Star Trek Federation Ships Achilles Heel

[Ed_Laprade]

Babylon 5 remains my favorite scifi show ever, but it was steeped in fantasy. I'd say moreso than Star Trek, though that's all debatable since both have highl;y fantastic elements.
I'm not sure I see how they were incompetents. Saying that Starfleet isn't military isn't correct.

Actually, Rodenberry insisted that Starfleet wasn't military. Not that anyone who wasn't a total fan bought that for a minute.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Actually, Rodenberry insisted that Starfleet wasn't military. Not that anyone who wasn't a total fan bought that for a minute.

Given the fact that Starfleet fights wars, I'd say they're a military organization. The difference is simply their mission, which is exploration rather than military dominance. It's a question of semantics more than anything else. They still have shields, they still have weapons, and they can still blow the hell out of things.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Babylon 5 remains my favorite scifi show ever, but it was steeped in fantasy. I'd say moreso than Star Trek, though that's all debatable since both have highl;y fantastic elements.

Like I mentioned neither are truly sci-fi, both are really fantasy dressed up as sci-fi I never contested that point. But while a great deal of B5 was steeped in fantasy tropes they were truer to a sci-fi approach than many. The human ships especially remained far more in line with newtonian physics than is usual aside from the jump space end-run. Their design and the manner in which they fought seemed far more plausible from a technical and tactical point of view given the limitation of mainstream TV they were working under.

Many of the plot points were directly pulled from fantasy, the looped time effect of the last war and Sinclair(or was it Sheridan it's been a long time since they were on air?) going back in time to fight the previous shadow war with the Membari and its repercussions. The telepaths and the telepath wars could have easily been magic in any different setting. The Shadows and Vorlons taking the place of inexplicable fey by way of inexplicable aliens. Many more, but in large part these were fantasy within the plot rather than the technology. Whereas in Star Trek the actual "technology" they are using is a direct stand-in for magic. Both had fantasy elements but they were applied with exceptions in a different manner.

I'm not sure I see how they were incompetents.

Just TNG here:

And how many times did they fail to do even the most simple things resulting in a crisis? How often has the Enterprise moved into a hostile situation with shields down? How many times has the Enterprise been boarded of all things. Even after being repeatedly boarded they station no guards at the bridge, they have no comprehensive offensive internal security system when it is one of the first things a competent captain would see put in place given how many times they've been boarded. (We see in DS9 that there are ways other than shields a vessel can be made either highly resistant or impervious to transporters through its construction yet none of these supposedly military ships have implemented this?)

They send the most senior members of the ship planetside into hostile situations on missions that some junior lieutenant or ensign should be commanding. Here's a great example, they find an ailing ship full of apparently semi-retarded aliens who don't understand their own tech. Who do they send over, their chief engineer of all people, nearly alone on a potentially hostile unknown vessel. That sort of incompetence would end in a court-martial in any first-world Navy.

Forget the name of the episode but a shuttlecraft crashes and the stereotypical malign alien entity kills all but one crewman who it keep hostage. As a command officer beyond the fast access of the diplomatic corps it's his responsibility to deal with this himself even though today the State Department would normally be called in. However he comes down to meet with the entity alone placing himself in danger of capture and placing the command authority of his vessel in danger. This sort of thing would ensure he never saw another command in the U.S. Navy. In other episodes I've actually seen him take the watch standers, the entire senior officer group who would normally ensure continuity of the chain of command and perform a commando raid of all things. That is the worst example of incompetence I've ever seen.

Saying that Starfleet isn't military isn't correct.

You need more than rank badges, uniforms, and firearms to be military. The Forest Service has all those things, does that make them a military organization? Based on what I've seen in TNG there are no signs of military protocol among the crew. They do appear to be comparable to a quasi-paramilitary organization though much as the police or forest service based on their protocols. I'd say they are most like a paramilitary version of the Oceanographic and Survey Service. They have civilian non-combatants including their own spouses and CHILDREN onboard the ship. They appear to have no dedicated ground combat force akin to the army or marine corps, not even the Naval Infantry that have been reformed recently. Other than shipboard weapons they appear limited to the equivalent of pistols and rifles. No signs of support weapons of any kind even light squad level support weapons. Their uniforms are not merely ill-suited for combat, they're impractical at a daily level. Thin tight-fitting bodygloves with no pockets? Their footwear isn't even up to par with Navy shipboard footwear.

Built like tin cans? They seem pretty sturdy in comparison to the other ships of that universe. Armed with pea shooters - again, between phasers and photon torpedoes, I'm not seeing the criticism considering that photon torpedoes are more powerful than nukes.

