Starship Transporter

[Timo]

It's a matter of degree here: if ships could be built in a day, special ships suited for a doctrine accommodating this production rate would be built, even if they were completely untried and substandard. It would only take a few months to perfect these designs anyway, through trial and error; losing, say, ten thousand ships of the original, imperfect designs (that is, a few months' production) would not be a significant loss, merely a welcome learning experience.

If ships could be built in a month, then perhaps Starfleet would concentrate on building stuff that is known to work. OTOH, if ships take years to build, then there'd probably be no point in building good old stuff; the dedication of resources would be so significant that one should always strive for nothing short of perfection, and every ship coming off the lines would be state of the art, with the newest bells and whistles.

the category for new designs is filled perfectly by the Norway/Steamrunner/Akira trinity anyway.

I beg to differ. The Norway was a non-entity, a one-off similar to some of the kitbashes of "BoBW". The Steamrunner and Saber look like they could be of the same "design family", and might be new, but they don't look much like the known recent designs - they have engines more akin to those of the Galaxy era. Plus, their registries are prewar... All that goes doubly for Akira, which has Galaxy style engines, hull shape and color, and prewar regs.

For a ship design that really "perfectly fills" the category of newbuilds, I'd like to see something with the engines of Sovereign or Nova or Prometheus... But that would have to have been an all-new design in DS9, because all the above three suffered from dramatic limitations. The first was a hero ship, not to be frivorously duplicated; the second was established to be a weakling unfit for combat; and the third was stated to be a fantastic new prototype. A "modern series production warship" could probably easily have been kitbashed for DS9 from the parts of the above three, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It's a matter of degree here: if ships could be built in a day, special ships suited for a doctrine accommodating this production rate would be built, even if they were completely untried and substandard. It would only take a few months to perfect these designs anyway, through trial and error; losing, say, ten thousand ships of the original, imperfect designs (that is, a few months' production) would not be a significant loss, merely a welcome learning experience.

Not when you now have to find crews to replace the 200,000 dead officers that went down with those ships. The Dominion can clone Jem'hadar crews hundreds at a time, but Starfleet still takes at least several months to train draftees to fill crew positions.

If the Federation dusted off the old M5 program and installed the AIs aboard their older designs, that would tally with the high rate of mass production (consider that the Brattain only had a crew of 26 when its 23rd century incarnation probably supported around 200). But the "new" designs wouldn't be all that new as much as uncrewed versions of existing designs that already know are sufficiently effective and dirt cheap to mass produce.

the category for new designs is filled perfectly by the Norway/Steamrunner/Akira trinity anyway.

I beg to differ. The Norway was a non-entity, a one-off similar to some of the kitbashes of "BoBW". The Steamrunner and Saber look like they could be of the same "design family", and might be new, but they don't look much like the known recent designs - they have engines more akin to those of the Galaxy era. Plus, their registries are prewar... All that goes doubly for Akira, which has Galaxy style engines, hull shape and color, and prewar regs.

Which doesn't make a whole lot of difference since we don't actually know what the registry system means. Besides which, simply looking at the design elements doesn't tell you much about the new/oldness of the design; for all we know Voyager and Nova are recent upgrades of 40 year old designs.

For a ship design that really "perfectly fills" the category of newbuilds, I'd like to see something with the engines of Sovereign or Nova or Prometheus... But that would have to have been an all-new design in DS9, because all the above three suffered from dramatic limitations. The first was a hero ship, not to be frivorously duplicated; the second was established to be a weakling unfit for combat; and the third was stated to be a fantastic new prototype. A "modern series production warship" could probably easily have been kitbashed for DS9 from the parts of the above three, though.

You're going to end up with all kinds of weird conclusions if you identify ship types strictly by what their nacelles look like. It's likely the design of the nacelles has alot more to do with the ship's purpose than its age.

 

[TheQman]

Back to the original question. Besides a large amount of power, a large amount of computer memory is needed to store the information during transport. We see this in the DS9 episode 'Our Man Bashir' when a large amount of core memory is needed to store the information of the crew.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

That's just a matter of having a sufficiently huge pattern buffer and a sufficiently huge computer core. That's not conceptually more difficult than building a new factory or a dry dock or any other gigantic piece of industrial equipment.

