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Galaxy Class in Dominion War

Their ship shouldn't have been technologically capable of putting a dent in the Enterprise, even with Geordi-Vision allowing them to see the shield harmonics or whatever, much less destroying the ship.
 
Well Generations has tremendous issues like that. Picard not going back 3-4 days to save his family and take the ship to Amargosa before the star is destroyed without damaging the rest of the timeline. The Enterprise and it's crew suddenly losing all ability and knowledge of rotating shield harmonics from the Borg engagements several times etc

Although yeah, the Galaxy class had an antique china level of reactor strength, sneezing near it was a breach waiting to happen.
 
Their ship shouldn't have been technologically capable of putting a dent in the Enterprise, even with Geordi-Vision allowing them to see the shield harmonics or whatever, much less destroying the ship.
1) Why WOULDN’T an older ship be able to destroy a shieldless newer ship? USS Lakota, ladies and gentlemen.

2) You really have to get over the idea that it’s a TV show. If one of the characters were God himself, he’d find himself getting arthritis or sciatica. Still, I wouldn’t cross him.
 
"Success of the Enterprise"? The damn ship was on the brink of catastrophic systems failure a few times a year, every year for its eight years of service, and was taken down by a run-down retired Klingon BoP which scored a lucky shot. Sure, they had inside access so to speak, but a ship which hadn't been in active service for over twenty years should not have posed a threat to Starfleet's flagship. Even the Duras sisters thought so.

That is a very cherry-picked list. Besides almost single handedly preventing a war with the Romulans and preventing the Klingons from becoming a Romulan puppet state, and beating the Borg, its routine diplomatic and scientific missions have been implied to be consistently successful.
 
1) Why WOULDN’T an older ship be able to destroy a shieldless newer ship? USS Lakota, ladies and gentlemen.
Admiral Leyton pimped the fuck out of USS Lakota. Chief O'Brien even said it was more powerful than an Excelsior should be.
Besides almost single handedly preventing a war with the Romulans
You mean in The Defector? The arrival of the Klingons creating a stalemate saved he day there.
preventing the Klingons from becoming a Romulan puppet state
Actually, the Sutherland deserves the credit there. The Enterprise sat on its ass while Picard yelled at Data for disobeying orders while he went and exposed the Romulan fleet.
beating the Borg
Only because Data hacked Locutus and put the Borg to sleep.
 
Admiral Leyton pimped the fuck out of USS Lakota. Chief O'Brien even said it was more powerful than an Excelsior should be.
And the Durases were firing musket balls? It was an old ship firing contemporary weapons.

Also, you didn’t address my second point. You know, the crucial one.

Also, wasn’t the E-D used as a lightning rod or something to send all the ice age weather something-or-other of an entire planet into space? Again, it’s a TV show. The ship can accomplish or fail to accomplish whatever the story demands.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. A travel pod can defeat a whole Borg unicomplex, if that’s what’s on the page. Puny Voyager did.
 
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You mean the one where you try to justify lazy writing as "a necessity"? Damn straight, I ain't addressing it.
Okay, then your problem is with the gods, not one specific starship class? Name one other that would have fared better in its place?
 
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Their ship shouldn't have been technologically capable of putting a dent in the Enterprise, even with Geordi-Vision allowing them to see the shield harmonics or whatever, much less destroying the ship.

Photon torpedos have antimatter warheads. Big antimatter boom against a starship hull??? That's not that difficult to believe. If a hull could withstand a blast like that, why even bother with shields anyway??
 
It might have been that response that gave Hayes (a well known "windbag" ) pause to keep Picard at arms length rather than go through with his original plan to order the Enterprise to the Typhon sector.

Now there's a cool idea. Too late to reassign Picard to a Type 2½ shuttle at such a late date... Or to tell Riker to sneak behind his Captain, apply Heavy Stun and then make sure there are steel bars to the brig in addition to the triply redundant forcefield. Anything that could be compromised has been compromised already, and NCC-1701-E could just as well be designated an enemy vessel. But as long as Hayes and Picard/Locutus can play pretend, this is not an unmitigated disaster yet.

Its not the numbers of ships that irk me so much as the lack of diversity.

What navy would go for diversity, though, if it were possible to find the one ace-of-all-trades design that streamlines logistics and ensures victory that way? Diverse navies are hobbled navies, although hobbled by necessity.

