Fleet construction

[Unicron]

In looking over some of my manuals recently, I'm curious about something that perhaps aridas can answer. In SotSF V1, there are a couple of designs that are described as having a cloaking system. Since this was before the Treaty of Algeron, is it fair to assume they're actual cloaks or just more of a passive stealth system?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

In looking over some of my manuals recently, I'm curious about something that perhaps aridas can answer. In SotSF V1, there are a couple of designs that are described as having a cloaking system. Since this was before the Treaty of Algeron, is it fair to assume they're actual cloaks or just more of a passive stealth system?

ACTUNG!

It was noticing this little tidbit for the first time that first lead me to think that the TNG and spinoffs were an alternate timeline from the TOS/movie continuity.

 

[Unicron]

Starfleet not using cloaks always seemed a tad silly to me, at least within the limited context of canon, but I can see some reasons why they wouldn't do so regularly. One aspect of the FASA Trekverse I liked was that the Klingons didn't use cloaks on many of their ships in that era, nor were they fond of the Romulan plasma weapon. Even the Romulans didn't use cloaks on all of their fleet, but only on specific classes relative to their function.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It would be as simple as sticking to the original limitations of cloaking devices: the cloaking device draws all the energy of the ship, and while it's active you don't have enough power for weapons, warp drive, transporters or long-range sensors. And even your short-range sensors are severely limited by the fact that electromagnetic radiation can't pass through the cloaking device and so only a small specialized "probe" extended outside the field can be used for detection (treknological equivalent of a periscope) without which the ship is blind and deaf.

 

[Unicron]

I agree. We saw in TNG that the Romulans had improved the cloak in some ways, but they were also keenly aware of technology that could penetrate cloaks like a tachyon web and an antiproton field. So the cloak is clearly not perfect, even though it does have some potential advantages.

 

[aridas sofia]

It is very hard to reconcile The Enterprise Incident with Starfleet not using cloaks unless the types of cloaks obtained from the Romulans in that episode later become obsolete. There would be some basic, multispectral mask/bending technology that would be developed and then discovered by an adversary and then circumvented and/or employed. If it was circumvented and not then progressed enough to circumvent the circumvention, it would be pulled from service for being ineffective. Plain and simple.

That back and forth might have happened dozens of times over the decades.

Of course, there may (and likely would have to be) other cloaking technologies as well. Not just bending energy around a ship but hiding the ship's displacement of spacetime while at warp. Or camouflaging the ship's hull against the real and/or subspace background. Or deadening the equivalent of sonic vibrations propagated via the gaseous medium of space.

 

[Ithekro]

Stealing one cloaking device does not mean one can reverse engineer it to make a fleet load of them. They might have tried that. It might have worked, or it failed.

 

[aridas sofia]

Well, the technology was easy enough to decipher that the thing could be quickly adapted to Federation technology on a completely different type, size and mass of ship. If it could be made to work on one Starfleet starship in fifteen minutes, it sure doesn't make any sense that it couldn't be fit to a whole fleet of ships in short order.

 

[T'Girl]

Unless the Romulan cloaking device completely fried the Enterprise's entire deflector generation mechanism after less than a minute of use, and Starfleet was never able to figure out how the Romulans prevented this from happening every single time.

 

[Darkwing]

There's one other reason I lean "small fleet," and it's this: Starfleet Academy's San Francisco campus is implied and sometimes openly depicted as THE main training center for Starfleet officers. Given that Starfleet doesn't seem to believe in noncoms (though its depiction is not consistent in this regard either) that means they are having to Staff an entire fleet with a graduating class of 2 or 3 thousand cadets every year. That seems like just barely enough to keep their numbers steady, especially for an organization that seems to suffer the kind of random losses Starfleet does in a given year (nearly twice that number of casualties in just the first three seasons of TOS).

Keep in mind that a career of 40 years is apparently equivalent to our 20, and that a number of officers, particularly Vulcans, might have a career of over 100 years. That'll mean higher retention, so 2-3,000 cadets may be enough to meet their needs most years. Add in some years graduating classes early to increase that (up to double, if graduating two whole classes that year), and stop-lossing some of the geezers that were planning to retire, and you can justify a fairly large fleet full of ensign j.g.Picards with a rank of 0-1/2 and 50 years in service.

 

[aridas sofia]

Unless the Romulan cloaking device completely fried the Enterprise's entire deflector generation mechanism after less than a minute of use, and Starfleet was never able to figure out how the Romulans prevented this from happening every single time.

I came to think of the entire idea that a cloaking device is some new fangled thing as pretty funny. I mean, they can warp spacetime, which means energy following the spacetime curvature is bent. And they have deflectors. Which means they are already bending/deflecting concentrated energy beams and matter away from the ship. Bending visible spectrum light should be child's play to these people. And really... they are fighting in the pitch black of interstellar space, presumably from thousands of miles apart. Does it matter whether they can "see" one another?

