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After reading multiple threads that either directly or indirectly delve into Galaxy Class bashing, I was wondering how the Sovereign stacks up against the Galaxy?
Design wise, ability wise etc..

Sovereign is faster, nimbler, more powerful, better protected. I'm pretty sure it has the edge on the Galaxy in just about every aspect except for sheer volume.

Well there's another way to look at it.

To Star Trek fans, quantum, ablative, regenerative mean the Sovereign's got better firepower, better armor, better shields.

You could look at it a different way. Sovereign was defeated by slave rejects of the Romulan empire who manufactured a retard ship in secret. If Scimitar had fought Warbirds it'd be a different story, but they fought little dipshits nobody's ever seen.

The deflector dish explodes at a single phaser shot.

The Sovereign was not mass produced for the Dominion war. That could mean a exorbant cost per unit, or it could mean that the platform was utter shit. War has a way of weeding out the useless, especially total war.

Personally I think the alpha strike of a Galaxy looks far more impressive than anything we've seen from a Sovereign. A Galaxy can swoop down like a Sovereign when it wants, like in Tin Man IIRC (or was that the Romulan Warbird?)

Um, I'd be interested to see you support this claim that a Galaxy's full firepower is somehow more impressive than the Sovereign's.

When I said "look" I really meant look, not anything more than that.

I'm thinking of Riker ordering full weapons on the Husnock ship. Who can forget that line, and the torpedo flares and phaser shots sweeping across.

I'm also thinking of the Galaxy separating and fighting the Borg cube, throwing up more torpedoes and phasers in a short time span than we see the Sovereign shit out at all.

I'm also thinking of Picard firing phasers on Yesterday's Enterprise, a king's death, the way Kirk should've gone. A couple phaser shots that destroyed a K'Vort.

The smallish, barely visible torpedoes in Nemesis are even different from the quantums the E fired in ST:FC. They couldn't even maintain consistency between the movies. They didn't even fire quantums in Nemesis.

The Ent-E fired q-torps in Nemesis. Although I think we only saw two volleys fired on screen.

Is it possible that the Galaxy has been reaching the limits that it can be for upgrading without risking severe hull stress (god knows they have enough things to worry about) and that the Soveraign is a better platforn that could be upgraded to even higher standards without worrying (as Much).

Ezekyle Abaddon wrote:Is it possible that the Galaxy has been reaching the limits that it can be for upgrading without risking severe hull stress (god knows they have enough things to worry about) and that the Soveraign is a better platforn that could be upgraded to even higher standards without worrying (as Much).

The trouble with the Galaxy class is that it was never designed as a warship, and as such, its combat performance has never been stellar.

Warships should always be designed from ground up as one.

brianeyci wrote:Well there's another way to look at it.

To Star Trek fans, quantum, ablative, regenerative mean the Sovereign's got better firepower, better armor, better shields.

The writers also believe that

You could look at it a different way. Sovereign was defeated by slave rejects of the Romulan empire who manufactured a retard ship in secret. If Scimitar had fought Warbirds it'd be a different story, but they fought little dipshits nobody's ever seen.

"52 disruptor banks, 27 torpedo bays"

that really does sound like a "retard ship"

The E-D lost to a Bird of Prey, a twenty year old obsolete model in fact.

The E-E got it's ass handed to it by the most powerful, state of the art warship in the quadrant.

The deflector dish explodes at a single phaser shot.

We never saw the E-D's particle emitter take a shot so this claim is BS, for all we know this is a common flaw

The Sovereign was not mass produced for the Dominion war. That could mean a exorbant cost per unit, or it could mean that the platform was utter shit. War has a way of weeding out the useless, especially total war.

The Sovereign was resource intensive due to it being a new design, building 'hollow' GCS's by the dozen was cheaper since the GCS has been built for a while (all the kinks are worked out and efficiency improved)

Personally I think the alpha strike of a Galaxy looks far more impressive than anything we've seen from a Sovereign.

The E-D and E-E were seen in drastically different situations, requiring drastically different tactics.

FedRebel wrote:The E-D lost to a Bird of Prey, a twenty year old obsolete model in fact.

On this point, it's only fair to point out that the Bird of Prey was able to completely bypass the D's shields, due to some sneaky and well thought out planning.

20 year old weapons or not, any weapon that can level cities are still gonna fuck up any unprotected Starfleet hull.

Besides, the launchers may have been 20 years old, but I doubt the torpedoes were.

It should also be pointed out that the Enterprise lost at Veridan mainly because Will Riker was an incompetent in command, who failed to employ his full arsenal, engaged in no evasive manoeuvers or even attempt to warp out of orbit, and mainly just sat there and let his ship get pounded.

Howedar wrote:Um, I'd be interested to see you support this claim that a Galaxy's full firepower is somehow more impressive than the Sovereign's.