The other thing that’s egregious is just how closely packed the ships were. These things have weapons ranges in what hundreds or thousands of kilometers?

Might be their punching power rapidly dies down as a function of distance - just like in naval battles until the very late 19th century. The only way to win then is to go point blank.

And when they blow up, they spew ungodly amounts of antimatter everywhere.

Or then they don't, as seems apparent from the evidence. Perhaps this is where core ejection comes in? It never saves any lives, but at least it prevents collateral damage to fellow ships in the furball, which is the primary reason for its existence.

Plus poor maneuverability, weapons fire rates, no shield bubbles, on and on... Trek went Star Wars with the space battles here. More art than internal reality.

Hmh? All that is contrary to Star Wars, where maneuverability is key, weapons fire at high rates without much effect, and shielding seems to be a feature of the tiniest skiff (it having been too difficult to portray any damage between "none" and "stock explosion removes skiff from existence").

But it's the "flagship" of the fleet, whatever that means. It's the the most advanced ship in the fleet, per Geordi, and per the obvious.

Well,

a) no, she's not the flagship
b) unlike "biggest" or "fastest", any dozen designs can be "the most advanced" simultaneously, each in its own relevant or irrelevant way
c) being advanced is typically a counterindication to being a flagship ITRW; no Admiral wants to break his flag aboard a prototype!

Hell, it was kinda ridiculous having Sisko on the Defiant when he should have been on a Sovereign in those battles. I like to think Admiral Ross was on one.

Might well be. And there are ways to work around the nonsensical idea that Captain Sisko would be in command of that fleet at all.

Sisko made the plans. Captains may well do that. Admirals then command - but Ross might give Sisko the honor of calling out the carefully preplanned individual shots, which is pretty much all that Sisko does. "Now we close in. Now we wait. Now we send in the irritating little fighters. And NOW everybody exploit the breach!" The COs of the other ships would have been told in advance to listen to this low-ranking underling, so that there wouldn't be delays from quizzical glances of confirmation towards Ross...

Timo Saloniemi
 
I don't think Sisko's ever stated to be the commander - but he does have the ear of two actual commanders, Ross and Martok.

The possible exception is the Sacrifice of Angels battle - it's his idea and he carries it out under Ross's authority.
 
It was expensive, but fan theory and Christopher Bennett's official novels have implied that the Galaxy class had some flaws that greatly shortened their operational lifespan. By the time of the Dominion War, they may have shifted their focus to other ships and the surviving Galaxies had skeleton crews and were just used tactically.

Christopher's novels are licensed fan fiction, they have nothing to offer about what's on screen.

We never saw a Galaxy being destroyed during the war, surely that should tell us a lot about their usefulness on the front lines?
 
What navy would go for diversity, though, if it were possible to find the one ace-of-all-trades design that streamlines logistics and ensures victory that way? Diverse navies are hobbled navies, although hobbled by necessity.

What navy wouldn’t use all their ships? This isn’t the Rag Tag Fleet. This is the biggest war ever, against a superior foe, and a fictional Starfleet with lots-o-cool-looking ships. They didn’t use 120 perfect Galaxys per fleet; they used a diverse set of models, similar to real world fleets. They just weren’t there because the TV show didn’t have enough CG models on the hard drive. Again, look at the list of ships I included above and notice that a lot of those would have been very useful and realistic to include. Including the USS Sovereign and the USS Enterprise-E. And dozens of little escort Defiants.

Might be their punching power rapidly dies down as a function of distance - just like in naval battles until the very late 19th century. The only way to win then is to go point blank.

Or it’s a TV show that doesn’t follow its own rules because kewl visuals. The Defiant needed to get through(?) the Dominion fleet to get to DS9; it wasn’t trying to make full use of “punching power” (wouldn't effect phasers for many kilometers or photon torpedoes at all); it just couldn’t go around it for some reason? Previously we’ve heard about needing to get a safe distance from a ship to fire torpedoes at it and when ships blew up, they took neighbors with them. Magically, not in these fleet shots, where ships had no shields either, and weapons impacts left no damage on the hulls.

