Carriers in Star Trek

[SilverDragonRed]

Why are people discussing a specialized carrier engaging in a one-on-one match against another ship. Sure, its Star Trek and stuff like that happens a lot in the show, but a carrier (not a battlestar) is only suitable for fleet engagements. It's more limited in its usefulness than a dedicated warship like the Defiant and the Prometheus.

Could be one of the reasons why Starfleet didn't pursue the class of vessel. Another could be that the concept for fightercraft en masse is relatively new. From what I recall, fighter swarms were only used a handful of times and those would have after the Marquis rebellion started. The situation where they would've been most appropriate to use was the First Battle of Chin'toka, and I don't remember if there was a single Peregrine or other strikecraft present at that battle.

[Lord Revan]

Why are people discussing a specialized carrier engaging in a one-on-one match against another ship. Sure, its Star Trek and stuff like that happens a lot in the show, but a carrier (not a battlestar) is only suitable for fleet engagements. It's more limited in its usefulness than a dedicated warship like the Defiant and the Prometheus.

Could be one of the reasons why Starfleet didn't pursue the class of vessel. Another could be that the concept for fightercraft en masse is relatively new. From what I recall, fighter swarms were only used a handful of times and those would have after the Marquis rebellion started. The situation where they would've been most appropriate to use was the First Battle of Chin'toka, and I don't remember if there was a single Peregrine or other strikecraft present at that battle.

yeah it's kind of odd to think of specialized ships like carriers engaging in 1 on 1 duels with other ships, it's not their role. At war carriers would probably be used as part of a fleet taskforce not as independent operators.

Only case were I could see carriers being used as independent operators would be to raid opponent shipping lines (or as pirate ships).

[Simon_Jester]

Thing is, the fighters lacking strategic mobility is a problem in fleet engagements as well as in single-ship actions. If your fleet deploys fighters and the enemy breaks contact to retreat or to attack another target at high warp, you're forced to choose between stopping to recover your own fighters, or abandoning them in place to pursue the enemy- which leaves you vulnerable to defeat in detail since you've just divided your fighting strength between two groups that can't reinforce each other.

I'd said they're more a mix between gunboats and modern fighters in terms of their battlefield use, they seemed to able to cause nontrivial damage to the Galors they attacked even if the attack wasn't decisive on its own.

Gunboats (and to a much greater extent torpedo boats) do inflict damage on larger ships... just not very much, and they tend to take heavy casualties in personnel and materiel. Even in situations where a full-sized warship would have taken light or no casualties.

[Esquire]

I think that might be less true in Star Trek than in other settings - ships seem to have a few main phaser arrays and no dedicated point-defense, although I'm sure that would change if somebody started using fighters seriously. Additionally, since torpedoes are often the decisive weapon, a battlestar-type design attacking in concert with its fighter complement could potentially be disproportionately more effective than a conventional ship of the same tonnage simply through a higher probability of having a torpedo tube on target at any given time.

[SilverDragonRed]

Thing is, the fighters lacking strategic mobility is a problem in fleet engagements as well as in single-ship actions. If your fleet deploys fighters and the enemy breaks contact to retreat or to attack another target at high warp, you're forced to choose between stopping to recover your own fighters, or abandoning them in place to pursue the enemy- which leaves you vulnerable to defeat in detail since you've just divided your fighting strength between two groups that can't reinforce each other.

The only solution I can think to solve that strategic mobility problem is to recreate the slipstream drive they put on the Delta Flyer in Timeless. That would greatly extend the reach of the strikecraft, even if they're only going 1% of the speed shown in that episode.

[Simon_Jester]

On the other hand, if they could recreate that for shuttlecraft they'd be a long way towards recreating it for everything, which would basically make carriers irrelevant because fighters could launch directly from a fixed base and hit anywhere within thousands of light-years. The only reason to have carriers then is so that your fighters' base can be mobile and therefore immune to long range surprise attack.

[Balrog]

On the other hand, if they could recreate that for shuttlecraft they'd be a long way towards recreating it for everything, which would basically make carriers irrelevant because fighters could launch directly from a fixed base and hit anywhere within thousands of light-years. The only reason to have carriers then is so that your fighters' base can be mobile and therefore immune to long range surprise attack.

You could in a sense recreate the Tiger's Claw from Wing Commander: the carrier's job is to operate deep within the enemy's territory, hiding in isolated/poorly-patrolled regions of space, launching fighters to harry the enemy. Even with warp drive equipped fighters, attacking a vital target and having to travel the hundreds/thousands of light-years to get back to a friendly base would be more hazardous than a mobile carrier allowing quick rearm/refit service.

