Star Trek undersells the capabilities of its starships
Star Trek undersells the capabilities of its starships
I saw this rant/complaint over on Reddit, and it got me thinking a bit.
We know that at least on paper, Federation starships are insanely fast and agile. Data has stated that the Galaxy-class Enterprise was able to achieve Warp 9 from , and some ships, like the Nebula class, don't seem to use impulse engines at all, favouring the warp engine for sublight speed usage at all.
Despite that, we also know that impulse engines aren't simple thrusters, and are able to move the ship in a way not directly in line with the output thrust (Relics), and from the same episode, we also know that smaller ships, like the Jenolan, will still run rings around ships like the Enterprise, even though it is nearly a full century out of date.
However, from what the show itself portrays, the ships tend to be fairly slow and sluggish when in combat, sedately drifting along the battlefield, while weapons fire goes every which way. The most recent and active thing we've seen a big starship do is maybe the fighter run in Picard.
In my opinion, by trying to keep to the slow and seemingly logical expectations for starships to be slow, hulking metal structures that slowly fly around shooting each other, Star Trek ends up underselling what Federation starships are able to do. They would be more realistically portrayed flitting about the battlefield like dragonflies, instead of being like "real boats" today, that have more of a sense of mass.
It seems wildly unintuitive, but it would also help show Federation propulsion technology being more advanced than what they are now. Starships can instantly stop and reverse course, or move in ways that would be impossible with modern technology, and the show not showing ships capable of doing just that might be to its detriment.
If we want to give a daystrom answer I'd argue the reasoning for the inconsistent maneuverability is that targeting computers make it irrelevant in combat. You dont hear about a lot of misses in star trek and they're able to still hit their targets even when at warp speed. So the only time we really see these ships get cooking is if theyre skipping across an atmosphere, running away, or avoiding debris and asteroids.
I suspect there may also be some kind of tactical doctrine where federation ships are meant to hold their ground , give out some warnings, and take a few punches to the nose before going all out. Since they arent going to dodge a phaser anyway they might as well stand firm as a show of strength. Federation policy is very firm about starting a firefight so it's likely need to have the record be very clear that they arent aggressors.
From a meta point of view it's a practical matter of the models for the starships being genuinely big. It is not easy, especially on a 1980s tv budget to make that thing dance around so we got two ships staring each other down via view screen, some dialog about how far away they were, and then reactions of the crew being thrown around as they took hits. Again from a realistic and in universe perspective I think this works. Phasers are super precise, and thanks to shields these ships are tanks. They can dance around but when your that far away that barrel roll isnt going to make much of a difference. But it was clearly technical limitation. We got staredowns and that one shot of the enterprise slowly turning around and warping away.
Once CGI became more common in the mid to late 90s I think the opposite trend wound up happening. DS9 has clouds of federation ships that in theory should be sniping at each other from thousands of KM away charging into a dominion cloud. I think voyager wound up usually striking a better balance of old school staredowns with the occasional cool thing like coming out of warp right on top of someone and blasting them and tractoring another ship away. Enterprise also has quite a lot of maneuvering though the nx class is smaller than the other hero ships.
I suspect there may also be some kind of tactical doctrine where federation ships are meant to hold their ground , give out some warnings, and take a few punches to the nose before going all out. Since they arent going to dodge a phaser anyway they might as well stand firm as a show of strength. Federation policy is very firm about starting a firefight so it's likely need to have the record be very clear that they arent aggressors.
That does make sense, considering that Federation shields are pretty tough, and the Federation itself probably doesn't want to seem the aggressor by firing first.
For the most part, a Federation ship can just tank a shot with barely a scratch (unless it's an equivalent power), and that might arguably be a better show of force than firing back.
