posted
Agreed, as long as Tom, Dick, and Harry are clearly defined.
By "specific situation" I mean the roles of the classifications.
The USN wouldn't send its ships to go fishing, for example.
Why would "scout" and "explorer" be useful in battle? Are they going to send ships to go look for a planet or investigate a star or something?
You can't mix in "scout" with "frigate" or any other naval term. Ships that function as cruisers or corvettes might work just as well as scouts when there isn't a war on.
The admiral I mentioned wants a medium-sized, relatively fast vessel to disable the attack ships. What should he send? A surveyor, to survey the crew to death? If he looks for the proper term in a dictionary, he would find "destroyer" listed.
------------------ http://frankg.dgne.com/ "CORUSCANT...DOES NOT COMPUTE...I mean, uh, you're under arrest." - Anonymous battle droid
posted
>Why would "scout" and "explorer" be useful in >battle? Are they going to send ships to go look >for a planet or investigate a star or something?
Explorers are Starfleets best armed ships so they'd be very useful in a battle.
>You can't mix in "scout" with "frigate" or any >other naval term.
Yes, you can. Each label describes one sort of ship. It doesn't matter what the historical origin of that label is.
>Ships that function as cruisers or corvettes >might work just as well as scouts when there >isn't a war on.
They might function as scouts but they would still be called cruisers and corvettes because scout refers to a different sort of ship.
>The admiral I mentioned wants a medium-sized, >relatively fast vessel to disable the attack >ships. What should he send? A surveyor, to survey >the crew to death? If he looks for the proper >term in a dictionary, he would find "destroyer" >listed.
He looks in a dictionary in the middle of a battle? Get real. He knows from training and experience exactly what that sort of ship is called by Starfleet and he uses that term. That term may be Destroyer or it may be Pansy. But he knows what it is and his crew knows what it is.
I want a tool to dig a hole. I look in a dictionary and see that the tool I want is called a spade. If I was in the army then I would have been trained to call it an 'entrenching tool'!
------------------ -->Identity Crisis<--
[This message was edited by Identity Crisis on May 27, 1999.]
posted
Starfleet wouldn't give every ship in the fleet multiple different classifications for use at different times. The ship is what it is. If a Cheyenne-class ship is told to go meet up w/ the cruiser Gobbledegook, the captain isn't goign to say "Cruiser?! Are we at war?!". He's going to know that, since it's peacetime, a cruiser isn't necessarily acting as a warship. It might be charting gaseous anomalies around Uranus. Starfleet gives each ship one classification, and SF officers are trained to know what those classifications mean.
Another (canonical) example: We know that, in that one DS9 ep (I can't believe I've forgotten the name already), the USS Grissom was carrying something like 1200 troops. Now, if this was the Excelsior-class Grissom, as it probably was, it wouldn't have been carrying that many people unless it was transporting them. Now, by your arguements, the Grissom's classification would have had to be changed from whatever it was (I would argue "cruiser") to "transport", otherwise it couldn't be used as a transport.
Grissom's captain: "Yes, I'm sorry, Valkyrie. We would come to your rescue, but we're a transport this week. If we helped you, we'd have to become a cruiser again, but then we'd have to dump all these soldiers we're transporting, because we wouldn't be a transport anymore. As you know, Admiral Gerratana ordered that no ship can perform a duty unless it is classified to do so..."
------------------ "I make fun of senior citizens, but obviously I aspire to be one of them, the alternative being what it is." -Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future
posted
There would be no point in identifying the Gobbledegook as a cruiser in peacetime, though.
Ships can perform more than one role, of course. But many ships are built for specific roles. Let's say Starfleet has two classes of ships, both built for surveying planets. One carries few weapons, but the other is heavily-armed (let's say it's usually sent to border planets and the like). If both are called "surveyors," then they wouldn't be easily differentiated from each other in battle.
------------------ http://frankg.dgne.com/ "CORUSCANT...DOES NOT COMPUTE...I mean, uh, you're under arrest." - Anonymous battle droid
posted
Well, who knows, maybe they would call it a "cruiser-surveyor", or something...