OTOH, I don't think it would be feasible even then to replicate an entire starship wholesale. More likely the ship is constructed piecemeal using smaller industrial replicators that simplify an otherwise conventional manufacturing process.

 

[Timo]

Not when you now have to find crews to replace the 200,000 dead officers that went down with those ships.

You mean zero dead officers?

After all, the argument was that if it were possible to build a starship per day per dockyard, one wouldn't build starships any more. One would build primitive attrition units, uncrewed ones, and transform the whole nature of space warfare in Star Trek.

Ships are only practical as a means of fighting a naval war if they are difficult to build, and thus worth destroying. If we could build a ship per day today, there'd be no point in fighting a naval war, because no shipment would ever need to be protected - it could be replaced instead; no assault would ever need to be escorted - it could simply be pushed through by numbers; no coastline would ever need to be protected - the enemy simply couldn't get two kilometers closer to the coast without running into a pile of barricade ships.

But the "new" designs wouldn't be all that new as much as uncrewed versions of existing designs that already know are sufficiently effective and dirt cheap to mass produce.

Doesn't sound likely. The missiles that were intended to replace aircraft in air combat in the 1950s weren't existing aircraft designs with computers welded in place of pilot seats. A robotic ship should be built on completely different principles, omitting such frivorities as a pressure hull. And one wouldn't waste time automating existing crewed ships first, when one could prototype a new design per day. Within a week, crewed ships and their designs would be retired...

You're going to end up with all kinds of weird conclusions if you identify ship types strictly by what their nacelles look like. It's likely the design of the nacelles has alot more to do with the ship's purpose than its age.

Granted that. But the fact remains that no ship design really emerged during the Dominion War, and only a single ship was ever indicated as having been built during that war (the Sao Paulo). The registry for that known newbuild was as high as that of two other known recent constructs, the Voyager and the Equinox. A good correlation exists for high registries for new ships, and a fairly good for low registries on old ones.

It's possible that old-design ships with "old" registries were built during the Dominion War, complete with old weapons. But real history has no corresponding examples to offer. If old designs of ships, aircraft or vehicles have been revived for mass production, they haven't been given old decor and definitely haven't been armed with old hardware...

We see this in the DS9 episode 'Our Man Bashir' when a large amount of core memory is needed to store the information of the crew.

Let's remember that this "large amount" was originally stored in the computer of the destroyed runabout. It only took up oomphs of room aboard the station because the station's computer had an inferior capability for handling transporter-type information. A dedicated transporter memory unit might be a fairly compact and affordable device even when tasked with transporting/replicating entire starships. And even if it weren't, one could produce thousands of mammoth-sized transporters by using existing transporters in a von Neumann chain of sorts. Just start small, link two or three smaller units and use them to replicate a double-size unit, link two or three of those and create a quadruple-size one, and so forth. If large scale replication is feasible, biblical scale replication automatically follows...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Not when you now have to find crews to replace the 200,000 dead officers that went down with those ships.

You mean zero dead officers?

After all, the argument was that if it were possible to build a starship per day per dockyard, one wouldn't build starships any more. One would build primitive attrition units, uncrewed ones, and transform the whole nature of space warfare in Star Trek.

Which would then require you to explain why starships need crews in the first place. Unless all those Mirandas and Excelsiors were UCAV-style drone starships, then even with 24th century technology it doesn't matter if it takes a day or a month or a year to build the ship, you still need a CREW.

Ships are only practical as a means of fighting a naval war if they are difficult to build, and thus worth destroying. If we could build a ship per day today, there'd be no point in fighting a naval war, because no shipment would ever need to be protected - it could be replaced instead; no assault would ever need to be escorted - it could simply be pushed through by numbers; no coastline would ever need to be protected - the enemy simply couldn't get two kilometers closer to the coast without running into a pile of barricade ships.

You have an overly simplistic view of the goals of warfare, it seems, since "destroying the other side's ships" is not an end in itself, but merely a MEANS to fight the war. The question here is that attacking the enemy's military therefore becomes a means to do WHAT?

