Is a Federation Dreadnought possible?

[Picard]

The problem here is that you are equating size to power, wich does apply in classical naval terms, but is not so in Trek.

It is, it's just that it's not the only variable. Speaking roughly, you still have a relationship of the form

Militarization*size ~= ship combat power.

Large, poorly militarized ships (the Galaxy class) still beat small poorly militarized ships. Likewise for highly militarized ships- at equal militarization level, the larger ship will win one-to-one. The only confounding factor is that a poorly militarized ship with brute size on its side can matched by a smaller, but more heavily militarized ship.

I contend that "battleship" as a name should be reserved for ships that are both large and heavily militarized. The Galaxy and Sovereign classes are not battleships, because they are not militarized. The Defiant is not a battleship, either, because while it's militarized, it can lose fights to Galaxies and Sovereigns.

Of course, since Trek writers can't grasp this concept, I bet they make large ships more powerful than the Defiant just because size matters or something, thus making this discussion harder.

And yet, size should matter. Even if it uses a lot of internal volume on non-military applications, a ship like the Galaxy will still have considerable firepower thanks to the space that is military. It's entirely plausible for a Galaxy to beat a Defiant, much as it's plausible for the research ship with an antiship missile launcher to sink a modern frigate if it gets its missile shots in first.

Of course, in real life the research ship is likely to get taken out in turn in a double kill, but the point remains: while the Galaxy class are not warships by today's standards, they are still armed, and fairly well armed by the standards of the setting they're in. The fact that a ship is optimized for war does not automatically make it a Galaxy-killer, if it lacks the weapons fit to do the job.

I know that the term 'battleship' feels like it should be big, but that's a gut feeling based on naval tradition, not actual reasoning. There would be similar problems with the term 'Cruiser' for example. What's the difference from ship to cruiser in space?

Easy. We just strip away the layers of extra meaning that piled onto the word over the last 150 years, and go back to the basic definition. Cruisers cruise. They go out on independent missions to police distant territory, to show the flag in foreign ports, to raid an enemy's commerce and remote installations, and so forth.

So in space, to deserve the name "cruiser," a ship should be long-range, long-endurance, and strong enough that it can be detached for independent operations. In Star Trek, the most logical ships to call "cruisers" are the ones that are relatively militarized and which can be sent on long-range exploration missions, like the Constitution class. Starfleet is, in practice, much more interested in having cruisers than battleships, which makes sense given that its main mission has a lot to do with exploration and less to do with point-blank combat in their core territory. At least, that holds true until the Borg and the Dominion show up... and I'd expect to see Starfleet coming out with larger, more heavily militarized ship designs after those enemies appear on the radar.

And from what I know of Star Trek, after a five to ten year time lag, we do.
________

The reason I keep pushing for this is that I think these categories are actually useful, so long as they are applied intelligently. They won't all apply*, but some of them are technical words that originated for a reason. And some of those reasons still hold in space warfare (at least in Trek), because you're still faced with the old naval problem of design compromises between factors like firepower, protection, and range.

*For example, there is no Star Trek equivalent to the ship category we now call "destroyers," because their capital ships don't normally rely on small escorts to deal with specialized threats.

Also, I agree that 'warship' is the term I'd use for ships designed for war in one way or the other, for example communications vessels, or support/engineering vessels, while anything called 'battleship' should be meant to actually participate in battle. In fact, we could say that all Klingon ships are 'Warships' in one capacity or the next, while the smallish Birds of Prey are more suitable as 'Scouts' than actual 'Battleships'.

Partial agreement. All Klingon ships are "warships," unless they have dedicated science vessels or merchantmen we haven't seen.

But the smaller Birds of Prey are very much intended for use in battle; it's just that they're too weak to be used against larger opponents, except in squadron strength. And unless I'm mistaken they are not scouts in the traditional sense, because they are not intended to avoid combat against comparable tonnage: their mission is not chiefly one of reconnaissance.

So it would be more accurate to use a number of other terms, like "corvette," "frigate," or "gunboat."

Defiant class is small and militarized. Prometheus class is average and militarized. Sovereign class is large and militarized (althought it is still very capable scientific ship), and Galaxy class is huge (per Starfleet standards) and not militarized - but Galaxy class could still kick asses of 'pure' warships other powers had if needed. I mean, Romulans were not even sure if they could defeat Enterprise without 2 warbirds, and Galaxy class was shown in Dominion war to be highly resillient - even more so than D'Deridex class. And we know that Romulan commander on-board D'Deridex class was wary of attacking Galaxy-class starship without support, even when having factor of suprise on his side.

And no, Trek writers do not make large ships superior to Defiant - Defiant managed to fight Lakota to standstill despite Lakota being heavily modernized (while still old) and several times larger, and also disabled Keldon-class starship within seconds.

[Picard]

I think you keep ignoring my main point. The only advantage size provides is more space for gear (be it weapons, armour, power systems or ammo). Two vessels of any kind, with exactly the same amount of equipement, but different sizes, will perform differently, since the larger and thus sluggier and easier to hit vessel will be at a disadvantage.

Agreed; this strikes me as trivially obvious, but I don't have any other complaints about it.

As for the 'Battleship' definition, in this situation we are faced with a fleet (the Feds) whose ships are not optimized for combat due to their exploratory role, so it wouldn't be out of line to have a smaller, more combat oriented vessel be called a 'Battleship', because that is what it might be. What you're proposing is that a 'Battleship' should be larger than those vessels just because, wich makes no sense, since, as has been droned once and again in this thread, size is in function of your needs, not the other way around, and it is desirable to fit more firepower in a smaller ship anyhow.

What I'm proposing is that the Federation Navy has no battleships, if we define "battleship" to mean something consistent with what the word means in real life. They don't need battleships; they make do tolerably well with squadrons of cruisers and with large, low-militarization ships.

I don't think it's necessary to revive the term "battleship" to describe a ship like Defiant, for which that description would be misleading because Defiant is neither large (as battleships classically are) nor capable of reliably beating all opponents not of its own class (as battleships classically are).

Turns out if you're going to do long-range high-risk exploration you can build a fleet of role-specifc ships instead of one giant ship. We've even seen that several smaller warships are capable of destroying much larger ones (due to the shield mechanic) so this would probably work well.

Ideally. On the other hand, your flotilla of specialists are liable to suffer from range limitations and other problems. You might be able to make up for it by mating the flotilla with a mothership that served mainly as a giant flying deuterium tank, I guess.

You're right, I hadn't considered that a less compact design makes subsytem damage less likely, but even then, the larger ship loses because it takes more energy to make it accelerate, thus it is more sluggish in its combat response.

I'm not sure; it can also have more energy, assuming power output scales with the volume and mass dedicated to power generation.

Now, all that multitargetting falls under the category of "use extra size to add more capabilities". What I am arguing here is that size alone does not equal power. How you use that size, on the other hand, does.

Agreed.

I think only Sovereign class could be 'battleship'.

[Picard]

And yes, 1000m long 'dreadnought' is certainly within Federation capabilities, but from Federation point of view (and I think they're right) it is better to build more smaller, faster and more manouverable vessels of minimal size for their 'job description' than very few huge, logistically expensive vessels with heavy firepower- it is possible to build vessel with firepower of entire fleet, but it will not have tactical versatility of the fleet, and can be only in one place at once. Althought federation vessels (newer ones) always seemed to have relatively heavy firepower for their size.