Which UFp Starship Amenity would you remove?

[beyond hope]

I can't believe you missed the single most obvious thing that needs to go... the civilians on the ship. There is absolutely no excuse for putting civlians on a military vessel, in fact I believe it might violate the Geneva conventions. I'm not sure what the civilian compliment of a Galaxy class is, maybe Darkling would no... I seem to recall it being in the range of 1/5th to 1/3rd of the entire ship's compliment! That's somewhere around 200 to 333 quarters that could be eliminated, along with attendant functions such as schooling and day care aboard the ship. You can either use the saved space to reduce the ship's size (and hence it's target profile,) or else put double that number of marines in their place (and yes, I know that Starfleet doesn't have them, before anyone jumps on me about that.)

I also vote for dispensing with the "luxury suite" crew quarters in general: not only is it wasted space, but remember that keeping all that space habitable is a drain on life support too. It's like these condos with the cathedral ceilings... extra space that really gets no practical use, which nonetheless life support must work to keep at comfortable temperature and provided with breathable air. Cut down on that space, you cut down on the life support requirements for the ship a bit. The net result of those two changes alone should be a ship more along the lines of the Ambassador class in size, without any loss in capability from the Galaxy class.

I'm not going to bother reiterating the arguments about the holodeck because other people have expressed them better than I could: suffice to say I'd leave them for training purposes. I also thought of a good reason to keep the replicators: replicated food won't spoil, and as has been mentioned before it may be more space-efficient (and if you want lean-and-mean to cram more weapons, shielding, and power onboard, space will be more of a concern than power consumption.) For power effiency you just take them offline while the ship is in combat. I'd imagine the Feds actually do this, but I can't remember any canon statements one way or the other and I know B&B's writing well enough to know not to make the assumption. Anyway, that would be a failure of tactical doctrine if those systems are drawing power while the ship is in combat, and not a failure of the systems themselves.

One thing I've been wondering about: this isn't the first thread where I've seen someone suggest a second warp core on a Fed ship. Does anyone know of a Fed ship that has more than one warp core? I know trek's got some godawful writing these days but if no ship in Star Trek has multiple cores, maybe there's a technical limitation that prevents it rather than Starfleet just never thinking of doing it.

[Evil Jerk]

One thing I've been wondering about: this isn't the first thread where I've seen someone suggest a second warp core on a Fed ship. Does anyone know of a Fed ship that has more than one warp core? I know trek's got some godawful writing these days but if no ship in Star Trek has multiple cores, maybe there's a technical limitation that prevents it rather than Starfleet just never thinking of doing it.

The Prometheus has three because it's in three warp capable pieces, but they're probably not all used when the ship is together (some say later models do, but there's nothing canon that shows us this)

[Alferd Packer]

Large crew quarters have to go. It should be something similar to a dorm; two or three people for a room, common washroom, eating facilities, etc. Replicators should be reduced in commonality; perhaps rationed like on Voyager, so that you could have your favorite extravagant meal perhaps twice a week or something. If I had my E-D blueprints, I'd be able to come up with some accurate numbers, but oh well. You'd probably be able to carry a few thousand more crew/soldiers on a GCS, plus store more antimatter/deuterium/torpedoes, etc.

[Isolder74]

Remove the holodeck's recreation capibilities, it's good for ground combat training. the crew quarters need to be majorly redesigned. the large presidential suites for every crewman and officer is silly.

[Master of Ossus]

The amount of space taken up by crew quarters is far greater than the amount of space taken up by the holodecks. Yes, the holodecks are kind of stupid given their number and size, but the quarters are the biggest problem there.

[Cal Wright]

They're not on a warship. They're on a ship which caters to families, peace, and general get the shit knocked out of you. Cramp the quarters and lose the daycares. Give those bitches some kick ass weapons. With the extra space, they could add some better sheild gens or at least some armor.

[tharkûn]

Funny all the comments here give us the Defiant (well they do keep replicators).

I'd disable the holodec first. Large crew quarters don't inherently kill people, the holodecs have. Until you get safeties that:
1. Actually work.
2. Prevent the holodec from taking over the ship.
3. Allow the damn thing to be shut off with an old fashioned circuit breaker.

After these conditions are met I'd take and leave a *small* number of holodecs (i.e. two) for use. My first priority is to ensure my ship doesn't get taken over when a crewman decides he wants a better opponent, my second is that crewmen don't get killed when the damn thing has its regular problems.

