Ship cannibalisation

[Judy Waxhorn]

Taking this to the logical extreme... Starfleet could have salvaged parts from Wolf 359 and slapped together a makeshift Sector Zero Zero One fleet in the event that the Borg came back. Those early days after the attack would have many people planning for the worst.

So time goes forward the Borg don't show up... these Frankenships are dismantled and large "high value" parts like the nacelles are used in new builds.


This happens again during the Dominion War. Anything that was not totally destroyed was salvaged and towed behind the lines and fashioned into a "new" ship.

We had three tiers of ships during the war: Ships that had not seen combat.... ships that were pieced together after combat.... and new builds coming out of the yard.



Both of these situations proved one thing: Starfleet could keep 'em flying under the worst possible conditions... it wasn't a lack of SHIPS that would have resulted in losing the war but a lack of CREWS. It takes quite awhile to train up and season a starship crew... and then there is the whole "lack of experience" thing.

 

[ngc7293]

From what I read, the Comet didn't last because the engine couldn't be upgraded. Which is why underslung engines work well.

 

[sojourner]

The comet didn't last long due to the design flaw in it's windows.

 

[Ghost_Opera]

Taking this to the logical extreme...
This happens again during the Dominion War. Anything that was not totally destroyed was salvaged and towed behind the lines and fashioned into a "new" ship.

We had three tiers of ships during the war: Ships that had not seen combat.... ships that were pieced together after combat.... and new builds coming out of the yard.



Both of these situations proved one thing: Starfleet could keep 'em flying under the worst possible conditions... it wasn't a lack of SHIPS that would have resulted in losing the war but a lack of CREWS. It takes quite awhile to train up and season a starship crew... and then there is the whole "lack of experience" thing.

Im not sure if the wrecks were used to slap together new ship, but rather to MacGuyver battlefield repairs and patches on any ship that can limp away from the fight and get back to the lines.

Just sayin

 

[scotpens]

From what I read, the Comet didn't last because the engine couldn't be upgraded. Which is why underslung engines work well.

The comet didn't last long due to the design flaw in it's windows.

Actually, after the metal-fatigue problem that had caused the early crashes was identified and corrected, later versions of the Comet were in civil and military service well into the 1990s.

 

[cwl]

Taking this to the logical extreme...
This happens again during the Dominion War. Anything that was not totally destroyed was salvaged and towed behind the lines and fashioned into a "new" ship.

We had three tiers of ships during the war: Ships that had not seen combat.... ships that were pieced together after combat.... and new builds coming out of the yard.



Both of these situations proved one thing: Starfleet could keep 'em flying under the worst possible conditions... it wasn't a lack of SHIPS that would have resulted in losing the war but a lack of CREWS. It takes quite awhile to train up and season a starship crew... and then there is the whole "lack of experience" thing.

Im not sure if the wrecks were used to slap together new ship, but rather to MacGuyver battlefield repairs and patches on any ship that can limp away from the fight and get back to the lines.

Just sayin

It depends on how much time and resources you have. In the case of 359 Starfleet could do what they want when it came to salvaging parts. In the Dominion War they didn't have the same luxury.
in the case of 359 Starfleet had a lot of time to salvage what they can.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Several others have said this already, but I'll agree...

You could reuse a lot of those components, but it would NOT be as simply as "unplugging it from here and plugging it in there." There would be a significant amount of "integration" work required to make parts work together properly.

A great "real world-ish" example of this we can think about would be the saucer of the 1701-D. The secondary hull and nacelles were GONE, but the primary hull was sitting there, damaged but not "lost," on the surface of a planet.

There is no indication that the saucer of the Enterprise -D would have been recovered and re-used. However, there would have certainly been vast amounts of hardware which could be stripped out and reused. I suspect that the whole saucer was stripped down, first of usable "small" hardware, then of "crew compartments" (according to the TNG tech manual, the compartments are suspended on stringers within the hull framework and can be swapped out easily), then major system hardware, and then they'd just start ripping apart the remaining infrastructure... framing, plating, etc... for recycling purposes.

So, it's likely that bits and pieces of the 1701-D saw re-use, but not that the 1701-D saucer itself saw re-use. It would have become raw materials and components for upkeep of existing ships and/or building of new ships.

Make sense?

 

[Starlock]

^Makes sense. But of course if it was me I would have gotten a whole bunch of party balloons tied to it and floated the darn thing away...


Now if I was an evil Starfleet Engineer back in the days when Men were Men, Yeomen wore miniskirts and Klingons Phart'd in airlocks I would use the modular nature of Federation starships to my advantage.


Y'all note that it was established that it is possible to identify starships just by their warp signature, correct?


So - what I would do on occasion would be to bring in two - maybe three starships of the same class - preferably with more than one engine and less than three - and make a point of taking their engines off and swapping them around something like the following: Starship A gets one engine from B and C. Starship B gets one engine from A and C and Starship C gets one engine from A and B. Simple, no?

Now the idea behind this all is that by changing the engines around like so should either result in enemy forces picking up the warp signatures of two starships when it is actually neither of them OR ideally the warp signature of a never before encountered starship. This just might work...

