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Lonestar wrote:Starfleet registration tags are virtually worthless.

I know there are some wacky issues with the registries, but overall there tend to be some consistencies. For example, TOS-era ships do not break 4000. Only a handful of TNG era ships fall under these numbers. With the rest numbering NCC-9000 and up (virtually every TNG ship has a five digit registry). This implies most ships of the TOS era have been retired (ships that fall under that category, include the mothballed Hathaway, the trashed Stargazer and a couple ships shown to be on active duty).

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Federation ... registries

The Galaxies, Intrepid-Class and Defiant-Class ships all fall into registries from NCC-70000 and up. Those are the highest registry numbers of the TNG era and are, as presented, the newest ships of the era. The Nebula-Class ships all are labeled in the 60000's and up (going into the 70000). Excelsior-class ships are scattered across the registries, suggesting a very long production life.

Skylon wrote:
The Galaxies, Intrepid-Class and Defiant-Class ships all fall into registries from NCC-70000 and up. Those are the highest registry numbers of the TNG era and are, as presented, the newest ships of the era. The Nebula-Class ships all are labeled in the 60000's and up (going into the 70000). Excelsior-class ships are scattered across the registries, suggesting a very long production life.

Or that registry numbers are jumped for weird reasons(like in the real world where we're jumping from DDG hull numbers in the 100s to the DD-1000 in the 1000s.)

I also maintain a healthy amount of skepticism because there are instances of hull numbers not matching registration numbers on dedication plaques(the Yamato, for one).

It's possible they get new registries if they're taken out of service and put back in or renamed; the E-A was another ship first, wasn't it? Excelsiors with very high registries either means they kept building them or when they pulled them out of mothballs they got a 'current' number. I think the ships expressly old (like Hood etc) have closer to 2000 than 70000 registries.

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.

====

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?

Stark wrote:It's possible they get new registries if they're taken out of service and put back in or renamed; the E-A was another ship first, wasn't it? Excelsiors with very high registries either means they kept building them or when they pulled them out of mothballs they got a 'current' number. I think the ships expressly old (like Hood etc) have closer to 2000 than 70000 registries.

That is possible, though the Ent-A seemed to be more honorific in nature ("Hey...these guys saved the planet, let's slap the name of their old ship on this Connie and give it to them"). They could also be kit-bashed in a sense (swapping warp nacelles, saucer and stardrive sections, refurbishing them and creating essentially a new ship made from recycled parts...just slap on a new name and registry).

The Hood's registry is NCC 42296...the registries of six other Excelsiors are in the 40000 range. A couple are in the 10000 and 30000 range, one each are in the 50000 and 60000 range. Two fall into the TOS range (the Excelsior and the USS Repulse, the later shown during TNG). Either they kept building them, or, as Stark suggested, refurbished them and slapped new names and registries on them.

Going back to Lonestar's point, there certainly seems to be an inexplicable jump registry wise between TOS and TNG, from the 2000's to, with only a few exceptions, 10000 and up. That could be a book-keeping thing on Starfleet's part There however seem to be some efforts to maintain consistency. In some cases it didn't work out (conflicting registries between the dedication plaques and the starship's hull). But, its enough to at least give a sense of continuity to ship production. Because of the (honestly few) inconsistencies I don't think you can throw out the entire registry scheme as indicating nothing.

It might also be that jumps occur when the Federation integrates a new species and they combine their existing fleet with the Federation one. The Mundianian Space Empire joins the Federation and pledges it's Thousand Strong Armada, Terror of the Generican Nebula! to Starfleet service, so Starfleet tags em all. Turns out that 9 out of 10 of those ships are crap and are retired within a year. It's probably happened a bunch of times as the Federation incorperates new species.

Mr Bean wrote:

Destructionator XIII 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.

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.

Why are we assuming that a culture with teleporters wouldn't design as much of its equipment as possible to be at least roughly beamed into place? Even in situations where you have to lay the ship up in drydock and tear parts of it open because there's just no room, the transporter still makes your life easier, if nothing else because you don't have to cut holes in the hull to get big pieces in and out.

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.

So what? You have to disconnect the wires and conduits anyway. Maybe some parts you have to tear open adjacent panels to get to them. Again, so what? You would have had to do it no matter what, and the transporter still saves time and labor.

I've worked on projects to replace heavy equipment in complex systems without a lot of clearance--I spent two summers in the oil industry, working on turnarounds in refineries. The amount of labor and time that could have been saved by a transporter is probably measurable in man-years. The number of crane movements and forklift trips alone are enormous.

To take an example, how about an modern engine?

Lets say you have a teleporter to remove it, all well and good but you kinda need to disconnect all the wires and what-not first. On a Starship there's not always going to be that space so you have to remove deck plating, bulk head and what not so you can disconnect everything and then the engine can be beamed away. Beaming it back is tricky and if screwed up will most likely requires you to fix two things. But lets say you can always put it back in exactly down to the billionth of an millimeter in accuracy.

