Starfleet Design of 2402
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ก.พ. 2024
- Starfleet in the 25th century has a variety of different starship designs ranging in origins. From the Sovereign classes still in use, to the reinvention of classic Star Trek ships like the Constitution Mark 3, the fleet is the most varied one we have seen yet.
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This Video is for critical purposes with commentary. - เกม
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Rick: "My favorite ship design is the Excelsior!"
Me: YAY!
Rick: "Which was designed before I was born."
Me: ...you didn't need to call me out like that.
I know right? Even the miranda
It's my favorite design too. I was born in '82, two years before its film debut lol
Ah, that takes me back to high school, reading magazine articles speculating what the Enterprise II would look like.
So Rick was born after 2290?
Sad old man noises.
I would argue that most 6th generations having a brighter hulls has a similar reason you gave to nostalgia ships existing...to send the message of "happy days are here again" for the Federation following the Dominion War
Now if only the lighting inside was closer to TNG than picard season 3. Goddamnit its like they build starships without lamps
What annoys me about STO is that you make a TOS character and you get hyped to Roam around that era and relive those classic moments till your shop explodes and you get transported to the future
Will STO be something we can play as a story offline at some point? It looks interesting
@@sulljoh1While it's not currently an offline game, I play it solo and enjoy it quite a bit.
@@daveh7720Same. I dont interact with other players at all. I just play the story and if an event has a cool free item then ill hop in and grind that out.
@@jehhhGamesOther than the occasional fleet invitation when I visit a hub like Earth Spacedock or Deep Space 9, I almost never engage with other players. The only exception was joining a fleet so I could ask questions while I learned my way around. (Which I highly recommend. There are fleets that don't require any participation; you're free to join in or not as you wish but they still offer help if you ask in fleet chat.)
Most of the older MMO are adopting a solo focus now. FF14 and SWTOR are the biggest except for end game.
Anyone else finding the listing from 10:35 onwards hilarious "one-legged galaxy three legged galaxy flat galaxy flat galaxy balancing a saucer etc) 😂
Best part, and from now on, I’ll always think of odd-numbered-nacelle designs as “#-legged __ ”, and roll-bar ships as “ __ balancing a plate on its head”. 🤣
@@UGNAvalon same
The 3 legged is the new "Kickstand" class.
Starfleet lost so many ships during the Dominion War, it makes sense that when they began to rebuild, they would create new designed ships with technology and advances developed during that conflict fully integrated into them.
That is quite true also when they rebuilt the designs at the Dominion War they went back to what was familiar.
This is one of the reasons I've never understood why I see people grumbling over these new ships. You got continuations and upgrades of older ships that have become newer classes.
I love the white and black color scheme of STO ships.
It does look sharp. :) (As much as I like the scheme with the blue, too. )
Agreed, for me it very much gives off a kind of NASA vibe, thematically tying it to the theme of exploration. There are also very practical, thermal management reasons for using white and black colors on real life spacecraft. And it also just looks good hehe
@@CommanderHuggins plus the orange coloration on the bussard collectors are a nice touch too
I'm also liking the interesting looks of the "newest" generation of ships in game with the Alliance ships
personally I really like the design language of the sto ships with the white and black look. There are lots of interesting ways you could explain how they got there in universe but ultimately to me it's a creative evolution of starfleet design language
One thing I've been thinking a lot about in general is what happens when a military can build and design ships so well, the outward shape becomes a matter of whim and desire more than form following function, as drives most real world examples (at least to some degree). But when you get so good at the engineering that the outward design and shape has no bearing on the functional capability, it begins to open the door to the idea that you could design ships purely for nostalgic reasons, for example. It means the driving force behind the look and feel of a fleet is no longer based entirely on the engineering limitations or just optimizations of the time.
For example, our rockets all look roughly the same (long tall cylinders with pointy noses) because that is the most efficient way to build them, and we're so tightly limited on power to weight and fuel ratios, that we can't afford any deviation from the most optimal shape, to address any other needs (such as aesthetics or even other functional considerations, like gliding for landings. The Space Shuttles were fairly big exceptions to this, with so much effort put into making that shape work regardless of the cost it incurred). Likewise large ships are all long and narrow, and low to the water because to make a boat that's a tall spire or a pancake runs into engineering challenges.
But, what if those engineering challenges didn't exist, and your vehicles could be whatever shape you want? What drives the design style now? Do you make ships to look like older generations to foster a sense of pride in past accomplishments? Do you fashion them after predatory birds to identify with your race, as the Romulans do? It's an interesting thought. I would expect even more diversity than what we're seeing with the Federation of the 2400s.
