What stops Starfleet from building more ships?

[AirshipFanboy]

What makes ST ships relatively rare? The Federation has a population of at least a trillion and only recruits warp-capable cultures. But, Starfleet probably has only a few thousand starships, which are often overworked or stretched thin.

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?

Any insights or speculation would be appreciated. I am asking because I am trying to concoct fleet-strength figures for a hypothetical Trek nation, and want a more thought-out limit than something like "as many ships as the Klingons have."

[Junghalli]

I'll copy and paste my speculation from the "Mobilization Capacity of the Federation" discussion (it's still on the front page if you're interested).

How wealthy are the Feds and the other powers? The lack of diversity in their ranks, the small fleets, the inability to produce large space structures, the need for land based colonies... all of these imply very poor productivity compared to what we would expect.

We know their ships are dependent on at least one apparently rare and valuable wonder-material: dilithium. It's possible that this creates a major bottleneck in the ability to build starships.

I remember in one Trek novel (Prime Directive I think it was called) dilithium was stated to be a form of crystal with a molecular structure that extended into "the fourth dimension" (the way it was described it sound like that's probably subspace). It's totally non-canon, but if we were to speculate that it's accurate it's not hard to imagine that much of their magitech might be dependent on this stuff. Heat dissipation? They use dilithium to channel the waste heat into subspace. Subspace radio? They use dilithium to put radio signals in subspace where they can go faster for some reason and retrieve them from subspace (this one is actually the use given in the novel). Warp drive, forcefields, artificial gravity, mass lightening? They do something funky in subspace which causes warping of realspace, which requires dilithium. If a lot of the technologies they depend on are completely dependent on this stuff, and it's really rare, its scarcity could be a huge obstacle to building giant fleets of FTL starships.

[Samuel]

But, Starfleet probably has only a few thousand starships

I'd actually say less- the loss at Worf 359 was a big deal.

We know their ships are dependent on at least one apparently rare and valuable wonder-material: dilithium. It's possible that this creates a major bottleneck in the ability to build starships.

Than why do they use convict labor to mine in in Star Trek 6?

[Count Chocula]

I'd speculate that it's ideological...even the Galaxy class, the most powerful TNG-era ship, was designated as the Explorer-class. The Federation's happy-happy-joy-joy socialist utopia seems to be vehemently opposed to any kind of aggressive fleet buildup, and Picard's actions and words in the series seem to typify the 24th Century starship commander's point of view, that is, that armed conflict is a distasteful last resort. Hell, the Federation didn't even field new combat-oriented ship types until the Dominion War was well underway IIRC. The Defiant was an anomaly pre-Dominion War, and a prototype assigned to a remote station at that.

Given their matter replication, the pathetically small size of the Utopia Planitia yards, and the firm control over even the merchant fleet, I'd say the Federation has the technical ability, but not the will, to build significant numbers of starships. Ironically, Starfleet's TNG ship count roughly matches the US' 600-ship Navy of the 1980s-1990s.

[Junghalli]

Than why do they use convict labor to mine in in Star Trek 6?

Maybe the Rura Penthe mine isn't so much a productive mine as a make-work project to keep the prisoners too busy and exhausted to plan rebellions and break-outs (maybe with an element of sheer sadism thrown in as well)? It might be a very, very poor dilithium load, to the point that ordinarily it wouldn't be worth the trouble of mining it at all, so they can "waste" it on a make-work project like that.

The novel I was speaking of described dilithium as being superficially identicle to normal crystals like quartz. Running with that, that gives me an idea that maybe a certain percentage of all quartz is dilithium, with rich loads being quartzes that have high dilithium concentrations (relatively - might still be only a tiny fraction of a percent). So every quartz mine would be a potential dilithium mine, but mostly the concentration is so poor it's not worth it (say, a gram of dilithium for every million tons of quartz you process). What they're mining at Rura Penthe might be such a poor load.

As I remember, there was a TOS episode where they showed a planet with a dilithium mine and there were only a handful of miners, suggesting a highly automated set-up.

[Samuel]

Why don't the other powers crush them than?

[Junghalli]

Why don't the other powers crush them than?

Their real dilithium mining is done elsewhere, obviously.

[AirshipFanboy]

While lurking after posting this, I found that Uranium235 made a thread arguing for a personnel shortage as a bottleneck: http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=72133

That give us one vote for raw material shortage, one vote for personnel shortage, and one vote for motivation shortage.

snip

Thanks Junghalli; although the idea of magic crystals with trans-dimensional lattices does sound a little funky to even my physics-illiterate brain, but it's probably not much weirder than crystals that are somehow porous to anti-matter. On screen, I don't recall dilithium ever mentioned in connection to any technology but the warp drives though.

Why don't the other powers crush them than?

