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.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
The Enterprise D wasn't done in by a hit to the bridge.
Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
It was an example.
The last torpedo they got hit with knocked something important out, that can not be repaired.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Obviously. So?
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
"It would take more than four years to achieve any sortof knowledge like that."
If they learn calculus in early grade school, who's to say they only study computers for four years?
Posted by Ultra Magnus (Member # 239) on :
Wait, when was the episode that said that Starfleet was the United States Navy?
I missed that one.
You know, because 24th century shipgoers > 20th century shipgoers > 16th century shipgoers.
Posted by Ace (Member # 389) on :
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.
Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
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.
Posted by Snay (Member # 411) on :
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 by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
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.
Posted by Valles (Member # 925) on :
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.
Blessed be. -n
Posted by SoundEffect (Member # 926) on :
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 by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
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.
Posted by Revanche (Member # 953) on :
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
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
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.
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by SoundEffect (Member # 926) on :
quote:Originally posted by PsyLiam: 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
My take on it was, and still is, it was totally alien technology and Starfleet didn't have a prayer. We saw in the show where the Jem'Hadar soldier in ops was 'trapped' in a forcefield, or so we all thought, and then he walked through it as though it wasn't there.
I made the same assumption about the Jem'Hadar Fighters. Whether the Odyssey's shields were up or down, I think the collision run would've succeeded anyway. I agree though that Starfleet didn't anticipate the tactic.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
quote:The technobabble was also perfect, there were no obvious Trek solutions to the crisis left unexplored.
Actually, there was one Trek solution - they could have beamed everyone from the runabouts to the Odyssey, thus rendering it temporarily indestructible.
The Odyssey explosion was one of the best ever in Trek. It may have been a stock explosion, but they followed it with the spinning, destroyed saucer emerging from the flames. Wow! Add to that the sheer fact that it was a Galaxy-class ship, obstensibly the equal to the Enterprise-D in combat capability (even with Keogh aboard, and not to mention the additional runabouts), and the producers really got their point across that the Dominion were no small fry. Very effective.
Mark
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
quote: If Trek could stay this consistent to *itself* more often, there'd be no speak of the fans getting alienated or the franchise dying.
Oh, of course there would be. This DS9 show is too much of a melodrama, they'd say. Soap opera in space. Where is the young Kirk we used to know?
We will not be happy until we are dead.
I have to question how shocking the destruction of the Odyssey was, really. I mean, I can't remember what I thought, and it wasn't all that long ago. I'm not quaking in my boots in fear of the Iconians, after all. (Though I do make a few nervous passes of my room looking for glowing blue spheres before booting up the computer in the morning.) More importantly, neither were the characters, which I suspect is the main difference, and I bet we'd still be talking about the destruction of the Odyssey if it had all been offscreen.
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
Someone on here pointed out that the point was doubly made by the fact that the Odyssey was made a Galaxy-class ship as a clone of the Enterprise-D and Keogh himself was meant to be a clone of Picard.
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
in fact, they backed off a little from their initial treatment of the casting, they had Oppenheimer wear a toupee to lessen his resemblance to the good Frenchman.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
quote:Originally posted by Timo: 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.
I never got that impression. Yeah, the Odyssey hit with 100% accuracy. So what? The Jem Hadar fighters weren't even slightly damaged, as far as we could see. The ship could have pounded the Jem Hadar fighters with water pistols with 100% accuracy, but we wouldn't say there were effective.
I think you're wrong about the ramming too. I do think that the Jem Hadar weapons were doing the job by themselves. The Odysset was spewing plasma (or whatever) and looked fairly crippled. The whole implication I got from the fight was that the Dominion knew that they had won, they'd proved their technologocial superiority, and the ramming was the icing on the cake to prove a point. It was showing that they were completely 100% commited to keeping the Federation out of Dominion Space. The sacrifice wasn't needed, and yet they did it anyway. That's how fanatical they were.
Posted by J (Member # 608) on :
I think Psy has a point there. The Dominion had already won... Sisko even stated that they were just proving a point with the destruction of the Odyssey.
Posted by Joshua Bell (Member # 327) on :
Forking the discussion of the thread, if not the topic:
Essentially, the US Navy is moving towards something described in the TNG Technical Manual - being able to pilot a ship on your PDA while walking down the corridor.
The article also describes a possible 70% reduction in crew sizes thanks to automation. This is in line with my belief that Roddenberry's notion that the bulk of the crew is officer-class was actually spot-on.
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