Agreed, I'd say they were more like a replacement for the mid-size workhorses like the Nebula, Excelsior and Ambassador-class rather than the Galaxy.
What ships SHOULD they have used in the Dominion War?
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Agreed, I'd say they were more like a replacement for the mid-size workhorses like the Nebula, Excelsior and Ambassador-class rather than the Galaxy.
He does that by his authority as captain of the flagship. He commanded fleets during the Klingon Civil War and the Borg attack on Earth and he would have during the Cardassian invasion of Minos Korva.
You just said:
“Starfleet doesn't work the same way that a modern surface navy works, and there's no reason why it should.”
The Enterprise is the flagship of Starfleet, explicitly stated as not a military organization. Its purpose is to explore in peacetime and defend in wartime. He’s on the Federation’s flagship (no need to play semantics) exploring in peacetime and presumably fighting in wartime. They’re not just hanging out with an admiral in peacetime (a colossal waste) waiting to fight; they’re individually or otherwise engaged in peacetime operations. The admirals are at hq planning, overseeing, and whatnot.
Right. Beyond it, hi, being a tv show, the Defiant was the testbed for a number of new technologies hastily thrown onto the field after the introduction of the Dominion threat and the much faster than anticipated Borg attacks. The Sovereign was the next step in capital ship for this new era of exponentially more dangerous threats.
100% this. The Sovereign was designed as the "toughest, fastest, most powerful ship Starfleet has ever put into service" at the time, to borrow a phrase from Riker – and it's very much a post-Wolf 359 design in that regard. That doesn't mean the Galaxy is soft, weak, or slow, because we have plenty of evidence that it is none of those things. But its mission profile is fundamentally different.
Or they lost some at the start of the war, say with the Seventh Fleet, and we're being a bit reserved with the remaining Sovereigns. Starfleet was sending lots of Galaxy-class to the front lines. Pretty much all of them would be in one battle if we assume 12 were built and three had known to have been lost before the war started. Plus Starfleet likely started building as many Galaxy-class as they could on Mars after Wolf 359.
Depending on the situation Starfleet does both. In peacetime it is definition #2.
However, definition #1 does occur during emergencies. In "Descent" we see Admiral Nechayev inform Picard that she is making the starship Gorkon her flagship and will be leading 15 starships. Picard is ordered to command "Task Force 3" comprised of Enterprise-D, Crazy Horse and Agamemnon.
Also in "Redemption" we see Captain Picard lead a fleet of ships to blockade Romulan supplies from reaching the Klingons. The Enterprise-D was the flagship for this fleet so you don't necessarily need a rank higher than a Captain to command a fleet.
Except he was not fighting in wartime. He was... exploring and playing ambassador. They were still going on archeological digs.
Would they though? The Galaxy-Class feels like a colossal waste of resources when trying to build a fleet. The ship, while absolutely capable, was not built for war. It's built as a space hotel for long range space exploration.
Be more specific. It was mentioned that the Evora were being made allies at a time the Federation desperately needed them.
You don’t typically arm hotels with torpedoes. In wartime it’s a battleship. With lots of room for troops, support craft, and materiel. It was also the most sophisticated piece of technology ever created when it launched a few years earlier with among the fastest engines and the most powerful arsenal in the fleet. You build more of those. Wolf 359 told the Federation they needed more R&D for the next generation of starship —one to combat an exponentially more advanced enemy— not on churning out lesser ships.
I believe in VOY episode "Relativity" we see at Mars the shipyards there finishing up USS Voyager. Around the yards we see a bunch of Galaxy-class ships and other ships under construction.
During the Dominion War, there are many Galaxy-class starships around Starbase 375, and USS Galaxy and USS Venture seem to continually be on hand at Deep Space Nine after the station is retaken.
When USS Voyager comes home a few years later, there are at least six Galaxy-class starships close enough to Earth to be called to intercept a sudden Borg ship.
During the Dominion War, there are many Galaxy-class starships around Starbase 375, and USS Galaxy and USS Venture seem to continually be on hand at Deep Space Nine after the station is retaken.
When USS Voyager comes home a few years later, there are at least six Galaxy-class starships close enough to Earth to be called to intercept a sudden Borg ship.
What archaeological digs are they going on in Insurrection? Picard was complaining about the Enterprise being used as a diplomatic firefighter rather than just being able to explore. Technically that is the only mission that we know about the Enterprise during the Dominion War and even then it turned into a basically a military operation. During World War II, the newest US battleships were not being sent to the frontline right away. The USS North Carolina and the USS Washington were kept purposefully away from the front lines at first.
