What stops Starfleet from building more ships?

[Bounty]

with only the infrastructure coming from the seriously damaged war machine of Cardassia

Nope, the Dominion set up their own facilities pretty quickly. Trelka V was a massive base of Dominion design; for instance; their cloning labs were new builds too.

In any case, it's irrelevant since even those "damaged" Cardassian facilities were considered enough to rebuild the Dominion fleet even with Cardassian space cordoned off. Industrial capacity was never the deciding factor in the war, else the reinforcements in SoA would be vital to continuing the war effort rather than simply a factor tipping the balance of power in the Dominion's favour.

[Batman]

Assuming Starfleet is usually spread more or less evenly across UFP territory, given the limits of Warp drive 40 ships is quite a lot even assuming an overall fleet strength far exceeding that depicted in DS9. They had what, 24 hours from the Swiss Army Deflector Dish failure to get those ships together? Assuming Trek ships can average 10,000c over that time anything more than 28 lightyears away was effectively out of it. And while Federation territory is comparatively tiny, it's not THAT tiny.

[Agent Sorchus]

In any case, it's irrelevant since even those "damaged" Cardassian facilities were considered enough to rebuild the Dominion fleet even with Cardassian space cordoned off. Industrial capacity was never the deciding factor in the war, else the reinforcements in SoA would be vital to continuing the war effort rather than simply a factor tipping the balance of power in the Dominion's favour.

You can claim this, but there is no evidence that the support industries were not important, there even is counter evidence, namely that the federation and their allies deliberately targeted the industry of the Dominion from the start of the war. The Dominion did not target infrastructure or industry, they targeted population centers in preference to anti industrial strikes. Namely if the Breen were able to do a deep strike versus the San Fransisco then why did they not expend that fleet against the industrial targets like the federation did in A Call to Arms. To say that it was not important is to deny the evidence that the federation and allies specifically targeted industrial targets while the Dominion were more focused on conquering civilian population centers, so that they could fulfill the changelings egocentric religious beliefs of superiority.

It is significant to note that of the 6 Cardassian shipyards that are mentioned in DS9 3 were destroyed another was attacked off screen with any unknown fate the next was only a refit and repair yard, and the last was "minor" yard that was only 4 years before the war. If the industry was not important to the war then why did the federation persecute operation after operation to destroy those targets?

That's right, it was important.

[JGregory32]

It could have been that the impact from Wolf 359 might not have been because 40 ships were lost, but because those ships represented a large amount of tonage and technological investment.

Everyone seems to think that there's a treaty between the Federation and the Klingon Empire limiting the number of ship to parity, what if it actually limits total tonage?
The Klingons respond by building lots of little, low tonage ships (BOPS and a few larger ones) while the Federation goes the other way, building larger ships but fewer of them.

The Klingon method is good for projecting a presence but the Federation method is good for actually putting the beat down.
I guess a comparision would be the Klingon's building lots of PT boats while the Federation are building battleships and dreadnaughts.

[Darth Wong]

Correct me if I'm wrong, Bounty: when you brought up the fact that Fleet X, Y and Z each had hundreds of ships, weren't you trying to demonstrate that, contrary to Patroklos' claim, Starfleet undoubtably operates more than a "couple hundred" starships?

Starfleet operates at least a thousand vessels dedicated solely to the Dominion War effort for any of the numbers in DS9 to make sense. If the Klingons can send 1,100 ships to the frontline, as they do in Whe It Rains..., from a fleet that was an even match with Starfleet despite being almost fully dedicated to combat vessels, there is no way the Federation would have survived fielding only 2-300 vessels which themselves are split between defence and exploration.

There is no way the Federation and Klingons could even put up a fight against a 22,000-vessel-strong Dominion with just 1,500 vessels.

There is no way the loss of nearly a hundred starships in a single battle could be considered a non-fatal blow to a couple-hundred strong Starfleet, yet that is precisely what happens in A Time To Stand - 98 ships lost, a devastating but survivable setback.

