Several of the members there liked to create fanships, the VAST majority where fanwanked to hell and almost made your eyes bleed to look upon. Probably where the intence hatred of fanships comes from...
Anyway, while going through the old posts in the group I found a rant I wrote years ago about uber ships and realised that a lot of what I said there I seemed to unknowly use in the planning of the Paladin as well. So here is a 3 year old rant of mine against the uber ship, I went through and edited it in places to fix it up and added some minor detail but it is mostly the same.
Why uber ships don't work.
For almost as long as I have been involved in the trek fan world I have seen poorly done fanships, from half hour copy paste jobs which usually just involve sticking new nacelles on a ship to very elaborate, yet equally retarded bottom up design jobs.
The vast majority of the time these ships are vastly to powerful for their size, or are appropriately large, but don't take in the consequences of a ship that large.
So here's my break down on why the vast majority of fan ships don't work, or at the least aren't practical.
Power: Many times people add extra phaser arrays to existing designs, or add to many arrays to ship to small to support them.
Ships even though it is never stated have an obvious upper limit to their power supply.
Federation ships are powered by a Matter/Anti-Matter reaction, this to our knowledge and supported by evidence in the show is the most effective form of energy production.
Thus the only way to get more energy is to make a bigger core.
Sure you can argue that while M/AM reactions may produce the most amount of energy possible the ships may not be able to harness all of it.
This is a legitimate debate, although one that is usually only brought up in hindsight after someone slaps a half dozen type X phaser arrays on a Intrepid.
But this "Lost" energy could only be a small fraction of the reaction, a fraction could be lost to heat, but from evidence seen and from the massive amounts of energy produced by M/AM the energy lost to heat seem to be negligible. The amount lost to Radiation would also appear to be minimal since there doesn't seem to be any great shielding around the reaction chamber, also if there was significant (or any) energy lost to radiation it would be logical for the ships to harness that energy somehow.
Thus we can assume that the vast majority of energy produced through M/AM reactions are harnessed for the ships use and you could only gain small increases in energy out put through better tech in the same sized core.
Thus the only way to get more power is to build a bigger core and have a bigger reaction.
This has two problems.
Firstly, and one that almost all designers over look, is by far the most obvious, bigger cores, are well, bigger. It seems simple but almost no one takes this into mind while build ships. Cores are not just the small part we can see on screen, there would be significant equipment used in support of it, storage tanks, matter transport ducts, energy conducts ect. We could assume, although it is by no means fact, that the size of the equipment used to support a core would increase exponentially with the size of it as it would need to deal with higher and higher levels of energy.
The second issue is that of the technical problems of having such a high powered core.
The two most powerful cores we have seen in person have been the GCS and the Sovereign, the issue of the GCS's core are numerous and well known and while no canon reason was ever given for its weaknesses one can assume that one of the issues were that it was at the time, by far the most powerful core ever fielded, by a considerable margin when compared to the size and power of other ships in the fleet.
While many of the issues seemed to be solved over the years and the Sovereigns core seemed far more stable it would seem that bigger, more powerful cores, are inherently more unstable and dangerous, a conclusion that also makes logical sense. The more power they produce the more dangerous they are.
Thus building bigger cores are not only more dangerous; it may just be simply beyond the technical capabilities of the Federation at the time. Again a conclusion supported by the fact that the Sovereign class, dispite being far more modern than the GCS in many ways seems to have a core of similar, even possibly smaller size.
Thus we have two issues to deal with while designing Federation ships, a upper limit to the size of the core due to technological limits, and a limit to the size of a core you can physically fit into ship for its needed power. You want to add high powered weapons to Intrepid ship you better up the size of the core, which takes up internal volume and also increses the size of the engineering core, and the size of the storage tanks and the size of the equipment to run it.
Phasers: Most of this rant is tied into the above rant on power.
Simply, more powerful phasers require more power, period. If you want more then you need to up the power in which case you run into all of the problems already highlighted.
I'll briefly look at the placement and type of phasers.
There is really no point in covering a ship with dozens and dozens of arrays, so long as the ship is covered all around and has intersecting firing arcs over important areas you have sufficient weapons coverage. Adding extra arrays is wasteful, it would be better to just have higher powered arrays, that is unless you have already reached the upper limit of type XII phasers.
