How small could the Enterprise be . . .

[Soontir C'boath]

But you gotta have the holo-deck

Nothing boost moral troop Moral Like a Holo-deck

Also make the Holodeck smaller...it doesn't appear to matter how big it is..

[Howedar]

If you put in the naccelles, get rid of the neck part, stick the saucer and stadrive together, make rooms smaller, etc. you can cut several hundred meters off at least.

Well frankly they might want to leave the neck on, and chop off the saucer (just take the engineering section, and start from there). You might have a decent start with that part, although making the engineering hull a bit larger (for more weapons) might be a good idea.


Oh, VERY FEW/NO WINDOWS!

[Sea Skimmer]

The only sane safety feature on the Enterprise is the double hull, and no doubt even that would be replaced with a triple hull plus armor.

[John Clark]

Agreed, there's a lot of space that can be saved... but you guys are trying to redesign the Ent to be a warship. That's not its mission.

[Robert Treder]

you guys are trying to redesign the Ent to be a warship. That's not its mission.

Well, there's another one of its errors...if it's going to be used as a warship, it should sure as hell be designed like one.

[John Clark]

You're not getting it. It was deliberately designed to be a Jack-of-all-Trades, and that's what it's used for.

[Robert Treder]

You're not getting it. It was deliberately designed to be a Jack-of-all-Trades, and that's what it's used for.

And one of the consequences is that it does not perform well as a warship. At least not as well as it could.

[Shadow]

And one of the consequences is that it does not perform well as a warship. At least not as well as it could.

This would make it less effective in the other types of missions it must perform.

[Robert Treder]

And why doesn't the Federation simply construct vessels dedicated to carrying out these other duties?!

Dedicated research vessels, dedicated transports, etc...

[Shadow]

And why doesn't the Federation simply construct vessels dedicated to carrying out these other duties?!

Dedicated research vessels, dedicated transports, etc...

They do have some ships that are dedicated to research, like the Oberth and Nova. They have warships like the Defiant, Prometheus, Akira, Sabre, and Steamrunner. They also have multi-purpose ships like the Excelsior, Ambassador, Galaxy, and Sovereign.

[VF5SS]

Well they can cut out all the multi-role shit. Waaaaaay too many weaknesses.

[EmperorChrostas the Cruel]

The whole point of the Federation not making warships until the dominion showed up, (the origial reason to build warships being the Borg) was political. They did not want to seem agressive and expantionitsic. As with all political desicions about military doctrine, this came back to bite them in the ass, in the form of much less effective military power. Cheap things often cost more than they look, and free thing seem to cost the most!

[RedImperator]

A quick and dirty method of making the GCS more formidable in combat would be to just build them without the saucer section with very few further modifications. The separating saucer idea is typical of Starfleet's twisted design priorities. They want to put civilians, including children, on a ship-of-the-line, but they're worried they could get killed in combat. So what do they do? Do they design the Galaxy strictly as a scientific vessel with only enough combat ability to fight its way out of trouble and keep them in nice, peaceful parts of the quadrant? Do they make it a pure warship and then design a new dedicated science vessel to take over its exploratory functions? No--they decide the best solution is to deliberately create a major structural weak point (millions of tons of mass being held to the stardrive sections by a handful of clamps), force the inclusuion of wastefully redundant systems (like the saucer impulse engines), with the idea that if the ship goes into battle, the civilians will be left behind on a giant floating target that can't even go to warp and probabaly maneuvers like a pig, and then the officers put in command of the Galaxies go into battle with the saucers attached anyway.

So dump the saucer. They'd shed about half their mass while retaining the same sized engines, they'd have a smaller target profile, and the photorp blind spot directly above the saucer would vanish, they'd only lose one phaser bank (there's a phaser strip on the dorsal surface of the stardrive hull normally hidden under the saucer) and one shuttlebay. According to the TM (non-canon, I know), the stardrive section has its own computer core and transporter room and all of the ship's fuel tankage. It goes without saying all your civilians and non-combat Starfleet personnel are kicked off the ship as well. About the only thing I think you'd need is a sickbay and some more crew quarters in the stardrive section, and you can make room for them by converting those hotel suites they call officer's quarters into regular barracks, and yanking out the science labs.

A more extensive modification would involve increasing the thickness of the hull armor, and, since you've shed so much mass, decreasing the profile of the nacelles. And bring back that double forward torpedo tube from the E-A, for some redundancy, and if there's room inside for the internal architecture they'd need, some of the E-A's ball-turret phasers. You could probably get away with a smaller deflector dish, while you're at it. Banks of fixed pulse phasers aligned at various angles would be nice too, especially to cover your blind spots. Swap out the E-D battle bridge module for the Defiant class bridge module or something similar--it seems to be a lot more functional. For REALLY extensive modifications, divide the ship into airtight compartments internally, add internal armor around critical systems like the antimatter storage pods, put in some REAL failsafes on the engines, and attach the nacelles directly to the hull's aft dorsal surface on either side of the aft torp bay (either cut the pylons off or wrap them over and around the nacelles to better protect them). Now you've got the combat capabilities of a GCS wrapped up in a package that's much faster, much more maneuverable, and generarally just more capable.