What stops Starfleet from building more ships?

[Darth Wong]

Out of Universe, is it just a brain bug of TOS and the feeling that Rodenberry wanted to convey of the lone explorers out in the wilderness, the wagon train to the stars, that has just carried over into the other shows and movies?

I wouldn't call it a brain bug. In TOS, Roddenberry clearly felt that a lone Constellation-class starship was a stupendous engineering achievement, and that even a large and powerful empire would only have a small number of such powerful vessels. That's not a brain bug so much as part of the backstory.

DS9 decided to do a "big war" story and they had been influenced by a desire to penis-wave in competition with other sci-fi franchises such as Star Wars and Babylon 5, so they suddenly created huge fleets of hundreds of starships. Mindful of the obvious contradiction with TOS, they proceeded to kludge up an explanation in the DS9 Technical Manual about how they were ancient ships brought out of mothballs, half-assed half-finished ships thrown together with skeleton crews, etc. But the original "lone explorer" notion was pretty much the way it was supposed to be. The "WW2 Pacific Island Campaign in space" thing from DS9 was a huge mutilation upon the original concept.

[Stofsk]

Out of Universe, is it just a brain bug of TOS and the feeling that Rodenberry wanted to convey of the lone explorers out in the wilderness, the wagon train to the stars, that has just carried over into the other shows and movies?

I wouldn't call it a brain bug. In TOS, Roddenberry clearly felt that a lone Constellation-class starship was a stupendous engineering achievement, and that even a large and powerful empire would only have a small number of such powerful vessels. That's not a brain bug so much as part of the backstory.

DS9 decided to do a "big war" story and they had been influenced by a desire to penis-wave in competition with other sci-fi franchises such as Star Wars and Babylon 5, so they suddenly created huge fleets of hundreds of starships. Mindful of the obvious contradiction with TOS, they proceeded to kludge up an explanation in the DS9 Technical Manual about how they were ancient ships brought out of mothballs, half-assed half-finished ships thrown together with skeleton crews, etc. But the original "lone explorer" notion was pretty much the way it was supposed to be. The "WW2 Pacific Island Campaign in space" thing from DS9 was a huge mutilation upon the original concept.

It's Constitution-class btw.

Remember 'Amok Time' where the Enterprise was supposed to rendevouz with IIRC two other Connies, for a flag-waving mission to some kind of border world which would send a message to the Klingon Empire? Also, the episode 'The Ultimate Computer' had a battle squadron of just four Connies vs the M5-upgraded Enterprise. I totally agree with you re: DS9's depiction of space battles. The loss of 40 starships at Wolf 359 was considered a Big Deal, but just a few years later Starfleet was losing hundreds of ships. I kinda like the idea of having small squads of starships fighting battles than the melee we got with DS9.

[Patrick Degan]

Out of Universe, is it just a brain bug of TOS and the feeling that Rodenberry wanted to convey of the lone explorers out in the wilderness, the wagon train to the stars, that has just carried over into the other shows and movies?

I wouldn't call it a brain bug. In TOS, Roddenberry clearly felt that a lone Constellation-class starship was a stupendous engineering achievement, and that even a large and powerful empire would only have a small number of such powerful vessels. That's not a brain bug so much as part of the backstory.

DS9 decided to do a "big war" story and they had been influenced by a desire to penis-wave in competition with other sci-fi franchises such as Star Wars and Babylon 5, so they suddenly created huge fleets of hundreds of starships. Mindful of the obvious contradiction with TOS, they proceeded to kludge up an explanation in the DS9 Technical Manual about how they were ancient ships brought out of mothballs, half-assed half-finished ships thrown together with skeleton crews, etc. But the original "lone explorer" notion was pretty much the way it was supposed to be. The "WW2 Pacific Island Campaign in space" thing from DS9 was a huge mutilation upon the original concept.

It's Constitution-class btw.

Remember 'Amok Time' where the Enterprise was supposed to rendevouz with IIRC two other Connies, for a flag-waving mission to some kind of border world which would send a message to the Klingon Empire? Also, the episode 'The Ultimate Computer' had a battle squadron of just four Connies vs the M5-upgraded Enterprise. I totally agree with you re: DS9's depiction of space battles. The loss of 40 starships at Wolf 359 was considered a Big Deal, but just a few years later Starfleet was losing hundreds of ships. I kinda like the idea of having small squads of starships fighting battles than the melee we got with DS9.