The key is examining the design in comparison to potential capabilities. First sturdiness. given that this is supposed to be a military vessel and as a Galaxy class should be their equivalent to a battleship.

Enterprise-D relies upon its shields in combat mostly, yet it's shields are apparently a single system. There is no redundancy. Either the main shield works or it doesn't. Given the hull volume of the enterprise it could fit at least a single fully redudant backup to take load if the primary fails, yet it doesn't. It has a single vulnerable central computer controlling everything on the ship, a military vessel would have this distributed as a network of many redundant individually smaller control systems each managing only a portions of the ship's systems to reduce point-source failure. Next armor, battleships usually had between 28 and 35 percent of their displacement(I'll go with mass for the sake of the enterprise) as armor. Now armor might be useless if weapons are relatively of a high-enough power, but given that DS9 took quite a few unshielded hits from phasers or torpedos over the sake of the series without breeching and that the unpowered Promethian warship took more than five torpedos to destroy I'll go with the assumption that it is effective. Yet according to the TNG:Tech Manual the skin of the Enterprise is under 13cm thick and most of that a non-armor grade foamed composite. This is not the way you build a capital ship. Nor is its frame strong enough since it deforms under the load of a single gravity without its structural integrity field.

Second armament. How much of the internal volume of the ship is taken up by its offensive systems? It possesses only three photon torpedo launchers. And it's magazines take up only a fraction of the available volume. The phaser banks are based on the pictures and diagrams in the TM comparitively very small in comparison to the available volume in the saucer. Let's use the bizmark for example since she was a paragon of battleships. Just under forty percent of her displacement was devoted to weapons and munitions storage. I can tell you right now the Enterprise is barely a fraction of this certainly not over ten percent. At the very least the saucer should be stuffed with subsidary reactors to feed multiple phaser banks. Also, where are their point defense weapons? Even destroyers have dedicated CIWS to automatically intercept incoming munitions, yet these are entirely lacking from the Enterprise.

Photon torpedoes. Based on the warhead description in the TM and even in the series occasionally they react 1.5kg of antimatter with the same amount of matter. Even assuming unatainable 100 percent efficiency that 64.3 megatons. During the Cold War fusion bombs of a size equal to and slightly greater than this were tested. And nuclear weapons aren't nearly as deadly in space due to the necessary design of ships and characteristics of space.

Phasers. Honestly I can't get a single lock on how powerful these things are. One minute their effects appear quite limited and in the next episode they do something with enormous evergy requirements. they're effectively a plot device and operate solely at the power necessary for the plot.

You have something on the bit about how they're kitted out lilke luxury liners - at least that's true about Enterprise-D. Not so true of other ships of the franchise.

True about the Enterprise-D, True about the Defiant, though I've seen less of the original series it appears to apply equally to that Enterprise. Have you ever seen a picture of the berthing spaces of a modern naval vessel? Most crew get a bunk barely as wide as their shoulders with just enough headroom to prop a book up on your chest. On many ships they hot-rack with three crew to a bunk in shifts. Compare that to the conditions on even the Defiant, it's like a Hilton by comparison. Have we ever even seen the conditions of the enlisted crew? Aside from one chief, who had quarters as good as an officer, it seems the entire crew is made up of officers based on who appears on the show and their rank conventions. Even the red-shirts are ensigns. On the Enterprise-D in particular this "warship" has the vast majority of its saucer taken up by ridiculous apartments in spaces better served by redundant back-up systems, extra weapons or munition space. Or even electronic warfare equipment.

Star Trek technology in general pushes the boundaries of what could even be considered realistic, even with their pseudo-science and techno-babble. For instance, in one episode they use phasers to reverse an ice age. In another episode they modify the ship's tractor beam to change the course of a neutron star fragment. Man, those two items alone would require an almost inconceivable amount of energy.

This isn't pushing the boundaries of what might be realistic, the technology itself is purely plot-device. Enormously capable one episode and useless the next. With no linking justification except for meaningless names jumbled together.

 

[Ranger REG]

Actually, Rodenberry insisted that Starfleet wasn't military. Not that anyone who wasn't a total fan bought that for a minute.

He meant it wasn't strictly military. If it is any kind of military, Trek is supposed to resemble a 23rd-century version of Lord Nelson's Navy that explored the uncharted world, whether it is the historical Captain Cook, or the fictitious Captain Aubrey & Dr. Maturin.

Plus, having a military organizational structure give these explorers the discipline to face the unknown. Civilians have no such structure or discipline.