But, buying the rather absurd concept and taking the episode just as it is, (and combining it with Balance of Terror), one could infer that the thing the Romulans have figured out that Starfleet scratches their head over is how to divert most of a ship's power to stealth (or, in the case of the bird of prey, weapons). The Romulans appear to be master plumbers, capable of trickling their generated capacity to every sink and bathtub or, at the flick of a switch, filling their swimming pool (but leaving everything else high and dry).

 

[Ithekro]

Well, the technology was easy enough to decipher that the thing could be quickly adapted to Federation technology on a completely different type, size and mass of ship. If it could be made to work on one Starfleet starship in fifteen minutes, it sure doesn't make any sense that it couldn't be fit to a whole fleet of ships in short order.

Figuring out how to make an existing unit work with your power systems is one thing. Duplicating the actual cloaking device might be the problem. Then the second problem is making a native Federation unit that works better with Starfleet systems.


I do think they managed to make a Federation cloaking device. Either by the time of the later TOS movies, or just afterwards prior to the Tomed Incident. That would have been where Starfleet signed off on not being allowed to own, operate, or research cloaking devices in an effort to secure a peace with the Romulans, who then go off and leave the Federation alone for the next 50 or so years.

The thing is, we have no on screen evidence of Starfleet having a cloaking device on TOS/TMP era ships. There were certainly several instances were a cloaking device would have been useful. To Kirk, or even Khan.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

There's one other reason I lean "small fleet," and it's this: Starfleet Academy's San Francisco campus is implied and sometimes openly depicted as THE main training center for Starfleet officers. Given that Starfleet doesn't seem to believe in noncoms (though its depiction is not consistent in this regard either) that means they are having to Staff an entire fleet with a graduating class of 2 or 3 thousand cadets every year. That seems like just barely enough to keep their numbers steady, especially for an organization that seems to suffer the kind of random losses Starfleet does in a given year (nearly twice that number of casualties in just the first three seasons of TOS).

Keep in mind that a career of 40 years is apparently equivalent to our 20, and that a number of officers, particularly Vulcans, might have a career of over 100 years. That'll mean higher retention, so 2-3,000 cadets may be enough to meet their needs most years. Add in some years graduating classes early to increase that (up to double, if graduating two whole classes that year), and stop-lossing some of the geezers that were planning to retire, and you can justify a fairly large fleet full of ensign j.g.Picards with a rank of 0-1/2 and 50 years in service.

All good points, but that would still imply a fleet with a total enrollment of around three hundred to five hundred thousand people. Enough to sustain a fleet of a couple hundred ships at most and fifty to a hundred well-stocked starbases.

 

[Ithekro]

Several ships seem to have minimum crews and starbases use locals for the majority of the crew with a Starfleet command staff.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Rearline support ships, sure. Old Miranda class transports and science vessels running crap jobs in seemingly un-interesting areas. And Deep Space Nine is the only facility that used "locals" but then only because it was technically a Bajoran space station with Starfleet administrators.

If we're going with the idea of a fleet o 600 to 1000 ships with over half of them running with skeleton crews, that's fairly different concept. It is also not likely to hold true for the TOS years, IMO.

 

[Ithekro]

In the TOS/TAS era there are also a lot of automated ship (freighters). A lot of space needs looking into but might be considered boring or low priority.

 

[Mysterion]

By way of modern-day comparison, here's a graphic that shows the current US Navy by type and class of ship: http://i.imgur.com/awVKTLr.jpg

It'd be interesting to see the same thing for Starfleet if we were ever able to nail-down how much what it has in the fleet.

 

[Unicron]

Shifting gears for a bit, I've recently enjoyed getting some new ships from the X-Wing Miniatures game. I've often found it interesting that the Empire developed a range of fighters in the TIE series but only a handful of those had shields or a hyperdrive. The Empire had enough resources to do so apparently, but the cost would have been significant enough according to several sources that it would mean they couldn't afford the raw numbers possible without spending the money on those systems.

 

[Ithekro]

Well when you have to supply a galaxy wide fleet and army with TIE fighters, you are going to be a bit cheap about it. Just with an estimated 25,000 Imperial-class Star Destroyers alone you'd need 1.8 million TIE fighters. And that's just for one class of starship.

 

[Go-Captain]

By way of modern-day comparison, here's a graphic that shows the current US Navy by type and class of ship: http://i.imgur.com/awVKTLr.jpg

It'd be interesting to see the same thing for Starfleet if we were ever able to nail-down how much what it has in the fleet.

There's also the Air Force one.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a16727/air-force-in-one-chart/

A Starfleet one would definitely be interesting, and should probably have several thousand ships.

Well when you have to supply a galaxy wide fleet and army with TIE fighters, you are going to be a bit cheap about it. Just with an estimated 25,000 Imperial-class Star Destroyers alone you'd need 1.8 million TIE fighters. And that's just for one class of starship.

It's funny, 1.8 million TIE fighters sounds like a lot, but then I think about first world war army sizes, and then how Star Wars should have thousands, if not millions of well inhabited planets. If anything, that many ships and fighters is low.