I've liked the notion that they would have 4 distinct types of ships in the evolving eras that defined their purpose: the wide saucer long range support / engineering / explorer (galaxy/nebula -> ross), the science specific ones (oberth -> pasteur -> nova) with shapes designed to fit the specific task, the elongated bow ships for combat and command (sovereign, odyssey), and the multimission cruiser (constitution, excelsior, obena, luna, akira) as a classic nod. Throw in a weird unique mission specific trend-bucker like the Defiant, Dauntless, or the Typhon and that kinda sums up Starfleet design doctrine. That said, these guys have to eventually make Starfleet evolve into the Universe Class style ships. Who knows?
Head Cannon time: after the destruction of Utopia Planetia, Starfleet HEAVILY invested in decentralizing the bulk of their ship building out side the Sol system, even encouraging further iterations on design from member worlds, thus you get a wider breadth of designs. I already have head canon that says that some of the wonkier kit bashes are Telleraties, Andorians and other core member worlds doing their thang with designs and technology. Also not having all your important stuff in one solar system makes way more sense, doesn't it? Like I'd stop making Earth the capital of the UFP, its always targeted.
To me, this makes perfect sense. As a notable Klingon once said, "InALIENable. If you could only hear yourselves. HUMAN rights... why, the very name is Racist. The Federation is no more than a Homosapiens-Only Club..." What a perfect opportunity for the Federation to bring more of its members into a more active and hands-on place among the development and expression of the collective societies they represent.
@@choalithikanthe2422He unironically said that while standing in front of Spock.
@@sexyshadowcat7 She, but yes. Klingons have a lot of gall calling other species racist.
That said, while Utopia Planitia was probably the largest fleet yard in the Federation a look at ship plaques shows that there were already many fleet yards all around the Federation Procyon (Andoria) and Beta Antares spring to mind. And Earth being the capitol still makes historic sense. Of the founding members Earth was the neutral one and the one that proved to the others that the cooperation and mutual goodwill was actually a viable strategy. It's also the most climatalogically neutral that we've seen. I don't find it to be anthropocentric, but historically significant.
More than that, is the simple fact that the other three founders have still been at war far more than they have been friends, even by the time the Enterprise J was launched.
Earth will forever be the lynch pin of whether the UFP stays together or rips apart entirely based on whether or not it is the Capital World.@@3Rayfire
I've always seen 6th Gen designs as a better integration of slipstream technology being distributed fleetwide. I got annoyed that in cannon the Federation is still limited by the warp barrier, despite the fact that they gathered so many new tech to surpass it and possibly explore beyond the galactic barrier.
Seriously, would have helped explain how our heroes can run around the galaxy in this era of Trek and not be tracked. Now we have to retcon dozens if not hundreds of episodes of Trek claiming actually we can't track ships at warp now (or it was only possible with the IFF transponder which is dumb cause...just turn it off then when not needed). Like I guess that increases the menace of the Borg cause they clearly can, but so many eps legit call out ships following other ships or intercepting them and why is cloak even that big a deal if ships can just stay at warp for weeks straight anyways and apparently not be detected or tracked. Just have them pop into transwarp or whatever and we already know that this can interfere with sensors in realspace.
I think that the warp barrier is similar to the real world speed limit of the speed of light. But in Star Trek; they can get extremely close to warp 10 and travel from the Milky Way to the Andromeda in 10 seconds due to the velocity approaching, yet not reaching, infinity.
@@SkywalkerFilms1927 I fully agree but i must admit that the term "Warp Barrier" also has another meaning for me: Like a barrier of technological availability. One thing i've always enjoyed about ST, is how the tech tree slowly grows over time with each new series. So i've been waiting for the moment, they start exploring other galaxies but they're gonna need some major upgrades to do that.
@@IN-tm8mw maybe we will get a show with the Enterprise J or later, and see the exploration of other galaxies.
I see a connection with older vehicles and the old Starships. Old cars can be more modified easier just like old ships, while new cars cannot be modified easily. Definitely love the looks of older Starships.
In my head, the way I think about the ships is that you have a Starfleet which is stuck between a fleet of what's left after the Dominion War and other conflicts have eroded the fleet, and the need to build a lot of ships quickly to get the numbers Starfleet needs for the duties it has. Which is why the Neo-Constitution is essentially the small, light cruiser. Instead of being the biggest and baddest, it is cheap and cheerful to make it easy to crank out a lot of them, all of which look like the classic "Starfleet" ship to ensure that everywhere people in the Federation look, they see Starfleet. Especially on the periphery where things might feel most precarious. It essentially is branding, but for diplomatic presence.
