SG1: There But For The Grace of God

[Deledrius]

I enjoy the 'what if' factor of the episode but thought the killing off of everyone was a bit heavy handed, though it got the point across.

It's a delicate balance, because on the one hand you can convey a lot with seeing losses you don't normally do (at least before Game of Thrones made it mandatory to constantly kill off main characters as a stunt in subsequent copy-cat shows), but it also throws up a million red flags to the viewer that consequences are over and we'll be resetting everything very soon. If you're not careful, you'll lose the weight of the moment.

[drewder]

I think the frequent use of nukes has to do with showing that earth is so frequently outclassed by aliens that even our most powerful weapons that we wouldn't use on earth are ineffective against them. Sort of like the dominion blowing up a galaxy class starship on ds9.

[Madner Kami]

Galaxies are hilariously unsuited for combat, once you think about it, so getting one destroyed isn't actually as big a deal is it's made out to be. It's a poster-child for how complacent and distant to reality the Federation or at least Starfleet Command has become. It's the Starfleet-equivalent to modern day SUVs. Huge, impractical, underpowered, expensive and underutilized.

[McAvoy]

Galaxies are hilariously unsuited for combat, once you think about it, so getting one destroyed isn't actually as big a deal is it's made out to be. It's a poster-child for how complacent and distant to reality the Federation or at least Starfleet Command has become. It's the Starfleet-equivalent to modern day SUVs. Huge, impractical, underpowered, expensive and underutilized.

The design I don't think is unsuited. They do have a near 360 weapons coverage and can fire volleys of ten torpedoes at a time. I think IU, they didn't hit hard enough with those phasers. Their shields were pretty underwhelming too, in comparison to like Voyager.

The thing is that they weren't designed as a battleship. They could be considered one in comparison to the Klingons or the Romulans, but they have a lot of space dedicated towards science and exploration.

It's one of those what ifs, that what if the Galaxy was designed for war and war only. Would they carry more phaser stripes or would the phasers would be even more powerful? Would they put more torpedo launchers in on the saucer? Would the, neck torpedo launcher be a twin launcher and not a single one? Woukd there be heavy armor plates covering the ship instead of a ton of windows?

[Madner Kami]

It's one of those what ifs, that what if the Galaxy was designed for war and war only. Would they carry more phaser stripes or would the phasers would be even more powerful? Would they put more torpedo launchers in on the saucer? Would the, neck torpedo launcher be a twin launcher and not a single one? Woukd there be heavy armor plates covering the ship instead of a ton of windows?

The phaser-strips are one of the primary weaknesses of the ship. Sure, as you pointed out, the ship has very good coverage, but a single strip can only engage one target at a time. The strips are extremely inferior to a turreted design (as you can find on the 2009 reboot-ships and, interestingly enough, on the Sovereign-class, as displayed in ST: Elite Force 2, Mission #8) which can get similar or even better coverage and can engage a single target continously just as well as the strips, but have the added advantage of allowing for way more overlaping firing arcs, vastely increasing the available firepower onto singular targets or allowing to engage multiple targets in the same direction, something that a Galaxy just can not do in vast swaths of the forward ~180° half-bubble, something which even the old "casemated" designs on ships like the Constitution- or Miranda-class could do. Plus, disrupting part of one strip completely incapacitates the entire strip, which effectively destroys the combatability of a Galaxy, if one or both of the two primary strips on the saucer-section are disrupted.

On the defensive side, there are also multiple catastrophic design choices. First and foremost, the complete reliance on shields. Once they are down, once they can be penetrated or otherwise bypassed, the ship has literally zero defences. Remember what happened to the Enterprise against a lone Bird of Prey? It took a hand full of hits, to completely penetrate the hull and cause terminal damage to the warp core of the ship. This is also something that consistently happens during the series and even to alternate universe Enterprises from universes, which should be vastely more "combat-ready", like in the case of "Yesterday's Enterprise". Three Birds of Prey can penetrate the shields in less than one minute. There even is an instance, where a single Galor utterly ruins the day of an otherwise combat-ready alternate universe Enterprise, simply because (universe-hoppping) Worf is slow to react as he can't figure out which button to press. The shields are drained fast and once they are gone... game over.
This nicely leads to the next design-problem beyond the lack of any armoring: An overabundance of windows, no sealing bulk-heads to speak off and a complete reliance on force-fields to deal with hull breaches, which is the dumbest possible way to deal with battle-damage, as it drains the available energy-pool in a situation where you do not want that to happen in the first place, because you need that energy to propell your ship, compensate loss of atmosphere via life-support, need to constantly load the phasers and shields and so on and on.

And then there's the security-issue. Galaxies are huge and the shields are usually not activated. A small force of intruders in a cloaked or otherwise hidden vessel can easily infiltrate the ship, stay hidden and cause damage without much or even any ability of the crew to deal with it in a reliable way, as it happened in "The Hunted". I mean, picture this:



Let that sink in for a moment. This is what it looks like, if you assemble the entire regular crew in 2x2m squares. You could literally walk through the entire ship and not meet a single other person... A ship that size with such a low crew complement is a nightmare to secure and I am not even just talking about intruder-scenarios, but damage-control as well. Say there's a hull-breach on deck 8, which disrupted a plasma-conduit that is feeding a phaser-strip or a shield generator and the turbo-lifts are offline. Good luck getting there in any meaningful amount of time and that is assuming, that the force-fields are holding the atmosphere in that area to begin with...

Federation ships are catastrophically over-reliant on highly complex technologies. Technologies which are repeatedly shown as being unreliable in any (combat-) scenario and Galaxies suffer doubly so, due to their size and innate inability to deal with small or multiple threats at the same time. Galaxies are luxury liners made for long-range exploration or mobile space-habitats, but are constantly getting drafted into scenarios for which they are incredbily ill-equipped to deal with.

