Starship design history in light of Discovery

[XCV330]

My personal pet theory has always been that it was a precurser testbed for the NX-01 technology. Like the real-life Gemini capsule was already halfway a ship from the Apollo mission, technology-wise. T

Gemini was a fantastic little hotrod of a spaceship.

The Intrepid version of Gemini might have been this alternative design that could have been used instead of Apollo for some missions. Meet "Big Gemini", ugly duckling extraordinaire with seating for 10:

(I love these oddball might-have-beens)

...although, for all we know, she and her convoy were unmanned robot drones like the Woden from "The Ultimate Computer" (TOS) and those from "More Tribbles, More Troubles" (TAS)—and presumably those which visited the similarly automated lithium cracking station on Delta Vega only once every twenty years per "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (TOS)—with only a lonely maintenance engineer putatively "commanding" her at that moment to send the alleged distress call! ("Babel" [DS9] saw O'Brien musing about such a posting a century further on, too.)

At any rate, "Fortunate Son" (ENT) itself did show us that among cargo haulers, some were quite content with the idea of retaining their tried-and-true Warp Two engines, even if others feared they would need at least a Warp Three one to keep afloat in the oncoming Warp Five era. But my point was merely that the option was apparently available to them. Personally, it's harder for me to envision forward-thinking Starfleet choosing not to take advantage of such an option in newly-built vessels than it is to imagine them electing not to refit outdated ships with faster engines they weren't designed for, or indeed doing exactly the latter, but this process being an undertaking requiring years to carry out. However, I do concede that there could be "reasons" for the first scenario, and further that the point becomes entirely moot if we simply ignore the script's suggestion of the Intrepid as being a Warp Two vessel altogether.

I like these kinds of discussions. its fun to speculate. Dierdre as a drone cargo ship like those cargo craft in TAS makes sense yes. At least 20 years ago there were still dhow's in the Indian ocean and Persian gulf working commercially so who knows, maybe those warp 2 crews are jsut really traditional.

Early Starfleet purposefully building a Warp 2 ship could also just be taken as a show of conservative military thought. The US Army had seen and used reloading breechloading rifles since the late 1830s, and in the Civil War especially saw how effective Henry and Spencer rifles could be. They had a chance to build on that but instead just took the old rifle-muskets they had made hundreds of thousands of at Springfield, and did the Allin Conversion on them, turning them into what is now called the Trapdoor Springfield, and oddball ugly duckling weapon that somehow got used in active service for the next 40 years while the rest of the world moved on.

 

[Timo]

The exact founding date of UE Starfleet may be utterly clouded if we so wish, simply by claiming that the earliest references are to the US Starfleet or the Western Coalition Starfleet or whatever. After all, the term "Starfleet" gets handed over to an increasingly cosmopolitan organization in the next historic juncture anyway - why not earlier already?

Without that caveat, though, UESF ought to be a thing created during Jonathan Archer's lifetime, as per the comment from "Horizon". Although of course it was supposed to be a humorous one, and thus may have run contrary to fact.

Anyway, the early Starfleet supposedly was founded for a purpose. We may argue it did not possess ships or a mission yet during its early decades, except on paper. But UESF if anything sounds like the sort of organization that would rush out to fill the local power vacuum, before the Vulcans fill it. We can't build deep space ships? Fine, we'll build a hundred shallow-space ones first. We can't arm them with phased particle beams? Fine, we'll build these universal gun berths and fill them with plasma guns first. We can't have a deep space exploration organization? Oh, our UESPA will just, you know, manage our space probes.

Exploration and deep space are new things in "Broken Bow". Starfleet is not. And Starfleet starships are never said to be. If the Intrepid isn't "it", what is?

I rather like the idea that the Intrepid preceded the Enterprise (and lent a few components and design solutions to her - "kitbashing" cuts both ways), but that something looking vaguely like the Steamrunner preceded the Intrepid. The more advanced these ships get, the smaller the engines in relation to the saucer... And the higher the odds of seeing one of 'em away from Sol.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[XCV330]

Exploration and deep space are new things in "Broken Bow". Starfleet is not. And Starfleet starships are never said to be. If the Intrepid isn't "it", what is?