You definitely get the feeling from TOS that, even in a full-scale war, fleet actions would be comparatively rare events and most of the fighting would involve actions between lone ships or squadron-strength forces at most, with deployment of WMD against planetary targets. On the flipside, you also got the sense that a fight between starships of opposing powers would not, in and of itself, be a sufficient cause for war.

[Stofsk]

Even TNG respected the TOS backstory more than DS9, at least as far as ships and fleets go. The 40 ships assembled to repel the Borg at Wolf 359, while done on short notice, was nevertheless considered an 'armada' by Admiral Hansen and he felt they were throwing everything they had (or everything that could be mustered up at short notice) at the Borg. A season later the, what, 20 ships assembled by Picard to conduct the interstellar blockade of the Klingon/Romulan border was also considered a not-insignificant commitment.

Then DS9 comes along and the scale gets turned up to 11, and it doesn't work well for Trek. Like you said, TOS implies that combat would be one-on-one or squad vs squad, with ships of quality and smart and capable personnel, which makes infinitely more sense than ginormous fleets of (crappy) ships that take one hit and already start 'sploding/shitting themselves.

[tim31]

The loss of 40 starships at Wolf 359 was considered a Big Deal, but just a few years later Starfleet was losing hundreds of ships. I kinda like the idea of having small squads of starships fighting battles than the melee we got with DS9.

I wrote a fanfic recently for a friend centred around the dominion war and got cracking on MA to get the numbers and dates reasonably straight as far as the official canon was concerned. What a frustrating experience that was.

[Coalition]

Wow, a few replies to mine. I'll condense them here.

I tried using similar, slightly less detailed comparisons. The problem is, if I tried doing a US Navy based comparison with the trillion-plus population of the Federation, it would result in a Starfleet with something like 30,000+ capital ships, and that's only using the carriers for comparison.

True, but you also wind up with ships that are 30-40 years old (the USS Nimitz was commissioned 34 years ago).

I got bored and did this on ditl.org forum, if you want me to copy it over. Lots of non-Federationally-correct names for the fleets involved too.

Actually, I'd be very curious to see what you came up with. I usually like reading other people's fictional constructs and analyses. Do you have the link anywhere?

Look at the comma.

I think this aircraft-carrier analogy is not that good.

Spaceships are way more complicated to construct than water-based ships. While size certainly is a factor, you are also limited by the compexity of the construction, the need for sophisticated parts and so on.

Also, it is quite important how the population is dispersed. If a lot of the population is living in small settlements on isolated planets, they can not contribute to your ship-building effort - they simply lack the construction facilities for it, and it would be way to complicated/expensive to ship the parts to your fabrication facilies.
It is kinda like the comparsion between an agricultural nation and an industrialized one. Sheer manpower is not that imporant as an factor.

I was basing it on carriers as both required the highest technology of their respective nations (Nimitz class of United States, and Constitutions for the Federation). I don't know if it would exactly average out, but it seemed like a useful back of envelope comparison.

What could be done is that you decide which part of the population is actually useful (aka on a highly industrialized world), and use that for the population comparison.

Using the total fleet of the United States Navy whose Naval Dominance unprecedented in Naval History, based off the population of the world's economic superpower would strike me as something one would only do for a extreme high end estimate if the underlying assumptions had any validity.

In real terms the US Navy has 1/3 of the total fleet, because the rest are down for training, maintenance, and refit. Further it is effectively responsible for the entirety of the world's oceans to maintain world trade, so the population the USN should be divided against is more along the lines of the entire world population to be analogous to the Federation. Otherwise it's the equivalent of declaring the GDP of the Roman Empire verse the population of the city of Rome itself is a reasonable cross section of what ancient empires could do.

In which case a 60 billion citizen Stellar-Nation would have 36 ~300m vessels up, and 108 total, based on the assumption it is analogous to the USN. Seems as how Federation vessels seem to be less maintenance intensive the total fleet should be smaller if acting analogously to the USN as obligations could be met with fewer total ships.

So the Federation has only 1/3 of its fleet available as well. What is good for the US Navy can also be applied to the Federation Navy. If the Federation decides to deploy half its fleet, then afterwards I would expect to hear about fleet shortages due to delayed maintenance, refits, getting new crew up to speed, etc.

There are other nations on earth that are also building their own navies as well so you'd have to add those navies to get the total strength. I'd like to only count the ships that have cross-oceanic capability for actual Starfleet strength. I'll admit that Russia and China (and a few others I can't think of off-hand) could probably qualify as offensive fleets, they are just exercised locally. Anyone want to run those numbers please?

