Most efficient Federation Starship?

[El Amigo Carlos]

What would be the Federation's most versitile and efficient ship?
If the Federation had to stick to only 3 starship designs, which would it be?

For example the Cardassians generally use only 1 Class the most, the Galor Class and they refit it when needed. Duo to this they are able to spam this ship and keep up with the other Alpha quadrant superpowers even if the Cardies are the weakest ones.
The Romulans probably have an equal amount of ships and the D'deridex is much superiort to any Cardassian ship.

With the Federation having like 50 ship models of which 10 are battle ready and, which would be the most efficient one to spam out?
Take in to note they can't make an infinite amount of Galaxy class ships or other OP ones. So generally some medium-strong one.
The Klingons use a shitstorm of 100-200 meter long BoPs and some bigger vessles so what exactly should the federation do?

We'll asume every class they ever made it currently refited with Post Dominion war technollogy.

 

[The Wormhole]

What would be the Federation's most versitile and efficient ship?

Excelsior class

If the Federation had to stick to only 3 starship designs, which would it be?

Excelsior, Miranda and Nebula classes

 

[bolak]

In terms of pure spaceframe efficiency I think the Constellation class is hard to beat; a big thick saucer of constant thickness for plenty of volume, without those space-wasting upper/lower compound-curves found on other ships. Dual shuttlebays on each flank and four nacelles for efficient long-range missions. It really looked like something that could be sent out on a 30 year mission and come back home all weathered and battered.

But perhaps it'd be beter to churn-out vast quantities of what fans used to call 'frigates' and send them out in pairs. Nearly everytime we heard of Starfleet losing a ship to Episodic Hazard it was on its own, so maybe it'd be less expensive in the long run to send pairs on each mission; less sexy in terms of hardware but more pragmatic. And if they encountered Big Badass Enemy Ship they could initiate multi-vector assault mode...

 

[BillJ]

If the Federation had to stick to only 3 starship designs, which would it be?

Constitution (TOS version), Excelsior (pre-refit), Intrepid.

 

[SPCTRE]

the one with the least amount of nacelles

 

[El Amigo Carlos]

Constitution (TOS version), Excelsior (pre-refit), Intrepid.

Intrepid?
We saw how Voyager faired against far less advanced enemies. I'm preety sure the Intrepid is just a glorified explorer spoonhead vessle.

The constitution had like 18 phasers, that shit was lit, a warship and a wannabe science vessle.
It wad fucking sexy when it comes to looks.

 

[El Amigo Carlos]

In my personal opinion I'd main the Nebula, a probably older Nebula was more than capable of destroying a Cardassian Galor and it does seem like a Generally smaller easier to make ship.
The Defiant is great really, a shitty ship to live in but for a 170meter(~) long ship it packs a massive punch, this really shows the prowess of the Federation in technollogical capabilities.

A Galor class or any Klingon ship is just like the Defiant, as compact as possible, a pure warship and the Federation excells as it.
Their tiny Defiant class can boulder a Galor or BoP
On another note the Defiant was equally powerfull as a reffited Excelssior Dominion war era made by a crazy Admiral.
So a smaller cheaper ship is as good as a warmade Excelssior.

Instead of the Nebula you could chose the Akira which is basically indicated to be stronger than a Defiant via the power of plot.


So I guess I'd use the Akira and Defiant as warships,scouts and patrol ships or whatnot and the Nebula as a science exploration ship because I'm biassed and I like it a lot.


The Prometheus is weird as hell, the multi vector assault makes no sense at all and i'll just not include it.
The Galaxy is a glorified Nebula but 3× the cost I reckon.
The soveirigin class was never seen actually in action so it's hard to tell, it's still a mainly exploration vessle.

 

[Farscape One]

I would include the Miranda class ships. They are older than even the Excelsior class, and they had several offshoot classes from it, like the Soyuz class. And they were used in a variety of ways... scout, escort, supply ship. They were probably the best Jack-Of-All-Trades class Starfleet ever produced, and looked compact enough to build a great many of them easily and quickly.

 

[Infern0]

Most efficient would seem to be Excelsior.

If they had to only have 3 types id say

1. Miranda, seems like a cheap capable science ship

2. Excelsior

3. Sovereign or Galaxy (they need a powerhouse to stand vs other capital ships)

 

[F. King Daniel]

They all do the same thing.

 

[Brass]

If you look at the borg, the cube seems to be pretty efficient. So, perhaps the Feds could copy that?

Wouldn't be very inspiring to look at.

I guess you need to define what "efficient" means. Efficient at what task? Battle? Exploration? Long term voyages, cargo hauling, etc. From that perspective, it probably makes sense to tailor different classes to different tasks. Especially when yo want to expend the minimum amount of material to construct the ship for the task at hand. A battleship is going to require more power and maneuverability than the typical cargo hauler.

The rather small diversity of alien ships is more of the same problem with aliens in trek. Writers tend to make each race very uniform in all aspects. There are of course, exceptions.

 

[El Amigo Carlos]

Most efficient when it comes to battle and exploration, so for example the Defiant is an amazing battleship but horrible exploration or science vessle.
The Galaxy is a great exploration ship but a very medicore battleships considering it's size and materials used for construction.