[Sea Skimmer]

In real life carrier design is driven largely by the need to put a giant open box inside of a ship that undergoes heavy bending motions in the seaway. Remove that issue and you have a lot more design options, and I'd suggest a logical carrier in space would be far more like a seaplane tender then a modern angled deck carrier. If you accept no hanger or only a hanger big enough for a few craft at a time, because weather is no longer a thing, you could operate much bigger craft and simply attach them to the exterior of the hull for long distance moves. Trek seems to be far more on these lines then the nonesense that are tiny tactical fighters in space. Seriously if you have FTL and shields then its pretty well impossible that you'd generate a situation in which small fighters actually make any sense for ship to ship combat.

[biostem]

Why are people discussing a specialized carrier engaging in a one-on-one match against another ship. Sure, its Star Trek and stuff like that happens a lot in the show, but a carrier (not a battlestar) is only suitable for fleet engagements. It's more limited in its usefulness than a dedicated warship like the Defiant and the Prometheus.

Could be one of the reasons why Starfleet didn't pursue the class of vessel. Another could be that the concept for fightercraft en masse is relatively new. From what I recall, fighter swarms were only used a handful of times and those would have after the Marquis rebellion started. The situation where they would've been most appropriate to use was the First Battle of Chin'toka, and I don't remember if there was a single Peregrine or other strikecraft present at that battle.

Well, my approach is one of "take the typical ST:TNG ship-to-ship encounter, but now give one a bunch of fighters". With the introduction of newer types of ships, a la the Defiant, ST fleet tactics didn't appear to change - we didn't see wings of *just* defiants flying any sort of picket duty or employing flanking tactics. Nor do we see anyone using tactics like the Picard maneuver to rapidly position around the battlefield. Thus, I'm assuming that, other than carrying fighters, these Federation carriers would not change other aspects of how they operate.

[SpottedKitty]

With the introduction of newer types of ships, a la the Defiant, ST fleet tactics didn't appear to change - we didn't see wings of *just* defiants flying any sort of picket duty or employing flanking tactics.

<nod> That would have been interesting to see developed in DS9.

I remember one piece of crossover fanfic I read where the Defiant-class was first introduced, and one character did say they "wanted to develop swarming tactics once we've built a few more of them".

[Eternal_Freedom]

They did seem rather slow on building them. We see, what, five of them? Both Defiants, the Valiant and the pair sent to chase down the Prometheus in Voyager's "Message in a Bottle." Not exactly a sterling effort, especially since they apparently had the kinks worked out by mid-season 3 of DS9 and a Borg attack and the Klingon conflict and the Dominion heating up.

They had two and a half years or so between getting the problems worked out and the Dominion taking DS9. Surely they could have built more than a handful of the things. I don't know the exact ratios, but I'm pretty sure one Galaxy-class equates to several Defiants, in both volume, materials and crew, and we know they built more Galaxies after the first batch since we see ten of the things turn up in "Sacrifice of Angels."

[Lord Revan]

IIRC the so called "war GCS" were just regular GCS with non-essential systems left uninstalled so they could be converted to regular GCS after the war, where as the Defiant class has exactly 1 role ro blow things up and it's a role the Federation is uncomforthble at best of times so they might want to build that many defiants as they don't want to that many defiants with no real use after the war.

[Sea Skimmer]

Defiant is basically a fleet torpedo boat in design and function. It has about as much in common with a casemate ram as it does a modern fighter.

[montypython]

From playing different types of space sims, one major consistent element across all of them I've found is that gunboats tend to be the smallest effective spacecraft for combat engagements, especially in large battles, due to better survivability, endurance and damage capability. Single seat fighters lack all of these even in large numbers, and can be destroyed before they get into range. Only if the setting/game mechanics specifically handicap large vessels do single seat craft work at all.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yup, and in real life we know a pilot cannot be functional past 8-10 hours in a fighter like cockpit, ferry flights up to 12 hours can be done but at the end of them the man will need to be lifted out of the cockpit. Anything over about three hours is very taxing. That issue alone would horrendously undercut the utility of a small fighter in space where distances are colossal. A small gunboat with such amazing features as an actual toilet would be absurdly more sustainable. The larger airliners and bombers have crew rest bunks for good reason!

No hard reason even exists why a fighter should have an agility advantage over a larger vessel in space, since all course changes require main engine impulse, and bigger ships have better payload fractions. If FTL is in play meanwhile you can simply appear in firing range of the enemy and salvo off some giant pile of missiles before the enemy can even get his pilots into the damn cockpits. Meaning the only value of fighters would be flying standing patrols, which means you'll be lucky if 10% of your force is able to get into action at any given time.

A role might exist for ships with very small crews and say, only 1 week of endurance, but it'd probably look a lot more like a frigate sized arsenal ship then a modern fighter or bomber.

