posted
Just a few things that I have noticed in Trek that should be in there.
One is rates. The average sailor normally has a rate in which we are trained to perform. These rates such as mine which is AME (Aviation Structural Mechanic) are there to give the average Sailor less to do, since giving a Sailor the entire job of lets say maintain a aircraft, which would take more than 24 hours a day to perform.
In Trek this proves quite the opposite. It seems that the average engineer can almost any job known to man. Granted most jobs would be performed by the computer, and all the engineer has to do is repair what would go wrong with the computer. Since it makes sense to have that engineer know exactly what he's looking at and why that computer is doing what it's doing, as well as generally knowing what's so important about that computer. It would take more than four years to achieve any sortof knowledge like that.
It seems to me that Federation ships need every single hull plate to be intact to work perfectly. (In the real world nothing including new things do not work perfectly). On Navy ships, they try to design ships where all the vulnerable parts are armored or cleverly placed to prevent damage whereas it would have caused alot of damage anywhere else. I would have imagined the same. Armoring the bridge for example. If this was true, then E-D should have survived when the Bird of Prey was targeting her. Voyager seems to be unbeatable since in the Year of Hell, she seemed to take more pounding that even the Enterprise seems capable of. Even E-E in Nemesis.
Just a few observations that's all.
-------------------- Matrix If you say so If you want so Then do so
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
Wow, this thread was shot down rather swiftly.
Anyway, yes, you'd think all the "vulnerable" parts would be protected, and most likely, they are (meaning the technical manuals, etc. would probably state they were). In the end, however, it's the writer who gets to decide just how protected a ship is, and any attempt to rationalize it is a hopeless endeavor. Just look at the aforementioned Generations battle...
...not that it is impossible to create a realistic situation for starship combat. The USS Odyssey's final fight was well done, for example. It was a very believable way for how a Galaxy class ship could be ineffective in combat against a much smaller opponent.
It's always interesting to think, though, that if Keogh hadn't transfered shield power to weapons, his ship might have survived.
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
Look at it this way, it takes 8 hours (roughly) to inspect 12 aircraft. It takes 6 hours to tak apart a F-14's AC system let alone putting it back together and put it into the aircraft as well going through the inpsections, tool-control, second person observations, and of course the paper work bullshit. This is of course only dealing with one part of the aircraft. This is only a part of the AME's job.
Now you have engineers working on practically everythign that makes a ship tick on a ship (on average) bigger than a aircraft carrier.
By the way the Galaxy class should be able to hold far more than what's stated. If you can fit 5,000+ sailors and officers in aircraft carrier which is about the same size (in volume) as a Excelsior class ship, then you can fit far more than 20,000 on the E-D.
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
Which is why the Enterprise's "emergency" capacity is higher then its normal complement. Given the families and scientific crew aboard a Galaxy-Class starship, the actual crew can't number more then a few hundred.
posted
What I was talking about was the about the ship can hold on board if you want to evacuate a planet, outpost, starbase, or a ship in extreme emergencies. Think about it, in those giant corridors you can fit three-person high bunks along one side of the bulkhead. If it was me to escape from death, I would not care about luxury.
What I meant is that the E-D should be able to carry far more than 20,000 in emergency conditions.
Registered: Jul 2000
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Valles
Ex-Member
posted
quote:Originally posted by Matrix: What I was talking about was the about the ship can hold on board if you want to evacuate a planet, outpost, starbase, or a ship in extreme emergencies. Think about it, in those giant corridors you can fit three-person high bunks along one side of the bulkhead. If it was me to escape from death, I would not care about luxury.
What I meant is that the E-D should be able to carry far more than 20,000 in emergency conditions.
My guess would be that the limiting factor in evacuation situations would be the capacity of the environmental systems, rather than the amount of space you can put people in. Remember, this is a closed, artificial environment.
