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Politics. Money. Practical use. Point of diminishing returns. Manpower. Limited resources.

Take your pick.

Perhaps there is a diminishing return on SIF that does limit the max size of ships.

McAvoy wrote:Politics. Money. Practical use. Point of diminishing returns. Manpower. Limited resources.

Take your pick.

Does money even exist?
Manpower obviously isn't a limiting issue; they have a population in the hundreds of billions.
Limited resources? What limited resources? Again, they have hundreds or thousands of planets to access natural resources. It's extremely unlikely these are a limiting factor.
Practical use? What practical use limitations are there?

Politics... well, this one I kind of agree with. Clearly the Abramsverse Starfleet has decided that 700-and-some meter ships are what they want, and so yes, there is SOME sort of reason why they decided that. But calling that a "limit" implies that they're not able to build larger ships, or that it's not practical to.

My position is that there's nothing to support the idea that they can't. If tomorrow they decided that they really should build 1,400 meter ships instead, or 2,800 meter ships, then there is nothing preventing them from doing so. And indeed the fact that the mile long Vengeance could be built, apparently with ease, would indicate that I'm right.

I agree...from what we have seen they sure can make them even bigger.

That being said.....I am not a huge fan of the GCS size Abrams Enterprise to be honest. Now it doesn't bother me quite as much as some other folks but still, making it so big wasn't very well thought out imho. (We wanted to make it look grander.....it's a stupid reason and it shows...).


They took what, 80 years or so going from the E-nil to the Galaxy class? Now it seems the argument is that they went all out building those huge ships because of the Narada......but that seems a weak argument to me. I mean they loose one ship to another mystery supership (of which they have NOTHING, no parts, no new technology not even new design ideas) and immediatly they go supersize everything crazy? Now that might seem prudent when viewed in isolation but one should not forget that this is nothing new for starfleet.

Heck, in the prime universe they CONSTANTLY loose ships to mysterious superships of the week and STILL it took them 80 years going from the Enil to the GCS. Some might say the Abrahmsverse is more hostily but apart from the Narada....can we really say that? Sure, Narada had a huge impact destroying vulcan but I don't see how it affected the overall situation in the whole universe. Cold war with the Klingons? Prime universe had that also.

Point is, there seems to be no reason why all of a sudden they are building ships the size of which is 80 years ahead of it's time. Now I am not saying it can't be done, but assuming that they start with the same tech-level as the prime universe, I would figure that by scaling the ships up to this size they have to be incredibly inefficient or come with other huge drawbacks. (Maybe that is the different between an engine room and a brewery.....just saying:)

(And indeed, most of their ships seem to be docked most of the time or immediatly returning to base after an assignment, in that regard they remind me of the Dreadnaught class from the Star Fleet Battles universe, which are said to be mothballed during peacetime because they are so expensive to run)

But again, the appearance of the Narada seems a weak reason to radically alter their ship-building policy. Didn't the Narada vanished into Klingon space? So maybe it's more a reaction to better and more advanced klingon ship designs appearing thereafter, but from what we have seen from klingon ships....seems also unlikely.

I imagine what would happen if a picture of a ww2 tank suddenly appears during ww1. (Since appart from a picture they also have nothing of the Narada). Would it be enough to really alter the history of tank design? Or would they still be mostly bound by the limitations of their industry, materials available and technical know how (huge and weak engines, gearboxes etc. etc.).

I think when other Spock and the Narada went back in time it was much different in that it radically altered the very fabric of the universe so that while the places and people are still there everything else iis different in a big way.

Are all the ships we get to see in ST XI and Into the Darkness as big as new Enterprise or even Vengance?
If ships that big are a new feature in SF (after the Narada incident) as we believe, where are all the older/smaller ships like the Kelvin? They must be still serving, or is the whole fleet that new and they just scrap all the ships they had before the Narana incident?

The destroyed fleet in the first reboot movie all seemed to be of a largeish size.

I agree, in theory, Starfleet could build a ship the size of Earth's Stardock. But it would take a huge amount of time (IRC, Stardock took 16 years to build), as well as alot of manpower and resources to build just one. And I always imagined Starfleet would build ships to fit their needs.

Starfleet's primary purpose is exploration. You could build dozens, even hundreds of Intrepids, Lunas, Nebulas, even throw in a score of Galaxys and Sovereigns, in the same amount of time it would take to build one, maybe two "Stardock" ships. With a whole fleet of these smaller ships, you could explore alot more of the galaxy with the same amount of resources and manpower.

And although it could have off-the-charts firepower, that would only be practical against a large fleet. I don't see these ships doing the everyday patrol of trade routes and other space lanes when a frigate or cruiser could do the same thing. And in case of a war, you could probably build hundreds of Defiants in the same amount of time as two or three of these behemoths. And with all of those Defiants, you could cover alot more of your border and still do alot of attacks on your enemy.

Politics could play into it as well. Building a ship like that is sending a message to other powers that you are readying for war. It could start a arms race when all you want to do is be peaceful explorers.