How many starships does Starfleet have?

[Nic Corelli]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]So... I`ve always wondered about this. Does it have several thousand starships, or I dunno, 126? I`m leaning towards the latter, because if only 70 starships had been sent to stop the Borg at Wolf 359, it`s very unlikely there was a thousand or two starships sitting somewhere... And someone DID mention that only one person in a million could be a starship captain...

Also, a number of star systems... It has 150 planets, according to First Contact, so that would be... 30 systems on average?[/colorost_uid0]

[Hotaru]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]I've always thought that starfleet had a few hundred starships, maybe 700 or so. Starfleet didn't have much warning about the borg in Best of Both Worlds, so only the closest ships could probably respond. More ships could be a long ways away, and not be able to make it back to earth in time. It's all very confusing.

As for star systems, I have no idea. We've seen alot. We know that there is planets within Federation space that aren't Federation members, would they have been counted as well? This would be alot simpler if they could simply decide on things and stick with them.

For more I would check some of the articles at www.DITL.org[/colorost_uid0]

[NAHTMMM]

[color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0="Nic Corelli"]And someone DID mention that only one person in a million could be a starship captain...[/quoteost_uid0]
I believe that that someone was Stone, way back in "Court Martial" in TOS. "Look, Jim, I know it's a stressful job being captain. Only one man in a million can do what you do every day. I've been there, I know that sometimes, stress gets to be too much, mistakes are made," etc., etc. if I'm not mistaken.

By Picard's time, if you count all the equivalents of tugboats and captain's yachts and such that they had, I'm sure the total would be well over a thousand. You have to have explorers (and in different varieties), each planet will want some defenders (except Earth's are never there somehow :suspicious: ), there will be vessels for important people when either the Enterprise isn't around or the important people aren't annoying enough to warrant a story, there are ships especially meant for fighting the Borg and prob'ly others for fighting particular other species, there will be cargo-type ships and ships specially designed to convoy them, there may even be ships designed specifically for high speed in case subspace is out of the question, and others I'm too tired to think of right now. All of these, spread out throughout the Federation, keeping eyes on dozens of different species and planets and negotiations and other stuff. That adds up to a LOT of ships.[/colorost_uid0]

[Scooter]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]If I recally correctly, Nic is right and dialog indicates that a sizeable chunk of the fleet is wiped out at Wolf 359. Starfleet considered this a priority threat and threw as much force at the Borg as it possibly could, which meant recalling as much of the fleet as could arrive at the battle in time.

Consider also all of the many occasions in which the Enterprise is the only ship in range to deal with a threat. This occurs even in Star Trek Generations, where the location is within a few light years of Earth. In STTMP, the Enterprise is the only ship that can deal with the approaching V'Ger even though it is sitting in Earth spacedock and hasn't even been run in yet. It strains credulity that a Starfleet generously supplied with vessels would have only one or two supplementing the defenses of Sector 001. These and many other instances bespeak a Starfleet of limited resources in terms of capital vessels.

According to Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek was conceived to be analogous to the British Navy of Horatio Hornblower: A small fleet of ships a handful of which are sent to the far reaches of the globe, out of contact with their superiors for long periods of time. I think that both early and later series reflect this idea.

However, we should probably draw a distinction between Starfleet battleships ("heavy cruisers"), which would include the various incarnations of the Enterprise, Voyager, and other large capital ships that represent and protect the Federation around the galaxy, and both (a) smaller Starfleet support ships and (b) the commercial fleet. Only the battleships would have been sent to Wolf 359, but there might well be a somewhat larger number of short-range ships, science ships, ambassador's consular vessels, etc., though I don't think there would be that many of these either. But there must be a very large number of commercial vessels in face registered on Federation and aligned worlds, carrying on commerce between the peoples of the Federation.[/colorost_uid0]

[taya17]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]I've always thought that they had several hundred ships or so, including science ships, battle ships, and those menial work-type ships. 700 seems to be about the right number.

But it's me, and I'm pretty much lame when it comes to trivia. Don't take my word for it.[/colorost_uid0]

[Gatac]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]This actually points to a far deeper problem - how big is the Federation?

If we go by Picard's FC statement and assume he meant a circle-like profile with 8,000 lightyears diameter, that would be a hell of a lot of space to patrol for only 700 ships. Also, the later stages of the Dominion War make it pretty clear that there's a lot of ships...It's almost directly stated that the fleet to retake DS9 is about 600 ships. If we only had 700 ships total, this would mean ordering most of the ships defending the Federation borders into a single attack action and leaving the rest of Fed space nearly completely undefended.