About maintenence - my guess would be that only the people that develop a given piece of equipment would know -everything- about it... The rest would get by using knowledge of basic principles, sophisticated diagnostic software, and RTFM as things came up. I would suspect that we're talking about equipment complex enough, and varied enough, that the kind of, hmm, expertise that we take for granted today is outside the realm of practicality.
Thus, all a Starfleet Engineer needs is enough knowledge to understand the manual and tell when it's wrong. As our engineer goes through his career and grows more experienced, he'll doubtless gain greater understanding of common problems, and come to rely less on his texts in such cases... but I think that there'd just be too much to learn for any human(oid) mind to ever be completely independant of his support structure.
quote:Originally posted by Ace: It's always interesting to think, though, that if Keogh hadn't transfered shield power to weapons, his ship might have survived.
The Odyssey would've been destroyed anyway. The reason Keogh transferred that power was to give the weapons more punch. The shields were useless. Federation technology wasn't designed to block the types of energy weapons employed by the Dominion and as we could see in the episode, the Jem'Hadar weapons fire was directly impacting the Odyssey's hull as though the shields weren't there. There were no shots that produced the shield 'bubble effect' against the Odyssey.
posted
I think the implication was that shields might have been ineffective against Dominion weapons, but they might have stopped the Jem'Hadar ship from ramming into the Odyssey. Although I tend to think they would have been destroyed no matter what they did.
Regarding the Enterprise-D. Okay, that last torpedo started the warp core breach, but I doubt that the idea was that one torpedo did it. The ship had been hammered for a couple of minutes. You can build all sorts of redundencies into a ship, but if you pound them with explosive weapons continuously, eventually they will go BOOM.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
That's my take on it too. Keogh recognized that the Dominion weapon's fire was doing as much damage with them up as they would if they were down. Supposition on my part, but he transferred power to the weapons so that for the few shots that did hit the nimble fighters (really more like corvettes, but heh) would do more damage.
He underestimated the enemy when he naturally assummed that some tactics, such as ramming, were not likely. IMO, since this was his first encounter, and the book had't been written yet regarding Dominion tactics, he should have kept them up. But, I do understand why, in the heat of the moment, he did what he did.
Good thing he chose to disembark the non-essential personnel. How many times did CAPT Picard ever do that? _________________________________________________________ If you define cowardice as running away at the first sign of danger, screaming and tripping and begging for mercy, then yes, Mr. Brave man, I guess I'm a coward. - Jack Handey
Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
This was one of the best choreographed battles in Trek history, certainly. Not only was there meaningful input from hero and nonhero characters alike, not only did everybody have a clear motivation to doing what they did and a sense of training and preplanning to it. The technobabble was also perfect, there were no obvious Trek solutions to the crisis left unexplored.
And it must have been a planned thing when the dropping of the shields was followed by the ramming - the writers very clearly wanted to say that the dropping, while a seemingly sensible maneuver, was the mistake that cost Keogh his ship and his life.
Also, neither side wimped out nor won an easy victory. The Federation weapons didn't bite deep enough, but they were shown to *work* - a hit rate of 100% was maintained for the Galaxy, even though the runabout scored a miss, a rare event indeed. The Dominion weapons were alien and devastating, but they didn't do the job by themselves. Tactics and sacrifice were needed.
Very few other Trek battles come even close. ST2 was one running starship battle from beginning to end, but "Jem'Hadar" did it all in far shorter time. The battles of ST6, "Generations" and "Insurrection" were one-trick horses and felt forced because of that. Everything about "Jem'Hadar" was far subtler, including the role of the dropped shields, the details of the actual ramming run, the way Keogh actually seemed to be *fighting* the battle even though the actor just stood there and shook.
And the death scene was truly awesome for televised Trek. The wounded, limping giant, "uh-oh" of the ramming run, the slo-mo collision, the stock explosion, the shrapnel - and *then* the orange-yellow light playing on the faces of the DS9 heroes for several seconds afterwards.
Forget realism wrt the real world. If Trek could stay this consistent to *itself* more often, there'd be no speak of the fans getting alienated or the franchise dying.
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