The person who designed the Centaur confirmed that it is to scale with the Miranda torpedo pod and it is not supposed to be an Excelsior saucer in-universe, but he had to work with the available model parts.
What ships SHOULD they have used in the Dominion War?
- Thread starter Arpy
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The person who designed the Centaur confirmed that it is to scale with the Miranda torpedo pod and it is not supposed to be an Excelsior saucer in-universe, but he had to work with the available model parts.
Perhaps this helps explain ships like the Curry and Raging Queen. An in-universe kit bash based on old warp core/nacelles. You won't get a top of the line ship that way, but the use of old components will result in a ship that is useful. Say, a utility ship that takes some of the burden off the ships of the line.
Which may be permissable under treaty. And kit bash ships may be allowed light armament for self defense, because you won't get a good (dedicated) war ship with such construction.
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Completely. Again, the new windows on the Excelsior design show it to be a much smaller hull, and the Miranda pod would have to be launching planet killer torpedoes for a launcher that size to make sense. ...maybe that's the Terran Empire version of the Centaur.
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Exactly.
There is clearly an advantage/reason to use older components rather than build a new ship, and given the incredible resources available to the Federation... building new ships shouldn't be an issue. So there has to be a different reason.
If they can't build a new ship to replace a lost/damaged ship, they can Frankenstein up a new ship out parts.
I previously started a thread in the Fan Fiction forum for The Edge of Midnight, by Seamus Devenish. It's an extraordinary work by a true fan and includes a lot about the ebbs and flows of interstellar politics and shipbuilding in the 23rd Century. Might be of interest to those who also like this thread. I'm listening to the audio version but there's a written one as well, with lots of helpful footnotes.
You almost convince me on a part of your argument. The reason for so few Centaurs, Ambassadors and others might be that they were not allowed to build that many.
But that begs the question, why do they have so many of them to start with?
To clarify, I could see the Curry as having a story like this:
It started out as something like the Centaur but scaled to the size of the Excelsior-class, like the Centaur is depicted in video games. It was later taken out of active military style service, and may or not have received engine changes, and then probably became a cargo ship, still used in war, just now for supplies not fighting.
While I think the above is possible, I do not believe that the Curry, or the other ships, actually come from searching interstellar "battlefields" for parts. I do not see it having a story of Starfleet seeing an Excelsior-class hull in 2 pieces, and a Constitution-class pair of nacelles, and then somehow thinking that they could assemble all four parts into some new and very unusual configuration, and have that work safely with warp-drive physics.
I do think Starfleet could have "developed" this design for a freighter after studying and using new-but-unused or decommissioned parts. A ship from spare parts, not random parts that survived a fight.
The "saucer over the aft part of the secondary hull" configuration must be original to the ship: despite the secondary hull sticking out forward of the saucer, it just too closely resembles the shape of a Ptolemy with a cargo pod for me believe that it was originally an Excelsior-class that or some reason was more viable to be repaired with the dorsal at the back instead of the front where the dorsal was designed to go.
If warp nacelles were self-contained engine pods as regular nacelles can be, then I could see the TMP style nacelles being added to a new designed hull later. Since there is a warp core and a reaction chamber inside the hull, then the tech is almost certainly too complicated for Starfleet to be able to just "bolt-on" new engines from an older, different design. The Curry and other ships like it would have to be "designed" or "redesigned" to accept these nacelles, and I don't see that as a process they could figure out whenever a battle was over to use whatever was left.
With newer nacelles, they could have been designed to fit older ships also, but there is little evidence for that. The Freedom and Niagara look like they could be older and have once had older nacelles. The Enterprise may have gotten new nacelles for TMP..
Potentially the Miranda and Centaur are the escort ships of their eras. I was going to say that if this is what escort ships look like in Star Trek, it could explain why the Nebula-class Phoenix is so powerful in its episode, although the stealth may have something to do with its special pod. The Yeager from DS9 might be an escort, too. Maybe the nacelles being below the hull help indicate this. The Elkins could be an escort, too, but again, there is the issue of the TMP era nacelles that would work better if replaced with the same size nacelles but of a bit different design.
Most of the Miranda's were probably built pre-treaty.
