Vektor said:
BolianAdmiral said:
Why I hate it... I hate it from a logistical standpoint. There is NO reason for the 1701 to be built on land, when ships even OLDER that it were built in orbit... the NX-01, and that "Venture Star"-looking ship in the opening credits of ENT. Why would a ship MORE advanced, need to be built on a surface? Even IF it were feasable to build a ship as massive as a Constitution-Class on land... with Trek's technology... why would you? All you would be doing, is assembling major components, only to have to devote (waste) even MORE time, manpower, and energy (and cost), to then transport all those massive components into space... expenditures that would have been totally avoided, by building the whole shebang in orbit from the get-go.
I really don’t understand why some people have such a hard time with the concept of building a starship on the ground. Sure, I’ll grant that it is counterintuitive and downright implausible when viewed from our own 21st century frame of reference where gravity is the main impediment to our conquest of space, but we already know that gravity is basically a non-issue in Trek from at least the 23rd century on. Trek starships routinely zip around solar systems with little or no regard to gravitational influences or acceleration stresses that would make lifting off from the Earth’s surface no more consequential than a minor course adjustment. Just because Starfleet doesn’t include surface landings and takeoffs in their mission profiles doesn’t mean they are too fragile to support themselves or don’t have enough power to go pretty much anywhere they damn well please short of close approaches to neutron stars and black holes.
As has already been mentioned by me as well as others, in just one episode of TOS,
Tomorrow is Yesterday, it was clearly established that the
Enterprise is quite capable of descending to within a few miles of the Earth’s surface, hovering at speeds slow enough for a 1960s jet aircraft to catch up with it, and then climbing back out again with no more ill effects than a slightly sluggish helm.
As to why older ships like the NX-01 would have been built in orbit, well, that actually makes perfect sense if you think about it. The technology for getting big ships off the surface and into space didn’t always exist any more than it does today, it had to be developed along with everything else. For all we know, the NX-01 and its sister ships may have been the last to be built in orbit, largely because the infrastructure was already in place. But then somebody figured out that you could build an entire starship, or at least the parts and pieces of one, in a shirtsleeve, normal gravity environment without having to worry about pressurization, solar and cosmic radiation, micro meteors and all the other hazards that go along with human beings trying to build something in space. You don’t need travel pods or transporters just to get your workers to the job site. You don’t need work pods or thruster packs to maneuver components and hold things in place, just good old fashioned cranes, conveyor belts and scaffolding. And when you’re done, you just power up the engines and fly it into space, or you neutralize its mass and pull it up with tractor beams, or you attach anti-grav tugs to it and do the same thing, or any of a dozen other equally plausible methods given the technology at your disposal.
Once you take the
logistics of getting into orbit out of the equation, the question is not what reason is there to build the ship on land, the question is what reason is there to build it in space? Probably there would still be a few good reasons, but would they outweigh the advantages of an Earth-normal construction environment? Arguably not.
