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How Fast is the Sovereign Class?
Saquist1
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I think your Warp 8 figure for Defiant is also in error. According to "The Sound of Her Voice," Defiant could hit Warp 9.5 by siphoning power off of the weapons. IIRC, the warp 8 limitation was under cloak -- any faster and they risked detection.
EDIT: I sort of feel like this discussion has wildly hijacked poor jrhottel's thread. Perhaps we should migrate it elsewhere?
According to O'Brian, the problem with through warp nine is an SIF power issue.
Worf:" But the problem on the Defiant is
how to maintain structural
integrity when we go above warp
nine."
To me that means warp 8 is the ships max speed under normal operation
Original Discussion
http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/showthread.php?79705-Sovereign-Suggestions/page16
Post edited by Saquist on
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There were also numerous issues with the ship initially that got ironed out over her service life. Doing some poking around, I did come across the reference to the SIF here, in the Class 7 warp drive article, which indicates that pushing the ship beyond warp 9 was, as you say, an issue of needing additional power for the SIF or (presumably) the ship would fly herself apart. That's a spaceframe issue rather than a drive performance issue, though.
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When Defiant arrives they say the ship's engines were so strong they literally shook the ship apart at full power.
Then in Sound of her voice it doesn't have enough power to stabilize the SIF and warp field for speeds beyond warp 9?
---
This may explain a few things as other Defiant's including Sao Paulo don't seem as powerful as the original in phasers or torpedoes. And after reading that Class 7 Warp Drive article Stormcloud may have something with the four streams of matter and Anti matter entering the reaction chamber. That's a good reference.
Sounds like O'Brien reduce the mixture and the ship's warp speed suffered as a result.
Interesting that they put the same core in Sovereign.
*Realize this makes me think Sovereign reallly does have a problem with High Warp like Defiant* I wasn't expecting that link. I always assumed the similarity in the core's as superficial.
Defiant's got this class-7 warp drive that's far more powerful than a spaceframe of its size is able to support. Its SIF doesn't have enough reinforcing capacity to account for the dramatic increase in stress put on the frame by high-warp. Its hull shape is certainly not optimized to deal with the contours of subspace, judging by the typical starship arrangements seen thoughout the Trek universe. If one takes the evolution from Enterprise (NX-01) to Enterprise (NCC-1701) to Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) to Voyager as representative of increasing mastery of designing spaceframes that are ever more efficient (and thus, faster, given the tremendous energies produced by matter/antimatter reactions and as evidenced by Voyager's own tremendous top sustainable speed of warp 9.975), then the radical departure that is the design of the Defiant class is going to introduce some pretty significant problems in that realm.
Pumping more and more power into a forcefield generator is only going to take you so far. The equipment itself is going to have design constraints that prohibit unlimited redirection of power through the system and it's going to take clever engineering and power modulation once you exceed those tolerances in order to continue taxing the system beyond the normal, sane limits of the spaceframe. Y'know, just the kind of thing O'Brien is famous for.
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These are my thoughts exactly.
Yet that is also why I have a hard time accepting Scimitar can out run a 9.7 Enterprise.
Warbirds practically killed themselves to reach 9.6 in the next Generation. That's all I can really see the Scimitar maxing at.
According to one article in the Star Trek The Magazine the Scimitar sported 3 of the Warbirds Quantum Singularity Power Cores. That makes sense. The ship was traveling at high warp with full weapons, shields and cloak activated and caught Enterprise effortlessly....
And everyone knew Data, Picard, Shinzon, that Enterprise was no match for the Shinzon's warp speed. The question is how does Data and Picard know this if it's the first time they've seen the ship and know nothing about it. The only logical conclusion I can come up with is that Enterprise's top speed is average or bellow average.
This is how Seven of Nine said Borg Cubes worked. They encounter tremendous stress but counter it with SIF and super redundant power but the fastest we've seen EVEN a Borg Cube travel is warp 9.6. The Scimitar is the worst shape possible for warp. It's clearly designed for the Thaelleron radiation deployment not for navigating subspace temporal drag.
(Unless the thread title is a typo.)
evil_genius_180, we're talking about Defiant because Defiant's warp capability is relevant insofar as Defiant chased the Borg Cube to Earth in First Contact from the Typhon Expanse in roughly the same time it took for Enterprise to reach Earth from the Romulan Neutral Zone. So, it's not because we're necessarily comparing Defiant as representative of the Sovereign in a lineage sense, but rather in a case study sense when Defiant was part of a pursuit/defense fleet.
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And the galaxy's top speed was supposed to be 9.4 (9.6 for short periods), so you can see, the sovvy is faster then the gal if it's max safe speed is 9.7, faster then the defiant too even though it doesn't sound like it.
According to some "mix canon" sources though, it's official top speed is warp 9.985 (17700c) for 12 hours.
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Yes, but the thread title is "How Fast is the Sovereign Class?" Yet, until I mentioned it, the Sovereign class had yet to even be mentioned in the thread, making the title seem a bit pointless. Remember, not everybody was following the other thread in which this discussion apparently started. Therefore, somebody not armed with this knowledge who is coming in and seeing the Sovereign class mentioned in the thread title and then nothing about that class even being mentioned in the discussion has to be thinking, "WTF?"
Oh, and to answer the thread title and the discussion about the Defiant: These ships are as fast as the script calls for. In reality, with the speed we've seen a single Borg vessel tear through a fleet of ships in the past, as well as how quickly the comm chatter suggested the Borg cube was tearing through that fleet, there's no way in hell the Enterprise should have been able to reach Earth from the Neutral Zone traveling at any normal warp speed in time to help. Such a journey in the apparently short time it took in the film would be impossible without traveling in a slipstream or at transwarp speeds, and yet no such tech was ever mentioned in the dialog of any of these films. And, yet, it happened because the script said it did.
Even traveling at warp 9.99, it would take a ship 6 hours to travel 5 light years, which is just longer than the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth. Across one sector at that speed is supposed to take 22 hours. Across the Federation is supposed to take 13 years. Now, assuming the trip from the Neutral Zone to Earth isn't quite as vast as traversing the widest part of the Federation, we can assume the 13 years trip is a bit of a stretch. However, the Neutral Zone is at least a sector away, likely more. (a sector is only 20 light years) In even 6 hours, the Borg would have already adapted to every weapon the Federation could throw at it and would have destroyed the fleet engaging it. Borg can travel at transwarp speeds, so even if the battle started away from Earth, which I believe it did, they would have advanced to Earth and assimilated it long before the Enterprise could make the trip from the Neutral Zone to Earth. Using any established warp speed chart, those are the "facts."