[Lord Revan]

I suppose something like the Protoss carrier from Starcraft might work where they use AI controlled drone fighters instead of ones piloted by a living being.

but to bring this back to Trek while use of FTL is theoretically possible we don't see it that often even when dealing with essentially stationary objects like DS9 so it would certainly mean that unless show otherwise most if not all combat would happen on impulse speeds with little to no use of warp speeds, hell the fact that Picard manouver was such devestating "there's no defense against this" attack suggest warp speed manouvers are really rare (if it was common for ships to use warp drive during combat then there would be counter to the Picard Manouver simply because as far as tactics go it's nothing special).

[Q99]

IIRC the so called "war GCS" were just regular GCS with non-essential systems left uninstalled so they could be converted to regular GCS after the war, where as the Defiant class has exactly 1 role ro blow things up and it's a role the Federation is uncomforthble at best of times so they might want to build that many defiants as they don't want to that many defiants with no real use after the war.

It had some phaser strips added to the nacelles too. Just a small variant, really.

Also it's speculated the warp core was upgraded to be more stable, because they were taking pretty heavy hits without blowing up like we've seen Galaxies occasionally do.

Though almost certainly, each wave of upgrades would make their cores a *bit* more stable... in TNG season 1-2 they seemed really bad, but got gradually less so as time went on.

I do have vague memories of looking through various Star Fleet Battles sourcebooks (for what that's worth) many years ago, and at least one of the carrier designs there looked a bit like an Excelsior on steroids with rows of launch bays running down the sides of the secondary hull; very different from the Akira layout with one big hangar in the middle.

Yea, there was one like that. SFB definitely used carriers a lot more, but they were so much bookkeeping I never really payed too much attention to them ^^

Size-wise, their fighters did strike me as akin to Runabouts and such- a bit bigger than a shuttle, way smaller than an actual ship.

[Lord Revan]

IIRC the so called "war GCS" were just regular GCS with non-essential systems left uninstalled so they could be converted to regular GCS after the war, where as the Defiant class has exactly 1 role ro blow things up and it's a role the Federation is uncomforthble at best of times so they might want to build that many defiants as they don't want to that many defiants with no real use after the war.

It had some phaser strips added to the nacelles too. Just a small variant, really.

Also it's speculated the warp core was upgraded to be more stable, because they were taking pretty heavy hits without blowing up like we've seen Galaxies occasionally do.

Though almost certainly, each wave of upgrades would make their cores a *bit* more stable... in TNG season 1-2 they seemed really bad, but got gradually less so as time went on.

Sure there was minor upgrages but my point was that that a "War GCS" could be converted into a normal GCS and could do everything a normal Galaxy did, while a Defiant ws purpose build for a specific task that would not show up that often and was more or less useless for the typical exploration and science tasks Starfleet didn during peace time.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Revan - I get your point, and it's a good one. However at the peak of the Dominion War (season 6/7) we'd already seen in Season 4 that Earth would accept military style stuff going on if push came to shove (even if it was a conspiracy at the end). I don't think the Federation Council would be pissing about worrying about public opinion on calling something a "warship" or the cost/benefit of the exploration/scientific tonnage : $$$ ratio when their very survival as an interstellar empire is at a very considerable risk of not existing next year.

Starfleet and the Federation may be passive by default but they're not suicidal.

I too am surprised at the lack of Defiants that we see on screen. If I were them, I'd be churning out 20 for every GCS in production and fuck the costs.


The *real* reason, behind the scenes, is they didn't want the battle scenes to be complicated or "confusing" to the viewer - remember the execs had a very dim view of the intelligence of their audience - which is why Defiant was called Defiant and not Valiant originally - having two ships with a V would "confuse" the audience. (Voyager & Valiant)

That said, we did see Message in a Bottle, which had two Defiants flanking an Akira class as some sort of squad, which was pretty cool. Little strike forces like that would have been awesome in the Dominion war - able to take down fleets of 20-30 Battlebugs with little/ no losses - if TDiC is representative (they destroyed 12 ships out of 150 and got out alive).

[SpottedKitty]

hell the fact that Picard manouver was such devestating "there's no defense against this" attack suggest warp speed manouvers are really rare

Isn't there a mention in the episode that the trick only worked because Ferengi ships at the time (and maybe in the "present" as well) don't have short-range FTL sensors, only lightspeed sensors? That's why the short jump of only a few light-seconds produced the confusion Picard took advantage of. This would imply a Picard manoeuvre just plain wouldn't work against anyone with sensor tech comparable to what's used in a Starfleet ship.

[Batman]

No, there isn't. The fan theory is the Ferengi didn't otherwise the trick would be completely useless but nothing in the episode actually says so.
Of course the trick should have been useless against the E-D anyway because it not only undeniably has FTL sensors but is much bigger and more advanced so even if, for whatever reason, Picard managed to carry through with his attack, their reaction should've been 'Congratulations! You brought our shields down to 99.75 %. Can we talk now?'