The holodec is fine as recreation, indeed think about the *one* thing sailors at sea lack that the holodec can easily replace, all the benifits of shore leave without the venereal disease assuming all masculinity is not beat of feddie troops this benifit is worth it alone. Its also great from training sims (assuming compotent safeties). There is a WORLD of difference between knowing what to do in an emergency and having practiced it "live" so often its habit. Its also good if you are planning covert ops, it is common practice to build mock-ups to train in before engaging in the actual mission. US POW camp raids did this, as did the IDF raid at Entebbe. Rather than having to spend all sorts of time making your mock-up and then having it be of poor quality ... use the holodec.

Crew quarters have got to go. In peace time this isn't that big of deal, in war its huge. Starfleet actually understands this (it seems) because when they make an actual warship (as opposed to an armed science vessel like the E-D) they do this. The quarters on the Excelsior seem emminently reasonable.

Other things to through out the airlock if you want a warship:

90% of those science labs. If you come across some scientific anomoly you call a dedicated science ship. Your business is not to figure out how the world works ... it's to break things and kill people.

"Jeffries tubes" Without a doubt the most ass-backwards way to design a ship. You should virtually never have to crawl to fix some vital system. Take and route all those crucially important systems right next to the damn corridors. You can even cover them with spiffy wall panelling that is easily removed with a screw driver and a hammer in a pinch. Inconsequential things like crew quarters, the bar, etc. should be buried in hard to access portions of the ship ... not key systems.

Doors without handles. While walking through supermarket doors is very convenient ... its damn stupid in times of battle. If the power goes down do you really want to wait while somebody finds the damn inconveinent manual release? Door design further sucks because you can't easily barricade them. If you do get boarded you want to be able to quickly and easily bloc doors. As it stands unless you fully occlude the doorway an intruder caan still force the door and shoot through any gaps in your barrier or chuck grenades. The doors on the Jeffries tubes suck even worse requiring people to bring magnetic hand holds in the event of emergencies.

[beyond hope]

90% of those science labs. If you come across some scientific anomoly you call a dedicated science ship. Your business is not to figure out how the world works ... it's to break things and kill people.

Where'd the "kill people and break things" quote come from? I first saw this in a Battletech novel and I was wondering who it could originally be attributed to.

At any rate, I agree completely with the Jeffries tube thing: perhaps some of the space saved by reducing the quarters to a reasonable size could be used to put vital ship's components out in the *open,* where they're *easy* to repair. Also, here's a thought: blast doors instead of internal shields to handle intruders (and other problems such as hull breaches.) I've always felt like those wide, open corridors on Fed ships are an invitation to enemy marines to come aboard: you can just see Stormtroopers knocking on the hull and yelling "boarding party!" before blasting their way in.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

Remove the holodeck, and replace it with either a cheaper, safer entertainment facility, or power cells. Then, make the quarters smaller, and remove the civilians. I would also remove the phasers and replace them with something more useful. I would also make the systems far more efficient. And, if the hull is supposedly so strong, remove the SIF, if we don't need it.

[Stormtrooper THX-1138]

Heh, I'm just imagining the fun I could have in one of those corridors with an E-web.

" Ok, folks, time to play a new game... I call it "Lawnmower" *depress trigger*

mm-hmm...Good times.

[Coyote]

Well, for reasons that have been well documented by now, I trashed the Palatial Estates that each crewer gets to live in and support the idea of dorm-style rooms.

The replicator seems like a nice way to produce mass quantities and varieties of food without having to worry about refrigeration, storage, spoilage, etc. Get rid of individual crew-room replicators and consolidate the replicators in mess rooms on each deck-- again, 'cause you gotta get these people eating and interacting together, and being a real team.

Of course, the HolDeck is ideal for training-- tactical drills, emergency-reaction drills, and also keep a few programs for common crew recreation to break deep space monotany. And what Tharkun said about using the HoloDecks as 'relief valves' for pent-up frustrations... well, that's also a wise idea. It also gives the first-line leaders a handy minor reprimand-- every crewer is allotted 'x' amount of time on the HoloDeck each week, and if he/she fukks up, then "no 'weekend pass' for you".

The civilians are science and support personnel, so serve a purpose on a StarFleet vessel largely devoted to benign exploration. Dedicated warships would have to ixnay the civvies.

But what about the worst, power-hungry, malfunction-prone disasters-in-the-making that went unmentioned? Get rid of those damnable TRANSPORTERS! They're always turning your best crewers and sweeties into jelly, they always fail when you need them most, they always suck up huge amounts of power...! Who needs them when you can equip shuttles with weapons, shields, and cloaking devices to make assault landers? In fact, with the space saved from those crew quarters, load up a few of the Fed equivilent of the 6-man Bird of Prey and turn the Enterprise into an escort carrier with some punch!

