Time for building

[McAvoy]

Actually no. Navies train along time with their new ships prior to going on deployments. Usually these crews came from other similar class of ships. For example, the USS George Bush, the USN's newest carrier is more or less the same as any other Nimitz class carrier but it took awhile before the Bush was ready for pre-deployment training exercises.

Even using the TNG technical manual, even though the highly quoted 20 year figure doesn't completely show truly how long it took the Galaxy class ship to be built. Off hand, I think it was five or six years which falls in line with a ship of that size. Later on let's say before the Dominion War, they could have reduced it down to 3 years.

[alexmann]

Actually no. Navies train along time with their new ships prior to going on deployments. Usually these crews came from other similar class of ships. For example, the USS George Bush, the USN's newest carrier is more or less the same as any other Nimitz class carrier but it took awhile before the Bush was ready for pre-deployment training exercises.

Even using the TNG technical manual, even though the highly quoted 20 year figure doesn't completely show truly how long it took the Galaxy class ship to be built. Off hand, I think it was five or six years which falls in line with a ship of that size. Later on let's say before the Dominion War, they could have reduced it down to 3 years.

What I meant is that the time that it takes to train a crew doesn't affect the time taken to buils the actual ship.

[McAvoy]

Naturally.

But it would be a ship without a crew.

In traditional naval sense, there are three dates marking the ship's building process. Keel laid date, launch date and completion/commissioning date. Keel laid date varies because it can be either the official date or the 'ceremonial' date (if there is one). Usually within days or even hours of each other. Launch date is basically a ship completed as much as possible to a certain weight before slid down into the water. Completion/commissioning date is when the ship is fully complete and with a full crew. By this point, crews are not fully trained either. It will take time before the ship is considered combat ready.

[alexmann]

Yes but this is about working out how long it would take to build the ship, not how long it would take to get it operational.

[Mikey]

Hardly useful to talk about a ship's completion without it being operational.

[McAvoy]

Exactly. Building ships may be easy for Starfleet for all we know. It could much harder to man those ships.

[Tinadrin Chelnor]

Hardly useful to talk about a ship's completion without it being operational.

Exactly this, there's no point building a mighty battle fleet, if you have no one to operate said fleet. The personnel requirements are just an important detail as any other part of the ship.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

I find it interesting to hear McAvoy (as an actual vet) talk about the need to train for a particular ship, because this is something Trek seems to have glossed over (if not ignored completely much of the time). Think about how routinely crew are bounced around, and how Starfleet crew and aliens alike seem to be immediately able to operate strange craft (unless the plot demands otherwise...). Maybe one can say there's a great deal of standardization in Starfleet design which makes the transition thing easier, but the countless example of alien designs still can't be so easily brushed aside.

I'd say these estimates on construction times sound reasonable though.

[mwhittington]

I do think there is a lot of standardization in the Starfleet LCARS menu system, but the system can be customized according to preferences, such as species, left or right handed, language preference, etc. For example, in Year of Hell, Tuvok was able to initiate a tactile interface because of his blindness.

[alexmann]

I would guess that preferences would be transfered with the crewmember.

[Mikey]

I would guess that preferences would be transfered with the crewmember.

Transferred? I'd doubt it... wouldn't it make more sense for a new crewman to customize his own new console, based on the different capabilities and functions of his new ship and station?

[alexmann]

I would have thought that all ships would have similar enough functions to simply transfer the old settings and modify them if necessary.

[Mikey]

IDK, I'd be pretty disappointed if I transferred from, say, a Steamrunner to a Prommie and didn't find almost everything more up-to-date and improved. There are also difference's in the ships' capabilities... an Akira-class, for example, would need to have a much more intensive torpedo fire-control interface than would a Nova-class, while the latter would have a much more complex science and sensor display.

[Captain Seafort]

an Akira-class, for example, would need to have a much more intensive torpedo fire-control interface than would a Nova-class, while the latter would have a much more complex science and sensor display.

I agree with the former, but not the latter. While a centralised tactical station makes a degree of sense, I'd expect a Nova to simply have more science-oriented stations rather than a single more complex one.

Of course, probably the best indication of the problems with just uploading your preferences would be the helm - every ship would handle differently, so proper conversion to type training would be needed.

[Mikey]

I agree with the former, but not the latter. While a centralised tactical station makes a degree of sense, I'd expect a Nova to simply have more science-oriented stations rather than a single more complex one.

Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other for the purposes of this discussion. The point is that one ship has far more potent - and more importantly, differently focused - sensors than the other, and thusly wouldn't have a similar operational console than the other.