TNG - The Big Goodbye

[RobbyB1982]

The defiant is special in that its small, but ALL its luxury is missing to make room for its weapons. It's ALL gun.

[McAvoy]

The defiant is special in that its small, but ALL its luxury is missing to make room for its weapons. It's ALL gun.

Well yeah. It's a warship. No creature comforts, no nothing. In fact I can tell you from personal experience she does greatly resemble what a modern naval ship looks now. The only difference is there are crew quarters even if they are bunker up. All naval ships pack sailors in like sardines. There is a reason why we call our beds racks and coffin lockers. You get as much room sleeping as you would if you slept in a coffin.

Unless you were smart and slept on the top so you can at least sit up.

[Beastro]

Shuttles are not helicopters though. They are faster, more manoeuvrable, heavily armed, can accelerate and decelerate to and from FTL speeds and insane mach speeds, faster than you can read this sentence, and have sensor suites able to read any potential battlefield in a way that makes any surveillance tech we have now, much less the seventies and eighties you are comparing them to, look like a tin can on a string, so the comparison to 80s helicopters is complete fatuous. And just for the record, tanks and APCs in any hypothetical Fulda Gap scenario would toasted by the nukes dropped there, because the idea of a massive tank or infantry battle was a fiction sold to the public to cover up just how quickly things would go nuclear.

Relatively speaking to what we've seen in Trek they are comparable given what we've seen of their troubles. For the most part they rely on their shields and we all know how well they fare in combat. The issue here is the disparity between the stated tech and what is shown in Trek.

The two were not mutually exclusive. The threat of a nuclear exchange did not preclude the real threat of amassed Soviet forces, especially given that what you described didn't change the Soviets thinking in the least, but PGMs did. They terrified them and lead to a desperate tech push to try to close the gap with the West as their numbers could then be mitigated.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, the exit is to your left, please visit the gift shop on your way out.

Are you aware of the Soviet perspective on WWIII? We like to think the perception of it eventually going nuclear and that being that is how everyone looked upon it, but they didn't. They saw WWIII as a long war and that exchange as the first of many as the war then devolving down to a race to rebuild with whomever rebuilding the fastest to make more nukes winning. This is why they targeted neutral nations with their weapons, like African nations, because they would be potential threats in the power vacuum after the West was in ruin. The Typhoon class SSBNs were original designed for such follow up strikes hitting places that showed signs of rebuilding (4 of their 16 silos were to carry satellites to launch up and periodically check until that was cancelled).

This played into their numbers game and why to this day they still keep tons of old tech around only getting rid of T-34s and such in stock in the 90s: In a nuclear devastated battlefield a WWII era tank or SPG would be king if its the only piece of armour still functioning. The massed numbers of the initial fighting were reflective of their mentality there as anything that survived would go towards that push.

[Fianna]

The big reason helicopters haven't replaced the military's ground vehicles is that you can only pack so much armor, equipment, personnel, and fuel into one before it becomes too heavy to fly. So even though you could theoretically have helicopters fly just a foot or two off the ground, and use them wherever you'd use a ground vehicle, they'd have so many drawbacks that the advantage of being able to take off if need be just wouldn't be worth it.

But in Star Trek? Their vehicles all operate with such powerful engines, weight is a complete non-issue. Whatever heavily armored, weapon loaded vehicle you might design, you could replace the wheels or treads with a standard flight system and not need to sacrifice one bit of functionality.

[clearspira]

To get meta on this, I wonder if the lack of ground vehicles and fighters in Trek is due to them not wanting to look like Star Wars? Post-Abrams that is a bit of an amusing idea of course.

But fighters are conspicuous in their absence in Trek. Gene has his ''Starfleet isn't military shtick'' but we all know how silly that is on in-universe examination. The only in-universe idea I can think of is that because starship phasers are pinpoint accurate and can destroy a mountain (unless the script says otherwise) then the Enterprise would piss over your typical Star Wars type fighter. The Federation being smart enough not to equip their ships with weapons from WW2.

[TGLS]

To get meta on this, I wonder if the lack of ground vehicles and fighters in Trek is due to them not wanting to look like Star Wars? Post-Abrams that is a bit of an amusing idea of course.

But fighters are conspicuous in their absence in Trek. Gene has his ''Starfleet isn't military shtick'' but we all know how silly that is on in-universe examination. The only in-universe idea I can think of is that because starship phasers are pinpoint accurate and can destroy a mountain (unless the script says otherwise) then the Enterprise would piss over your typical Star Wars type fighter. The Federation being smart enough not to equip their ships with weapons from WW2.