Part of this theory is also that the Khitomer Accords didn't kick in full-scale immediately. There was kind of a "ramp up" to it, and at that point the Federation's premier ship was the Excelsior... so they build as many of them as possible in the "open period" before the limitations kicked in.
It's a bit of everything though. Why are there so many Miranda's? They may just also be really good, reliable ships.
That would make sense.
The UFP President talked about "the evacuation of Qo'nos" during the Khitomer Conference, I'd imagine Mirandas particularly in their stripped down less militarized configuration would have been quite helpful there (though I'd also imagine Klingon troopships doing a fair bit of the work).
Maybe the Constitutions and Ambassadors were left to guard the vast expanses of the Federation while huge numbers of others fought the battles. One Ambassador could be a dozen smaller ships. The Sovereigns too (like the Enterprise) could be the command ships for other fronts in the war. …though, again, we never saw Ross’s flagship so maybe that’s one of those.
Sort of like the fleet Picard was building to evacuate Romulas before things happened on Mars. I could see the Mirandas being mass produced with the idea of a towed passenger or cargo pod for rapid turn-around times to meet the 50 year estimate. The question is....did they actually do this, or did the Klingons and Federation come up with another idea? Just after 50 years from Khitomer was the heroic act of the USS Enterprise-C...so the Klingons and Federation might have gone back to war just a little over 50 years after Praxis.
You thought is that they were Reliant, you say?
Seriously, though, the question is, does this fit with the plot of the shows they were first featured in? Perhaps.
Apparently, Kronos was not evacuated, since the Klingon Homeworld seen in TNG and is called Kronos. The Klingons are often eager for war, so that part fits okay.
I remember when I first heard about the Dominion War that I might get the chance to see at least one of the conjectural classes of ships mentioned in TNG. Maybe a Renaissance-class ship, perhaps, as the USS Aries was still in operation in 2379. I was disappointed to see familiar models with a few kitbashes thrown in.
Yeah, I was hoping we’d get a handful of new Federation ships, and maybe at least one new Klingon or especially Romulan ship—I mean their entire fleet can’t be massive warbirds. Certainly I think many of us imagine a much larger variety of Starfleet and alien ships…I mean, look in the art forums.
Yeah but money. That's always the thing. Those episodes were already expensive, getting new ships in there adds up.
On the flip, I wish we at least got some more focus on the ships we DID have that weren't Miranda's, Excelsiors, or kitbashes. Like, they HAD Akira's out there... but we never really got to see them in any great capacity. Just better utilizing what we had would have been an improvement.
At least another Romulan ship would have been nice. Klingons... meh, they had a small variety and I was fine with that.
A couple of line of lines dialogue could have combined showing more of the new designs with names for them that already existed. For example, the Renaissance-class has numbers in the 40000's, so I have considered the idea this might be the class of the ship that externally appears to be Excelsiors in TNG, especially if the fact that certain Excelsiors in TNG were rendered at about 642 meters, larger than 467 meters.
Also, for the Curry and other ships like it, it might do to consider them Mediterranean class, like the Lalo from TNG. A fan version of the Lalo uses very similar configuration, although the scale is different from what they Curry would be. It also uses Ambassador-style nacelles for a look at how a ship like the Curry probably would have looked if the Ambassador model had been available to use for nacelles. I would scale this up to the size of an Excelsior saucer.
https://www.trekships.org/mediterranean.jpg
Frankensteining ships was always a shorthand way to express that Starfleet was taking horrific losses, but yeah realistically they should have been able to just cheaply reuse old components to build new ships whole cloth that having to kitbash.
This ain't the Imperium of Man, having forgotten how to make whole classes of ships so just bolt more guns and armour onto lesser classes, or refit damaged cruisers with launch bays to make carriers.
This ain't the Imperium of Man, having forgotten how to make whole classes of ships so just bolt more guns and armour onto lesser classes, or refit damaged cruisers with launch bays to make carriers.
The thing is we don't actually KNOW that the Kitbash ships are made from old components. It's entirely possible that Starfleet just found it more efficient to build a bunch of ships that were effectively modular. They could get production lines going on modules and pump them out, and as they are produced they just fit them together to build a new ship. They might be using older designs/technology, but the point is less to build the most high-tech, bleeding edge ships possible... they just need ships, quickly.
