So, why did the Galaxy class never undergo saucer separation prior to battles in the Dominion War?

[FederationHistorian]

Think about it.

There’s the stardrive section and its battle bridge crew, and the saucer section with its bridge crew. Each with its own armaments, more effective 2 on 1 tactics, and a greater chance that a part of the crew and the ship survives.

Seems like a sensible thing to do, particularly with a foe that is prone to using kamikaze attacks that could take out an entire Galaxy class ship.

 

[Farscape One]

A couple things. First, the saucer section is not as powerful or as fast as the stardrive section, and is far more vulnerable to attack. It would get picked off pretty quickly.

Second, it does help augment the ship as a whole in terms of power, as Riker mentioned in "The Best of Both Worlds".

I think Galaxy class ships serve more as giants to fight other giants, like the larger Jem'Hadar battleships. Jem'Hadar fighters are left to smaller, more maneuverable ships like Miranda, Defiant, and Akira class. Same against Cardassian types of ships.

Another thing to remember is shipbuilding resources. Almost certainly, Starfleet can build 4 or 5 ships compared to a single Galaxy class ship. They needed numbers quickly since the Dominion can build ships extremely fast. Probably why we basically only saw REALLY large engagements with Galaxy class ships as part of the force.

 

[valkyrie013]

Separation for the saucer was only really used to evacuate all non-essential Personnel family scientist and alike

In a battle situation they were being left at home at Starbase or else where there wouldn't be there so the ship would have a crew, maybe troops but no reason to undock.

And as said, the saucer isn't a hindrance. 2 large type x phaser strips, etc.

 

[Christopher]

A couple things. First, the saucer section is not as powerful or as fast as the stardrive section, and is far more vulnerable to attack. It would get picked off pretty quickly.

The original idea, as seen in "The Arsenal of Freedom," was that the saucer would be left behind somewhere safe before the stardrive section went into battle. Essentially, the saucer was a research institute/university village riding on top of a battleship. The battleship part was supposed to go into combat alone. Or, to use a Western metaphor, the saucer section was supposed to be the fort where the townfolk sheltered while the cavalry rode out to battle.

Unfortunately, that idea of the ship's dual nature was lost, partly due to the difficulties using the separable 6-foot miniature and partly because of the early writing-staff turnover that caused the emphasis on the civilian side of the crew to be abandoned except when Keiko or Guinan or Mr. Mot showed up. (The civilians were supposed to include numerous scientists, not just Starfleet personnel's families, barbers, and bartenders.)

I've always felt it was a missed opportunity that they abandoned the separation idea. By the time of the Dominion War, they were using digital ship models, so they could've built one of just the stardrive section. I presume the reason they didn't was because they'd abandoned the separation idea so long before that viewers wouldn't have recognized the ships without the saucers.

Another thing to remember is shipbuilding resources. Almost certainly, Starfleet can build 4 or 5 ships compared to a single Galaxy class ship.

All the more reason it made little sense to keep the saucers. If they'd built a bunch of battle hulls alone, it would've gone much faster.

And I just don't buy the BOBW excuse that the saucer gives the ship more power. On the contrary, the saucer would be a drain on the ship's power due to its life support demands and equipment, as well as its enormous mass weighing the ship down. That was part of the original thinking behind separation -- that the battle hull alone would be lighter, faster, and more maneuverable and would have more power available without the saucer's demands. Yes, it has fusion reactors, but presumably the amount of power they add is not enough to offset the power drain of having the saucer attached, at least in the original conception.

Besides, if the reactors did provide more power, then they could've built an alternate, smaller and lighter saucer attachment that would be all reactors without the demands of crew quarters, labs, holodecks, etc. That would've been an interesting use of the modular design, swapping out one saucer type for a different one.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Besides the production cost issue, the stardrive section looks stupid separated. The designers weren't told the ship had to separate until after they designed the ship.

 

[Christopher]

Besides the production cost issue, the stardrive section looks stupid separated. The designers weren't told the ship had to separate until after they designed the ship.

It was one designer, Andrew Probert, and it was during the design process, not after.

http://fsd.trekships.org/art/1701-d.html

Also, it wasn't a cost issue. The 6-foot miniature was just too unwieldy and difficult to work with, and the new 4-footer they introduced late in season 3 couldn't separate. The 2-foot miniature that ILM built along with the 6-footer could separate, but I guess it didn't have as much detail.

