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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Timo: [QB] There's one thing that should definitely be remembered in discussions like this: the progression of a ship from "the best" to "obsolete" is by no means a linear one. Just because a ship happens to be obsolete at time T does not mean it will REMAIN obsolete. Even more importantly, just because a property X is considered obsolete at time T1 does not mean it will be so at time T2. Real-world examples abound: Anti-aircraft guns aboard ships? Obsolete in the sixties, or so the western navies thought. Not so today, even though the threats are harder to shoot down with guns than they were in the sixties, not easier. Speed is life? Perhaps, but the old F-14 is TOO fast for its own good. Speed is also money, and the much, much slower F/A-18 is better suited to today's carrier aviation environment. So there's no real reason to assume that Starfleet would want to give up older ships just because they perform poorly compared with new ones. Tomorrow, "poor" performance may become superior to "great". And new ships need not be built with superior performance - the Sovereign could have a max speed of warp 8.2, and still be superior to the Galaxies as far as current operating environment is concerned. Of course, Starfleet is also in a superb position to mothball its temporarily-obsolete ships for reactivation when they cease to be obsolete. Wet navies can't do that - their old ships and aircraft rust out from beneath them. Oh, how modern navies wish they *could* whip out a WWII- or even WWII-vintage gun cruiser to give them artillery support in amphibious ops... Timo Saloniemi P.S. Concerning Defiant max. speed: I firmly believe that the maximum speed of any given starship is warp 10, TNG scale - it's just a matter of boosting the individual parts of the drive system past their set limits. In 99 cases out of 100, breaking the limits results in a kaboom. And in 999... cases out of 1000... (add digits to personal preference), Starfleet lacks the technology to break the limits in any major performance-boosting way, so warp 10 remains unattainable - but in most cases, some minor increases can be attained rather easily, if you are willing to pay the price of having a burned-out ship. So the Defiant can go warp 9.5, but only a fool or a main character would attempt that. Warp 9.92 is probably possible as well, but even a main character is going to die in such an attempt with 99.9999% certainty. And warp 9.99999... speeds require a breakthrough even a main-character chief engineer or science officer doesn't have in his or her back pocket - unless the plot really, really requires it. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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