It would give the ship fans something to look for in all that clutter, trying to spot details of all the types. When they're all basically the same ship, they all blur together.
Implications of the fleet
- Thread starter Sisko_is_my_captain
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Ah, OK. That reasoning makes sense even though I don't agree.
Thank you, antiquated blender
I remember reading some backstage info for TNG from different sources which stated that there was a desire to do new ship classes for TNG. The Ambassador, as originally designed by Probert, was supposed to appear much earlier. The Oberth class was supposed to be a related design, and not a reuse of the Grissom from ST III. But budget restraints forced them to reuse the Miranda, Excelsior, and Grissom. They got away with making the Constellation class because it could be constructed out of commercially available Star Trek and non-Star Trek model kits, and the production crew were loathe to use the Constitution Refit for filming (as originally planned for "The Battle") It would have been nice if they made non-damaged versions of the Wolf 359 ships, since they seemed like near contemporaries of the Galaxy and Ambassador, but they never tried to replicate them even when they had photos of the ships in their pristine state...except for what we would eventually call the Nebula class. IIRC, that was the first non-wreckage 24th Century design to be featured prominently besides the Enterprise-D. Outside of the Defiant, DS9 seemed to be stuck with hand-me-downs from its older brother TNG (physical models at first, and then the CGI First Contact fleet along with digitized versions of the usual suspects) Strangely after TNG ended, the Ambassador was blacklisted, and never appeared on DS9 (after the pilot that is) or Voyager, and was not digitized until long after those shows ended. The Sovereign was quarantined (pun intended) to the TNG movies only for seemingly stupid and shallow reasons (It's too cool to appear on TV!) Voyager got some new designs besides the Voyager itself, but they all seemed like variations on Voyager (Prometheus: "Sexy" Voyager, Dauntless: "I can't believe its not Starfleet" Voyager, Equinox: "Itty-bitty Teenie Weenie" Voyager, Relativity: "What would happen if an incredibly obese man sat on Voyager, in the Future!") The cost for building new physical models precluded their construction on TNG for a long time, and it wouldn't be until the widespread use of CGI that we got a more 24th Century flavored 24th Century Starfleet.
IIRC it was because the filming model had been damaged and couldn't be used to create digital assets
Everything you've stated here, to my knowledge, was absolutely true. And to add to that, I’m pretty sure the Lantree was also supposed to be a different class than the Reliant model they ended up using, since the crew only numbered 26.
Not quite. It was ILM that hated filming the TMP Enterprise. But the producers of TNG were definitely planning on using it to represent the Stargazer until Greg Jein created a filming model based on the kitbash in Picard's ready room (which was never intended to be the design of the Stargazer.) But Jein's filming model was not made from model kit parts, only the yellow desktop model was.
The five kitbashes built by Ed Miarecki were not originally meant for BoBW. They were just study models commissioned by Michael Okuda to show the show's producers different ship designs that could be constructed from the Enterprise-D's parts, for future larger filming models to be based on (which was what happened to the Nebula class). When Okuda et. al were looking for things for the debris field, they found these study models, added parts to them, and gave them names and registry numbers. And then, of course, wrecked them.
As @Agony_Boothb pointed out, the model was damaged and crated away and was subsequently forgotten. Not to mention that they had a brand-new filming model of the Excelsior built by Jein for "Flashback' that they scanned into a CGI model, so they focused on that instead of bothering with the Ambassador.
That wasn't the reason. The producers thought that if they used the Sovereign class model in the show for a random ship, everyone would think it was the Enterprise-E. Because apparently they thought the audience were morons.
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Okay, thanks for the clarification. I thought it was damaged long after it stopped being used. Do you know the nature of the damage? I was lucky enough to have seen the model at Christie's before it was sold, and while it had some wear and tear (the lifeboats were peeling off), it looked in pretty good condition. I'm guessing the damage was internal (something with the lighting)?
