Combining a warship design with a scientific exploration design never made sense to me. Really, the ship should kick ass OR take names, not both! If they must be combined, then all the science personnel and gear should be in a detachable module, that can make a soft landing on an earthlike planet. The combat module can then operate independently.
But I want my Holodeck!!! Where else am I going to be able to have sex with counselor Troi?
Go watch Insurrection. When the Enterprise-E is battling the Son’a ships, Riker calls up the “manual steering column”, and something that looks oddly like a 20th century joystick slides up for him to use.
Most starships don’t have families on board. The Enterprise-D was one of the exceptions.
The Borg would adapt to bullets just as easily as they would adapt to phaser beams.
The explanation in the technical manual is that the shape of the ship is designed to conform to subspace geometry such that it enhances the warp field, allowing the ship to go faster. Actually, the Fesarius, Balok’s First Federation ship, was spherical and yellow; the Borg also have spherical ships. But the ships don’t have to bank when they turn.
There is definitely no tube connecting the nacelles. I don’t recall any episode that fits this description. I know that in “The Apple” Kirk ordered Scotty to prepare for emergency saucer separation.
Funny, they’ve never seemed able to fend off physical attacks before. Even a holographic Thompson submachine gun was effective. A good sniper’s rifle should be even more so.
But if you have to use energy weapons, why are they used at such ridiculously short range? If you gave some of those phaser rifles to a marine fire team, they’d be shooting down aircraft and satellites with them.
Good point, hadn’t thought about that. I suppose a missile can be fired with shields up, though, right? Perhaps the missile can have transporter technology, so as soon as it exits the shield radius then it transports the explosive payload against the enemy ship’s shields.
With the kevlar/anti-energy clothes, let’s try some camo, replicated just before beaming to the surface to suit the environment. The British Red Coats were obsolete hundreds of years ago.
Let’s also get some quality control in our ship building. I tire of key systems going down everytime things get dicey. I want helm control to be up at least 99.99% percent of the time. Even windows NT could claim that much.
How much control over the artificial gravity does a Federation starship have? Instead of constantly taking turbo-lifts, it would be nice if you could walk down a hallway, up a curved surface, then walk “up” the wall which has become a continuation of the hallway at a right angle. Or it would be interesting to have the gravity adjustable; some people might prefer to sleep (or have sex) in zero-gee.
Also, I’d like to see the head.
How about the Federation’s approach to computer systems? In Federation starships, there’s a single massive computer core which controls everything, from managing the warp core to opening doors and flushing toilets. This is, of course, a terrible idea. As shown repeatedly on the TV show, a single virus, act of sabotage, or other computer failure can take down virtually every system on the ship.
Important systems like the warp core, life support, shields, and helm control should have their own redundant isolated control computers. And general ship computing power would be much more robust as a network of interconnected computers rather than one gigantic central controller.
And as has been pointed out, standard federation sidearms have terrible ergonomics, terrible accuracy, and terrible fire rates. At least in the TV shows; there have been a few better examples in the later movies. Still, a team of modern Marines with assault rifles and grenades would utterly slaughter a Starfleet security detail. Since it’s been established that a replicator can easily create something of the complexity of an assault rifle, proper arms should be no problem.
I suspect that the main reason that the Tommy gun was so effective against the Borg was that they weren’t expecting it - nobody had shot them with a tommy gun before. Kill a few dozen Borg with bullets, and they’ll probably come up with a way to shield against them.
I wouldn’t want to rely on any weapon technology that uses transporter technology. Transporters are easy to disrupt - radiation, strong gravity, severe thunderstorms - seems like every other episode there’s a reason why the transporters won’t work properly.
Oh man where to start. I’ve always thought that the Star Trek writers must have been ordered not to think out how most effectively use the technology that exists in the series.
Holograms: Why not have holographic projectors on every deck in every room. In the same way the Doctor on STV can treat patients in Sick Bay, security forces could be programmed to appear to repel boarders, or Emergency Replacement Crewmen would appear to take the place of the poor fried red shirts.
Transporters: While you can’t beam through your own shields you can lower shields not facing your enemies and say lay a minefield. Then, retreat through it. Think of it The Enterprise loads mines in all of its transporters and as it maneuvers around the enemy vessel lays the mother of all space mine fields.
But seriously, how about actually training the security personal. It seems that Star Fleet only accepts the slowest, stupidest, and most uncoordinated humans into its security forces. In every episode security officers fail to stop someone that a bridge officer later handily dispatches. I don’t think I need to tell you but, US Naval bridge officers don’t stand a chance against someone who manages to force his way though a squad of armored and heavily armed Marines.
You forget the “ManSkirts” shown in the first season of TNG. Very quickly abandoned.
Forgot, or repressed. One or the other.
As mentioned above, the new ship needs redundancy. A second bridge (like STTNG’s “battle bridge”, except there should be a skeleton crew in there at all times), backup power source so they can eject the core and still have power and basic engines. In case of a hostile force boarding the ship there should be BULKHEADS along with force fields (the force fields alone kept failing) that seal off the ship into small sections with all engineering hatches automatically sealing to keep the enemy from crawling into service hatches or “hotwiring” the ship’s computer. The outer hull should be made of the same material as the ship Picard joined as a smuggler so normal sensors couldn’t detect it at longer distances.
