Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

[William Murderface]

no clue about what their boggle is, but the case has been made since DS9 was on that it may be a very nice scifi show in the Star Trek setting, it's not really so much of the exploring new worlds and seeking out new life and trekking the stars and shit like that

The plot of being a frontier fort and instead of going to strange new worlds, the strange new worlds would be coming to them was a good idea, but I think the execution was lacking at times, especially in the early seasons. That got less and less airtime in favor of Bajorean and Cardassian and later Dominion and Klingon stuff so the initial premise was more or less shuffled aside. It happens in shows though. TNG was supposed to be on the edge of known space and rapidly ended up with them doing missions inside the Federation all the time, just like how VOY was supposed to be about this ship that is lost and the two crews needs to learn to coexist became Starfleet and Starfleet with a different collar pin with only the occasional lip service paid to how the Maquis is different.

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

Even giving it the Wave Motion Phaser-cannon is actually a bad idea. It's a point phaser that can't be used at warp and requires moving the entirety of the heavy ship to aim right. The reason why that refit even existed was because of Admiral Riker being a Boomer about the ship instead of switching over to a modern design.

>90% of all combat happens at sublight speed and physically aiming the weapon by moving the ship isn't all that uncommon. 23rd century phaser banks only had limited firing arcs, too, requiring the ship to maneuver into a good firing position to utilize the maximum amount of weapons. The Galaxy-class is quite maneuverable for a shipt that size; the drawbacks of a spinal mount are therefore relative, not necessarily absolute. The advantage of a phaser sniper rifle of that size is range and power per shot. The doctrine of the X-type in my head revolves around stalking unsuspecting opponents in stealth-mode and then ambushing them with the phaser sniper rifle. As such, it is more of a precision tool, ideal for interdicting, ambushes, raids behind the frontlines. Imagine the havoc you can dish out by engaging in large scale convoy raiding with this thing during the Dominion War.

The normal Galaxy class has another thing going for itself: a well angled saucer section that offers are very large surface area that allows for a ludicrous amounts of weapons. I'm talking about cramming like 30+ phaser arrays per side. Since you can armor it up by removing decks you don't need in a war, that's a pretty tough thing to sink. The 'neck' of more conventional Starfleet designs is a relative problem, but if I was sitting in the chair of a Romulan warbird I'd go after the nacelles first; they're the actual problem here.

On cloaks: there are reasons why Pressman's cloak would have been the gamechanger. Transphasic/interphasic cloaking is virtually unbeatable with conventional sensors and it would require a whole lot of R&D to find an effective counter. Provided Pressman and gang don't find a way that allows a ship to fire while existing out of phase. That would be a scary first strike weapon that very likely cannot be detected easily, if at all.

Generally for me it comes down to doctrine. And Starfleet's doctrine mostly sucks balls. There is a lot of shit you could do with their conventional designs, but Starfleet planners either lack the brain or the balls or both for that...

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

he Galaxy-class is quite maneuverable for a shipt that size; the drawbacks of a spinal mount are therefore relative, not necessarily absolute. The advantage of a phaser sniper rifle of that size is range and power per shot. The doctrine of the X-type in my head revolves around stalking unsuspecting opponents in stealth-mode and then ambushing them with the phaser sniper rifle. As such, it is more of a precision tool, ideal for interdicting, ambushes, raids behind the frontlines. Imagine the havoc you can dish out by engaging in large scale convoy raiding with this thing during the Dominion War.

These are better tasks for either a destroyer or a dedicated artillery ship, both of which would be smaller and easier to maneuver. A flagship is supposed to be in the center of a formation with enough armor to withstand combat while also serving as a mobile C&C, especially when the Feds like wide fire control for their ships, so their array-based ships don't need maneuverability as much.

And the thing about transphasic cloaking is managing the plasma supply so it doesn't overload itself from long-term usage, making its use as an ambush device dodgy and the reason why it never made it out of the prototype phase. Section 31 would be using it otherwise.

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

no clue about what their boggle is, but the case has been made since DS9 was on that it may be a very nice scifi show in the Star Trek setting, it's not really so much of the exploring new worlds and seeking out new life and trekking the stars and shit like that

That's part of why I enjoyed DS9 so much. Not that the exploration format isn't interesting, but this all goes back to my single pet peeve with all sci-fi media: both the creators and in some cases it seems also the audience are, for some reason I can't comprehend, deathly fucking afraid of expanding their horizons and shifting the focus onto something unfamiliar. I could spend an hour listing all the old examples I've already mentioned a thousand times in this thread: having to make everything about humans when you have dozens of really interesting alien races; having to make nearly every main series show take place on the exact same single starship; having to rely on your constantly traveling exploration vessel as a plot device to encounter novel threats to make a story; and that's just Star Trek, other sci-fi franchises are even worse about this.