Exactly, in that scene, Picard is complaining that their latest diversion after meeting the Evora would mean they'd miss out on a dig he was looking forward to:
PERIM: Command wants to know our ETA at the Goren system.
PICARD: The Goren system?
RIKER: They need us to mediate some territorial dispute.
PICARD: No, no, we can't delay the archaeological expedition to Hanoran II. That'll put us right in the middle of monsoon season.
RIKER: The diplomatic corps is busy with Dominion negotiations.
PICARD: Oh, so they need us to put out one more brush fire. Can anyone remember when we used to be explorers?
It's possible they were making hay while the sun shone, as it were. One of the common timeline placements for INS is sometime during "It's Only a Paper Moon," "Prodigal Daughter," and "The Emperor's New Cloak," and that whole middle third of the season from "Covenant" to "Penumbra" is light on war stories. If there was a lull in the fighting after "AR-558," Starfleet might've been sending the Enterprise to take care of as many non-combat missions as possible, and the archeological expedition might've been a bit of a bribe to Picard, in particular, fitting in a mission that he'd be personally interested in as a sort of working shore leave between all the other errands that they had a brief window to take care of until the fighting flared up again.PICARD: The Goren system?
RIKER: They need us to mediate some territorial dispute.
PICARD: No, no, we can't delay the archaeological expedition to Hanoran II. That'll put us right in the middle of monsoon season.
RIKER: The diplomatic corps is busy with Dominion negotiations.
PICARD: Oh, so they need us to put out one more brush fire. Can anyone remember when we used to be explorers?
The Curry and Raging Queen as test beds? Sounds plausible. The saucer section and engineering hull may have been ready for testing earlier than FTL, because of problems with the experimental Transwarp system.
Well, the two reasons for placing the movie where I mentioned is that that’s when it came out in relation to when the episodes aired, and that Worf appears only briefly at the beginning of “Pale Moon,” which seems to take place over a few weeks, and isn’t in the next two episodes at all.
SNIP!
SNIP!
The whole entire point of the destruction of the USS Odyssey, at the hands of the Jem'Hadar (DS9) is that Starfleet, at the time, was neither ready for combat, nor did it have the type of starship that was "combat ready". To paraphrase Guinan, but the Galaxy-class is NOT a ship of war; it's a ship of peace, which is why families were allowed onto Starfleet starships. Just a different mentality, which is fine. Only when the Dominion War began did the class were repurposed for war, though originally was a long-range exploration vessel.
As for your torpedoes line: based on what you stated, why even have security on board? Torpedoes and a phaser bank would still be needed, as a form of self-defense while exploring the unknown, not to mention that torpedoes AND phased are modular enough to serve other purposes, such as probes, communications relays, etc.
Just saying.
SNIP!
The whole entire point of the destruction of the USS Odyssey, at the hands of the Jem'Hadar (DS9) is that Starfleet, at the time, was neither ready for combat, nor did it have the type of starship that was "combat ready". To paraphrase Guinan, but the Galaxy-class is NOT a ship of war; it's a ship of peace, which is why families were allowed onto Starfleet starships. Just a different mentality, which is fine. Only when the Dominion War began did the class were repurposed for war, though originally was a long-range exploration vessel.
As for your torpedoes line: based on what you stated, why even have security on board? Torpedoes and a phaser bank would still be needed, as a form of self-defense while exploring the unknown, not to mention that torpedoes AND phased are modular enough to serve other purposes, such as probes, communications relays, etc.
Just saying.
Losing a ship does not mean you’re not “combat ready.” A new threat beyond any known at the time entered the fray and adjustments were made. But it isn’t as though the Romulans, Cardassians, Talarians, Tzenkethi, or Tholians hadn’t made themselves belligerent against the Federation for decades prior. Or the Borg. The only reason Sisko didn’t lose DS9 is because of the combat planning Starfleet (and conveniently he himself) had done in recent years that among other things developed the Defiant.
Furthermore, the Odyssey itself (after offloading unnecessary personnel at DS9) fought long enough to save Sisko’s life and succeed at its mission, even without useful shields. It was not destroyed by enemy fire but a needless kamikaze run by presumably a fully crewed starship. Very well, point taken. We’ll save a pen for your surrender papers.
They’re lalways ships of war and ships of peace. The difference in the alternate timeline is that after a quarter century at war they were only the one.
It’s the other way around. You’re calling them hotels and therefore unnecessarily armed. I’m calling them battleships.