The whole Washington Treaty WW2 business demonstrates politicians in RL like to keep fleet sizes down, much like in modern day with nuclear arsenals. Why should the UFP and its neighbors not do something similar? Even if you're militaristic why sink funds into ships instead of research when you don't have to? Why do the equivalent of building a swarm of early WW2 tanks instead of investing the funds to be able to build late WW2 tanks?

For matching enemy fleets, consider the Federation's neighbors. The Klingons are antagonistic politically and slightly militarily; the Romulans are unknowns, and there are other empires out there. They may agree with a few, but that is assuming they can have reliable open communications. Don't forget, the Washington Treaty allowed two nations who were combined smaller than the third (Britain had ~1/3 the US GDP, and Japan had ~1/6) to let the larger power reduce the forces, and the United States at the time was getting isolationist again.

For this to hold true to the Federation, the Federation would have to have twice the economy of the Klingons and Romulans combined (1/3 + 1/6 = 1/2), and not want to get involved in interstellar politics.

I agree; we'd see a move toward the something more like the Terran Empire, but without the wanton cruelty and inexplicably unsustainable behaviour.

Do we get to keep the miniskirts and midriff baring outfits (for female personnel only)?

[tim31]

Sure, why not? Or since we're talking post dominion war, we'll return to that. But not like the early TNG skirts, oh no. Something a little more... Office slut.

[Havok]

Sure, why not? Or since we're talking post dominion war, we'll return to that. But not like the early TNG skirts, oh no. Something a little more... Office slut.

I have to say I prefer the camel toe body suits Troi wore.

[tim31]

You totally would though

My favorite canon uniforms were the ones introduced in TWOK, now that I've stopped growing(actually that happened a while ago) I really should attempt to make one.

[Thanas]

To be honest, I far prefer the huge fleets in DS9 - one would think two large powers would be able to muster a total of ~800 ships given the fact that it is war.

[Serafina]

To be honest, I far prefer the huge fleets in DS9 - one would think two large powers would be able to muster a total of ~800 ships given the fact that it is war.

So do i. And there really is nothing wrong with them using old ships - their primary, intended use was for exploration, anyway. You do not need the newest, state-of-the-art technology to do some exploring and borderpatrols.
Keeping them is way more sensible than scrapping them and building new ones instead.

[Steve]

I don't necessarily think it's wrong to be upset with the DS9 creators for going for the big fleet battles. They were trying something new in Trek as a setting and wanted to convey the sense of an utterly massive interstellar war being waged as opposed to border skirmishing or trying to slap together whatever ships are available to stop a Borg cube going hell-for-leather at Earth at what, Warp 9.6 or something? A stupendously high speed none of the UFP's usual foes could sustain and with a ship that was self-contained enough that it didn't need a supply train, thus enabling it to penetrate Federation space so quickly that only the ships in the innermost sectors could be mustered in time to try and stop them. And, given that the UFP hasn't fought a major interstellar war in, well, forever - the Talarian, Tsen'kethi, and Cardie conflicts were all described in terms of being border wars, though the Cardassian Border War was still rather bloody - even the small force of 40 vessels Hansen brought together was a literal armada by Starfleet standards of the time.

I do agree that there is likely some form of production bottleneck that limits starship numbers, but it may not be as severe as a simple lack of desire for a humungous fleet but a preference for a smaller fleet of more advanced vessels with the best crew available. Starfleet may have an institutional mindset of being a service of high-quality officers and crew that use their skill and technology, not numbers, to defend the Federation and fulfill their missions, meaning that even if there is only a limited bottleneck or none (or if there was one and it's no longer around due to technological advance), they still don't want a larger fleet because "that's not what Starfleet does".

[Pablo Sanchez]

The idea that it's a motivation issue is stupid. It requires that every other empire in the entire region be made stupid or incompetent, so that the Feds can literally deal with them without even trying.

The Federation might simply be much larger than them, but much less effective at marshalling it's resources. Remember that the Federation is a heterogeneous organization that includes large numbers of non-human species, while Starfleet is heavily dominated by humans. A huge majority of observed personnel have been human, the principle civil and military establishments (starfleet command, the academy, the UFP capital) are on Earth, the UFP geographic system is centered on Earth ("Sector 001"), and Earth is commonly portrayed as being absolutely critical to the survival of the Federation. This suggests the possibility that the UFP is a highly decentralized alliance of many different species, and that whereas humans make up a minority of the population (perhaps even a small one) they are disproportionately responsible for the organization and defense of the Federation as a whole, because the other member species are unable or unwilling to make equivalent contributions.