But those are not the ships Starfleet most wants. The interesting thing about the Sagan and Echelon classes is that while they share a standardized nacelle with the Neo-Constitution (so, that's the high-volume part ever ship uses for cost reasons), both of those classes share a classic hullform: the Miranda class. While there were out of universe reasons for the previous ubiquity, in-Universe, the saucer-blended-into-a-large-box would seem to be the hullform Starfleet finds most useful. So, they've built two classes using it. Their heavy cruiser Echelon-class which will be going around doing the heavy "exploration" work of scaring would be enemies and fighting anyone who decides to see if the Federation still has their mojo. And the Sagans are the battle cruisers. Able to rapidly move around the Federation and beyond due to their quad nacelles, they are the ships which you have in smaller numbers (the extra nacelles are expensive), but which can respond to any crisis faster, and also are the threat deterring would-be hostile powers, because their speed makes them very hard to catch, but their heavy firepower makes them able to strike enemies very hard. If you declare war, you suddenly find your ships and bases disappearing after having close encounters of the Sagan kind in places you didn't expect.
Behind that you have the leftovers of the Dominion War emergency builds which could fight, but were not very livable, and the "experiments" that the STO universe provides which can be explained as Starfleet trying to explore what works best, and alternatives that they might never have otherwise tried.
At least, that's how I see the breakdown (in-Universe), rather than the 4 groups you're suggesting.
Great analysis. Obviously we have IRL reasons, but in-universe, I think the Mirandas stayed around as long as they did because they filled a specific role. When you needed a ship with modest capability (but more multimission than an Oberth), the Miranda filled the job cheaply. Since they were cheap and most tasks are modest (just logically more things are small than large) you had a lot of them and they stayed around awhile. If you needed more oomph you sent an Excelsior. The grander classes through the ages were sent when that was what was needed. It's why the Connies died out even if they were broadly contemporary with these 2. Mirandas are cheaper, Excelsiors more capable, and the space in between is too niche to really bother (even if kitbashes and whatnot indicate Starfleet likes making new classes by the dozen). Which has carried over mostly with successive generations of flagship designs. Why keep around Ambassadors unnecessarily long when the Galaxy is just it but bigger and better? It's why I view the Sovereign much more as the update to the Excelsior role (with the scale up of capability and size to boot) and the Odyssey class as the successor to the Galaxy class. Now opening up a new space for the old Excelsior and Miranda spots in a post Dominion War threat environment (and given the battle FX huge number of losses, somewhat ironically given the general fan expectations Galaxies actually came through pretty well in the fighting).
I really love this era of Starfleet ships. And I also love how they've included so many ships from STO into canon now. I have a 3D model of the Reliant class, the USS McFly NCC-1985.
The andorian and vulcan ships are still around.
I haven't played STO but somewhere I saw some modernized Andorian ships, that would be fun if Rick covers em.
@@OllamhDrab yes I remember spacedock did a video about it. A modern version of the andorian cruiser. Quantum slipstream, Quantum torpedoes. One was given to starfleet during the klingon war .
Major plot detail is every ship design is completely modernized with latest tech. While keeping the original external aesthetic of the ship. So every ship is on equal footing with one another regardless of what era they are all from.
I believe that the Picard era designs and STO White & Blues were designed at the same time but for different reasons.
I think the White & Blues, or 6th Generation designs were designed mainly for Slipstrean travel and long-distance exploration as most had multiple deflectors, while the Evolutions were designed for local or “just beyond” Federation Space, they’re Likely slipstream equipped aswell but their drives probably aren’t as advanced as the 6th generation ones and can only probably do hops between a few dozen lightyears while the 6th Gen can hop between hundreds, if not Thousands before needing to rest.
I believe that them both being together is the result of two different design philosophies their design teams had, The 6th Gen I believe is based on Decommissioned Hulls with vastly upgraded and the most Advanced state-of-the-art tech bolted on, while the Evolutions are based on New designs but using the older 5th gen tech. In Picard, While the Odyssey looks it? It’s actually a 5th Gen ship, or more accurately an “Evolution”, not a 6th Gen design, although the design did pioneer some systems that would be used in the next generation, in its onscreen form it looks antiquated compared to ships like the Sutherland and Gagarin.
I'd love to hear your take on some of the weirder original STO designs!
Galaxy and sovereign classes are my favorite ship designs i have the ds9 technical manual and the enterprise D technical manual great detail
I love the Gagarin design, especially with the mirror version colors.
Some of the 6th Gen stuff could be classified as Legacy ships: The Reliant and Sutherland classes were STO reskins of famous ships from the Miranda and Nebula lines.
