A Federation Military

Lord Pounder · Post by **Lord Pounder** » 2004-07-11 06:18am

Executor wrote:[quote="Alyeska]Incorrect. The Defiant, Akira, and Prometheus are dedicated warships. The Sovereign class retains multi mission capacity, but it is heavily biassed towards combat. Dedicated battleships designed solely for war will either be similar in scope to the Prometheus, only larger in scale, or they will be designed to be optimized for war and as such will be slower then their conventional cousins.

The Sovereign has one of the most powerful cores in existance and it can make the ship move only so fast. Simply putting more power into the design does not make it faster.

Incorrect. While a Trek ship can't go faster than Warp 9.95 better warp engines mean the ship can hold that pace longer. Must warships don't need to be sprinters.

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2004-07-11 10:58am

Executor wrote:It's stated that the Defiant is the only Warship, I don think the others are dedicated warships they still seem like civilian ships just with enhanced combat performance.

Incorrect. Its stated that the Defiant is a pure warship and that is a rare thing. Furthermore the Prometheus was designed and built after the Defiant. Neither the Prometheus or the Akira look anything like civilian ships when you factor in their design. The Akira is a torpedo support ship and a carrier of sorts. The Prometheus is a testbed for technology and packs almost as much firepower as a Sovereign into a smaller frame.

These new ships are specificailly designed for war, yes the sovereign might be the most powerful at the moment, but dont you think thed be designing more powerful cores, or that a Fed Dreadnought might have multiply cores.

The Prometheues was designed with multiple cores in mind. The production staff also said the Akira has two cores.

Many other forces in ST dont use warp nacelles on pylons and seem just as fast, or faster,

Incorrect. Races of equivilant technology to the Federation that don't use visible nacelles or use nacelles very close to the ship have a known speed disadvantage. Extended nacelles are a requirement for high warp speeds. Look at the Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and Dominion designs. All have reasonably exposed nacelles. Ships like the Defiant or Galor do not move as fast.

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2004-07-11 11:00am

Lord Pounder wrote:Incorrect. While a Trek ship can't go faster than Warp 9.95 better warp engines mean the ship can hold that pace longer. Must warships don't need to be sprinters.

No, you are incorrect. The Nebula class has identical engines and power plant to the Galaxy class and can not maintain the same speed. This is because the ship has an inferior warp geometry design.

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2004-07-11 11:42am

FOG3 wrote:Cease new contruction of Galaxy-class vessels and other such inefficient use of resources.

Executor wrote:The federation main mission of exploration will stay the same.

Starfleet isn't being converted into a military here, according to the OP. As I read it, the general idea is that the Federation is forming a completely new military fleet and leaving Starfleet as-is. (Which would make Starfleet into a combat reserve force in addition to its exploration/civilian duties instead of being the main combat arm, I suppose. Sort of a heavily armed Coast Guard.)

Edit: I forgot to make my actual point with the quotes (:oops:), so here it is now: They'd still want Galaxies and other such exploration vessels in Starfleet, since it isn't Starfleet that's going all warships on us here.

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2004-07-11 11:45am

Starfleet already has several hull forms they can use towards building dedicated or improved warships in the short term. With relatively few modifications to the Nebula and Galaxy class you can build superior firepower warships over the Sovereign. The Akira, Prometheus, and Defiant are already good current designs.

Future designs that maximize gun count, warp core power, and armor while keeping high speeds can be designed. We know the Sovereign is powerful but still keeps the ability to explore. Its a decent inbetween design, but imagine a dedicated ship of its size.

Executor · Post by **Executor** » 2004-07-11 12:13pm

Rogue 9 wrote:
FOG3 wrote:Cease new contruction of Galaxy-class vessels and other such inefficient use of resources.