DS9 really breaks the mold here if you think about it, and for once it's a show as much about the Bajorans and the Dominion and (less so) the Cardassians as it is about humans. O'Brien, being the relatable everyman, obviously has to be human but Sisko the station commander just happens to be a Fed for political reasons and he ends up developing close ties to Bajor. There are probably more Bajoran characters appearing in the show than humans.
Obviously Bajorans are largely just humans with funny noses but they have a few interesting quirks that make for decent stories and I appreciate the attempt to bring in something new because for some inexplicable reason no one, not even other Star Trek shows, is doing anything like this.

 

[Flexo]

Then Wolf 359 happens and they have to build ships with attrition rate in mind, hence the Defiant, Saber, Nova, Steamrunner "Escort" class. Why did they settle for the Defiant? It has a bunch of forward-facing weapons and ideally a cloaking device, like a Bird of Prey. The anti-Borg isn't meant to solo Borg ships, they're meant as a mass wave of decent-ish ships to maybe take out a Cube. Essentially, the Federation had to tacitly admit that Klingon naval doctrine was better at actually fighting wars and only got the goal after the Dominion War ended.

Not entirely...

Because the weapons ports on the ships are all oriented in a limited cone field when you're going to have to fight ship battles in 3 dimensional space. As freaky as it sounds, the best ship doctrine were the Borg. Equal side design with (as far as we can tell) full weapon compliments on each side meaning they can handle approaches from any direction.

If the federal REALLY was to get serious with ship combat, they would essentially put turret bubbles all over their ships so phasers and torpedoes could be launched in direction and there would be no "blind spot" for the enemy to exploit.

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

These are better tasks for either a destroyer or a dedicated artillery ship, both of which would be smaller and easier to maneuver. A flagship is supposed to be in the center of a formation with enough armor to withstand combat while also serving as a mobile C&C, especially when the Feds like wide fire control for their ships, so their array-based ships don't need maneuverability as much.

A smaller hull likely doesn't have the space for the power plants you need for the big ass gun you want to fire. Unless you use torpedos, but they have other issues.

The biggest issue I always had with space combat in Star Trek is that the rules and even most specs of the weapons are unclear. Combat happens at point blank range with other ships only a couple hundred meters away, which is odd. The only hard number on the range of fire control, phasers and torpedos I personally know is 10,000 meters. That's the range you have in Starfleet Academy, the 1997 space flight simulator. Quite good game/visual novel, actually. But then again 10 km is nothing, in partcular when you know that WW2 era capital ships had up to 30 km maximum effective firing range with their main guns and 5-8 km with the secondaries. It is even less than nothing when you realise: oh, you're in space and you're using directed energy weapons most of the time.

I can imagine that with FTL-sensors in use by everyone phasers have an effective range of a least one or two lightminutes; that would be roughly 18-38 million km. And with 23rd, 24th century tech there is also very little dispersion of the beam, so the punch over longer ranges should be very consistent. I can understand why the writers went with very short ranged fights, so that the audience can see what's going on and who's shooting what and so on. Even in nu-Trek where CGI has replaced models they default back to close quarter fights that at most happen at less than a thousand km between the fleets and no one is really maneuvering, at all.

LoGH and the Expanse - for all their other flaws they have - have better space combat. In case of the former, combat happens over tens of thousands of miles at the very least. The fleets are large enough they occupy a whole lot of space and coordination is difficult, often impossible to due massive electronic warfare. They relay orders with couriers in shuttles, lol. And because of all of that, both sides have ships where almost all weapons are concentrated at the usually heavily armored bow. A good portion of the fleet combat revolves around trying to outmaneuver or encircle the enemy fleet to hit them from a direction where their weapons aren't pointing at. The Expanse has CIWS to shoot down incoming missiles and torpedos, something that should be possible to accomplish with phasers. Some of the weapons they have can't even be used at very close range (railguns and virtually all missiles). Hell, even Star Wars has at times a better grip on these things...

 

[teriyakiburns]

I read a DS9 book when I was a kid, where the station was boarded by aliens that had armour that deflected all beam weapons, eventually it dawns on them that projectile weapons will work.