I think there also might be a situation of "new old stock" happening. At some point Starfleet was building a ton of components, but moved onto something else. Factories were still pumping out pieces so they ended up with a massive stock of 2280's-era warp nacelles. They're new and perfectly fine, they've just been storage. When it came crunch time and they needed ships quickly... rather than turn on the assembly lines and getting more up-to-date tech going, they just used the stockpile of parts they had.
I get the vibe that the kitbash fleet was always intended to be quantity over quality.
We know that cutting-edge tech in Starfleet can be problematic. We know both the E-D and Defiant had some severe performance issues that were eventually mostly hammered out. Enterprise-A was pretty much a pile of garbage, going by STV. The purpose of these ships, to get a fleet up and running quickly, didn't really lend itself to having that luxury. They needed to be good to go. So... makes sense to use time-tested hardware.
This is sort of what I have been saying. We know those ships exist, but in my view they have to be ships built from new modules based on existing designs. I would assume that if the FJSTM ships exist, Starfleet knew about modular ship designs for a long time prior to DS9. The Excelsior architecture was probably able to be used for modular designs, and the Galaxy even more than that.
When fans say that a Starfleet ships is a kitbash, they might mean one of three things:
1. That the ship design itself, in universe, reflects the concept that Starfleet engineers were able to create ships for various roles by using the same architecture. The modules themselves may have been designed for this purpose in the first place.
2. Starfleet literally took old parts from ships that existed and built them into new ships with "strange" configurations for an unexplained reason.
3. Starfleet took new parts from existing designs and many years later somehow figured out that they could be recombined into new ships with strange configurations for an unexplained reason.
I can support my option 1, but not option 2 or option 3. Starfleet figuring out a way to get TMP nacelles to work on an Excelsior-variant ship in 2295 is a big difference from Starfleet doing the same thing in 2371. I understand the drama and danger implied by the that the idea that during DS9 Starfleet might have 1000 TMP nacelles somewhere and 500 Excelsior hull parts somewhere and was forced to quickly combine them and rush them into service. But knowing what we know about how warp drive works on the show, it seems very far-fetched that this redesigning could be done fast enough to help the in the Dominion War at all.
It doesn’t make sense for the Frankenstein fleet to be that way by design. If Starfleet meant to create a Lego fleet, the esthetics of the ships would reflect that. They don’t.
Designers on the show would never build these ships if they had more money. Every time we revisit the past, new designs are introduced to it; it’s doesn’t make sense to take anything we’ve seen as definitive.
I’d be super curious to see what AI could do with a future remaster of DS9 in the vein of the TOS one, especially. Lots of new ships on the horizon.
Designers on the show would never build these ships if they had more money. Every time we revisit the past, new designs are introduced to it; it’s doesn’t make sense to take anything we’ve seen as definitive.
I’d be super curious to see what AI could do with a future remaster of DS9 in the vein of the TOS one, especially. Lots of new ships on the horizon.
Unfortunately those scenarios were never going to happen. By the 6th season, DS9 had neither the time nor the money to make new ship designs, either physical models or CGI. They were literally reduced to using things like model kits, Playmates ship toys and Hallmark ornaments as filming models. And they had ILM surrender their four FC CGI ship meshes despite most of them being so corrupted that they were forced to show them on screen only in the far background. The ironic thing was that VOY had great CGI models like the Intrepid class, the Prometheus class, the Nova class, and even the fake USS Dauntless, and the films had the Sovereign studio and CGI model, and they couldn't use any of them by mandate.
Always keep in mind that none of those kitbashes were ever meant to be taken seriously. They were just meant to be little damaged blobs in the far background, and not meant to be analyzed up close. I'm still of the opinion that the Yeager was just meant to be an inside joke; the prevailing attitude being that nobody would ever recognize it on a 13-inch SD TV screen. I mean, c'mon. If someone made a kitbash by building a Monogram Volkswagen camper van model kit, glued nacelles to it and went at it with a Dremel, nobody in their right mind would ever take it seriously as a bona fide Starfleet vessel.
