At the time of Kirk, 9 years in the future from the TV series.
For all we know there were more at some point that were destroyed, or retired because of too much damage.
Starship design history in light of Discovery
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
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For all we know there were more at some point that were destroyed, or retired because of too much damage.
Ok. So from that point forward Starfleet vessels begin to be designed based upon common aesthetic. There are still older, more transitional ships currently in service at the time of Discovery, and quite possibly TOS only we never get to see them as they reused the Enterprise model for everything
I may have mentioned this earlier in the thread at some point, but I tend to think that the reason we see different ship classes in DSC than in TOS is because DSC season 1 told a story set mainly in Federation territory, within its borders, while TOS was mainly on the frontier, well beyond its borders. So in the latter case, we'd see fewer ships overall, certainly fewer happening to be in the same place at the same time, and they'd tend to be classes meant for deep-space operations and frontier duties, like the Constitution class.
Maybe, but also maybe not. You should rewatch Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan and Star Trek Generation. Despite the Enterprise fly inside the core of Federation Space, specially near Earth Space, they are the only starship around when there are emergency call coming.
So basically Discovery is violating the canon. As the Enterprise is actually the only star ship that do the work inside the Federation Space. Everything else are just decoration.
It certainly explains how so many Starfleet ships came running to the "Light of Kahless" battle site so quickly when the Shenzhou yelled for help.
Whereas I have kind of the opposite rationalization for the 24th century, where Starfleet could only muster some 40 ships to fight the Borg at Wolf 359 (right in Earth's backyard) yet had hundreds of ships in the Dominion War less than a decade later. I figure that by then, they have many, many ships ranging far into the frontier, more than they have close to home (since the UFP is more secure and peaceful by then and doesn't have as large a defense force, maybe), and they couldn't get them back in time for Wolf 359, but had more time during the Dominion War (and the Klingon conflict leading up to it) to gather their forces back from the frontier.
But getting back to the 23rd century, a simpler explanation for why we see fewer ships in TOS than DSC is that many of the DSC ships were destroyed in the war, so we have a smaller Starfleet in the wake of it.
But getting back to the 23rd century, a simpler explanation for why we see fewer ships in TOS than DSC is that many of the DSC ships were destroyed in the war, so we have a smaller Starfleet in the wake of it.
I always took the fleet sizes in DS9 with a BIG grain of salt...
It always felt weird to see capital flagships with thousands of people on board getting one-shotted without a single burst of their shields...
As soon as these supersized ships appeared, they always switched from "submarine battle mode" to "Napoleonic wars"-tactic of throwing too many people directly in enemy fire lines for them to shoot at once. That was always stupid, and always felt like they wanted to have Star Wars-like battles with fighters and much smaller crafts, but because of budgetary reasons instead inserted the supersized capital ships into the highspeed fighter action.
Well, either one is equally implausible when translated to 3-dimensional, weightless vacuum. I've rarely seen any onscreen attempt to depict space combat in anything like a physically and logistically plausible way, and certainly never in Star Trek (where even remembering that space is 3-dimensional is so rare that it's portrayed as a brilliant insight the one time it happens in TWOK). Babylon 5 did well with the physics of space vessels (e.g. fighters being able to turn without banking and orient themselves in any direction while coasting forward), but I don't know about the tactics. Andromeda in its early seasons did excellent work with space combat tactics ("Point of the Spear" is particularly good), but the VFX were fairly poor and inaccurate, and the scientific plausibility of the universe went out the window when the original writing staff was replaced. The Expanse is probably the best we've gotten overall.
Galactica did that as well.
Novetversewise, they will in over 100 years.
Thing is: It's weightless, NOT mass-less.
That means, while the object is floating around, you still need the same force as on Earth if you want to actually change it's trajectory. That's btw one of the things real life astronauts most often hurt themselves: They see a massive bag floating in the air, think it's lightweight, apply the force you would use to move a floating balloon - and completely crash into the floating object.
Translates to starships, that means if you want to move a big, capital ship, you still have to use the exact same force to change it's course you would need on Earth as well. A "submarine style" battle for big ships is thus way more realistic than having your big ships maneover like fighter jets.
That's a given, of course. I grew up reading hard SF and science magazines; I knew the basics of maneuvering in space before I learned how to drive.
