/strek/ - Star Trek

Depending on lore you wish to follow and generally with established canon you can only upgrade a ship so far before it becomes obsolete, with the Klingons being the exception being able to keep ships that are hundreds of years old at a level where they are competitive with their peers.

>>10329

I sense a webm coming.

>>10379

What is the purpose of the 3rd nacelle?

>>10337

>hundreds of years old

I have a hard time believing that unless the Klingons are sort of technologically stagnant from ENT to VOY. I guess that would make sense since the warrior caste is the high status caste. This would mean that Klingons would have been more powerful in the past since everyone else would have been weaker.

>>10413

The 3rd nacelle is for awesome, of course:

>>10413

Lore written in the old Starship Tech manuals which I seriously need to reread sometime was that come TNG era Klingons while not known for it, were some of the finest engineers in the galaxies when it came to starship design. Very fast, agile and powerful deep space raiders that could punch well above their weight. Anything they built was designed to last, be easy to repair and very accommodating of future upgrades.

Cardassian ships had a similar simple, easy to repair and designed to last principle as Klingons but theirs were designed for squadron tactics and often nowhere near as powerful as any of their peers.

Federation ships were meant to be impressive feature wise but suffer heavily from over-engineering that bar a few ship types means they have to design a new ship whenever hey want to really want an upgrade.

Romulans were also similar to Federation ships in they tended to suffer from over-engineering and had a habit of having their bark a lot worse than their bite if you really challenged them with a similar class of vessel. They had tremendous power output and definitely packed some serious firepower along with strong shields, but they were also slow and very vulnerable once their shields were down.

Ferengi were basically raiders mixed in with a casino, can't remember what the fuck the lore was exactly but generally they bluffed a lot.

Breen were meant to be an unholy offspring of Klingon and Romulan ships iirc.

Dominion were a sort of wild card race in design. Having cheap expendable squadron ships like Cardassians, then also have Battleships similar to the Romulans and Federation.

Mind you this is fluff written close to two decades ago and when writers had a massive boner for Klingons

>>10425

I guess the Klingons are Russian even with their fictional technology.

>>10425

the main guns on the bird of prey draw power directly from the warp core. the ships have a crew of about 12-20 people.

so despite being practically the size of a big runabout, they can nearly match the firepower of the federation's flagship, alone. on top of that, they have a torpedo launcher and a cloaking device.

>>10452

>>10425

I mentioned this in the other ship autism thread, but if they just put the warp nacelles inside the wings of the Bird of Prey i could accept it. I refuse to believe that warp coils can just be stuffed anywhere that's convenient. Them shits are supposed to be dangerous. Wing-shaped Nacelles could look cool as hell too.

>>10454

You'd like the Insurrection class then which is sadly non-canon

>>10413

> What is the purpose of the 3rd nacelle?

It's so you have a third nacelle. Otherwise you have two nacelles, not three.

>>10452

>so despite being practically the size of a big runabout, they can nearly match the firepower of the federation's flagship, alone.

The only reason a Bird of Prey was a threat to the Enterprise D was because they knew the shield frequency. Otherwise they wouldn’t have attempted the attack.

In the case of Star Trek 3, that BoP was up against the Enterprise with less than a skeleton crew. Even the Klingons comment that they should be dead meat.

In Star Trek 6, The BoP can fire while cloaked and still wails on the enterprise for minutes without being effective. The Enterprise and Excelsior rip it to shreds easily when it decloaks.

It’s a more efficient design but to threaten starships it needs to be in a pack.

>>10486

The main advantage of the bird of prey is that it can kill almost anything in space, and run from whatever it can't. It can follow its foe for weeks waiting until the enemy ship drops shields for some reason. It can be fixed easier, and built faster and cheaper. Also they can build enough of them to blot out the stars with their hulls - if their cloaking devices weren't on.

Also Romulans, Klingons, and Cardassians each had dozens of times more warships than the Federation, at most I could see the federation having a few dozen ships actually built for combat.

Basically Star trek makes zero sense in economic, military and political terms it was written by a communist after all logically a backward planet of primitive primates wouldn't come to lead the federation of species that had the warp drive for thousands of years.

>>10507

>Also Romulans, Klingons, and Cardassians each had dozens of times more warships than the Federation, at most I could see the federation having a few dozen ships actually built for combat.

The Federation didn't have any ships built just for combat in the TNG era until they built the Defiant, and then Akira, Centaur and maybe 1-2 other classes. This is kinda pointless as they're pretty clear that Federation ships are at least a 1-1 match to their Romulan and Klingon counterparts, and the Federation ships were more advanced then the Cardassians at least until the Dominion War.

