23rd Century Starfleet

[Arknight]

I like the Ranger, but I seem to recall that in the FASA adventure that had the Regula 1 station that the deckplans for the Ranger had only 3 decks... or am I imagining?

Tom

[Dan Stack]

Correct. The adventure was "The Strider Incident". The deckplans were pretty poor in my opinion - no bathrooms for example!

[Sea Tyger]

To be honest, you could be absolutely right and I'd be none the wiser. I have never seen deckplans for the Ranger.

I determined the number of decks based on the height of the ship and the crew. If the crew did not fit into the formula provided in Coda, I took the highest or lowest number of decks (depending if the FASA crew number was too large or too small respectively, especially if I actually changed the size of the ship, like with the Nelson), and made the crew as close to the original number as possible. For the Excelsior and Miranda, I chose to use the Spacedock crew complement as the official one, and approximated it as best I could.

In the Ranger's case, FASA listed the crew at 73, which is way over what a 20m high ship can do in Coda (you would need 25 decks for a scout to have that many crewmembers). Given 3-5m per deck, the Ranger would have anywhere from 4-6 decks (I round to fall within 3-5m). I chose 6, then used a x3 multiplier (I could have taken x5, but decided to use x3 for some reason that I cannot recall at the moment) to give me a crew of 18.

[Imagus]

Ok - I think you've done most of the ones I wanted now!

Although I can't stand the Wilkerson or Baker classes...

The Remora was pretty much what I came up with, although I'm still not in favour of torpedoes on an escort vessel. I like the rewrite of the Chandley history to cope with modern Trek history!

I'm particularly impressed that you were happy to resize ships to suit your own impressions of their jobs. It's more or less what I'm doing. What's your take on FASA vs Coda destroyers and frigates? I'm just re-typing based on size (i.e. Larson-class frigate and Loknar-class destroyer.

I'll run up my own versions soon and post them anyway - people can have fun spotting the differences

[Sea Tyger]

Originally posted by Imagus
What's your take on FASA vs Coda destroyers and frigates?

Before Coda, I subscribed to the FASA belief that the frigate was the primary pure combat ship in the Starfleet arsenal (some cruisers are more powerful, but their role is different); a frigate is the largest ship in the fleet in the 2270s and early 80s.

Destoyers, then, become the hunter-killers, operating in small wings of ships to harass enemy warships, and escorts stick close to the big ships as a defensive screen.

Personally, I think Coda got the escort and frigate job descriptions backwards, but if you look solely at the Defiant (which should not, IMO, be an example of the type; instead, I believe it's a unique ship that has been nominally classified as an escort because Starfleet isn't supposed to have "warships"), you can understand why they wrote it up that way.

I reverse the job statements of the two types (frigates normally operate independently, and escorts do not), and I pretty much ignore destroyer escorts. If anything, I'd expect that a DE would better fall under "destroyer," rather than escort, but that's just me.

[PGoodman13]

Curiosity compels me to ask this, then, Sea Tyger: From your notions of what ship is supposed to do what, did I get the idea right with my King's Protector class from a few days ago? I'm an AF vet, not a Navy one, so while I know my Trek pretty well, I'm not always certain I'm doing ship roles properly.

[Sea Tyger]

Originally posted by PGoodman13
Curiosity compels me to ask this, then, Sea Tyger: From your notions of what ship is supposed to do what, did I get the idea right with my King's Protector class from a few days ago? I'm an AF vet, not a Navy one, so while I know my Trek pretty well, I'm not always certain I'm doing ship roles properly.

Spot on! From its description, the KP fits well into the role of a Coda Trek escort. Personally, I'd also list it as a heavy escort, with a slightly expanded role (independent operations).

[PGoodman13]

Originally posted by Sea Tyger
Spot on!

Oh, good, I'm getting better at this sort of thing, then.

From its description, the KP fits well into the role of a Coda Trek escort. Personally, I'd also list it as a heavy escort, with a slightly expanded role (independent operations).

Well, they're capable of independent ops, but not for very long periods of time. Anything too big and their best option is to tuck tail and run, if the big mean thing doesn't gobble them up as a snack.

Besides, they're too damn small to do much on their own for any length of time. How much rec facility do you think a size 4 ship actually has, after all?

[Imagus]

I did some more looking into these types last night, especially with regards to Trek.