------------------ "I make fun of senior citizens, but obviously I aspire to be one of them, the alternative being what it is." -Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future
posted
Frank: The better armed surveyor that was going to be used in battle wouldn't be a purpose-built surveyor, then, would it? And therefore it would be a cruiser or a sloop or something.
------------------ "But compared with Star Wars, Star Trek, for all its obnoxious spin-off "make it so" durability, is Hamlet and Lear alongside Saved by the Bell."
"Good old Liam as Qui-Gon Jinn, the hero in this film, is represented as fighting against the forces of greed. A Star Wars picture that preaches against greed is a little like Bill Clinton in the pulpit for a chastity-begins-at-home campaign."
-Rex Murphy on Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
posted
Ah.. I now see where you're coming from. Mon dieu! How could we classify a surveyor that had been given added diplomatic capabilities so it could ferry ambassadors? Or what would we call a transport ship with special equipment enabling it to do sensor sweeps across the neutral zone? We must redo our classification system!
------------------ "But compared with Star Wars, Star Trek, for all its obnoxious spin-off "make it so" durability, is Hamlet and Lear alongside Saved by the Bell."
"Good old Liam as Qui-Gon Jinn, the hero in this film, is represented as fighting against the forces of greed. A Star Wars picture that preaches against greed is a little like Bill Clinton in the pulpit for a chastity-begins-at-home campaign."
-Rex Murphy on Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
[This message was edited by The_Tom on May 27, 1999.]
Explorer- large ship, haeavily armed, capable of acting as long range scouts and surveryors: soverins, galaxies, nebulas, ambassadors
Cruiser- heavily to medium to lightly armed, capable of midrange xploratory missions: heavy crusiers (largest)- akiras medium crusiers (medium sized)- steamrunners, light cruisers (smallest...but i guess that's obvious....)- norways
frigate- lightly armed, designed for short to mid range missions: heavy frigate-? medium frigate-miranda light frigate-nova, oberth
scout- heavily to mid to lightly armed, capable of long to mid range exploratory missions: heavy scout-intrepid medium scout-saber/sabre light scout- data's acout ship (USS Spot, Feline class)
escort (warship)-heavily armed vessel heavy or medium escort- prmometheus class light escort- defiant class
craft- a small ship, either a servcice vehichle or a short range personel transport: runabout, shuttlecraft
For all of the above classifications, the heavy/medium/light system designate size and armaments.
Might this classifcation system include both range, armament, and technological advancdment into one simpl system?
------------------ "How many people does it take before it becomes wrong?"- Jean-Luc Picard
"Fortune Favors the Bold."- Benjamin Sisko
"And so, the warriors, the peacemakers, the helpers, the saviors, the forgotten, and the remembered, they all signed on that data padd and peace was made."- Shannon London-Karkarsku, leader of the Unisist Movement
Captain Alex Herenwhiner, Transwarp inter-dimension timeship explorer U.S.S. Liberty
posted
Even I have to concede that there's something wrong with Oberth class frigate...
------------------ "A Star Wars picture that preaches against greed is a little like Bill Clinton in the pulpit for a chastity-begins-at-home campaign."
-Rex Murphy on Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
posted
To summarize: Frank seems to believe that a ship is classified according to whatever mission it happens to be fulfilling at any given time. So the E-D was an Explorer, Medical ship, Battleship, Transport, etc. depending on which episode we're watching.
I, on the other hand, believe that a ship is classified according to it's overall capabilities and characteristics. A cruiser is a cruiser beacuse it fits the description of what a cruiser IS not because it's doing what a cruiser DOES as any specific moment in time.
Ask yourself which system is easiest for Starfleet to use.
So that cruiser that was designed to be a cruiser, but which happened to be acting as a scout at a given time would be called a cruiser and not a scout as you said up thread? You admit that you were wrong when you said it should be renamed a scout when it was acting like a scout?
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