Deepcrush wrote:With most of the work being internal there isn't any reason the ship couldn't remain on station while committing the upgrades.
With only 1/10th of the ships weapons down for the refit and no other systems being impacted what would make this a 'major' dockyard job?
How exactly do you intend to get to the internal systems without going through the hull? You'd have to remove the entire phaser array, along with an unknown area of the hull surrounding it, and replace it with the new array. Quite apart from the fact that this would leave a damn great hole in the ship, the new array wouldn't be delivered as individual components - it would take far too long to assemble. Instead they're be prefabricated and moved into position as individual segments, something like ten metres on a side. It's possible that such work could be carried out in interstellar space, with shuttles, but why would you do that, when the ship would still be sat around helpless and it would take longer due to the bottleneck of getting the components out of the hangar, and the lack of specialist personnel.
On top of this, it isn't just a matter of replacing the array itself - everything behind it, including the basic hull frame and the
entire power train from the array to the warp core would have to be replaced as well. Both those system would have been designed for type-X phasers, the former would likely have problems with the greater recoil of more powerful weapons and the latter wouldn't be able to carry the sort of power necessary to make more powerful weapons worthwhile. Again, neither the power systems nor the hull frames are small objects - you couldn't replace them on the fly, but would have to remove huge sections of the out hull, along with whatever interior bulkheads were in the way, to get the old components out and the new ones in. You would, in effect, have to dismantle the entire ship and rebuild it to carry the new weapons.
Given the amount of work we're talking about here, your two best options are to either rebuild the entire ship as was done with the Connie, or just leave it as was as Teaos suggests, updating the torpedo pod to QTs if extra firepower is necessary.