Executor wrote:The federation main mission of exploration will stay the same.
Starfleet isn't being converted into a military here, according to the OP. As I read it, the general idea is that the Federation is forming a completely new military fleet and leaving Starfleet as-is. (Which would make Starfleet into a combat reserve force in addition to its exploration/civilian duties instead of being the main combat arm, I suppose. Sort of a heavily armed Coast Guard.)

Edit: I forgot to make my actual point with the quotes (:oops:), so here it is now: They'd still want Galaxies and other such exploration vessels in Starfleet, since it isn't Starfleet that's going all warships on us here.

Yes thats right there making a dedicated military branch, starfleet as we know it will remain how it is.

Executor · Post by **Executor** » 2004-07-11 12:24pm

Alyeska wrote:Starfleet already has several hull forms they can use towards building dedicated or improved warships in the short term. With relatively few modifications to the Nebula and Galaxy class you can build superior firepower warships over the Sovereign. The Akira, Prometheus, and Defiant are already good current designs.

Future designs that maximize gun count, warp core power, and armor while keeping high speeds can be designed. We know the Sovereign is powerful but still keeps the ability to explore. Its a decent inbetween design, but imagine a dedicated ship of its size.

Conceeded on the warp nacelle/speed issue.

Lets forget that for now, the main purpose of this new military is to have dedicated warships, having the most guns, warp core power, armour etc.

I could see a Fed Dreadnought being the size of a Dominion battleship IIRC 1200 meters, similar boxy sort of style as the Defiant, if extra speed is a real issue, nacelles out similar again to the dominion ship, if not close to the ship as defiant.

It would be armed with several turreted pulse phaser, say 4 twin up front, 4 twin each broadside and 2 twin rear, multiple torpedo tubes 8 forward 6 or 7 each broadside 3 or 4 rear, with several thousand torpedos. a dozen or 2 small but powerful phaser strips, minimal shuttle bay, and heavy armour in crictical places. Powered by a sovereign or improved sovereign core and several smaller defiant style cores. Whould such a ship be realistic for the Feds to build if they so desired.

The Silence and I · Post by **The Silence and I** » 2004-07-11 01:20pm

I think a true Federation Battleship/Dreadnought would be very similar to current designs. The Sovereign is the Federation's hardest hitting vessel right now, and it has no pulse weaponry at all. The Defiant is the only vessel to have pulse phasers of significant firepower, and they almost tore off the nacellels when test fired - I don't think turreted pulse phasers are a smart option for the Feds, they require massive reinforcement to mount a fixed version, the resources needed to secure a larger, more powerful, turreted version PLUS the loss of accuracy that seems to happen to anyone using pulse weapons, would make it impractical.

Better to use large phaser arrays, they offer superior accuracy, more can be mounted, and they can amass great firepower. Such a ship would also mount many PT launchers and a few QT launchers, with large store of each. Very heavy regenerative shielding would complete the vessel. A possible addition would be a very large weapon system, a suped up QT launcher, or phaser bank.

Avatar of Narendra III · Post by **Avatar of Narendra III** » 2004-07-11 02:30pm

I think A Federation Dreadnought would probably be designed with decent maneuverability. maybe a large prometheus style with Quantum Torpedo Turrets and full broad-side Phaser arrays, multiple cores contained in the center of the ship and some of those wall mounted phaser arrays from the Dom War. On the nacell issue, I was wondering what the feasability of something like voyagers warp, except with the Pylons retracting wth an armored cover.
What do you think?

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2004-07-11 06:16pm

Avatar of Narendra III wrote:On the nacell issue, I was wondering what the feasability of something like voyagers warp, except with the Pylons retracting wth an armored cover.
What do you think?

Needlessly complex. If those areas are damaged, the machinery might become disabled and the nacelles unable to deploy.

Also, the space which the nacelles retract into can't be used for anything else, and you're looking at a lot of extra mass to build basically armored boxes for the nacelles to retract into.

