Star Trek: Picard

Doomcock for Senate.

Get off my lawn, you damn romulan!

At least "hippie" former 1st officer called JL out for being stupid enough to waltz into starfleet and lay out everything he knows. Although we know she 99% won't be splitting from them she is intelligent enough to plan on getting the hell away from the death squad magnet after hitching a ride.

That was one thing about the dominion war in DS9, watching galaxy class ships get destroyed in a few hits was WTF-y

I don't recall many Galaxy classes getting owned outside the Jem'Hadar ships that kamikazed into them.

I'm ok with all that though. If you accept that these ships are just going to form up like jet fighter squadrons... then yeah. with all of the force involved one torpedo will do significant enough damage to a warship that it creates cascade failures to destroy the entire thing. It's all kind of silly from the start. With phasers/lasers at least you can theorycraft some sort of harmonic light shields defense. With torpedoes... I guess you could make the hull a mile thick, but the ships wouldn't be all sleek and nice looking.

The expanse does that better but even the expanse is silly about it.

My uncle had a great tabletop game when I was little which the entire game was 1 federation ship vs 1 klingon ship and trying to resolve a solution to orbits so that you 1 hit kill the other guy. Surprising how a fancied up calculus problem didn't get more popular!

Cybsled said:

I don't recall many Galaxy classes getting owned outside the Jem'Hadar ships that kamikazed into them.

Click to expand...

The ship was already easily beaten and retreating, the Jem'Hadar kamikazed it for lulz. They were large and powerful ships, just not warships.

Gavinmad said:

The ship was already easily beaten and retreating, the Jem'Hadar kamikazed it for lulz. They were large and powerful ships, just not warships.

Click to expand...

Yeah, they did very poorly against the Jem'Hedar at first because they relied almost solely on shields for defense (They weren't agile and had no armor) and the Dominion energy weapons passed right their Federation shield technology.

But meh, this time period is where the change began from Sub/Battleship aesthetics to more star-warsy fighter style, and it was a bad choice IMO. I really liked the Defiant as a ship, but the whole concept of small, super agile ships in Star Trek is dumb (It works for Bird of Prey because birds of prey were kind of known as throw away pieces of shit, they were JUST escorts and only used because they were cheap). Using FTL/Light speed weapons should make it so the only real defense is shielding and so ships are constantly growing larger and producing more power(To reinforce shields). This was the perfect lore reason (The real reason was budgets for models) why fleets favored expensive, large assets and there were always only so few ships (IE a fleet of 30-40 was massive). I think moving away from this formula was a huge mistake.

CGI kind of fucked up Star Treks aesthetics in that way.

Lithose said:

Yeah, they did very poorly against the Jem'Hedar at first because they relied almost solely on shields for defense (They weren't agile and had no armor) and the Dominion energy weapons passed right their Federation shield technology.

But meh, this all began the change over from Sub/Battleship aesthetics to more star-warsy fighter style, and it was a bad choice. I really liked the Defiant as a ship, but the whole concept of small, super agile ships in Star Trek was dumb. Using FTL/Light speed weapons should make it so the only real defense is size and energy (To reinforce shields), and so fleets should favor expensive, large assets. Small ships were only good as escorts and for being cheap (Like birds of prey). I think moving away from this formula was a huge mistake.

Click to expand...

Did they move away from that formula though? The larger engagements in DS9 were still all very 'battleship' heavy.

Gavinmad said:

Did they move away from that formula though? The larger engagements in DS9 were still all very 'battleship' heavy.

Click to expand...

They had support fighter wings that were starfleet ships and also the Klingon birds of prey and Defiant. I believe there are also mentions in the show of them basically outfitting their existing ships with the things they built to fight the borg and such in the TNG movies. The Akira class ships carried the fighters, but towards the end of DS9 everything was on the table as it was Dominion Fighters supported by Cardassian cruisers, so they had both, light fighters vs the dominion and big ass ships as line breakers.