That all depends on why you're fighting the war or the particular battle of the day. An EP607 can depopulate an entire planet in a relatively short time, but it can't mine that planet for resources or impose political change on neighboring star systems. It can maybe protect the ore freighters that have to come in later to extract resources, but it can't escort them to their destination; even if you have another drone device to escort the ore freighters, there's nobody around to repair the drones if they malfunction, nor do the crews of the freighters have anywhere to go if their ship is damaged or disabled.

The only time you don't need crews on ships is if you're some imperialistic weirdo hopping the galaxy assassinating your enemies a few at a time with some remote controlled drones. That's just interstellar terrorism, not really "war" in any meaningful sense of the word.

Doesn't sound likely. The missiles that were intended to replace aircraft in air combat in the 1950s weren't existing aircraft designs with computers welded in place of pilot seats.

Which is why it's no wonder those missiles never actually accomplished that particular assignment, eh? On the other hand, the earliest unmanned aircraft designs have usually been remote-controlled drone versions of aircraft that already exist; this pattern holds true even in the Trekiverse, hence M5 being tested on the Enterprise first, and also the Romulan drone ship in "Babel One" which is supposedly derived from an existing Romulan design.

Of course a hundred years after both experiments, neither power seems particularly interested in unmanned starships; apparently they, too, have realized that terrorizing your enemies with remote-controlled battle wagons is a really half assed way to fight a war.

It's possible that old-design ships with "old" registries were built during the Dominion War, complete with old weapons.

That's three assumptions in a row that have no actual support: that registries go in chronological order, that ships with low registries are older than higher ones, and that the ships we saw post FC had "old weapons." Again, if the registries indicate something other than a construction sequence--if it actually indicates something about WHERE they were constructed and by whom--then it's possible the Akiras and Norway/Steamrunners are even newer than the Defiants.

 

[Search4]

Just to add to registry confusion: we of course know they continually reused the 1701 number. And i believe the Defiant's number when it was destroyed and replaced. So, "low number" could easily be a replaced ship, with a traditional hull and much more modern technology inside.

 

[Timo]

...But with traditional weaponry on the outside?

It's extremely difficult to believe that the point emitters typical of pre-2300s starships would match the strip emitters of mid-to-late 2300s, when the two are so obviously different in shape. It's like trying to believe that a weapon shaped like a muzzle-loader cannon from the 1700s is "in fact" a modern auto-loader weapon firing armor-piercing rounds at twenty kilometers. Surely the shape has got something to do with the function?

Yeah, yeah, in theory a point emitter might still be worth something in the 2370s (the Lakota refit and all). But it's rather fanciful speculation that ships with point emitters could be newbuilds when strip emitter is the thing defining a newbuild visually.

And NCC-1701 was only ever reused with an added identifying letter. To claim that NCC-42356 would be built after NCC-75631 but registered "in honor of" an older, now retired vessel... Well, it's way more farfetched than stating that registry numbers are chronological.

You have an overly simplistic view of the goals of warfare, it seems, since "destroying the other side's ships" is not an end in itself, but merely a MEANS to fight the war.

Sure. And if you can build a ship per day, that's the means you choose. By that means, you utterly defeat your enemy, and then you can go and achieve your goals of war at your leisure.

Crews are only needed on "current" starships to keep them fighting after they suffer damage or encounter something unexpected. Daily built ships don't need to "keep fighting": one can scrap them and build new ones if there's any damage. The side that stoops to repairing, let alone maintaining onboard repair teams, loses. And as for the unexpected, well, that's what numbers are for. You don't change your plans to account for nuances in enemy plans when you can steamroller him instead.

Crewed starships deployed against uncrewed ones would be akin to sending rifle cavalry against tanks / armored cars that are armed with machine guns - the scenario that lost Poland. Both would be maneuverable battlefield units, not all that dissimilar in size, but the latter could accommodate lots of combat gear in place of useless flesh. And the latter could be easily repaired and replenished by industrial means, whereas a dead horse is a dead horse (and a wounded horse usually is a dead horse, too, although sometimes worse).

Starfleet simply couldn't afford to hang on to the past if the technology to build a starship a day suddenly emerged. That is, unless it could somehow keep that technology a secret from its enemies, and/or was militarily so superior to begin with that it didn't need the edge. The Dominion War wouldn't fit that bill.

