PIC S3 Ships & Tech

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Yeah, but one doesn't need synths to do the heavy lifting.
I mean, automation comes in many forms... and in Trek, what usually can be done with manual labor CAN be done with antigrav units and tractor beams... and SF tech can easily create small/compact devices with these in mind that can crawl through the ship and do maintenance, repairs and upgrades (oh yeah, they have the DOT's which pretty much do the same thing - the USS Titan-A used them).

It seems like they focused on Synths as their pre-dominant Droid for some reason.

Why they didn't use the DOT's or Exo-Comps ( ::Shrugs:: )
Somebody won the droid contract race at that time and Synths took over as the primarily contracted Droids.

Plus, I never saw ships in Trek being built manually, because it doesn't make sense. For space, you'd need massive amount of automation to do the task, not manual assembly... and if you have the ability to make ships in space, then you have robotics and automation that can/should do all of it.
The manual labor might be needed in some final touch ups in the final stages as the ship is completed, which would be done in conjuction of finalizing the assembly of the ship (especially if done via prefarbication techniques).

Yeah, but you need the Automation fully established, tested, & up and running for that to work well.
If you destroy the infrastructure, it takes time to debug all your automation setup to get it fully working.
That could take quite a while depending on setup.
If you lose the man power and supply chain behind it, that will hinder things dramatically.

Replacing the hw can be done with transporters usually.
Given the modular nature of SF ships, I'm actually surprised that SF isn't using transporters in this fashion when they could just as easily lock onto affected components and replace them.
The old components could be directly disassembled inside the matter stream back to energy or base elements/recycled to be used for replicating a new component.

Remember, that depends on how much passive Transporter Shielding you have to prevent enemies from doing the same to your hardware. If you have Anti-Transporter Shielding to prevent targeting of specific sub-systems, then it's going to be harder to get a specific lock on certain hardware.

It just seems to me SF wastes a lot of resources needlessly on mind numbing stuff that should have never been done by manual labor... and it surprises me that Trek writers also seemingly ignore this.

Depends, some things are easy to do with automation, other things aren't that easy.

Just go watch how a modern Naval Combat Vessel is made.

There's a surprisingly large amount of manual labor.

 

[Tim Walker]

But, we don't know the actual aftermath of the synth attack.
I mean, we've seen in PIC s1 finale they had a massive fleet of nothing but Zheng'he class of ships which warped in to face off the Romulans.
Plus, SF likely just doesn't have Utopia Planitia as a single starship construction facility for the entirety of Starfleet (regardless of what the writers would want us to think) because it wouldn't be plausible for the whole UFP that stretches 8000 ly's and has over 150 member planets (star systems which are fully developed and have their own starship construction facilities that would not only support the native species fleets, but also be under SF's juridstiction/protection and would use them for starship construction as well).

There have been different size estimates for some of the First Contact ships, such as Saber and Steamrunner. For example, it has been commented that a smaller estimate would result in a Saber with about the same volume as a Miranda. To make up for severe losses, I can easily imagine such remaining in production in the immediate post war years. Probably being built in smaller shipyards across the Federation.

Construction of the copy/paste fleet would come later.

 

[fireproof78]

just seems to me SF wastes a lot of resources needlessly on mind numbing stuff that should have never been done by manual labor... and it surprises me that Trek writers also seemingly ignore this.

It's written for a modern audience.

 

[Macintosh]

There have been different size estimates for some of the First Contact ships, such as Saber and Steamrunner. For example, it has been commented that a smaller estimate would result in a Saber with about the same volume as a Miranda. To make up for severe losses, I can easily imagine such remaining in production in the immediate post war years. Probably being built in smaller shipyards across the Federation.

Due to its generally boxy shape the Sabre packs a surprisingly large internal volume for its external size. A length of around 170m – roughly the same size as the Defiant was supposed to be, though she famously had many scaling issues of her own – would give the Sabre a bit more volume than the Constitution refit or the Miranda (239,000m³ vs 235,000m³ and 218,000m³, respectively). Ex Astris Scientia lists a tentative length of 223m, which would give the Sabre a volume of around 530,000m³, or around 85% that of the Intrepid-class.

This surprisingly big internal volume might well explain why the Sabre has so many lifeboat hatches...