If a motivation-shortage is the problem with the UFP, then the other powers may simply have smaller populations and/or economies than the Federation and just have to push harder to make up for it.

Given their matter replication, the pathetically small size of the Utopia Planitia yards, and the firm control over even the merchant fleet, I'd say the Federation has the technical ability, but not the will, to build significant numbers of starships.

It's also interesting that a disproportionate number of the Federation shipyards we've heard of are in the Sol System - Utopia Planitia, McKinley, and Copernicus shipyards. This could be because humans dominate the Federation and want to keep it that way, or simply because Earth's established shipyards give it a comparative advantage in shipbuilding.

[JGregory32]

Why don't the other powers crush them than?

It does seem like the other alpha quadrant powers use the same types of technology. It could be a case of everybody's reliant on the magic crystals so nobody has a very large fleet.

Of course this gives me a great idea for scouts finding the proverbial mother load of magic crystals, leading to a massive war over them.
Then just for shits and giggles you can have Q reveal that the crystals never actually existed and that it was all a test.

[Samuel]

Why don't the other powers crush them than?

Their real dilithium mining is done elsewhere, obviously.

I was actually responding to CC

[Coalition]

Any insights or speculation would be appreciated. I am asking because I am trying to concoct fleet-strength figures for a hypothetical Trek nation, and want a more thought-out limit than something like "as many ships as the Klingons have."

One way to get an estimate is to copy the United States Navy for a fleet composed of ships TOS sized. The Constitution sized Enterprise is about 300 meters long, and the Nimitz class carrier is roughly the same.

From there, you take a listing of the numbers and classes of ships the US Navy uses, and copy that over to starship equivalents. Take the population of your star empire, divide it by the population of the United States, and use that as the multiplier for the fleet size.

I.e. The United States Navy has 10 Nimitz class carriers, and a population of ~300 million. So if your Star Empire has 60 billion people among the various homeworlds (not counting colonies), then you would expect it to have ~2000 starships similar in size to the original Enterprise. They may not be the same design, and you may have 10 heavily industrialized worlds meaning you have split up starship construction between them, the hulls might be good for 50 years (meaning you only build 40 at a time), so initially people might not see that much.

At 40 ships built per year, divided among 10 homeworlds, that would be one ship leaving the yards every 3 Earth months. There might be more ships present for repairs/refits/checkups, etc.

This is ignoring strategic mineral limitations on fleet production (dilithium) or the bureaucratic overhead for more ships.


I got bored and did this on ditl.org forum, if you want me to copy it over. Lots of non-Federationally-correct names for the fleets involved too.

[AirshipFanboy]

One way to get an estimate is to copy the United States Navy for a fleet composed of ships TOS sized. The Constitution sized Enterprise is about 300 meters long, and the Nimitz class carrier is roughly the same.

From there, you take a listing of the numbers and classes of ships the US Navy uses, and copy that over to starship equivalents. Take the population of your star empire, divide it by the population of the United States, and use that as the multiplier for the fleet size.

I.e. The United States Navy has 10 Nimitz class carriers, and a population of ~300 million. So if your Star Empire has 60 billion people among the various homeworlds (not counting colonies), then you would expect it to have ~2000 starships similar in size to the original Enterprise. They may not be the same design, and you may have 10 heavily industrialized worlds meaning you have split up starship construction between them, the hulls might be good for 50 years (meaning you only build 40 at a time), so initially people might not see that much.

At 40 ships built per year, divided among 10 homeworlds, that would be one ship leaving the yards every 3 Earth months. There might be more ships present for repairs/refits/checkups, etc.

This is ignoring strategic mineral limitations on fleet production (dilithium) or the bureaucratic overhead for more ships.

I tried using similar, slightly less detailed comparisons. The problem is, if I tried doing a US Navy based comparison with the trillion-plus population of the Federation, it would result in a Starfleet with something like 30,000+ capital ships, and that's only using the carriers for comparison.

Hence, I was wondering what the bottlenecks are.

I got bored and did this on ditl.org forum, if you want me to copy it over. Lots of non-Federationally-correct names for the fleets involved too.

Actually, I'd be very curious to see what you came up with. I usually like reading other people's fictional constructs and analyses. Do you have the link anywhere?

[Serafina]

I think this aircraft-carrier analogy is not that good.

Spaceships are way more complicated to construct than water-based ships. While size certainly is a factor, you are also limited by the compexity of the construction, the need for sophisticated parts and so on.

Also, it is quite important how the population is dispersed. If a lot of the population is living in small settlements on isolated planets, they can not contribute to your ship-building effort - they simply lack the construction facilities for it, and it would be way to complicated/expensive to ship the parts to your fabrication facilies.
It is kinda like the comparsion between an agricultural nation and an industrialized one. Sheer manpower is not that imporant as an factor.