Since I like to think that the Federation takes up a major chunk of the Alpha Quadrant, I personally think Starfleet has something in the order of magnitude of about 5000 active ships. That would, of course, include tankers, freighters, etc. - but also quite a lot of heavy cruisers.

Now, admittedly, this is the "war readiness" state, but it can't be that much more than normal operative strength; if we assume that the fleet was hastily build up by a significant factor, this begs the question of why the fleetyards had so much spare capacity.

As for the "only ship near Earth" thing in the movies, I assume that this is the legacy of the great exploratory phase that was going on all through TOS and early TNG, where the Federation expanded rapidly. Later on, the Feds saw that they had hit borders everywhere, and decided to A) conduct extensive surveys in systems they had only scanned briefly after claiming the space around them and B) to consolidate their defense and normalize sector fleet strenghts. Thus, a lot of the exploratory ships (which we have been consistently shown - of course *they* are alone, operating in unchartered space) were recalled to establish a defensive parameter. In the same vein, ship production of medium-range, combat-capable designs was cranked up, bringing fleet strength up to high levels.

As for Wolf 359, as said, the Federation is pretty big, and warp drive isn't unlimited speed. Those 39 ships were simply everything that could reach the Borg cube in time for an intereption. I figure that this not only prompted the marked increase of fleet strength and the stationing of "defensive" fleets near important core worlds, but also lead to the continuing warp drive research that has steadily increased speed in newer designs - after all, nearly all post-Galaxy designs hit something well over Warp 9.9 as maximum speed, whereas our good old Enterprise-D could climb up to 9.6 on a good day.

And that's how *I* see it, atleast.

Gatac[/colorost_uid0]

[AKAArzosah]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]There is a difference between 'Federation' Ships and 'Star Fleet' Ships. If you count all the ships in the Federation, there has to be at least a couple thousand ships, but not many of them would be controlled by Star Fleet.
Many cargo ships would be privately owned, or owned by a company, and some of the Federation's science and exploratory vessels would just be scientists, not military.
Think of the resources needed to build all those ships. They may not technically cost anything, but you need to have something to make them out of. Can they replicate everything? I doubt it.

Also, hadn't the Federation been building more ships for years during the Dominion War, building up strength for the final attack? First Contact was before that, too.[/colorost_uid0]

[Gatac]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Actually, that's a good point, but let's see what Starfleet needs to control:

- Exploration. This encompasses ships as large as Galaxy and as small as Oberth-class. This alone could well amount to a few hundred ships, depending on how exploratory the Federation really is. While there may only be a couple of frontline exploratory ships, there have to be a lot more surveyors (Novas?) for detailed exploration of claimed territory. Sure, passing through a system and scanning a bunch for a few hours does the initial survey, but you can't tell me that's all she wrote about a specific system. Lifeforms, geological survey, possibly spatial phenomena or navigational hazards...that could take weeks, per system.

- Border Defense. Going by the official formula, a ship with a "normal cruise" of Warp 9.9 would go a bit over 3,000 times lightspeed. That's more than two *years* to cross the Federation, one-way, without resuppliying and ignoring that many (older) ships don't even reach Warp 9.9 as emergency speed; certainly, I haven't seen any ship that could sprint at Warp 9.9 for years without refueling, not to talk of the enormous material stress on the warp coils. Now, most of the border is probably protected by automated drones, but defensive fleets still need to be able to react to border incursions in a reasonable time. Even if we postulate that the Federation ignores intrusions that do not directly threaten colonies until it can send a reaction fleet to take their space back, this, at the very least, implies that each colony needs some sort of defensive measures - and probably a few starships near that can arrive within hours, seeing how Trek weaponry can utterly devastate a colony in relatively little time. (Perhaps ironically, the textbook example of a good planetary defense at Chin'toka was deployed by the Dominion and still taken down within the space of hours, at most. And the Romulan/Cardassian attack on the Founder's homeworld absolutely devastated the entire surface within hours, too - and that's a hell of a lot more firepower than you'd require to destroy a few major cities, which could probably be done in a minutes.) Now, going with a 8,000 ly Federation, 1000 "assets" (Picard said 150 members, not 150 systems, and I presume every major species has atleast a few colonies), with each getting the same slice of "space" to control, and fumbling that space back into a circle, I get a radius of about 126.5 lightyears for each "asset". Using Warp 9.9, it would take a ship over *two weeks* to cross that distance; were it based on a different colony right next to the attacked one, it would require a month to get there, not to talk of possible communications lag which is present even with Subspace communication.

