posted
Yes. Though there’s plenty of canon evidence for the limitations of big fuck-off capital ships (like susceptibility to swarming attacks), when all your primary foes themselves do big fuck-off capital ships - Romulans, Breen, Dominion, even the Klingons, and all the Borg really DO are big fuck-off capital ships - then you really need to have ample supplies of big fuck-off capital ships yourself.
Hence “Galaxy wings.” The bit in the TNGTM about there only likely being twelve Galaxy-class hulls built, that can be safely ignored at this point surely? A policy position that probably was overruled or overtaken by events before the ink had time to dry. For an edging-towards-Kardashev-2 civilisation, the ability to churn out any given starship design at scale is a no-brainer (the Inquiry fleet dispels any question about that). It’s having the crews to operate then that’s the limiting factor.
Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
This is why I've always been a big-fleeter from TWOK-era onwards. The Federation is enormous. You need to cover that area, & you need ships to do it. Running out beyond the rim & back takes time, & resources. Canonically, the background is there to justify it. You have dozens, if not hundreds, of shipyards throughout the Federation.They're orbital yards, which means it's not like modern ones. There's no need for shifts like today where you're there from 6-6 building & then you put down your tools & go home for the night, start up the next day, closed for 2 days, & it takes 8 years to build an aircraft carrier. No, you got the whole planet to hire from. You can run that shit constant, all damn day: one shift comes on & builds, then they clock out while the next comes on & builds, then they clock out while the next comes on & builds, & so on. During WW2, Kaiser Shipbuilding reduced Liberty ship construction from the prewar 230-day average down to 45 DAYS....& ultimately down even farther to about 3 weeks! One ship was built in 4 days, 15½ hours! And that's with early 1940s tech! With replicators, recyclers, & an entire planetary population–actually mutliple planets just in one solar system–there's no reason a Galaxy shouldn't have a keel-to-commission time of like a year ,& no reason why Starfleet shouldn't be commissioning thousands of ships a year even if only 30% of its yard resources are solely dedicated to newbuild rather than refits.
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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posted
Which brings us on to another thing: how many crew does a ship actually need to actually run it? I’d say not many. After all, most of the ships we’ve, well, seen the most of, they had biggish complements, but how many were actually necessary crew? There were scientists, researchers, family, passengers…
For the long run, I think a larger crew us necessary: to be able to run three or four duty shifts; to carry out complex maintenance; to do on-the-job training, as trainer or trainee.
But when you see the Ent-null effectively automated by Scotty in a matter of hours, so that “a chimpanzee and two trainees could run her”; or the Ent-D being flown IN A BATTLE by FOUR PEOPLE just last week; or that Miranda-class whose crew, all about a dozen of them, died of old age; and the Prometheus being flown perfectly easily first by a handful of Starfleet test personnel, then a handful of Romulans, then two EMHs, then you have to think that in-show “modern” tech doesn’t require a starship to have hundreds of people onboard running it, not for short periods at any rate. So the Inquiry cut&paste fleet, each ship could have had a couple dozen crew onboard at most…
And, I can’t remember when this theory came about, but that thing about some of the Galaxy-classes seen in DS9 being mostly empty volume, without extensive corridors and quarters installed… maybe that’s more common than we realise.
It’d explain the empty volumes seen in, for example, the Ent-null in DSC & Short Treks! The VAST empty volumes in Discovery itself in DSC s3 still stretch credibility beyond breaking point, however…
Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Yeah, even Voyager said they only really needed, what, 87 out of 150?
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Actually, I just remembered I did this math already. My project has a "written in" date of 2407 (chosen well before the Abramsverse, STO, or the Discoverse). Because I'm a big-fleet guy, & because I based postwar UFP on post-WW2 ideas, in that things got better & the engines of war were redirected to science & exploration, I had to do the math.