I think what caused my confusion is that DecTrek appears to have reintroduced destroyers, which were not present in LugTrek. However, on second checking, they were there all along, but Starfleet didn't use them - they were listed with warships under "Threat designs". In the NG, all the types are listed together, so my conclusion is that SF still does not use them. I'm creating the FASA destroyers as frigates or escorts as seems appropriate - the FASA frigates are just big frigates!

Historically, frigates seem to have been the predecessors to cruisers, and apart from the USN, went out of service in the 19th century. Destroyers were originally fast ships designed to hunt and kill torpedo boats (torpedo boat destroyers), and escorts were used for interference-type defence work on behalf of big slow-moving ships (freighters, convoys and specialist vessels, like aircraft carriers).

Can anyone give me any more info on this?

[Sea Tyger]

The term "frigate" dates back to the 13th Century to describe a type of galley that was sailing in the Mediterranean. Later, a frigate was "any medium-sized, fast sailing ship of moderate armament."

The US Navy's first frigates were launched between 1797 and 1800, including, of course, the Constitution. The US Navy built frigates well into the 1850s, including the Merrimack, which was raised by the Confederates and converted to the ironclad CSS Virginia. Some of the US Navy's frigates served into the 1880s.

I'm not sure exactly when the US Navy stopped classifying ships as frigates, but they did. It wasn't until the 1975 that Navy's destroyer escorts were reclassified as "frigates."

If you look through http://www.hazegray.org/worldnav/ you will find that most of the world's navies have frigates of various kinds, from ASW to air defense to patrol frigates. In many navies, the frigate is the largest class of vessel in their inventories.

Either way, yes, modern frigates are primarily escorts for larger capital ships, although Webster's Dictionary lists a frigate as "intermediate" between cruiser and destroyer. Since US Navy frigates are reclassified destroyer escorts, the Webster's listing probably doesn't apply to them, but instead to frigates in general. That may be why the FASA frigate was a little larger than the destroyer.

I'll stick with Starfleet destroyers, if only because I like them. I can easily say that they were a product of that era, and that the more "evolved" Federation of the 24th Century no longer used them.

[Eric R.]

This is from James Dunnigan's & Albert Nofi's Victory at Sea: World War II in the Pacific:

"to Some extent decedants of the frigates of sailing navies, cruisers were nevertheless very much a tweenth century type of warship. Much smaller than battleships but too two or more times larger than destroyers, cruisers did not have as sharply defined roles as either of those two types."


And I simply ask if its called an escort then what does it escort if it "routinely operates independantly"? Thats way I have always seen the two as one and not two separate classes much in the same way I see explorers as battleships/Dreadnaughts

[Sea Tyger]

Honestly, we shouldn't be using modern navy definitions to explain Starfleet ships. Just as ship classifications have evolved in the last 700 years, so has it evolved in the Star Trek universe.

Cruisers, once capital ship escorts and strike ships, have now become multi-purpose exploration vessels designed to operate independently for sometimes years at a time.

The "explorer" classification didn't even exist until the beginning of the 24th Century, with the advent of the Ambassador class (I say this since the Constitution has been reclassified a Heavy Cruiser and that the Excelsior is an Exploratory Cruiser).

Frigates began as a type of 13th Century vessel that sailed the Mediterranean sea, then became a fast, moderately-gunned sailing warship, then a modern escort. Who's to say that the frigate doesn't take the place of the battleship and aircraft carrier of today as the Federation's primary warship, side-by-side with the bigger explorers and cruisers? Also, note that "destroyer escort" in the NG is an escort type, and not a frigate.

Destroyers remain the 23rd Century's primary "bulldog"-like strike ship and large escort, but are phased out entirely after the Cold War with the Klingons ended in the 2390s (my explanation, not official), with "escorts" taking on that role for the Federation, it seems.

We don't need to, and shouldn't, pigeon-hole Star Trek ships into modern definitions.

[Imagus]

Originally posted by Eric R.
And I simply ask if its called an escort then what does it escort if it "routinely operates independantly"?

That's what's odd! As far as I can make out, escorts only operate independently in peacetime - because they make convenient coastal patrols. In wartime, they are purely defensive vessels.

[Azrael028]

What about the Constellation? That's a early 24th century ship.

[Sea Tyger]

Originally posted by Azrael028
What about the Constellation? That's a early 24th century ship.

You'll find the Constellation in the "Starfleet, 2300-2339" thread.

http://forum.trek-rpg.net/forum/show...&threadid=4773