>>10506

It became the Redshirt Class in DS9

>>10507

>>10508

let's also not forget the episode rascals, where a pair of birds and a ferengi ship almost instantly subdue the enterprise in a few moments. it's over so fast riker's head is still spinning when the entire crew is taken captive.

starfleet vessels are designed to fill an insane number of different roles. science, exploration, deep space travel, combat, diplomatic engagements which can actually be held onboard the ship itself, evacuation and emergency relief, all kinds of shit. starfleet is probably the most scientifically advanced of all the major powers except the borg. the original 1701 was considered a heavy cruiser, according to starfleet command (the video game, yea it's not canon but as far as ship sizes and capabilities it makes sense).

the klingons are geared towards combat, above all. one bird of prey isn't a match for a federation heavy cruiser, but it's no pushover either. dukat went tear assing around the alpha quadrant in just one stolen bird of prey, no one knew how to handle him, it was like playing with cheats on.

best part of the bird of prey is that it's tiny. the empire could probably crank out 10 of them for the price of whatever a galaxy class would require (of course we don't have any federation approved galactic currency to compare them to so I have no idea what the real price would be).

and of course none of this really takes into account dramatic license or episode budgets. this is pretty much all opinion and personal perspective, as someone who has watched almost every available moment of everything star trek has ever shown.

>>10559

Constitution class was labelled as a Heavy Cruiser in TOS and TMP considered on par with a Klingon D7 Battlecruiser.

Also there are two types of Bird of Preys shown with the K'vort Heavy Cruiser type of Bird of Prey being actually shown most often in TNG while the much smaller B'rel was shown more during movies and DS9. In fact you can see the B'rel and K'vort pretty much side by side during the last scene of Call to Arms on DS9 and there is a considerable size difference with a B'rel being eclipsed by a Vor'cha while the K'vort is almost as wide.

>>10506

More likely it was a cheap model to reuse.

>>10575

Then why did they make 3D versions of it?

>>10559

>let's also not forget the episode rascals, where a pair of birds and a ferengi ship almost instantly subdue the enterprise in a few moments. it's over so fast riker's head is still spinning when the entire crew is taken captive.

Starfleet crews have a poor record when it comes to their ships being captured. The original Enterprise got conquered by Space Hippies.

>>10589

Doesn't help when Riker's in command

>>10413

>What is the purpose of the 3rd nacelle?

Because Admiral Riker is an incompetent careerist. He pretty much said he was the only reason the enterprise D wasn't decommissioned.

>>10589

And don't forget children.

>>10559

>best part of the bird of prey is that it's tiny. the empire could probably crank out 10 of them for the price of whatever a galaxy class would require (of course we don't have any federation approved galactic currency to compare them to so I have no idea what the real price would be).

Well one interesting aspect I remember is that I think it was said once that the time and resources spent producing a Defiant Class the Federation could make a Galaxy Class or a Heavy Cruiser. Can't remember which it was. Basically the Defiant Class was a massive waste of resources

>>10616

>incompetent careerist.

Perfect Admiral material then.

>>10559

>it's over so fast riker's head is still spinning when the entire crew is taken captive

To be fair I never thought Riker was the most competent person in the captain's chair. I could be wrong but whenever he was running things for an episode nothing good seemed to come of it.

>>12779

To be fair, Trek's interpretation of space combat has always been a parallel with naval combat, and light/fast destroyers HAVE completely supplanted the role of battleships in the modern navy.

I find it interesting that there is no such thing as a "carrier" type ship in Trek, though. Imagine a giant, moving ship that has no role but to carry 200 heavily armed shuttlecraft? If nothing else, it would wreak havoc on an enemy ship's targeting scanners.

>>12803

There's actually a few carriers shown in Voyager. The issue is they aren't very effective as larger ships are more than capable of easily dispatching small craft. Hell a torpedo spread is all that's needed to deter a swarm of Maquis raiders.

>>10482

>Not building a ship with 20 nacelles.

>Not wanting to take a ship up to Warp Factor 11.

<But Warp Factor 10 is already infinite speed.

>Yes, but this one goes to 11.

>That's one faster.

>>12829

>Not wanting to make a ship that warps by drifting

>>10575

Yes, they were Reliant on that model for quite some time.

>>12829

Confirmed for truth because Riker regularly calls for the BoBW Enterprise to go Warp 13

>>15738

Goddamnit

>>15784

What? Why is their a benis on the front?

>>15784

Wait isn't Defiant the one that gets teleported over to the SWOLEverse?

>>15994

It is. I don't understand why they have to use the Defiant for a story again. TOS and ENT were enough. It's another cheap nostalgia bait.

>>15784

Considering they never showed this ship do you think they ran out of budget? :^)

>>17519

>>15997

They probably could not license the ship. Remember, STD is basically fan fiction.

>>17564

>implying an element of doubt that it isn't fan fiction

Lewd Trek fiction is more Trek than STD.