Could the Federation?......

[MKSheppard]

IMO, the Feds could design a ship with half the size of the sovereign,
but 80% of the firepower if they actually thought things through and
got some real warship designers

The defiant does show what they can do if they're not stupid - it's a
shame they never applid the methodology to larger ships than 100m.

[BenRG]

I am a fan of Trek in my own way, but I am shocked that this is even being discussed. The Galactic Empire is part of a history of cultural and technological development that has a remembered history of at least 20,000 years ("a thousand generations", remember?). The Federation's oldest spacegoing member appears to be the Vulcans, and even they didn't have drives that could get you above Warp 8 at the time of First Contact with the Humans. So, they can't be much beyond 2 or 3 centuries longer in interstellar travel than Earth at most.

The result, of course, is a scientific and technological difference that is completely insurmountable except through dodgy story-telling (say... interference by Q or some other super being). So, no, the Federation couldn't build a ship to rival the Imperial-class Star Destroyer.

However...
It is very interesting to discuss if the Federation could develop a kind of starship that would be a star destroyer equivalent in their own scale of technology and scientific know-how.

Remember the Star Destroyer is basically a hybrid aircraft carrier, marine carrier and battlecruiser. You could easily conceive of a horribly over-weaponed and over-armoured starship designed to project Federation space and ground forces (if there is any such animal) to any point in the explored galaxy through the use of transwarp drives. Add the new weapons and defensive technology upgrades from 'Endgame' and you have a ship that, IMHO, would easily win in any ST Race vs. ST Race battle. It still wouldn't match a Star Destroyer for sheer power, but it would certainly change the balance of power in our little corner of the universe.

[Iceberg]

My idea for a Federation battlecruiser:

- Ablative armor in an "All or Nothing" scheme (forget batmobile armor; whoever designed batmobile armor should be shot, because it's a damned stupid idea)

- Superfiring triple pulse phaser turrets for main armament

- Command is distributed from one bridge to four: Navigation Bridge, Fighting (or Main) Bridge, Combat Information Center and Flag Bridge; each of which can pick up control from the others in case of emergency and each of which is at least 100 meters from any of the others for damage control purposes.

- SURGE SUPPRESSORS. Fucking fuse boxes.

- Viewscreens show tactical representations unless direct visual is specifically needed for ship control (such as during docking operations).

- Positive-pressure matter-antimatter ejection systems, to ensure ship safety even in a catastrophic loss of power event.

- Power systems that don't go critical the second you touch them with a wrench.

[Dalton]

IMO, the Feds could design a ship with half the size of the sovereign,
but 80% of the firepower if they actually thought things through and
got some real warship designers

The defiant does show what they can do if they're not stupid - it's a
shame they never applid the methodology to larger ships than 100m.

Defiant was 150m, wasn't it?

[Anarchist Bunny]

Okey dokey then, time to expand the parameters (sp?).

The Feds through some reason has acess to ALL tech available in the Trek universe. Includes Weapons, Utilities, Power generation. Everything short of super beings (Like Q who could annihilate the whole Empire if he wished). And the ship isnt limited to 1 power reactor. Be creative.

So if we give the Federation technology far beyond theirs, magicly give them the ability to understand and implement it together to make new ships that would have almost none of their orginal techology and this all sounds like Q level doings and makes it no longer the Federation doing it. I'm still not sure about being able to make a ship the level of an SD, I haven't seen a lot of Trek in years so I don't know much of Flavor of the Week aliens, but if you want to try and argue Frankenstiening together a bunch of other one time dead races technologies to try and compete with Empire tech then make another thread, this is the thread title itself says Federation, so stick to the topic.

[MKSheppard]

Defiant was 150m, wasn't it?

Close enough. The thing that really burns me up is that Trek with a few
changes, could mass produce ships, that while not being able to stand
up to an ISD, would be capable of at least hurting said ISD if they
operated in task groups and used intelligent tactics.

[YT300000]

Now assuming Transphasic torpedoes don't use some way to get past shields, I'd estimate their yield is only 5 gigatons. In other words, you'd need around 300 thousand to defeat an ISD.

And that's assuming this ISD doesn't simply fire a single shot and instantly destroy this USS Giant.

1. More efficient and very small phase cloaks (from old Janeway's shuttle)
2. Ablative armour
3. Transphasic torpedoes.

Here are my rebuttals:

1. The 20-year in the future cloak from old Janeway's shuttle was never installed on Voyager.
2. In Endgame, Voyager took a barrage roughly the size of the one that collapsed E-D's sheilds (BoBW I think), which is ~ 90 MT. Since it only brought the armour down to 97%, that means the full capacity of the armour is ~ 2.97 GT. Since a MTL is ~ 22 GT, well the armour won't help much.
3. In FC, a Borg sphere was annihilated by 4 quantum torps. A max of 256 MT could hit the sphere (no shaped charges). Since a sphere is 450 metres across and a cube is 3 km across, the lower limit a cube can take is ~ 1.7066666666 GT. The number is most likely quite a bit higher. That means the absolute min yield of a Transphasic torp is ~ 1.71 GT. Someone else will have to figure out the max yield.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

Okey dokey then, time to expand the parameters (sp?).

The Feds through some reason has acess to ALL tech available in the Trek universe. Includes Weapons, Utilities, Power generation. Everything short of super beings (Like Q who could annihilate the whole Empire if he wished). And the ship isnt limited to 1 power reactor. Be creative.