Earth did have much earlier starships like Conestoga, Bonaventure C1-21, various DY's, the Valiant, the XCV Enteprise, etc, not to mention all the ECS ships. Valiant might have been a Starfleet ship. It's never stated. By 2155 they had several interstellar colonies and at least one that was errantly presumed to have failed. They knew about pirate races, and traded with others, even if no one bothered to tell them that the Vulcan empire was on their galactic patio.

I don't know what is meant by Deep Space in that episode, except "the parts of the map the Vulcans won't tell us about." I could see that being extremely frustrating. You can't hide a star, but you can prevent your new less technological buddy from knowing whats there.

 

[Christopher]

I don't know what is meant by Deep Space in that episode, except "the parts of the map the Vulcans won't tell us about." I could see that being extremely frustrating. You can't hide a star, but you can prevent your new less technological buddy from knowing whats there.

That's the way Trek usually portrays it, but it isn't really true. We're already at the point where our telescopes can detect planets around other stars and characterize some things about their atmospheres. In the years to come, as our telescopes and methods improve, we'll be able to extrapolate the shape of a planet's land and water masses, detect biosignatures and technology signatures, etc. If you put a telescope out beyond 550 AU and used the Sun itself as a gravity lens, you could magnify distant images so much that you could even make detailed maps of planets around other stars. In a realistic work of science fiction, future humanity would already have extensive physical information about other star systems long before we actually traveled there in person. We'd know which worlds were inhabited, what their technological level was, and the like. We could probably identify the drive signatures of spacecraft (since any engine powerful enough for interplanetary or interstellar travel would give off a lot of waste heat and radiation) and determine which star systems had mutual interaction, conflict, etc.

The mistake a lot of SF writers make is assuming that space works like the surface of Earth, where anything far away is hidden by the horizon and you have to get close to it in order to see it. But space has no horizons. With a clear line of sight, you can see things as distant as billions of light years. It's just a question of how far you can magnify the image. I wish more writers of fiction were aware of that.

 

[Timo]

Of course space has a horizon, though - it just happens to be spherical, surrounding us from every direction. And it is not intuitively easy to see, being invisible by its very nature.

What Vulcan star charts would tell but the best telescopic studies from Earth would not is whether Alpha Omega X is currently in the hands of Klingons or Tellarites. Telescopic observations in Trek are basically never conducted in realtime, either because FTL sensor beams of sufficient range don't exist, or then because when the range of observations grows beyond STL means, the area of space to be studied becomes so immense that Alpha Omega X will be scheduled for attention no sooner than May 3rd, 23,554 or so.

In the real world, there is no FTL and we cannot get realtime data. In Trek, exactly because FTL exists, realtime becomes important - things can change radically at X at a moment's notice, with FTL fleets warping in to change the ownership or geography of Alpha Omega X. Or, say, Ceti Alpha VI exploding on its own.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[XCV330]

That's the way Trek usually portrays it, but it isn't really true. We're already at the point where our telescopes can detect planets around other stars and characterize some things about their atmospheres. In the years to come, as our telescopes and methods improve, we'll be able to extrapolate the shape of a planet's land and water masses, detect biosignatures and technology signatures, etc. If you put a telescope out beyond 550 AU and used the Sun itself as a gravity lens, you could magnify distant images so much that you could even make detailed maps of planets around other stars. In a realistic work of science fiction, future humanity would already have extensive physical information about other star systems long before we actually traveled there in person. We'd know which worlds were inhabited, what their technological level was, and the like. We could probably identify the drive signatures of spacecraft (since any engine powerful enough for interplanetary or interstellar travel would give off a lot of waste heat and radiation) and determine which star systems had mutual interaction, conflict, etc.

The mistake a lot of SF writers make is assuming that space works like the surface of Earth, where anything far away is hidden by the horizon and you have to get close to it in order to see it. But space has no horizons. With a clear line of sight, you can see things as distant as billions of light years. It's just a question of how far you can magnify the image. I wish more writers of fiction were aware of that.