It's a pile of speculation, yes - but the obvious thing here is that Starfleet can't build a ship a day. Otherwise, we'd have seen it. It's also unlikely that a ship per month could be completed, since only a single plotline ever featured a newbuild Starfleet ship. (The opposite seemed true enough, though - the Dominion could build ships fast, unless somebody went and did something about it, as was the central point in two or three plotlines.)

Of course a hundred years after both experiments, neither power seems particularly interested in unmanned starships; apparently they, too, have realized that terrorizing your enemies with remote-controlled battle wagons is a really half assed way to fight a war.

Or, more probably, no side knows how to mass-produce starships yet, crewed or uncrewed. After all, the sides are constantly shown short of ships, be it peacetime or wartime. The Klingons shouldn't suffer from a shortage if they had the building tech, since they could allocate the resources through draconian measures. The Feds shoudln't suffer, either, since they would be so rich as to always have the resources to spare.

Also, a century after those experiments, one would assume the tech would have moved well beyond hooking a computer to a formerly crewed starship.

..it's possible the Akiras and Norway/Steamrunners are even newer than the Defiants.

Perhaps. But the Excelsiors and Mirandas shouldn't be.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

...But with traditional weaponry on the outside?

You keep saying this, but I can't tell if you're referring simply to old designs (Excelsiors and Mirandas) or if you have somehow got it in your head that the Akiras and Norway/Steamrunners have old-style ball turrets instead of phaser strips. As far as I can tell, all three designs have MODERN weapon designs.

And NCC-1701 was only ever reused with an added identifying letter. To claim that NCC-42356 would be built after NCC-75631 but registered "in honor of" an older, now retired vessel... Well, it's way more farfetched than stating that registry numbers are chronological.

Not neccesarily. Voyager's NCC-74656 might actually be in honor of an Ambassador class starship of the same name, originally NCC-4656; the "7" prefix might be tacked on to indicate the ship was built after the Treaty of Algernon with certain treaty-specific design features built in.

You have an overly simplistic view of the goals of warfare, it seems, since "destroying the other side's ships" is not an end in itself, but merely a MEANS to fight the war.

Sure. And if you can build a ship per day, that's the means you choose. By that means, you utterly defeat your enemy, and then you can go and achieve your goals of war at your leisure.

That's my point: unless the entire point of the war is simply to secure a shipping lane or something, you can't utterly defeat your enemy just by blowing up all of his ships. Destroying all of his ships is simply a means to an end, but it is not an end in itself, and a battle tactic that can achieve ONLY this end becomes rather wasteful when your enemy suddenly switches to a totally new type of warfare that your systems aren't designed to fight.

A crewed starship can function as a generalist and adapt to those changing tactics in ways drone weapons usually can't. Sure, the drones will make incredibly useful space superiority weapons (as Starfleet found out the hard way at Chintoka and the Dominion at DS9) but you can't fight an entire war with them.

Crewed starships deployed against uncrewed ones would be akin to sending rifle cavalry against tanks / armored cars that are armed with machine guns

No, it would be exactly like sending a crewed tank against a smaller uncrewed tank operated either by AI or by remote. The thing is, the uncrewed tank is designed to do one thing and do it exceptionally well: usually, kill other tanks or accomplish a limited set of mission goals. The guys in the crewed tank can either try to beat it at its own game (they probably won't succeed) or they can rig a booby trap along its mission path and blow it up or disable it (not at all difficult since you're building them to be cheap expendable attrition units that don't take much punishment).

Since the disabled AI tank is incapable of repairing itself, it now has to self-destruct to avoid capture; since nobody survives to tell their command base how the vehicle was destroyed, the next AI tank will come along and wander into the exact same trap, repeat as necessary.

Like I said: AIs have their place in battle, but as SUPPORT elements, not as independent elements themselves. Those attrition units aren't worth a damn unless they're attached to an honest-to-God starship with a crew and an experienced commander who can figure out how to use them properly.

Also, a century after those experiments, one would assume the tech would have moved well beyond hooking a computer to a formerly crewed starship.

Indeed. So the lack of such AI-only designs must have far less to do with the technology to make them work than it has to do with their simply not being all that useful in the first place. In other words: both the Federation and the Romulans CAN build them, they simply chose not to for some reason.

..it's possible the Akiras and Norway/Steamrunners are even newer than the Defiants.