Even on the Space Shuttles, all computer systems, all life-support systems, and emergency landing systems are sevenfold redundant. This on a vessel that isn’t even designed for combat. On a warship, you can expect to lose your primary and secondary systems on a mission.
Ship’s weapons systems will be distributed around the entire surface of the hull, so that an attack may be mounted in any direction, and also for the above-mentioned redundancy. There will be many more weapons, even if it means making them weaker: The Exterminator will be capable of simultaneously engaging fifty or a hundred targets.
On the afore-mentioned weapons: Transporter weapons would work just fine, even through shields. It’s not that transporters can’t be used through shields; it’s just that the pattern gets scrambled in the process. Frankly, if you’re transporting an antimatter bomb, you don’t really care if the pattern gets scrambled, it’ll still be just as effective.
Heck, you don’t even need the antimatter. Let’s look at the capabilities of a transporter. It’s capable of converting matter to energy, with near 100% efficiency, at considerable distance, move that energy to its own location, and convert it back to matter. OK, so how about we use the same technology to “beam up” a chunk of our opponent’s hull? Except we skip the part about moving the energy to us and re-converting it. Klingons go boom, and we didn’t even need to pay for the bomb.
And if we ever get into a situation not covered in “the book”, and have to jerry-rig something with the power grid re-routed through the main deflector dish, and it works, that will be added to the book. We will immediately forward the specs of our modification to qualified Starfleet engineers, who will proceed to design a production model for the device, or at least a protocol for re-assembling it from available materials, and that technology will be made available to all Starfleet vessels at the first opportunity.
Actually, most starships have three masssive computer cores each capable of handling the full load. The schedule is rotated so that one core is offline at all times and the other two split the processing queue.
In addition to the three main computer cores, small auxilliary processors are scattered throughout the ship. If there’s one thing computer scientists (and especially programmers) know, it’s redundancy.
All of my statements in this and in my previous post can be verified by checking the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual, or by asking your nearest Star Trek geek.
Except the TM’s aren’t canon, and are contradicted by the episodes. In one Voyager ep, they lost their “main computer core”, and they were almost completely helpless without it.
There should be a cargo bay loaded with big hunks of metal. That way if the hull is breached you just beam a piece of metal to the location and plug the leak.
Yes, more weapons… Four torpedo launchers in the front. Two in the back. At least 5 laser cannons on the saucer. A few more randomly placed around the ship. That way you just fire them one after another and achieve rapid fire.
Most of all, you need to make the ship look menacing. Barbs, spikes, head of your enemies nailed to the hull. Well maybe not the last one. The ship should look as intimidating as possible. That way you don’t even need to bother with shields or weapon. The other guys take one look at you and think: “Uh oh.” followed by them running away.
Yet despite this, Federation ships are routinely completely crippled whenever the “main computer core” fails. If there’s redundancy there, it’s incompetently implemented and remarkably prone to common-mode failures.
Which, being non-canon, are to be ignored whenever they disagree with the canon TV shows, as appears to be the case here.
Case in point: during the episode “The Naked Now”, some out-of-his-head engineer yanked a few dozen control chips out of a computer. This left the Enterprise completely unable to move until they were replaced. One computer failure completely crippled them - no redundancy there. The TV show episodes are full of this kind of thing.
The Defiant was a lot better designed as a combat ship - which made perfect sense in the show. I don’t recall its systems ever being crippled by a single computer failure as was so common on the other shows. Still no seatbelts though. Then again, we didn’t see nearly as much of it, and when the writers were strapped for ideas they’d have somethign stupid happen on DS9 as opposed to on the Defiant.
Let me get this straight,
You can imagine that you have the ability to design multi-purpose ships but you can imagine that you have the ability to seduce Troi?
Dude, she totally digs you! You’re like this bear, and she’s this bunny rabbit. And you are looking at your claws thinking what do I do. And the bunnys scared man.
(sorry)
Torpedo tube that face every direction. Or torpedo like they made in VI that will track an enemy vessel.
Oh and screw the treaty and give me a cloaking device.
Well, I always thought there would be some advantage to a vaguely aerodynamic shape in the event of a crash landing - might give you the iota or two of maneuverability you need to better your situation somewhat.
But now I think it might come in handy in parts of space that may be thickly clouded or something (thinking of the opening “Voyager” credits).
And I liked Wearia’s idea of repairing the hull mid-mission, but if you’re already using the transporters, I say find a way to get the replicators on the job. Have the hull effectively “heal” mid-battle.
Well, ya know, completely removing the Holodeck might not be neccesary…just include a manual shutoff lever. One outside, one inside. And to be safe, have the holodeck programs monitored while in use. (To deal with privacy concerns, hire the holodeck monitor from a planet populated by eunich monks. It’s not like they’d have anything better to do.)
Ranchoth
I find the main fault with Federation sidearms is that nobody knows how to use them. Feds seem to think that they have to hose somebody down to have any effect - they’ll keep holding the beam on somebody as they fall over, which is why they get overrun by three guys with clubs.
We’ve seen them turn the power way up and hold the phaser on a rock until it explodes, or melts, or starts a fire; so we know that a phaser doesn’t need to reload after every shot. Here’s a tip if you’re surrounded: hold down the trigger and spin around. You’ve just shot everybody nearby.