At least its better than "There is no evidence".
The Oberth-class in ENT, TOS, and VAN
- Thread starter MatthiasRussell
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^Why is it better? The burden of proof is not symmetrical. It falls on the person making an unlikely claim.
Exactly. It's more than illogical to think that this same design has been continually mass-produced, with at least no outward signs of change, for at least 100 years, while other more advanced starship classes were being produced in that same period of time. That's like having a continuous run of 1908 Ford Model T's while at the same time producing 2008 Ford Mustangs. It doesn't make sense.
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because it only needs the actual spaceframe to be in servicable condition.
All the systems can be replaced. new sensors, life support etc. As long as the spars are okay, why not? it's not like the Oberths are subjected to any really tough conditions. And the Galaxy class spaceframe was rated to last for a century (TNG tech manual). And I find it hard to believe that a ship as big as a Galaxy would be relegated to simple missions in later life. And we';ve seen mirandas serving in battle. Starfleet builds ships to last. it's very believable to me that the Oberths have been around for ages simply because they aren't actually required to DO much. it's the sensors and computers that do all the hard work, and they're being replaced every 5 or 10 years.
Who says that they are still building Oberths? They've got Novas now.
And like I;ve been saying, all they need is the oberth spaceframe - which, let's face it, is little more than some bits of metal welded together. It's the systems within the ship that lead to what it can do. And as I've said, those systems can be upgraded relatively easily.
I've seen a video of a guy who loaded windows 3.1 onto his computer and then installed the updates one after the other until he got to Windows seven. A similar thing could easily happen with a starship.
Remember also that "E2" showed us that a monumentally beaten-up NX-01 was still more than spaceworthy after 100 years. The Hathaway was spaceworthy after 80. I won't bring up the D7 again (which would be several hundred years older than 225 if you go by the Klingon/Karsid backstory in Ishmael), or other shows like Stargate, where ships truly are built to last.
If they hadn't fup'd with the registry, I'd have said Sisko's Saratoga was the same one disabled in STIV, up(down? There's no weapons pod)graded.
If they hadn't fup'd with the registry, I'd have said Sisko's Saratoga was the same one disabled in STIV, up(down? There's no weapons pod)graded.
It was mentioned that the numbering scheme may not mean anything because starfleet may have changed their numbering system. I can believe this. As starfleet evolves, they may see a need to change how they process registry numbers. Hopefully they still reset the scheme as the numbers get preposterously large. The US overhauled how they numbered fighter designations at least twice in a hundred years.
I honestly don't think there is conclusive evidence for the Oberth's age but there is a lot of compelling arguments. I just hope a future 22nd or 23rd century book gives us a rational and conclusive answer that we can all get behind.
I honestly don't think there is conclusive evidence for the Oberth's age but there is a lot of compelling arguments. I just hope a future 22nd or 23rd century book gives us a rational and conclusive answer that we can all get behind.
Christopher, a good reason why Starfleet may continue to use Oberths for 150-200 years if there's a scarcity of materials and building smaller vessels meant that you could build more ships. You could get 3 small ones instead of one big one. If Starfleet wanted to build up a fleet quickly after the Earth-Romulan war then small ships like the Daedalus-class and Oberth-class would be ideal because they can be built quickly.
It clearly took around a hundred years or so for other races to become integrated in Starfleet, since there were very few Vulcans and we saw (almost) no Andorians or Tellarites in the fleet, presumably because they still used their own pre-Federation ships. The nascent Federation might not have been able to find enough titanium, duranium or whatever to build a fleet of larger ships, so they chose to build smaller ones to create the first fleet.
It clearly took around a hundred years or so for other races to become integrated in Starfleet, since there were very few Vulcans and we saw (almost) no Andorians or Tellarites in the fleet, presumably because they still used their own pre-Federation ships. The nascent Federation might not have been able to find enough titanium, duranium or whatever to build a fleet of larger ships, so they chose to build smaller ones to create the first fleet.
I was referring to the TNG timeframe, not Voyager. In TNG, there is ample evidence that the Oberth class was still in regular production at least up until the launch of the Enterprise-D. The Pegasus was only twelve years older than the Ent-D, and according to the dedication plaque for the Tsiolkovsky, she was commissioned in the same year as the Ent-D, TMP-style bridge chairs and everything.
So try installing the engine, systems, and whatnot of a 2008 Ford Mustang into the frame of a 1908 Ford Model T and see how good that works out.
Bad example since they have completely different chassis. The Oberth would have the same spaceframe from first production to last.
