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Which class starships survived the test of time?
kayajay
Member Posts: 1,990 Arc User
We know that the first Excelsior class was created in the 2280's and the class was still being built in the 2370's, because they were involved in the Dominion War.
The Miranda class the 2260's, with them also in service in the 70's.
The Prometheus was also created in the 70's and as seen through the Enterprise J's window, was fighting in the Battle of Procyon V.
They're obviously proven designs, but which one stood the test of time the longest?
I always wondered in "Voyager", which class deep space vessels were redirected and I'd always assumed Excelsior or Galaxy.
It would just be great to see the latest generation versions of the classic designs and actually the Battle of Procyon V itself.
The Miranda class the 2260's, with them also in service in the 70's.
The Prometheus was also created in the 70's and as seen through the Enterprise J's window, was fighting in the Battle of Procyon V.
They're obviously proven designs, but which one stood the test of time the longest?
I always wondered in "Voyager", which class deep space vessels were redirected and I'd always assumed Excelsior or Galaxy.
It would just be great to see the latest generation versions of the classic designs and actually the Battle of Procyon V itself.
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With the Excelsiors and Mirandas it was probably the case that there was a lot of them and they're a starship equivalent of the B-52 or the Iowa-class BB something that was good enough to (though their role has clearly change as the Excelsiors and Miradas where the heavy hitters of their time but Excelsiors are weaker line ships and Mirandas were frigate equivalents). I'm guessing those designs were robust enough due to being designs during essentially war time (either during the Cold War that ended in TUC or during the hot war between Klingon Empire and UFP) that it was cheaper to update those via refits rather then replace them with newer classes.
Also according to STO both MIrandas and Excelsiors are used in the 25th Century (and nothing in Picard really counters that as you'd probably have you best and newest ships in the fast strikeforce like what Riker commanded, rather then having older but viable classes.
On another tack, I want that LD Miranda's nacelles in STO.
The Rhode Island, aka my FAVOURITE ship in the game. The Equinox was commissioned before Voyager and the Rhode Island itself was...2407? In the unaltered timeline, Voyager was 7-years in the Delta Quadrant, before the Admiral said it took her another 17 to get Voyager home. And then it was the 10th Anniversary of their return.
Refitting a ship is extremely common IRL, and with a lot less wear and tear in space compared to corrosive sea water, or even the pressure fatigue on aircraft hulls, its easy to imagine many hulls lasting for centuries. Something like the Lakota, an upgraded Excelsior would be standard practice.
It just doesn't make sense to make a completely new ship when you can refit an old one. As much as Trek wants us to believe economics doesn't play a role, the economics of doing something usually has a strong correlation with efficiency, which is why metal recycling is cheaper than mining more of it, and why refits happen.
Same goes for their cousins, the Romulans. The T'liss class has been around since the Earth-Romulan war according to lieutenant Stiles (though ENT introduced the T'varo class which is similar enough that Stiles could have been considered to be generalizing).
If we expand that farther... a Constitution class actually makes an appearance in the Endgame recreation we saw at the beginning of Star Trek Elite Force II as part of that fleet that intercepted the Borg Sphere Voyager was riding. So technically that class could have existed at least into 2378 in some form as well.
What prevents Starfleet from taking a Constitution Class and putting a new Warp Core in it and upgrading it's Phasers?
I see them like cars, you can take a car from the 50's, add fuel injection, ABS, AC, swap out the transmission if you wish.. heck you can put a new entertainment system in it.. add bluetooth.. whatever. Yeah, it's a lot of work, but still typically less then spending development on designing and building a brand new model car.
The bulk of money will be spent on mass producing newer ships.. of course, but there is no reason that Starfleet couldn't go back and save some resources by bringing older ships up to newer spec. That seems like something that would not only be done, but would actually be pretty common. The idea of retiring a Starship after 100 years seems ridiculous.
The thing with Fed ships is that they are modular so if an upgrade is too extensive to do to the nacelles in place they just get popped off and new ones slotted in their place. Same thing with the internal warp drive systems, if the required new core is so different that a new type cannot be put in the the old one's place the secondary hull gets swapped out (that is what was supposed to happen in Phase II back in the '70s, the ship was the TOS saucer mated to the movie-style secondary hull because the old transverse warp core shown in TAS was too obsolete).
That kind of modularity can take the longevity of those ships a long way.
On top of that, with the way they design things by talking to the computer they could easily build new subclasses into the same hullforms a hundred years down the line from the original by saying "computer, design a new ship based on the (insert class name here, like for instance Miranda)" and the computer wouldn't get creative with the looks so it would look very close to the original. Then the Federation would no doubt call it by the same class name even though that odd nomenclature reuse for a subclass a century later seems weird to anyone who actually thinks the shows should have a realistic, consistent history.