I meant in terms of political/military power. The Vulcans were a more than unhelpful, not telling Earth about the Klingon Empire,or the Romulans for that matter. Not telling important things about family and neighbors seems to be a Vulcan trait. That Earth had contact with other species besides the Vulcans for decades through trade links and still didn't know about them is beyond baffling.

 

[Christopher]

I meant in terms of political/military power.

Well, yeah, that's part of what I'm saying. It would theoretically be possible to detect starships, cities, power systems, etc. by their emissions, so you could estimate how large and powerful a civilization and its space fleet was. You could track the movements and interaction of ships between different systems, observe which systems interacted with each other regularly, and thus have evidence of political or economic alliances. It might even be possible to use spectroscopic readings of trace gases in the atmosphere or the like to determine if a species native to one planet had a sizeable presence on another planet, so that you could identify colonies, worlds with large immigrant populations, etc.

Military engagements would also be possible to detect from afar, since advanced weapons would emit a lot of energy. If you could detect the emissions of starship engines, you could certainly detect nuclear or antimatter explosions, high-energy beam impacts, etc. So you could tell from a distance who was at war with whom, and how powerful their weapons were. You could track the progress of battles and conquests, observe which species were ruthless to their enemies and which showed more restraint or mercy, which took slaves back to their homeworlds (see above about detecting population mix by spectroscopic signature), etc. Military power might well be the easiest thing to determine about an alien civilization, due to the intense energies involved. (The most powerful radio emissions from Earth, the ones that would be easiest for alien civilizations to detect, are from military radars.)

So there's a lot that you could determine astropolitically about other species just by watching them from afar. Again, there are no barriers to your line of sight. All you need is a powerful enough telescope and you can go full Rear Window on alien civilizations, watching their lives unfold in a fair amount of detail. And of course, if they're broadcasting signals into space openly rather than in tight beams (though they probably wouldn't if they have any regard for efficiency), then you could gather even more detail about their appearance, their technology, their culture, etc. Though you'd need extremely sensitive equipment to tease such signals out of the interstellar noise. Despite the memes about I Love Lucy broadcasts expanding through space as a spherical wavefront, the truth is they would've become all but indistinguishable from background noise at a light year or so away from Earth, barring incredibly ultra-sensitive radio telescopes and incredibly advanced signal-reconstruction software.

 

[Tuskin38]

The Europa's registry is the same 4 numbers as the Reliant's, just rearranged huh

 

[XCV330]

Well, yeah, that's part of what I'm saying. It would theoretically be possible to detect starships, cities, power systems, etc. by their emissions, so you could estimate how large and powerful a civilization and its space fleet was. You could track the movements and interaction of ships between different systems, observe which systems interacted with each other regularly, and thus have evidence of political or economic alliances. It might even be possible to use spectroscopic readings of trace gases in the atmosphere or the like to determine if a species native to one planet had a sizeable presence on another planet, so that you could identify colonies, worlds with large immigrant populations, etc.

Military engagements would also be possible to detect from afar, since advanced weapons would emit a lot of energy. If you could detect the emissions of starship engines, you could certainly detect nuclear or antimatter explosions, high-energy beam impacts, etc. So you could tell from a distance who was at war with whom, and how powerful their weapons were. You could track the progress of battles and conquests, observe which species were ruthless to their enemies and which showed more restraint or mercy, which took slaves back to their homeworlds (see above about detecting population mix by spectroscopic signature), etc. Military power might well be the easiest thing to determine about an alien civilization, due to the intense energies involved. (The most powerful radio emissions from Earth, the ones that would be easiest for alien civilizations to detect, are from military radars.)

So there's a lot that you could determine astropolitically about other species just by watching them from afar. Again, there are no barriers to your line of sight. All you need is a powerful enough telescope and you can go full Rear Window on alien civilizations, watching their lives unfold in a fair amount of detail. And of course, if they're broadcasting signals into space openly rather than in tight beams (though they probably wouldn't if they have any regard for efficiency), then you could gather even more detail about their appearance, their technology, their culture, etc. Though you'd need extremely sensitive equipment to tease such signals out of the interstellar noise. Despite the memes about I Love Lucy broadcasts expanding through space as a spherical wavefront, the truth is they would've become all but indistinguishable from background noise at a light year or so away from Earth, barring incredibly ultra-sensitive radio telescopes and incredibly advanced signal-reconstruction software.