I think it'd be very hard to make a case for a Starfleet that doesn't consist of at least 2,500-5,000 frontline vessels - neatly splitting the alliance three-ways and still ending up outnumbered against the Dominion - unless you assume a massive, never-mentioned, never-shown technological advantage over every other power in the show.

People like to bang on about the Wolf 359 battle being a crippling blow, but the fact is, Starfleet suffered worse multiple times over the course of the Dominion War and always bounced back. To a peacetime Federation with only a vague memory of interstellar war those 39 ships were a punch to the face, but for the Federation operating a decade later and going up against a five-digit aliens fleet of doom? Those 39 ships were peanuts.

Your argument is not unreasonable given the fact that we are forced to reconcile the events of DS9 with the rest of the timeline. However, that is immaterial to the earlier discussion about whether DS9 is difficult to reconcile with the rest of the timeline. Or, to put it another way, would anyone in his right mind have proposed such large fleet numbers before DS9 aired?

[Darth Wong]

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 ...

That's always a possibility, but if the Federation had a huge territory to defend and an extremely inefficient way of mustering forces to defend it, you would think someone would have found a way to exploit that.

[Darth Wong]

In any case, it's irrelevant since even those "damaged" Cardassian facilities were considered enough to rebuild the Dominion fleet even with Cardassian space cordoned off. Industrial capacity was never the deciding factor in the war, else the reinforcements in SoA would be vital to continuing the war effort rather than simply a factor tipping the balance of power in the Dominion's favour.

Based on some pretty vague dialogue which can be interpreted in more than one way. Yes, they feared that the Dominion would rebuild their forces if they were hemmed in. But the Dominion already had a huge fleet orbiting Cardassia: it's not as if they were expecting them to rebuild their forces from nothing. That was the whole point of the argument: should they risk heavy casualties by attacking Cardassia despite the massive defensive force the Dominion had waiting for them?

Think about this: it means that the Dominion already had enough fleet power at Cardassia to make a frontal assault a dangerous and costly proposition. Any increase to this force, or time to fortify positions and deploy purpose-built defenses, would only make it more costly, especially since the defender appears to have certain advantages given the events of certain prior episodes, such as the ability to draw power from huge fixed generator installations. The idea that this scene means "OMG they can produce unlimited ships at will" is just plain silly.

[Simon_Jester]

What scarce factor of production stops them from churning out more ships? Skilled labor? Industrial output? Personnel to man their ships? Expensive, hard to produce technology? Are their shipyards difficult to construct? Difficulty lifting parts into orbit? A shortage of raw materials or a difficulty in transporting said raw materials? The expense of producing antimatter? Or, simply a small military budget?

When Starfleet asks for more ships, what production bottleneck stops them? Has this ever been suggested on screen, or off-screen?

"The expense of producing antimatter" is an interesting suggestion, I think. Even if we give the Federation the most favorable assumptions about manufacturing, spacelift, and labor capacity imaginable:

-Nigh unlimited labor, because they have a large population with very little to do in a post-scarcity economy;
-Nigh-unlimited production at the shipyards, with replicators turning out large components fast enough to make assembly a modular process, like what US shipyards did with Liberty ships in the Second World War;
-And nigh-unlimited spacelift, because (hypothetically) with replicators you can get most of the tonnage of raw materials you need from space-based sources rather than tossing them up from a planet.

They still need antimatter, and they're not going to be able to mine it from anywhere. Starfleet's reliance on a high energy cost manufactured fuel for its warp drives may be the bottleneck in capacity after all. Your ability to make antimatter depends almost entirely on your supply of energy, and if you can't build enough groundside fusion power plants to keep more than X ships supplied with antimatter, your fleet is limited to X ships.

I don't believe that they have nigh-unlimited shipyard capacity, but even if they did, they'd still be in trouble unless they also had unlimited power supplies.

