NX class design

[James Wright]

Was the NX class starship a good design for a ship that was bound to go into combat eventually, should the Enterprise have survived some of its' encounters with the Xindi for example?
Don't get me wrong, I like the NX design but in ship vs ship actions it looks like the NX-01 takes considerable damage and it's only by sheer luck and the tactical abilities of the captain and crew that the ship survives any of the fights the ship is placed in.
In my opinion the NX class just wasn't meant to go toe to toe against other ships but to move as fast as possible, get in take the shot and get out.

James

 

[u.f.p. engineer]

(u.f.p. engineer) Hi, I'm A real structual engineer and I've built every Federation Starhip on paper, from basic construction all the way to the toliets (based on Federation Concepts) and u are right.. The bigger a vessel get's the more weak spot's accur and in turn the more possabilities for damage...This also is so for extreme design's s, some were really not intelligent...

 

[u.f.p. engineer]

(u.f.p. engineer) Also to let you know as of the first of the month (march) I open my new business. (edited away)
thanks..mike


(Please don't use the board to sell things, if you need to you can buy adspace. Thanks, Hoser)

 

[sojourner]

I think the NX class was just inferior technology compared to most things it encountered.

 

[Ronald Held]

Only because almost everyone they met had superior tech plus the Vulcans kept humans from making more progress over about 100 years

 

[Wingsley]

Well ENT appeared to raise the question repeatedly as to whether the Human Race was "ready" for deep space flight. Archer and other Earth Starfleet people seemed to think that piercing the Warp 5 threshold meant they were ready to build Warp 5 starships and "get out there", but the encounters with multiple aliens made it clear that (1: Warp 6 or 7 seemed to be an interstellar "respectability" standard, and (2: warp speed ain't nuthin' without defensive forcefield technology to better protect your starship.

This may be why the Vulcans kept trying to talk the Humans out of proceeding with the "NX Project". It also seems the Romulans were in the background, trying to influence the Vulcans.

 

[James Wright]

If the NX-01 had lost its' connecting pylons to its' nacelles and impulse engines in battle the ship would effectively be cut in half.(Yeah, I know the ship would be destroyed!)

James

 

[Vanyel]

The loss of a nacelle is pretty much catastrophic damage to even 24th century starship. And except for the Defiant class, the nacelles are pretty vulnerable, even with shields. In a battle, my tactic would be to concentrate fire on a nacelle pylon, weaken the shields and damage or destroy the pylon and/or nacelle.

 

[Unicron]

(u.f.p. engineer) Also to let you know as of the first of the month (march) I open my new business.

This forum really isn't for the sale of items.

 

[PrimeDirective]

What we need to take into consideration before we go shooting our mouths off talking badly about the NX-class design, is that compared to other warp-capable species, humanity reached warp cability and crossed the warp-five barrier a lot faster than anyone else. I think that when you take humanity's history, we did a pretty damned good job at creating starships, weapons, and transporters that give any other alien species' tech a run for their money. For goodnes's sake, if it wasn't for humanity, the Coalition of Planets, let alone the UFP, would have never formed.

 

[Deks]

Agreed.
Despite the fact that the NX-01 was a bit inferior to other ships out there ... for the most part it was relatively close technologically speaking.

I would say that the Vulcans probably didn't share most of their knowledge with Humans, however, 'something' was shared.
Perhaps initial plans (or indications) for directed energy weapons and so forth, but hardly anything concrete.

For the most part, Humans had to develop most of the technology on their own it would seem.
Vulcans most likely influenced (slightly) the direction of technological development, but in just a century, Humans were able to reach Warp 5.
Incidentally, Paris mentioned in Dark Frontier that it was around early/mid 22nd century 'money went the way of the dinosaurs' ... so it's quite possible that elimination of money (or the fact is was on it's way out anyway) greatly accelerated humanity's progress.

 

[sojourner]

Refinement comes quickly after a breakthrough. Look how far the electronics industry has changed since the invention of the
transistor.

What we need to take into consideration before we go shooting our mouths off talking badly about the NX-class design, is that compared to other warp-capable species, humanity reached warp cability and crossed the warp-five barrier a lot faster than anyone else. I think that when you take humanity's history, we did a pretty damned good job at creating starships, weapons, and transporters that give any other alien species' tech a run for their money. For goodnes's sake, if it wasn't for humanity, the Coalition of Planets, let alone the UFP, would have never formed.