The Defiant topped out at a little over warp 8, or something like that. Most of its power went to engines. If the battle started in another system, the Defiant should have been left behind when the Cube advanced. Though, we also don't know where the Defiant was coming from. It could have been a latecomer to the battle and, like the Enterprise, set a course for Earth knowing that the Cube was headed there and attempted to head it off. Or, it could have already been in the Sol system and stayed there due to its limited top speed as a "last line" of defense. We simply don't have enough information about how/why the Defiant was there to say for certain. Again, the script called for it to be there, so it was.
-Worf says 9.3 takes Enterprise past the Redline. (Galaxy)
-The Tech Manual says warp 9.2 is the Enterprise top speed. (Galaxy)
-They achieve 9.6 and could match "the Intruders" 9.8 at extreme risk.
-In Best of Both Worlds Enterprise achieves 9.6 for 12 hours and takes 8-12 hours to repair the damage.
Sorry about that.
-The discussion centers more on suspension of disbelief in what ever hand the writers had in the results unless there is an unresolvable contradiction.
-No time frame is ever given for the Cube's ETA to Earth
-No time frame is ever given for Enterprise's arrival at Earth from the Neutral Zone
The Second Borg Invasion
1.-Deep Space 5 reported the destruction of Ivor Prime
2.-Long range Sensors were Tracking the Borg Cube and as of Picard's briefing with the Admiral they had one hour before the Cube crossed the Federation Border
3.-The Fleet made it's stand in the Typhon Sector
4.-It would have taken Enterprise 3 hours 23 minutes to arrive at the Typhon Sector from it's unknown location. However Enterprise traveled to the Neutral Zone instead.
5.-Defiant was present at the Defense Perimeter in the Tyhpon Sector.
6.-The perimeter is breached. The Cube's heading is for Earth. (Speed was at least 9.1)
7.-An unknown amount of time passes and Enterprise arrives at Earth
The Romulan Neutral Zone
Unfortunately there is very unclear data about how far the Neutral Zone is from Earth.
-TOS tells us that the Zone was established after Romulan Earth War in which some believed Romulans didn't have warp.
-TNG further compounds this saying that the Romulan invasion fleet had reached the Vulcan Defense Perimeter at merely Warp One 14 minutes after crossing the Neutral Zone. This would put Galordon Core in a Solar System next to Sol.
-However TNG also implies the Neutral Zone is very far away from Earth as it implicates the Borg in connection with the disappearance of the Federation and Romulan Outpost on either side. The Cube was first encountered 7,000 lightyears from Federation Space.
SECTORS
We also don't know how large a sector is Trek. It's used extremely loosely. Right now this is an unknown quantity. In TNG The Wounded Riker touts that Enterprise can scan one sector a day with a 10 light year radius. If a sector is 20 lightyears cubed and Enterprises speed is warp 9.6 then it would take 10 days for the Enterprise to get more than 75% sensor coverage in each corner of a sector. The ship would have traveled 80 lightyears.
What We Know About The Defiant
In TNG La Forge and Leah Brahams innovated a multi matter anti matter stream on the Galaxy Class Enterprise that boosted power by 14% and enable Enterprise to get out of radiation trap.
-Defiant Class 7 Warp Core uses 4 simultaneous streams of matter and antimatter which could mean a minimum boost of 42% higher than it would normally be. And if a larger ship is Galaxy that would make Defiant's normal equal outpout 58% less.
-The Full output of the engines was reported to shake the ship apart (So Defiant must frequently operate below maximum power.
-Nog revealed that Federation safeties originally limited the ship to warp 3.2. When the safties were released they could move at normal velocities.
-The Sound of Her Voice DS9 reveals that the ship is limited under at least warp 9.1. In order to travel above warp 9 they must dump weapons reserve power into the Structural Integrity Fields or the ship would tear it self apart. This leaves the ship without Phaser power but allows a maximum speed of warp 9.5
Edit:
According to the math...
-Using the canon warp speed warp 9 (840 x lightspeed) TNG Bloodlines)
-Galaxy taking a Day to scan one sector
One Sector would be around .625 of a light year cube for a total of 2.5 light years traveled taking 26 hours to transit.
Saquist, can you edit that into your first post?
That's not a terribly useful mindset, evil_genius_180. Yes, ultimately, these are all stories that someone cooked up to entertain audiences. But in telling a story, one creates a setting and that setting must be assumed to operate under consistent rules. Those rules don't have to 1:1 match our reality, so long as they are consistent within themselves or make a point to explain any breaks in consistency. This is a fundamental element to good world-building and is also a necessary assumption to conduct any kind of technical analysis on the world of a piece of speculative fiction -- be it science fiction or fantasy fiction. Even in fantasy fiction, the magic must have some kind of rules, or there's no story. Any mage can just wave his fingers and resolve any problem.
So, for the rest of this thread -- everyone -- let's please dispense with the "But it's just writers who don't know/care what they're doing!" Whether or not that's true, it is irrelevant for the sake of this discussion.
Now then...
Here's a link to a clip of the entire battle, starting from the incoming transmission and ending with the destruction of the cube. It corroborates all of your points above. The specific quote dealing with the cube's speed is:
"We have it in visual range: a Borg Cube on course 0 mark 215, speed warp nine point --"
The line then gets cut off by the Borg transmission. Lower limit on Borg cube speed: warp > 9; upper limit warp < 10. Not very useful, given the range of multiples of c that that spans. In any case, Defiant was involved at both Typhon and Earth, meaning that either Defiant was able to pace the cube as it traveled to Earth, or was able to arrive at Earth in time to re-engage the cube amidst other defenders.
It's possible that defensive task forces were mobilized along the cube's entire projected path and only a handful of the ships seen at Earth are part of the original Typhon fleet, though this is purely speculative on my part.