Now, that ignores possibly crowding of colonies and is a very rough, worst-case scenario, but it establishes an order of magnitude that leads me to believe that defensive ships number *very* high, by the very virtue that a small reactive force can't possibly defend such a large volume at the given speeds.

I'll also grant that this could very well only be important for the outer colonies, and they probably have the strongest defenses next to coreworlds, but the Federation simply can't just leave a shell around their space and hope it isn't pierced somewhere - cloaked ships and Transwarp conduits, anyone?

- "Free" ships. While it is possible that defense ships and explorers are recalled in times of need and assembled into "free" fleets, this doesn't sound very feasible; the explorers are too far away, the defensive ships are needed elsewhere. I'll agree that this leaves a lot of wiggle room.

- Supply ships. Probably civilian, but fleet tankers are a feasible idea, particularly when one considers "gas guzzlers" such as the Defiant class. Galaxy-class vessels could probably help out due to their enormous fuel payload, but I think it would be stupid for the Federation to not have atleast a few mil-spec tankers they can send with their fleets for resupply.

An extremely fast fleet-buildup seems a bit fishy. One wonders: Where does the manufacturing capacity for THAT come from? Either you already have it because you need it to support your (big) fleet, you have it for no good reason with a small fleet, or you need to first crank up your production capacity by a large margin and then dish out starships like crazy. While I certainly agree that a lot of new ships were built for the Dominion War, they didn't come out of the blue, either. Raising manufacturing capacity by orders of magnitude in a manner of a few *years* stretches credibility. There's not a whole lot of time between FC and the Dominion War for that.

Having a big fleet isn't so difficult; it's building it up in a manner of years that poses a big pill I'm not ready to swallow.

If, on the other hand, you want to argue that fleet strength went up by a rather modest factor 2 from the first encounter with the Borg to the outbreak of open hostilities with the Dominion, that I could agree with, under the assumption that the Federation went to total emergency mode in terms of ship production. Still leaves us with a lot of starships.

In short, I believe that, with the established sheer size of the Federation, a few thousand ships under Starfleet's command *excluding* many more privately-owned or otherwise-operated ships in the Federation is definately feasible.

Gatac[/colorost_uid0]

[Scooter]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Gatac has thought this through pretty thoroughly. We never really know the size of the Federation at any given point--small during TOS, large by Voyager?--but it's true, only the ships in close proximity to Earth could have arrived in time for Wolf 359. And Federation ships are not restructed to Federation space, since the Enterprise's portfolio is to explore strange [iost_uid0]new[/iost_uid0] worlds etc.; so however many ships Starfleet would need to patrol its existing borders, it would need more than that to explore beyond the Federation.[/colorost_uid0]

[Sa'ar Chasm]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]This is one of those questions kept vague so the writers wouldn't paint themselves into a corner. After TOS ended, it was bandied about that there were only 12 Constitution-class starships, and much fan speculation has gone into assigning names and registry numbers to them.

I think the apparent size of Starfleet ballooned at the end of DS9 for two reasons: the script called for it, and advances in CGI technology made it possible to show more than two ships travelling in tandem. As to how many ships Starfleet really has, I have no idea. There are at least three Fleets mentioned by name (3rd, 7th and 9th, the latter getting wiped out in the opening arc of the sixth season). A Fleet seems to consist of about 2-300 ships. Whether there are really nine (or more) Fleets in service depends on whether Starfleet started numbering their Fleets at 1 for this war, or continued the numbering scheme from a previous war (this has at least once precedent in Earth history that I can think of, and probably dozens more that I'm unaware of).

As to what ships count towards the total...the US Navy counts ever landing craft, supply ship and tugboat towards its combat strength, so the current fleet of 400 or so ships is about 75% unimpressive scow.

I've just had another thought...the other reason Starfleet was able to increase its numbers so fast was that it didn't bother installing armour or shields on anything except the Defiant. This can be seen in any battle scene: the Defiant takes dozens of hits, consoles explode and spray sparks, but the pristine white hull is undamaged. The Miranda-class scow escorting the Defiant takes a glancing blow and is instantly converted into plasma.

