DOD has little reason to make changes. Also, cargo and recreational craft can be used longer because they are not being shot at. Front line vessels have to be more regularly replaced, especially as weapon technology improves.
 
Those points for the Miranda may or may not be true. Material science may have much improved building materials since these ships were launched just as the 20th century had better metals and construction processes than the 19th. You also have to consider how stress fatigue wears down metallic structures as it did Galactica. The old computer and warp cores may also be hard to replace with modern ones. There eventually comes a time when overhauling a design or structure requires so much work, it is better to built something new. And just because a ship is spaceworthy, doesn't mean it won't be easy canon fodder.

The c-130s are old but not THAT old compared to Mirandas. Such planes are also typically not placed in harms way and without a substantive military adversary competing with new designs, the DOD has little reason to make changes. Also, cargo and recreational craft can be used longer because they are not being shot at. Front line vessels have to be more regularly replaced, especially as weapon technology improves.

B-52s are also a long used plane, that is planned to be used till at least 2040, and that can be extended, and that is a front line bomber.

Also, there is nothing that says that the Miranda's we see are not more recent production based off a a older design. Even if they stopped producing them 20 years ago, if they have a 40-60 year expected service life, that would mean there could be plenty of Miranda's about.
 
With the superior building materials, technology and whatnot of the future, 100 year old ships should be commonplace without the need for OCD refits and upgrades. What's really changed between the Enterprise NX-01 and the Enterprise-E? Nothing, except they dropped the "-ic" from "photonic torpedo" and the warp dial goes up to 9 instead of five. How long did the Klingons use the D-7 cruiser? More than 225 years - which is all of one Vulcan lifespan.
 
And "Darmok" gives us a phaser bank in a photon torpedo tube. Sometimes, it's okay to just pretend something didn't happen.

Well, none of it happened, so we're actually pretending that everything else did happen... you know what I mean.
 
Phaser turrets can be really tiny - like the ones on the NX-01. There could be one stashed away right by the torpedo tube and only ever used in "Darmok"
 
I would expect to AT LEAST expect to see newer styled nacelles on those Mirandas. But, yeah, I'm still not convinced so we'll have to agree to disagree.

As to the B52, they are usually not sent in to a war zone until air superiority is achieved. They most definitely use more modern engines and are an exception to the rule.
 
There's no logic in assuming that every visual ever seen in Star Trek must be taken literally, because a great deal of it is physically impossible (visible beams or roiling fireballs in vacuum, brightly lit ships in deep space, ships crawling past each other at mere meters per second when the story says they're at high impulse), contains errors or in-jokes, or recycles stock footage. A lot of Delta Quadrant starships in Voyager were reuses of Alpha/Beta/Gamma quadrant ships in other series, even though trade between the respective civilizations was impossible. It shouldn't be taken literally, any more than we should literally believe that all the characters played by Majel Barrett or Vaughn Armstrong really looked and sounded exactly alike, or that Saavik or Tora Ziyal underwent a complete transformation of face and voice and nobody noticed. Or, for that matter, that Captain Kirk, his crew, and the entire universe around them suddenly transformed into cartoons for about a year and then turned back to live action. It's at times like those that we need to move past rigid literalism and accept that what we see onscreen is merely a dramatic representation of a hypothetical reality, one that sometimes uses approximations, substitutions, and symbolic representations. We're supposed to use our own imaginations and intelligence to look beyond the surface and visualize the "true" reality that the images are just approximating. We're not supposed to take every tiny detail as absolute literal truth that must not be questioned.

So no, that was not a D7 in that Enterprise episode, not in-story. It was a stock image that the creators of a fictional television program used as a substitute for an earlier Klingon ship as a convenience, and that they replaced with a more period-appropriate design at the earliest opportunity. It was, essentially, a mistake, one that those involved with the show admitted and corrected.

Same with the Mirandas and such in TNG. They used those because it was more economical and practical to reuse pre-existing starship models from ILM than to spend money building new ones. Sometimes they used them even when it was inappropriate, like for the Lantree in "Unnatural Selection," which was clearly intended in the script to be a far smaller type of ship. And then there's the use of the same Klingon Bird of Prey miniature to represent two vastly different sizes of Klingon ship. I just choose not to take those literally. What we actually see isn't some divine gospel we have to accept without question; it was a compromise made for the sake of economy and expediency, reusing a design that didn't make sense in context because it was the closest substitute they could afford for the intended "reality" of the story. And that's where it's incumbent upon us as viewers to exert our own imagination and critical thought instead of just slavishly accepting every last detail, even the mistakes and compromises, as unquestioned fact.
 