[Howedar]

If room size were reduced, you could build 2 or 3 ships of Galaxy capabilities for the price of one. Like somebody said, they wouldn't need to be tiny (dorm-room size would do), but they are sure as hell too big right now.

[Doomriser]

I see no problem with the replicators and holodecks, provided that they are used in a more sensible manner. A more permanent problem is the crew quarters. The quarters take up the most space (The Ent-nil had the same crew as the E-D) - imagine all the good stuff the starship could be filled with instead of mostly empty, loneriffic luxury suites. Bunking crews together would create bonding too. The large quarters have the least space/usefullness ratio, and should be ditched.

[Admiral Piett]

If room size were reduced, you could build 2 or 3 ships of Galaxy capabilities for the price of one. Like somebody said, they wouldn't need to be tiny (dorm-room size would do), but they are sure as hell too big right now.

Steel (in this case duranium) is cheap.What makes a ship expensive are the systems,weapons,power generators,sensors etc.Not the hull.For a ship
the hull makes only for roughly the 20% of the cost.Crew quarters are just empty space,thus they are relatively cheap.Large crew quarters are ineffcient but you are not definitively going to get two galaxies by reducing the size of crew quarters.As I said they are just empty space.

[MKSheppard]

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rcrierie/ ... erMess.gif

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rcrierie/ ... ewMess.gif

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rcrierie/ ... lities.gif

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rcrierie/ ... Living.gif

5 lieutenants typically share quarters......

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rcrierie/ ... Living.gif

[MKSheppard]

(The Ent-nil had the same crew as the E-D)

WRONG.

E-nil had 450 crew, the E-D has about 1,500+

[greenmm]

Luxury suites, although the holodeck came in a very close second.

Seriously, if the holodeck was supposed to replace shore leave for most occassions, then it should also replace the need for large personal quarters. I mean, really. Between 10 Forward and the holodecks, the only use for their quarters is changing clothes, privacy, and sleeping, all of which can be taken care of with quarters half the size we see.

Holodecks were a second-place. How many times do we see the holodeck go offline/fritzy and lock someone in/disable safety protocols/provide a method for an alien force to take over the ship/let Prof. Moriarty out to play? Enough is enough with it.

The replicators.... if anything, this is only thing I'd keep. It saves on internal storage to use it instead of bulk food storage (although I'm sure that they actually store some of the basic building blocks on board, because the energy cost to carry that much food in a transporter-style "buffer" would be horrendous -- heck, IIRC, the 1 TW main engine can only provide enough power to be equivelent to about 11 milligrams of solid matter per second anyway... love to see a breakfast for 1000 made from that paltry amount...).

[CmdrWilkens]

(The Ent-nil had the same crew as the E-D)

WRONG.

E-nil had 450 crew, the E-D has about 1,500+

The E-D has about 1200 people onboard of which how many hundreds are civilians or scientist pretending to be crewmen.

[Evil Jerk]

(The Ent-nil had the same crew as the E-D)

WRONG.

E-nil had 450 crew, the E-D has about 1,500+

The E-D has about 1200 people onboard of which how many hundreds are civilians or scientist pretending to be crewmen.

Do they ever give specific numbers even in the TM?
As in how many crew, how much useless baggage.. er.. civilians?

[Soontir C'boath]

I'd go for replicators. I don't think they can make good chinese food as well as we can.

Hey on Voyager Neelix is a cook and make an assortment of things. Are those replicators in there used just for drinks? If so WHAT A EVEN MORE WASTE OF POWER!

Cyaround,
Jason

[Enlightenment]

Do they ever give specific numbers even in the TM?
As in how many crew, how much useless baggage.. er.. civilians?

The real-crew count can be estimated from on-screen data.

Bridge: 5 crew on average
Engineering: ~10 crew in engineering, unknown number of personell elsewhere.
Medical: ~3 staff
Security: at least one four person ready team, at least one brig watch.
Transporter ops: 1 person per transporter room (6).

Assuming a four section watch, (5+10+3+5+6) * 4 = 116 crew absolute minimum. The crew count is probably somewhere around 200-250 once admin posts and watch areas not seen on screen are factored in.

[Failed Glory]

But you have to add on all those kids and teachers and actors and useful science people running around studying 20th century science and how it relates to current technology. Not to mention Guinan and her staff of about thirty bartenders (apparently serving drinks as a human life skill was lost by the 23rd century). Put some useless red or green-shirt security guards in the mix and you have a crew of a thousand.