I admit I was never that crazy about the look of the separated battle section, but maybe we'd think better of it today if we'd been given more than three chances to get used to it. In any case, whatever the real-world reasons, it's problematical that they established the practice and then just abandoned it without any good in-universe reason for doing so. Like I said, I just don't buy the "more power with the saucer attached" idea. After all, the battle section was supposed to have been specifically optimized for combat without the saucer. So saying it's better in combat with the saucer contradicts the entire point of having a separable battle section in the first place.

 

[Takeru]

..., the stardrive section looks stupid separated.

Yeah, this. Why put an ugly half ship on screen when you can have a better looking complete one?

 

[Tosk]

I figure the ship performs better as a whole 'cause the computer core is in the saucer.
(or if there's more than one, it performs better with more cores.)

 

[Agony_Boothb]

Besides the production cost issue, the stardrive section looks stupid separated. The designers weren't told the ship had to separate until after they designed the ship.

And we all know the last thing the Federation needed was for the Ship-fashion conscious Dominion to get catty about how ugly the Galaxy class looked like without its saucer.

Jokes aside, I agree. Also, the Saucer was pretty much useless without a warp drive. If the Secondary hull got destroyed by the enemies they went off to fight, and the enemies then located the saucer, they were screwed. It also lead to the Prometheus class and it's Multivector assault mode which might be one of the dumbest, techwanky things I've seen in trek.

 

[Christopher]

I figure the ship performs better as a whole 'cause the computer core is in the saucer.
(or if there's more than one, it performs better with more cores.)

Again, though, the battle section was supposed to have been optimized for combat without the saucer. So it's contradictory to say it performed better with the saucer. Why design it with that built-in limitation? It would mean that Starfleet's engineers intended it to work better one way and then discovered by accident that it worked better the other way. And that requires a degree of incompetence in Starfleet engineers that I don't find plausible. I mean, according to the TNG Tech Manual, they spent 22 years designing, building, and testing the Galaxy class before they put it into service. You'd think they would've noticed such a glaring design flaw sooner.

Also according to the TNGTM, both hulls have independent, identical, redundant computer cores, so either one can perform equally well in a separated state.

Also, the Saucer was pretty much useless without a warp drive. If the Secondary hull got destroyed by the enemies they went off to fight, and the enemies then located the saucer, they were screwed.

You could say the same about the population of a medieval village sheltering within the castle walls while the king's soldiers rode out to fight off the invaders. That doesn't mean it makes more sense for the villagers to go into battle riding on the backs of the soldiers' horses. In the former case, yes, they're at risk if the defenders lose the battle, but in the other case, they're at risk either way. How is that better?

The ideal situation for a saucer separation was something like DS9: "The Jem'Hadar." They had the Odyssey offload its civilian crew to the station and take the intact ship through the wormhole, but that was exactly the kind of situation that saucer sep was meant to be used for -- leave the saucer behind at the nice safe starbase and then send the battle hull into enemy territory. Plus it would've been immensely faster and easier just to move the command crew to the battle bridge and separate the hulls than to spend hours evacuating all those people to the station.

Unforturnately, the later producers just didn't like saucer sep, and so they abandoned it without ever coming up with a decent in-story reason why.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

[

Again, though, the battle section was supposed to have been optimized for combat without the saucer. So it's contradictory to say it performed better with the saucer. Why design it with that built-in limitation? It would mean that Starfleet's engineers intended it to work better one way and then discovered by accident that it worked better the other way. And that requires a degree of incompetence in Starfleet engineers that I don't find plausible. I mean, according to the TNG Tech Manual, they spent 22 years designing, building, and testing the Galaxy class before they put it into service. You'd think they would've noticed such a glaring design flaw sooner.

Also according to the TNGTM, both hulls have independent, identical, redundant computer cores, so either one can perform equally well in a separated state.




You could say the same about the population of a medieval village sheltering within the castle walls while the king's soldiers rode out to fight off the invaders. That doesn't mean it makes more sense for the villagers to go into battle riding on the backs of the soldiers' horses. In the former case, yes, they're at risk if the defenders lose the battle, but in the other case, they're at risk either way. How is that better?