Once CGI became more common in the mid to late 90s I think the opposite trend wound up happening. DS9 has clouds of federation ships that in theory should be sniping at each other from thousands of KM away charging into a dominion cloud. I think voyager wound up usually striking a better balance of old school staredowns with the occasional cool thing like coming out of warp right on top of someone and blasting them and tractoring another ship away. Enterprise also has quite a lot of maneuvering though the nx class is smaller than the other hero ships.
True, I think that many of the complaints are just the differences between the two, although at the same time, with CGI being as cheap as it is, it might also be nice to see them make use of that agility, rather than just having it just be something that only exists in theory.
One thing that irked me about Picard S3 was how agile the
Millennium FalconEnterprise D was flying into the core of theDeath StarBorg Cube. I found the ships being big lumbering hulks much more entertaining as they had believable weight to them.Of course we have things like The Picard Manoeuvre, but look how much time they spent explaining a second of combat. One of the bigger flaws of new trek is how agile everything is, just a lot of visual noise with random shapes and sizes zooming around like fighter jests with no consideration for inertia. If we just had huge ships flitting around the battlefield like Nightcrawler then you'd lose all sense of relatability and it would just be pure visual noise.
Wait, didn't they do that in Discovery to beat the Klingon ship or something? That was not enjoyable Trek to me.
I assume the restored Enterprise-D was lightly loaded and only had the bare minimum needed for it to operate and didn't have most of the working facilities of a fully-manned Galaxy class ship and there would have been a lot more power reserves available that allowed it to pull off crazy maneuvers.
Many areas of the ship likely didn't have life support and inertial dampeners would have only been used in parts of the ship that were habitable like the Bridge.
In other words, the restored Enterprise-D is a stripped-down hot-rod.
What is "weight" relative to a civilisation with advanced gravity manipulation? Starships have been proven to go from FTL to a full stop in less then a second or two, with that level of cancelling out inertia why can't a Galaxy-class dance around across six degrees of freedom?
On top of that, the most restrictive factor in manoeuvring is how much G-force a pilot or crew can take. In Star Trek, that G-force is always zero.
The Doylist answer is simply that when Trek started an audience couldn't have been expected to understand 6DOF movement and so the ships handle like aircraft and are governed by the same restrictions. We're conditioned to think of larger starships as lumbering beasts akin to the old battleships of yore but there's no in-universe reason for it.
Well yeah I was getting at the more Doylist balance of having the things on screen be relatable. Certain concepts would work better in books but be confusing on TV.
In universe, if a ship is using impulse engines to turn 360 on the spot, even at the speed of light with no acceleration, a bigger ship still has more distance to physically turn. In reality the difference would be imperceivable to the human eye, but with computer aided aiming etc. it would still represent a significant difference in manoeuvrability. Data being able to fly a galaxy class like that is at least believable, but humans would not be able to keep up. Bigger ships also presumably require more energy to turn, so they may do it slower to conserve power.
I would rather have it presented in an intuitive way than just flashes on screen. I've always considered the space battles in Star Trek to be representations of ships much farther apart. Some of the distances they mention, there'd be no way you'd even see the other ship with the naked eye.
Of course we have things like The Picard Manoeuvre, but look how much time they spent explaining a second of combat. One of the bigger flaws of new trek is how agile everything is, just a lot of visual noise with random shapes and sizes zooming around like fighter jests with no consideration for inertia. If we just had huge ships flitting around the battlefield like Nightcrawler then you'd lose all sense of relatability and it would just be pure visual noise.
However, we also know that their tech allows their ships to be extremely agile. They have inertial dampeners that let the ship come to a halt almost immediately, and can allow the crew to survive manoeuvres that would kill normal pilots.
It just seems like an odd limitation to treat Federation ships, with all their fancy future propulsion and inertial cancellation/artificial gravity technology, as the same as modern ship combat, where they will slowly float around, shooting at each other from a distance. It might be more relatable, given, but it also ties them down, when their ships should be moving in ways that we should find illogical/impossible, but is entirely feasible, given what their technology can do.