No, because according to the above poster, the Oberth frame can be used with "upgraded" internal components. "Upgraded" means newer and more advanced than what it was originally intended to have. Sure, you could do that for a certain period of time, say, five years, ten tops. But 100 to 200 years? He's saying (according to my analogy) that you can put in a 2008 engine (provided that it fits into the frame of the Model T) and get the same results as if that engine were installed in a Ford Mustang. But...you can't. The external chassis of the Model T just cannot hold up with a 2008 engine installed in it. Advances in technology over a certain period of time means that you can't keep upgrading something indefinitely; eventually you have to get something new, and it will be sooner rather than later.
You can concoct all sorts of ad hoc arguments for why the Oberth class could hypothetically have lasted 200 years, but they all raise the same question: Why don't any other ships last that long????? Why should this one class be such an enormous outlier?
Besides, we now have evidence about what Starfleet ship classes existed before TOS -- the background ships glimpsed in the 2009 movie. Sure, by the time we see those ships, the alternate timeline has existed for 25 years; but most of them seem to be designed along similar lines to the Kelvin, a ship that we know was extant in the Prime universe before the timeline split. So it stands to reason that the classes we saw there--some of which were relatively small--were representative of classes in use in the early to mid-23rd century. And not only did we see no Oberths there, but we never saw any of those classes in any later era. True, that's because the movie is the most recent Trek production to date, but it's what we have in the way of evidence, and it doesn't suggest that there was any tendency for pre-2250 ship designs to be kept in use for over a century.
Besides, we now have evidence about what Starfleet ship classes existed before TOS -- the background ships glimpsed in the 2009 movie. Sure, by the time we see those ships, the alternate timeline has existed for 25 years; but most of them seem to be designed along similar lines to the Kelvin, a ship that we know was extant in the Prime universe before the timeline split. So it stands to reason that the classes we saw there--some of which were relatively small--were representative of classes in use in the early to mid-23rd century. And not only did we see no Oberths there, but we never saw any of those classes in any later era. True, that's because the movie is the most recent Trek production to date, but it's what we have in the way of evidence, and it doesn't suggest that there was any tendency for pre-2250 ship designs to be kept in use for over a century.
I stated earlier that as long as the spaceframe can withstand the stresses of the newer technology, specifically faster warp engines, then there's no reason to design a new spaceframe for vessels with that specific mission profile. Look at the Connies. The TOS Enterprise was gutted back to the spaceframe and completely redesigned for the movies. The ship was about 30 years old before the gut-to-spaceframe refit and then had another 15 years of service before being self-destructed.
Why can't the Oberth have looked differently in the 22nd century and had a similar gut-to-spaceframe refit in the early 23rd and then again in the late 23rd?
I, personally, never liked the "we've changed everything except a rivet in section J-25, but it's the same class" non-sense.
Again, you're arguing in a vacuum, ignoring the larger context. If Starfleet did routinely operate the way you suggest, then surely there'd be a lot more long-lasting ship classes than there are. But aside from the Miranda, Excelsior, and Oberth classes, and probably the Constellation class, the tendency of Starfleet is to change its designs rather radically in fairly short order. Look at all the new shapes of starship that came along in the 2370s, few of which bore any great structural resemblance to their predecessors. Obviously, since these are fictional ships being designed by artists for a viewing audience, they're going to change up the designs every chance they get, and only reuse designs when they need to for reasons of economics. And since CGI has made it easier to "build" new ship classes, the long-term reuse of old designs is strongly established in-universe as a rare exception to the norm. And the use of the movie-era miniatures tapered off once more new ship models became available, suggesting that even those rare long-lived classes had reached a point of obsolescence at last. We don't have any evidence to suggest that any class of Starfleet vessel remained in service for more than 90-odd years.
What you're arguing for, a single class being in use for 200 years or more, is therefore an extreme exception to the pattern. So the burden of proof is on you. It's not enough for you to say "why not," because that's putting the burden of proof on the wrong side of the argument. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Not to mention the fact that it's a rather bad design to begin with.
Quite frankly, I find that Trek fans' hoop-jumping leaps of logic in order to justify what is essentially 80's and 90's budgetary limitations is nothing short of amazing. That's why I keep saying that if there ever is going to be a TNG-R, that there'd be absolutely no reason why those old movie models couldn't be replaced by new CGI models of newer and different classes. Like I said in another thread, it's not like the scriptwriters for such episodes as "The Naked Now" and "The Pegasus" actually envisioned the ships to be the same class as the Grissom from 80 years before. The VFX people were working with what they had available at the time and with their budget, whether whatever model they ended up filming made logical sense or not.
Boy is that one ugly bird.
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