The ideal situation for a saucer separation was something like DS9: "The Jem'Hadar." They had the Odyssey offload its civilian crew to the station and take the intact ship through the wormhole, but that was exactly the kind of situation that saucer sep was meant to be used for -- leave the saucer behind at the nice safe starbase and then send the battle hull into enemy territory. Plus it would've been immensely faster and easier just to move the command crew to the battle bridge and separate the hulls than to spend hours evacuating all those people to the station.

Unforturnately, the later producers just didn't like saucer sep, and so they abandoned it without ever coming up with a decent in-story reason why.

Civilians should not have been on the ship in the first place.

 

[Christopher]

Civilians should not have been on the ship in the first place.

It was intended to operate on the frontier for up to 15 years without returning to base, one of the many concepts that were abandoned once the original creative staff left the show. And it was meant to be a research vessel, essentially a university village in space, not a battleship. It wouldn't be realistic to expect civilian scientists to give up all family and community life for 15 years and live like ascetics. It wouldn't be realistic to demand that of Starfleet officers either.

And again, the original idea was that the civilians were not just officers' family members, but scientists and experts who just weren't in the military to begin with. Really, I wish there had been a stronger civilian presence. Why should the military be the only group doing science or exploration out on the frontier? That's not realistic. Plenty of great explorers have been civilians. Jacques Cousteau, one of the models for Picard, was an ex-naval officer commanding the civilian research vessel Calypso.

I think a better way of doing justice to TNG's intended premise would've been to have two or more separate ships, a civilian science vessel commanded by Picard (perhaps as a retired Starfleet captain, after Cousteau) and a Starfleet escort vessel(s) commanded by Riker. There could've been some interesting clashes between the civilian and military perspectives on various situations.

 

[Orphalesion]

Honestly I always found it kinda weird that the civilians and families and scientists and such were all housed in the big, broad front section of the ship that was basically a giant, obvious target in ambush and battle situation.

Yeah I know it's meant to be separated from the warp drive section, but since they never did that it almost seemed like it was there to shield the warp drive section.

Also the most obvious flaw about the separation to me was always that the saucer just had impulse, imho, it should have possessed a small, secondary warp core so that it could flee to a nearby starbase in an emergency (or in a situation where the warp drive section had become damaged beyond repair)

 

[Christopher]

Honestly I always found it kinda weird that the civilians and families and scientists and such were all housed in the big, broad front section of the ship that was basically a giant, obvious target in ambush and battle situation.

The navigational hazard of relativistic space debris and blueshifted background radiation is just as great as the risk of enemy fire from the front, but the navigational deflector protects against those hazards. People never think of the deflector dish as a combat defense, but the physics are the same; an oncoming torpedo should be deflected the same way as an oncoming meteoroid. So attack from the front shouldn't be a problem.

Besides, the Enterprise was supposed to conduct research and diplomatic missions, with combat being something it avoided except as a last resort. Not every vehicle in the universe needs to be a damn battleship. There's a reason it's called Star Trek and not Star Wars.

Also the most obvious flaw about the separation to me was always that the saucer just had impulse, imho, it should have possessed a small, secondary warp core so that it could flee to a nearby starbase in an emergency (or in a situation where the warp drive section had become damaged beyond repair)

That's another reason I think it would've made sense to have two or three ships traveling together. It seems unwise to have any FTL ship traveling alone, because there's no backup if it gets stranded. I think that, ideally, FTL travel should always be conducted in groups.

Of course, shuttlecraft have always been portrayed as warp-capable (except in Enterprise), and one could always use subspace radio to call the nearest starbase for a tow. But then, as I've said, the original concept behind the E-D was that it would spend years in deep, uncharted space far from any friendly port, like Voyager but on purpose, so that shouldn't really have been an option.

Although, of course, TNG abandoned that concept almost immediately. The series opened with the ship starting at the farthest point in explored space -- literally called Farpoint for that reason -- and beginning a mission into the unknown depths beyond it where no human had ever gone before. But in the very next episode they were answering a distress call from a Starfleet vessel, and in the one after that they were on a medical relief run between two well-known planets. So the original producers were no more committed to that initial concept than their replacements were.

