Science Labs and Shuttlebays on Starships

[Darkwing]

Can we please NOT?

No. I get it, you don't like it. Others do, and it's a sensible comparison, because Star trek was based on the Hornblower novels, in space, using the situations of the Napoeonic era fleet, but using the modern US Navy as the basis of the fictional organization to make it more understandable to the viewers. Now, later, Roddenberry lost control, Meyers made the military connection more obvious, and then when Roddenberry got control back he tried to claim Starfleet was not a military, but that was drivel when he said it, and hasn't gotten any more intelligible since.
We haven't seen Starfleet build anything that isn't very closely derived from modern ships, but inn Spaaace. The most divergent is the Explorer class, which is just a politically correct way of saying "Heavy multi-role Cruiser that can fight and explore, just like the CH-1701", while eschewing modern designations. There are still frigates, cruisers, fighters, etc. Cloaking devices make for functional submarines in space. It's largely WWII in 3-D, with a background of black curtains with pinholes.

Shortly after the UFP incorporated, there probably was a wide variety. But standardized technical architecture makes it a lot easier to operate jointly, and by Kirk's time, they had done that. We've never seen any real evidence that Starfleet is divorced from it's roots.

 

[Ithekro]

I don't think there was ever a canon representation of how many Galaxy-class ships were built or if they had a limited number of them built at all. They were new and somewhat rare during TNG series, but by the time of the Dominion War and by the time USS Voyager returned home, they seem fairly common. Way more than six ships and probably more than 12 ships including the clear loss of three on screen (USS Yamato, USS Odyssey, and USS Enterprise). If there were only 12 built, I think we see all the surviving ships in the last episode of Voyager as part of the extremely rapidly assembled anti-Borg task force. If that was all of them, why are they all at Earth?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Maybe you got that impression. But a starship captain was a very different thing from a spaceship captain, as Merrick said.

So what? That doesn't make the Enterprise MORE ADVANCED than any other starship.

Roddenberry was touting FASA and FJ as legitimately part of Trek when he made money off them. Then he found out he had to pay if he wanted to use their derivative works, and got vindictive.

Rodenberry has been dead for twenty years. FJ and FASA are older still. Even if they were still canon -- which they're not -- they're no longer RELEVANT.

It'd look derivative of FJ is all.

Which is kind of what I meant when I said it would be (and look) stupid.

I didn't say they never used the Galaxy hulls they left unfinished. They commissioned 6 fully assembled ones, and stashed 6 unassembled ones when the program finished building.

No, they didn't STASH them at all. They just went ahead and finished building them.

Strangely, a lot of fans still think FJ designs are compelling, even compared to all the stuff we have now.

That's a matter of opinion. But apart from the fact that the FJ designs are no longer canon and are never going to be, the basic design logic of the FJ designs was largely rendered irrelevant by the appearances of the Reliant and the Grissom and even the Excelsior. We learned then, and continue to be shown, that there isn't a standardized modularity in starship design; while a few basic components are often shared across a FAMILY of designs, the size, shape and proportions of those components can and do change.

So once again this is looking and sounding like nostalgia for the pre-TMP syndication era... I should really do a study or something.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

No.

I wasn't actually asking you.

However:

Shortly after the UFP incorporated, there probably was a wide variety. But standardized technical architecture makes it a lot easier to operate jointly, and by Kirk's time, they had done that.

This statement is baseless. You have NO IDEA what they did by Kirk's time, because in TOS we only ever saw a single class of starship and no other design was ever presented until Wrath of Khan. The Constitution could have been one of FIFTY different designs and we'd never have seen them because TOS didn't have the budget to show them to us.

OTOH, TOS-R has shown us a variety of different ships, including a small Medusan vessel that looks nothing like the Constitution class. We also have USS Kelvin, which by all accounts is a ship design that would have existed in the Prime timeline as well. That means the Kelvin-derived designs seen in the alternate universe also existed parallel to the Constitution class. Shenzhou and Discovery did as well.

So whatever source you think you're basing this statement on, your information is (at least) 30 years out of date and is no longer relevant.