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Mikey wrote:I may be showing my old-timer's disease, but I don't remember an incident in TNG of a GCS being endangered due to inability to defend itself; all the problems we saw, IIRC, were due to computer security issues, strange unexplained-danger-of-the-week, poor warp core safety protocols, or some such.

There was "Peak Performance", where a single hit from a Marauder knocked out all the weapons.

Indeed, for all we know, other mainstay designs like the everlasting Excelsior and even the Connie may have (even likely would have) suffered their share of nits and flaws which were worked out over their first decade in service; we may partly "rationalize" some of the E-D's foibles by the fact she was, at the time, of a new class of ship.

And almost always the ship sent to deal with the unknown or the dangerous.

Hell, we know Excelsior did, although she was an experimental ship.

First off, you can't compare the Excelsior to the GCS. Its not a fair match. SF still had IQ when they built the Excelsior.

Deepcrush wrote:First off, you can't compare the Excelsior to the GCS. Its not a fair match. SF still had IQ when they built the Excelsior.

An excellently designed frigate would still lose to a badly-designed battleship.

Captain Seafort wrote:

Mikey wrote:I may be showing my old-timer's disease, but I don't remember an incident in TNG of a GCS being endangered due to inability to defend itself; all the problems we saw, IIRC, were due to computer security issues, strange unexplained-danger-of-the-week, poor warp core safety protocols, or some such.

There was "Peak Performance", where a single hit from a Marauder knocked out all the weapons.

Wasn't the E-D on super-low-power training-mode shields and weapons at the time?

Yep - the hit fused the weapons into that mode. Doesn't change the fact that it shows that the weapons have a single-point-of-failure.

Captain Seafort wrote:Yep - the hit fused the weapons into that mode. Doesn't change the fact that it shows that the weapons have a single-point-of-failure.

It is admittedly a design flaw; however, saying that it has a direct bearing on what the E-D's ability would have been to fight off the Marauder at full power is fallacious.

Well, the NX-2000 did only say hello to Captain Styles when he tried to go to Transwarp rather than go kaboom, so that's something

Mikey wrote:It is admittedly a design flaw; however, saying that it has a direct bearing on what the E-D's ability would have been to fight off the Marauder at full power is fallacious.

I would say that it does have a direct effect - it shows that a single hit at the right point can affect the power supply to all the ship's weapons, probably by knocking out the control lines rather than the power, given that Roga Danar did something very similar to the internal sensors in "The Hunted". It would certainly be less effective as a deliberate tactic, given that it was a lucky hit with reduced shields, but the know phenomenon of bleed-through means that the possibility of a similar event occuring in battle cannot be discounted.

Anything's possible, of course; but I imagine if it were as debilitating a flaw as that when shields were up, we would have seen it happen a lot - the E-D was in dire straits fairly regularly.

The fact that it's a flaw that needs a lucky hit to take advantage of it doesn't change the fact that it's a flaw. HMS Sheffield was incredibly unlucky that the Exocet that hit her broke the main water line. Doesn't change the fact that only having one was stupid, and led to the abandonment and subsequent loss of the ship.

Captain Seafort wrote:

Deepcrush wrote:First off, you can't compare the Excelsior to the GCS. Its not a fair match. SF still had IQ when they built the Excelsior.

An excellently designed frigate would still lose to a badly-designed battleship.

Just remember that the modernized Excelsior is an equal to even the latest GCS. Again, Excelsior for the win.

Deepcrush wrote:Just remember that the modernized Excelsior is an equal to even the latest GCS. Again, Excelsior for the win.

A refit of unknown resource intensity and production run proved about equal to a dedicated warship a fraction of the size of a GCS. The Lakota is powerful, almost certainly more powerful, ton-for-ton, than a Galaxy, but I'd be very surprised if she were equal to even a Batch-I Galaxy, let alone one of the war-standard ships.