Setting aside the TOS reference for a moment, the three Vulcan ships crossing the Neutral Zone and reaching Galordon Core in "Unification II" don't necessarily say anything about the location of the Neutral Zone with respect to arth. Galorndon Core is explicitly mentioned as being a border world, so that being their first stop is fine. I also don't recall (nor have I yet found reference to) those ships traveling at only warp one, but I'll go dig up the episode to check (hooray, Netflix!).
I don't think the first encounter with the cube and the eventual attacks by the Borg along the Neutral Zone are necessarily representative of Neutral Zone distance. Q transported Enterprise to J25, whereupon the Borg became explicitly aware of the Federation, but they had been lurking about well before that based on Seven of Nine's recollections of her parents. That Q just happened to pick a Borg Cube so far from Federation space may have been a kindness on his part, rather than just selecting the closest Borg Cube.
Circling back to TOS, I think too many conclusions have been leapt to with the remark about "Simple impulse" from "Balance of Power." We've canonically seen (thanks to ENT) that Romulan ships definitely possessed warp drive prior to "Balance of Power" and even the Earth-Romulan War. The "simple impulse" remark could easily mean that the Bird of Prey relied on fusion reactors rather than matter/antimatter reactions or the Romulans' later preference for singularity cores. Scotty's full line is "Their power is simple impulse." It's Kirk that then infers that this means Enterprise can outrun the Bird of Prey. All true, if Enterprise can generate stronger warp fields from a more powerful reactor.
It's also very possible that Scotty assumed their power was impulse only because he'd never encountered a ship with a singularity core before. Either way, I don't think "Balance of Power" is the greater limiter of Romulan tech that other people seem to think it is.
All true. What's more, the scanning reference in "The Wounded" is actually fairly useless, since Riker's talking about the scanners being able to scan a ten light-year radius and being able to scan a sector per day. There's no indication that these two timeframes actually overlap: a spherical region twenty light years across per day. It could easily be significantly larger than that, if the ten light-year figure is per second or some other such amount.
The most concrete canonical reference to a sector -- IIRC -- is the one in VOY "The Voyager Conspiracy."
Going just by rough estimate, 75 years = 70,000 light years was sort of the premise of Voyager's journey, pegging their expected cruise speed at around 933c, which is roughly equivalent to warp 7.8, using the WF^(10/3) of the revised TNG warp scale. Given Voyager's top stated speed of warp 9.975, this must intentionally factor in refueling stops and so on in its estimate, but let's use it here.
"Crossing" thirty sectors should normally take three years of sustained, warp 7.8 travel. There are two limits we can derive from this: the maximum sector size comes from a straight shot across thirty cube-shaped sectors along any given edge; the minimum sector size comes from a shot diagonally through thirty sectors, entering and exiting through their corners.
933.33c for three years is exactly(!) 2800 light years. This places the naive maximum sector span at 93.33 light years across, and the absolute minimum sector span of about 54 light years. Of course, all of this hinges on Voyager's use of warp 7.8 as a consistent timing metric.
All other references to explicit sector size listed in Memory Alpha are too nebulous to define anything consistently, although they all handily fit within these sizes. It's worth noting that sector sizes that are dramatically smaller than this may well be shorthand references to subsectors (as in the "Peak Performance" example), which would be understood by the speakers through context.
Yep, all true.
It's worth noting that "The Sound of Her Voice" takes place on Stardate 51948.3, in 2374, and First Contact takes place on 50893.5, in 2373, meaning Defiant would not have been performing any better in the battle with the Borg than it did in "The Sound of Her Voice." Before checking the dates, I was sort of hoping First Contact would turn out to take place after, thereby permitting Defiant time for some war-derived warp engine/SIF upgrades. Alas, no joy there.
So:
Unfortunately, I don't think we have enough concrete information from this data alone to draw any conclusions about the Sovereign class's top speed.
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The problem is the time.
-Picard makes the decision to leave as the fight first starts.
-The Fleet is either just in side Federation Space or on the border.
-Enterprise shows up at Earth as the battle is clearly wrapping up.
The cube is heavily damaged according to reports.
Clearly Enterprise didn't engage the Cube Before as the lieutenant is surprised at the new arrival and Picard notes the destruction of the Admiral's ship.
So the movie seems to tell us one of two possibilities.
1-Either Enterprise is incredibly slow
2-The Romulan Neutral Zone is nearly as far away as the Typhon Expanse from Earth
Resolving Enterprise's speed could be accomplished by finding out how far away Vulcan is from Earth.
Did you even READ the rest of my post, or just decide to stop after that one statement? Because I went on to explain how it doesn't work using any established warp speed chart. Even if the ship's maximum warp speed was warp 9.99, and they could sustain that for a generous length of time, there's no way the Enterprise could make it to Earth in time. No matter how you do the math, it doesn't work. The only way the ship could make it in time would be to travel at transwarp or in a slipstream, which there's never been any indication that the Sovereign class can do.
As for the Defiant, we don't know where it was coming from because it was never said. For all we know, that ship was part of a defensive line in the Sol system and was waiting for the Cube in case it advanced that far. The ship could have already been there when the Cube was first spotted, for any number of reasons, and ordered to stay by Starfleet. We simply don't know. One thing is certain: it could not have pursued a Borg Cube. It's simply too slow. In fact, most Starfleet ships couldn't because Borg ships can go incredibly fast warp speeds and even transwarp. The ships we saw fighting in the Sol system could have all been a part off a "last line" of defense after the main fleet failed to stop the Borg ship.
My point about the script was that the writers either didn't know or simply didn't care that the Enterprise could never make it in time. Otherwise, the ship would have started from a more believable position in relation to our solar system. However, this is done a lot in Star Trek. They make long journeys in seemingly short amounts of time.
WHAT poor writers if they can't decide on a performance figure and stick with it. you can tell that something has been written badly when it contradicts itself at later dates, probably quite likely in a series with multiple writers. none the less if star trek was a series of novels then this thread would have already been filled with rants about why the author couldn't keep consistent with his performance figures.
I think the latter option is the most probable, myself. That is, admittedly, entire supposition, but it's supposition that both fits all of the known facts and also prevents dealing with "the most advanced ship in the fleet" also somehow being far slower than peers and predecessors.
We do know this, don't we? (Source.) (Source)
Roddenberry's statements are generally regarded as canon, so that's established.