I think you're right on the money with this breakdown, though I'd name them:
reliable / refined / r&d / renaissance.
The Excelsior is still my favorite and the ship I use most often in STO.
Excelsior non refit and Obena are probably my favorite star trek ships visually by quite a bit.
I appreciate how you’re trying to link everything together but I can’t make the same leap of logic because it’s different people making designs up.
How i feel about this era is that it feels like starfleet has looked at its own history to see what works and made new version of it
I really love a variety of Star Trek ship designs (not even just Federation ships) throughout the generations of the shows/movies/games/etc. and new takes on old designs are always something I'll welcome seeing more of.
You are so respectful and do your darndest to make these ships work in any and all cannon, I would LOVE to see you take on those... um... industrious ships early and beta STO had us flying around in.
I like to imagine that on top of all the classes featured in Picard 3, there are still remnants of the “Old Guard” category in low intensity or supplementary missions like Intrepids, Nebulas, etc. fulfilling roles like the Royal Fleet Auxiliary or Military Sealift Command being irl examples.
Absolutely awesome, Rick! This is the most perfect way to put 25th century starships and StarFleet design into proper perspective! Excellent job!
I liked the way you broke them down. For my own head-canon, I like to imagine that there was a period like this roughly every century for Starfleet, where they were bringing in a load of new designs and technical updates to old designs. And of course, for the new designs you would have conservative designers putting out Evolutions or Nostalgia ships, while the more radical designers would create whole new aesthetic generations. Eventually, one of these two factions would get their way and become the new standard.
I figure this is how you get designs like the Walker-class from ST: Discovery, as a product of the radical designers of the early 23rd Century, while the much more conservative designers responsible for the Constitution (as a clear nostalgia design derived from the more patched-together NX refit/Columbia-class of the previous century) ended up winning out and dominating Federation starship design for most of the century. Then came the TMP era and the Lost Era, where initially the main designs were mere updates and aesthetic alterations of old designs, before radical new ships like the Ambassador class ended up creating a whole new dominant aesthetic for Starfleet, which would last for nearly a century.
In the early 25th century, we see the same pattern, with the radical designers being behind the 6th Generation ships. In the STO universe, it looks like the radicals have largely won out for the next century or so of Starfleet's design aesthetic, while ST: Picard's universe seems to have had the opposite outcome, with more conservative nostalgia-based designs leading the way.
My headcanon is that most of starfleet is human centric in design and naming simply because humans are impatient and just start working on stuff after they get their hands on new design ideas from everyone else, and everyone else just sighs and goes along with it.
Andorian research group is still debating finer details of hull plating material's impact on the latest generation of shield design when the humans roll up the Andorian's share of a new federation fleet they shoehorned copies of the prototype in.
A Vulcan meeting on what to name the next fleet flagshiip gets interrupted by the human captain hailing them about something... Halfway through the flagship's first five year mission. They named this one Enterprise, again, and hope no one was offended.
great categorization imo. Also laughed at '' 1 legged galaxy, 3 legged galaxy, flat galaxy..'''
I have never felt so old as when you started talking about the Soverign and Akira as out of date ye-olden technology.
It would be funny to see an early STO ship design somewhere in the background in the shows. I kinda love how goofy they look compared to the modern designs.
Right off the bat, a frontal view of the NCC-86500.
I really like STO's Hestia-class. I used a modified version of it in one of my TTRPGs not as a battleship but as an exploration craft that can split into light cruisers for research, which seems like a better use to me. I'd love to see a video on that design!
I love your work! Thank you!
All Star Trek designs and universes are all nicely settled and co existing after the first mirror to the new movies and games
Yes please, an episode about the weirder Fleet designs, not necessarily limited to STO.
Your take on the evolutionary diversity of Fleet ships makes sense to me given what we see on screen- more observations than hypotheses. The thing that contributes to grate on me is the ongoing refusal to recognize that eventually you will need dedicated warships. What’s that you say, the Defiant? At best it’s a destroyer severely limited by its need to aim its main weapons by steering the ship. If the Fleet is going to use big guns they need to be in turrets. Yes, that means a serious battleship or five, explicitly not for use against other Alpha and Beta quadrant powers of course, but external threats on the level of the Borg.
Maybe someday.
STO ship design is... hard. There's some I like, and some I dislike. But the big culprit in many is... I *hate* the nacelles.
I think what's fun with the idea of the 'Nostalgia' is that I justified my character having an NX-class in the 25th century through the ship was made a celebration of the first Warp-5 ship launched 200 years later or so. So the ship was designed to look exactly like it did back in the day but it was packed to the brim with more modern stuff. Thus explaining why it had a shield despite no secondary hull, and it's rear-mounted phaser strips on the tiny part, as well as having two dual-phase cannons aimed aimed forward that are actually phasers designed in a way to resemble phase cannons.