What I came up with is that Starfleet strengths in 2407 totalled 46.8 million current personnel, 8.83 million active reserved, & 18 million inactive reserved. This was achieved using the following rough touchstones:
• 363 Galaxys (see supra on why so mamy) @ 1000 crew avg.=363,000 • 910 numbered starbases @ 2200 avg=2,002,000 • ca. 65,000 active starships @ 650 avg.=42,250,000 • Unnumbered installations: 1,500,000 • Non-starship/starbase/installation-based personnel: 722,000
When you think about it, this isn't an unachievable number. There are supposedly 150 UFP members, but that's at the system level; it doesn't count colonies, outposts, or stations at eithet the federal or member-level (e.g., Mars being under the umbrella of United Earth). It doesn't account for Starfleet being the Foreign Legion of the galaxy with its open-door "get sponsored & you're in" program for non-citizens. Furthermore, consider the 985-billion citizen mention in Star Charts for the 2380 census. All these world have billions of peoole on them EACH. Assuming that 25 years later there's an extra 10 billion (which is a SUPER conservative estimate), that still means my number for just active SF personnel strengths is only 0.000047 of the entire population! And the entire service is still fully staffed, both military & scientific sides alike, with more people coming every day!
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
A major interstellar power like the UFP would have the technology and resources (raw materials, personnel, w/e) to *easily* field millions of Galaxy-class ships. Not hundreds, not thousands. MILLIONS. Y'all ain't got no sense of scale.
(and 985 billion for the entire 8000-ly spanning Federation would be hilariously underpopulated, with even a single basic Dyson swarm of orbital habitats able to house quadrillions with room to spare, but at least that number is less off than fleet sizes in sci-fi usually are)
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On the one hand, I don’t want to get into what we think they should be doing. Because that is very subjective and for whatever reason, in-universe they don’t feel the need to have hundreds of Galaxy-classes. Mind you, as we’ve just seen they’re not short of other capital ships - plenty of Odysseys, Sovereigns, Inquirys, and those fucking Galaxy knock-offs, the Sutherlands.
On the other, I’m fairly sure that somewhere in the Flare database there’s a ~20yo thread where I bemoan the lack of any real advancement in the scientific basis of Star Trek. That much of it is still based on a set of scientific precepts from the mid-1960s - antimatter-powered warp drive, phasers, photon torpedoes, transporters. Not just has our understanding of the universe moved on since then, there’s been sixty years of subsequent speculative fiction showing us the art of the (what might be) possible. Mind you, we’ve finally seen a bit of that after the time-jump in DSC, and I’m not sure it’s really gelled with the audience!!
posted
985 billion is a silly number. I was working this stuff out in the context of having to make highly defensible conservative estimates black in the throes of the Vs. Debate, and even then I couldn't have kept under a trillion with a straight face. I got 975 billion just by doing Earth x 150, but had to bump it up to at least two trillion to account for 900 billion casualties as predicted in "Statistical Probabilities"(DSN) followed by the conquest of the Dominion a century later. I rather doubt 85 billion under the Dominion boot would be going all bunny-rabbit.
Per Wolf 359 the average count on starships is around 275 in 2367, and that's including at least one Oberth, a Miranda, et cetera. Based on that plus at least 8-10 thousand ships per DS9, I also came up with tens of millions of Starfleet personnel in a UFP that is quite minimally militarized.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
I agree wholeheartedly that it's a silly number–it should be trillion at least, if not quadrillion–but I was working within semi-canonical goalposts.
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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posted
It can be whatever you want it to be. There are too many variables. Off the top of my head: number of member… worlds, species, systems, colonies, starbases, etc.; population of each of these, again carrying wildly; birth rate of all these dozens of species (some could have loads of offspring and/or very quickly/regularly/often; others might have just one and very rarely); then there’s overall population growth of each species; etc.
quote:Originally posted by Shik: I agree wholeheartedly that it's a silly number–it should be trillion at least, if not quadrillion–but I was working within semi-canonical goalposts.
Oh, you're fine. I was just hatin' on Star Charts again.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
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