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The letter of application is only needed if you are not a Federation citizen; Nog needed one, for instance.

As for numbers. My impression early on was that Starfleet was thought to have far fewer ships than it ended up with. In TOS I'd have guessed at less than a hundred ships in the whole fleet. In most of TNG I'd have said two or three hundred, tops. For an organisation that spans thousands of planets, that's absolutely miniscule.

It would be like having something half the size of the US Navy... with a population a thousand times the size of the US to draw on for recruits. You could AFFORD to take only the best of the best of the best of the best on those numbers.

But then DS9 came along, and with the war it became rapidly clear that Starfleet had thousands of ships, maybe more than that even, and ground troops and god knows what else. But even then, it wouldn't surprise me if Starfleet was a lot smaller as a % of the population than any present day military force. And could thus be that much more choosy.

Regarding ship numbers by the way...

Does Starfleet maintain the largest fleet it reasonably can? I think that's a no brainer, of course they do.

But the real question is, does the Federation fund Starfleet to the greatest extent that it can? And that's very much a grey issue. It wouldn't surprise me to find that Starfleet ate a huge percentage of the total Federation GDP, it wouldn't surprise me to find that it was small; we simply don't know.

It's also worthwhile thinking about the possible bottlenecks. Rick Sternback used to say that the hard part in building a starship was the warp coils. He said they were not replicatable, and the process of forging one is long, slow, and difficult to get right. So it's perfectly possible that the Federation has the resources to build and maintain five times the number of ships... but they don't, because they just don't have enough warp coil production to make them go anywhere.

If that were the case it would make sense to build a lot of sublight-only interplanetary ships, partially for defence, partially so you don't need to send starships gallivanting around responding to random disasters. Indeed, you could do the same with science ships, by using a GCS engineering hull to transport and support dozens of saucer sections, each configured for a different role (planetary survey, solar survey, random-anomaly-of-the-week survey, etc).

You couldn't be more correct, Enkidu. The other side of that coin is that the bulk of the crews are enlisted personnel - which is how one would expect a ship to be crewed, yet we see far more officers than enlisted crew.

Far more? Aside from O'Brien and a few of the Defiant's crew I don't think we've seen any enlisted personnel in Trek. Even O'Brien was once refered to as a Lieutenant.

Captain Seafort wrote:Far more? Aside from O'Brien and a few of the Defiant's crew I don't think we've seen any enlisted personnel in Trek. Even O'Brien was once refered to as a Lieutenant.

And certainly holds an officer's post on DS9.

The TOS movie era actually had enlisted personnel. There's actually existing rank pins for enlisted ranks. And those brown-shouldered uniforms? They're listed as 'cadet jumpsuits' on the DITL page, but I don't know that cadets would be manning posts in the master situation room in San Francisco, where you clearly see such uniforms in STIV.

Captain Seafort wrote:If that were the case it would make sense to build a lot of sublight-only interplanetary ships

From what we've seen, a sublight ship is nothing but a target for a warp driven one. Elan of Troyius, for instance.

GrahamKennedy wrote:

Captain Seafort wrote:If that were the case it would make sense to build a lot of sublight-only interplanetary ships

From what we've seen, a sublight ship is nothing but a target for a warp driven one. Elan of Troyius, for instance.

Yes. Given that warp ships seem to mostly be able to engage those drives at will inside the system. The tactical uses of warp against a target stuck in sublight (even if they do have FTL sensors) are myriad and devastating.

The only reason we ever got the impression of low numbers in starfleet was because we only saw very few ships.

But that makes perfect sense. There is almost no need for ships to ever come together. It is a waste of a ships to pair them up and there is no call for them to form fleets unless under attack which is exactly when we do see them.

But when you look at the times when ships are called to a single location they form up pretty fast giving the impression that there is a fair number around.

Ok just doing a bit of quick math.

In the TNG episode 'Redemption, Part II', the Duras family attempt to gain control of the Klingon empire. Picard, suspecting that the Romulans are supporting the Duras, gathers a fleet of Starships at the Klingon-Romulan border in order to prevent supplies from crossing. Again he has a matter of a day or two, but is able to assemble a fleet of over twenty Starships for the mission.

Using a high warp speed of 9.9 which is faster than most ships are capable of doing even for short periods of time let alone over time.

So at 9.9 warp over two days they travel almost 17 light years are covered and 20 ships assemble. That forms a bubble of space 34 light years circumfrence. Thats 2,852 square light years (I think)

With what I think is a conservative guess at around 3.2 billion light years of federation space.

3,200,000,000/2,852= 1,122,019 ships.

Now granted the fleet that assembled was near a boarder where you can assume there is a high density of ship compared to normal space but even dividing that number by 10 or even 50 still leaves you with 112,201 or 22,440 ships.

Given the size if the Federation and ships to space density that we have seen it seems safe to assume there is 10k+ ships at least.


