No, Crazy Eddie, you make the ships as strong as you can make them.
No. You make them as strong as they NEED TO BE to get the job done.
Which is a distinction without a practical difference. The jobs needing to be done include the jobs of warships.
And starships do not need to be particularly heavily armed or shielded to fill that role to the limited capacity they are expected to do so. Their tactical capabilities and weapon systems COULD be much stronger -- Vengeance is (well,
was) living proof of this.
But they don't NEED to be stronger in that regard. Their weapon systems are perfectly adequate for the tasks they are assigned. They're hardly the most powerful weapons you could possibly fit on a starship; they're the most powerful weapons a starship would need to do its job.
Our cruisers in 2015 would demolish a Baltimore Class gun cruiser.
lol no they really wouldn't. A Baltimore in gun range would tear through a Ticonderoga like tinfoil. Even if you didn't upgrade the Baltimore's AA defenses (radar guidance for the Bofors and Oerlikon guns), the RGM-84 missile that is Tico's ONLY means of anti-ship attack isn't designed to penetrate heavy armor; it'll bounce off a Baltimore like a spitball. The Tico's Mark-45 gun would have better luck, but it wouldn't do much more than scratch the deck armor before the Balti's guns blew it out of the water.
And WHY this massive discrepancy both in armor protection (of which the Ticonderogas have exactly NONE) and in firepower as well? Why did we retire the Iowa class battleships even after they proved again and again that their 16-inch guns were SUPERB fire support weapons for shore bombardment and that the bigger ships could carry huge modern arsenals far superior to their smaller counterparts? Why didn't we simply replace the Iowas with a modern equivalent of super-powerful missile-heavy battlecruiser (like the Soviets did with the Kirov?).
Simple: because the kinds of things naval vessels are being asked to do these days require neither heavy armor nor heavy firepower. The Tico cruisers aren't designed to blow up enemy warships; they can do it, but they are in no way specialized for it. The Tico cruisers and the Burkes are designed to shoot down enemy aircraft and prevent them from attacking the battlegroup's REAL strength, the aircraft carrier. For that matter, aircraft carriers aren't designed to engage enemy warships either; that, again, is what fighter planes are for. So the battlegroup AS A WHOLE is much stronger than its World War-II counterparts even though their relative firepower on any one ship appears to be -- and factually is -- far weaker than it would be on an earlier vessel of similar size. Put simply: the Navy plays to its strengths.
Starfleet, also, plays to its strengths. They don't need superior firepower in because superior firepower fails to be a decisive factor in 90% of their engagements. They need superior sensors, superior science assets and superior engineering, the combination of which allows Federation starships to neutralize threat vessels several times larger and more powerful than they are, often doing so using non-combative means, which means they can not only neutralize threats, they can do it without causing any loss of life to the enemy and
subsequently preventing the possibility of retaliation and/or interstellar war.
Strong as we can make them includes sensors, propoulsion, engine efficiency, communications, training of personnel, quality of commanders, etc. Not one single time did I, or would I, suggest that maximizing strengths, capailities, effeciencies = big guns and nothing else.
Oh, really? Because earlier in the thread you wrote this:
Instead, these weaker science and exploratory ships have to be the ones to fight off invasions and other threats. That's hard to believe.
And I'm explaining to you that the exploratory ships are not actually "weaker" than the putative combat-oriented vessels you assume should be out there. They are actually far more effective in the defense of the Federation than the combat vessels would be because 90% of the things that threaten the Federation are impervious to conventional attacks anyway.
So yes, the science vessels and exploratory ships are INDEED the ones who fight off invasions and other threats. They do it all the time, and they're pretty damn good at it. They are, in fact, much better at it than the Vengeance could be;
we know this because unlike Admiral Marcus we have a pretty good idea of what kind of shit is lurking out there in the galaxy, and we know that some of the things heading towards Earth in the late 23rd century would splatter the Vengeance like a bug on a windshield.
Nothing was overlooked. All the capabilities of all departments of all ships is ALWAYS part of "strong as they can be". YOU and only YOU are confusing my statements here. I.e. strength = firepower.
Again, I'm not the one who suggested that exploratory/science vessels were "weaker" just because they're not built for combat. Those were YOUR words, not mine.
Maybe you should rephrase yourself?
Khans comment must be wrong. Among the ships built must be many for combat.
He's not wrong, and strictly speaking, there aren't. Suffice to say there are enough people in Starfleet's top brass who are smart enough to know that the vast majority of the Federation's potential threats can't be solved by combat action, which means the vast majority of Starfleet ships don't specialize in it.
So Vengeance, unlike MOST Federation ships, is built exclusively for combat. This, ironically, makes it one of the least useful vessels in the entire fleet since none of the things that will
actually threaten the Federation in the next fifty years will be the kind of threat that Vengeance is designed to handle.
And no reason to think Kirk and Company wouldnt have stopped the Doomsday Machine or V'Ger while in a Battleship.
Three major reasons to think so:
1) The response to to both of those threats was ultimately dictated by Spock's analysis of the situation, which in turn depends on careful analysis by his science console and the library computer, comparing obtained data with known sets. In short, Enterprise was able to analyze both situations in order to come up with a solution to those problems when their original approach (fight it out) failed. Unable to analyze the Machine's power levels in detail, unable to analyze the nature of its inner mechanism, its armor, its functioning or its apparent purpose, Vengeance's only real option would be to uselessly throw firepower at it until the Machine eventually destroyed them. Which, incidentally, is exactly what Decker did.
2) Specific to V'ger, the only reason Enterprise was able to initiate contact was because Spock was able to find a way to communicate with it during the second attack; Enterprise's communications array completely overlooked V'ger's messages and Spock himself was only aware of them because he sensed V'ger's thoughts. Vengeance, being built exclusively for combat, lacks dedicated science facilities and would have no way of detecting V'ger's highly accelerated transmissions, let alone quickly devising a response. In which case, V'ger would have destroyed Vengeance just like it did the Klingon ships.
3) Pacifying V'ger was ultimately accomplished by digging through the ship's historical records and pulling up an obscure piece of information from old NASA records. Vengeance, being built exclusively for combat, would not have detailed records on old Earth space exploration programs, given that most of its computing power would be dedicated to strategic operations.
The only way around these problems would be to go back and modify Vengeance to equip a library computer console, historical database, laboratory equipment and specialized computers and a set of science sensors a lot more sophisticated than basic tracking and fire control would require. You would, in essence, have to modify Vengeance into a heavily armed science vessel. At least in this new form it is useful as a first responder to sudden unexpected threats... but then, it's not useful for much of anything else you might want it to do either. Solving THAT problem would require adding additional facilities -- as well as additional
crew -- along with lab equipment, fabrication equipment, and also additional habitation considerations to keep morale high and reduce stress and tension so the crew can operate efficiently. Some of its weapon systems will have to be sacrificed in order to make this possible.
At the end of the day, by the time you're done modifying Vengeance from a "exclusively for combat" to "science-ready multirole platform," you're pretty much reinvented the Enterprise.