Yes, sometimes fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

These ships are all held together by "structural integrity fields" and protected by force fields so design doesn't matter in terms of survivability.

Hell, the hulls are close to superfluous.

 

[Nick Ryder]

BUT the S.I.F. could only go so far. I mean if they lost power it would have meant that parts of the ship would quickly start to degrade, especially once they hit warp speed. That's the thing I liked about the NX-01 was that it felt more sturdy, it wasn't so free form, it felt like a real SHIP not a floating hotel. I mean, really... sure you had holes punched into the hull, but they were still able to fly because bulkheads would close that section off. On a 24th or even 23rd Century ship they relied heavily on shields and force fields.

While yeah the NX01 was inferior in some ways, it was superior in others.

 

[Deks]

From what was mentioned in the show, the S.I.F. is there to (among other things) enhance/sustain overall hull integrity under extreme warp (or other) velocities, but I doubt it's responsible for holding the entire hull together in the first place, or that hulls are superfluous to begin with (in many events, ships lost main power, and if a physical hull did not exist, the entire thing would decompress very easily on a number of occasions).

It was mentioned in Enterprise itself that the NX-01 would be able to reach Warp 6 or 7, however, due to their S.I.F. technology being insufficient and would require retrofitting, it was not pursued at the time.

 

[Timo]

I'd argue that the "design" of NX-01 was pretty advantageous for space combat, since it's basically the same thing Starfleet will keep on using for the next 200 years. It's more the "standard of equip" that our heroes find wanting during their 22nd century adventures. Just pull out the original plasma peashooters and nuclear torps and install more modern weaponry, and you get a pretty respectable space combatant. Better engines might be nice, but not really necessary for defeating 22nd century opponents, it seems. Actual forcefield shields are a must - but even those can probably be plugged in without major structural changes.

Not that Starfleet would necessarily want to. All the ships of that class may be worn down to uselessness by the time Starfleet gets access to suitably good equipment. Or then production technology or resources have improved, and it makes better sense to build all-new ships that are a tad larger or leaner or whatever. But the basic design philosophy of starships doesn't seem to change much between ENT and TNG, so apparently the Earthlings got it right from the start.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Incidentally, Paris mentioned in Dark Frontier that it was around early/mid 22nd century 'money went the way of the dinosaurs' ... so it's quite possible that elimination of money (or the fact is was on it's way out anyway) greatly accelerated humanity's progress.

Actually, I think it worked the other way around. Humans got into space and discovered--as anyone who is honest already knows--that the human concept of "money" is actually arbitrary fiat that means nothing to anyone else in the universe. Nobody outside of Sol accepts US dollars or Euros or United Earth Credits; it's all just paper to them.

Probably it was the Boomers that discovered that all interstellar commerce is commerce stripped of pretenses and accounting games: you trade something you have for something you want, and the value of a thing is as much about where it's from as where it's going. That essentially means the only way to acquire wealth is to trade things your planet has plenty of for things your planet needs MORE of, and returning these things to your planet makes you kind of a big shot.

The thing is, if you have these things your planet needs, in what sense are you "wealthy?" You can get more of what you personally need (so local currency might still exist) than you otherwise would, but in the end, you're not acquiring anything that could apply for an investment other than more of what you need to do your job (a warp three engine for your ship, for example). In the end, you're not a tycoon or a capitalist, you're just a space-faring merchant on The Great River.

I kind of expect that NX-01 was the last ship in Starfleet that ever had an actual price tag on it; subsequent vessels would be billed in terms of what went into their construction (X amount of man hours, Y amount of duranium, Z amount of transparent aluminum) and so on. When you start measuring resources in those concrete terms, certain things get emphasized and certain things get excluded; complicated sophisticated technologies like computers and energy weapons become somewhat cheaper since they're reduced to the materials required to build them, while things like rare elements used in warp coils and subspace transceivers become harder to find and more expensive.

I dare say this might have been one of the driving forces behind the Founding of the Federation: the realization that a handful of worlds had BETWEEN THEM the resources to build perfect starships and perfect civilizations, but needed a robust and well-protected (Nausican-free) trade network to exploit those resources.