 

[Timo]

Well, Q told Starfleet to turn back. Perhaps they did?

However, as per the dialogue of "Encounter at Farpoint", Picard was never actually tasked with going beyond Farpoint. Instead, he was told to perform a dull bureaucratic audit there, and did. There was no promise of deep space adventure in the pilot, so it's quite logical and consistent that none ensued.

Basically, then, "the concept" never existed in-universe. Rather, it was replaced from the outset by the concept of the Flagship being tasked with dull things, and a surprise twist then turning those into adventures. Quite a few early episodes adhere to that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Orphalesion]

Besides, the Enterprise was supposed to conduct research and diplomatic missions, with combat being something it avoided except as a last resort. Not every vehicle in the universe needs to be a damn battleship. There's a reason it's called Star Trek and not Star Wars.

Okay, Darling, watch the attitude here. I was perfectly pleasant, so I'm not sure why you're getting that kind of language, or attitude.
And even if it isn't a battle ship, personally I'd put the civilians where they are least likely to be hit, no matter if it's a battleship or not.
Plus you know, in case you haven't noticed, Star Trek is still a space adventure show, so there were always going to be fights, otherwise the idea of a battle bridge would have been kind of redundant in the first place, wouldn't it have been?
And we all know space is three dimensional and that in "realistic" space battles it might not matter. But a lot of the battles in Star Trek are fairly conventional, with two ships facing each other and shooting.

 

[Christopher]

Okay, Darling, watch the attitude here. I was perfectly pleasant, so I'm not sure why you're getting that kind of language, or attitude.

"That kind of language?" "Damn" is such a mild expletive that it's little more than emphasis. It conveys mild annoyance at best -- in this case, with this same argument that I've been having since 1987. "You shouldn't have families on a battleship." It's not a battleship in the first place, it's a science ship. That's the whole point that the civilian presence was meant to convey to the audience -- that this was a different, less military Starfleet than the 23rd-century version, one for which combat was seen as a failure of the mission rather than a part of it. Though that's one more thing that later producers regrettably left behind, which is why the argument persists.

And yes, the frontier can be dangerous, but people have been taking their families onto dangerous frontiers since the Stone Age, which is how we ended up living all over the planet. Living in civilization is dangerous too, what with car crashes and gun violence and such, yet Americans do shockingly little to minimize those dangers. At least families on a starship are protected by its shields and armaments and its ability to flee danger, while families on a colony planet may be far more vulnerable to attack, as we've often seen.

And even if it isn't a battle ship, personally I'd put the civilians where they are least likely to be hit, no matter if it's a battleship or not.

As I said, the safest place should be the front of the ship, because of the navigational deflector. It's just that people don't stop to think about how powerful the navigational deflector would be as a combat defense as well.

Besides, the vast majority of the E-D's phaser strips are found on the saucer. It's hardly defenseless.

Also, if you think about it, the saucer's volume is so vast that a mere 1000 crewpeople -- or just several hundred, assuming the rest are in the stardrive section -- would take up only a tiny portion of it. According to the Starship Volumetrics site, the saucer's volume is 3,829,567 cubic meters, so that means that if there are, say, 760 people in the saucer at any given time, that would be about one person per 5000 m^3, i.e. a cube about 17 meters on a side. That is a hell of a sparse population density. If we assume a typical compartment on the ship is, say, 125 m^3, and for simplicity that there's only one person in any given compartment, then the odds of an occupied compartment being struck are 1 in 40. If there are an average of two people per compartment, then the odds are 1 in 80, and so on. (And yes, I'm ignoring that an impactor would have to pass through outer compartments to get to inner ones, but I'm making a bunch of simplifying assumptions for the sake of getting the point across.)

So as with the hard-SF combat mechanics in Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, the sheer emptiness of most of the ship's volume would reduce the odds of a populated section being struck. (They had no deflector shields, so any impacting projectile would just drill an expanding cone of plasma right through the ship's volume. Unpopulated areas were drained of atmosphere during combat so as not to propagate blast and thermal damage.)