By most efficient I meant it as a multi task ship that can actually explore and research yet also hold it's own fairly on the battlefield.

 

[Brass]

In that case, I'd have to disagree about the galaxy being a poor battleship. For it's time, it's a top notch battleship. There are various episodes when the Ent-D is transporting cargo as part of the plot in TNG as well. In TNG it is brand new, so I'm not sure that it's established that it is particularly expensive to build. It is seemingly so, since most of the other ships we see are miranda and excelsior class. To me it seems an open question of how exactly materially expensive it is. Is it only uncommon because it's new, or simply because it's a behemoth? By DS9 the Galaxy seems to be something of a workhorse and very common. By then in terms of effectiveness it starts to slip behind the times, I'll grant you that. On the other hand, it seems really simple to churn them out then.

 

[Rahul]

In-universe, the Intrepid class is the absolute powerhouse. 100% self-sufficient for 7++ years, absolute top speeds (Warp 9,9 over looooooong times), can stand against friggin' Borg cubes in a fight(!), and can literally do any science shit possible with it's deflector dish and everything. It's a beast.

Almost equally capable as a Galaxy-class ship, but for a fraction of it's size and crew complement. So it makes sense to compromise the majority of the fleet of them. So while the Galaxy (or Souvereign for that matter) would win the direct comparison, it wouldn't match up against a group of Intrepids.

In a fictional "3 ships fleet" you'd need that big capital ships, the all-rounder, and a super efficient war ship. The Defiant blows almost everything out of the sky, but I'm not so sure if that's the hero bonus of having Sisko on board. In direct battleship-comparison, the Prometheus seemed to have taken the upper hand.

So, the max. efficient group of starships would be:

1. Galaxy class/Souvereign class (capital and flagship)
2. Intrepid class (science, exploration, battle, multi-purpose everything - largest number)
3. Prometheus class (battleships)

 

[Galileo7]

Refit-Constitution Class
Excelsior Class
Prometheus Class

 

[Admiral2]

Most efficient when it comes to battle and exploration, so for example the Defiant is an amazing battleship but horrible exploration or science vessle.
The Galaxy is a great exploration ship but a very medicore battleships considering it's size and materials used for construction.

By most efficient I meant it as a multi task ship that can actually explore and research yet also hold it's own fairly on the battlefield.

If you're going to hold to this standard then you don't need three different designs. Just pick one heavily armed explorer and build lots of them. A fleet of three hundred Sovereigns is all you'd need.

In reality, it's hard to design a truly multi-purpose ship. They come in all shapes and sizes because they tend to have specialties, and those specialties are based on the needs of the governments acquiring them, so saying "pick three designs but make them all do the exact same thing" is counter-intuitive. If you're going to pick three designs to build a Starfleet, you need to start by designating three missions for that fleet to accomplish.

So for missions, I pick "Home Defense," "Interstellar Force Projection" and "Exploration."

For Home Defense, I pick the Nova-class. They're small and cheap in terms of resources so you can build lots of them, so you build enough to leave a couple of squadrons in each key Federation system to stand as a close-in defense.

For Interstellar Force Projection, I pick the Intrepid-class. No, the shovel-ships aren't my favorite, but they are versatile, durable, fast and pack sufficient punch if used correctly. I'd use them to patrol the space between Federation systems, and surge them into task forces to meet any border incursions that try to roll in.

For Exploration, we come back to the Sovereigns, because this is the mission where a single starship is going to be on its own for significant periods of time, so you need something big, self-sufficient and loaded with resources, as well as enough firepower to take care of itself when no help is immediately forthcoming.

Those are my picks.

 

[El Amigo Carlos]

The Klingons,Cardassians and Romulans all use basically one ship type for everything and they're medicore at all they do.

Romulans seem to have the best ship in general but the D'deridexes probably are often decades old but juet moderetely refitted and they can't really just shut down a Quantnum singularity.

You could have 3 designs always, why not. A versitile ship is generally not really super advanced at any specific aspect.


As I said, compared to the size, the Galaxy seemed a bit underpowered, often basically losing to opponents it shouldn't really but it definetely was the strongest ship of the quadrant when it came out.


The Borg cube actually is a great vessle, you can't hit 1 random spot and suddenly disable all weapons and whatnot XD it's thingies are spread out well, no weak spot but it being a cube makes it's weapons devided on 4 sides(weak in 1v1 combat).


Just like we saw in the Prometheus, splitting in 3 makes you 30× stronger so I feel like a sovereign could get gankbankt.

The Intrepid is trash and even facts or God himself won't change my mind.

 

[The Old Mixer]

but it being a cube makes it's weapons devided on 4 sides

6.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Another vote for Excelsior and Miranda, they're still in use after almost a century, if that's not a sign of how effective they are then I don't know what is. I'd probably also include the Nebula as well, it is very versatile and effective in a wide variety of situations.

 

[matthunter]

The Intrepid is trash and even facts or God himself won't change my mind.

Well, that's the "discussion" part of the thread over, isn't it?

"It might actually be the best and you could prove it with stats, flipcharts or divine intervention, but fuck all that shit".

If it warped up and smacked you with a full torpedo spread, you still wouldn't buy it?