Well:
A) Eggshells and hammers definitely doesn't apply with Trek type craft.
B) Federation (or possibly AQ) military thinking might go: "Well if we control space using our battleships, then we can just pound the hell out of any target that tries to do anything spacey, and just ignore them if they trench up."

[McAvoy]

To get meta on this, I wonder if the lack of ground vehicles and fighters in Trek is due to them not wanting to look like Star Wars? Post-Abrams that is a bit of an amusing idea of course.

But fighters are conspicuous in their absence in Trek. Gene has his ''Starfleet isn't military shtick'' but we all know how silly that is on in-universe examination. The only in-universe idea I can think of is that because starship phasers are pinpoint accurate and can destroy a mountain (unless the script says otherwise) then the Enterprise would piss over your typical Star Wars type fighter. The Federation being smart enough not to equip their ships with weapons from WW2.

I think it may just come down to budget. Before CGI you had to film each fighter individually and sync them up with the other shots of the same model to show more than one fighter. That is time consuming.

Yeah in the universe where more power generation means more powerful shields and weapons and being faster, a larger ship will trump the small fighters.

[Verothian]

But fighters are conspicuous in their absence in Trek.

There have been a few alien species that rely on a fighter based combat system, the Swarm in in Voyager and the Cell ships in Enterprise for example, one of which used a draining nonstandard weapon and the other using a particle beam. The cell ships were essentially weaponized lego blocks if I remember correctly. While the swarm ships weren't meant to individually deal damage and instead drain off the shields to prepare for boarding, the cell ships were intended to start off as pin pricks and then could deliver bigger punches in concert once the defenses were down.

The weakness of Fighters is that they generally need a home port - the cell ships could combine to create a carrier of sorts, while the Swarm was semi-nomadic and generally existed in some odd hibernal down-powered state when not active. I don't believe the Federation has a carrier class ship that could house as many fighter type craft as the Suliban or Swarm - though that would be an interesting concept.

Part of this might be that the Federation doesn't have the bodies to justify manned fighter craft in the same way as Star Wars or B5. To make up for this, I've always felt its implied that the Federation relies more on drone tech when they have to get down in the trenches, such as those used to tag and bag the fey in Insurrection, and the Federation's inexplicable fascination with Go-tron tech on their starships to make them split apart, the side parts can be remotely controlled with pre-set combat maneuvers like in Voyager. On top of this, we also have the self-replicating mines in DS-9.

It always seems the Federation is just one provocation away from creating a ship that's just one big replicator and going full Protoss Carrier. In terms of broad tactics, outside of wars with the major powers, there really wasn't a need for the Federation to invest in the gritty ground warfare tech (until the Maquis and Dominion).

[McAvoy]

The fighters specifically the ones we saw the Maquis and the ones we saw in DS9 fleet battles looks like they may not need a homebase. Like larger shuttles with wings.

Even to accommodate these such fighters, you could easily design such a carrier as big or even smaller than a Galaxy class to hold 100 of them.

My view of fighters in Trek is that the best use of them is not using energy weapons on the big ships but make them torpedo craft. Carry one or two photon torpedoes each slung or underneath like old WW2 and attack individual ships en masse of let's say ten craft per ship.

I don't think we ever saw a ship shoot down a photon torpedo. That seems to be an effective weapon to me. Even if let's say the torpedo on these crafts are not full size. Like let's 75% as big. But if you have ten craft carrying even one torpedo that means ten potential torpedoes hitting the shields of that ship. I doubt most ships could handle that.

[Deledrius]

I don't think we ever saw a ship shoot down a photon torpedo. That seems to be an effective weapon to me. Even if let's say the torpedo on these crafts are not full size. Like let's 75% as big. But if you have ten craft carrying even one torpedo that means ten potential torpedoes hitting the shields of that ship. I doubt most ships could handle that.

Outside of the DS9 battles, we generally see torpedoes move quickly, and phasers be slow but strong. I think one could make a decent argument (taking into consideration the fact that all of this has been the sort of thing that changes week-to-week on Trek) that most of the time the targeting systems wouldn't be able to lock on to a torpedo quickly enough in most cases for phasers to shoot them down. Situations like Dreadnought are exceptions due to the circumstances.

It's a shame that JJ Abrams (yet again) was ignorant (or simply displaying his Star Wars envy) in making Trek suddenly use the pew-pew barrage instead of the traditional (and fairly unique for the franchise) sustained phaser effect, because it would have opened the door for Discovery to have something actually substantially different in technology to use once they got to Season 3. Instead, Trek has apparently had them all along. Once again, not doing their homework properly left them with wasted opportunities for doing what they wanted in a meaningful way instead of just for the spectacle.