Phaser pulse canons should be used very carefully, they have a poor firing arc and thus should not be used on big slow ships unless turret mounted, which provides weak points on the ships surface.
Torpedoes: Added torpedo tubes seem to be the standard for any upgraded fan ship.
Many people seem to think that a torpedo tube can easily be slipped into almost any design, almost as if they fit between the deck plates.
A torpedo tube would require sore serious equipment behind it. Not only do you have the tube, you have loading bays, mechanical equipment to move and load the torpedoes safely, computers to manage the system, room for maintenance ect. The more impressive the tube, such a rapid fire tubes, would need some serious internal space to house the equipment necessary to shift and load 4 torpedoes a second, every second.
Smaller ships would not be able to physically handle the heavy hitting torpedo tubes, even medium sized ships such as the Intrepid would have serious trouble housing the high end tubes, not with out gutting the internal of the ship.
Shielding: Like phasers, shields mainly tie back to power supply, higher energy
Shielding needs more power which leads to all the problems already covered.
Armour: This is a more iffy issue; technically there is nothing to stop someone from throwing 3 feet of ablative armour on their ship. The only negative to that particular ship would be slower speed and agility.
On a wider scope though, if you intend your ship to exist in the trek universe you need to be realistic with its resources. The more armour you add to a ship the less you would be able to build with a set amount of resources which is what would happen in universe.
Ship lay out: There is nothing to stop you using any design ideas you want to in your design, multi vector assault mode, saucer separation, adjustable vector nacelles, redundant nacelles ect.
But each one of these features would increase the build time of the ship, it will also add weaknesses to the design, take up internal volume in some cases, increase complexity of the design.
New tech: The trump card of any fan design, the point that is impossible to argue against and can turn a shuttle into a fleet killed death machine.
But let me make this very clear, NEVER introduce new tech. You can slightly upgrade existing tech but the introduction of new tech almost always leads to a fan wanked uber ship.
First there is no need for it.
Introducing a new type of beam weapons? Why? Phasers work fine and even species considerably more advanced than the Federation seems to use them. If you introduce new super powered beam weapons you may as well scrap the whole design. There is no need for it and it just leads to super ships which are utterly pointless. Why only make your new beam weapons twice as powerful as a phaser? Why not a million times better? Then the fleet can be made up of runabouts and everyone can dance under rainbows as the Borg and Dominion run scared of our leet tech.
New torpedoes are almost always retardedly powerful, the Federation had PT's for over a century and even when it got a new type of torpedo, the QT, it was only under limited deployment.
Even if you think you can justify the new type by saying Voyager bought them back or the Krenim empire has them doesn't mean the Federation should have them. Sure you could pretty easily fit them in but by introducing them you screw the balance of the trek universe over. If the Federation gets these uber weapons it no longer needs the rest of the ship to be that good, or have nearly as many warships.
If you give the other powers equally powerful weapons why bother? Just leave everyone with canon tech and get on with it.
New tech either creates a vast power shift which totally voids the need for your uber ship or it goes to everyone which just becomes pointless.
Stick with canon, everyone knows it and it will stop your ship becoming to fanwanked.
The last issue I want to touch upon is the ever popular "fleet upgrade". Usually when someone says how they will "fix" Starfleet.
It usually follows the lines of:
*Give everyone QT instead of PT's.
*A foot of ablative armour for all
*Fast warp core
*Usually ditchs older design and plans to build a million and one Defiants and Sovereigns.
*Everyone circle jerks over how awesome I am
This assume several things, one that Starfleet is totally retarded, and that they have unlimited resources.
If they could field QT's to everyone why wouldn't they do it already? It would be rather simple yet hugely effective in upgrading the fleet. Its almost as if creating the new and advanced torpedo is hard and labour intensive and thus they can only be given to the best ships.
Same issue with the ablative armour, not only would it require massive resources, you would also need to bring in all the ships over time to upgrade them as well as the negative effect it would have to speed and agility.
Armour costs huge amounts of resources and cannot be slapped on every single ship in any meaningful quanity.
Starfleet and the Federation obviously has a limited amount of resources, there is no reason to assume they are holding back their industrial might. And while, yes, they could reassign some of it to the fleet, there is only so much they could and would be allowed to do.
The idea of redesigning the make up of the fleet is usually not to bad of an idea but is usually done to retarded levels, building ships takes time and resources. You cant replace the fleet in 5 years.