Assuming Starfleet is usually spread more or less evenly across UFP territory, given the limits of Warp drive 40 ships is quite a lot even assuming an overall fleet strength far exceeding that depicted in DS9. They had what, 24 hours from the Swiss Army Deflector Dish failure to get those ships together? Assuming Trek ships can average 10,000c over that time anything more than 28 lightyears away was effectively out of it. And while Federation territory is comparatively tiny, it's not THAT tiny.

And since Wolf 359 is so close to Earth, it's a good bet that all those ships were among the ones closest to Earth. Posit that Starfleet keeps a lot of its "best" ships, with elite crews and all the latest equipment upgrades, in its core territory, and losing 40 of those ships becomes one hell of a loss. Even if the overall fleet has ten or twenty times that many.

[Bounty]

In any case, it's irrelevant since even those "damaged" Cardassian facilities were considered enough to rebuild the Dominion fleet even with Cardassian space cordoned off. Industrial capacity was never the deciding factor in the war, else the reinforcements in SoA would be vital to continuing the war effort rather than simply a factor tipping the balance of power in the Dominion's favour.

Based on some pretty vague dialogue which can be interpreted in more than one way. Yes, they feared that the Dominion would rebuild their forces if they were hemmed in. But the Dominion already had a huge fleet orbiting Cardassia: it's not as if they were expecting them to rebuild their forces from nothing. That was the whole point of the argument: should they risk heavy casualties by attacking Cardassia despite the massive defensive force the Dominion had waiting for them?

Think about this: it means that the Dominion already had enough fleet power at Cardassia to make a frontal assault a dangerous and costly proposition. Any increase to this force, or time to fortify positions and deploy purpose-built defenses, would only make it more costly, especially since the defender appears to have certain advantages given the events of certain prior episodes, such as the ability to draw power from huge fixed generator installations. The idea that this scene means "OMG they can produce unlimited ships at will" is just plain silly.

I'm not arguing for unlimited ships. I simply have a problem with Jester's idea that the Dominion was strapped for production facilities and that this was some sort of decisive factor in the war. They would at least have needed sufficient facilities to maintain and repair the fleet around Cardassia for as long as they planned to bunker down, which to me suggests that they had a bit more in the way of shipyards than whatever was left of the already-not-that-large Cardassian navy.

Or, to put it another way, would anyone in his right mind have proposed such large fleet numbers before DS9 aired?

I doubt it. Up until DS9 the biggest fleet action outside of Wolf 359 consisted of what, two dozen or so ships in Redemption?

[Samuel]

They still need antimatter, and they're not going to be able to mine it from anywhere. Starfleet's reliance on a high energy cost manufactured fuel for its warp drives may be the bottleneck in capacity after all. Your ability to make antimatter depends almost entirely on your supply of energy, and if you can't build enough groundside fusion power plants to keep more than X ships supplied with antimatter, your fleet is limited to X ships.

You can also build large solar panels to get energy to produce it. Antimatter is just a storage medium or energy so this is a limit of their ability to produce energy... except that is tied directly to their industrial potential so it doesn't make a ton of sense or it to be the limiting factor.

[Stark]

People like to bang on about the Wolf 359 battle being a crippling blow, but the fact is, Starfleet suffered worse multiple times over the course of the Dominion War and always bounced back. To a peacetime Federation with only a vague memory of interstellar war those 39 ships were a punch to the face, but for the Federation operating a decade later and going up against a five-digit aliens fleet of doom? Those 39 ships were peanuts.

From SoD, this is a pretty unavoidable conclusion. It is, however, clearly the result of hackjob writers just fiating up hundreds more ships. If you're going to say that the 359 loss wasn't really numerically significant, that it was a slap to the face, stung more than it hurt, stirred up a peacetime force unprepared for losses or whatever that's fine ('two years to recover' could mean a lot of things aside from 'it takes 2 years to build 40 ships'), but there are clearly not a thousand ships lying around in TNG doing nothing. They were retconned into existence in DS9, to my mind simply to match the very heavily fleet-based war-map-driven stuff in Babylon 5. That's not necessarily bad, but since I'm not emotionally invested in DS9 I have no problem accepting that they just made it up and wholesale changed the setting/tone/whatever.