He already supported it at least as well as any of the widespread competing claims that a Sovereign has better firepower than a Galaxy, which is to say that he merely appealed to subjective impression. As far as I can tell, everyone simply assumes that the Sovereign is far better because it looks cooler, has newer technobabble, and didn't explode in its only known combat incident. None of those things really speaks to any assessment of firepower.

We've seen a Galaxy-class spew multiple torpedoes from it's single forward bay in one shot many times in TNG - by contrast, the Sovereign has a far more pedestrian volley-fire from it's two forward torpedo bays and it's single "quantum" (that means more powerful, according to my made-up techno-babble dictionary) torpedo launcher.

That's one of the few objective assessments of firepower I can think of.

havokeff wrote:

FedRebel wrote:The E-D lost to a Bird of Prey, a twenty year old obsolete model in fact.

On this point, it's only fair to point out that the Bird of Prey was able to completely bypass the D's shields, due to some sneaky and well thought out planning.

20 year old weapons or not, any weapon that can level cities are still gonna fuck up any unprotected Starfleet hull.

Besides, the launchers may have been 20 years old, but I doubt the torpedoes were.

The fact that the BoP managed to fuck the E-D's hull is one thing. The fact that when Riker ordered "lock Phasers and return fire" the phaser blast didn't hold continuous, punch through the BoP's hull and blow it to bits (ala "Yesterday's Enterprise") is what has always been maddening about that battle.

Hell, instead the BoP's shields hold, and the Ent-D goes running away like a scared dog until Riker, Data and company develop a technobabble way to get around the BoP's shields when they should have just hammered the shit out of them.

Seriously, were they just thinking "WHAAA! the Klingons technobabbled around us, we need to prove we can do the same to them!"

Skylon wrote:The fact that the BoP managed to fuck the E-D's hull is one thing. The fact that when Riker ordered "lock Phasers and return fire" the phaser blast didn't hold continuous, punch through the BoP's hull and blow it to bits (ala "Yesterday's Enterprise") is what has always been maddening about that battle.

Indeed. There is also the question of why the Ent-D doesn't just unload a spread of torpedoes onto the BoP as soon as the shooting starts.

However in 'The Wrath of Khan', one low powered burst from the Enterprise is enough to knock out the Reliant's weapons and warp drive, once its shields are no longer a factor. This damage couldn't have been too serious, at it was repaired by the battle a few hours later, but it does suggest that Federation control systems are ridiculously vulnerable to battle damage (as does the ease with which the Enterprise was disabled in ST3 - though to be fair that system was jury rigged - and countless control/computer failure in TNG and Voyager).

Thus I'm going to go with 'the weapon controls were damaged, and only one phaser array was still operable' and try not to think about it again.

Darth Wong wrote:

Howedar wrote:Um, I'd be interested to see you support this claim that a Galaxy's full firepower is somehow more impressive than the Sovereign's.

He already supported it at least as well as any of the widespread competing claims that a Sovereign has better firepower than a Galaxy, which is to say that he merely appealed to subjective impression. As far as I can tell, everyone simply assumes that the Sovereign is far better because it looks cooler, has newer technobabble, and didn't explode in its only known combat incident. None of those things really speaks to any assessment of firepower.

Actually I think this assessment comes from a visual inspection of the ship (more total weapons emplacements) and from watching it fire said weapons (I believe most/all of them have been seen firing onscreen).

Howedar wrote:Actually I think this assessment comes from a visual inspection of the ship (more total weapons emplacements) and from watching it fire said weapons (I believe most/all of them have been seen firing onscreen).

The fact that it has lots of phaser strips doesn't necessarily mean it has more firepower. We know nothing about the cooling, supply, and other subsystem requirements of phaser strips. It could very well be that in order to put that many weapons on the ship, they had to give something up in return. Simply counting the number of apparent weapons is a highly suspect modus operandi, particularly on ships where everything is known to be so heavily interconnected and interdependent. It's not as if they're going to be self-powered turrets.

Similarly, I find it highly unlikely that all of the torpedo emplacements on the E-E are of comparable capability to those on the E-D; based on production drawings, some of them look like they were almost bolted on with little in the way of support apparatus. Compare this with the E-D launchers, where nearly every ship schematic (seen both in the TM and on at least a couple of displays on the show) shows the launchers to be somewhat large and extending a considerable depth into the hull.

Skylon wrote:The fact that the BoP managed to fuck the E-D's hull is one thing. The fact that when Riker ordered "lock Phasers and return fire" the phaser blast didn't hold continuous, punch through the BoP's hull and blow it to bits (ala "Yesterday's Enterprise") is what has always been maddening about that battle.

Hell, instead the BoP's shields hold, and the Ent-D goes running away like a scared dog until Riker, Data and company develop a technobabble way to get around the BoP's shields when they should have just hammered the shit out of them.