 

[Tuskin38]

The curious Curiosity Class is now the.....

https://twitter.com/DaveBlass/status/1661711185891274752

No, that's a different design.

 

[Markonian]

I wish Eaglemoss was still around to consolidate all the Twitter post info and images into a book.

 

[Macintosh]

I wish Eaglemoss was still around to consolidate all the Twitter post info and images into a book.

Ben Robinson is. Maybe reach out to him? He could well be working on something.

 

[valkyrie013]

Utopia may have been a big loss, but at the moment of the rebellion, it was producing ships for the rescue fleet, which probably accounted for 90-100% of whatever production was going at the time. When it was destroyed, it was mostly the rescue fleet that was gone, and spinning up production at another area was time prohibitive due to the time to the super novae

Utopia would have been a big hit, but wouldn't have hamstringed production past maybe 5 years, and that is just a slow down till other docks could be built or upgraded at other areas. That and raw material/ parts wern't made/mined at mars, so there wouldn't be any shortage of non replicatable material.

So, in the end, yes losing Utopia would have sucked, but there are plenty of other areas that can build ships.it wouldnt have been catastropic to ship production.

 

[Markonian]

Didn't Terry Matalas post that Starfleet, as of 2401, is unable to recover from the loss of Utopia Planitia? Hence the Titan-recycling because they cannot make new parts.

 

[Dukhat]

Didn't Terry Matalas post that Starfleet, as of 2401, is unable to recover from the loss of Utopia Planitia? Hence the Titan-recycling because they cannot make new parts.

First I've heard of that. And I doubt it was mentioned on the show. And it makes no sense anyway. The Federation should have quite a few shipyards and definitely lots of raw material to build ships. The loss of one shipyard should not have made such a drastic impact. Plus, they replicate matter to create new parts. Why would UP being destroyed stop that from happening?

 

[Deks]

Didn't Terry Matalas post that Starfleet, as of 2401, is unable to recover from the loss of Utopia Planitia? Hence the Titan-recycling because they cannot make new parts.

Doesn't make sense.
The UFP is massive, over 150 fully developed star systems which have their own species and unknown amount of colonies each belonging to each of those 150 star systems.

The loss of Utopia Planitia would be nothing. SF, would still have facilities in Earth's orbit, and it would have to have shipyards similar in size/scope to Utopia Planitia in all of those other 150 memeber planet star systems.

The loss of one would be a setback yes, but nothing that the Federation wouldn't be able to rebuild fairly quickly after the synths attack.
It shouldn't even take them years to rebuild it... a year or less if they mobilize construction ships, transporters, replicators, etc.

 

[Ithekro]

I wonder how many of the other shipyards were using synths? We were not informed if other synths Federation wide had rebellion issues like Mars did, but if there was a strick ban on the technology, than every yard that used them would need to be restaffed and possibly retooled if the synths were doing jobs that were dangerous enough that biologicals could not do without a bulky suit (that might not fit in the location needed).

The other yards also might not have had the capacity of Mars and it would take time to expand them to make up for that loss in production.

Star Trek also tends to have the Federation putting too many of its eggs in one basket (see how often they believe that loosing Earth with mean everything in the Federation falls).

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I wonder how many of the other shipyards were using synths? We were not informed if other synths Federation wide had rebellion issues like Mars did, but if there was a strick ban on the technology, than every yard that used them would need to be restaffed and possibly retooled if the synths were doing jobs that were dangerous enough that biologicals could not do without a bulky suit (that might not fit in the location needed).

Given how the UFP likes to go "All In" on tech, probably ALOT of StarFleet Shipyards were using a massive amount of Synths as their primary droids due to the Bi-Pedal like design and similarities to the average UFP Humanoid.

The other yards also might not have had the capacity of Mars and it would take time to expand them to make up for that loss in production.

If it was just the Utopia Planetia by itself, that might be a hiccup, but I think it was a combination of multiple factors that caused severe StarFleet ShipYard manufacturing capacity issues.

Kind of like our IRL Global Supply Chain issues due to COVID or what caused GPU Prices to spike and have a giant shortage.

Star Trek also tends to have the Federation putting too many of its eggs in one basket (see how often they believe that loosing Earth with mean everything in the Federation falls).

Earth is usually one of the core Domino Pieces.