Plus you know, in case you haven't noticed, Star Trek is still a space adventure show, so there were always going to be fights,

Which is a specious argument for not including families. An adventure show in any setting is going to put its characters in constant peril. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the high school was subject to constant monster attacks and supernaturally induced student deaths, but they didn't take the kids out of the school and close it down. In Eureka, the town was almost destroyed on a weekly basis by crazy experiments gone wrong, but the scientists in Eureka still lived there with their families. It's just a basic conceit of adventure shows.

otherwise the idea of a battle bridge would have been kind of redundant in the first place, wouldn't it have been?

It's called taking precautions. I keep a fire extinguisher in my kitchen, but I've never had to use it once in all the years I've lived here. I keep an emergency kit in my car, but I've never had to use it either. Being prepared for emergencies and last resorts doesn't mean you want or expect them to happen. Ideally, the battle bridge would never need to be used at all.

 

[Takeru]

It's not a battleship in the first place, it's a science ship.

A "science ship" that's armed to the teeth and is regularly send into battle or to project strength to stop other species from trying something stupid. The galaxy class is not strictly a battleship but calling it a science ship isn't accurate either (and I don't think it was ever identified as a science ship on screen), they get too many explicitly non scientific missions for that to be true. The galaxy class is a multi purpose ship (with one of its purposes apparently being a space taxi to get diplomats from A to B ) that can pretty much do anything.

 

[Qonundrum]

A couple things. First, the saucer section is not as powerful or as fast as the stardrive section, and is far more vulnerable to attack. It would get picked off pretty quickly.

Except the saucer could be used as a decoy or bait, until the enemy wised up.

Without the saucer, which seemed to draw power from the stardrive section unless it separated, the stardrive could then use the leftover power for phasers, shields, drinks dispensers, and other things needed for battle.

(IMHO, the makers were on the right track - and they had a point about how the time involved to separate the saucer did jar the flow of the drama, and they couldn't pop it all the time either... - but there seemed to be leftover details with the saucer, since it didn't have a warp drive and would putter along very slowly by comparison, as well as being picked off in attacks. It's amazing the Borg didn't take the opportunity to breach its defenses to pick up all those fleeing families shiny new drones-in-the-making, as it seems to make more sense that - in an emergency - you shoo everyone into the saucer, pop it, let it hover on impulse, while the stardrive does its thing... )

Second, it does help augment the ship as a whole in terms of power, as Riker mentioned in "The Best of Both Worlds".

I forgot about that, but I'm not revising my comment above, because drinks dispensers are cool Riker has a point that the two sections' drive systems can be combined for greater power, which defeats the purpose of the ability to separate because earlier stories said the stardrive along would be a formidable weapon (or something to that effect*.)

* okay, I found it - From "Heart of Glory":

KORRIS: We have heard this ship can separate in time of battle.
WORF: Yes. When relieved of its bulk, the Enterprise becomes an exceptional weapon.

Which, despite season 1's best attempts, isn't strictly true, as TBOBW shows the saucer had been modified to have its phaser arrays discharge antimatter weapons to take the Borg off guard... of course, with no warp drive in the saucer, do they keep the antimatter stored nearby the unshielded plutonium that's right next door to the school rooms and nursery? (Or rather, did they really have enough time in advance to haul over enough material and safely for the modified phaser arrays?)​

Plus, there might be times when separating and having multiple phasers from numerous different angles might be a bertter choice than all at a similar angle. Like putting a cube of sugar into a bowl of warm water versus a bunch of smaller granules and wondering why the smaller ones dissolve first (net surface area), or how serial transmission of data is generally slower than parallel... but those aren't ideal good direct comparisons, especially as the resultant sugar water will be quickly drank by a hummindbird and they can't live in space. For ships that weren't the Borg, there'd be a tactical advantage in doing so. Even with the Borg, they found a way to do something clever with it.

I think Galaxy class ships serve more as giants to fight other giants, like the larger Jem'Hadar battleships. Jem'Hadar fighters are left to smaller, more maneuverable ships like Miranda, Defiant, and Akira class. Same against Cardassian types of ships.

^^this

It still would have been cool if someone remembered that popping the top.

Another thing to remember is shipbuilding resources. Almost certainly, Starfleet can build 4 or 5 ships compared to a single Galaxy class ship. They needed numbers quickly since the Dominion can build ships extremely fast. Probably why we basically only saw REALLY large engagements with Galaxy class ships as part of the force.