True, sometimes different shaped warp fields require different hull shapes to make efficient use of it. For instance the sunflower seed shape "saucer" some ships have was said in one episode to be due to the field shape they used for the ship (that was in the babble about the Prometheus iirc).
On the other hand, they still use older warp bubble shapes too, for instance they have shown the Galaxy class warp bubble as being an oblate spheroid (most of the round saucer ships probably use that shape) and the Miranda is an efficient shape for that bubble style.
Also, at least some of the Mirandas were fairly new as of TNG. For example in the episode Night Terrors they show the dedication plaque of the Miranda class USS Brattain and technobabble about the ship's history, and it was made by Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems in 2345, around twenty years before TNG takes place, rather than San Francisco Naval Yards in Earth orbit in the mid 2200s like the USS Reliant from WoK.
That shows that they tend to build a certain amount of new ships using older hull designs and parts assets that probably don't go obsolete anywhere near as fast as engines and other systems.
Totally fair.
I was thinking of the older ships more in line as a vehicle comparison to cars from the 50's to the 70's. A Model A, yeah.. obviously you're not strapping a Hemi to one of those and heading down the road.
For Combat ships, sure.. those would have to be retired more often, I can see that. Especially if we are talking STO where even the most mundane mission turns into fighting waves of enemies, at that rate I guess it's fair to say that ships wouldn't last that long. It's a tough call because it's somewhat hard to compare things like Naval ships and Cars to hypothetical starships, but I guess I just always thought of the Starships to be made of materials that would make them last a lot longer.
I guess the best comparison would be the Space Shuttle and even the Columbia was 'only' in service for 22 years so I guess by every metric we currently have you would be right.
What's to stop Starfleet from the 32nd century from the Discovery future to recommission Johnathan's Archer's NX-01 Enterprise and other NX ships with 32nd tech with detachable warp nacelles?
If age doesn't matter anymore why not bring back the NX class with 32nd century tech.
They more or less did from a style viewpoint (though in the 24th century), the 24th century Akira is quite a bit like an NX in design aesthetics.
That's all Discovery got. It was still a 1000-year old starship, so why upgrade it, instead of just copying the Spore Drive into one of their latest ships? Although when Starfleet was obviously using Quantum Slipstream, was Discovery even worth having around? Okay, so it may have taken them a few hours or even days to travel the same distance (although are you really telling me that they hadn't upgraded the means or developed something new of their own?) If they had to retrofit it and they couldn't possibly have done a full Constitution Refit job, so they ship would still have had an old hull, etc...it was all just yet another Producer-driven thing so add more CGI and "cool" effects.
A 32nd Century Defiant though...small, manoeuvrable and overpowered would have made great sense. Or, a Fleet of Kel Dano ships, which are shuttlecraft size on the outside and Enterprise-J on the inside.
A friend of mine actually once suggested that during the Dominion War and when Starfleet were pounding out ships, why they bothered building saucers for the Galaxy class. We all know that without the saucer, the drive section was basically a warship, so why not just make hundreds of drive sections? They would have practically been Defiants in themselves and oh-so very cool to see.
If all they were doing was ship duels then making Galaxy secondary hulls without the saucers might have been a practical solution, but they were fighting a war instead so they needed the Galaxy class to perform their primary wartime role, which is that of a powerful self-escorting troop carrier capable of carrying and fully supporting 6,000 troops in the hottest assaults.
I mean we see Chekov in the battle aswell. That battle had people from multiple time eras.
Spock to Kirk, as Kirk is about to hug him.
Star Trek V: "The Final Frontier"
I'd prefer the old vintage class starships over the new models. Though new model of ships is fine for some folks but i'd prefer the old classic's with new upgrades. Whats wrong with a 32nd century Excelsior? I'm one of those guys that thinks a 1950 Chevy is still a good vehicle all you need is to upgrade it to modern standards and it will run as good as the new models.
I think you mean the 26th Century ships (which were based on the Ent-J) with the 23rd Century TOS variants we got from AoY.
The Intrepid also does fairly well, like the Sovereign.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
but you don't necessarily NEED the older ships to fight your major battles. SOMETHING has to go out and maintain the sensor arrays, shuttle troops around, or in the case of the Lantree, simply move cargo faster than a cargo ship goes. even on a major battlefield, they serve the purposes of additional sensors, support ships, or as in the IRL navy, take the hit that the capital ship would take otherwise.
Well it for all intensive terms is the Prometheus because all the ships they used in that battle were models they reused from Voyager
They should just close the thread after that.. it’s all downhill from here.