In game terms, the NX uses 2x Covert Phaser Beam Array in the rear, 2x Covert Dual-Phaser Beam array in the fore, 1x Rapid Fire Missile, 1x Kentari Missile Pack, 1x Spatial Torpedo. It spews out enough missiles to rival the old Starfleet Command PC game. Plus the Covert Phaser Beams look a hella lot more like Enterprise's Phase Cannons than the actual phase cannons you can get in the game, which are absolutely rubbish. Yeah I went out on a tanget but, why not!
I will say this... I no longer *care* what's canon or not. People started waging these 'canon wars' and just saying " _Anything not on a big screen isn't canon_ " but frankly think about it... It's always big corpo that wants you to fight over details like that. Instead just pull one long line and decide: Yes, they're all canon period. Just going by the big screen is dumb.
Seems spot on catagories
I was always disappointed that the other member world's technological lineage wasn't always represented. When we saw more designs during enterprise I thought it was great. Yes, they weren't actually a part of the United federation of planets at that point but it would make sense that these designs continued. Hopefully we'll see some going forward and we can forget about the Vulcan jellyfish from the films 🤣🤣
I always liken it to the US military.
Yes you have mutable companys developing technology. However, it all looks like it goes together. I feel like Star Fleet would do something similar.
Brilliant analysis!
I love your videos! Best star trek content creator of all time. Could you please do a starships video from the star trek enteprise era 2150s? Keep the videos coming🙏
We do see the vulcan warp ring in TNG and DS9, on the Apollo class. Its mentioned as being used by both Starfleet and the Vulcan National Merchant Fleet.
I generally think the aesthetic is pretty well established and follows from what came before but I’m more interested in what comes next given what little we’ve seen of the 26th and 27th century. Like how what we have leads to those eras. My guess is some design influence from currently unknown aliens, whether future Federation members or not.
honestly, the main thing I'm thinking when I see all these new ships in the show is "too many classes for no reason". if we were looking at ships of wildly differing size and purpose, like runabouts, cargo ships, stealth/recon ships, etc. then it would make more sense, but they're all giant 400-600m long general-purpose cruisers. we went from "just throw hundreds of the same bland new ship at the screen and call it a day" in Picard season 1 to "oops, better please the fans, throw every fan-service idea in and make em drool", and it just isn't believable. The variety of designs we saw in introduced First Contact made more sense, considering many of them were smaller.
And.. I loved Picard season 3, honestly, it redeemed the series and I was on the edge of my seat, loving every minute. But.. dismantling the Titan and rebuilding it into a new class that half copies the 150 year old Constitution class, but with a fugly new secondary hull, is just..... ?????
I feel like the “Evolution” and the “Nostalgia” categories would have a lot of overlap and could almost be combined… but overall this is a great way to break the ship designs down I think.
And I totally agree that it’s more realistic to see multiple design lineages and types. Just look at the variation in military equipment on planet earth alone and think about how much bigger Starfleet is!
I think there is a great deal of convergence between 6th generation and the nostalgic.
My theory when it comes to the design of some of those ships; lets say the Exeter, Resolute, and Reliant classes (all based on Constitution, Excelsior, and Miranda respectively)...all three were based on designs of what worked well for Starfleet for decades but all eventually hit a technological wall after new and developing technologies emerged and were improved upon over the centuries. The starship designers probably thought: these worked before let's do it again but with current technology and design philosophies and thus we get the Exeter and so on. They can serve their purpose in Gen 6 but also have a familiar enough profile for other races to identify them.
Some of the 6th Generation science vessel designs are just wild (looking at you Trident class).
Why would the Excelsiors be gone, we saw new ones being built at the utopia planitia shipyards in the voyager episode "Reletivity"
Video idea: How the seperate mediums infulenced each other. Designs, lore, events happening in one, made into another where it developed more and eventually affected the origin back. How ideas bunced around, literally.
I remember the Apollo Class uses a warp ring (TNG: Tapestry, Unification I & II. And DS9: In The Pale Moonlight & For The Cause.) They were used by the Vulcan National Merchant Fleet. (& one was used by the Maquis) I don't know why Starfleet vessels only use Warp Nacelles for FTL, and it's the only example I can think of off the top of my head, but we did at least get that non-starfleet vessels were continuing R&D for other forms of FTL before Lower Decks and Enterprise.
The vessel always stuck out to me because the Vulcan ships in Enterprise had so many smooth curves, while the Apollo Class had a very angular design.