Here are my thoughts on what really happened to cause the depletion of Ship Building Capacity in the UFP / StarFleet.

- Synth Attack & the long term effects on Utopia Planetia -
The Synth Rebellion happend in 2385, that set Mars Ablaze and destroyed Utopia Planetia
The Zhat Vash & the Conclave of Eight's involvement in the Synth Rebellion wasn't publically revealed publically until 2399 to the rest of the UFP
The Synth Ban was lifted in 2399 thanks to the efforts of Admiral Jean-Luc Picard & Captain William Riker along with Raffi Musiker's decade+ pursuit of the truth.

The reason why StarFleet ShipYard Building Capacity was depleted:
1) StarFleet has ShipYards in all major UFP Member Species (> 150 + Member Worlds with multiple Star Systems) & their territorial Star Systems
2) Loss of Utopia Planetia itself wasn't the problem, that's only 1 ShipYard, however... (see below)
3) It was the loss of significant trained man power on mars. Out of the 92,143 dead due to the 'Synth Rebellion', a vast majority of that # (> 50,000+) were trained StarFleet Ship Building workers at all levels of StarShip manufacturing.
4) The Synth Ban signicantly reduced automation man-power since the Synth was the "Primary" form of Automation and required re-tooling of other forms of droids to take it's place.
5) The loss of infrastructure required rebuilding + retooling + verification & validation of the new Shipyard after the Martian Atmosphere was restored to normal which took several years.
6) The biggest issues was due to multiple factors simultaneously:
- The Re-Shuffling of Shipyard man-power across the UFP / StarFleet to compensate
- The significant loss of one of the highest output Shipyards in all of StarFleet
- The massive resources needed to stop Mars Burning Atmosphere took several years and alot of resources
- The loss of Synths due to the "Synth Ban" as the Droid workers required deactivating ALOT of Droids that were used in the field, that was a significant amount of automated man-power lost
- The Re-Training of new Shipyard Manufacturing Workers was a MASSIVE UnderTaking
- The Re-Building of Utopia Planetia took ALOT of resources to restore it to Pre-"Synth Rebellion" state & output capacity
- The Re-Investigation into what could've caused the Rebellion took a massive IT effort across all of UFP, this closed many potential vulnerabilities, but didn't lead to the exact culprit
- The Culprit would be figured out many years into the future thanks to S1 of ST:Picard figuring out what happened. Many thanks to StarFleet Intelligence Officer Raffi Musiker for not giving up on
finding out what really happened, her obsession with the "Conspiracy" behind the 'Synth Rebellion' took a severe toll on Raffi's Physical Health & Personal Life; the UFP & StarFleet owes her a apology &
debt of gratitude for not giving up on her obsession with the "Conspiracy" behind the 'Sytnh Rebellion'.
- The re-investment into new Droid Types to help with Automated Ship Building was also a massive effort to Test/Validate/Deploy/Integrate into the new Ship Building Processes
- The demand on raw material supplies required spinning up new raw material mining, processing, & Shipment Logistics train from across the UFP, that also took a significant amount of time.
- The logistics strain was very severe for 15 years since many ships were lost that day and other incidents around the UFP including the massive incident the year before.
- The year before, many ships were severely damaged due to the "Vau N'Akat plot to destroy StarFleet & the UFP" due to Vau N'Akat from 50 years in the future of mid 2380's.

 

[fireproof78]

I wonder how many of the other shipyards were using synths? We were not informed if other synths Federation wide had rebellion issues like Mars did, but if there was a strick ban on the technology, than every yard that used them would need to be restaffed and possibly retooled if the synths were doing jobs that were dangerous enough that biologicals could not do without a bulky suit (that might not fit in the location needed).

The other yards also might not have had the capacity of Mars and it would take time to expand them to make up for that loss in production.

Star Trek also tends to have the Federation putting too many of its eggs in one basket (see how often they believe that loosing Earth with mean everything in the Federation falls).

Indeed and I think the whole "Well it's just one shipyard" fails to account for Starfleet's tendency to build from the inside out, and not spread things out to support a loss at a facility. Two, I think it fails to account for how many resources were put in to trying to support the Romulan evacuation, as well as the rebuilding costs from the Dominion War and other conflicts that Starfleet has endured. Finally, it fails to account for the significant loss of manpower, both from no longer using the synths, and the loss of trained personnel to actual work on the shipyards. It's not just manufacturing power but knowledgeable individuals who are able to be trained and continue the work.