Why does Vulcan's distance from Earth help?
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This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves about Star Trek. They do this sort of thing a LOT. (too much, in my opinion)
However, I do apologize for not then responding to the rest of your post. That was an oversight on my part and I am sorry if I caused offense by doing that.
I don't think the warp speed charts are actually canon, so far as I know. They're referential and we can trot them out when they mesh up with what we see on screen, but when screen contradicts them, they lose every time. That's just the nature of canon vs. supplemental material. To be fair, I'm skirting this line awfully close by using the (10/3) exponent to determine c multiples of warp factors, though I'm trying to avoid using them directly (in the case of the discussion of sector size, for example; just using on-screen mentions of distances and times and equating them with an equivalent warp factor).
We do, though. Defiant is explicitly referenced by name in the battle reports Picard and company are listening to when the Typhon defense perimeter first meets the Borg Cube. It's there for that fight. It's also there at Earth. So, in some capacity, Defiant traveled from the Typhon Sector to Earth either in tandem with or in pursuit of the Borg Cube, and with a small enough speed deficit that it could continue the fight once it arrived at Earth.
All this says is that the warp speed charts published in secondary materials are in error. They do hand-wave this somewhat in the TNG Technical Manual, by suggesting that particulars of the spacetime region can affect warp factors. One fan-generated resolution for a number of the inconsistent travel times is the notion that some "routes" provide substantially higher effective speeds than normal. There may well be such a route to the Earth from the Typhon Sector, from the Neutral Zone to Earth, and so forth, especially if these routes are reinforced by repeated travel.
Again, this is all purely speculative, but speculating a solution is far more productive than "Well, writers are idiots, so none of this makes sense!"
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Geordi: "They don't seem to be in any hurry. They're only moving at warp one."
Given the delicate nature of the (supposed) plan, having ships plod across the Neutral Zone while a message was transmitted and digested makes a fair amount of sense. I wouldn't regard this as any kind of indication that they planned to continue at warp one, nor that they had been traveling at warp one up to that point.
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I think it's time to address that statement and attempt to define it both by your expectation and by comparison of it's equals among the Fleet.
Intrepid: 2370 stardate 48038.5
Prometheus: 2374 stardate 50749.5
Defiant 2367
Enterprise 2372 49827.5.
Clearly Sovereign came before Prometheus whose list of actual abilities is far advanced from anything ever said about the Enterprise. But we are specifically looking at speed. Prometheus's episode is marred in all sort of writing fouls and contradiction that will likely never be sorted out just to make this horrible plot work.
Message in a Bottle Problems
-Prometheus is fleeing Federation Space at warp 9.9
-We are told Prometheus was designed to be faster than any ship in the fleet.
(Intrepid is faster than warp 9.9)
-A Nebula Class ship catches up with the Prometheus
(The problem here the Nebula class has the same top end speed as Galaxy Warp 9.6.)
Clearly it's possible just like the Galaxy that the Nebula class ship pushed it's engines to 9.9 to catch the ship (at extreme risk) then the question is, if the Prometheus was faster than any ship in the Fleet why didn't the Romulans simply out run the Nebula Class Starship?
To compound this screw up 3 more Federation ships catch up with Prometheus. Two Defiant class ships which we know aren't remotely capable of warp 9.9 and an older Akira Class starship.
Clearly Prometheus is more advanced than Sovereign.
It has Ablative Armor, Regenerative shields, Multivector assault mode, Holograms across all Decks, 3 Warp Cores and designed to be staffed by 4 crewmen. Since Prometheus was launched well after Sovereign or Enterprise then it would be the most "Advanced Ship in the Fleet". The caveat here is that they actually say it was faster while with Sovereign this was never uttered.
There are related Technology to Defiant, Sovereign and Prometheus Class ships.
Defiant shares a warp core with Sovereign.
Prometheus shares Ablative Hull armor with Defiant and Regernative shields with Sovereign. Clearly these ships were designed in parallel apart of the same Advance Starship Design Project that mothballed the Defiant after the Borg Threat. (The ship is never said or seen to have Quantum torpedoes) Since Prometheus also appears to have been mothballed it's a safe speculation that the Sovereign IS the Enterprise renamed. (yes pure speculation)
Regardless the reasoning is sound that all of these ships were mothballed for the same reason. The Borg Threat was no longer a clear and Present Danger but with the Dominion War forced these new advanced ships to be recommissioned
If any of these ships were truely ready they would have been deployed immediately. Instead, Sisko chose the Defiant, rather than the two other ships to bring out of storage. Enterprise never saw action in the Dominion War and wouldn't have battled the Borg unless Picard defied orders. When we start looking at these 3 ships in this light their potential flaws and the reason why they were in storage becomes more apparent.
The question is why should we believe that Sovereign must be faster than anything?
At 16 ly + .5 lightear Galordon Core is from the Neutral Zone then we know how far away the Neutral Zone is from Earth and since we know the Borg Cube was traveling at Warp 9 or faster we now have a minimum speed and distance. We might be able to calculate a range of speed.
The intercept by a Nebula is pretty easy to explain. Given that the Romulans were explicitly attempting to mask their warp signature, they may have been traveling well below maximum speed at this juncture and only increased to warp 9.9 after dealing with the Nebula.
This is further corroborated by the Romulan helmsman's report that they are "40 minutes from our border at present speed." If they were explicitly traveling at maximum warp, the clarification would be irrelevant. It's a minor verbiage choice, but relevant.
I don't think there's any reason to assume Prometheus was mothballed, especially considering how far into the (one possible) future it ends up seeing use (c.f. ENT). Defiant was shelved when the likelihood of a Borg attacked diminished, as stated by Sisko, but I don't think it follows that Sovereign was part of the same process. It strikes me as far more likely that when Defiant was reactivated in light of the Dominion threat, they started integrating her combat-centric technologies into existing designs (e.g. Sovereign, Akira, et. al.) and also refined them for top secret, future designs (e.g. Prometheus).
Oh, I don't think we should. Again, I think Intrepid is probably the fastest ship in the fleet at the time of First Contact. However, I don't think that we have any reason to assume that Sovereign is uncharacteristically slow for its generation, either (excluding Defiant and its special considerations). At the very least, I would expect it to be capable of sustained warp 9.2, if not 9.6+. At the very least, its top speed must exceed warp 8, since Picard explicitly requests this speed rather than "Maximum Warp."