Besides, the nacelles aren't that important, and the only examples I recall of ships being destroyed by nacelle impacts were indirect, and due to design flaws in the Enterprise-D. Hell, the Odyssey took unshielded hits to the port nacelle and would have survived if it weren't for the suicide run. There are more important things to spend all that mass and volume on than armored boxes for the nacelles.

Knife · Post by **Knife** » 2004-07-11 06:47pm

The Fedies have the basic building blocks right now with various ship classes. They just need to structure their fleets right and come up with some tactics beside the floating wall, for their fleets until they can design and build dedicated warships.

Most importently for the Federation, though, is the formation of a Army and dedicated Naval Troopers (Call them Marines if you will). Starfleet needs to develope a 'gator navy' for those troops too.

Executor · Post by **Executor** » 2004-07-12 02:24pm

The Silence and I wrote:I think a true Federation Battleship/Dreadnought would be very similar to current designs. The Sovereign is the Federation's hardest hitting vessel right now, and it has no pulse weaponry at all. The Defiant is the only vessel to have pulse phasers of significant firepower, and they almost tore off the nacellels when test fired - I don't think turreted pulse phasers are a smart option for the Feds, they require massive reinforcement to mount a fixed version, the resources needed to secure a larger, more powerful, turreted version PLUS the loss of accuracy that seems to happen to anyone using pulse weapons, would make it impractical.

Better to use large phaser arrays, they offer superior accuracy, more can be mounted, and they can amass great firepower. Such a ship would also mount many PT launchers and a few QT launchers, with large store of each. Very heavy regenerative shielding would complete the vessel. A possible addition would be a very large weapon system, a suped up QT launcher, or phaser bank.

I thought the defiant nearly ripped itself apart when they powered the engines up?

So you reckon keep or increase the number of torpedo tubes but instead of Pulse phaser have phaser strips, what about a galaxy X type phaser beam, would the feds be able to engineer such a weapon at thois this time period?

Jalinth · Post by **Jalinth** » 2004-07-12 05:39pm

Executor wrote:
Alyeska wrote:Incorrect. The Defiant, Akira, and Prometheus are dedicated warships. The Sovereign class retains multi mission capacity, but it is heavily biassed towards combat. Dedicated battleships designed solely for war will either be similar in scope to the Prometheus, only larger in scale, or they will be designed to be optimized for war and as such will be slower then their conventional cousins.

The Sovereign has one of the most powerful cores in existance and it can make the ship move only so fast. Simply putting more power into the design does not make it faster. The warp nacelles have to be specificaly designed and the hull of the ship must be fit to specific limitations in order to maximize speed. This is why Starfleet ships are designed as they are. Not because they want to, but because they have to.
It's stated that the Defiant is the only Warship, I don think the others are dedicated warships they still seem like civilian ships just with enhanced combat performance.

These new ships are specificailly designed for war, yes the sovereign might be the most powerful at the moment, but dont you think thed be designing more powerful cores, or that a Fed Dreadnought might have multiply cores.

Many other forces in ST dont use warp nacelles on pylons and seem just as fast, or faster,

Probably the best way of handling it is having strong nodal forces. These would be warships designed to go relatively short distances (they can't wander around the galaxy exploring hither and yone) quickly and would not be able to sustain themselves indefinitely. Since these forces should be lodged around either a starbase or other logistics facility, many of the "comforts" of the Galaxy class can be omitted and shifted to the starbase or planetary facilities - these would contain all of the necessary holodecks, barracks, etc.. to house the nodal fleet. The space and others savings would either reduce the overall size or go towards more shields/weapons/armour etc... This would produce very strong ships that have limited duration - good for quick reaction defense and initial assaults but not useful for sustained fighting unless backed up logistically.

The main fleet would need to more on the lines of a war Galaxy class - able to sustain itself for extremely long periods w/o outside backup. The nodal forces would hold an opponent, the main fleet would then reinforce these forces and destroy it (in Trek's case - talk them to death). If people must live indefinitely on a starship, some luxuries must be provided.