I remember that one. Odo and Quark got stuck in a time dilation field and ended up a week later, having to piece together why the station was wrecked and find a way to travel back in time to stop it happening. Pretty good story.

 

[Flexo]

no clue about what their boggle is, but the case has been made since DS9 was on that it may be a very nice scifi show in the Star Trek setting, it's not really so much of the exploring new worlds and seeking out new life and trekking the stars and shit like that

Back in the day, Ds9 was intensely disliked by a lot of trekkies. An old joke was that the show is called star TREK, why are we on a STATION that is STAIONARY? Also after the immense popularity of Picard, Sisko was initially seen as too abrasive.

It took time for a lot of us fans to grow to love DS9 and realize how great it actually was.

When Voyager premiered, the show runners tried to go "back to basics" and make it more like TNG again. (So much so that apparently for a time, Voyager initially used the TNG episode numbering.) So it wouldn't surprise me if the RLM crew never quite grew out of that phase - still preferring TNG and thus to them, Voyager is at least closer to it than DS9 was.

 

[NSA]

A smaller hull likely doesn't have the space for the power plants you need for the big ass gun you want to fire. Unless you use torpedos, but they have other issues.

The biggest issue I always had with space combat in Star Trek is that the rules and even most specs of the weapons are unclear. Combat happens at point blank range with other ships only a couple hundred meters away, which is odd. The only hard number on the range of fire control, phasers and torpedos I personally know is 10,000 meters. That's the range you have in Starfleet Academy, the 1997 space flight simulator. Quite good game/visual novel, actually. But then again 10 km is nothing, in partcular when you know that WW2 era capital ships had up to 30 km maximum effective firing range with their main guns and 5-8 km with the secondaries. It is even less than nothing when you realise: oh, you're in space and you're using directed energy weapons most of the time.

I can imagine that with FTL-sensors in use by everyone phasers have an effective range of a least one or two lightminutes; that would be roughly 18-38 million km. And with 23rd, 24th century tech there is also very little dispersion of the beam, so the punch over longer ranges should be very consistent. I can understand why the writers went with very short ranged fights, so that the audience can see what's going on and who's shooting what and so on. Even in nu-Trek where CGI has replaced models they default back to close quarter fights that at most happen at less than a thousand km between the fleets and no one is really maneuvering, at all.

LoGH and the Expanse - for all their other flaws they have - have better space combat. In case of the former, combat happens over tens of thousands of miles at the very least. The fleets are large enough they occupy a whole lot of space and coordination is difficult, often impossible to due massive electronic warfare. They relay orders with couriers in shuttles, lol. And because of all of that, both sides have ships where almost all weapons are concentrated at the usually heavily armored bow. A good portion of the fleet combat revolves around trying to outmaneuver or encircle the enemy fleet to hit them from a direction where their weapons aren't pointing at. The Expanse has CIWS to shoot down incoming missiles and torpedos, something that should be possible to accomplish with phasers. Some of the weapons they have can't even be used at very close range (railguns and virtually all missiles). Hell, even Star Wars has at times a better grip on these things...

I think it makes sense for there to be trade-offs with different designs and weapons, I wish it was better spelled out. If a Sovereign has no drawbacks, every ship would just be a Sovereign. After all, this is a society without scarcity, so the only limits are the abilities of the technology.

Take for example the Constitution and Miranda in the movie era. Maybe the reason the Connie is so spindly and elegant is because it makes the warp drive super efficient, allowing for a 5-year mission. The Miranda might be sturdy and have 2 hangar bays and be way better tactically, but that MUST come with a cost, otherwise the Connie wouldn't exist. Perhaps the Miranda can only go 2 years between refits and burns twice the fuel in exchange for a way more compact and tactically sound profile. Like the difference between a police car and SWAT van. Even with an infinite budget it would be retarded to use SWAT vans as police cars - they lack speed, range, and maneuverability.

The same could be true with the Galaxy and Nebula. Maybe the Galaxy burns half the fuel, needs half the maintenance, and has 10 times the range, but the trade off is that it has a bunch of tactical weaknesses. Something like the Defiant probably needs non-stop dock work, because it pushes every system to the limit all the time. The nacelles are not out on thin pylons, so it needs to run a coolant system twice the size of a Galaxy's coolant system for half the max speed. Takes damage like a champ though.