Most races in ST are nearly the same tech.

[BenRG]

Don't forget that there are some much older races who have made isolated quantum-leaps in technology that flirts with magic. The Voth (dino-guys) are one, as are the Iconians and the First Federation. However, even if you suddenly accept that their technology suddenly became available to the Federation, I'm still not sure how much good this would do them against an opponent of the power of the Empire.

[Anarchist Bunny]

YT, thats accually no where near the min of the Transphasic torps. Transies bypass Borg shields, while the quantums didn't. They were made spesificly for use against the Borg, I think designed to be unadaptable to very hard to adapt to. And like I said earlier in the thread, when the E-D first met a cube, before they began to adapt to Fed tech, a PHASER blew a hole through the cube(although it at a corner IIRC).

[YT300000]

YT, thats accually no where near the min of the Transphasic torps. Transies bypass Borg shields, while the quantums didn't. They were made spesificly for use against the Borg, I think designed to be unadaptable to very hard to adapt to. And like I said earlier in the thread, when the E-D first met a cube, before they began to adapt to Fed tech, a PHASER blew a hole through the cube(although it at a corner IIRC).

If they were made specifically to be used against the borg, then they might be useless against the Empire. THey certainly couldn't bypass shields using frequencies.

[Ignorant_Boy]

This is just like asking that if the entire world pooled all their resources together, would they be able to build a Sovereign-Class Starship? Well TurboPhaser?

[YT300000]

This is just like asking that if the entire world pooled all their resources together, would they be able to build a Sovereign-Class Starship? Well TurboPhaser?

They would be able to build one. It just wouldn't do anything.

[Tribun]

Even if they MANAGE to build a SD-Rival, they would have only one, against a fleet of tens of thousands.

-Can build a SD-rival: NO.

-Can use it, if build, to make thier chances better: no too.

[Admiral Johnason]

Prehaps a ship painted with a nude Janeway covering the hull could work. Seriously, it would take at the very least 20 years of lots of research and massive amounts of resources. I personally give them 60 years if there were many good breaks and healthy trade.

[Howedar]

The Federation could design a ship that would fill the ISD's role in the Imperial fleet quite easily. With all lost tech and such, the Feds could construct a ship that could intimidate at least as well as an Imperator.


It couldn't stand toe-to-toe with one, of course.

[consequences]

Big ships are the wrong way to go against the Empire, its just more resources lost to every HTL shot. Barring mass suicide tactics(my favorite solution as any one whose read my work knows), the only real possibility is with Shep's previously mentioned swarm tactics(my second favorite solution, unless combined with above). It still doesn't matter however, because the resource differential is so vast.

my five minute version of why the debate is pointless

Each ISD is worth lots and lots of the GCS
If you limit them to equal capability by volume, each ISD still is worth 14 GCS.
If you somehow reduce the ISD to the individual ability of the GCS, there are still a minimum of 25000 ISDs, and maybe 12000 Fed ships at absolute peak, very few of which are GCS.
They are bigger, more capable, and there are lots more of them. Its like being Belisarius campaigning to retake the Western Roman Empire, and finding the U.S. Army of Desert Storm as his opposition, he's fucked every way possible.

[Gandalf]

Uh, that is in addition to all the other ships they build. Shelby said in BoBW that 'They will have the fleet back up in a year'. They lost 39 ships, that suggests that the Feds can build about 40 ships a year, probably more.

As GAT said, that would be a seperate shipyards, also, when you see several shots of the remnants of the fleet, several are just empty hulks, this would be much easier to repair.

[Drooling Iguana]

If they joined their entire fleet togeather with really long bungee chords, would that count?

[TurboPhaser]

This is just like asking that if the entire world pooled all their resources together, would they be able to build a Sovereign-Class Starship? Well TurboPhaser?

No, of course not. At least not parts of it. Seen any warp cores built in any factorys bear you? I havent. Would all the power stations on the planet put together match a Warp core output? Probably not. I wouldnt know.

Not much of a thread is it?

[Ignorant_Boy]

No, of course not. At least not parts of it. Seen any warp cores built in any factorys bear you? I havent. Would all the power stations on the planet put together match a Warp core output? Probably not. I wouldnt know.

Not much of a thread is it?

Well then, seen any hypermatter reactors being build in any factories in the Federation? Would all the warp cores in the Federation put together match an ISD's hypermatter reactor? Maybe, maybe not. But be creative

[HRogge]

The Federation has not enough antimatter to produce similar energies as hypermatter reactors. Antimatter is some kind of ultra-tech battery, it does only store energy ( you have to use more energy to create antimatter than you get by anihilating it ).

[Lord Pounder]

I ahet to break this to you TurboPhaser. Give your feddies ship a million transphasic torps if you want. The ship will never live long enough to fire them. One HTL makes the ship burst like a balloon being thrown on the fire. Unless the feddies can produce shields millions of times better than what they have now they'll never live long enough to even fire a second shot.

[Striderteen]

I think the best move the Federation can make is to give up on starships completely and switch to missile drones -- take small warp-capable shuttlecraft, fit them with as many single-shot missile tubes as possible, and send them at the Empire in massive swarms.

It's still a losing battle, though.

[Thunderfire]

It depends on the amount of antimatter in federation stocks.
I think it would be possible to build a ship capable of launching
huge M/AM warheads. 100,000 tons of antimatter per warhead
would be nice. Add shield & cloaking and you get some nice
long range weapons.