I mean we're usually seeing top of the line ships going toe to toe, even if they were to move around like that, the other ships can probably keep up.
It wouldn't be unbelievable to see the Enterprise D run circles round a slow private shuttle, but usually a tractor beam would get the job done and use less energy without said shuttle crashing or something.
As for inertial dampeners, maybe they need some charge up time and/or predicable movement. We often see people on the bridge getting thrown around from small sub-light nudges.
sorry mis-click, here's what I meant to say:
One thing that irked me about Picard S3 was how agile the
Millennium FalconEnterprise D was flying into the core of theDeath StarBorg Cube. I found the ships being big lumbering hulks much more entertaining as they had believable weight to them.Of course we have things like The Picard Manoeuvre, but look how much time they spent explaining a second of combat. One of the bigger flaws of new trek is how agile everything is, just a lot of visual noise with random shapes and sizes zooming around like fighter jests with no consideration for inertia. If we just had huge ships flitting around the battlefield like Nightcrawler then you'd lose all sense of relatability and it would just be pure visual noise.
Wait, didn't they do that in Discovery to beat the Klingon ship or something? That was not enjoyable Trek to me.
Starships are fast but they really shouldn't be that maneuverable. You do still have to worry about the inertial dampeners. If you're constantly changing directions, the inertial dampeners have to compensate for the acceleration. Keep in mind that starships can accelerate at rates that would flatten anyone into bloody goo without inertial dampeners.
Even if they're always using a warp bubble to change the ship's mass, it would not be easy to compensate for quickly accelerating to 0.1c, going down to 0, and then immediately accelerating to 0.1c to another direction.
Furthermore, if you spin the ship the inside of the spin will be moving less than the outside. Not only does the inertial dampener have a maximum capability, but it will also have a maximum gradient across the length of the ship.
bloody goo
If the inertial dampers fail and you go to full impulse, you don't get redmisted, you get converted into high energy plasma. Which is kinda the same thing but way more.
Starships are fast but they really shouldn't be that maneuverable. You do still have to worry about the inertial dampeners. If you're constantly changing directions, the inertial dampeners have to compensate for the acceleration. Keep in mind that starships can accelerate at rates that would flatten anyone into bloody goo without inertial dampeners.
On the other hand, the ship not being able to accelerate that quickly due to the limitations of its inertial dampening system, should also be factored in. There's not much point to saying that a Galaxy class starship can accelerate to Warp 9 from a standstill in a third of a millisecond, if the actual time it needs is about 10 seconds, because it would otherwise overwhelm its inertial dampeners.
Even if they're always using a warp bubble to change the ship's mass, it would not be easy to compensate for quickly accelerating to 0.1c, going down to 0, and then immediately accelerating to 0.1c to another direction.
We are given an example of a ship basically going -0.1c to Warp 9, since the specific example is "from slow reverse impulse to Warp 9 in 0.3 milliseconds". Logically, it should also be able to accelerate to only a portion of that speed, or use the engines to stop just as quickly.
But warp speed isn't the same as impulse. Warp doesn't accelerate based on Newtonian principles. It's bending space in a bubble around the ship. That's how it's able to go faster than the speed of light.
Changing directions at warp has other issues. From what we've seen, they actually have to drop out of warp in order to make large course corrections.
Zipping around the battlefield has virtually no tactical advantage. Can you dodge phaser fire that travels at the speed of light, or photon torpedoes, which are faster than that?
I would argue that although the sub light maneuverability of federation starships is very high, the maneuverability of 24th century weapons is faster relative to those ships, than modern weapons are compared to modern vehicles.
Let's not waste energy moving that could be diverted to shields and phasers.
undefined> Zipping around the battlefield has virtually no tactical advantage.
This is really the correct answer. If you aren't moving at warp, you might as well not be moving for all the good it will do you. If you are moving at warp you're moving in a straight line so quickly that unless the other ship is following you at warp, it doesn't really matter.