Mr Bean wrote:That assumes you have the room to beam it out. The Star Trek designers are space wasters but I somehow I don't think they leave ten foot gaps across from ten foot consoles so it's a question of can you disconnect a part, beam it out and beam it back with enough precision to not you know leave your new part .05 mm's to the left and thus into the bits that you now have to repair.
You don't need to transport it with that kind of precision. You just need to beam it in with enough play to install it properly the old fashioned way.
Mr Bean wrote:Is it possible for all parts?
Unlikely
It is possible for SOME parts? Quite possible, however I'll note that there are again space issues. Can you teleport the old part out and the new part in? Possible. But what if it's a connected part? Why would a teleporter take a bundle of loose wires and metal bits and beam it exactly back into place with all those lose wires connected and the space screws in? Smaller parts yes (But again if its small enough to hard carry they do) medium parts maybe (Unless prevented by material science it makes good sense to say teleport a new bridge console in to replace the one that exploded last episode) but larger parts? That assumes you have a void big enough to put it in that's also big enough to adjust it as needed to connect back up wires.
Your "exact transporter matchup" is unnecessary. See above.
We know that they can replace quite major parts of the ship already. In
Phantasms, the Enterprise got a warp core
and some bum warp conduit that carried interphasic critters that infected the crew. After the incident, they were able to manufacture and install a new section of conduit. How long this section was is debatable, but they were able to manufacture a new section in the field and replace it within six hours without calling for a tow back to the nearest starbase, and even if it did (and Geordi was lying), it certainly did not require "ripping out" the old conduit with the implied violence Shep imagines — the ship was NOT down for several months. So, it appears that the conduits too are easily serviceable and replaceable... at least certain sections of them that can be serviced easily. However, the other parts of the conduits are of similiar technology and lifetime, which means that if they had to replace those parts seven years after commissioning, the Enterprise-D must be getting on in years if they have to be "ripped out". If their greatest ship (at the time) has such a short lifetime, this is at odds with similar ships that are still in service after many decades.
Also, Shep seems to be making the background assumption that the spaceframe is
not designed for centuries of space irradiation and harsh stresses if properly cared for, and decades even without such care as the Jenolan. Granted, centuries
is a bitch-long time, but it only postpones when you need to write off the spaceframe, and does not eliminate the eventuality. The spaceframes do wear out — they just have a looong lifetime. Even though the SIF generators will wear out faster in exchange, replacing a few generators here and there ought to be much easier than tearing apart the entire spaceframe and rebuilding it.
There's also this general background assumption that because the
class is old, that the
ships themselves must also be old. Maybe the class is still in production; the class is old, but the ships themselves are brand new. That neatly sidesteps the aging spaceframe concerns; the
class is aging and relegated to second-tier ships, but still useful for certain missions, and because the class has been in production for many decades, spare parts and expertise are abundant. An old, but dependable design that's still in production.
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MKSheppard wrote:Obviously yes, the UFP has a lot more advanced MatSci than what we have now; and even in the real world -- we've advanced a lot -- we used to have to recore a naval reactor every two-ish years; now we can have them be sealed units for a 25-30 year lifetime.
But when that 25 year period comes due, what results is a very expensive, very lengthy recoring process, because you have to cut holes in the decks between you and the reactor, then carefully lift the spent reactor core out, inspect the reactor plant for signs of any damage which would prevent continued operation; fix the damage, then close the whole plant back up.
This is why the US Navy retired it's Nuclear Cruisers (CGNs) in the 1990s; they had been designed for a 35 year lifetime; and still had about fifteen to twenty years left depending on the ship. But what doomed them was that virtually all of them were coming up on their mid-life recorings. And those were very very expensive.
So the designers fucked up on the refit design for nuke cruisers and the whole class had to be retired before its time. It happens. Yet some nuclear-powered classes had to be recored every two years by your own admission. Did they have to scrap those classes too? Or were their designs such that they could be recored relatively painlessly?
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