So no, that was not a D7 in that Enterprise episode, not in-story. It was a stock image that the creators of a fictional television program used as a substitute for an earlier Klingon ship as a convenience, and that they replaced with a more period-appropriate design at the earliest opportunity. It was, essentially, a mistake, one that those involved with the show admitted and corrected.

Why does it have to be a mistake? Why are judging the lifespan of an alien spacecraft based on human expectations? The appearance of the D-7 in Enterprise works fine and violates nothing within the series.
 
Honestly, I don't mind having the Mirandas in various roles, the majority of the time it is easily explained. Like the D-7 in ENT, its a goof, plain and simple. The Oberth in TNG Pegasus, it was a goof.

I do agree that the 24th Century Mirandas would have been upgraded depending on their mission profile. The Lantree would have been the barest upgrade, but seeing the Majestic and the Sitak I would imagine they would have been upgraded enough to fight the Dominion, like what they did with the Lakota.
 
Same with the Mirandas and such in TNG. They used those because it was more economical and practical to reuse pre-existing starship models from ILM than to spend money building new ones. Sometimes they used them even when it was inappropriate, like for the Lantree in "Unnatural Selection," which was clearly intended in the script to be a far smaller type of ship. And then there's the use of the same Klingon Bird of Prey miniature to represent two vastly different sizes of Klingon ship. I just choose not to take those literally. What we actually see isn't some divine gospel we have to accept without question; it was a compromise made for the sake of economy and expediency, reusing a design that didn't make sense in context because it was the closest substitute they could afford for the intended "reality" of the story. And that's where it's incumbent upon us as viewers to exert our own imagination and critical thought instead of just slavishly accepting every last detail, even the mistakes and compromises, as unquestioned fact.

But by the Dominion War when they had all the CGI models from First Contact, couldn't they have used the Steamrunner, Norway, Sabre, and Akira models to fill the fleets? By the 6th season of DS9 I would imagine they had a wealth of "newer" class models that COULD have fit in just as economically production-wise.
 
^By that point, the use of movie models as 24th-century ship classes had been well-established and they just continued the tradition. I'm speaking of the reasons why it was done in the first place in early TNG, when they had to save money by reusing the filming miniatures they already had available.
 
For whatever budgetary reasons, the props, costumes, sets and starships(models) used in all official STAR TREK productions: TOS,TAS,NG,DS9,VOY,ENT & MOVIES must be considered canon to some degree and not just random substitutions.:vulcan:
 
For whatever budgetary reasons, the props, costumes, sets and starships(models) used in all official STAR TREK productions: TOS,TAS,NG,DS9,VOY,ENT & MOVIES must be considered canon to some degree and not just random substitutions.:vulcan:

^"Must?" By whose authority? Where do some fans get this idea that they're employees or servants or something and are compelled to obey what they're told? That's not what being an audience means! Being an audience means interpreting what you see, applying your intelligence and imagination and critical thinking to it, finding your own meaning in it. It's the right of the readers or viewers of a work of fiction to find interpretations that the creators never intended. Being an audience member is supposed to be an active, engaged activity, not just passive absorption.

Besides, "canon" doesn't mean every tiny detail must be treated as some sacred gospel. Canon is simply the core body of work, and every canon contains mistakes and contradictions. In a television show, where saving money is necessary, producers often deliberately include things that they do not intend any intelligent audience member to take as literal fact -- reusing the same props or costumes on different planets, recycling stock footage of the same special effect to represent a separate place, thing, or event, recasting roles, building sets that are too large to fit inside the starship represented by a miniature or computer model, etc. They do not do these things with the expectation that the audience will slavishly take them as literal fact; they do them with the expectation that the audience will apply reasonable suspension of disbelief and critical judgment and interpret what they see as a suggestion or approximation of a different "reality" that they will imagine for themselves.
 
Personally I like the idea that Mirandas were still in service as of the Dominion War. I love those tough little ships. And Birds of Prey that are vastly different sizes but the same basic design aren't a problem IMO.
 
And Birds of Prey that are vastly different sizes but the same basic design aren't a problem IMO.

If it were simply the general design, sure. But every single component being manufactured in two different sizes? How does that make sense from an engineering standpoint? There are vehicles that come in different sizes, like, say, a small private jet versus a commercial airliner, and there are going to be design similarities, so they have similar shapes on different scales. But still, it's not like every single component of the smaller design is going to have an exact, larger counterpart in the exact same position on the larger design. It's not like a jet that's twice as large is going to have windows and door handles and fuel hatches and wind speed sensors and warning decals that are twice as large as well. Not everything scales up.

So the two different sizes of Bird of Prey represented by the exact same miniature, or the same stock footage, is a classic case of something where the visuals cannot and should not be taken absolutely literally. The "reality" would have to be two designs that had the same approximate shape but clear differences on the detail level due to the different scales involved.
 
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