It seems to me that most of the Starfleet ships no matter the source are getting smaller more advanced and specialised. This is a good thing as it allows more varied designs to be imagined and would be a more logical approach given the size of the galaxy.
Great video
Excellent video, love the theories on the wide variety of ship development and agree the multiculturalism of Starfleet definitely leads to having the more varied designs. As a side note, for STO I would love it if Thomas or someone could come up with some Treknobable about the seeming concurrent development of the two very different style of bussards: The dark, opaque, reds we see on ships like the Yorktown, Pathfinder, and Reliant; and the bright orange, translucent bussards on ships like the Gagarin, Titan, and Justicar. Obviously its just different artists with different styles but would love an in universe explanation.
Probably two competing design houses imo
Haha the Wolf 359 25th century refits in STO will make his head explode.
The most cost-efficient and logical ship design would be:
Take a ship design that works very well, then add modularity to it, better engines come up? Remove old ones and slide new ones.
Same for weapons, services and systems, with modularity in mind you can keep a design alive for far longer.
Great video :)
I would enjoy watching you going over the designs linage of STO
I'm going to have to disagree with you on the Oddy being the start of the distinct 'STO style.' That would actually be the Tier X.5 ships that we got *very* early on, even before the Specters story arc. We got the Bellepheron, the Venture, Sau Paulo, and generally all the design tropes we would see in the Oddy, just unrefined. It's also where the exact white and black color scheme emerged. This is before the T6 vessels even came out. (insert "I was there" nostalgia-boast speech here). The Oddy was the culmination and general codification of that general design ethos into a coherent style, which was then followed up by the Tempest and the Avenger classes followed on by the T6 ships starting a year later.
Excellent video sir
One part of STO i really loved the idea off and hate they fell quite flat on was the Khitomer Class Battle cruiser and other potential Klingon / Federation alliance joint ventures.
I still hope one day on screen we will see an I.K.S or A.C.S Enterprise and U.S.S Enterprise leading a fleet battle.
"LeT's MaKe AlL oUr ShIpS nEtWoRkEd" - starfleet big brains
We have that now, IoT. Internet of things
The difference is not letting your ships be controlled by a system, that's the problem.
That’s literally what we’re doing now
That never ends well, remote control a ship into the wrong star system and it starts a war.
Worked out so well for the Battlestar universe, wouldn't you say?
Even if the Federation was trying to streamline their designs to as few classes as possible, I still think with the way technology naturally evolves, coupled with the wide diversity of species incorporated into the Federation, it only makes sense they would have a wide variety of ships. Look at how quickly we moved from Enterprise D to Enterprise G compared to the time from Enterprise to Enterprise C. Supposedly, Enterprise J is a long way out still, so maybe things will calm down? In any case, space is big and it just makes more sense to have a wide variety of ships to fit a wide variety of assignments you can get when exploring the galaxy.
It's a nice theory you wrap up with
8:50 to 9:00 "They were getting back to their roots, which, to some designers, means looking back at older ships and trying to recapture that magic". Ending with an _STD Connie_ no less.
But do remember my review on the Excelsior II: I had a friend bring out an Excelsior I to compare and they were damn near the same size. Combine that with the registry of the E2 version of the Excelsior - NCC-42037 - and that means one thing: most of these aren't new ships, but akin to the TMP Constitution. Basically new ships, but on old bones.
The Dominion war showed the weakness with having so many different ship designed being used.
1) Parts, you can't quickly scavenge one ship to replace parts on another as some are vastly different from each other.
2) Engineers, any engineer would need to be knowledgeable of the design of the ship they are on. If they are constantly changing ships in a war, then they will likley end up on a ship they have zero knowledge about.
During peace time this is all and good with almost no issues, but during war time these become problems.
I stand by the Nova class science scout as my favorite. I looove small capable ships!
I liked a lot of the Starfleet ships we saw in Picard. 11:45 If you watch Star Trek lower decks you can still see them andorian and Vulcan ships you mentioned.
I really enjoyed this breakdown and the classifications you assigned the eras. My one little quibble (tribble?) Would be that form follows function, the final catagory of nostalgia is fine but new tech and the requirements of that class would define the form. Who amongst us would like a return to 1930s ship / aircraft design just because it was they hay-day of the passenger liner. Most fed citizens would not care of the designs of starfleet ships as most would never encounter them.
To the point about every ship using the same nacelles, while I agree that there are likely better versions out there standardization for an entity as big as the UFP is a must. When building a MASSIVE fleet with a myriad of roles you have to balance cost, effect and time equally. Sure, there are likely better designs but they also likely cost more or take more time to produce. You make a standard part so you always have enough for repairs, refits and future construction and you pick the one that can be made in the best time, for the lowest cost and provide a solid reliable result.