The same must be true for weapons too. Photon torpedoes are way less powerful, but they must have some advantage over Quantums because they use both. Maybe they're easier to store. Maybe the launch system is smaller and less prone to damage. Maybe you can still fire them with main power offline, but Quantums need a hit of energy from the warp core to activate. Maybe Quantums are impossible to convert to science probes. Maybe Photons can track targets, but Quantums are dummies.

The dual mission of Starfleet - exploration and military - explains why there are so many different ship types, because they're being pulled in different directions. Romulans on the other hand can just churn out warbirds and call it a day.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

After all, this is a society without scarcity, so the only limits are the abilities of the technology

It still takes time and skilled labor to do it. Not everyone is Geordi and Scotty. The post-scarcity society is built on the Federation's massive, massive trade network and Starbase logistics. As we saw in Voyager, the second they are cut off from Starbase support, replicator rations suddenly exists and everyone easily adapts to it. Scarcity is also implied in later post BoBW-episodes with the Franken-Fleet kitbashes. Because most of Starfleet got wrecked, the shipyards found themselves with spare parts for Excelsiors and Galaxies, but not enough to build complete ships, so they built the Centaurs and Nebulas instead. Even in this society, only 6 Galaxies were commissioned at a time, which also implies post-scarcity has a finite limit of resources despite industrial-sized replicators.

 

[Trig.Point]

I think discussion of the technology and engineering behind Star Trek isn't particuarly rewarding because of the ever shifting goal posts.

If Star Trek had been based on a literary work with the TV show built off it, then the science and world building might have had a chance to evolve in a coherent way. Instead what happened was numerous different workman style writers just fired off episodes under contract, many of whom were just generic TV or movie writers. Yeah sometimes there was a Ronald D Moore or René Echevarria but I think most writers were just earning a crust and were often shoe horning existing stories or ideas in the Star Trek universe and weren't really bothered about contradictions or plot holes. They were also I think addicted to techno babble, and just a nonsense understanding of science I mean the idea that transporters essentially kill people and then recreate copies was around since the 1980's (which I think is the reason Stargate used rings as a beam of energy)

The same must be true for weapons too. Photon torpedoes are way less powerful, but they must have some advantage over Quantums because they use both. Maybe they're easier to store. Maybe the launch system is smaller and less prone to damage. Maybe you can still fire them with main power offline, but Quantums need a hit of energy from the warp core to activate. Maybe Quantums are impossible to convert to science probes. Maybe Photons can track targets, but Quantums are dummies.

I used to read a lot of Star Trek novels when I young, some of them were really good. Such as 'The Romulan Way' by Diane Duane which gave a really captivating history of the Romulan (for a book in 1987 it described the Romulan religion, which worships the universe, as being started on an online message board). Duane also tried to explain TOS combat in a more coherent way moving away from 'on viewscree' and ships trading blows, rather it was about ships trying to match velocities and rather than batter down opponents shields score hits in the gaps that appear as a ship manouvers.

Star Trek space combat makes no sense, the distances involved, the speed of the weapons the fact that a Photon torpedo can't be going more than 80mph because of the way it moves relative to ships. The writers just arent' interested.

Here's a concept that applies to Star Wars, Star Trek and numerous other sci fi shows. A space ship capable of moving at any significant fraction of light speed, would be able to destroy an earth size planet by impacting on it, just from the energy in the velocity.

 

[Mr. Racewar1488]

Here's a concept that applies to Star Wars, Star Trek and numerous other sci fi shows. A space ship capable of moving at any significant fraction of light speed, would be able to destroy an earth size planet by impacting on it, just from the energy in the velocity.

The Holdo Maneuver? That was one in a million.

 

[Trig.Point]

The Holdo Maneuver? That was one in a million

I just googled that a golf ball moving at .99 times the speed of light would be the equivalent of a 6 megatonne nuclear bomb. Holdo was just lucky nobody every thought of it before her.

 

[crowabunga]

(which I think is the reason Stargate used rings as a beam of energy)

I don't know if that had any role in Stargate's initial conception, but later episodes ruined the whole "unbroken functioning of a living organism" thing: in one episode, Teal'c gets lost in-transit during some accident that forced the gate to shut off early, but gets saved from a buffer that Carter is eventually able to "receive" from like a normal gate transmission: this is because per some SG lore (that might have been thought up just for that episode, consequences be damned) "you" don't actually go through the wormhole, you get broken down, transmitted via wormhole as a data/matter stream, and then reassembled by the receiving gate.