Since we have only observed the Federation through the perspective of members of Starfleet, we don't actually know that much about the makeup of its government and society. Isn't it possible that the Federation is a human-dominated alliance with an essentially defensive character? Say that being a Federation member species entails membership in a customs union and free trade with all other member states, as well as token tax contributions and tacit submission to Federation authority, and allows the member planet to avail itself of the human fleet, which is maintained at a level only large enough to police the territories and defend against nearby threats like the Klingons and Romulans, because the alliance is defensive in nature. The member species, theoretically defended by the humans, do not maintain their own fleets but rather pay the humans to do so. In exchange for sacrificing its young men humanity gets vicarious great power status and a position at the center of local galactic politics. The Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, et al., all have overall much smaller power bases, but are also centralized empires, which allows them to get more from less.

[Stark]

To be honest, I far prefer the huge fleets in DS9 - one would think two large powers would be able to muster a total of ~800 ships given the fact that it is war.

'War' doesn't mean 'has heaps of stuff'. I really don't see the connection here at all, outside of the in-universe 'they're supposed to have dozens of major planets and thousands of colonies what gives with low-hundred fleet counts' thing. Even in TNG random mercenaries had relatively custom ships, so you'd expect large nations to have sizable fleets of that sort of size range.

I don't care so long as it's consistent, but I guess DS9 had to compete with B5.

[Steve]

Eh, i don't really see how someone can compare the war-fighting in the two shows. B5's wars tended to be relatively short if very intense and focused-upon in the show - the Shadow War, for instance, began at the end of the 14th episode of Season 3 and was in the remaining seven episodes of Season 3 and was brought to a close in the first six episodes of Season 4, a grand total of thirteen episodes, while the Earth Civil War took up what, six more episodes with a cleanup episode? - while the Dominion War started at the end of Season 5 and lasted the last two years of Deep Space Nine (against the desires of Rick Berman, it'll be noted, who wanted it to end in the Season 6 opener, was talked into letting the main arc of it stretch for the first six Season 6 episodes, and who then apparently gave up on mandating "the war is over" and let the show keep it around until the very end of the series). The battles were portrayed differently and used differently in the two series (and, while B5 had at least one battle end in a philosophical debate, DS9 OTOH had one end because of a friggin' technobabble solution - and don't get me started on the magic Breen energy dampener... I wonder what's Breen for "MacGuffin"?). I suppose the argument can be that B5 had battles of greater scope, dominating entire episodes, than Trek usually had and that was what was adapted, but I got the impression that Behr and Moore had their own thing going on and weren't just looking at B5 for comparison.

[Stark]

How's that relevant? Fleets were massively inflated in DS9, and I speculate this is due to the influence of B5 on the whole 'fleet battle' silliness. The relative merits of the two shows are totally irrelevant.

If you listen to DS9 hundreds of ships can be lost in a single engagement and while unpleasant, it's not really a big deal and the war will go on for months or years. It's just background noise, not decisive, whcih is a massive shift from TNG.

[Steve]

Checking the air dates, I can see that it is plausible to say that the two full 'fleet battles" of Babylon-5 (Coriana 6 and Mars/Earth at the end of the Earth Civil War) might have influenced Moore and Behr in the Dominion War fleet engagements (though, given the timing, likely not the major engagement at DS9 in "Call to Arms"), so the point is accepted though not entirely agreed with. The fleet engagements in DS9, on and off-screen, always struck me as RDM and Behr trying to show the viewers the scope of a massive interstellar war. What kind of influence Babylon-5 had on that when their battles were, up to Coriana 6, primarily squadron-level much like prior Trek battles is what I'm not sure of.

What did you feel was a clear example of influence from B5?

[FOG3]

There are other nations on earth that are also building their own navies as well so you'd have to add those navies to get the total strength. I'd like to only count the ships that have cross-oceanic capability for actual Starfleet strength. I'll admit that Russia and China (and a few others I can't think of off-hand) could probably qualify as offensive fleets, they are just exercised locally. Anyone want to run those numbers please?