Wait, you've lost me. Galorndon Core is 0.5 light years from the Neutral Zone. Vulcan is 16 light years from Earth. We have no knowledge of the distance between Galorndon Core and Vulcan, which maybe thousands of light years.
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It comes down to two choices, either use the writer reference material or use canon references, but neither will really be accurate.
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Sisko joined the Defiant project at Utopia Planitia as a Lt. Commander. There is zero reason to assume that he would have access to other top secret projects developed at that time, even if they were developed in parallel. La Forge was still a starship's chief engineer at that time, so there's even less reason to assume he would have knowledge of what was in the works for all ships, especially if it's as classified as Prometheus appears to have been.
Prometheus herself was commissioned from Beta Antares, not Utopia Planitia, further distancing the projects from one another. Enterprise-E was commissioned from the San Fransisco Fleet Yards, presumably making that the base of Sovereign development. Their proximity isn't a requirement for tandem development -- and, indeed, I agree that their developments were probably mutually influential -- but the fact that each comes from a different yard suggests very strongly that they are not as closely linked as you are intimating.
Defiant keeps its warp speed lower while cloaked to avoid detection. Romulan ships do the same, and when forced to go faster, are easier to detect. That right there more than sufficiently justifies "slow due to masking issues." The dialog for those scenes and the nature of the hijacking being as clandestine as it appears to be further solidify this interpretation.
I don't agree with your insistence on parallel development. Defiant went into development in the late 2360s, then finally e merged in the early 2370s. Sovereign emerged in the mid 2370s, with no indications that its development ever stalled out; indeed, stuff developed for Defiant may have made its way into the Sovereign process even while the Defiant project itself was mothballed. So too for Prometheus.
Akira. Steamrunner. Norway. Saber. Akira and Steamrunner, in particular, see major Dominion War action, suggesting that they are the real resultingmainstays of the "new fleet" discussed post-Wolf 359.
I don't know what the relevance of this inquiry is. I don't particularly regard Sovereign as a successor to Galaxy, given that we still see Galaxy in a number of future scenarios. Sovereign is a force projection platform more than anything, not an explorer. Picard laments as much in Insurrection.
I don't think that conclusion follows at all. It indicates that Sovereign isn't designed to win races, sure, but suggests maneuverability and defense as primary considerations for the design over simply trying to flee from a threat. This is entirely consistent with other battle instances, particularly Enterprise-E completely shrugging off a Borg beam attack that only moments before had sliced an Akira in two. Sovereign is designed to take hits and tactics for the ship center on that. It does not follow that the ship's warp performance would be significantly worse than its peers or predecessors.
I'm still not following. The Vulcan ships were coming toward Galorndon Core from the Neutral Zone. None of the participating ships were at Vulcan. The Vulcan ships were coming from Romulan space. Galorndon Core's (and the Neutral Zone's) distance to Vulcan (and Earth) could be many thousands of light years; this scene does not offer any data on that one way or another.
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At warp 9.975, it took Voyager 5 days to travel 40 light years in a couple different episodes. source That's about as canon as you're going to get. I don't know if we ever had the exact distance between the Romulan Neutral Zone and Earth, I doubt we did. Plus, we don't know where along the Zone the Enterprise was.
Ah, I didn't remember it being mentioned. The Borg cube should have left the Defiant behind. In the episode "Q Who?" we saw a cube overtaking the Enterprise going well over warp 9. Then in "The Best of Both Worlds," they had to almost push their engines to the limit to catch up with the Cube and it was even slowed down by the Federation fleet in the Wolf 359 system. That Enterprise was definitely faster than the Defiant.
Not to mention you are forgetting that Defiant was not meant to have ablative armor. Out of the 3 ships only Prometheus was constructed with the armor. Sisko had it applied to Defiant without informing Star Fleet Command. So if you believe that the ships were not designed unilaterally and there was absolute secrecy isolating the ships then either Sisko was spying and Star Fleet didn't mind...or it was his project and knew exactly where it would be applied, especially since he knew there was to be a new fleet.
This is simple deduction, there are too many coincidence to simply write off as isolated events.
Now Defiant stays at lower speed because of it's energy signature while warp. I have seen nothing that implies that warp speed in general is more difficult to mask with higher velocity. For instance, the War Bird's issues wasn't speed.
La Forge:
Unless they're pulling so much power for something else that they can't fully cloak.~ TNG Tin Man
Neither scenario applies to Prometheus.
In the 2360's the Borg invaded the Federation.
Shelby states there are new systems in development but aren't ready yet.
Sisko tells us there is a whole new fleet being prepared to fight the Borg Threat.
Prometheus's original Registry number implies an older ship or perhaps a design much further back.
But as they are Prometheus 74913, Sovereign at either 73811 or 75000 and Defiant 74205 confirm parallel development. And since I've done the math on the Starship Registry before, I know Star Fleet Averages 315 ships a year in peace time and 1,000 plus a year during the Dominion War. The Registries are within 300 units of each other they were developed simultaneously. I'm afraid Akira, Steamrunner, Norway and Saber are all pre-Galaxy starships according to the Registry.
Few have done as much research as I have on Registry. Memory Alpha is wrong about that new fleet being made of these ships, not just because of the Registry numbers but clearly none of those ships stood a chance against the Borg Cube. Most were dusted in single shots or volley's just like Excelsiors and Mirandas. Moreover none of those ships have any more than 3 phaser arrays. Most have no torpedoe tubes at all. Akira may seem to have a bunch of tubes but it certainly didn't use them in the battle and it was a hi res model.
[~http://www.startrekmovie.com/forums/showpost.php?p=107771&postcount=147
The problem here is none of the three ships have a purpose in Star Fleet aside from being attack ships. In other words exactly what Sisko was speaking of in terms of the "New Fleet."
Concerning Speed.
There is no other conclusion one could make. The Captain didn't attempt to out run the aggressor despite having no intel on it's warp capabilities, yet 3 individual apparently guess properly that Enterprise wasn't going to be a problem catching up to. The only way all 3 could make such an assured determination is if Sovereign had a below par Warp performance. By this I'm guessing anywhere from Warp 8 to Warp 9.2.