The galaxy class ships general amenities make sense (although the holodecks are simply too dangerous). But the crew quarters must be reduced - the only person who should have this much space is the captain and flag staff. The rest of the officers can have an officers mess or other rec facilities (same with enlisted) so shouldn't even be in their cabins except for sleep (or sleeping with someone). The captain needs a place to chill and can't really do it with other officers for obvious reasons - so extra space here is fine. But otherwise, Data's cabin would be for 6 to 8 lower ranked officers.

The exploration side should be similar. Trade weapon capability for speed, defensive shields and a heavy sensor suite for exploration purposes. This way, the explorers can evade anything they can't fight.

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2004-07-12 06:09pm

Holodecks aren't dangerous. They have been used countless times without problems. What needs to be done is the holodecks need to be on an indepdent computer control network with no connection to any other computer system. That avoids the few problems we have seen.

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2004-07-12 07:31pm

Alyeska wrote:Holodecks aren't dangerous. They have been used countless times without problems. What needs to be done is the holodecks need to be on an indepdent computer control network with no connection to any other computer system. That avoids the few problems we have seen.

You're talking about the system that took over the Enterprise once and nearly destroyed it because Geordi gave it a poorly worded command. Not only could they not turn it off or simply disconnect it, it took such thorough control that the only reason they managed to avoid destruction was because they were able to reason with Moriarty. How many other times has an episode revolved around the fact that the holodeck breaks down and takes someone hostage and they have to talk it down? That's just on the Enterprise alone. With that rate of Significant System Failure, where even a poor instructions can cause it to freak out and take over, it's got to kill hundreds of people around the Federation a month.

Agent Fisher · Post by **Agent Fisher** » 2004-07-12 08:04pm

What about making a ship to carry a pair of Defiants. kinda like those rockets planes they tested by mounting them on B-52s. Then you could put three of those carriers into a fleet, giving the defiants longer range.

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2004-07-12 10:58pm

Gil Hamilton wrote:
Alyeska wrote:Holodecks aren't dangerous. They have been used countless times without problems. What needs to be done is the holodecks need to be on an indepdent computer control network with no connection to any other computer system. That avoids the few problems we have seen.
You're talking about the system that took over the Enterprise once and nearly destroyed it because Geordi gave it a poorly worded command. Not only could they not turn it off or simply disconnect it, it took such thorough control that the only reason they managed to avoid destruction was because they were able to reason with Moriarty. How many other times has an episode revolved around the fact that the holodeck breaks down and takes someone hostage and they have to talk it down? That's just on the Enterprise alone. With that rate of Significant System Failure, where even a poor instructions can cause it to freak out and take over, it's got to kill hundreds of people around the Federation a month.

That is poor AI development as well as joining the systems in the holodeck. All of those problems can be avoided. Note that we have never heard of that again. Furthermore, holodecks were still relatively new at the time.

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2004-07-12 11:09pm

Alyeska wrote:That is poor AI development as well as joining the systems in the holodeck. All of those problems can be avoided. Note that we have never heard of that again. Furthermore, holodecks were still relatively new at the time.

It's a bit more than mere poor AI develoment. There is poor AI control, poor engineering (they couldn't unplug it or even turn of the power to it), poor architecture (the holodeck can take over the Enterprise's main computer on it's own if it feels the need or on someone's instruction). Besides, what does it matter what the problem is? It's still clearly dangerous and they were unable to fix it after years of it constantly breaking down on the Enterprise. Hell, they were clearly unable to work out the problems in it before installing it. After all, how did those bugs make it past the prototype? The damn thing freaked out and hacked the Enterprise's main computer, nearly destroying the ship, because Geordi told it to make an opponent that would be a challenge for Data. How the hell is that not dangerous?

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2004-07-12 11:16pm

And did you not notice that I said the holodeck would be completely independent? Any problems, turn it off.