[Lord Revan]

hell the fact that Picard manouver was such devestating "there's no defense against this" attack suggest warp speed manouvers are really rare

Isn't there a mention in the episode that the trick only worked because Ferengi ships at the time (and maybe in the "present" as well) don't have short-range FTL sensors, only lightspeed sensors? That's why the short jump of only a few light-seconds produced the confusion Picard took advantage of. This would imply a Picard manoeuvre just plain wouldn't work against anyone with sensor tech comparable to what's used in a Starfleet ship.

As Batman pointed out it's fan theory and a one not supported by the episode in question where it's implied that federation had not discovered no defense agaist the Picard Manouver and it should work just fine against the Enterprise (granted Data does discover a counter) so a lack of FTL sensors doesn't seem to be the issue.

[BabelHuber]

I think the proper analogy for 'fighters' (that is, single-seat independent spacecraft) in Star Trek isn't fighters from 20th century naval aviation. It's gunboats. Small vessels that are built using essentially the same technology as big heavy warships, and armed with smaller versions of the same weapons.

I totally agree. I would add that the whole purpose of such a gunship is to perform a given task cheaper than a cruiser could. Hence at the beginning of the 20th century you have various sorts of gunboats, ranging from tiny ships which were used in rivers to long-range ships which could even perform cruiser-like tasks, but were inferior regarding speed and armament.

Such a ship usually gets misson-killed by a real cruiser quickly and has no chance to run away. Hence it is not suitable for fleet actions, but it IS able to replace a real cruiser for certain tasks, so you can use your cruisers for fleet actions, trade protection, commerce raiding etc. instead of wasting them for tasks a cheaper ship could also perform.

In ST, we do see such ships, like the Nova class USS Equinox in the Voyager-episode Equinox. If I recall correctly, it's called a science vessel, but of course it should be superior to freighters, Marquis raiders and other smaller or civilian ships. So if you e.g. want to check freighters for illegal loads, hunt pirates or show the flag, a Nova can be as good as a Sovereign.

The same goes for the Peregrines. They are Warp-capable, but due to their small size they should only be able to perform missions which last a few days at max. For certain missions near a star system, their cost/performance ratio should be tremendous.

Peregrines were used when the Federation retook DS9, but the fleet had to sortie ASAP, so the Dominion couldn't destroy the mine field at the wormhole. Hence the Federation gathered together all ships it could.

I doubt Peregrines would be used when there are enough better-suited ships available. Instead, you rather would use Peregrines to replace some cruisers for standard tasks, so you would have more cruisers serving in your fleet.

Hence I don't see the need for carriers in ST, as well as I don't see the need for ocean-going, long range motherships for Torpedo boats in 1910.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I would note, a Nova Class is a science vessel yes, but if you look at the hull, that fucker is a light cruiser in terms of its combat role. Comparable number of phaser arrays, forward and aft torpedo tubes (though fewer than Voyager), and was able to give Voyager a run for its money even in a decrepit state. It was a bit slower in warp and had a smaller crew, its original design role was internal patrol and planetary surveys. Rather than 5 year duty tours, it would have duty tours of a few months to a year probably.

And that is something I think gets missed. Federation ships have a lot of wasted space (in terms of combat performance), typically. Because their mission profiles are particularly long-term. They have crew amenities, space for families including the infrastructure of a small town. Strip that out, and you can get ships like the Defiant and Nova classes, which can punch well above their own tonnage.

A ship like the Akira can spare the space to have large hanger bays without sacrificing performance in other areas, and can thus function as a hybrid carrier/missile cruiser.

[BabelHuber]

And that is something I think gets missed. Federation ships have a lot of wasted space (in terms of combat performance), typically. Because their mission profiles are particularly long-term. They have crew amenities, space for families including the infrastructure of a small town. Strip that out, and you can get ships like the Defiant and Nova classes, which can punch well above their own tonnage.

Actually, I think it does make sense for the Federation to only have ships which can handle long-term missions:

Since it sometimes takes weeks or months for a ship to reach its destination, all ships have to be able to handle this. It's like 100 years ago with ships of the British Empire, where the crews basically lived on the ships. In contrast, German naval crews lived in caserns on land and manned the ships only during their missions.

This of course means that the ships were designed differently, the British ships had to have more creature comfort and a longer range.

What does not make much sense is that all Federation vessels are multi-purpose designs, so they have lots of storage space which isn't needed for combat missions.

So I could envision a warship-like Federation design without multi-purpose capabilities, but I don't think it makes sense for a Federation ship to only be able to handle short missions.