Given that we have seen numerous small outposts, planets without spacestations (or any space facilities) and isolated planets in Star Trek, they simply can not concentrate their efforts as easily.

[FOG3]

Using the total fleet of the United States Navy whose Naval Dominance unprecedented in Naval History, based off the population of the world's economic superpower would strike me as something one would only do for a extreme high end estimate if the underlying assumptions had any validity.

In real terms the US Navy has 1/3 of the total fleet, because the rest are down for training, maintenance, and refit. Further it is effectively responsible for the entirety of the world's oceans to maintain world trade, so the population the USN should be divided against is more along the lines of the entire world population to be analogous to the Federation. Otherwise it's the equivalent of declaring the GDP of the Roman Empire verse the population of the city of Rome itself is a reasonable cross section of what ancient empires could do.

In which case a 60 billion citizen Stellar-Nation would have 36 ~300m vessels up, and 108 total, based on the assumption it is analogous to the USN. Seems as how Federation vessels seem to be less maintenance intensive the total fleet should be smaller if acting analogously to the USN as obligations could be met with fewer total ships.

The whole Washington Treaty WW2 business demonstrates politicians in RL like to keep fleet sizes down, much like in modern day with nuclear arsenals. Why should the UFP and its neighbors not do something similar? Even if you're militaristic why sink funds into ships instead of research when you don't have to? Why do the equivalent of building a swarm of early WW2 tanks instead of investing the funds to be able to build late WW2 tanks?

[Junghalli]

Also, it is quite important how the population is dispersed. If a lot of the population is living in small settlements on isolated planets, they can not contribute to your ship-building effort - they simply lack the construction facilities for it, and it would be way to complicated/expensive to ship the parts to your fabrication facilies.
It is kinda like the comparsion between an agricultural nation and an industrialized one. Sheer manpower is not that imporant as an factor.

Given that we have seen numerous small outposts, planets without spacestations (or any space facilities) and isolated planets in Star Trek, they simply can not concentrate their efforts as easily.

I can see a couple of problems with this explanation. It assumes that much of the Federation's population is tied up in these tiny podunk colonies that are so small as to be incapable of contributing meaningfully to their industrial capacity. With a population that big that adds up to a lot of tiny podunk colonies. To eat up a meaningful fraction of a population of a trillion (say, 200 billion, 1/5th of the population), you'd need 100,000 colonies of 2 million residents each. I don't think there's any evidence that the Federation is anywhere near that thinly spread. As I remember, in TOS it was stated to own something in the single digit thousands of worlds. Granted, that may have changed by TNG.

More problematically, having the population so thinly spread implies the ability to transport truly vast numbers of people to these podunk colonies. The example above requires moving more than 30 times the entire population of our Earth! Granted, some of that population could be due to natural increase, so the actual transport might have been only, say, 1/4 that, and it was spread out over roughly 100 years. Still, that would imply the ability to move several hundred million people per year. That's comparable to the entire population of a large present-day nation like the United States! Even if you use much more optimistic assumptions for how much of the colonies' population is natural growth you're still talking about moving millions of people every year.

In short, this answer would paradoxically actually require the Federation to have truly vast shipbuilding capacity just to be able to spread their population out so much in the first place.

[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 personnel idea makes more sense, but I was thinking about this, and realized the major flaw: if there's plenty of resources for equipment but few personnel to operate it, then you would expect their precious few military personnel to always have the best equipment. Instead, older classes of ships are still in wide use, and top of the line ships are always in short supply, reserved for elite units. When the Federation built an outpost at DS9, they literally took a hand-me-down from the Cardassians instead of building their own, and they continued using it even when its strategic importance became obvious. Rather than build a powerful Federation space station, they simply kludged some upgrades onto the junky old Cardassian one. Later, during the Dominion War, they even brought out all kinds of mothballed ships that were built before their crews were born. Ancient Excelsior-class ships are still in wide use. Does this really sound like an organization which has a massive surplus of shipbuilding ability and is limited only by slow recruiting?

It seems to make more sense to argue that they simply can't build more ships due to manufacturing or resource limitations of some sort, and that the even greater scarcity of top-of-the-line ships is due to their greater difficulty of manufacture. Really, the only argument in favour of their limitless shipbuilding capacity in the first place is Trekkie wankery.

[Imperial Overlord]

I remember in one Trek novel (Prime Directive I think it was called) dilithium was stated to be a form of crystal with a molecular structure that extended into "the fourth dimension" (the way it was described it sound like that's probably subspace). It's totally non-canon, but if we were to speculate that it's accurate it's not hard to imagine that much of their magitech might be dependent on this stuff. Heat dissipation? They use dilithium to channel the waste heat into subspace. Subspace radio? They use dilithium to put radio signals in subspace where they can go faster for some reason and retrieve them from subspace (this one is actually the use given in the novel). Warp drive, forcefields, artificial gravity, mass lightening? They do something funky in subspace which causes warping of realspace, which requires dilithium. If a lot of the technologies they depend on are completely dependent on this stuff, and it's really rare, its scarcity could be a huge obstacle to building giant fleets of FTL starships.