I think they actually made this into a bigger plot point in the last episodes of Stargate: Atlantis, where the crew have to take a giant risk transporting Atlantis to Earth through a wormhole as whole matter, not broken down.

 

[Mr. Racewar1488]

I just googled that a golf ball moving at .99 times the speed of light would be the equivalent of a 6 megatonne nuclear bomb. Holdo was just lucky nobody every thought of it before her.

Because it'd make everything in the OT redundant.

Rebel #1: Oh fuck, the Empire has a huge battle station called the Death Star! We need the plans for it STAT!
Rebel #2: Nah, we'll just fly a corvette into it at near lightspeed.

*Blockade Runner flies into DS1 at near luminal velocity and it vaporizes. Roll credits*

Mon Mothma: Oh shit, the Empire built another Death Star! We need the Bothans to steal the plans!
Crix Madine: Bitch, we've done this already!

*Nebulan-B Frigate flies into DS2 at near luminal velocity and it vaporizes, again. Rebel heroes smoke Endor Kush with Ewoks. Roll credits.*

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

iirc in Star Wars you're in "hyperspace" a subrealm of reality, and where you smash into the shadow the gravity of things casts into hyperspace which does to them as much as stepping on somebody's shadow irl, rather than just vwooshing forwards really fast like it looks before they cut away to the ship going poof

 

[Space Police]

I used to read a lot of Star Trek novels when I young, some of them were really good. Such as 'The Romulan Way' by Diane Duane which gave a really captivating history of the Romulan (for a book in 1987 it described the Romulan religion, which worships the universe, as being started on an online message board).

Any other Romulan-focused literature recs?

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

Star Trek space combat makes no sense, the distances involved, the speed of the weapons the fact that a Photon torpedo can't be going more than 80mph because of the way it moves relative to ships. The writers just arent' interested.

Aye. I did some digging the last couple days, rewatched some space combat heavy episodes and the entire lightshow doesn't make much sense. However, I also stand corrected: there is one hard number on the range of Federation directed energy weapons, specifically the phasers installed on your average Nebula-class cruiser: 300,000 km - or one light second.

So, if the writers really wanted, really gave a damn about long-term implications, space combat would AND should have gone down the LoGH-route: two opposing fleets trying to outmaneuver each other, carefully moving to avoid enemy fire, while trying to dish out as much as possible fast as possible. In the end it would not necessarily the fleet with the faster ships winning a fight, but the ones with the longer weapons range, better and more accurate sensors, more ECM to deal with sensor/com jamming and more staying power/better damage control.

It would also mean that fleets have to be balanced. Jack-of-all-trades would be utterly steamrolled by a specialised ship, and those would be countered by a combination of different specialised ships. Hence, the numerous ship classes Starfleet uses would make a whole lot of sense, because they carry different equipment for a specifically tailored Mahanian-type fleet battle.

But nope! We have dozens of ship classes that all have the same sub-light speed (.5 c), same max FTL-speed (past Warp 9 it doesn't really matter anymore anyway), pretty much the same weapons and the only difference between them revolves around the question if a main character is serving aboard or not. For me personally this is really frustrating because stuff like the Dominion War could not only have been great, but excellent.

 

[Trig.Point]

Any other Romulan-focused literature recs?

Not that I can remember, that one stuck in my mind because the chapters alternated with the story of the Romulans migrating from Vulcan on board generational ships, to a story of a federation spy that had gone native on Romulus.

But nope! We have dozens of ship classes that all have the same sub-light speed (.5 c), same max FTL-speed (past Warp 9 it doesn't really matter anymore anyway), pretty much the same weapons and the only difference between them revolves around the question if a main character is serving aboard or not. For me personally this is really frustrating because stuff like the Dominion War could not only have been great, but excellent.

Again coming back to the books, some of them tried to expand on the wider federation and politics. One aspect being that Star Fleet wasn't the only military. Which each new society joined they kept their existing military to whatever degree they wanted (this is something that was used in that star trek cartoon where there was a vulcan ship) even individual nations on earth kept their militaries to some extent, because if you're living in luxury communist utopia why not have a military.

Also another aspect that was touched on was human colonies going independent, which I suppose kind of pre empted the Maquis arc in DS9.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Any other Romulan-focused literature recs?

did DC Fonatana work on any?
if so, them

tbh anything Dee touched is important, she invented most of the real bullshit beyond "uhh.... vulcans and... logic? I guess"