If you're talking the present then the USN is the only operator of Fleet Carriers. The Russian flagship has what is properly a defensive air wing with offensive capability from ship launched missiles, and is in a state of poor repair. The USN mothballed reserve fleet is probably more worthy of being counted given its condition. Their Cold War strategy relied heavily on SSGNs and SSNs opposing Fleet Carriers, so never really got into it in quite the same way. From what I've heard the British currently have no fighter aircraft on their trio of mini-carriers. If you want to count little boys and underwater boats, I would suggest using Haze Gray.

If you project into the future then France, Britain, and India will have carriers. Then there's the Japanese "not a carrier" thing. I'm not aware of Chinese plans for such a vessel, although I'm not informed enough for that to mean much.

The whole Washington Treaty WW2 business demonstrates politicians in RL like to keep fleet sizes down, much like in modern day with nuclear arsenals. Why should the UFP and its neighbors not do something similar? Even if you're militaristic why sink funds into ships instead of research when you don't have to? Why do the equivalent of building a swarm of early WW2 tanks instead of investing the funds to be able to build late WW2 tanks?

For matching enemy fleets, consider the Federation's neighbors. The Klingons are antagonistic politically and slightly militarily; the Romulans are unknowns, and there are other empires out there. They may agree with a few, but that is assuming they can have reliable open communications. Don't forget, the Washington Treaty allowed two nations who were combined smaller than the third (Britain had ~1/3 the US GDP, and Japan had ~1/6) to let the larger power reduce the forces, and the United States at the time was getting isolationist again.

For this to hold true to the Federation, the Federation would have to have twice the economy of the Klingons and Romulans combined (1/3 + 1/6 = 1/2), and not want to get involved in interstellar politics.

Britain was the one compromising going into the treaty by removing their old standard, and the USN doesn't exactly have a history of even vaguely getting the funding it needs or wants. Socialist utopia type place means the old guns and butter argument should be used even more heavily then normal. So why would they be funding them so well, when in reality militaries practically have to fight their Congresses just to get another capital ship?

Further the alternate history episode with the Enterprise C, pretty much establishes things wouldn't be going well if the Klingons decided to break the treaty brokered with the help of Kirk. Both were fought and peace established in the TOS time frame, where Bones is able to even get Romulan Ale. So why would you presume they both aren't talking, and incentives wouldn't encourage them in that direction anyway?

[lord Martiya]

The Federation might simply be much larger than them, but much less effective at marshalling it's resources. Remember that the Federation is a heterogeneous organization that includes large numbers of non-human species, while Starfleet is heavily dominated by humans. A huge majority of observed personnel have been human, the principle civil and military establishments (starfleet command, the academy, the UFP capital) are on Earth, the UFP geographic system is centered on Earth ("Sector 001"), and Earth is commonly portrayed as being absolutely critical to the survival of the Federation. This suggests the possibility that the UFP is a highly decentralized alliance of many different species, and that whereas humans make up a minority of the population (perhaps even a small one) they are disproportionately responsible for the organization and defense of the Federation as a whole, because the other member species are unable or unwilling to make equivalent contributions.

Since we have only observed the Federation through the perspective of members of Starfleet, we don't actually know that much about the makeup of its government and society. Isn't it possible that the Federation is a human-dominated alliance with an essentially defensive character? Say that being a Federation member species entails membership in a customs union and free trade with all other member states, as well as token tax contributions and tacit submission to Federation authority, and allows the member planet to avail itself of the human fleet, which is maintained at a level only large enough to police the territories and defend against nearby threats like the Klingons and Romulans, because the alliance is defensive in nature. The member species, theoretically defended by the humans, do not maintain their own fleets but rather pay the humans to do so. In exchange for sacrificing its young men humanity gets vicarious great power status and a position at the center of local galactic politics. The Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, et al., all have overall much smaller power bases, but are also centralized empires, which allows them to get more from less.

You have a point. And the Klingon would probably be with you: if I remember well, in The Undiscovered Country they called the Federation an Homo Sapiens Club.

[Agent Sorchus]

More likely the relatively small sizes of the fleets in TNG should have been the result of a massive support infrastructure build up. In DS9 the infrastructure takes a back seat to numbers of vessels deployed, and we get the huge fleets of mothballed excelsior class ships out.

