Headless Galaxy Classes?
- Thread starter USSHermes
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Was there any real-life reason for keeping the CGI saucers in the DS9 battles?
yeah, IMO... the real life reason is that the CGI people kept them on there so that we wouldn't be having the other side of the thread... "Why WASN'T There any Headless Galaxy Classes"
and so that people wen't saying "what class was that?" "is that a new class"
and so that people wen't saying "what class was that?" "is that a new class"
That's a really weird reason to do/not to do something in a TV show.
Realistically, the only people keen enough to notice or care what kind of starships appear in such and such a scene are the same people smart enough to figure out exactly what it is they're looking at. I have no idea why "we don't want to confuse our viewers" is a thought that any producer takes even remotely seriously. It would be like the writers of a sitcom pulling a joke from the script saying "Nobody under twenty five is going to get it."
If they really thought we were going to be confused, they probably should have stopped reusing/redressing the same three or four models to represent alien-of-the-week ships from every corner of the galaxy. If they thought we were too stupid to notice that, we should have been too stupid to notice that those mysterious-looking starships in the background were just Galaxy classes without saucers attached.
They're far more recognisable with their saucers. If the E-D had split on a regular basis as originally envisaged, I'm sure we'd have seen saucerless Galaxies.
Wow, I like that idea.
It reminds me of all the "Apollo Applications" ideas (like the Saturn rocket-based space station). "We had this great hardware, what else can we do with it?"
RE the point brought up about Galaxy class ships entering combat with their Saucer section still attached.
I'm sure I read some place that a producer claimed those Galaxy Class ships we see were either:
A: Devoid of non essential personnel or
B: Scrambled out of construction yards with 75% of their interior unfilled (decks yes, rooms no) with only the essential systems and backups (and their redundant sub systems) required to make the ships work. An upgraded weapons pack was also mentioned.
B seems to fit for most of them as you see one get 3 chunks taken out of it at the first Battle on Chin'Toka and it keeps going like nothing happened.
I'm sure I read some place that a producer claimed those Galaxy Class ships we see were either:
A: Devoid of non essential personnel or
B: Scrambled out of construction yards with 75% of their interior unfilled (decks yes, rooms no) with only the essential systems and backups (and their redundant sub systems) required to make the ships work. An upgraded weapons pack was also mentioned.
B seems to fit for most of them as you see one get 3 chunks taken out of it at the first Battle on Chin'Toka and it keeps going like nothing happened.
Yes, like Skylab. But using a bigger portion of the Saturn rocket, and using several of them.
That is a good idea. We saw something similar with some of the small saucered Wolf 359 ships.
When I look at the Enterprise D, I look at the lower phaser ring being the width the saucer should have for ship-to-ship conflicts.
Thus that whole saucer can be a dropship.
But I can't draw squat.
Some fan-designs talk about the "Back-up" phaser being nearby.
OK, I just scanned the thread, so I apologize if someone else made this point. Personally, I would think it would be much more efficient for Starfleet to make 3 or 4 smaller combat focused ships, like Defiants or Akiras, than to rush out 1 or 2 incomplete Galaxys.
Some in-universe justification I've heard sounded pretty plausible; The idea of seperating your scientists and family for combat sounded great on paper while designing the ship, but in practice captain's found that
1) Combat situations tend to be spontaneous and unpredictable; Many such situations in TNG didn't tend to give you a spare 10 minutes to shuffle the crew around and ditch the saucer. Also,
2) Not equipping the saucer with it's own warp drive meant the civilians were really SOL if anything happened to the stardrive section, or if more than one opponent was involved; The Saucer did not have the power to outfight most opponents, and no capacity to evade or outrun them.
Why Starfleet's 20 year design process on the Galaxy didn't figure these hiccups out before the first ships were already in service is another question, tho.
Indeed.
From the TNG Technical Manual it was proposed that a percentage of the primary hull was left un-finished for future expansion and extending capabilities.
We also "know" there's quite a bit of starship capability represented by the Galaxy class - lots of science labs, lots of computing and storage space (some of it redundant), cargo, waste management/replication capability to produce surplus goods and support quite a large number of people comfortably, and lots of room for embarked craft. And then the as-designed people component of families, civillians, and Starfleet --- rec rooms, holodecs, lounges, sickbay (several wards and specialty areas), a 'mall' (ala Probert), maybe stores... so that's a lot of Starship.
So you remove (or not build-in) many of the science labs, you take out parts of the computer cores (I assume they are modular), you scale down the waste management and life support equipment to something more basic, you go without as many creature comforts (holodecs, family quarters, vip quarters, observation lounges,)... and you KEEP the weapons, the impulse engines (and their fusion reactors), the shield generators, the power systems... maybe you ADD some extra power batteries, maybe add some fusion generators, add some extra capacity to the phaser capacitors.
It's a big target, but this way it's somewhat lighter and the raw power of the ship is unleashed without it's multirole capability.
The stardrive, by itself, I think loses some potential fighting capability. The primary hull doesn't HAVE to be deadweight in a fight.
I imagine the Galaxy could be quite the gunship.
Depends how far along they were. If the ships were basically complete or nearly so (i.e., the most important bits - hull, life-support, bridge, engineering, power, weapons, etc - were all getting near-completion and could be rushed along and bolted together within months), then it might make sense just to forget the non-essential bits (holodeck, et al) and get them into service ASAP.
If you're starting a ship from scratch, however, and it is needed urgently for an ongoing war, then, indeed, it would make no sense to start on a Galaxy when Defiants (plural) could be constructed much more quickly, can be run on a smaller crew (in the face of a manpower shortage) and can do 80-90% of what a Galaxy would be set to do anyway.
[Indeed, that's the whole point of the Defiant-class - a cheap, mass-producable, small crew, single-purpose ship, If Starfleet DIDN'T set their shipyards to mostly produce Defiants during the Dominion War, after the DS9 crew had proven it to be viable in actual use, then the class was a complete failure.]
Is there any evidence for this? I always thought, based on the admittedly non-canonical DS9 Tech Manual, that the Defiant was a very resource intensive craft for it's size. Furthermore many of the components were slow to manufacture. The original planned fleet was to be just six ships.
I've no objection to the idea that Star Fleet would produce as many as possible, I just think that there would be practical limitations to the process.
Agreed on that. People tend to point out that the Defiant was supposed to be the start of a new warfleet - but "The Search" doesn't exactly say that this fleet would consist of Defiant class ships. Instead, said design is consistently considered a prototype if not a testbed (and a failed one at that). And Starfleet employs her in a silver-bullet fashion in the end...
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
In fact, "The Search" flat out states the Defiant never quite worked as planned (Overpowered and imbalanced, to the point that it's powerplant signatures was leaking past the Cloaking field in that two parter, iirc), and had been brought out of storage at Sisko's request.
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