^^excellent point. Plus, TNG onward did keep realistic tabs on the quantity of ships they could make. Again with the Borg, they sent forty ships and were trying to find alliances to build numbers with.

 

[Qonundrum]

The original idea, as seen in "The Arsenal of Freedom," was that the saucer would be left behind somewhere safe before the stardrive section went into battle.

:facepalm:

I forgot about that. "Farpoint" demonstrated that in plain sight as well. For known attacks, they'd have plenty of time to pop the top then move to battle. But the only problem with that is the possibility of surprise attack. Which was thankfully few during the course of the run of the show.

Essentially, the saucer was a research institute/university village riding on top of a battleship. The battleship part was supposed to go into combat alone. Or, to use a Western metaphor, the saucer section was supposed to be the fort where the townfolk sheltered while the cavalry rode out to battle.

Unfortunately, that idea of the ship's dual nature was lost, partly due to the difficulties using the separable 6-foot miniature and partly because of the early writing-staff turnover that caused the emphasis on the civilian side of the crew to be abandoned except when Keiko or Guinan or Mr. Mot showed up. (The civilians were supposed to include numerous scientists, not just Starfleet personnel's families, barbers, and bartenders.)

^^this

I recall reading somewhere that the makers had trouble finding ways to do saucer separations while keeping the dramatic flow and story from screeching to a halt. And one can't do "Arsenal" or TBOBW every week either. They could have done it a little more often, but on a scripting level it IS hard to put in some of these nuances without grinding things to a halt. Especially after seeing it the firs time, which "Farpoint" demonstrates admirably. But a couple elapsed cutaways would take care of that, for detaching and re-attaching... the fact they did warp core breaches umpteen million times put the kibosh on the momentum a few times too...

I've always felt it was a missed opportunity that they abandoned the separation idea. By the time of the Dominion War, they were using digital ship models, so they could've built one of just the stardrive section. I presume the reason they didn't was because they'd abandoned the separation idea so long before that viewers wouldn't have recognized the ships without the saucers.

^^this, enough time had passed since "Generations" and it'd be easier just to not get into reminding the audiences, who'd largely not care either way.

All the more reason it made little sense to keep the saucers. If they'd built a bunch of battle hulls alone, it would've gone much faster.

And I just don't buy the BOBW excuse that the saucer gives the ship more power. On the contrary, the saucer would be a drain on the ship's power due to its life support demands and equipment, as well as its enormous mass weighing the ship down.

^^seconded. I mentioned that above, though it's not impossible for the saucer to contribute power to complement, like running two 9V batteries in parallel just so you could play on the NES for 10 minutes instead of 5 without needing the pesky AC charger*, early TNG did set a narrative that the stardrive alone, without the saucer, was formidable.

* don't try that in real life. While the hardware has built-in rectifier that allows DC power supplies to be used instead of the provided AC unit, it'd drain the battery too quick... plus, in this silly analogy, it's more akin to putting a 1.5 "C" battery in parallel with a 9V. The power added would only be practical in certain ways (improving shields to let the stardrive use the power elsewhere, if needed, or to make the shields stronger., or as a redundant backup. If the 1701-D had consoles that could reroute functions (not too unlike web apps), the same philosophy can go to power distribution to a certain point as well.)

On edit: Oh wow, someone really was asking: https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=15487

That was part of the original thinking behind separation -- that the battle hull alone would be lighter, faster, and more maneuverable and would have more power available without the saucer's demands. Yes, it has fusion reactors, but presumably the amount of power they add is not enough to offset the power drain of having the saucer attached, at least in the original conception.

^^this, and those fusion reactors would be needed primarily for the engines and life support. Hmmm, if a saucer got flung into battle, how long would it last? It has an impressive phaser array system... but nothing else. Not to mention power draw, power drain, and reserve fuel... the saucer has no ramscoop to collect hydrogen to power the fusion power plant with and if there are other ways to collect mass amounts of that then I'm potentially hesitant to ask how a thousand people could do that...

Besides, if the reactors did provide more power, then they could've built an alternate, smaller and lighter saucer attachment that would be all reactors without the demands of crew quarters, labs, holodecks, etc. That would've been an interesting use of the modular design, swapping out one saucer type for a different one.