Not that I'm saying you're nerdraging or anything; in-universe your conclusion is sound.

[Simon_Jester]

They still need antimatter, and they're not going to be able to mine it from anywhere. Starfleet's reliance on a high energy cost manufactured fuel for its warp drives may be the bottleneck in capacity after all. Your ability to make antimatter depends almost entirely on your supply of energy, and if you can't build enough groundside fusion power plants to keep more than X ships supplied with antimatter, your fleet is limited to X ships.

You can also build large solar panels to get energy to produce it. Antimatter is just a storage medium or energy so this is a limit of their ability to produce energy... except that is tied directly to their industrial potential so it doesn't make a ton of sense or it to be the limiting factor.

OK. Replace "fusion power plants" with "fusion reactors, solar cells, or other forms of energy that don't burn manufactured fuel." I only used "fusion plants" because they're the iconic source of high density power in Star Trek (and much other science fiction, come to think of it).

More generally:
Why shouldn't fleet size be linearly related to industrial capacity? When you get right down to it, any explanation except "they don't build more ships because they don't want to" is a direct function of overall industrial capacity. Maybe they don't build more ships because they don't have enough shipyards- they should more and bigger shipyards? Maybe they don't build more ships because they don't have enough raw materials- they should build more mines or asteroid extraction facilities or whatever. Maybe they don't build more ships because they don't have enough antimatter- they should build more antimatter converters.

If Starfleet's size is limited by anything other than obstinance and stupidity, the limiting factor must be the industrial power available to Starfleet to build ships, or to maintain ships once they're built.
_______

If antimatter converters are large, expensive pieces of capital equipment (likely, in my opinion), they're a plausible candidate for the limit. For Starfleet to operate more ships, it must make more antimatter, and the facilities for making the stuff aren't cheap or easy to run. They're only going to be able to increase their fuel production if someone is willing to give them the staff and gigawatts to do it with.

Two practical consequences of this:
-In peacetime, the Starfleet antimatter budget is likely to be a small fraction of the Federation's total power supply. That goes double if the Federation has widespread use of energy-gobbling technology like transporters, holodecks, and replicators in civilian life.
-In wartime, the "hard limit" on Starfleet's ship strength can increase drastically, simply because people are now dedicating 20% of their civilization's power supply to making antimatter instead of 2%. Indeed, if Starfleet is running its antimatter-makers on a low duty cycle, it may be able to step up fuel production almost instantly, as part of the initial mobilization.

[JGregory32]

Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't a big bottleneck be training? Besides O'Brian every character is an officer who attended starfleet academy. There's a big bottleneck right there, unless you massively expand the academy, your just not going to have room to train people.

They could have gone to a war footing where people were given less training or more training was done on simulators such as holodecks and not in classrooms to staff the ships we see in DS9. They could also have dragged in everybody who retired but was still mentally and physically able to command.
A 'Frakenship' fleet led by gray hairs and crewed by people so green they might be Orian could account for many of the issues seen in the DS9 series.

[Darth Wong]

I'm not arguing for unlimited ships. I simply have a problem with Jester's idea that the Dominion was strapped for production facilities and that this was some sort of decisive factor in the war.

How could it not be a decisive factor in the war? If they had twice as many ships, they would have won.

They would at least have needed sufficient facilities to maintain and repair the fleet around Cardassia for as long as they planned to bunker down, which to me suggests that they had a bit more in the way of shipyards than whatever was left of the already-not-that-large Cardassian navy.

Have you seriously thought this through? Maintaining a defensive force to protect a single star system is obviously much easier than maintaining a fleet which is actively patrolling space over an area hundreds of light years wide. Hell, these ships wouldn't even necessarily need functional warp drive, and certainly not high warp capability.

Or, to put it another way, would anyone in his right mind have proposed such large fleet numbers before DS9 aired?

I doubt it. Up until DS9 the biggest fleet action outside of Wolf 359 consisted of what, two dozen or so ships in Redemption?

