On Ship Design Longevity

[Mysterion]

So why do we keep seeing those Miranda, Oberth and Excelsior class starships so long into the TNG/DSN/VGR era?

Maybe some of the answers lie here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_warship_record

Interesting article.

 

[Python Trek]

Cool article. I've never really had a problem with those 23rd century designs surviving far into the 24th c. You stick with what works, y'know? And it's not as if the Feds were not innovating at the same time---we had the Ambassador and the Galaxy, for example.....

 

[Hatchet2k4]

I agree, it makes sense just like the article. If you think about it, the largest ships made for quite some time were Excelsiors.. Compared to any class before it they were truly multi purpose, with room for almost anything you would need for any mission. The Mirandas and Oberths were still around for their more specific roles. The only thing is there are very few classes for that time period.. Perhaps for a while Starfleet saw no need to create new classes until some dramatic new advances in starship building technology? The real big explosion in ship designs happened after the Galaxy class. Either suddenly the resources for building new ships expanded greatly, or they overhired in their starship design department. :P

 

[Unicron]

It certainly seems reasonable that the advanced tech we're accustomed to seeing in Trek and other shows would lead to longer design lifespans.

 

[Belryan]

It's a TV show. It's expensive to make new physical models. Therefore, once it's built, it's around for a while.

 

[Praetor]

^Well, you're no fun.

I do agree that it's never bothered me that the older ships would stay around in-universe. If we are to accept that a lack of seeing Constitutions means they aren't in service because of the real-world reason that they didn't want to confuse viewers, then we might need to think up a reason why they wouldn't still be in service.

 

[Wingsley]

Well, judging from the vague similarity between NX-01 and Kirk's Enterprise, perhaps we're looking at the Connie from the wrong end of history. Maybe there are "missing link" Federation starships from the post-ENT thru pre-TOS eras that evolved into what we knew as the Connie, so maybe that design was around from the 2160's to the time it was retired in the 2290's or early in the 24th century. That would be over 100 years.

 

[David cgc]

I prefer to just think there were plenty of Constitutions, and for that matter, Ambassadors, Constellations, Norways, and others, despite the fact that we never happened to see them because the models were unavailable, or never made into CG,or would've confused someone, or whatever.

 

[USS KG5]

We never saw many ships in TNG full stop really, the only exception being the chunks of kitbashes in BOBW, which you can take or leave for the most part.

Once we started seeing fleets in DS9 we did see lots of Akira, Steamrunner and Nebula class ships in addition to lots of Galaxy, Excelsior and Miranda class ships. Starfleet clearly does not have hundreds of designs, but they have a reasonably diverse fleet.

 

[Colonel Midnight]

The article is somewhat misleading, as one of the primary drivers for keeping/re-starting the DDG-51 production line is that it's replacement, the DDG-1000 project, is a complete and utter train-wreck of a program.

I can't recall the exact amount, but the latest cost estimate for the DDG-1000 was somewhere north of a few billion dollars... per hull. (Google has a few links showing approximately $3.3B. *zoinks*) Here's an interesting report:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL32109.pdf

Cheers,
-CM-

 

[sojourner]

Sailing ships stayed in service for decades... until steam came along. Steam ships stayed in service for decades... until diesel/electric came along. Diesel/electric stayed in service... until nuclear... oh wait!

You get what I'm driving at. A ship is still valid until there is a paradigm shift in technology.

 

[Timo]

Sailing ships stayed in service for decades... until steam came along. Steam ships stayed in service for decades... until diesel/electric came along.

One might want to note that most sailing ships tended to rot pretty quickly, unless made of the best-quality timber. Navies in northern Europe or North America often had to make do with fir rather than oak, and the ships so built had no chance of becoming heritage pieces like USS Constitution. Ships built before Europe ran out of oak weren't all that long-lived, either, for reasons of generally poor maintenance. "Decades" thus is sometimes generous for the lifetime of a sailing ship (or of a steamship built of wood), while it's somewhat dismissive of the durability of ships built out of iron or steel.

If wood weren't such a poor material for shipbuilding, we might have seen much more heritage ships in the early 20th century, converted to steam from 19th century windjammers. In contrast, large coal-burning steamships converted for oil boilers lived long and prospered, despite their original propulsive technology becoming quite obsolete.

So the passing of guard in the starship business might not be all that closely related to technological generation changes. Much would depend on whether starship hulls are worth refitting and recycling. For all we know, hulls are throwaway stuff and the proper way to refit a starship is to discard the hull and build a new one around the highly durable warp drive system or the good-for-centuries powerplant...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Santaman]

We've got a few more modern examples, Huascar is a neat old ironclad we Dutch have two Ram turret ships from the 1860's, HrMS Schorpioen and HrMS Buffel which are in pretty good condition, HMS Warrior is in good shape too and of course there was SMS Goeben/ Yavuz Sultan Selim which was a battlecruiser build in 1911 and scrapped in 1973, she was in continues service for about 50 years without really big refits whatsoever.