So you may not agree with the conclusion but neither have you offered a substantial alternative and the problem is that there is none. Even if Enterprise can achieve warp 9.2 that's still much faster than anyone has seen a Romulan ship ever safely attain. You would have to establish a logical and tactical reason for how all three knew and why they took the action they did. They didn't even return fire untill secured from warp. How the ship reacts to a Borg attack at sublight means nothing about it's performance at warp.
Neutral Zone Distance.
I'm afraid the vulcan ships were about to arrive at vulcan according to the episode. Not only does Sela confirm that the ships would have landed on vulcan before any one could do anything and be entrenched in position but the Enterprise specifically notes that the Vulcan defense perimeter was responding after only 14 minutes of high warp travel from the Neutral Zone and Galordon Core.
Clearly if Vulcan were thousands of light years away the urgency then is false.
The ships were traveling at warp one which is solid evidence in of itself that the destination was not light years away for this Romulan gambit to pay off in the time required before Enterprise stopped the convoy. Just half a light year away would result in a 6 month journey.
These are cargo ships. They don't have a high top speed and no modifications to the engines were ever mentioned. Quite clearly the plot dictates that if Enterprise had been diverted by the false distress call those ships would have reached Vulcan. Considering the vast distance of just 5 lightyears, Enterprise could out run any cargo ship or even deal with the crisis and then still capture the cargo ships with more than enough time to spare. They were not a possible thousand lightyears away or even one.
But seriously though, I don't know how reliable this is but: Memory Alpha: Sovereign Class
And there's also this site, which has probably been around since the original series: Ex Astris Scientia
No argument here, in principle.
Speculative.
Completely speculative and entirely unfounded. There is no indication that LaForge had direct involvement in the creation of the Sovereign, Defiant, or Prometheus warp cores. The only mention I see is that LaForge was involved in the year-long Enterprise-E shakedown cruise. Enterprise-E launched/was commissioned on 49827.5, Enterprise-D went down 48650.1, so there is a year gap there, but no where do I see reference to LaForge being assigned to starship development projects during that period, which renders this...
...completely moot.
I acknowledged as much in my prior post.
Point of interest: while I happen to like the "Naval Construction Contract" interpretation of NCC myself, it's not canon.
While you are correct that Sisko had it applied to Defiant without the knowledge of Starfleet Operations, it does not necessarily follow that Sovereign lacked said armor itself, nor that Prometheus was the first ship explicitly designed to include it. It has always seemed to me that ablative armor was an experimental advance around Defiant's activation, but was always intended to make its way into all modern Starfleet designs from that point forward. That would include Sovereign and Prometheus.
All of my preceding counterarguments aside, I am actually coming to agree with your interpretation of the Sovereign/Defiant/Prometheus projects being part of the same block of projects, and representative of Shelby's "New Fleet." I just don't necessarily agree that they are quite so tightly integrated.
The overall goal of a "New Fleet" to fight the Borg necessarily implies a number of advancements that all of the ships would presumably share, apparently culminating in Prometheus (which we saw goes on to have something like two hundred years of successful service history). Lessons learned at each step would necessarily make their way into concurrent/subsequent designs and, presumably, active ships would receive refits to integrate the new technologies as well. This is part of why we still see ships like Galaxy into the 2400s: they are modular enough that they can also receive the "New Fleet" upgrades (advanced warp cores, ablative armor, regenerative shields, quantum-capable torpedo launchers) and stay relevant amidst ships designed decades (or centuries!) later.
Well, it is speed, in that they need to pull more power to keep up with Enterprise-D, thereby leaving them with less to maintain a full cloak. In "The Search," it's also pointed out that "cloaked ships radiate a slight subspace variance at warp speeds." As you say, though, cloaking and warp drive interactions are irrelevant to the matter of masking a warp signature.
Warp trails are the residual subspace distortions left behind by a ship. The greater the speed, the greater the distortion, the more easy it's going to be to find and track the trail. Therefore, traveling at lower speeds and attempting to mask a trail is going to meet with greater success than traveling at higher speeds, especially at or exceeding the incredible speed of warp 9.9+ that Prometheus is capable of achieving.
This exchange from "The Die is Cast" reinforces this conclusion:
I do not think it is reasonable to assume Prometheus was running at maximum warp while commandeered by Romulans. Everything about its situation, the Romulans' efforts to be sneaky rather than flee, and remarks about their mode of travel (e.g. "at our current speed") indicate that their hijacking emphasized stealth, not outrunning pursuit. They may well have been traveling at warp six, in fact, given the preceding quote.
I'm afraid this may infuriate you, especially given the amount of work you've obviously put into it, but I don't think the registries can be regarded as sequential (especially once they get into the x0000s of the 24th century) specifically because of ships like Akira, Steamrunner, et. al.
These ships are very clearly not pre-Galaxy, as they defy every aspect of the changing design lineage leading up to Galaxy, but embody and share traits with designs known to have been formulated afterward. Up until these ships complicated the matter, I would have been right there with you advocating that registries were sequential, but design lineage must trump numerical sequence. Starfleet, quite simply, couldn't design ships like Akira, Steamrunner, and the like until after Galaxy. To suggest otherwise flies against every aspect of the design sequence of those ships, from escape pod hatches to nacelle design to physical arrangement.
Short of explicit, on-screen statement that these ships were designed and launched prior to Galaxy, or that registries numbers are without a doubt sequential after the switch to 5-digit registries, I'm afraid I consider this an indefensible argument. (As an aside, I am perfectly happy to accept that registries are sequential within "blocks" -- for example, everything with a 51xxx registry being built in the same "order" -- but these blocks need not follow any sequential, time-based pattern.)
Given that runabouts also receive full registry numbers, I don't think the "explosion" of NCC numbers necessarily indicates a massive increase in starship construction, but rather represents a paradigm shift of also numbering small craft with full registries, whereas shuttles previously received registries attaching them to their parent starship.
Sovereign does. Sovereign, or at least Enterprise-E, was kept largely out of the Dominion War and instead maintained diplomatic operations despite its (apparent) reduced capacity to do so compared to Galaxy. Defiant and Prometheus were pretty clearly combat ships, though.