Well that's the problem, isn't it? It's actually a huge problem in terms of continuity. One might argue that perhaps they experienced a huge and rapid conscription-based force buildup akin to that of the US in World War 2, but you can't run high-tech starships with hordes of poorly led grunts who have a few weeks of basic training. The alternative argument (that they had this size of military all along but it was just out of sight or highly dispersed) is not much stronger: every time we see deep-territory ships in prior series, they're always small and poorly armed vessels.

[Alyeska]

Wolf 359 was clearly a big blow to the Federation. It represented a loss of significant value to Starfleet, and it was the single biggest Federation fleet ever assembled in TNG and up through the first half of DS9. But as others have put it, things changed. The writers realized that the fleet was a little too small for their intended stories. Probably wrote themselves into a corner. The producers indicated an upward number of 12,000 Starfleet ships. Just a tad larger then Wolf 359.

Anyway, the explanation for the larger number of ships post Wolf 359 that I've liked best is a combination of little things. The Borg caused Starfleet to consider new things. The Defiant was the start of this project. I suspect that after the loss of Wolf 359 they started to increase the production rates somewhat. Then tensions increase with the Maquis, Cardassians, the Dominion shows up, Klingons start a little war. Starfleet further increases ship production. That still doesn't account for all the ships. Infact, there are a significantly larger number of older ships than new ones. Miranda and Excelsior class ships. The final element I would pull from the Boneyards. We know that the Federation has a number of ship depots where they stored their older ships. With the looming war on the horizon, and then the war itself, Starfleet likely started reactivating those ships in large quantities.

Even still, we are left with inequities. The Dominon is said to outnumber the Klingons something like 20-1 when the Klingons had 1,500 ships on the front line. Even if Starfleet had 4,000 ships, that are a tad outnumbered. If we go with the Producers intended 8,000-12,000 ship fleet, it becomes plausible Starfleet could take on the Dominion. But that just cannot jive with what has been established in TNG and half of DS9. Starfleet flying around with 12,000 ships could sustain 40 ships at Wolf 359 without sneezing.

I wonder. Could the 8,000-12,000 figure potentially represent every Starfleet ship in the entire war, destroyed, built, and reactivated? That becomes a little more plausible.

[Darth Wong]

The very high ship figures might include logistical and support ships. We know that the Federation seems to treat small runabouts as full ships, even assigning them NCC registry numbers. Moreover, a real-life naval fleet is not just fighting ships. It also includes support ships, which are no less "ships" than any other kind of ship. For all you know, every kind of ship which could carry fuel was pressed into service, so the space-faring equivalent of every U-Haul cube van in ten star systems might have been called to duty and made part of Starfleet.

They might be counting Klingon and Dominion ships the same way.

[Stark]

Defiant is total red herring; they built less than a dozen during DS9. That has nothing to do with where the hundreds of new ships came from. Just like the other low-number classes like Norway etc, those developed too late to be built en masse like Akira, etc.

The idea that they had hundreds floating in storage and crews for them but never activated them (say for the Cardy war) and that they built piece of shit worthless kitbashes is similarly dumb; if all this material was lying around, why was it never used until the writers of DS9 waved their magic wand and increased total fleet size by more than an order of magnitude in about 2 years?

It's pretty sad that they COULD have used these magical rabbit hole ships in any of a dozen other crises, but didn't, and even in the movies Starfleet is far smaller than DS9 suggests (we never see a fleet larger than a few dozen ships, ever). Turns out the writers were just internet nerds who wanted to write stories that didn't fit within Star Trek and so they changed what Star Trek was... and then it changed back.

[Stark]

The very high ship figures might include logistical and support ships. We know that the Federation seems to treat small runabouts as full ships, even assigning them NCC registry numbers. Moreover, a real-life naval fleet is not just fighting ships. It also includes support ships, which are no less "ships" than any other kind of ship. For all you know, every kind of ship which could carry fuel was pressed into service, so the space-faring equivalent of every U-Haul cube van in ten star systems might have been called to duty and made part of Starfleet.