I always thought the Akira and Excelsior ships were none to pleasing ships to look at. The Sov minus the overly long nacells is a finer vessel.
Dunderstadt class is clearly meant to be another nostalgia based design. It’s based off the fan design Hornet class but also the Pioneer class now canon in the fleet museum and even to a lesser degree the NX class refit.
Sagan evokes Constellation class but far less than the Dunderstadt does the Hornet or Constitution III the Shangra La Class.
The Pioneer isn't related to either of those ships. Both the Dunderstadt and Hornet were based on the Akula class from either FASA or SFB (I forget which). I believe the Akula is in Star Trek Legacy (the mid 2000s game).
@@ffnbbqgenerally yes but look at the configuration. It’s close a saucer with an engineering fuselage stub slung under it and nacelles behind and above. It’s not a clean reference I will grant.
It makes absolute sense to see Soverreigns, Akiras and Luna class ships 25 years after the Dominion War. Ships aren't created with a life span of only 10-15 years. That would be a collossal waste of ressources. The TNG Technical Manual states, that the Galaxy class spaceframe was designed to be in service for a hundred years. And given that around the TNG era Constitution, Miranda and Excelsior class are still in service, this seems plausible.
Naturally, the mission profile changes over time, since the spaceframe at some point reaches a level, where new technologies cannot be incoporated anymore. You can see that these classes outlived their purpose during the Dominion War, where I think most of the remaining Miranda class ships were lost. Same propably goes for many of the remaining Excelsior class ships. I can partially see reason on continuing the Excelsior design, as the Excelsior proved to be an extraordinary piece of engineering and design. Even almost 100 years after the first Excelsior was commissioned, the spaceframe was that versatile, it could easily be upgrade to keep up with a Defiant class ship. Which is, without any doubt, one of the best warships in the quadrant around this time.
Much like I don't see a reason why STO needed to create a variety of designs based on these ship classes (at least not from an in-universe point of view), I don't see an in-universe necessity for the shows. This doesn't feel like progress, but nostalgia. These frames outlived their purpose and recreating them for the sake of showing "Starfleet is still Starfleet" makes little to no sense. After all, Starfleet needs to incorporate generations of new tech and recreating new designs based on designs hundreds of years old leads to the fact, that these ships will have a very short life-span.
You also wouldn't design a battlecruiser based on a sailing ship, would you?
To me, I see it like successive generations of cars. a 1985 corolla is completely different to a 2024 corolla, but they're both the same car and are part of the same lineage.
I would agree with your list, and also feel personally attacked that ships like the Sovereign, Akira, and Defiant are listed as "Old Guard" 🙂
I love this channel.
I full agree whit this analisys great job
I guess the one point against such high variety is that most of the ships can't really be fleshed out or have time to shine, so they just kind of become background filler. At least in TNG you could recognize it when a Nebula or Oberth showed up, you could have entire wings of similar ships fighting for DS9. With this many varied ships, big fleet shots just kinda become a random jumble.
The ship design in STO is hit and miss but I’m glad they made some of them canon. It’s a nice nod of respect for it once being the only source of new prime universe Trek content during those dark days of the JJ Abrams era.
My favorite design is sovereign class. Odyssey is a close second. And voyager/intrepid class in third
A video on weird sto ships would be very welcome.
The thing is, each era of design has a common design language that allows you to place a vessel in a given era regardless of the ship's configuration. Unfortunately, the Picard era fucks that up entirely. The TOS era, TMP/TWOK era ships and TNG ships were all very distinctive with the older Galaxy, Challenger and Nebula classes all sharing that design language. As they shift into the Dominion War and the TNG era films, you can see a more aggressive design language to the ships but its consistent and allows you to place those vessels in the timeline.
Fortunately, the more recent era of STO design has a solid lineage and consistent design language which looks like an evolution of what came before them. Putting it into Picard was done for practical reasons, the main one being cost savings. However, the STO ships are supposedly older than the four original Federation ship designs we see in Picard but generally look more advanced to me. They just don't match the design language of the current era. Nor do they even look transitional the way the Niagra, Cheyenne and Ambassador classes did.
That's a reasonable way to classify the ships, though I feel like first season of Discover was weirdest. So many of those ships at the Binary Stars don't fit standard Starfleet design principles at all.
My favorite has always been the Miranda class ever since I saw the Reliant in Star Trek 2: the Wrath of Khan in theaters.
Don't forget that a lot of the TNG era and earlier ships were destroyed either fighting the Dominion or by Borg incursions.