 

[sojourner]

I think they could identify starship classes by warp signature, not starships. In which case your idea does not work as the nacelles between classes would not be compatible.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

I don't see anything wrong with Starfleet engineers salvaging usable componets from damaged ships to use on others. Especially in the post-DS9 era, with so many ships lost, they would need to get what ships they have left fighting fit as quickly as possible.

Seems pretty logical in my mind. But then again my mind is a dark and scary place...

 

[Santaman]

I assume big parts like the warp engines and maybe the impulse deck could be swapped out easily, same with the bridge which seems to be a module as well, so if you've got a ship with its nacelle shot off its probably simply replaced by another one but I doubt it would be one from a ship that has been wrecked since you'd have no idea if there isn't some hidden damage.

Battleships used to rotate guns between them, worn ones were sent to be refurbished and then were put back into a common pool so for example HMS Ramillies had guns at one stage comming from HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Erebus.

Could be that Star Fleet simply uses a similar system.

 

[lennier1]

It's not just that.
Look at present-day ships like the Arleigh-Burke class missile destroyers. While they may belong to the same class no ship is the same as any of her sisters. Even within a "flight" ships massively differ from each other in key details.
And don't even get me started on offsprings like the the Japanese Kongo and Atago classes...

 

[Captain Robert April]

I don't see anything wrong with Starfleet engineers salvaging usable componets from damaged ships to use on others. Especially in the post-DS9 era, with so many ships lost, they would need to get what ships they have left fighting fit as quickly as possible.

Seems pretty logical in my mind. But then again my mind is a dark and scary place...

Just a part of being Scottish...

 

[Unicron]

I was thinking the other day about what might become of "scrapped" starships, as I know this happened fairly frequently with FASA ships. Would their useful parts be primarily recycled into compatible builds, or would the majority of the ship not be used again?

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I was thinking the other day about what might become of "scrapped" starships, as I know this happened fairly frequently with FASA ships. Would their useful parts be primarily recycled into compatible builds, or would the majority of the ship not be used again?

Well, think about real life, today. What do we do with military aircraft which are retired or scrapped?

Any of you ever been to south-central Arizona, just outside of Tucson? Anyone know what I'm talking about? The "boneyard?"

We KNOW that the Federation does the same sort of thing, at least in TNG-era times. How? Well, because we see a just such a "boneyard" in one two-part episode of TNG.

Now.. we see several times in TNG when the Enterprise suffer damage to her "warp coils," don't we? Well, it's highly doubtful that they'd swap out the entire nacelle. But, I can easily see a starfleet dockyard (possibly with some big "construction transporter" system?) swapping out the damaged coil and replacing it with another one.

If a ship's main hull is damaged, and the engine is still mostly intact, it seems to me that the components of that engine would become "spare parts" for other ships of that general type.

In TMP-era terms, it's not practical to swap out engines between a Constitution, a Federation-uprated, and a "Reliant type" (Miranda, Avenger, etc). But I'm sure that there are many, many internal components which are entirely interchangeable (with significant recalibration required, naturally). Not the least of which would be the "field coils."

The problem I think so many people struggle with here is getting the WORKING COMPONENTS confused with the housings. People think of swapping out nacelles. But the nacelle is just a housing. As long as you're not changing the internal configuration dramatically, there would be no reason to "swap nacelles" even if you replace every single working component of that engine.

The earlier example of changing out guns on modern capital ships is a great example. To change swap out guns, you don't need to swap out the hull, too. Just the working elements themselves.

 

[Santaman]

^^ I assume that they also swap out the entire nacelle if its too time consuming to repair it, so if you've got 80 refit Connies then Starfleet will have 100 sets of nacelles in a pool system, if one has become difficult to repair they swap out the thing with one coming from the pool and repair the damaged one without time presure, when done throw it back in to the pool so another refit Connie can use it in the event Troi's grandmaw was at the helm and smashed it into a star base...

 

[Unicron]

Jackill had a specialized "large material" tug pod specifically for transporting things like a new nacelle or even a secondary section for a heavy cruiser, in case the ship had lost an engine or the saucer had to separate. One could also use it for transporting such parts to a shipyard for assembly.

 

[throwback]

In the Ships of the Line, on page 79, there is an illustration of the Enterprise undergoing her refit in the early 2270s. The ship's new starboard nacelle is being ferried by an Oberth-class variant. This variant has four connections to the nacelle, two on each side. This variant has four warp engines, and is probably used for transporting nacelles over long distances.

There is another probability to consider. A starship could be specially modified for carrying an additional nacelle to a ship in distress. This is analogous to the B-747 which can carry an additional fifth engine.

http://cdn-www.airliners.net/aviation-photos/photos/4/0/7/1051704.jpg

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/3031408/

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

I don't see anything wrong with Starfleet engineers salvaging usable componets from damaged ships to use on others. Especially in the post-DS9 era, with so many ships lost, they would need to get what ships they have left fighting fit as quickly as possible.

Seems pretty logical in my mind. But then again my mind is a dark and scary place...

Just a part of being Scottish...

Damn straight!