Can you back that up with examples? I have a hard time believing trained astronauts would be so dumb as to assume floating things are light when they themselves are floating. And even if they unthinkingly applied their Earthly reflexes once, I'm sure they'd quickly learn from experience.
Where that one single, artificially narrow standard is considered, perhaps, but there are countless other ways in which the physics are profoundly different.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php
Just having the ships in naked-eye range of each other, confined within a comparatively tiny volume of endless space, is artificially Earthbound thinking. Distance is probably a spaceship's greatest advantage in combat with an enemy, at least where defense is concerned. Then there's the tendency to portray starships as "hovering" in place, even when they're over a planet. Nothing stands still in space; everything is orbiting something, whether it's a planet or a star or the center of the galaxy, and in at least the former case, orbital dynamics can play a significant role in a battle that SFTV and film creators routinely ignore. (In my Trek novels, I've written a number of space battles using tactics that took orbital dynamics into consideration, since that's far more interesting than just having them float there and shoot colored lights at each other.)
I just watched DS9 in its entirety for the first time this year, and when the scenes with Miranda’s doing wannabe x-wing maneuvers and ships taking the one phaser burst and completely exploding came on, there were moments where I just flat out laughed at the screen. They made these massive starships look ridiculously small and lame.
Cringe level 10,000
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Ship maneuvering in First Contact and DS9 started to get a little fantastical, particularly when it came to how the Defiant moved.
Though that sort of starship maneuverability carried over into the Dominion War arc on DS9 where most of the space battles were vastly more dynamic than even the confrontation between the Starfleet armada and the Borg cube. The spins, turns and swooping maneuvers that were made by Alpha Quadrant alliance vessels against Dominion ships are still arguably the greatest and most exciting combat sequences ever shot for the Trek franchise.
If I want to see "realistic" space movement, I go watch NASA vid's.
They're very interesting but boring as hell.
I prefer my Sci-fi space entertainment to have loads of action in it.
It may not be how things really work in space, but I can live with that.
That's a false dichotomy. If you watch The Expanse, you'll see a show that features both realistic space physics (aside from an imaginary high-acceleration rocket system) and plenty of action. And there are tons of military SF novels out there that are loaded with action built around realistic space physics. Just because most movie and TV producers are too lazy and unimaginative to try it doesn't mean their way is intrinsically better.
If anything, what's boring to me is seeing the same old space-battle cliches over and over. Acknowledging real physics can let you make a combat scene interesting in ways that would never occur to someone who was just copying a naval battle or a WWII dogfight. Like the harrowing scene in an Expanse episode where a character neglected to lock down a rack of tools before a space battle and the occupants of the ship were mortally endangered by the loose tools being flung around the cabin as the ship applied changing thrust at multiple gravities. That was a lot more exciting than just tilting the camera and having the actors fall out of their chairs.
I had a thought the other day that Star Trek missed an interesting opportunity. What if someone very early on had applied some real thought to inventing a novel system of combat in warp drive? Trek usually just ignores the difference between maneuvering at warp and maneuvering at sublight, even though it makes no sense to treat them the same way. A ship at warp is in a pocket of spacetime moving FTL relative to the surrounding space. If one ship at warp fired a phaser beam at another ship at warp, it should have no effect, since the phaser beam would have to travel slower than light through the normal space between the two ships' warp bubbles. So taking that limitation into account would've required creating an imaginative set of battle tactics for fighting at warp, something more complex and challenging and novel than just firing a broadside from the port cannons. And there are all sorts of other ways that an imaginative tech consultant could've defined rules for warp combat that would make it distinctive, like maybe limitations on the ability to detect a ship at warp so that it could be used for stealth attacks. Or maybe being in warp creates a blind spot that an enemy can exploit.
Of course, given all the different creators that have worked on Trek over the decades, with differing levels of knowledge or concern for plausible science, you wouldn't have wanted such a warp combat system to be too complicated. But if someone early in the game had concocted a few firm rules and protocols -- you can do this, you can't do that, you follow this procedure to get that result -- then it could've been standardized as easily as, say, transporter rules like "You have to lock onto someone with sensors to transport them" or "You need to drop shields first." And it could've let them create a combat system that was unique to Star Trek and different from anything else out there. That's certainly not boring. Everyone doing space battles the same way is what's boring.