Speaking as someone who's actually pulled an engine and put it back, I can't begin to tell you how helpful a transporter would have been, even if it couldn't magically disconnect all the hoses and wires first.

Now you have go in, reconnect everything and seal everything back up. It's not as if you can take said engine simply ask your Teleporter room to beam one out and beam a new one in without any prep work what so ever. Doing maintenance you have to check it, you have to test it, and in case the teleporter room beamed it .00007 of a millimeter to the left you need to check and move it.

[/quote]Oh, come on. Are we demanding that same level of precision from the humans who have to install and remove this stuff in the real world? Do you not have to check everything and test it before you restart if it's put in by dockyard workers instead of transporter operators?

You're doing a great job arguing that transporters wouldn't magically make replacing any piece of equipment a breeze, but unfortunately nobody's making that claim. The thread is asking why Starfleet keeps their ships operating a long time, and "the transporter makes maintenance and repairs considerably easier" is obviously a piece of that answer. Combine that with the fact that the largest piece of internal equipment, the warp core, is designed to be ejectable and the warp nacelles are modular, and the analogy with present-day nuclear warships begins to break down.

RedImperator, your points are quite valid.

I believe the demand for accuracy arises from materializing an object within another. Having a few cm of clearance doesn't seem to difficult to manage for a maintenance team or for an experienced transporter operator.

I still don't understand how the air an object is transported into doesn't cause negative effects.

Maybe use forcefields to seal off the location, then transport all the air out or open it to vacuum before transporting the component in. On the other hand, how much of a negative effect could it have?

Stofsk wrote:Maybe use forcefields to seal off the location, then transport all the air out or open it to vacuum before transporting the component in. On the other hand, how much of a negative effect could it have?

In-universe apparently NONE as there never ARE any whenever they beam something or somebody into a volume of space that WAS moments before occupied by air.
I think Jeremy is asking WHY there are no negative side effects and that's a damned good question as there's absolutely no indication transporters actually evacuate the air in the volume of space their transportees are about to occupy.
It is ALSO, I very much suspect, a question that a) has come up before and b) ended with everybody reluctantly agreeing on the answer being 'we haven't the foggiest'.

Lonestar wrote:Dunno Stark, just like in real life, I can't imagine it's easy to keep upgrading systems within the same hull. Modernized Queen Elizabeth BBs looked much different than unmodernized ones, for example.

And anything kept in service for a hundred years is likely have to go through major work(reactor replacement, what have you) and they'll be a temptation to re-engine them, replaced the defelector dish, etc. There should be a lot more external differences after a hundred years.

I mean, the Enterprise-B and Lakota both had external differences, perhaps representing a Block IIIa or something that was built as the cold war with the Klingons was petering out and money for line ships was going away, thus needing a beefier "heavy cruiser" since the replacement class was being truncated

But most of the systems are supposed to be under the hull; Matt Jefferies explicitly suggested that the original Enterprise was meant to have as many systems within the hull as possible, so as to allow maintenance to be done without having to send crewmen outside the ship. (The other concept was that the nacelles were supposed to be basically plug-and-play; they could be relatively easily swapped out with replacements at a starbase if need be.) If the shield generators and antimatter reactor get swapped out, there's no reason to assume we'd see a noticeable external difference. Heck, look at Enterprise (TMP) and Enterprise-A (ST 5); we see two completely different shuttlebay arrangements within an identical outer hull. Same with the torpedo bay (ST 2, ST 6) and the bridge. Enterprise-D got several system upgrades through the course of TNG (including a whole replacement antimatter reactor, and better phasers) and yet we never see those changes manifest on the exterior.

Enterprise-B and Lakota may have been part of a subtype which proved to be not cost-effective and canceled in favor of further standard Excelsior-class ships. We see a lot of Excelsior-class ships throughout TNG and DS9, but there's only a short span of a few years between the prototype and the introduction of Enterprise-B; were so many really built so quickly before producing a handful of sideboob-Excelsiors and then shutting down the line? (in favor of Constellation, no less... bleh!)

Were the constellations regular role ships? I thought they were a specific long-term exploration ship, while Excelsior is used for all kinds of things (and seems to be more powerful militarily).

Sorry for taking so long to get back to this thread -- but I've been researching in the DC Navy Yard.

While the ship's crew can do quite a bit of preventive maintenance themselves -- this can only go so far on a deployed ship.

You can have Spaceman Schmuckatelli replace 50,000 Isolinear chips as they burn out during his two years in the engineering department before he transferred to Science, but what happens when a warp drive coil burns out? That's basically yard time.