All good points. Very few scientist, I suspect, in the 1960s, would have imagined the number of explanets discovered by now. I remember reading in Omni in the mid 1980's that theoretically an exo-planet could be theoretically determined by the "Wobble" effect it had on a star, and of course that did happen, but all that staying at home and watching the universe with gigantic observatories doesn't fit in well with Trek's swashbuckling. And that's fine.

FTL civilizations that have magic gravity flooring could probably find ways to obscure sensors to critical areas. On the other hand, the ability of powerful enemies to keep mutual track on each other by observation is also a way to prevent hostilities. I like Broken Bow but the biggest problem with it is that it put Kronos (not to mention Rigel) so close to Earth. ENT's first season was a confusing backstory for the years after the Phoenix flight showing humanity did get out into the solar system while it was rebuilding parts of Earth,with long range freighters that were making truly long distance runs, but did not know their own back yard. I don't envy those of you that had to write around that.

 

[DanielPMonut]

Well, yeah, that's part of what I'm saying. It would theoretically be possible to detect starships, cities, power systems, etc. by their emissions, so you could estimate how large and powerful a civilization and its space fleet was. You could track the movements and interaction of ships between different systems, observe which systems interacted with each other regularly, and thus have evidence of political or economic alliances. It might even be possible to use spectroscopic readings of trace gases in the atmosphere or the like to determine if a species native to one planet had a sizeable presence on another planet, so that you could identify colonies, worlds with large immigrant populations, etc.

Military engagements would also be possible to detect from afar, since advanced weapons would emit a lot of energy. If you could detect the emissions of starship engines, you could certainly detect nuclear or antimatter explosions, high-energy beam impacts, etc. So you could tell from a distance who was at war with whom, and how powerful their weapons were. You could track the progress of battles and conquests, observe which species were ruthless to their enemies and which showed more restraint or mercy, which took slaves back to their homeworlds (see above about detecting population mix by spectroscopic signature), etc. Military power might well be the easiest thing to determine about an alien civilization, due to the intense energies involved. (The most powerful radio emissions from Earth, the ones that would be easiest for alien civilizations to detect, are from military radars.)

So there's a lot that you could determine astropolitically about other species just by watching them from afar. Again, there are no barriers to your line of sight. All you need is a powerful enough telescope and you can go full Rear Window on alien civilizations, watching their lives unfold in a fair amount of detail. And of course, if they're broadcasting signals into space openly rather than in tight beams (though they probably wouldn't if they have any regard for efficiency), then you could gather even more detail about their appearance, their technology, their culture, etc. Though you'd need extremely sensitive equipment to tease such signals out of the interstellar noise. Despite the memes about I Love Lucy broadcasts expanding through space as a spherical wavefront, the truth is they would've become all but indistinguishable from background noise at a light year or so away from Earth, barring incredibly ultra-sensitive radio telescopes and incredibly advanced signal-reconstruction software.

Right but you'd only know about their emissions, etc, as of *hundreds of years ago*

 

[PiotrB]

Tweet with image how Europa's bridge could look.

 

[Christopher]

but all that staying at home and watching the universe with gigantic observatories doesn't fit in well with Trek's swashbuckling. And that's fine.

Sure, I'm not saying you wouldn't go there at all, I'm just saying it's naive to assume you'd have no advance knowledge of what you'd find when you got there. First you'd identify the potentially friendly powers or habitable worlds remotely, then you'd go there in person armed with that foreknowledge. There would still be surprises and pitfalls enough to drive any number of stories, but you wouldn't be going in completely blind. (Plenty of Trek episodes involve visits to worlds whose civilizations are already known to exist but not understood in detail, e.g. "A Taste of Armageddon" or "The Hunted.")

