Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard
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It makes it feel like Starfleet finally learned something. Isn't the whole point of technological progress that things get easier not stay hard?
Interesting. I guess I always assumed the Inquiry was a smaller ship class. The relative size of the windows on the ship to the ship make it look like a smaller ship. But if it really is bigger than a Sov and almost as big as a Galaxy then I agree mass producing that many ships makes no sense.
Also not buying that.
14 years prior to PIC, they still manufactured starships the same way they’ve always done: at construction facilities and shipyards. They’re probably replicating prefab components with industrial-scale replicator units nowadays hooked up to enormous reactors for power, though, and assembling them into finished ships after the design’s undergone testing. And as we know, replicators require a lot of power as it is; even in the 2370s and 2380s, we see them almost exclusively being used for smaller objects, and Voyager rationed replicator usage (supposedly) to prevent power drain. The power required for the mass replication of an entire starship would be in any case highly prohibitive, especially if it were twice the volume of a Sovereign-class starship. I don’t see it happening.
Besides, to cite the TNG Tech Manual again, “if you could make a starship at the push of a button, you wouldn’t need to.” I don’t see Starfleet having that ability at this point in time. Whoever it was who built the Dyson Sphere from Relics (is it the Iconians?) probably had that ability, but Starfleet ain’t nearly there yet.
Just gonna tack this on...as mentioned above, the ability to replicate huge starships would require leaps and bounds far far beyond what Starfleet’s shown to be currently capable of.
Not only that, but also undesirable from a storytelling standpoint as you previously mentioned.
I don't think it necessarily does. I think it demonstrates that Starfleet learned lessons from the Dominion War and Wolf 359 that having a rapid response force is essential. Do I think they could constantly churn these ships out? No. Do I think they did in response to the Utopia Planitia Attack? Yes.
Do you think they could’ve churned that many ships out that are twice the size of Sovereign-class vessels, though? I can’t buy that. I can maybe buy them building ships on par with the Intrepid-class in volume, but not 2x the Sov.
I agree that Starfleet would’ve learned lessons from W359 and the DW in regards to having rapid response forces. But not on the size of the ships in this fleet, or the pure technological capabilities required for mass replication of massive ships.
Yes.
What it was an older class and those ships were constructed over many years? Also storing them as a strike force means easier to get ready, versus several classes of ships.
The idea that it’s an “older class” seems to contradict Riker’s statement that this is the “most advanced ship Starfleet has put into service”. It would make more sense if it were an older ship — though I still disagree that Starfleet would be able to mass-produce ships that large (they didn’t even mass-produce Galaxy-class ships, for god’s sake!). or at the very least that many.
There must have been hundreds of starships in your average Dominion War fleet seen on DS9 so I can buy that dozens were mobilized for the season finale of PIC. It's just hard to buy that Riker needed that many but hey, it's Trek.
How about "old ship, new tech", ala: Discovery?
And they seemed to have a fair amount of Galaxy's in the Dominion Wars. Maybe not 218-ish, but a lot for the CGI they had during DS9.
I can buy those since the fleets were varied and oft structured into those “Galaxy wings” we saw. What we saw in Picard was...one class of ship, each one a little more than twice as big as a Sovereign by Eaglemoss’ measurement, and 112+ of them. You could spend those same resources to construct 234 Sovereigns with the resources required to fill out 112 Inquiries at that size. Frankly, at STO’s estimated scale, you could probably make 500 smaller inquiries with the resources required for 112 big ones.
Ehhh, I guess? That might be a bit of a big ask though.
There were at least ten that we saw — half of those were probably constructed off of the original six leftover spaceframes that Starfleet had on reserve for construction.
Yeah, 112 was just B.S.
Make them all just two or three variations on one class of ship but 112 starships? Riker was never that paranoid.
Make them all just two or three variations on one class of ship but 112 starships? Riker was never that paranoid.
Exactly.
Maybe 20. But 112?
We get it. Viewers these days like cool battles with lots of ships. It's like a video game that way. But dial it back.
We get it. Viewers these days like cool battles with lots of ships. It's like a video game that way. But dial it back.
TBH, I doubt they'd have that many older ships we didn't see in the DW sitting in mothballs.
As far as Galaxy's, I think we say more than 6 get blown up in the war, let alone how many we may have seen onscreen.
Mm. I just counted like...18+ instances of unidentified Galaxy-class starships across dominion war photos on Memory Alpha. Frankly, some of those might be intended to be the same ships across these photos — but 10 or more were all in one singular fleet among several other starships at Starbase 375 ahead of Operation Return.
Exactly exactly. Makes for bad drama, as Mike Okuda said in that — I’m gonna cite it again — author’s note in the TNG Tech Manual.
Speak softly and carry a big stick.
The whole point of the attack on Mars was that it crippled the Federation's shipbuilding capacity, which was already being drained by building evacuation ships for the Romulans. If the Federation could churn out that many starships in a few more years (and remember, the fact that there were over a hundred nearby and not tied up with another mission too important to abandon or laid up in port or otherwise unable to haul ass for a propaganda appearance implies that, across the Federation, there were many times more of them), with all the bells and whistles, without using robotic labor, there's no problem. Constructing people-movers wouldn't have been an imposition on the Federation, and losing the shipyards wouldn't have even been a fig-leaf excuse for putting a stop to it.
