Dreadnought Class

[Tyyr]

Could you defeat that ship?

Easily, I can pull big numbers out of my ass too.

Length: 250
Width: 125
Height: 75
Decks: 25,000
Crew: 75,000

The first problem I see with this thing is that you have 25,000 decks, each with the surface area of a small European country. Seriously, 31,250 square kilometer per deck and you have 25,000 of them. Now granted this is a trek ship so lets say they average 1/10 of that. You're still talking 3,125 square KILOMETERS per deck. To put that in perspective Deck 10,743 would be the 176th largest country on Earth today. The total estimate we'll go for total surface area of the decks in this thing would be 78,125,000 square kilometers. That's 4.6 times the surface area... of RUSSIA. You could house Russia, Canada, the US, China, Brazil, Australia, India, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Sudan, and Algeria in this thing and still have enough room to pack in a few dozen smaller vacation spots like NEW ZELAND, COSTA RICA, and ENGLAND. Each crewman would have over a thousand square kilometers of deck space all to themselves.

Now mind you, this is by estimating that this is a Trek ship and therefore about 90% empty space by the defined volume.

If you took every ship that Starfleet, the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians, the Dominion, and the FUCKING BORG have ever made you probably still wouldn't accumulate the shear volume of resources you'd need to build this thing. We're talking a ship with the mass equivalent of 175,000 Galaxy class starships. You're easily six orders of magnitude larger than anything Starfleet has ever built. Even the Voth city ship was only about 11 km long.

[alexmann]

What the hell are replicators for?

[Mikey]

What the hell are replicators for?

Not this, considering the fact that they couldn't replicate a manhole cover.

[Tyyr]

Well first of all they can't replicate a good many things you need to build ships with. Second, they consume power, lots of it. Starships use them because they have antimatter reactors and it allows them to not have to carry huge quantities of stores. Also they don't just create matter but rearrange it. Third, that's not how ships are built in Trek.

You're still missing the point, it's a scale up of 175,000 times. What your suggesting is going from building a toy boat for your bathtub and thinking knowing how to do that will let you build the U.S.S Iowa.

[Graham Kennedy]

Effort is not good!

On the contrary, I love effort. I could sit and watch it all day long.

[alexmann]

1st In the background story for this ship, they find a non-stripped down dyson sphere and get tech from that
2nd Again in the background story they have learnt from aliens how to stabilise omega
3rd I prefer the theory that replicators don't need matter and will just convert energy

[Tyyr]

1 and 2 are not included anywhere in your write up and 2 doesn't even make any sense and 3, actually makes it worse as the amount of energy needed to just create matter is phenomenal. If you want to simply create 1kg of matter you would need to annihilate 1.6kg of antimatter with 1.6kg of regular matter. And you want to replicate something the size of a small moon?

[Graham Kennedy]

If you took every ship that Starfleet, the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians, the Dominion, and the FUCKING BORG have ever made you probably still wouldn't accumulate the shear volume of resources you'd need to build this thing. We're talking a ship with the mass equivalent of 175,000 Galaxy class starships. You're easily six orders of magnitude larger than anything Starfleet has ever built. Even the Voth city ship was only about 11 km long.

One of my pet peeves about a lot of sci fi ships is that the writers often don't seem to appreciate just what a behemoth they have created. Ships a mile long are common in sci fi - hell that's small by many standards. But the rule of cube means that a mile long ship is over one hundred times the size of a modern aircraft carrier. Such a ship should be able to mount tens of thousands of fighters, hundreds if not thousands of weapons, have a crew in the hundreds of thousands, and so on.

A 250 km long ship is, as you say, the size of a large country. But it's worse than that... even a crowded country is mostly empty space. Hell, even a city is mostly empty space when you count in all the roads and gardens and parks and such, and factor in that half of it is only occupied for a fairly small fraction of each day. The population density of a naval ship is far, far higher than any city we have.

Take a Nimitz class carrier and scale it to 250 km long. By my rough estimates you would have a ship that weighed 43 trillion tons... had a crew of 2 thousand billion people... carried 35 billion fighters. It's just plain silly to think that such a thing could be built by the Federation.

[Tyyr]

Almost no one remembers the cube rule. Double the length of a ship keeping the proportions equivalent and the new ship has eight times the mass and volume of the original.

[alexmann]

Omega Molecules can power the replicator which will create the ship. Imagine the Dyson sphere. With the technology from there you could replicate a whole ship in one go.

[Graham Kennedy]

And if monkeys could fly out of people's arses, there would be a lot more monkeys in the world.

[alexmann]

And a lot more pain.

[Tyyr]

The only thing that we know Omega molecules do is completely fuck up subspace. So their only currently known use is to make warp drive impossible, and you want to use them to power the ship?

[Graham Kennedy]

"Not just any molecule. The most powerful substance known to exist. A single Omega molecule contains the same energy as a warp core. In theory, a small chain of them could sustain a civilisation."

[Tyyr]

I stand corrected. I still think that powering your starship with a substance that should something go south will render faster than light travel impossible for light years in every direction particularly stupid, especially given's Starfleet's warp core safety record.