Well,
a) no, she's not the flagship
b) unlike "biggest" or "fastest", any dozen designs can be "the most advanced" simultaneously, each in its own relevant or irrelevant way
c) being advanced is typically a counterindication to being a flagship ITRW; no Admiral wants to break his flag aboard a prototype!

a) in your head-canon? Rephrase?
b) they were saying that it’s the new alpha in the fleet, not that it had the most advanced carpet warmers. Come on
c) which is why the Prometheus wasn’t during testing but why the new Enterprise-D was afterward.

Might well be. And there are ways to work around the nonsensical idea that Captain Sisko would be in command of that fleet at all.

Sisko made the plans. Captains may well do that. Admirals then command - but Ross might give Sisko the honor of calling out the carefully preplanned individual shots, which is pretty much all that Sisko does. "Now we close in. Now we wait. Now we send in the irritating little fighters. And NOW everybody exploit the breach!" The COs of the other ships would have been told in advance to listen to this low-ranking underling, so that there wouldn't be delays from quizzical glances of confirmation towards Ross...

Sisko made plans and executed them (including altering them as he saw fit) from our tiny outdated hero ship that should have had dozens of siblings everywhere but didn’t (again) for non-in-universe reasons. We never see the Federation, Klingon, or Romulans do anything but Sisko orders dozens of wings of far superior ships left and right, and then nearly gets himself (Space-Eisenhower) killed trying break through enemy lines because?? Was he the Federation’s premier cloaked mine expert too? It’s a TV show.
 
The Galaxy-class has a lot of internal volume for stuff, and seems to have at least some plug and play like capacity. Whie Starfleet might not be up to strapping a mass of new weapons hardpoints on them, they can add a bunch of capacitors and other systems to increase the yield of their existing phaser arrays or allow them to fire multiple beams from the same strip at once, effective increasing their firepower by many times.
 
What navy wouldn’t use all their ships?

A navy that wants to win?

It's a matter of doctrine devised to match the available tech. If you have short range guns, then you must bring all of your smallest gunboats into the melee with the ships of the line, because the side with more of the guns wins, and the side that utilizes a reserve will automatically lose. But if you have long range guns, then if you take your time to move your smaller ships into range, you automatically lose to the side that leaves the small ships at the pier.

And if you want to win by strategic mobility, you absolutely must leave all your older 17 kt ships at the port when deploying your grand fleet at 25 kt.

Now, Trek seems to ascribe to pre-WWI, pre-dreadnought tactics in that its guns seem to work best at very short ranges and even the smaller ones can add to the mix. But Trek also features sweeping strategic maneuvering. It's just that the latter takes place offscreen: the maneuvers we see near Bajor are of short range, similar to the minuscule Washington-Richmond or London-Berlin gap in wars of late that otherwise involved vast distances and maneuvers. In a hop from Bajor to Cardassia Prime, the slower and smaller vessels are allowed to participate. And, by the pre-dreadought doctrine, required to.

They didn’t use 120 perfect Galaxys per fleet; they used a diverse set of models, similar to real world fleets.

Real world fleets aren't diverse.

The USN has a single destroyer design nowadays. It still feels this is one too many, as not all of the vessels are perfectly identical as rational logistics would require. It is greatly bothered by having non-identical carriers, too. But in both respects, the USN is mature: it knows what it wants, and it has exactly that in the Arleigh Burke and the Nimitz. Not so with the USMC, still searching for the perfect amphibious assault ship types in this fairly new field of warfare.

Previously we’ve heard about needing to get a safe distance from a ship to fire torpedoes at it and when ships blew up, they took neighbors with them. Magically, not in these fleet shots, where ships had no shields either, and weapons impacts left no damage on the hulls.

No torpedoes were fired in the DS9 battles, remarkably enough (a single Miranda in "WYLB" notwithstanding - now there was a cool shot!). Perhaps this VFX conceit could be read as a treknological continuity triumph, as torpedoes indeed would be worthless in melees.

Weapons impact in turn left significant damage on hulls in DS9, for the first time ever in televised Trek.

a) in your head-canon? Rephrase?

Naah. You are simply dead wrong.