I always found it weird that in the same era where we literally recycle biological human waste to produce food in replicators, we still come up with a multitude of starship designs to "replace" older ship designs. And what happens to the old ships - are they scrapped? To me this sounds very 20th and 21st century - where we use naval ships until the end of their lifespan, and then they are decommissioned, maybe put in reserve, and ultimately sent to the scrapyard. I know Starfleet "boneyards" have been shown on screen before but would think by the 24th and 25th century we "recycle" starships as much as possible, including updating and reusing major modular components. This helps explain the variety of different designs with similar components, such as the one-legged, three legged, and flat ships with Galaxy saucers. There are other in-universe allusions to this, such as the many variants of the Miranda class, and the radical rebuild of the USS Titan in Picard S3. Other than being destroyed, exactly when a ship stops being "itself" due to being rebuilt so many times and it loses its name and hull number in the 25th century is debatable. If an older Excelsior gets fitted with a modern new saucer section and upgraded engines, is it now a new class and ship? At least in my own head cannon a lot of these various similar "classes" we see are simply variants of established classes and ships using new or recycled components through the years. This doesn't mean every ship needs to be 100 years old - if a workhorse design is still fundamentally sound, I see no reason why they can't keep producing updated new variants of the same design like the Miranda, Excelsior, etc. Anyway, just some thoughts.
I honestly don't see the Andorrans or Vulcans abandoning their designs, but I can understand why they ere not adapted by Star Fleet. Andorran designs are only slightly less aggressive than the Klingons, and Vulcan designs require constant precision and possibly specialized training. Star Fleet tends to use simpler designs that everyone can adapt to quickly.
Technically speaking, Starfleet is just the exploratory and defensive arm of the Federation, there's nothing saying that given member species don't still maintain their own non-exploration, non-military ships, for instance for commerce or civilian science(did the Vulcan's ever give up their own fleets? Pretty sure they still have their own ships in Picard, they just do their own thing). They just all throw in their lot together when it comes to common goals. Most civilian ships wouldn't typically have a pressing need for defensive/offensive capabilities when traveling across civilized Federation space. Any light milia ships that are around to deal with piracy or crime are still going to be fairly insignificant because there are no nation state equivalent power criminal threats aside from the Orions, which can usually be dealt with by low level militia because Starfleet gets called to come and kick them firmly in the groin any time they start harassing Federation aligned ships too much, keeping piracy somewhat limited and dispersed
I can appreciate the classic designs of ships, but its the modern designed models with the chevron shaped saucer and streamlined nacelles, that really catches my eye. Ships should look fast if they're going to be fast and it's more closely resembles design evolution from our own universe. Look at cars or planes from the 1960s to now. It may not make sense scientifically, but it does esthetically
I love that you can customize the liveries of STO ships. Wish real-world planes would bring back nose and tail art. Pin-up girls on WW2 bombers, skull and crossbones on F-14 Tomcats... Surely it wouldn't hurt to add a little blood-red dye to your stealth coating, right?
Making "Dominion War" a 5th Generation of development (unless I misunderstood that part?) seems off to me - Defiant-class is a product of the Borg risk, not the Dominion War, and then the main line ships of the Dominion War were Galaxy and Miranda class ships, supported by stuff like Excelsiors etc (though DS9 did feature more "fighter" craft, but I think that's already in TNG, in that episode where Wesley is in the Academy?). Basically the Dominion War pushed the politics of the Federation to be able to do new things (mostly bad things!), but not that much in the technology of Starfleet
Great video. Although, I think the presentation should have been better as a venn diagram. It would help bring across your point.
Starfleet after the 26th century might eventually eliminate the warp nacelles and incorporate them into the saucer section. The starships will then look like your typical alien saucer.
Out of curiosity, have you watched/considered making videos on Stargate? It would be cool to get your opinion on all things Stargate, while also comparing the SGC to the UFP
Things like;
-The Tau'Ri ships (And how a peak Daedalus warship compares to Federation ships)
-The SGC and its policies
-SGC adversaries in general and how the Federation would fare against them (They would find the Ori and Replicators very difficult I believe. The Wraith would terrify the Federation)
Whew, I was worried. “Likely” is misspelled twice at 10:00 as “likley.”
I was wondering if you could possibly do a video on the borg and why they didn't use cloaking tech, as they have assimilated it and it would definitely have help them assimilate planets.
I'm honestly surprised we never saw a B-52.
Can you group the starships like by this video to keep their sources connected? For instance Star Trek Online ships in one list so I can keep them straight coming from STO? I’m not in the game so cannot follow this otherwise.