Production and Commissioning

[Captain Seafort]

Logical speculation though, given that there were two in the closing scene of "Call to Arms", Sisko's fleet in "Favour the Bold"/"Sacrifice of Angels" included five or six of them, there were three in "Tears of the Phrophets", and an unknown number in "What You Leave Behind" (probably five or six given that the staship shots were mainly stock footage from the previous three battles.

[Mikey]

Since we're discussing semi-canon vs. non-canon, logical speculation is certainly valid. It stands to reason that production on subsequent orders would go faster than on the initial builds, because all that trial-and-error in the initial construction has been dispensed with.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

Well, all the galaxies completed so far aren't necessarily the initial order. I would like to see a canon reference to how many Galaxies there were supposed to be when and what order. I really don't know where most of this info comes from.

Well there have been at least 6 galaxy-class ships named on screen. The Galaxy, Yamato, Enterprise, Odyssey, Venture, and Challenger. Since three were gone before Sisko's fleet was assembled in "Favour the Bold"/"Sacrifice of Angels". So since there are at least two or three unnamed ships(two of which are commonly thought to be the Trinculo and the Magellan) it would make since that all 12 frames were finished. It would make sense for the Galaxys to be on the front line but I doubt all of them would be able to make it to the battle on such short notice. And given the Borg threat and the Dominion war it would make sense to finish the frames.

[Captain Seafort]

A quick note to point out that the "12 spaceframes" note comes from the non-canon tech manual. If we're taking that as a decent source if there's corroborating evidence then the Venture is almost certainly a Batch 2 or later, given it's additional phaser arrays on the nacelles.

[Deepcrush]

I thought that batch one was 6 frames and that batch two was split between the Nebs and GCS.

[Captain Seafort]

Where did you get that from? The "two batches of six" is from the tech manual, which doesn't even mention the Neb. Besides which, there may be a lot of commonality between the two designs, but not so much that you could swap from one to the other in mid-build. Aft of the main shuttlebay they're completely different (albeit similar) hulls.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

Where did you get that from? The "two batches of six" is from the tech manual, which doesn't even mention the Neb. Besides which, there may be a lot of commonality between the two designs, but not so much that you could swap from one to the other in mid-build. Aft of the main shuttlebay they're completely different (albeit similar) hulls.

Well, the saucers, and maybe the nacelles could be used, but I've never heard of this Nebula theory before.

[Captain Seafort]

The nacelles yes, and most of the saucer, but the lower aft eighth would have to be a completely different design since it's part of the neck in the Galaxy and the upper engineering hull in the Neb.

[Deepcrush]

Where did you get that from? The "two batches of six" is from the tech manual, which doesn't even mention the Neb. Besides which, there may be a lot of commonality between the two designs, but not so much that you could swap from one to the other in mid-build. Aft of the main shuttlebay they're completely different (albeit similar) hulls.

I wasn't talking about the tech manual. I was just thinking about how things showed up on the show.

[Eclipse]

Originally the galaxy and nebula did have the same saucer, and naccel design. After the neb entered full servise some thing where changed in the design including it's use of it's own saucer.

[Mikey]

Welcome, Eclipse!

And that may be true, but because of the attachment points for the engineering hull and nacelles, the components wouldn't be interchangeable without serious reconstruction.

While having interchangeable components like that would be a huge boost to logistics, we couldn't expect Starfleet design to show that much forethought.

[Anon]

Mikey I'm not sure why they wouldn't give "that much forethought." According to DITL they gave that much forethought when they built the Oberth class, and had to have similar forethought for the massive production run and refit of the Miranda class. Production, deployment, operations and support are supposed to be considered as early as concept refinement and technology development phases of the modern acquisition and product devlopment. Mass production, and mass supportability is only about a century old concept. So why wouldn't an advanced civilization who has a far better understanding of engineering be able to take these into consideration early in the development of a new system?

The reason I'm focusing on the Galaxy is a result of DITL stating that the Galaxy was supposed to replace the Oberth and Ambassador class of ships. This information is cited from TNG tech manual. That same source apparently states that the Ambassador was the replacement for the Constellation and Excelsior. That means the Ambassador was supposed to replace well over 500 ships. According to DITL the Federation only built 58 Ambassadors to replace a fleet of 500, that doesn't quite make sense.

So in reality the Galaxy is supposed to replace the 500+ Excelsiors and Constellations, the 58 Ambassadors and the 2,186 Oberth Class ships. Since the Federation is growing, one would have to assume the number of ships needed to continue its exploration, scientific, and defensive missions would need to grow as well. So in reality the Galaxy would have to be built at a tremendous scale nearing 3,000 ships!

If this is the reality DITL is endorsing, then an initial production run of 12 ships to figure out its production processes and ensure that they have a good ship would make perfect sense. SO I don't doubt the 12 ships initial production run. But they wouldn't start on all 12 "keel layings" right away. They would stagger it so as production problems come up they could test out corrective actions on the next ship about to enter that phase of construction.

[Jordanis]

The nacelles yes, and most of the saucer, but the lower aft eighth would have to be a completely different design since it's part of the neck in the Galaxy and the upper engineering hull in the Neb.

Have we ever really gotten a close enough look at the junction between the saucer and engineering hull on the Nebula to rule out that the saucer's half of the attachment mechanism is the same?

[Mikey]

I feel I can safely assume that the possibility of interchangeability between the Calaxy and the Nebula hasn't been given "that much forethought" because we've never seen any indication that such a concept WAS built in. We can't assume a thing simply because it makes sense to US.

[Jordanis]

True, but every part of the Nebula saucer that we've seen in reliable detail has been identical to the Galaxy saucer, right down to a shuttlebay placement that no longer makes sense in the Nebula design. If they're already giving up on interchangeable saucers, why is that shuttlebay still there? Why don't they put the doors on the front? Since that bay actually takes up that entire pair of decks, it wouldn't be a very big structural change.

Given that, it seems like a very short extrapolation to say that the Nebula and Galaxy saucers are completely identical (save the bridge, I suppose, but bridges are modules), as opposed to identical in every detail save the one area we haven't seen clearly.

I know that's not actually a logically sound argument in the classical sense, but neither is assuming that it isn't identical.