One those things might not be a loss but taken all together and it adds up to a significant hurdle.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Indeed and I think the whole "Well it's just one shipyard" fails to account for Starfleet's tendency to build from the inside out, and not spread things out to support a loss at a facility. Two, I think it fails to account for how many resources were put in to trying to support the Romulan evacuation, as well as the rebuilding costs from the Dominion War and other conflicts that Starfleet has endured. Finally, it fails to account for the significant loss of manpower, both from no longer using the synths, and the loss of trained personnel to actual work on the shipyards. It's not just manufacturing power but knowledgeable individuals who are able to be trained and continue the work.

One those things might not be a loss but taken all together and it adds up to a significant hurdle.

Very much like COVID and how it affected IRL Supply Chains due to various factors.

 

[fireproof78]

Very much like COVID and how it affected IRL Supply Chains due to various factors.

Indeed. Or development of different space based tech. A disruption in the knowledge or training chain has long term effects that simply are not always accounted for by "Well, just replace it." Well, I'm not just replacing equipment but training up new engineers and such to complete the task. The human component is one that is often failed to be accounted for when in a recovery situation.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Indeed. Or development of different space based tech. A disruption in the knowledge or training chain has long term effects that simply are not always accounted for by "Well, just replace it." Well, I'm not just replacing equipment but training up new engineers and such to complete the task. The human component is one that is often failed to be accounted for when in a recovery situation.

Especially when you lose ALOT of highly trained specialty workers in a high tech field in one night.

That kind of retraining and replenishment takes ALOT of time.

And banning Automation of the primary Droid type "The Synth" would've been a devastating blow to productivity.

Especially if you have to go research and find new Droids to take it's place.

It looked like "The Synths" were highly integrated into the UFP Shipyards at that time and were well established.

 

[Ronald Held]

Perhaps most of the shipyards in the UPF make ships for their systems. Retooling for Starfleet ships would be time consuming.

 

[Ithekro]

Starfleet seems to have got the fleet up and running again before the 25th century started. Though several designs looks like reconstructions of existing designs and may well be massive refits of older designs using new technologies like those brought back by the USS Voyagers (original and -A). Some ships were entirely new designs, others were retro designs.

There seems to have been yet another shift in warp drive technology since the 2360s and 70s as the newer ships have a different warp effect than the older Galaxy-class and the ships from that era. Also a higher warp speed around warp 9.99 it seems, which while not sounding faster than warp 9.6 is really a lot faster (around four times faster, meaning Titan could make it to Earth four time faster than the Enterprise-D at maximum warp. So perhaps there needed to be some redesigns on existing frames to make use of the newer warp engines. That would also take time.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Starfleet seems to have got the fleet up and running again before the 25th century started. Though several designs looks like reconstructions of existing designs and may well be massive refits of older designs using new technologies like those brought back by the USS Voyagers (original and -A). Some ships were entirely new designs, others were retro designs.

There seems to have been yet another shift in warp drive technology since the 2360s and 70s as the newer ships have a different warp effect than the older Galaxy-class and the ships from that era. Also a higher warp speed around warp 9.99 it seems, which while not sounding faster than warp 9.6 is really a lot faster (around four times faster, meaning Titan could make it to Earth four time faster than the Enterprise-D at maximum warp. So perhaps there needed to be some redesigns on existing frames to make use of the newer warp engines. That would also take time.

If your ship can cruise at Warp 9.99 for days on end, on my Warp Factor Scale 3.0 (My Scale = TNG Warp Scale with the hand drawn curve to infinity past Warp Factor 9 deleted. I just let the #'s run naturally according to the original TNG Warp Factor formula).

@ Warp 9.99 ~= Warp Factor 27 ~= 56,084 c
in 1 minute, you'd travel 0.112268993839836 ly
in 1 hour, you'd travel 6.73613963039015 ly
in 1 day, you'd travel 161.667351129364 ly
in 1 year, you'd travel 59,047.7874948666 ly <- (Assuming you can sustain it non-stop for 1 year, your engines would have to be special to pull that off).