I isolated this quote in particular because this is a fallacious line of thinking. Refuting a claim does not require an alternative be proposed or available. Ever. Period. If you feel differently, that's your prerogative, but we may as well end the discussion because we are clearly playing by different sets of rules.
This is no different than the "you can't critique something if you can't do better" line of garbage that some people trot out in the face of criticism. Pointing out flaws in a piece of art does not require artistic ability; pointing out flaws in the line of reasoning leading to a conclusion does not require an alternative conclusion. It merely means the proposed conclusion is in error.
Let's list what we know from the scene of Scimitar's sneak attack:
Of significant note here is that Enterprise is already at maximum warp. Picard can't order a higher speed; Enterprise is already there. This is more indicative of Scimitar's performance than of Enterprise. Yes, we've not previously seen a Romulan ship capable of matching a Galaxy in a straight-out race, but neither have we seen a Romulan ship with three power cores before, either, nor a ship designed as recently as Scimitar appears to have been. From what I can tell, D'Deridex warbirds can do about warp 9; any higher puts serious strain on them. Warp 9.x (matching Galaxy "high warp," per Picard's log) requires that they exceed normal maximum engine output "by thirty percent." (Source: "Tin Man")
I think you have your quotes mixed up. Here are the relevant excerpts:
Traveling at warp one while crossing: (Of side interest here, this heading actually might let us calculate their real galactic travel vector, given that we know the location of Vulcan's star.)
Sela, anticipating success regardless of her captives' freedom
The "fourteen minutes" quote
The mention of Vulcan defense ships
The sequence of events here plays out in a pretty straight-forward manner.
While the fact that Vulcan ships went active at all certainly implies that Vulcan is close enough to Galorndon Core to merit readiness should Enterprise not successfully intercept the ships, the 14 minute bit refers to Enterprise's intercept time from some point between Galorndon Core and the Neutral Zone, not that of the Vulcan ships (presumably from Vulcan). This may also be a purely perfunctory response to any declared threat against a Federation planet with a home defense fleet. (In fact, that strikes me as incredibly likely.)
The dialog and Sela's plot make it exceedingly clear that she expected her ships to receive escort to Vulcan by Federation/Starfleet forces, presumably at a much greater speed than warp one (as you point out, reaching Galorndon Core from the Neutral Zone would have taken half a year at warp one -- which is canonically established as equal to lightspeed) and to land her troops on the planet before anyone realized what was happening. She may have even been prepared for this to be a multiple-day journey, with Starfleet personnel sent over to inspect the hijacked Vulcan ships, though this is admittedly entirely speculative on my part and doesn't mesh well with the activation of the Vulcan defense ships. Positing that any ship would only be capable of warp one, however, is completely outlandish; warp one is an impractical speed for a ship intended to ferry cargo across interstellar distances. This speed is clearly faux-diplomatic in nature.
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Yeah, and Bernd is the height of unbiased.
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1:09:51 - "Seven minutes."
1:09:58 - Scene ends (transitions to Enterprise-E cruising toward the Rift)
1:10:04 - Cartography scene begins.
1:10:29 - "At our current velocity, we will arrive at sector 10-45 in approximately 40 minutes, sir."
1:11:32 - Interference begins. Elapsed time since scene start: 1:28.
Changing those into "relative" times:
00:00 - "Seven minutes."
00:07 - Scene ends (transitions to Enterprise-E cruising toward the Rift)
05:32 - Cartography scene begins.
05:57 - "At our current velocity, we will arrive at sector 10-45 in approximately 40 minutes, sir."
07:00 - Interference begins.
So, we leap across about five and a half minutes in that cut. This doesn't really tell us anything pertinent to the discussion, but is perhaps of academic interest.
Wish I had the Blu-Ray so I could get some higher-res shots of the cartography screens, but Data zooms in, rescaling the grid as he does, so I doubt we'd actually be able to derive any actual size of the Bassen Rift from that.
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Allow me to preface all our musing by saying our overall goal is to find answers to the contradictions or problems that canon presents. When at all possible it is of course best to stick with canon and failing that with the next most reliable source information. I don't think it prevents us from speculating on canon. To quote Spock: "Nature abhors a vacuum." To simply let a canon detail remain a contradiction doesn't help us answer question and it's isn't much fun either. Rampant speculation of course undesirable but I believe it's okay if logic and canon conspire together for something a bit more reasonable.
We know the multi-stream reactor is La Forge's idea. That is a direct involvement in the creation of cores in the Defiant and Sovereign. However what we don't know is the extent of his involvement with the development of those power plants. I'm perfectly okay with that unknown. That's story writing potential for someone, right? Just like with Einstien who provided the brilliant concept of nuclear energy, we know he didn't create the Atomic bombs but we definitely know it was born from his ideas. Personally I think it dove-tails beautifully.
As concerns the Ablative armor and who had it first, canon is explicit enough. With tech is often unnecessary to make huge assumptions but Prometheus is the only ship designed with the armor in mind.
-Only the Original Defiant had the armor and cloak. There is no indication that Defiant 2 was ever equipped with ablative armor and neither was Valiant as they make no mention of the extra protection during it's attack on the Battleship.
-As for Sovereign it's issue is it's also never given any indication during it's most intense battles that the armor was ever applied. The ship took a huge pounding in Nemesis and hull breaches were riddled across the hull. Defiant didn't always make and explicit detailing of the percentage of the armor remaining but this is one instance in a battle where this ship could have used the extra protection and plot wizardry and never got it. Thirdly Sovereign is 685 meters long. The other two ships are at most 200 and 400 meters. That's a lot of surface area. Ablative armor has to be reapplied after damaged. The result would amount to months in dry dock to reapply the armor for the ship the size of the Sovereign. The other two ships show us that the number of windows is a factor with the armor and Voyager shows that every attempt was made to conceal every opening to the point of deployment doors with the armor. Some in Star Fleet went to the trouble of designing the Ablative Armor generator for just that purpose.