Perhaps. But the Excelsiors and Mirandas shouldn't be.

Nobody said they were; I don't think they are, and that would make the issue of high-registry numbers sort of a moot point since high registry CANNOT indicate late construction.

 

[Timo]

That's my point: unless the entire point of the war is simply to secure a shipping lane or something, you can't utterly defeat your enemy just by blowing up all of his ships. Destroying all of his ships is simply a means to an end, but it is not an end in itself, and a battle tactic that can achieve ONLY this end becomes rather wasteful when your enemy suddenly switches to a totally new type of warfare that your systems aren't designed to fight.

But with an industry that produces a starship per day, you can then revamp your military overnight and negate the new threat.

That's the only point I'm arguing: that if things of starship magnitude could be built in a day, Starfleet as we know it could not exist. Something else would exist in its place. One day, it would be an armada of droneships. Another day, it would be a Death Star orbiting every enemy world. Yet another day, it would be a giant iron maiden slowly closing around enemy stars, or a giant swarm of nanites fusing every vertebrae in enemy bodies.

Starships are a good compromise for those losers who have to settle to building something, then waiting a few decades before they can build something else. But starships and daily replication of starship-sized items are utterly incompatible conceptually.

...high registry CANNOT indicate late construction.

Huh? Everything with a 7 as the first of the five digits certainly looks modern: strip phasers and either Galaxy or Sovereign design features. Everything with a 6 there is of the Galaxy school of design, too, including the Akiras. And everything with 4 or lower is of Excelsior or earlier make, with ball phasers etc.

The only fuzzy area is the five-digit range that has 5 as the first digit. There's the oddball Prometheus there, plus one Excelsior, but also Steamrunners and assorted Galaxy kitbashes (and a number of unseen designs). Really, nothing wrong with that, either: the only thing in the entire registry scheme that even remotely contradicts the idea of perfect chronological order is the Prometheus. Which, of course, had a 70000-range registry perfectly visible on the interior displays...

Any registry scheme that does not assume chronological order must invent an ordering basis from scratch - and acknowledge the fact that the chronological scheme is a valid competitor, supported by some known chronological facts (Excelsior is TOS movie era, Galaxy is TNG era, no high registry ship is stated to operate in a "low registry era" yet) and contradicted by just that one VOY ship.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

That's my point: unless the entire point of the war is simply to secure a shipping lane or something, you can't utterly defeat your enemy just by blowing up all of his ships. Destroying all of his ships is simply a means to an end, but it is not an end in itself, and a battle tactic that can achieve ONLY this end becomes rather wasteful when your enemy suddenly switches to a totally new type of warfare that your systems aren't designed to fight.

But with an industry that produces a starship per day, you can then revamp your military overnight and negate the new threat.

Only if you you can also DESIGN new starships in a day, and if your miracle industry can also produce infinite amounts of everything else in a day.

In a nutshell, the ability to build a starship a day is a good way to win PART of the war, obtaining space superiority. A sufficiently determined enemy simply stops building starships and waits for your away teams to beam down so they can ambush them.

It's entirely possible that starships can be built remarkably quickly using replicator and assembler technology, but there are practical as well as doctrinal limits to what they can build and how quickly, and alot of it is just a matter of preference. The ability to build anything doesn't imply actually knowing what to build.

Starships are a good compromise for those losers who have to settle to building something, then waiting a few decades before they can build something else. But starships and daily replication of starship-sized items are utterly incompatible conceptually.

Yes and no. I pretty strongly believe there are resource and--you could say--"financial" limits to what Starfleet can build at any given time, but IF it has the money and resources it can build anything it wants pretty much as fast and as often as it wants. The reasons they don't isn't because it isn't technically possible, it's that it isn't financially/energetically feasible, AND for a variety of reasons those starships still need qualified crews and command officers. Really, I think that the Trekiverse is in many ways a post-scarcity society; technology has eliminated (or at least mitigated) the importance of careful resource allocation and budgeting, so the limiting factor in production is now the human element: you build whatever you need, nothing more and nothing less.

...high registry CANNOT indicate late construction.

Huh? Everything with a 7 as the first of the five digits certainly looks modern: strip phasers and either Galaxy or Sovereign design features. Everything with a 6 there is of the Galaxy school of design, too...