In TNG the fleet levels are low and there are a large number of older craft still operated by the fleet. Those old craft are all roughly fall in the same dimensions of the excelsior, with the exception of the rare Ambassador. If the majority of the fleet repair and resupply pre-TNG had been built to handle only vessels of the excelsior's girth; we have to compare that to the fact that Ent-D was never without and always had the required resources, no matter if they were operating in the backwaters of the federation. If both of these statements are true than prior to the deployment of the Galaxy class all the fleet infrastructure had been put through an expensive upgrade program.

The Klingons most likely followed a similar route of build up as the federation to get to TNG era fleet levels, probably an increase on the fixed defenses was also fallowed. The Romulans possibly started their build up earlier so that they could operate their massive warbirds throughout their territory, or the warbirds required far less infrastructure to operate (Quantum Singularity not requiring exotic fuel sources). The Cardassians are operating closer to home and do not deploy ships of excessive dimensions and their next generation of vessels do not exceed the volume of the previous generation of vessels by the same magnitude that the federations vessels do.

This reconciles the fleet numbers in DS9 with the fleet of TNG by supposing that the fleet was partially mothballed and not built up to allow for more modern facilities to be built.

[Isolder74]

Limited DiLithium might make alot of sense. If you look back at the episode that includes the Hathway where they are using a decommissioned vessel to stage a war game. Inside the engine room, the DiLithium chamber is empty. Wonder boy manages to use some Anti-mater he 'borrowed' and the shards of the crystals to get them a small warp jump. Telling in this the decommissioned ship has had it's crystals removed implying that they are valuable and rare enough to warrent their transfer to an operational ship.

[Steve]

Limited DiLithium might make alot of sense. If you look back at the episode that includes the Hathway where they are using a decommissioned vessel to stage a war game. Inside the engine room, the DiLithium chamber is empty. Wonder boy manages to use some Anti-mater he 'borrowed' and the shards of the crystals to get them a small warp jump. Telling in this the decommissioned ship has had it's crystals removed implying that they are valuable and rare enough to warrent their transfer to an operational ship.

Scarcity of Dilithium reserves is a potential bottleneck, yes, though not as bad as in the Kirk era due to the "recrystalization" method (possibly the one pioneered by Spock in ST4).

[Stark]

What did you feel was a clear example of influence from B5?

To be honest, in AU the airtimes were very different so I can't really comment on the influence either way. I've heard the shows were so close in time that it's very difficult to see which direction the influence was going, but airtimes over here put B5 well in front 'big space war' wise (even if it looked worse).

Since quoted fleet sizes increase so much (and yet it was apparently largely older/kitbash ships so it's not really industrial expansion) I figure the writing team just 'changed' the setting. In TNG nobody could say 'oh yeah this fleet of A HUNDRED SHIPS was TOTALLY ANNIHILATED that's a bit sad', because it woudln't really make sense compared to the fleets we see in TNG (even if it is 100 Excelsiors).

[Steve]

Ah, true, forgot to account for Aussie airtimes, I was going by the US ones on IMDB.

I do agree they shifted the setting's scope, but I think it was more of a case of Moore and Behr deciding that this wasn't just another skirmish or standoff with the Klingons but a massive interstellar war between polities containing hundreds of main worlds and thousands of colonies. So they raised the scope to match and, remembering the UFP's relative disarmament, added all the "Frankenstein Fleet" ships to show a UFP so desperate to replace losses and bulk its forces up that it's cannibalizing the mothball fleet and slapping ships together to rush into action.

[Patroklos]

DS9 doesn't get the fleet numbers all that wrong if you remember a few things.

1.) The Dominion war was not a surprise. There were years building up to it where starfleet knew to ramp up production for something coming. The time difference between Wofl 359 and the Dominion War is not inconsiderable given other wartime armament buildups. Take a look at US WWII shipbuilding. In the space of three years the US went from having 3 carriers to 30.

2.) Wolf 359 was a surprise. Given months and years to prepare they obviously would have concentrated a lot more. And while that fleet wasn't as large as the major battle fleets in DS9, even relative to them 40 is a significant force.

3.) We need to take in univers characterizations with a grain of salt. In this day and age a single USN CSG is considered a major fleet by most, and it makes up less than 10% of combatants. Also, I gurantee you that if even a single US ship were sunk for whatever reason the media the world over would hail it as a major defeat.

4.) Throughout the entirety of the Dominion War the Federation was always depicted to be in dire straights. We see a less than a hundred ships onscreen at any given moment, and they never talk about anything more than a couple hundred. That very well could be the vast bulk of the fleet, and to be honest that isn't all that much given the known scale of the Federation.