Or are you able to point to some evidence of the E-E being called a flagship?

b) they were saying that it’s the new alpha in the fleet, not that it had the most advanced carpet warmers. Come on

Again, the USN today has half a dozen "simultaneously most advanced" ship types; every other big navy, likewise. Some have better AA or ASW capabilities, some have cool propulsion innovations, some just bristle with doodads. There is no metric by which one could define an "alpha". Especially not in a diverse fleet, which you for some reason think is a good fleet.

c) which is why the Prometheus wasn’t during testing but why the new Enterprise-D was afterward.

The E-D was suspected of being an utter lemon as late as "Contagion", FWIW. And we could see the first season of TNG with the multiple chief engineers and all the changes as the minimum shakedown length required for big ships of relatively novel type, consistently with the E-E.

But that's beside the point, which is that the Prometheus was never the flagship, either. Nor was any other brand new or old and proven ship other than the one vessel that was. We aren't at liberty to assign flagshipness. Starfleet is. And it assigned that to the E-D (in that fancy "Flagship of the UFP" form), but never to any of the other hero ships.

Sisko made plans and executed them (including altering them as he saw fit) from our tiny outdated hero ship that should have had dozens of siblings everywhere but didn’t (again) for non-in-universe reasons.

Why should the Defiant have siblings? She was designed to be anti-Borg. You don't win the Borg by numbers - you defeat them with tricks. And no trick works twice on them.

The Defiant was an example of what would have become the new fleet, putatively capable of fighting the Borg. She failed in that, and the fleet apparently never came to be - but nothing suggests it would have been a fleet of Defiants.

We never see the Federation, Klingon, or Romulans do anything but Sisko orders dozens of wings of far superior ships left and right, and then nearly gets himself (Space-Eisenhower) killed trying break through enemy lines because?? Was he the Federation’s premier cloaked mine expert too? It’s a TV show.

Sure. It's just something we might wish to rationalize away - and that part isn't difficult, because what Sisko is actually shown doing does not amount to leading the fleet. He does way too little for that, suggesting somebody else is doing the missing 90%.

Timo Saloniemi
 
We don't know how many Defiant-class starships they built. We know there are at least five built as we see USS Defiant on screen with two other of her class at the end of "Call to Arms", and neither of these two ships can be USS Valiant (which was caught behind enemy lines), nor USS Sao Paulo, with USS Sao Paulo built late in the war, originally with a much higher hull number than that of Defiant or Valiant. It is also unlikely that these two unknown Defiants in "Call to Arms" were the ones seen in both of the Voyager episodes to feature a pair of Defiants ("Message in a Bottle" chasing down the stolen USS Prometheus, and "Endgame" where they engage in their original function....fighting the Borg.)
 
Indeed, the more Defiants, the merrier, as we wouldn't want to see Starfleet strategically redeploy the ships across great distances due to their propulsion handicaps (which no doubt were greater for users unwilling to take the sort of risks Sisko or O'Brien took). A couple deployed per battlefront and staying there would seem more reasonable.

Does this mean Starfleet was trying to construct a swarm of Defiants? Five would seem excessive for prototyping. Yet the Defiant, the Valiant and the Sao Paulo at least have closely matching, on-your-face registries (and of course all the rest have the Defiant registry painted on if we look closely enough, and a "closely matching" one even if we squint). Regardless of whether these registries were allocated in the late 2360s when the prototyping was done, or in the mid-2370s when Sisko gave the class new validity and an active status - and regardless of whether they were painted on at completion, assigned with the laying of the keel, or allocated when the project was launched on paper - they sort of tie the Defiants together chronologically.

Not so perhaps with the Galaxies seen. Only one of the CGI ships appears to have been assigned a legible name and registry, nicely fitting in every respect. The others we can imagine as early or late products just as we please.

Timo Saloniemi
 
nor USS Sao Paulo, with USS Sao Paulo built late in the war, originally with a much higher hull number than that of Defiant or Valiant. It is also unlikely that these two unknown Defiants in "Call to Arms" were the ones seen in both of the Voyager episodes to feature a pair of Defiants ("Message in a Bottle" chasing down the stolen USS Prometheus,
In my head canon, those two Defiants in Message in a Bottle were the Defiant an Sao Paulo, thus explaining why they both have "USS Defiant NX-74205" on their hulls.

Though, in all seriousness, one of them most certainly was the actual Defiant given the security officers who beam aboard the Prometheus bridge were regular background extras on DS9.
 
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