[Zatman]

I think the phaser arrays can target multiple things simultaneously: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/start ... 0812194116

[drewder]

The point isn't that Galaxy class ships are bad at combat it's that up until that point the enterprise had easily taken on all comers successfully and then a few small ships had taken it out even though the ship and crew were loaded for bear. It's the starship equivalent of the worf effect were they show an alien is a real threat by beating up worf.

[clearspira]

Bringing this back to Stargate for a mo, the F-304 Daedalus vs the Enterprise is in my opinion one of those great Death Battles as I would say they are very similar ships. On balance though it is the Daedalus. Like Kami said, the Enterprise is too over reliant on shields whereas the Daedalus has proven multiple times to be heavily armoured. Crappy shields too. There is no way imo the Federation matches the Asgard or the Ancients in terms of shield tech. Federation warp drive is also embarrassingly slow compared to hyperdrive.

[clearspira]

It's one of those what ifs, that what if the Galaxy was designed for war and war only. Would they carry more phaser stripes or would the phasers would be even more powerful? Would they put more torpedo launchers in on the saucer? Would the, neck torpedo launcher be a twin launcher and not a single one? Woukd there be heavy armor plates covering the ship instead of a ton of windows?

The phaser-strips are one of the primary weaknesses of the ship. Sure, as you pointed out, the ship has very good coverage, but a single strip can only engage one target at a time. The strips are extremely inferior to a turreted design (as you can find on the 2009 reboot-ships and, interestingly enough, on the Sovereign-class, as displayed in ST: Elite Force 2, Mission #8) which can get similar or even better coverage and can engage a single target continously just as well as the strips, but have the added advantage of allowing for way more overlaping firing arcs, vastely increasing the available firepower onto singular targets or allowing to engage multiple targets in the same direction, something that a Galaxy just can not do in vast swaths of the forward ~180° half-bubble, something which even the old "casemated" designs on ships like the Constitution- or Miranda-class could do. Plus, disrupting part of one strip completely incapacitates the entire strip, which effectively destroys the combatability of a Galaxy, if one or both of the two primary strips on the saucer-section are disrupted.

On the defensive side, there are also multiple catastrophic design choices. First and foremost, the complete reliance on shields. Once they are down, once they can be penetrated or otherwise bypassed, the ship has literally zero defences. Remember what happened to the Enterprise against a lone Bird of Prey? It took a hand full of hits, to completely penetrate the hull and cause terminal damage to the warp core of the ship. This is also something that consistently happens during the series and even to alternate universe Enterprises from universes, which should be vastely more "combat-ready", like in the case of "Yesterday's Enterprise". Three Birds of Prey can penetrate the shields in less than one minute. There even is an instance, where a single Galor utterly ruins the day of an otherwise combat-ready alternate universe Enterprise, simply because (universe-hoppping) Worf is slow to react as he can't figure out which button to press. The shields are drained fast and once they are gone... game over.
This nicely leads to the next design-problem beyond the lack of any armoring: An overabundance of windows, no sealing bulk-heads to speak off and a complete reliance on force-fields to deal with hull breaches, which is the dumbest possible way to deal with battle-damage, as it drains the available energy-pool in a situation where you do not want that to happen in the first place, because you need that energy to propell your ship, compensate loss of atmosphere via life-support, need to constantly load the phasers and shields and so on and on.

And then there's the security-issue. Galaxies are huge and the shields are usually not activated. A small force of intruders in a cloaked or otherwise hidden vessel can easily infiltrate the ship, stay hidden and cause damage without much or even any ability of the crew to deal with it in a reliable way, as it happened in "The Hunted". I mean, picture this:



Let that sink in for a moment. This is what it looks like, if you assemble the entire regular crew in 2x2m squares. You could literally walk through the entire ship and not meet a single other person... A ship that size with such a low crew complement is a nightmare to secure and I am not even just talking about intruder-scenarios, but damage-control as well. Say there's a hull-breach on deck 8, which disrupted a plasma-conduit that is feeding a phaser-strip or a shield generator and the turbo-lifts are offline. Good luck getting there in any meaningful amount of time and that is assuming, that the force-fields are holding the atmosphere in that area to begin with...

Federation ships are catastrophically over-reliant on highly complex technologies. Technologies which are repeatedly shown as being unreliable in any (combat-) scenario and Galaxies suffer doubly so, due to their size and innate inability to deal with small or multiple threats at the same time. Galaxies are luxury liners made for long-range exploration or mobile space-habitats, but are constantly getting drafted into scenarios for which they are incredbily ill-equipped to deal with.

Starfleet keep on doing that. The Miranda has a reputation for being a bitch, but the way it was used in TWOK clearly indicates that it is a support ship. It carries cargo and maybe fights off the odd pirate. Its not designed as an attack ship against the best the galaxy has to offer.

But yeah, totally agree with you on how over-designed the Galaxy is. The Intrepid with its semen computer system was the same.

[drewder]

Bringing this back to Stargate for a mo, the F-304 Daedalus vs the Enterprise is in my opinion one of those great Death Battles as I would say they are very similar ships. On balance though it is the Daedalus. Like Kami said, the Enterprise is too over reliant on shields whereas the Daedalus has proven multiple times to be heavily armoured. Crappy shields too. There is no way imo the Federation matches the Asgard or the Ancients in terms of shield tech. Federation warp drive is also embarrassingly slow compared to hyperdrive.

I have no doubt stargate ships would absolutely crush star trek ones. For me all you have to look at is time. As in Stargate tech was ancient at the time of the building of the pyramids. The millions of years that the ancients and asgard had to develop their technology means that they would have to have the most glacial development cycle possible or they'd be eons past the few hundred years the federation have had to develop since discovering spaceflight.