The reason they have families on board is because in the real world our spaceships will also. That’s the dream, anyway. Outer space is not going to be Captain Proton with a new alien baddie every week. We may be lucky to find any intelligent life on par with us at all. They’ll either be long since perished or so far beyond us we don’t even recognize them as life. In 1987 Trek dared to put some aspirational vision in its Sci-fi. To have us going out into the great emptiness on ships like the Galaxy Class. Today, because of Trek’s success, we find ourselves with perhaps too many belligerents around every corner. Ditto all the forehead aliens.
Star Trek 3 makes it out that the Excelsior is new in a way that makes the TOS crew uncomfortable. They complain about it significantly. If not for the onscreen evidence of the existence of the Curry, I would suggest that Excelsior and TMP parts were not compatible.
In other words, possibly a TOS-style ship could be refit to a TMP one, but a TMP ship could not be refit or combined to an Excelsior-type vessel. Maybe all prior ships built specifically for the Federation Starfleet had compatible modules that to a degree that could be updated to newer designs within some limits, and the Excelsior and the related classes were part of the first time that a new, totally redeveloped set of designs, not only due to transwarp drive, which would be why the first ship of that development would be called "The Great Experiment."
It would work so well for the drama of the movie. The Curry prevents the above paragraph from being true, though, if we are to interpret that it really has TMP nacelles, which is hard to avoid seeing. I'm not as worried about the other DS9TM ships since their use of TMP parts alongside of Excelsior parts is more easily explained as "only looking like TMP modules," and not necessarily being the exact same ones.
that makes more sense to me than older nacelles on a newer ship, and I'd go so far as to suggest that the Freedom and Niagara might be ships that once had an older style of nacelle that have been updated to Galaxy-style nacelles in a refit at some point.
Swapping the modules from the TOS-era to make ships that are literally in-universe kitbash designs is not something I would see occurring. I would assume that the designs of a saucer, dorsal, nacelles, deflector, and nacelle struts were created in such a way that they did not need to be fully redesigned for every new class. I could see a factory making many nacelles for any class of that era, but not just a bunch of saucers being built without thought to which class of ship they would be used on.
I could see the Curry and related classes as ships built in 2295, or maybe 2320, based on the NCC numbers, for example, but not as new designs for 2371.
It seems that might be the case, since it took a major refit to change out the warp drive systems for the first movie. But that further makes the idea of a literal in-universe kitbash ship less likely. The Excelsior-style hull would have to be built with a TMP warp core in mind (and maybe in the saucer in the case of the Curry??) and as such the idea it was made from parts that were found in the site of a battle in space, or built from generic Excelsior and TMP parts Starfleet had in storage somewhere seems even less likely.
The idea of missing parts makes sense, but it still does not explain the fitting an older warp drive into a newer hull that was not made for it. For that to happen, the Excelsior would have to have been designed with both its saucer and secondary hull having the backwards compatibility contingencies for older nacelles and or warp/cores.
Not having enough parts might explain some design choices, but I do not see how it explains the idea of putting the Excelsior saucer in the middle of the secondary hull with the nacelles attached to it (or attached to the secondary hull) to create almost a "wheelhouse rear" look almost akin to a present day container vessel, when Starfleet ships almost without exception have their bridges at the forward of center on the ship.
Since that bridge position does suggest a freighter, maybe that could be the Curry's role. It still does not explain the TMP nacelles on that ship though, unless Starfleet just wanted a newer freighter and did not care about utilizing the new transwarp drive for it, but wanted the Excelsior hull for a cargo pod because it is bigger than some other choices? It seems like a lot of effort to have had to design backwards compatibility into the Excelsior's modules, just to allow a freighter design to use the older nacelles when it could be using new ones! (Taking away the secondary hull as a cargo pod, NCC-42043, NCC-42254 and NCC-42284 all have similar designs except for the nacelles and I could see them in the science vessel/frigate/cargo carrier role filled by the Miranda and Nebula in other eras.)
Any interview I've seen with Dan Curry he seemed very thoughtful and intentional. I am sure that the NCC-42254 and NCC-42284 look the way they do for a reason, I really wish we knew why he decided to combine the parts he did.
FYI, Curry only built the USS Curry model. Gary Hutzel built the Raging Queen, despite the similarity to the former. And its registry is actually 42264, not 42284.
I think it is part of it though. The Excelsior WAS something entirely new and uncomfortable... until it wasn't anymore. Transwarp seems to have never taken off, so the thing that MADE it so incredibly new and different was dropped. Now it's just... a newer type of ship.