If you were to add something useful to these multiple mission ships it would have to be a masseuse. What the hell? A thousand people and never someone to rub your back and tell you,"Your neck muscles are stiff, you must be under a lot of stress..."

[seanrobertson]

...namely, ALL OF THE ABOVE.

Frankly, the Holodeck is what I'd rip out of every staship. Waste of space and energy, prone to dangerous malfunctioning at least a third of the time, and helps to turn a crew's brains to goo. It might be acceptable to retain one holochamber on board to be used wholly for scientific or tactical research and have no recreational programmes in its system memory.

The food replicators: let them eat buik. A Federation starship is a festival of energy waste.

And the luxury suites have to go as well. Little wonder Federation crews are so soft and muddleheaded, drowning in all that luxury. These are supposed to be ships of the line, not cruiseliners. And all that space could be far better used for extra fuel and consumables storage, materials fabrication, machine shops, extra power reactors, sensors, weapons, cargo storage.

Time to tell the Starfleeters that they're in the Navy now.

Bah, Patrick. What about the civilians onboard these cruise ships?

I, for one, want a replicator that can give me as many banana pudding
and sesame chicken plates as I want, and I want a holodeck that lets
me, as Dennis Miller once said, fuck Claudia Schiffer for $4.95
(These days, among supermodels, I think I'd have to pick Gisele
Bundchen. As is typical among supermodels, she does smoke,
and might do smack to keep her weight down, but insofar as
pure looks are concerned...wow. Sexy young girl.)

Seriously, replicators and holodecks would have to go on a military
ship. Most anything related to astrometrics or exploratory science
would go. My ship would be little more than a massive antimatter
storage tank with very strong shields, hull armor on the double,
and at least one "deflector" that I could use for big honking core-wasting
discharges.

In addition to that, pulse phasers for point defense, and several
squadrons of fighters or drone missiles.

[tharkûn]

Holodecks are fine if they have proper safeties and are limited in number. The space is not that huge of a deal. They are very useful for training and also useful for recreation. Too many people forget that recreation en route is *very* important, its nothing to have several rooms devoted to recreation on large ships. The holodec is a *very* good recreation tool (provided the crewmen don't turn their brains to goo there) and using it to releive frustration without the risk of venereal disease ... it's a good thing

The only problems with the holodec are:
1. It needs to be secluded from the rest of the ships systems. No more taking over the ship through the holodec.
2. Safeties need to actually work.
3. You need to quickly and easily be able to pull the plug on it.
4. For a ship voyager's size I'd want two holodecs. For something E-D compliment I'd want a few more (so everyone gets 1 hour a week and a few hours left over to dole out as minor bribes). If the US navy can bring movie screens to sea, holodecs are fine.

I'd fix those first, but having holodecs is not a bad thing in and of itself.

Transporters are not a hideously bad thing. They do seem quite effective at moving large numbers of people in short periods of time, they would also be better for beaming large amounts of suppies around.

Replicators are useful for more things than food. Think *spare parts*. Most certainly you want to have enough parts on hand to fix anything in an emergency. However over the long haul you don't know what's going to break, but you do know *something* will break. On modern ships you have to carry enough spare parts so you aren't screwed if you break the same part multiple times (this has been somewhat alleviated with the advent of aerial resupply, however this is not an option for warships in ST as they don't have hideously faster supply "planes"). The replicators would allow you to have sufficient spare parts to repair everything without having to carry everything in triple amounts in case of freak accident.

The holodec is the most dangerous flaw, but that can be corrected without scrapping it. The luxury quarters have to go long term. They won't kill anyone in peacetime, but they so fundementally wrong long term. Replicators just need to be restricted in use. Take them out of personal quarters and combined in a mess area and in areas likely to need them for other purposes (i.e. egineering)

[Tsyroc]

Do they ever give specific numbers even in the TM?
As in how many crew, how much useless baggage.. er.. civilians?

I didn't find any but they kept making comments about having to provide comfort bla bla bla for 1000 people.

I did find that each person assigned to the Enterprise-D is alloted 110square meters of living space.

Decks 9, 11, 33 & 35 are all configured as living quarters but kept empty, just in case. It says that in the short term, use of these quarters can increase the ships complemetn to 6,500. It doesn't say if each of those people also gets the mondo-sized crew quarters though.

The tech manual specifically mentions treating the crewmembers well with all the amenities. Plus it talks about some engineers arguing against wasting so much space when they could achieve the same mission specs with a smaller and cheaper ship.

Incidently, the E-E is classified as an Explorer.