This is really the one way out. In DS9 they appear to talk in very broad terms about 'ships', and it's possible that the total numbers include all kinds of ships that aren't of military value, aren't full starships, whatever. I believe you yourself suggested that there's precendent for this back in the day; Dominion fleets and Klingon fleets count very small ships like Birds of Prey as 'ships', after all, so for the Federation to have numerical parity with their generally far larger ships is absurd unless you posit either Fed 'frigates' or some strange way of counting ships. Many fleets are shown with generic cargo ships.

[Patroklos]

Are you seriously suggesting Starfleet operated no more than a "few hundred ships" during the Dominion War?

No, I am telling you what we know the high limit has to be (600) from the sources we have. I was telling you why the loss of 40 ships might be considered catastrophic it the time of Wolf 359 as opposed to not being so during the Dominion War.

We need to avoid minimalism and numbers wanking, If I had to guess the total fleet inventory of major combatant warships is probably around 1000.

That's absurd. How do you reconcile that tiny number opposite a Dominion fleet that numbered some 30,000 strong?

As I said before, numbers are one thing but tonnage is really what matters. As depicted onscreen the bulk of the Dominion (as in the Dominion itself, not its allies) fleets consists of small "fighter" type vessels. Your average starfleet vessel is several times bigger.

[Big Phil]

Does the 20,000 ship fleet count for the Dominion include their fighters as well, or is that major capital ships only?

[Bounty]

What "fighters"? Bugships are 150m vessels with enough firepower to gang up against capital ships. They're small, but they're hardly on the scale of one-man snubfighters.

[Patroklos]

What "fighters"? Bugships are 150m vessels with enough firepower to gang up against capital ships. They're small, but they're hardly on the scale of one-man snubfighters.

They are called "fighters" "attack ships" in various sources. It sounds like it has more do to with a role description than anything else, but they are small ships. In any case they are 95 meters. The only other front line Dominion warship we see in regular fleet battles is the very large and powerul Dominion battlecruisers (650m) but they are extremely rare (and also several times smaller than the far more common Romulan D'deridex-class). There are the Dominion battleships, but appentely they are so rare as to be irrelevant, the only engagement we see them in is Cardassia, and they do nothing. If I had to guess of the top of my head from what is seen onscreen the attack ships outnumber the battlecruisers at least 20:1.

The Breen vessels are also dimunitive in comparison to the Federation at 330m.

Contrast this to the most common Federation ship classes like the Miranda (243m), Nebula (440m), Excelsior (467m) Ambassador (526m) and Galaxy (643m). We are talking about the average front line Federation combatant out wieghing their nomral Dominion counterpart from anywere from5-20 times! Tonnage is not on the side of the Dominion, and I blame this mostly on the laziness of the producers to authorize more models to fill in the Dominion fleet.

This also explains why the Klingons sighted the numbers they do, as by far their most representative vessels are the BOPs registering at a mere 109m.

http://www.merzo.net/

[seanrobertson]

Does the 20,000 ship fleet count for the Dominion include their fighters as well, or is that major capital ships only?

It's actually thirty-thousand*, and yes, it undoubtably includes the Bird-of-Prey sized attack ships.

*In "When It Rains ... ," we're told the Dominion Alliance would outnumber 1,500 Klingon ships twenty-to-one. (The script mentions 1,100 Klink ships, but the aired version's different: When we had a discussion very similar to this one back in '03, several posters confirmed the difference.)

[Darth Wong]

Does the 20,000 ship fleet count for the Dominion include their fighters as well, or is that major capital ships only?

I don't see any reason why we should be excluding unarmed vessels such as fuel tankers and repair ships, never mind smaller combat vessels. When people count the ships in a modern naval fleet, they don't exclude all of the support vessels unless they specifically state that they're only referring to combat ships.

[Patroklos]

I good example of this is the 300 or 600 ship Navy when analysts talk about the US fleet. They are in fact including all commissioned naval ships combatant or not (though not MSC ships).