As for Trek ships, it would be totally redicilous to assume that those would have the same limited lifespans as current naval vessels, the materials are a thousand fold better then we can even dream off nowadays, they don't corrode, they don't develop metal fatigue and they will be manufactured to incredible standards.
I don't think its all that surprising to see Mirandas flying around or Constitution refits or whatever, I even wouldn't be surprised that Oberth class vessels started out as fleet scouts and later on were delegated to science work after a century or so, scoop the weapons out and throw some sensor packs in tadaa, there you go.

 

[Finn]

Relics implied that the Constitution Class isn't in service by the time of TNG with Picard's remark about one being at a museum.

 

[Data Holmes]

I never liked the way on screen trek handled this type of thing. I always liked the universe as presented within the fandom works of the FRS/SSA/MastercomDatacenter materials myself.

 

[Praetor]

I even wouldn't be surprised that Oberth class vessels started out as fleet scouts and later on were delegated to science work after a century or so, scoop the weapons out and throw some sensor packs in tadaa, there you go.

It would certainly explain the Grissom's apparently low registry number...

Relics implied that the Constitution Class isn't in service by the time of TNG with Picard's remark about one being at a museum.

To be fair, Picard was talking about a TOS-era Constitution class ships. We didn't see any concretely dateable TOS-era ships in use in the TNG era... I think the closest we might get were the Amargosa research station in 'Generations' and Kasidy Yates' freighter, both of which had TOS-style graphics.

(I like to think that the refit-era tech marked a small paradigm shift that marked TOS era tech pretty much obsolete.)

I was recently watching a documentary on the military channel about the Abrams tank. In it, they mention how the tanks, when they are essentially wrecked, come back to the factory to be disassembled, refurbished, upgraded, and rebuilt - perhaps not unlike what happened to the Enterprise between TOS and TMP. Apparently, there are Abrams tanks still in service today that are from the original production run in the early 80s, but have been completely rebuilt and upgraded to newer specs. It's not so hard to imagine the same type of operation giving starships ridiculously long lifespans.

 

[Finn]

^ I'm not sure. Picard doesn't think in terms of "TOS" era. He simply identified it as a Constitution class before saying there's one at the fleet museum. For all we know, The constitution class looked nothing like it did on TOS when they were first built. Not to mention that there may be other constitution class ships with different bridge configuration, both from the TOS era and during the movie era... Look at the Yamato (the real one) and the Odyssey. The bridge looked different from the Enterprise D.

It'd be like a late 25th Century Starfleet Captain seeing a holograpghic representative of the main bridge from season one with the wooden paneling and saying "Galaxy Class...there's one at the fleet museum. It doesn't mean that captain was thinking of the wooden paneling.

 

[Nightfall to-Ennien]

Picard doesn't think in terms of "TOS" era. He simply identified it as a Constitution class before saying there's one at the fleet museum.

This was the bridge of the original Enterprise, in series production trim, that we're talking about. Even in-universe, it's legendary, so I wouldn't find it unlikely that Picard was referring specifically to there being a ship 'like it', meaning near-identical in configuration, in the Fleet Museum. As for the mention of there likely having been different bridge configurations, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there were, but the only difference we ever saw in TOS between pre-refit Constitution class bridges was some had a highback rather than mid-back command chair.

 

[Praetor]

^That line was what I was thinking of. Saying "there's one like it in the fleet" to me means there's a TOS-style ship. There are far larger differences between the TOS and TMP ships besides the equivalent of TNG's disappearing wood paneling...

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The article is somewhat misleading, as one of the primary drivers for keeping/re-starting the DDG-51 production line is that it's replacement, the DDG-1000 project, is a complete and utter train-wreck of a program.

Which leads us to question what the DDG-1000 program was supposed to accomplish anyway. Like its flying cousin the F-22, it's shaping up to be an overpriced toy designed to fight a war that will never happen against an enemy that no longer exists. And even with dubious claims as to why we might some day need a stealth fighter in the unlikely event we go to war with China, what the fuck do we need a stealth destroyer for?

I tend to think Starfleet is a bit more pragmatic than that. Instead of dreaming up a whole new system just so some Federation defense contractors can have something new to sell, they'd rather upgrade existing platforms unto absurdity and spread the R&D costs for the upgrades over the many thousands of implementations. In the long run that becomes alot cheaper than designing totally new ship classes every fifteen years, in fact you'd only have to come up with something new when a new technology exists that is fundamentally incompatible with the older designs (hence Excelsior was designed in conjunction with Transwarp Drive, otherwise it would have been just another Constitution).