And then there's the Excelsior-class USS Melbourne, NCC-62043. Not quite as clear is the Pegasus (NCC-53847, pretty high for an Oberth) and the Mirandas get as high as the 3000s (USS Sitak, NCC-32591).

That alphanumeric registries exist and/or are hinted at can't be ruled out either (USS Yamato, NCC-1305-E). Even if you take the registry from "Contagion" to override the earlier reference, the higher NCC-71807 could well be a registry that sticks a "7" in front of the "1807" that began life as a Constitution class starship. Sisko's Saratoga and the Excelsior class Melbourne might fit this scheme as well, both of them possibly being rebuilds of earlier starships of a totally different class.

Any registry scheme that does not assume chronological order must invent an ordering basis from scratch - and acknowledge the fact that the chronological scheme is a valid competitor, supported by some known chronological facts (Excelsior is TOS movie era, Galaxy is TNG era, no high registry ship is stated to operate in a "low registry era" yet) and contradicted by just that one VOY ship.

Well, yes and no. The most famous Galaxy class starship is NCC-1701-D. There's really no in-universe reason why just this one ship would defy an otherwise uniform registry system, unless the registry system isn't actually uniform and is more like the issuing of phone numbers and area codes, with some codes being reused after the ship they were issued to is scrapped, and newer codes being handed over to older ships when their original becomes unusable for some reason. That hundreds of other ships don't have letter suffixes isn't a foregone conclusion either.

 

[BK613]

Well, yes and no. The most famous Galaxy class starship is NCC-1701-D. There's really no in-universe reason why just this one ship would defy an otherwise uniform registry system,

Always figured that the Federation Council created some rule (maybe even an amendment to the Federation Constitution) that forever linked the name with 1701, honoring the fact that the ship and crew had saved the Federation's collective butts three times in about six months...
And since it came from the Council, it was something that that Starfleet had to follow.

unless the registry system isn't actually uniform and is more like the issuing of phone numbers and area codes,

or something even more confusing, like military tail numbers

with some codes being reused after the ship they were issued to is scrapped, and newer codes being handed over to older ships when their original becomes unusable for some reason.

This sounds reasonable. It's not hard to imagine some situations where numbers were intentionally skipped either. For example, suppose hull numbers 1700-1719 were set aside for Connies, but SF only builds twelve or thirteen of them. Later on, unused numbers in this range are applied to other classes where you ended up building more than you had originally planned. Another situation would be bringing a mothballed vessel back into service for a specific mission and giving it a new, modern number after extensive modernization.

That hundreds of other ships don't have letter suffixes isn't a foregone conclusion either.

hmm I only remember the Yamato and the Dauntless having suffix letters and in both cases, it was aliens trying to fool SF personnel with fake ships. So I am not sure if much can be attributed to those vessels, although neither Picard or Janeway ever questions the registries.


---------------------------

on the original topic, you wouldn't need to beam a starship into space if you have antigrav tech like the kind that holds Stratos above the ground.

 

[Timo]

Really, I think that the Trekiverse is in many ways a post-scarcity society

But the central issue here is that starships are scarce.

Starfleet is always short of those. Ships arrive too late to save the day, there aren't enough ships to preemptively deter the enemy, and things remain unexplored or poorly explored as a ship has to move on to the next assignment.

One might say that it all boils down to a shortage of crews. But that's just sidestepping the issue: crews could certainly be trained in greater numbers. Flying starships isn't exactly rocket science, despite appearances... A society with a population in trillions shouldn't have to settle for a mere 10,000 starships because of a crew shortage.

The most famous Galaxy class starship is NCC-1701-D. [..] That hundreds of other ships don't have letter suffixes isn't a foregone conclusion either.

But as said, that's speculation that requires proof. The contrary theory, that there aren't hundreds of such ships and that NCC-1701 is a (nearly) unique case, has the proof right in front of our eyes.

Really, not only is the onscreen evidence something like 99.999% in support of chronological registries (for the five-digit NCCs), this is also the known artist intent behind the numbers. Not that artist intent would matter in the canon sense - but it does explain why the evidence so consistently favors chronological order, and why it takes some desperate grasping to come up with counterexamples (yet again, only for the five-digiters).

Timo Saloniemi