Coalition · Post by **Coalition** » 2004-07-13 01:45am

Question on this Rapid Reaction Force: is it supposed to stop an incoming attack on it's own, or is it supposed to tie up an incoming force long enough for the main fleet to pull together and counterattack?

I'd see the Rapid Reaction force as designed around Defint style vessels of various sizes. Their whole job would be to plot the entry vector of an opponent, and plant themselves in its path, powered down (STL, inactive vessel = hard to spot).

When the enemy vessel(s) gets close enough, they power up quickly, jump to warp, and rapid-volley photons right in its face (or quantums, for extra flavor).

Either the enemy vessel rapidly turns nd changes course, or they eat several photons on the forward facing. On a closing vector, there might not be enough time to react.

Defiants then break away, and get ahead for the next ambush.

The whole goal of this is to force the enemy vessel(s) to employ evasive maneuvers, active scans, reduced speed, or all of that.

While the attacker is being led around, and mousetrapped by the RRF, the main fleet is coming over, to see what the trouble is.

The RRf will need stashes of photons and antimatter nearby, for refueling. These stashes would be top secret.

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2004-07-13 12:27pm

So your plan relies on warp strafing? It therefore fails, as I recall.

Could be wrong, but I don't think so.

consequences · Post by **consequences** » 2004-07-15 08:55pm

Agent Fisher wrote:What about making a ship to carry a pair of Defiants. kinda like those rockets planes they tested by mounting them on B-52s. Then you could put three of those carriers into a fleet, giving the defiants longer range.

I had a similar thought, but I was hoping to get more than two Defiants per carrier.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2004-07-15 09:41pm

Although I have never seen any canon evidence to suggest Nebula is slower than Galaxy, I agree with Alyeska that warp geometry is important; hanging a pair of defiants off the ship is going to seriously screw that up. Build SW-style warp add-ons

RevWaldo · Post by **RevWaldo** » 2004-07-15 10:29pm

Regardless of the Federation staying civilian/exploration/diplomatic and developing a military wing, I would still end production on the Galaxy class starships. the library at Startrek.com lists five Galaxy class star ships. of them, three have been destroyed. I assume that means only 5 galaxies classes have appeared in the series. To me, they do not sound very good as starships.

Also, the Enterprise-D always seemed to be falling apart during TNG. It's a big ship with many problems. At the End of Generations, Picard says this ship went before its time. I disagree. The ship needed to go.

For my reactionary force, Defiant class ships are a must. The STARTREK.COM library details the success of this class, so I will not bother doing that here other than quote it as a "tough little ship"
At only five decks, I believe the Federation could indeed build a high-warp ship to serve as a ferry for 4-6 Defiant class ships. judging by the fact that a Galaxy class ship is over 30 decks.

Voyager also proved that it is a powerful ship. I'd strip its science stuff (techincal term) and focus on weapons, speed, armor, and long range sensors and communications. This new class (I'll call it the Waldo-class just to make a few people groan.) would be carged with patroling the borders of federation space. The Defiant and its ferries would respond to the Waldo class ship's alters.

Developing the transwarp drive and installing the Armor Janeway brought back from the future is also a must. Temporal Prime directive be damned.

Beyond that, I would want a carrier ship filled with fighters and intercepter. would be nice if the fighters were capable of separating their wings making them resemble X's. . .

Thag · Post by **Thag** » 2004-07-15 11:04pm

Stark wrote:Although I have never seen any canon evidence to suggest Nebula is slower than Galaxy, I agree with Alyeska that warp geometry is important; hanging a pair of defiants off the ship is going to seriously screw that up. Build SW-style warp add-ons

Depending on where/how you hang them. Something like an enlarged Cheyenne-class might work as a "mothership". You dock the smaller craft directly behind the saucer, inside the box formed by the four nacelles. Warp bubble completely encloses everything, and most of the small craft are shielded to the front by the main hull of the carrier.