ENT's first season was a confusing backstory for the years after the Phoenix flight showing humanity did get out into the solar system while it was rebuilding parts of Earth,with long range freighters that were making truly long distance runs, but did not know their own back yard. I don't envy those of you that had to write around that.

Well, it helps that space is absurdly huge. Within just 100 light years of Earth, there are probably nearly 15,000 stars. Current knowledge of exoplanets suggests that essentially every one would have a planetary system, and conservatively 10% of them might have habitable planets, maybe more like 20%, so that's 1,500-3,000 inhabited worlds to survey in that volume. If you could visit, say, one new world per month, it'd take 125-250 years to visit them all even once. And if one particular world were interesting enough to draw a lot of attention and resources, that might delay the exploration of other worlds.

Right but you'd only know about their emissions, etc, as of *hundreds of years ago*

But we're talking about knowing of the existence of habitable or civilized worlds. It doesn't matter if the information is up-to-the-minute for this discussion, because we're just talking about whether you'd know anything at all about the civilizations that existed in other star systems. And of course, if you did travel there to meet them, you'd get more and more up-to-date information the closer you got.

But we're talking about Star Trek, where they have faster-than-light sensors and can instantly detect things happening parsecs away. So theoretically they should have very detailed, current info about other civilizations at large distances. But they never do unless it's called for by the plot.

 

[Timo]

The issue (or, rather, lack thereof) here is that they don't have that info even if it's called for by the plot. Realtime studies of distant star systems just plain don't happen. Which is why starships exist as a plot element.

To be accurate, there are so far exactly two remote sensing / imaging moments in Star Trek, one of them explicitly the work of a (vast, complex and rare) FTL instrument working across interstellar ranges, the other not: the spying on Martian yards in TNG "Parallels" and the spying on the streets of Romulus in "Unification".

The latter feat is credited to a "long range scanner". We might argue the "long" range to be something like half a light hour, which would still be immensely good going for a Star Trek sensor in the 24th century. Or then half a light minute, which might be more realistic for photographing a face and/or isolating a biosignature.

If we instead choose to think they used something like the Argus Array, we are left wondering why our heroes are not better versed in the events of Romulus and Qo'noS overall - even if scanning the skies with those super-eyes would be futile in general, they could certainly be staring at two important worlds without blinking.

Everywhere else, from TOS to DSC, up-to-date information on distant or hostile systems comes explicitly or implicitly from "probes" or "visits", and a starship has to spend at least a couple of moments in orbit in order to acquire information of similar detail on the surface of a planet.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[cooleddie74]

In my fanfic and head canon the United Earth Starfleet was chartered and entered service under the operating authority of UESPA in 2132, making the organization just under two decades old at the start of ENT. There may be books or online sources that also list 2132 as the founding date.

 

[DaveyNY]

The issue (or, rather, lack thereof) here is that they don't have that info even if it's called for by the plot. Realtime studies of distant star systems just plain don't happen. Which is why starships exist as a plot element.

To be accurate, there are so far exactly two remote sensing / imaging moments in Star Trek, one of them explicitly the work of a (vast, complex and rare) FTL instrument working across interstellar ranges, the other not: the spying on Martian yards in TNG "Parallels" and the spying on the streets of Romulus in "Unification".

The latter feat is credited to a "long range scanner". We might argue the "long" range to be something like half a light hour, which would still be immensely good going for a Star Trek sensor in the 24th century. Or then half a light minute, which might be more realistic for photographing a face and/or isolating a biosignature.

If we instead choose to think they used something like the Argus Array, we are left wondering why our heroes are not better versed in the events of Romulus and Qo'noS overall - even if scanning the skies with those super-eyes would be futile in general, they could certainly be staring at two important worlds without blinking.

Everywhere else, from TOS to DSC, up-to-date information on distant or hostile systems comes explicitly or implicitly from "probes" or "visits", and a starship has to spend at least a couple of moments in orbit in order to acquire information of similar detail on the surface of a planet.

Timo Saloniemi

My guess would be that using arrays for that kind of "watching', is probably a big No-No and isn't allowed by way of the Federation Charter.
After all, if you can do that kind of "spying' on your Foes, what's to stop you from doing it to your Friends.