I dunno if this any of this clarifies the issue or confuses it, but it's my .02 credits worth. There are websites out there that speculate as to the size of the Federation (but the names escape me) and also attempt to reconstruct the design lineages of the ships we all know and love. The latter is called the Starfleet Museum, or something. There's a link of Ex Astris Scientia This is an excellent fansite. It puts a lot of rational thought and effort into speculations, and manages to spell all the words correctly as well.[/colorost_uid0]

[Gatac]

[color=#000000:post_uid0]Hm. Yeah, there's a lot of sites that speculate on this. As you can see, I'm working from the assumption that when Picard said "8000 ly", he meant "a rather unified cylinder-esque region of space with a diameter of 8000 ly". Technically, this does not really follow; I've seen all kinds of interpretations ranging from "space with a volume equivalent to a cylinder with a diameter of 8000 ly" to "the largest distance between two colonies is 8000 ly". The first one can justify a lot of crazy shapes, the second one follows the theory that the Federation isn't really unified space, but more "pockets" of systems with vast expanses of lightly-colonised space between them.

And if any of you folks believe that I am trying to argue an über-Federation, check this site:

Link

Because I'm fairly sure that you'll consider me moderate when you've seen the 16 kilometers of Sovereign (now that's a huge engine of butt-kicking!) on this site.

Gatac[/color:post_uid0]

[Sa'ar Chasm]

[color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0]Because I'm fairly sure that you'll consider me moderate when you've seen the 16 kilometers of Sovereign (now that's a huge engine of butt-kicking!) on this site.[/quoteost_uid0]

Great google moogly...

I'm surprised he hasn't got any assault carriers or dreadnaughts on that site. If he played D&D, I'd call him a Munchkin.[/colorost_uid0]

[Opium]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]I think Sa'ar's explanation sounds pretty good, in my totally random opinion, although I am a rabid DS9 watcher, and they indeed had a few hundered, if not over a thousand, Starfleet ships.

But my question is...how many in the whole Federation? From "tugboats" to galaxy-class butt-kickers? Like 50,000? 10, 000? 100,000?[/colorost_uid0]

[Nic Corelli]

[quoteost_uid0="Sa'ar Chasm"][color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0]Because I'm fairly sure that you'll consider me moderate when you've seen the 16 kilometers of Sovereign (now that's a huge engine of butt-kicking!) on this site.[/quoteost_uid0]

Great google moogly...[/colorost_uid0][/quoteost_uid0]
[color=#000000ost_uid0]GEEZZZ! This is a Monster!

Come on, Sovereign can`t be that big. It just [iost_uid0]can`t[/iost_uid0]! This thing can win a Dominion War all by itself![/colorost_uid0]

[Celeste]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]This is the specs from a Paramount backed Role Play game for the Soverign class if you're interested. They're very detailed and may be of some use. [/colorost_uid0]

[Scooter]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Wasn;t there a TAS where the Enterprise [iost_uid0]replicated[/iost_uid0] a gigantic Dreadnaught class starship?[/colorost_uid0]

[Hotaru]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Scooter, there may have been an episode like that, I don't know, but most people don't really accept TAS as cannon. With all the shipyards it would seem like replicating a ship just isn't possible, otherwise why would you need them?[/colorost_uid0]

[Opium]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Um...not to sound silly but... what's a TAS?[/colorost_uid0]

[taya17]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]TAS == The Animated Series, which was a bunch of TOS cartoons they made sometime WayBack and which some people don't quite consider canon, which beats me as to why.

Also-- I'm not too sure about the 16km length of the Sovereign class starship. It's 24 decks high, so that would make it about three-quarters of a kilometer high (taking the 1 deck == 3m estimation, which works for modern buildings, except in Singapore where they're closer to about 2.5 for the newer flats).

Looking at the CGI pictures of the E doesn't convince me that it's 22 times as long as it is high. I might give 12-14 km as its length, but 16 is stretching it a bit (pardon the pun).[/colorost_uid0]

[Gatac]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Well, I do admit, he has something of a point; the bridge design really does call for a bigger ship, and the Nemesis "bottomless chasm" thing is pretty much a deathblow to plausibility like Deck 79 in Final Frontier.

But 16 kilometers? Come off it, man! I statted up a 31st century Trek ubership once, and it's not *half* as long.

Gatac[/colorost_uid0]