ships weapons upgrades

[cwl]

between ST:FC and ST:INSURRECTION the USS Enterprise (Sovereign class) received a major weapons upgrades. several torpedo launchers were added along with multiple phasers too. Consequently the refitted Enterprise is significantly more powerful than the pre-refit model.

Now this begs several question:

was the Ent-E the only ship to receive such an upgrade?
was the Sovereign class the only class to receive such an upgrade?
what are the pitfalls of such an upgrade?
are such upgrades difficult to do?
Does this mean that Starfleet has turned a lot more militaristic?

personally I prefer the pre- refit Enterprise -E because with all the added weapons its more like Star Wars than star trek.

opinions?

 

[T'Girl]

Likely all Starfleet ships are upgraded from time to time. Kirk's Enterprise seem to have had it weapons changed out after Balance of Terror.

The Enterprise E had more than her weapons upgraded, her warp engine pylons were relocated from where they originally attached to the secondary hull.

 

[cwl]

yeah I think they were moved a few degrees.

 

[Timo]

The addition of weapons could reflect the emergence of a new threat, and thus be a feature of every major starship eventually. Say, "Jem'Hadar" proved that phasers were not good enough for shooting down the small but deadly Jem'Hadar attack ships quickly enough; Starfleet could have added point defense torpedoes to deter the new threat.

Those add-on tubes seem too short to conform to our (probably false) ideas of warp launchers, and they're never seen firing torpedoes at warp speeds. Good candidates for an all-new category of weapons, really.

Alternately, the Sovereign class may always have been slated to receive lots of weapons, but was initially fielded without, for any number of real-worldish reasons. And really, some of the "new" weapons, especially the single tubes at bow and stern, could "always" have been there; their absence is basically impossible to prove from the shots of the previous movies.

However, the fact that the secondary hull shape was so drastically changed (and to a lesser degree the fact that the nacelles were repositioned on new pylons) might suggest that the E-E herself suffered catastrophic damage at some point, and was rebuilt in a nonstandard fashion. Her refit would not reflect standard Starfleet practices at all, then.

It's not clear whether the refit was an upgrade or perhaps a downgrade. Perhaps the extra weaponry became necessary because the ship got slower, less agile, structurally weaker or otherwise disadvantaged in combat. Similarly, the third nacelle added to the E-D in that one alternate future might have been more of a remedy to the degrading performance of the old-timer than an actual performance-boosting upgrade.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

It was between Insurrection and Nemesis, and it wasn't a real upgrade at all. When planning out the space battle scenes the bods at Digital Domain realized how woefully armed the Enterprise-E actually was. So they added more weapons ports to cover blind spots and make it so Enterprise could attack and return fire at angles other than those already seen in FC and INS.

Those weapon ports were meant to have "always been there", like the Remans and bumpy headed Klingons and Enterprise NX-01.

 

[Timo]

...However, that has never stopped us from seeing what "really" is there.

Some of the supposed "blind spots" weren't blind even before the (CGI) model was redecorated with a few additional torpedo tubes. The enemy attacking from the upper six in ST:INS still got his share of torps - although whether that was from the rear shuttlebay roof tube that "was always there" or from the secondary hull bottom rear tubes that really were always there, we can't really tell.

Timo Saloniemi