And it seems logical that the Tellerites and Andorians (after having somewhat recently discovered a Vulcan spying base; ENT - "The Andorian Incident") would probably insist on (demand) that that particular caveat be included when the document was written.

Now, whether Section-31 is actually doing that is anybody guess.

 

[XCV330]

My guess would be that using arrays for that kind of "watching', is probably a big No-No and isn't allowed by way of the Federation Charter.
After all, if you can do that kind of "spying' on your Foes, what's to stop you from doing it to your Friends.

And it seems logical that the Tellerites and Andorians (after having somewhat recently discovered a Vulcan spying base; ENT - "The Andorian Incident") would probably insist on (demand) that that particular caveat be included when the document was written.

Now, whether Section-31 is actually doing that is anybody guess.

reconnaissance has been shown repeatedly to prevent more wars than it starts. I don't think anyone would give up that kind of asset.

 

[DaveyNY]

reconnaissance has been shown repeatedly to prevent more wars than it starts. I don't think anyone would give up that kind of asset.

True, but I'll bet even in the 24th Century there are still numerous and boisterous discussions in the Federation Council Chambers about who's array is pointing where.
And during the Discovery/TOS Era it was probably much louder and a lot more raucous!
Look at just how smoothly things went during the "Babel" Conference just a decade later.

 

[Christopher]

My guess would be that using arrays for that kind of "watching', is probably a big No-No and isn't allowed by way of the Federation Charter.
After all, if you can do that kind of "spying' on your Foes, what's to stop you from doing it to your Friends.

We're talking about being able to identify whether life or civilization even exists in another star system -- detecting the wholesale spectroscopic signatures that reveal the byproducts of life or industry in a planet's atmosphere, analyzing the light curve of a rotating planet to identify the shape of continents and oceans and the lights of cities, detecting the emissions of radar systems and other technologies, etc. That's not spying, it's astronomy. You can't tell people they aren't even allowed to look in the direction of your star system. Especially since we're talking about the ability to determine their existence before contact, so obviously any agreements made after contact are irrelevant to that topic.

 

[DaveyNY]

Heh...
Tell that to the Andorians & Tellerites and see how far ya get...
<chuckle>

 

[Christopher]

Heh...
Tell that to the Andorians & Tellerites and see how far ya get...
<chuckle>

You're making no sense. Nobody who wasn't paranoid would mistake, say, a weather satellite for a spy satellite. It just doesn't have the resolution. I'm talking about something with far, far less resolution, something where information about the star system as a whole is teased out of the spectral variations in a single point of light -- the same way we currently identify exoplanets, the ways that have been theorized for identifying atmosphere, biosignatures, and technology signatures on exoplanets and that might actually produce results within the next few decades. Given the astronomical methods that exist today and are predicted to be in use over the next generation or two, by the mid-22nd century we should already have identified any inhabited exoplanets and technological civilizations that exist within a few dozen light years. Trek's premise that we know nothing about them by that point is scientifically misguided.

Besides, the mere fact that the Andorians and Tellarites exist cannot be seen as a state secret, something that they'd be afraid to let others know. That may be true of a secretive race like the Aldeans ("When the Bough Breaks") or the Paxans ("Clues"), but the Andorians and Tellarites both interact openly with other powers. They're not hiding the fact that they exist, so they'd have no reason to feel their security had been breached because an alien species determined telescopically that their planet has an oxygen atmosphere and city lights.

As for detecting the existence of military might, I'm talking about the results of its actual use -- engine thrusts and explosive impacts energetic enough to be visible across parsecs. Anyone using such engines or weapons in that way is not trying to hide them. It's completely out in the open. The secrecy about the Manhattan Project stopped when Hiroshima was bombed. It was public knowledge afterward that America had nuclear weapons. That's the kind of knowledge I'm talking about -- the kind that's out in public and impossible to hide, the kind that nobody is trying to hide. I'm talking about determining whether a civilization as a whole even engages in warfare and what worlds it is or isn't fighting against -- nothing as granular as specific battle plans or military secrets.