Cost cutting space ships

[chaos42]

I think that we have seen this more and more in games and media that its becomes a recurring issue and i realized it from watching this show and other things. A lot of time starships are built in series that are cost cutting nightmares. There are some times reasons but most of the time its just to be as cheap as possible, take the tie fighter for example its entire concept is its so cheap we can build hundreds of them and swarm enemies. Or take the ships form the lost fleet series build so cheaply that they break after 3 years because they where not designed to last much longer because of the high attrition rate, or the uss voyager plagued with issue with its crappy gel packs or anything the cardassians made as it usually is made cheap as can be made.

Is there like a trope for this if not i think there needs to be one

[CharlesPhipps]

I think that we have seen this more and more in games and media that its becomes a recurring issue and i realized it from watching this show and other things. A lot of time starships are built in series that are cost cutting nightmares. There are some times reasons but most of the time its just to be as cheap as possible, take the tie fighter for example its entire concept is its so cheap we can build hundreds of them and swarm enemies. Or take the ships form the lost fleet series build so cheaply that they break after 3 years because they where not designed to last much longer because of the high attrition rate, or the uss voyager plagued with issue with its crappy gel packs or anything the cardassians made as it usually is made cheap as can be made.

Is there like a trope for this if not i think there needs to be one

I have nothing to add other than KUDOS, another Lost Fleet fan.

May the Teddy Bear Cows of Doom not destroy us all.

[ORCACommander]

a ships reliability is inverse to the tech tech requirements of the plot

[clearspira]

On the point about Voyager, it was designed to be state of the art, no expense spared. There was nothing about it that was meant to be cheap. Its problems came from bad writing and the Federation being nowhere near as impressive as it is meant to be.

[Admiral X]

Never quite got the obsession with organic computers in the '90s and early '00s.

[CharlesPhipps]

On the point about Voyager, it was designed to be state of the art, no expense spared. There was nothing about it that was meant to be cheap. Its problems came from bad writing and the Federation being nowhere near as impressive as it is meant to be.

There's no shipyards and they were frequently in combat. It was also a Science vessel, not a top of the line craft.

[Beastro]

On the point about Voyager, it was designed to be state of the art, no expense spared. There was nothing about it that was meant to be cheap. Its problems came from bad writing and the Federation being nowhere near as impressive as it is meant to be.

The problem there is assuming that building such a ship would insure it was good.

Reality often finds that it's the exact opposite and why militaries are so traditional and conservative.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Zumwalt which is now nothing but a white elephant of a testbed for new tech and will never become a warship.

Also see 18th Century French ship design developments that had their ships of the line falling apart after a few years at sea. The only major thing it accomplished came from the Royal Navy capturing examples and integrating the practical things into their, much derided stale but solid ship designs (as well as adding nice, legendary names to the RN from the captures like Invincible).

Keep in mind that militaries and navies are not efficient creatures due to the fundamental nature of war. We like to think of wars between nations being at 99% effectiveness vs 85% but it's more 12% vs 9% or worse.

At the end of the day it's most often the least worst military that wins wars, not the best.

Never quite got the obsession with organic computers in the '90s and early '00s.

All apart of the organic tech fad due because real, sensible computers were old in Sci-Fi and so everyone needed to look for something odd and exotic to be the next step up.

[TGLS]

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Zumwalt which is now nothing but a white elephant of a testbed for new tech and will never become a warship.

I don't know. Even after the cancellation they're still going to have 3, and even the F-35 eventually got around to active combat. On the other hand, anyone attacking an American navy ship is improbable.

[Beastro]

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Zumwalt which is now nothing but a white elephant of a testbed for new tech and will never become a warship.

I don't know. Even after the cancellation they're still going to have 3, and even the F-35 eventually got around to active combat. On the other hand, anyone attacking an American navy ship is improbable.

F-35 is atypical development now do to tech. DDG-1000 though is a ton of bad design decisions people knew were bad and still went through with the beast.

The big issue atm screwing up completely is are the engines.

I forget the details, but the ships power requirements are beyond the engines ability, so when there's a major spike, like going high speed in and emergency, systems all over the ship shut down effectively leaving it blind and defenceless. On top fo that the emergency back ups can't help as they produce even less power.

Even if that problem wasn't kicking around there's very little to do with the ships as this brief quote sums up:

By the way, there are no plans to resume production of the DDG-1000, nobody is promoting the idea and there is no caucus supporting the proposal. The obligatory Monty Python parrot speech is very appropriate here. The only discussion in the Navy right now is what to do with the three hulls they have. It's politically impossible to sell or scrap them, the funds available for any major conversion or modification are simply not available. Refitting the ship in ways that task her for an anti-ship role is only financially possible because of the inherent flexibility of VLS systems. Structural changes are out. Another possibility is that the ships will be used as technology test-beds and trials ships. If the surface warfare reconfiguration falls through, most likely bet is that they'll be placed in "extended readiness" (ie reserve) until they're forgotten and then quietly scrapped.

They should have never been built in the first place and are a sad legacy of Rumsfeld, Transformationalism and the quest to reinvent wheels by making recreating older designs that are lethal to their crews (to which I'm referring to the tumblehome hull).

[chaos42]

the point about voyager i was referring to was what chuck was pointing out that the ship is a mess from its holodeck power supply not working with anything else to the gel packs getting infected to the ship having numerous issue with things failing from everything neelix puts in his kitchen. The only piece of hardware on the ship that works is the EMH and they have to run that thing far past its normal specs

im just saying that this seems to be an issue in some sci fi, and i think it needs a trope, because i see it a lot. Look at the ship from aliens lands on a planet and fire break out all over the place just form landing. Or lets face it any star fleet shuttle craft. A lot of sci fi ships are build very very poorly because like in the lost fleet the turn over is high. I wounder if thats the real source of those tiny shuttle pods we use to see in tng the little 2-3 person jobs that had only one job and that was to either crash into a planet or be blow up or other wise destroyed


This is something i had been thinking about when it came to star fleet pre borg because we see a lot of star ships that are very very old like the miranda class that has been converted into a cargo ship (real reason its just reusing models), or those bloody oberth class or any number of ships that by the point the enterprise has been build are really really old being around since kirk's day and yet their still being used. I have this idea of an old excellsior class thats been reduced to cargo ship duty and is staffed by who are like those 3 from that episode of voyager with the 3 crew members who under preformed. Star fleet doesn't waste people so they assign them to the boring easy job that no one wants to do, so their ship is the bottom of the fleet when it comes to replacement parts so its using some parts that are so old they look like the stuff from star trek 6. Its just an idea i had but i think it would be funny, sort of red dwarf meets star trek as the crew of this ship is capable of doing stuff but they are either self sabotaging like rimmer, lazy like lister, or other such neurotic conditions that make you wounder how they survived this long.