On the other hand I am willing to assume that Prometheus has a similar core as the other two ships. It makes sense that regenerative shielding would have some power demands that would require a power plant of that nature. For a lighter attack ship of this nature the dual layers of protection is a great idea. But unlike many fans I'm not willing to speculate that Prometheus had Quantum torpedoes other wise in the 3 instances we've seen the ship we would have seen it once. . Maybe they were still in development with Defiant and Sovereign and weren't in mass production. I think the new systems such as Regenerative shields (If the ship has the power) and quantum torpedoes and warp cores are those "Defensive Systems" Shelby was talking about that were in development. (Perhaps not the cores as that episode happened after BoBW.) But every technology has it's draw back. Most things can't be applied absolutely unilaterally. Their may be mass, power, maneuverability, effort and time table considerations that make one technology better suited else where.
Well at this point, reason is irrelevant. You've used canon to prove the it is possible the ship wasn't had high warp despite the urgency of the situation. With this quote there is cause to believe that stealth was indeed chosen over speed. Touche', Mcc. However this does not explain the 3 other ships that caught up with Defiant despite a clear 6 hour head start. Those ships weren't capable of such high velocities.
Star Fleet Registry History
As I said I have been researching this for a long time. I'll be succinct. The Registry is definitely sequential. Rick Berman and Michael Okuda confirmed that in interview as they talked about what the size of Federation Fleet amounted to and what the original registry of Enterprise would be (which is where the NCC-75000 originates from and why two ships had to be re-designated because prop errors, namely the USS Yamato and the USS Prometheus.
Of course Berman got his information from Okuda. When asked about how many ships Star Fleet had he said between the USS Hood and the Voyager around 30,000.
My research on Federation Fleet movements show that they don't move and fight in the thousands. They seem to be spread out. In Sacrifice of Angels Sisko refers to "Elements" of Fleets" were taken to create his task force. Sisko was going up against 1,200 ships but only had 600 hundred. Sisko was counting on 3 elements of ship to match the Dominion Forces he'd likely encounter. The Klingon's would have been that final element but not even Sisko knew how many ships he'd be facing. (Of course this is pure speculation) But if each fleet is made of four elements of 300 then a fleet is easily 1200 ships. And the Fleet numbers have reached Nine. So if there are 10 Fleets at 1,200 each, that's at least 12,000 ships in active combat.
However the most convincing evidence comes from the DS9 Episode "When it rains..."
The Klingons are the only thing standing between the Domnion Breen energy draining weapon and Defeat. A Romulan General or perhaps Neral himself notes that even with 1,500 ships in reinforcement the Klingons would be heavily out matched.
Romulan:
"With the Breen, the Cardassians and the Jem'Hadar you're still outnumbered twenty-to-one."
Twenty times 1,500 gives us a Dominion Fleet of at least 30,000. This number is obviously bigger because it's parried off of the Klingon reinforcements only, not what ever Klingon ships currently on station. Thus Star Fleet and the Klingons and Romulans had to have a Fleet comprable and even larger to combat the Dominion's superior weapons technology. As we say the Allies were losing ships left and right.
Akira, Norway and Steamrunner
The only design lineage that these ships all use that appear post Galaxy is the Lifepod or life pod hatches.
This pecularities have been noted by others.
Star Trek vs Star Wars Complete Tech Assessment
http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWvolumetrics2.html
"7. The First Contact ships are for the most part a confusing pain in the ass, chronologically speaking. The Akiras, for instance, sport Galaxy-esque saucers, NX-esque catamarans, Sovereign-esque bridges and escape pods, engines that look like a funky fusion of TMP and TNG, and so on.
The Saber is a little weird with her saucer-attached engines and hexagonal saucer, but I find her likable nonetheless. The Steamrunner, however, is just stupid-looking. So stupid-looking, in fact, that she can only barely justify a single solitary 'cool point' for having a name that comes from the original War of the Worlds. The only one that looks decent in a chronological sense is the Norway, and that was the one they never used again."
You have to understand that the introduction to these ship and the belief that they are future ships is what is referred to a Historian's Fallacy. In writing that's better explained as Retconning, and the perfect example of a retconning ship the NX Enterprise herself that sports details that look exactly like the Akira. So if we can accept the NX Class with it's many noted similarities from nearly the same profile, the exact same hull details and so on then it's not illogical to look at these ships and conclude (in light of the registry and the size of the Federation Fleet) that Sovereign didn't set the trend but rather copied ships which came before. Consider to that this ship does not look like a precursor to the Constitution Class at all. Remember there is absolutely no evidence other than circumstantial similarities that these ships new.
Refuting a Claim vs Solving a Contradiction
Remember I spoke of filling the vacuum, previously. This is the art of deduction. You are of course correct that rebuttal doesn't require a counter proposal. That's not what I'm asking for. I'm always looking for errors in logic and if it's revealed in my own there is point in denying it. However there is a mystery to be solved.
What I'm saying is I understand you don't agree with the logic, perhaps if you could delineated as to why or even offer a better explanation to fill that void. Your previous explanation counter argument wasn't particularly explicative. Rather than simply having faith in Sovereign's state of general "advancement" and assuming it refers to literally everything about the ship..can we be motivated to make that conclusion by facts or reasonable speculation on the facts?
-I was under the assumption that the maximum speed of a Warbird is Warp Eight
-If it's true the Scimitar has 3 such cores then Scimitar was powering shields Weapons, Cloak and High Warp all at the same time with no apparent struggle (as you pointed out)
-The fact that Enterprise wasn't shaking itself appart at Maximum means either this was the Max sustainable speed (Galaxy's Warp 9.2 vs 9.6) or that it's Max speed was so low that it could not incur subspace disturbance from the velocity like Runabouts and other craft with low max speeds.
Position of the Neutral Zone
I'm not seeing the contradiction so far.
Enterprise was stated to be at Galordon Core. Picard (Sela actually) sent a message to remain at Galordon Core so the 14 minutes from there to intercept the Vulcans ships is static.
Sela's Time table implies strongly less than a day travel to Vulcan at whatever the final speed of their escort by saying (Before anyone could do anything) That implies minutes not even hours for if the Federation escorts suspected anything or received a message (like they would have) then the invasion could have been prevented. This plot required timing through distraction and they didn't get it.
P.S
This entire episode is completely suspect as to what it suggest, it does give a better concept of the distance between Earth and the Neutral Zone by putting Vulcan and Romulus effectively right nest to each other and Earth a mere 16 light years away in Sector 001. That would give a better location for Romulus for the Original Earth Romulan War.