But as has been stated its not the numbers that are induspute but weather they could field more if they wanted to or as the original point was bigger better ships.

Shelby said they could have loses of 39 ships replaced with in a year. Even assuming they could build 50 a year that is bugger all.

For a population reaching into the trillions over hundreds of planets to be only able to field 50 new ships a year is just odd unless they are for more involved than we think.

Warp coils and other bits are canon stated to be hard to make. We know you need industrial replicators to make advanced bits of tech and we have no idea how big, hard, or energy consuming these things are.

You need treks advanced metals which may be very hard to make.

All up building a starships appears to be far harder than just slapping bits together and building them bigger and better woulde severly limit the number fielded.

Teaos wrote:Ok just doing a bit of quick math.

In the TNG episode 'Redemption, Part II', the Duras family attempt to gain control of the Klingon empire. Picard, suspecting that the Romulans are supporting the Duras, gathers a fleet of Starships at the Klingon-Romulan border in order to prevent supplies from crossing. Again he has a matter of a day or two, but is able to assemble a fleet of over twenty Starships for the mission.

Using a high warp speed of 9.9 which is faster than most ships are capable of doing even for short periods of time let alone over time.

So at 9.9 warp over two days they travel almost 17 light years are covered and 20 ships assemble. That forms a bubble of space 34 light years circumfrence. Thats 2,852 square light years (I think)

With what I think is a conservative guess at around 3.2 billion light years of federation space.

3,200,000,000/2,852= 1,122,019 ships.

Now granted the fleet that assembled was near a boarder where you can assume there is a high density of ship compared to normal space but even dividing that number by 10 or even 50 still leaves you with 112,201 or 22,440 ships.

Given the size if the Federation and ships to space density that we have seen it seems safe to assume there is 10k+ ships at least.


But as has been stated its not the numbers that are induspute but weather they could field more if they wanted to or as the original point was bigger better ships.

Shelby said they could have loses of 39 ships replaced with in a year. Even assuming they could build 50 a year that is bugger all.

For a population reaching into the trillions over hundreds of planets to be only able to field 50 new ships a year is just odd unless they are for more involved than we think.

Warp coils and other bits are canon stated to be hard to make. We know you need industrial replicators to make advanced bits of tech and we have no idea how big, hard, or energy consuming these things are.

You need treks advanced metals which may be very hard to make.

All up building a starships appears to be far harder than just slapping bits together and building them bigger and better woulde severly limit the number fielded.

That's a good swing at the build rate question. So take it out to its conclusion--50 a year at how many years does each hull last? Seems like they get nigh-on 50 years out of each hull (more on some *cough*miranda*cough*, less on others), and that works out to 2,500 ships. If you say all the planets in the federation can produce 200 a year you come back to 10,000 ships.

Of course, wartime production was shown to be significantly higher than that, and it didn't cripple the Federation economy. Presumably what is difficult is the high-performance warp coils. General warp coils can't be too hard, or else you could never mass-produce runabouts or shuttles or freighters.

The 50 a ship seems far to low. Grnated they said 39 month in a year so maybe that could very well mean 39 in 2 months which is with in a year. But that streches credability.

It could be possible that the Federation splits its whole fleet into sectors and that one sector could regain those loses in a year. That way with multiple sectors the over all fleet could be rather large.

All the ships in the Federation can't be built in or around sol. They would take way to long to travel to the far west which is 7500 light years away.

I think in another thread there someone finally submitted some small bit of evidence that there were more shipyards than we thought at first. And GK is right about what Sternbach said - even industrial replicators can't help you with warp coils - they have to be manufactured the ol' fashioned way.


GK brings up another excellent point. We often talk about Starfleet, but Starfleet's capacity is based on legislation a/o referendum from the UFP itself. 39 - 50/year may seem light based on the tech and capabilities of Starfleet, but that number may be limited by the amount of resources which the UFP is willing to allocate to Starfleet.

It wouldn't be surprising, given what we saw of the Federation in TNG, if the Federation allocates less for Starfleet (at least for Starfleet's military functions) than do the Klingons or Romulans. (about the only canon evidence we have is that the Cardassians' military budget is huge as a percentage of total economy). It would make an interesting point for the discussions on war in the alpha quadrant if this was true and the Federation would ramp up it's military budget in case of war. The question then becomes (channeling Rochey again), is it "too little, too late?"

I think you're channeling Seafort.

And yes, it is inevitably "too little, too late." The outbreak of a war is far too late to prepare for war. The Federation was getting their butts kicked six ways from Sunday at the outset of the Dominion War, and continued to do so even after having to drag every ancient mothballed museum-piece back into active duty... plus welding a few spare parts together to cobble up some of those awful kitbashes.

That's a combination of unpreparedness in both fleet size and personnel management, as well as not keeping the fleet up to the SOTA because "we haven't needed to so far." For example; after O'Brien solved the problems with the Defiant and it was proven to be a viable and lethal starship, how long was it after that until we saw another one?