[/quote]

That actually sounds like the tongue-in-cheek Star Trek novel How Much for Just the Planet? by the late, great John M. Ford involving diplomacy, romance, and wacky escapades surrounding the Klingon Empire and the Federation trying to get their hands on a dilithium rich world and the natives (human colonists who moved as far away as possible for interstellar civilization) fucking with both of them.

[Junghalli]

That actually sounds like the tongue-in-cheek Star Trek novel How Much for Just the Planet? by the late, great John M. Ford involving diplomacy, romance, and wacky escapades surrounding the Klingon Empire and the Federation trying to get their hands on a dilithium rich world and the natives (human colonists who moved as far away as possible for interstellar civilization) fucking with both of them.

Good guess, I suppose, but that wasn't the one.

I think it was about a twentieth century equivalent planet of reptiloid aliens (Talin IV) that had a devestating nuclear war and Kirk was blamed for accidentally instigating it (I forget exactly how). Or it might have been a different one I read. My memory's pretty fuzzy about it, but I remember the passage describing dilithium as being superficially similar to regular crystals like quartz except "its molecular structure extended into the fourth dimension" so it could translate FTL signals into regular ones that conventional receivers could take.

Edit: the 1 trillion plus population count makes me wonder just what the demographics of the Federation is actually like. Dividing by Picard's number of there being "over 150" planets in the Federation (presumably he means major worlds, as in TOS a larger number was stated) gives an average population of 6.6-6.7 billion per planet. On the other hand, didn't it come from an estimate along the lines of 900 billion probable casualties in the Dominion War, suggesting the actual population is probably considerably larger (unless the Dominion was planning genocide)? Assuming that 900 billion represents 1/4 of the Federation's population you get 24 billion per planet average. Of course, some appreciable fraction of the population may exist on minor possessions that are not counted to the 150 number.

[erik_t]

It strains credibility to imagine that the Federation maintained its happy-go-lucky worldview after losing more than a few percent of their population. My gut says that a rational human society would end up borderline-genocidal after losing 25%. The resulting peace was far too magnanimous to believe such casualty percentages.

[tim31]

I agree; we'd see a move toward the something more like the Terran Empire, but without the wanton cruelty and inexplicably unsustainable behaviour.

[The Romulan Republic]

It strains credibility to imagine that the Federation maintained its happy-go-lucky worldview after losing more than a few percent of their population. My gut says that a rational human society would end up borderline-genocidal after losing 25%. The resulting peace was far too magnanimous to believe such casualty percentages.

Its been a while, but I thought the "900 billion casualties" bit from the Dominion Wars was a hypothetical Dominion projection of how many casualties the Federation was likely to suffer before it would surrender, not the actual number of casualties for the war?

[Junghalli]

Its been a while, but I thought the "900 billion casualties" bit from the Dominion Wars was a hypothetical Dominion projection of how many casualties the Federation was likely to suffer before it would surrender, not the actual number of casualties for the war?

I haven't watched the episode in question, but as I remember yes, that was the context. Somebody was pointing out all the huge numbers of people who would die before the probably inevitable Dominion victory and, as I remember, arguing that it would be better just to surrender. In that context is seems plausible to suggest pretty relatively large death tolls, comparable to, say, the USSR in WWII.

[Steve]

The gene-engineered people Bashir invited to DS9 in Season 6 were responsible for that projection IIRC. A 900 billion death war resulting in Federation collapse and submission to the Dominion. Their projections showed a century or two of Dominion rule until overstretch brought the Dominion down and the Federation was reformed amongst the entire Alpha Quadrant or something.

[Alyeska]

I'd speculate that it's ideological...even the Galaxy class, the most powerful TNG-era ship, was designated as the Explorer-class. The Federation's happy-happy-joy-joy socialist utopia seems to be vehemently opposed to any kind of aggressive fleet buildup, and Picard's actions and words in the series seem to typify the 24th Century starship commander's point of view, that is, that armed conflict is a distasteful last resort. Hell, the Federation didn't even field new combat-oriented ship types until the Dominion War was well underway IIRC. The Defiant was an anomaly pre-Dominion War, and a prototype assigned to a remote station at that.

The only design to be introduced after the start of the Dominion War was the Prometheus. Every other design was Pre-War.

Sovereign
Defiant
Akira

All pre-war designs. Now every single one of these are Post-Wolf 359.

[Havok]

Out of Universe, is it just a brain bug of TOS and the feeling that Rodenberry wanted to convey of the lone explorers out in the wilderness, the wagon train to the stars, that has just carried over into the other shows and movies?