Thanks for the corrections. As for the Sovereign, I recall a similar explanation for why the Intrepid class never appeared on DS9, besides that one episode with Sloan. Like they worried people would think the USS Voyager magically returned to the Alpha Quadrant.
If they had more of a budget and chose to use ships that would still be in service from the past thirty years (again, why not, the Miranda and K’t’ingas were for, what, over 90?) I wonder what other ships than the ones I mentioned they could have included that we never saw before. Maybe one of Voyager’s mini-era that looked like it (no other ships have; the Prometheus is more Sovereign/Nova Class-inspired).
I like the Galaxy-ified Saber above. How about a Galaxy-looking escort like the Defiant?
Or how about something more in-between the Galaxy and Sovereign designs? Though, if they refitted the Galaxy to be a little sharper as I mentioned in-quote, maybe this could serve as the link there.
Of the two latest-era designs, maybe one could be completely new to a new PIC esthetic (not an STO one) and another a slightly older one that’s the design link to the Sovereign. Actually, I wouldn’t mind a handful of completely new to this era designs to sprinkle about here, again, if we had the budget and creativity.
Finally, I think I did a decent job with my quotes suggested ships of including different types and sizes, but I think it important to use more than one ship and size. Corvettes, Frigates, Cruisers, Hospital Ships, Transports...Clippers, etc. If you are only going to use one ship profile Zheng He (of the same time period, size, shape, job, etc), then there’s less reason to have more than the one variation.
Heavy Cruisers: PIC I, Sovereign, Galaxy
Cruisers: Probert Ambassador, (extra PIC)
Light Cruisers: Prometheus, Intrepid
Frigates: PIC II, Akira, Nebula
Corvettes: Rhode Island, Saber, (extra PIC—maybe no saucer?)
Hospital Ships: Olympic
Clippers: Cheyenne, (extra PIC—maybe 3 nacelles?)
(I’m calling these heavy/light by size, but is that right or do we go by armament? Although I imagine older ships to be refit with newer weapons anyway.)
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Even if you extrapolate from modern Earth you should get thousands of ships.
The USA has about 60 Burke class destroyers. The USA's GDP is 1/4 of the whole planet. So 60 times 4 is 240 ships per planet, of just one type. The Federation has 150 member worlds, so 240 times 150 equals 36,000 ships.
It is also a low end because 150 is just the seats of government and don't include things like total solar system output, or colony world output. Sol alone has Earth, Mars, and the moon as population centers. Even if that only doubled potential fleet size that bumps it to 72,000, which is coincidentally close to Voyager's registry number 74656, and Voyager's crew is pretty close to that of an Arleigh Burke class destroyer.
If you do it with super carriers, of which there are 11, then 150 super America Earths gives 1,650. We could equate those to Galaxy class ships or the like. It is also interesting because the Galaxy class crew is 1/5 of a modern super carrier, so based only on crewing Starfleet could man 5 times more ships.
But how do you find personnel for a fleet that big if everyone has to go through the Academy system to become an officers, given how few enlisted we have ever seen. If enlisted are trained for one job, and learn the rest on the job it could work. So instead of O'Brien being almost the only enlisted person in the fleet we would shift to seeing O'Brien as normal and officers as rare, more like today.
As a side note, 1650 Galaxy class ships each with a 50,000 person evacuation limit would be able to move 82,500,000 people per trip. Moving 900,000,000 would take 11 trips. Assuming everyone has to be moved 100 light years away to escape the super nova blast zone, and assuming the fleet moves at an average 0.23 ly/h it would take 18 days, one way, or 18 x 2 x 11 = 396 days.
The beginning of Picard firmly establishs sufficient building capacity at Utopia Planetia alone to construct a fleet of tens of thousands given the requirements for just 900,000,000 million people, not even the remaining billions in the Romulan star system and yet more billions in neighboring systems.
100% agree with this. They won't come up with a good one so I'd almost rather they didn't show it until competent designers and showrunners who appreciate starship design were in charge.
