posted
The idea of the Freedom being a transport or passenger liner seems highly unlikely, because of the miniscule internal volume. The saucer is practically all the ship's got for all the equipment and quarters, and everything else.
I think I like the "Coast Guard" option the best. Although it's definitely part of the regular Starfleet, the Freedom could still be a kind of ship meant for local patrol.
Of course, in this case "local patrol" means close to Sector 001, and if those are the ships intended to guard Earth, then it's no wonder that aliens like to paint a big bulls-eye on it every few years.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
I KNOW.. it's a News Ship. Those big windows are there to look good, behind the show's host, as he narrates the WAR.
-------------------- joH'a' 'oH wIj DevwI' jIH DIchDaq Hutlh pagh (some days it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps in the morning) The Woozle!
Registered: Nov 2002
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Jason, you forgot the little "plow" or whatever the fuck it is on the forward underside of the nacelle.
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted
Yeah...I forgot it on purpose! Fuck that little useless thing (what the hell is it anyway?!?) Mabye that was supposed to serve as a deflector or something on the original? It makes the ship look dippy from the sides.
quote:The idea of the Freedom being a transport or passenger liner seems highly unlikely, because of the miniscule internal volume. The saucer is practically all the ship's got for all the equipment and quarters, and everything else.
I'm going with the ship being 430 meters in length, so it would be plenty big enough for all of that, while still being relatively small by TNG/DS9 standards.
quote: I think I like the "Coast Guard" option the best. Although it's definitely part of the regular Starfleet, the Freedom could still be a kind of ship meant for local patrol.
Of course, in this case "local patrol" means close to Sector 001, and if those are the ships intended to guard Earth, then it's no wonder that aliens like to paint a big bulls-eye on it every few years. These ships could operate in two or three ship groups in a sector for fast response to threats and even a Warbird would be pressed to take on three opponents at once.
"Local patrol" could be any disputed system or area where pirate raids or interspecies disputes might occur as well as patrolling the ever boring Romulan Neutral Zone. I also dig these as a better armed alternative to the Oberth "floating target" class of starship for follow-up science missions that the big explorers (Galaxy, Soverign, Nebula) don't hae time to stay for months at a time and conduct.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
The 430m size seems pretty well established now, so the Freedom is pretty big for a "low-end" ship... But it's all relative anyway. And I'd just love to go by the rationale that Greg Jein no doubt used as well: the Freedom is to mid-24th century what the Saladin was to the mid- to late 23rd. Which, according to FJ, is indeed "low-end warship", or destroyer.
And don't go yelling "It's 100% noncanon" here. It's a sad Trek fact that the role of a starship cannot be discerned from its external appearances, so the noncanon train of thought is all we have. And all the modelmakers themselves had. If it is "modelmaker canon" that single -nacellers are destroyers, then so be it, even if we could find no rationale to it.
Not that we couldn't. A single nacelle is less of a loss in combat than two nacelles. A single hull, OTOH, already carries all the essentials of a starship. An attrition warship could very well "logically" look like the Freedom. And remove the badass torpedo tubes, and you have got this "scout" or "courier" variant, which makes limited sense but is "FJ/modelmaker canon" nevertheless.
I'd be ready to postulate a torp-less Hermes/Cygnus type of ship to accompany the Freedom, and to assign this design to one of the known unseens of the era. Andromeda class, perhaps (the Prokofiev scouted around...)?
I think it makes great sense to build ships specifically for this task. This way, you don't
a) have to remove your other ships from productive work, or
b) use outdated ships to train people who are going to operate modern ships.
It's a given that a training ship cannot really do productive work, since its crew isn't up to the specs. And it's cheaper to build a ship that has just one phaser emitter than one that has fourteen, when all the phaser training can be done with that single emitter. And when you add up these single-unit savings, it probably *will* become financially viable to build a ship that cannot be pressed to active duty no matter what, and to use the money saved by the single-uniting to construct more of the ships that *can* be pressed to such a duty, *in addition to* the training ship.
All that said, I still don't think the Firebrand is a training ship. The destroyer / attrition warship idea is otherwise the most appealing, but suffers from the fact that we haven't seen any other Freedoms anywhere. In war, they should be the most numerous ships out there! (Perhaps Sisko and the 9th Fleet just got the short straw and were given Mirandas as their attrition units. Or perhaps Starfleet never got around to building sufficiently many Freedoms, as they had miscalculated the economically viable size and designed too big an attrition ship. Some old "75% of the capital ship of the day" rule of thumb from Saladin era probably misled them.)
-------------------- joH'a' 'oH wIj DevwI' jIH DIchDaq Hutlh pagh (some days it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps in the morning) The Woozle!
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quote:Originally posted by Grokca: Weren't these formerly know as the French class?
THe French class would not have ANY nacelle!
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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I would like to see the Freedom as some sort of testbed for nacelles. Maybe the regular Freedom even has smaller twin nacelles. Anyway, the particular ship at Wolf 359 (the Firebrand) was just ill-fated. Not only because it was destroyed, but because it carried a single Galaxy nacelle and looked like crap at that time. What a shame.
-------------------- Bernd Schneider
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Mabye the Niagra is also one of those "testbed vehicles" then? I really don't know what they were thinking with the Freedon and Niagra studio models: the studio models were HUGE and they still had almost zero detail! -or Impulse Engines! -or Escape Pods! (Freedom only)
...still, I kinda like my oddball ship: it sure stands out in the fleet if nothing else!
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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