Also; we're assuming that the structural integrity field (SIF) is 100% efficient; and there's no 'leak through' due to poor calculations, or oversights on the designers; or even the effect of a battle -- e.g the SIF was rated to deal with and damp out 56 MegaSheps of force on the spaceframe; and then in a battle with someone, a series of torpedo strikes put 70 MegaSheps of force on the spaceframe.

Where does the excess strain go?

Design oversights also cause problems a lot more than most people think.

USS Long Beach CGN-9 was notorious for burning up her shafts. And her engineering department was very good about following maintenance schedules and not overstressing the plant. Despite this, you could mark time by how often Long Beach burned up a shaft.

One of the likely reasons this happened was that Long Beach was our last true cruiser -- she was built on a traditional cruiser hull.

But what was different was that unlike previous cruisers; she did not have armor -- which in previous ships acted to stiffen the hull. So this allowed the hull to hog outside it's design specs, placing extra strain on the shafts.

Destructinator XIII wrote:I betcha maintenance on big internal components would be a lot easier if there was some way to magically teleport things through walls. If only Starfleet had that kind of thing available, it'd be a real cost-cutter.

That probably does help a lot with standard maintenance for Spaceman Schmuckatelli. Beam the replacement AE-65 line replacement unit straight from the cargo bay it's stored in to the hallway where it needs to be installed.

But as others have pointed out -- transporters can't beam certain types of things, and they are notoriously fickle in the presence of radiation.

One of the big problems we have in disposing of nuclear warships is that the entire engineering plant is basically low level radioactive waste, even after the plant's been shut down for a month, and all the fuel has been removed. This is because certain types of materials can become "activated" by intense radiation and become radioactive themselves.

Why is it necessarily 'yard time' to change a warp coil? I know you like to pretend everything is like the wet navy, but this is spaceland with teleporters. While they'd doubtless do it at a base of some kind, is there a reason to assume it'd take months like re-engining a boat? They're even designed to be changed, as mentioned above.

I actually love how you put a totally irrelevant bit of trivia in as your last paragraph with no attempt to link it to anything being discussed. Um, thanks?

Stark wrote:Why is it necessarily 'yard time' to change a warp coil?

The warp coil in a nacelle is a pretty huge component in terms of scale and it operates in a very high intensity radiation environment for long periods of time -- that's a prescription for it to be become radioactively activated and "hot"; which means that you can't just simply beam it out and beam the new one in.

Presumably, there are at least one or two spare warp coils stowed in the cargo decks in disassembled form -- e.g. they're in four quarter segments stowed nearby a external hatch opening large enough to fit the coil parts through.

But assembling them and then installing them on your own is going to be a "last ditch" option -- since it would take even longer than it would with a proper shipyard helping you, and you would have to spend more time aligning and calibrating them by yourselves than with the specialized equipment a yard would have to handle the coils.

I actually love how you put a totally irrelevant bit of trivia in as your last paragraph with no attempt to link it to anything being discussed. Um, thanks?

Actually it has revelance. Long Beach CGN-9 had a very good engineering division, and they played everything by the book, but the shafts were a continuous source of problems for them.

Which is relevant to spaceships... how?

PS, making up how they carry spare warp parts doesn't strengthen your argument that it's 'yard time' with the implied long duration or high cost. Obviously they're going to want help, but it's not 'put ship in drydock, disassemble 50% of it and rebuild the whole thing'. At absolute least the warp coils are out on these funny booms which means they're much easier to replace than a nuclear reactor on a carrier.

Stark wrote:Were the constellations regular role ships? I thought they were a specific long-term exploration ship, while Excelsior is used for all kinds of things (and seems to be more powerful militarily).

I don't remember there being much exposition on their role. They were still being used up until a few years prior to TNG starting (as Picard had been sent in the Stargazer to offer a truce to the Cardassians, then had to run back when they decided to shoot at him instead), and we saw one being used as part of the twenty-something task force headed by Picard in TNG Redemption to blockade the Klingon-Romulan border.

Picard once said Stargazer was an "overworked and underpowered" ship, although it could be that it had since had one too many upgrades and was now struggling to accommodate the newer systems that had since been packed into it - maybe it wasn't cost-effective to design a newer reactor that fit within the ship so it just had to struggle with what it had.

I got the impression it was supposed to be a relatively major type, but all the fannish stuff around the four engines and Picard's exploration mission is a bit strange.

MKSheppard wrote:Also; we're assuming that the structural integrity field (SIF) is 100% efficient; and there's no 'leak through' due to poor calculations, or oversights on the designers; or even the effect of a battle -- e.g the SIF was rated to deal with and damp out 56 MegaSheps of force on the spaceframe; and then in a battle with someone, a series of torpedo strikes put 70 MegaSheps of force on the spaceframe.

Wut. Where did you pull that strawman? The argument for the SIF was that it lengthens the life of the spaceframe, not make it last forever. Even if not 100% effective, the SIF would reduce cycling stresses and take the edge off local stress overloads. Building your spaceframe to the assumption of having SIF allows you to use materials that are not as stiff, but have better cycling performance.