Maybe the fleet amassed at Utopia Planitia but was build throughout the system/Federation.
Possibly, but if the fleet was being built at multiple places I would expect plenty of the fleet existing outside the Sol system. I suppose we could assume everything was nearly ready to go when the attack happened and the final staging had just occurred. It is also a lot more logical to imagine more than one shipyard building that fleet.
Not quite (although you're on the right track).
Canonically, the largest number of persons stated as being loadable onto a Galaxy-class starship is a shade over fifteen thousand (~15x standard), and given that a) Yesterday's Enterprise implies that accommodating half that for extended periods taxes the ship's resources, and b) even that is considerably more additional relative capacity than any of the other hero ships -- the Connie might be able to do up to double in an emergency even fully-loaded, but the max planned capacity appears to be around 550 (Journey to Babel), the Intrepid-class can only get to 350 to 400 with extreme resource pressure) and the Defiant-class can apparently do about 150 (likely with similar issues to the Intrepid) -- I very much doubt that they have over triple again the capacity (so use only ~2% normally, rather than 7-14%).
With that in mind the calculation changes too:
15,000 x 1650 = 24,750,000 per trip,
900,000,000/24,750,000 = 37 trips (technically 36.3636... but).
Travel time = 18 x 2 x 37 = 1332 days.
Note, canonically the job intended to be done with ten thousand Wallenberg-class transports, suggesting a maximum (and not unsupportable) capacity of nine thousand per ship, which if deployed en masse could therefore do the entire job in one go.
Ah, I knew there was a 5 in there.
If we go with the 118,000 m^2 housing space and use 6.7 m^2 per person, which I think is what is used for US military recruits, we get 17,611 which is really close to the 15,000 evacuation limit. But that's just 4 people per average room and a real life ship would use bunk beds and hot swapping if they're really desperate to pack people in.
Assuming each bunk space could have a stack of four bunks would result in 4*17661=70,644. That's probably how the rescue fleet is getting the 90,000 person per ship density, but five bunks high, or just more housing space and less of everything else. Hot swap on 4 shifts gives 4*70644=282,576. I think this makes it clear the real limitation is life support, or thrice daily meal replicator power requirements.
I'm pretty sure, for a galaxy class, a good % of the hull is not used, as in is configurable dependent on mission.. I'm pretty sure you could dry dock a galaxy clasd, add extra life support equipment and living quarters to up rate the evacuation capacity..
G
Gonzo
Guest
At the end of the day the real limiter is going to be food, water and oxygen when ferrying refugees.
Lots of planets have the physical room for the refugees, very few of those have the infrastructure required to support them.
Lots of planets have the physical room for the refugees, very few of those have the infrastructure required to support them.
...Although Romulans would have to be phenomenally unlucky not to have a habitable planet just outside the sphere of destruction, since those are so bountiful in Trek in general.
And it only takes a single planet to house, say, a hundred billion. For the first year or so, that is. if in that time the amazing terraforming technology of the future can't bring about an agricultural revolution, it's really not worth much. Food and fresh water are both simple matters of available power, even without replicator technology...
As for resources during transport, is it difficult to apply stasis technologies to a great many people? I mean, it's not difficult with a small number, but that proves little.
Timo Saloniemi
And it only takes a single planet to house, say, a hundred billion. For the first year or so, that is. if in that time the amazing terraforming technology of the future can't bring about an agricultural revolution, it's really not worth much. Food and fresh water are both simple matters of available power, even without replicator technology...
As for resources during transport, is it difficult to apply stasis technologies to a great many people? I mean, it's not difficult with a small number, but that proves little.
Timo Saloniemi
A couple of industrial-grade replicators should take care of those problems.
well, it would be easier to make the Rescue fleet to be able to disengage there "Cargo Area" an have any refuges live out of the cargo containers.. they have food, water, shelter, until the infrastructure and stuff get settled..