Seriously, were they just thinking "WHAAA! the Klingons technobabbled around us, we need to prove we can do the same to them!"

To be fair, the BoP that got toasted in Yesterday's Enterprise could well have been the same one that got nailed with five torpedoes earlier on in that battle.

That said, I too find it maddening that Riker didn't order a full barrage of phasers and torpedoes. I think Ron Moore tried to weasel an excuse for that battle along the lines of "every phaser and torpedo costs money".

I think Ron Moore tried to weasel an excuse for that battle along the lines of "every phaser and torpedo costs money".

Ironic considering how many times the BoP misses, or the money they blew on the Astrometrics set.

I find it highly unlikely that all of the torpedo emplacements on the E-E are of comparable capability to those on the E-D; based on production drawings, some of them look like they were almost bolted on with little in the way of support apparatus.

Never mind support apparatus, the one bolted onto aft docking port is barely large enough to hold a single torpedo! Unless they added a loading track through the ceiling to an armoury behind the airlock, it's single-shot...

Darth Wong wrote:

Howedar wrote:Actually I think this assessment comes from a visual inspection of the ship (more total weapons emplacements) and from watching it fire said weapons (I believe most/all of them have been seen firing onscreen).

The fact that it has lots of phaser strips doesn't necessarily mean it has more firepower. We know nothing about the cooling, supply, and other subsystem requirements of phaser strips. It could very well be that in order to put that many weapons on the ship, they had to give something up in return. Simply counting the number of apparent weapons is a highly suspect modus operandi, particularly on ships where everything is known to be so heavily interconnected and interdependent. It's not as if they're going to be self-powered turrets.

In putting all those strips on, they had to be lower power as the ship would not be able to take it. More phasers with less punch rather then less phasers with more punch. Quantity vs Quailty so to speake.

Why would the Enterprise-D have even been designed in the Yesterday's Enterprise universe? It's not a dedicated warship, and has serious design flaws, so why would this (more aggressive) Federation build a ship so flawed, for which it has no need (city in space not being relevant when you need warship)?

I understand that the plot of this episode was "Klingons-Federation fight war now, but everything else just by chance exactly same" but it's still a ridiculously stupid episode.

Bluewolf wrote: In putting all those strips on, they had to be lower power as the ship would not be able to take it. More phasers with less punch rather then less phasers with more punch. Quantity vs Quailty so to speake.

Do you have a source for this? Isn't it more likely that they simply draw off a common source (the 'EPS system' or whatever) and thus their phaser firepower or ability to use multiple strips cannot be determined simply by counting them?

Did anyone ever determine if the 'length = more powerful' idea from the TM has any substance? I know they don't use the smaller E-D ones very often, but the travelling glowpoint doesn't linearly increase in intensity...

No unfortunatly, just a guess. What do the phasers draw power off?

SancheztheWhaler wrote:Why would the Enterprise-D have even been designed in the Yesterday's Enterprise universe? It's not a dedicated warship, and has serious design flaws, so why would this (more aggressive) Federation build a ship so flawed, for which it has no need (city in space not being relevant when you need warship)?

I understand that the plot of this episode was "Klingons-Federation fight war now, but everything else just by chance exactly same" but it's still a ridiculously stupid episode.

The War Galaxy ships from DS9 did pretty well in combat against a foe more powerful than the Klingon Empire, so I'd think the GCS in the Klingon War time was built the same as the ones in DS9 (whatever differneces there are) and thus performed in their duties much better.

Most of the lousy stuff about the GCS came from us wathcing the Ent-D, so I'd wager it's tha ship in particular that was the lousy one out of the lot, not the whole class.

SancheztheWhaler wrote:Why would the Enterprise-D have even been designed in the Yesterday's Enterprise universe? It's not a dedicated warship, and has serious design flaws, so why would this (more aggressive) Federation build a ship so flawed, for which it has no need (city in space not being relevant when you need warship)?

I understand that the plot of this episode was "Klingons-Federation fight war now, but everything else just by chance exactly same" but it's still a ridiculously stupid episode.

Which flaws are you referring to that we know exist in the Yesterday's Enterprise timeline?

That Enterprise didn't strike me as any sort of city in space. There were no families on board and it appeared that their role was geared more towards battle rather than science or exploration.

If you're talking about the design itself, according to the script the Enterprise C was only lost 20 years before the episode, so maybe the design of the ship was approved and began construction long before open hostilities began with the Klingons. Personally I feel that's a sufficient explaination for why the ship was the same design. I haven't seen the episode in a while, so the script may be misleading me about the information.

Do we know how long the Galaxy Class ships were in the design and construction phase before they were launched? Or do we know how long the Federation-Klingon war had been going on in the other timline?