www.ditl.org

There is a difference between being able to build and building such ships. 23rd century could build such ships but perhaps the infrastructure wouldn't make it economoicslly feasible. For example the US was fully capable of building a Nimitz class size ship in WW2, but why would they?

Captain Seafort wrote:However, as I've always pointed out when this argument comes up, Picard was "in awe" of the "size and complexity" of the E-D as of EaF - a century after the E-nil. This indicates that for the UFP to construct a ship of that size was unprecedented and, when taken in conjunction with the gradual growth in ship size through the Connie, Ex, and Ambassador, therefore precludes the possibility of the Geneverse TOS UFP being capable of building such a ship.

Except that that's really not true, because "I am in awe of it's size and complexity" is not the same thing as "it is the biggest, most complex ship in Starfleet," let alone "it is the biggest, most complex ship ever built by Starfleet."

To use another present day analogy, the British Type 45 destroyers are 8,000 tons and many have commented on how huge and complex they are - because they are, compared to the preceding Type 42 destroyer that was around 4,500 tons. But they'd still be regarded as rather small ships next to an Invincible, or one of the amphibious assault ships, or one of the World War II battleships.

Picard's previous command was the USS Stargazer, a ship that is on the order of nine times smaller than the Enterprise-D of a design that dated back 75 years. This is easily enough to account for his amazement at the size and complexity of the Enterprise.

You choose not to believe that, which is fair enough. But that is your opinion, not a canonical fact.

False analogy, given that no-one has ever been close to "in awe" of the size and complexity of the Invincibles.

Um, yes they have. There was a whole documentary series recently which followed the ship through what turned out to be her last deployment, and even those who served aboard her frequently commented on the huge size and complexity of the ship. And as I said, the same has been said of the Type 45s.

Essentially static structures aren't even remotely comparable to ships. Do you think 13th century England could have build a sailing vessel the size of Harlech castle?

Castles are not comparable to sailing ships, certainly. Starbases are far closer to Starships, though - at least the space ones are. Spacedock is made of similar materials, it's most likely built in the same way. It operates in the same environment. We don't know that it has shields and weapons, but it likely does. The only really fundamental difference that we know of is that it doesn't have a warp drive on it.

But even granting that ton for tone a Starship is harder to build than a Spacedock... how much harder can it reasonably be? Twice as hard? Five times harder? Twenty times? Spacedock is a twenty six thousand times the size of a Constitution and almost a thousand times larger than a Galaxy class. If you can build those in TOS, even granting a fifty-fold increase in difficulty per ton for a ship should make Galaxy class sized ships trivial.

I think what's at issue - because people's probelms with neo-Trek ship sizes are certainly opinion pieces - is not that it was ever stated that original 'Trek couldn't build ships larger than the Connie, even far larger. Rather, the Connie was the lord of the demesne - the Nimitz-class, or the QE-class in the WWI timeframe, of TOS-era 'Trek. The thinking goes, as I understand it, that if the Connie was the big front-line top-of-the-heap ship and ships could've been built almost twice the Connie's size... then why was the Connie limited to 400m?

But again, this presumes that the Connies are the biggest ships around. In truth we know so little about the TOS era Starfleet that it's hard to get a handle on what the Connies are. Canonically, the STIII computer readout calls them heavy cruisers and the Klingons call them battlecruisers. There is canon for the existence of Dreadnoughts, albeit rather sketchy (The Dreadnought Entente, NCC-2120, is identified in the Epsilon IX comm chatter in TMP). But for all we know there are destroyers, troop ships, colony transports, who knows what else that are larger.

AFAIK (and admittedly, that may not go too far) the only things larger/more powerful than the Connies were the Franz Joseph dreadnoughts (which IIRC were similar in size, just with an extra nacelle) - but of course, we know what happened to the canonicity of Joseph's designs. Kirk's statement of "only a dozen" doesn't state explicitly, but heavily implies, that the Connies were absolutely the SOTA as far as UFP starship design.

True. But that line could have meant of the class. Just like I could say that there are ten such ships such as the Nimitz, but there are other super carriers before that and after that.

Though it is interesting that TOS made a distinction of what a starship is. Almost like being a capital ship.

Wasn't there some quote out there by Gene about the E-nil being an average ship or run of the mill ship? Meaning there could have been bigger better ships in the fleet?

McAvoy wrote:True. But that line could have meant of the class. Just like I could say that there are ten such ships such as the Nimitz, but there are other super carriers before that and after that.

True, but the context seems to indicate otherwise.

McAvoy wrote:Though it is interesting that TOS made a distinction of what a starship is. Almost like being a capital ship.

Exactly the way it seemed to me.

McAvoy wrote:Wasn't there some quote out there by Gene about the E-nil being an average ship or run of the mill ship? Meaning there could have been bigger better ships in the fleet?

I don't recall that. Do you have a source?

McAvoy wrote:True. But that line could have meant of the class. Just like I could say that there are ten such ships such as the Nimitz, but there are other super carriers before that and after that.

It's very nebulous as to whether there are other Starship classes in TOS. We not only don't see or hear of smaller types like destroyers, we don't know if there are full on Starships that are of other classes.

It would be kind of weird in my mind, if there were only twelve ships in the whole of Starfleet and they were all Constitution class. But I certainly can't prove it.

Though it is interesting that TOS made a distinction of what a starship is. Almost like being a capital ship.

Indeed. Again, this is something the show was terribly vague about.

One thing to bear in mind is that Gene co-operated with Franz Joseph on the Star Trek technical manual. That book depicts a more "sensible" Starfleet with scout and destroyer classes, a tug and a big dreadnought. Apparently he liked this "fleshing out" of the fleet. However, when he made TMP he decided to go his own way, which led to the introduction of the idea of "canon" and the "starship design rules" that, purely coincidentally, happened to rule out every single one of Joseph's designs.

But there are oblique references to these designs in canon - dreadnoughts and scouts appear in the Epsilon IX comm chatter, and some of the designs appear on bridge displays in the background of scenes. So it can be argued that both smaller and larger ships were indeed in service in TOS.

IIRC, only one of the Joseph designs - a single-nacelled ship - made it into canon as a schematic on a monitor.

No, there was also the tug here, as well as the mention of a scout and a dreadnought in the TMP comm chatter.

If I am right, that's why Ptolemy, Saladin and Federation are on DITL. Because they appear on chats and screen and not only in the book.

GrahamKennedy wrote:No, there was also the tug here, as well as the mention of a scout and a dreadnought in the TMP comm chatter.

Hmm, I remember the monito display of the Hermes a/o Saladin-class, but not that one. I find it hard to take the comm chatter as a definitive indiction of anything, as anyone could refer to something as either a "scout" or "dreadnought" without it necessarily meaning a specific class. Be that as it may, if we accept those ships as extant in the TOS timeframe, then we are likely bound to regard them by Joseph's specifications for them - which still means that none are larger than the Connie by more than 30m.

DarkMoineau wrote:If I am right, that's why Ptolemy, Saladin and Federation are on DITL. Because they appear on chats and screen and not only in the book.

That, and I think they're cool.

BTW, since you brought up the Federation class again GK, I noticed a while ago that while you say in the description that it has 30% stronger shields than a Constitution-class, on the strength indices, it has far less (90 for the federation, 220 for the Connie). I imagine that would change the overall strength somewhat.

Hmm, that's odd. Thanks