Gavinmad said:

Did they move away from that formula though? The larger engagements in DS9 were still all very 'battleship' heavy.

Click to expand...

It was a mix, DS9 was the first big step in that direction. As Angerz said, they had fighters, and the Defiant itself was a big step in that direction. Unlike Birds of Prey which were pretty much emphasized throughout Stark Trek to be pieces of shit; the Defiant was actually emphasized to be a really tough/hearty/advanced ship, with the same kind of durability as a battlecruiser. Which in the Stark Trek lore, forces you to ask why design any battleships? They are stupid in a universe with the Defiant.

Lithose said:

It was a mix, DS9 was the first big step in that direction. As Angerz said, they had fighters, and the Defiant itself was a big step in that direction. Unlike Birds of Prey which were pretty much emphasized throughout Stark Trek to be pieces of shit; the Defiant was actually emphasized to be a really tough/hearty/advanced ship, with the same kind of durability as a battlecruiser. Which in the Stark Trek lure, forces you to ask why design any battleships? They are stupid in a universe with the Defiant.

Click to expand...

The Defiant program was originally a failure. It wasn't until after the deus ex machina of O'Brien being able to magically iron out all the previously unfixable problems of the prototype that it finally went into production. And keep in mind that other defiant class ships weren't staffed entirely by major characters of a TV show. The USS Valiant was destroyed by the Jem'hadar, and even the Defiant herself was destroyed by the Breen and had to be replaced by the Sao Paulo.

Yeah, if any petty officer were able to fix the issues that the big wigs at the shipyard couldn't, on the side while also maintaing an entire space station, then *any* ship coming of the assembly lines at Mars would be a complete fucking mess.

Quineloe said:

Yeah, if any petty officer were able to fix the issues that the big wigs at the shipyard couldn't, on the side while also maintaing an entire space station, then *any* ship coming of the assembly lines at Mars would be a complete fucking mess.

Click to expand...

Did the Defiant use any alien tech? It's a Romulan cloak and maybe it has some Borg tech?

If that's the case O'Brien had experience integrating Ferderarion and alien (Cardassian) tech on DS9.

It's hilarious that the extra that operated the transporter in early TNG ended up having such a big role.

Chris said:

Did the Defiant use any alien tech? It's a Romulan cloak and maybe it has some Borg tech?

If that's the case O'Brien had experience integrating Ferderarion and alien (Cardassian) tech on DS9.

It's hilarious that the extra that operated the transporter in early TNG ended up having such a big role.

Click to expand...

DS9 was pure Starfleet tech except for the cloak. The big thing O'Brien bitched about all DS9 was that Starfleet and Cardassian tech were a pain in the ass to work together.

I mean O'Brien also was the character that had the biggest growth in all the shows. From lowly Transporter Chief on TNG to Chief Engineer on DS9. All while seemingly never getting a proper commission. lol.

Harshaw said:

DS9 was pure Starfleet tech except for the cloak. The big thing O'Brien bitched about all DS9 was that Starfleet and Cardassian tech were a pain in the ass to work together.

I mean O'Brien also was the character that had the biggest growth in all the shows. From lowly Transporter Chief on TNG to Chief Engineer on DS9. All while seemingly never getting a proper commission. lol.

Click to expand...

I just rewatched through DS9 actually and it really is amazing O'Brien's level of growth as the series moves on. I've said before that having the view of the world through non-comms eyes was one of the cooler parts of the show. And at the end he ends up an instructor at Starfleet Academy, so he remained Chief his whole career.

Back to the topic of Star Trek fighters and faster space battles, I am reasonably certain the biggest shift that caused more of them to be used in Season 6 and 7 was that the SFX company that did Babylon 5 changed teams to be DS9's VFX team. DS9 was always a scale model, but in the last 2 seasons, the big space fights were the same CGI team that gave us the space battles in Babylon 5.

Dom said:

That whole episode was fantastic

Click to expand...

Yeah, definitely one of my favorites. Bob Gunton as Captain Maxwell does a really good job.