 

[Felon]

... which makes so much sense in a setting with transporters.

This isn't particularly well-thought-out. If you lose shields, you'll probably lose transporters too.

And as Umbran said, without shields you're dead anyway. What's the point of burying the bridge?

 

[mmu1]

This isn't particularly well-thought-out. If you lose shields, you'll probably lose transporters too.

And as Umbran said, without shields you're dead anyway. What's the point of burying the bridge?

...except that, on the show, they don't. They sometimes lose shields, and the ship is fine, aside from light damage. Other times, they're badly torn up, but only rarely do they lose all power to other vital systems. The shields are not generated on the fly, they appear to rely on their own energy storage banks, so losing shields doesn't mean you lost all power.

As for the second point - the ST shields aren't impervious. Many times, you see ships take damage - sometimes light, sometimes quite serious - despite the fact the shields haven't collapsed. Other times, the ships get hit with their shields down, and survive. (for the Enterprise D, this was practically the way of life) So it'd make perfect sense to protect the vulnerable sections better.

 

[Ranger REG]

On the Enterprise-D in particular this "warship" has the vast majority of its saucer taken up by ridiculous apartments in spaces better served by redundant back-up systems, extra weapons or munition space. Or even electronic warfare equipment.

Either the "warship" is built by an incompetent military, or an exploration ship experimenting with "family onboard."

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Either the "warship" is built by an incompetent military, or an exploration ship experimenting with "family onboard."

the latter part of that is what I was getting at earlier in that post when I was talking about whether Star Fleet was a military organization. And I pretty well concluded it was thus

They do appear to be comparable to a quasi-paramilitary organization though much as the police or forest service based on their protocols. I'd say they are most like a paramilitary version of the Oceanographic and Survey Service.

And the evaluation of the Enterprise as a warship came from Whisperfoot's assertion that the Enterprise-D made an effective and capable warship. This after I evaluated whether or not StarFleet crews and officers appeared to be competent, and then pointed out their not really military nature.

Basically you could boil that entire long post down to 2 options.

1.) StarFleet is a military organization. In which case it is the most undisciplined, poorly trained and led military force seen in history. Commanded by the truly incompetent and supplied and armed by aesthetes more accustomed to designing luxury liners and trendy civilian novelty gadgets than military equipment. So deluded it entirely lacks not only many capabilities present in the 20th century but ANY dedicated ground forces.

2.) StarFleet is a paramilitary version of the Oceanographic and Survey Service. In which case all the things that would make it an improbable laughingstock as a military force actually become somewhat reasonable features. Even the poor training, leadership, and discipline makes a great deal more sense if they are really an only vaguely military organization with military responsibilities tacked on by those who didn't realize the inherent problems that causes.

 

[Relique du Madde]

1.) StarFleet is a military organization. In which case it is the most undisciplined, poorly trained and led military force seen in history. Commanded by the truly incompetent and supplied and armed by aesthetes more accustomed to designing luxury liners and trendy civilian novelty gadgets than military equipment. So deluded it entirely lacks not only many capabilities present in the 20th century but ANY dedicated ground forces.

2.) StarFleet is a paramilitary version of the Oceanographic and Survey Service. In which case all the things that would make it an improbable laughingstock as a military force actually become somewhat reasonable features. Even the poor training, leadership, and discipline makes a great deal more sense if they are really an only vaguely military organization with military responsibilities tacked on by those who didn't realize the inherent problems that causes.

I think starfleet is a combination of these two choices which basically boils down to a military organization created by civilians, politicians and government contractors with little or no military experience. This could lead to both choice 1 and 2 with Star Fleet being created as a provision to an existing exploratory force's budget (since it would be less expensive to create a token army from an preexisting exploratory force then it could be create a military force while maintaining an exploratory force).

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

I think starfleet is a combination of these two choices which basically boils down to a military organization created by civilians, politicians and government contractors with little or no military experience. This could lead to both choice 1 and 2 with Star Fleet being created as a provision to an existing exploratory force's budget (since it would be less expensive to create a token army from an preexisting exploratory force then it could be create a military force while maintaining an exploratory force).

I agree with your premise of the force as originally a civilian organization, but calling it military is stretching the term beyond it's breaking point.

On the other hand Star Fleet becomes extremely plausable as a PARAmilitary organization. When you see force being used the doctrine is very much of a police or border patrol mindset rather than a military mindset. A paramilitary organization with policing and border patrol as well as exploration duties that had an extra military role for which it was not suited tacked onto it by a civilian authority that didn't know how bad an idea that was.