There's no physical principle that keeps a spaceframe from having an lifetime of over a century, and if it launches sleeper ships (SS Botany Bay), then this kind of endurance is implied.

MKSheppard wrote:But as others have pointed out -- transporters can't beam certain types of things, and they are notoriously fickle in the presence of radiation.

One of the big problems we have in disposing of nuclear warships is that the entire engineering plant is basically low level radioactive waste, even after the plant's been shut down for a month, and all the fuel has been removed. This is because certain types of materials can become "activated" by intense radiation and become radioactive themselves.

Nevertheless, the Feds were able to change out sections of the D's warp plasma conduits without grounding the Enterprise for an ungodly number of episodes.

Stark wrote:I got the impression it was supposed to be a relatively major type, but all the fannish stuff around the four engines and Picard's exploration mission is a bit strange.

Out of universe the ship was originally supposed to be a movie era Constitution Class, but was changed after shooting had already begun. While not much canon material exists, she does seem to have served a role as both a heavy cruiser and an explorer, not unlike a Connie. Considering most of them were 80 years old I assume that they were being commissioned as a Connie replacement along side the Excelsior class.

Uraniun235 wrote:

Stark wrote:Were the constellations regular role ships? I thought they were a specific long-term exploration ship, while Excelsior is used for all kinds of things (and seems to be more powerful militarily).

I don't remember there being much exposition on their role. They were still being used up until a few years prior to TNG starting (as Picard had been sent in the Stargazer to offer a truce to the Cardassians, then had to run back when they decided to shoot at him instead), and we saw one being used as part of the twenty-something task force headed by Picard in TNG Redemption to blockade the Klingon-Romulan border.

Past that, the USS Victory seen in TNG was still in service during DS9 according to some casualty charts.

We also have an idea of when the ship was introduced. The Hathaway at "80 years old" places its launch during the TOS movie era. The Contellation with an "NX" designation appears on the Operation Retrieve charts in ST VI.

Further, I recall the Hathaway become described as a "Cruiser". As we usually hear the bigger Trek ships called "Heavy Cruisers" can we infer she carried out the same functions as a Constitution/ Excelsior but was a bit less capable?

Picard once said Stargazer was an "overworked and underpowered" ship, although it could be that it had since had one too many upgrades and was now struggling to accommodate the newer systems that had since been packed into it - maybe it wasn't cost-effective to design a newer reactor that fit within the ship so it just had to struggle with what it had.

The Stargazer's bridge had some rather old elements for a TNG period ship (the Ent-C, lost before the Stargazer looked more up to date). Owing to the production crew reusing consoles and even the captain's chair from the Enterprise-nil bridge used in the first three TOS movies for the Stargazer. Picard always made it sound like the Stargazer was always shit on by Starfleet, and had a really crappy deal. I mean, how often does Picard recall something good happening on that ship?

Skylon wrote:Further, I recall the Hathaway become described as a "Cruiser". As we usually hear the bigger Trek ships called "Heavy Cruisers" can we infer she carried out the same functions as a Constitution/ Excelsior but was a bit less capable?

If it was introduced at around the same time as the Excelsior, I could definitely see it being "cruiser" but not "heavy cruiser" as that appears to be the role that Excelsior took. I'm not exactly sure what you'd need it for though, as for the heavier work you'd want an Excelsior, and for lighter work you already have the Miranda (which appears to have been another hugely-produced ship frame given the variants seen in TNG and the huge number of them used as cannon fodder in DS9). Maybe it was a stopgap built while they designed a conventional warp drive to fit to Excelsior, rather than refit any more Constitutions (or maybe there weren't any left to refit).

It depends. In non-canon sources the Excelsior was often described as a battleship or dreadnought to the Connie's heavy/battle cruiser classification. If that was originally the case, the Hathaway could easily fit into the heavy cruiser classification. However, it would probably be reclassified to something like a medium or light cruiser if the the Excelsiors were reclassified to heavy/battle cruiser status.

Well, look at Archer's ship. It had phasers, torpedoes, and an energy field protecting the hull of the ship.

Centuries later, you have the Enterprise E. It has phasers, torpedoes, and an energy field protecting the hull of the ship.

For all that Star Trek harps on science and discovery, it's relatively static technologically. There have been no major developments that would change the way war is fought, and it's possible that obsolescence for ship designs simply doesn't exist. While an individual Miranda or Excelsior might wear out, the design itself would stay viable.

Yeah the only real advancement is in terms of refining the technologies' performance, efficiency, etc. and than applying said technologies on a larger scale.

Instead of Archer's, Kirk's and Picard's Enterprises being like different generations of fighter aircraft, they're more akin to different models of a type of fighter when it comes to technological advancement.