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Can I say "the french" again?

Teaos wrote:Can I say "the french" again?

Too much is never enough, my friend.

What really annoys me is watching SF (and Klingons of course) using ships that were designed hundreds of years earlier and watching SF having incalculable classes of ships...

The age of Klingon designs isn't a problem - it's simply evidence that technology has only been advancing slowly (or not at all) over the previous centuries, which is strongly supported by Geordi's comments in "Relics".

I agree with the point about the number of Starfleet ship classes though.

And we we ever see is the out side of the design. There is no real reason to change that so long as it can still support new technology.

All other things being equal, I'd agree - but the problem isn't just the scarcity of alien designs, it's that scarcity compared with the stupidly huge number of different Fed classes.

Indeed. If every race only had, say, five different ships then at least that'd be something. But we have every other race with five types of ships at amost, and the Federation with several dozen.

Well technically the Federation is 150 species... so thats less ships per species than the others.

Teaos wrote:Well technically the Federation is 150 species... so thats less ships per species than the others.

I know they said 150 members, but did it ever specify 150 different species?

No they didnt but it is usaully accepted that when Picard said "150 worlds" he ment homeworlds and when Kirk said his number in the thousands he was refering to every planet they owned like Mars ect.

Teaos wrote:Well technically the Federation is 150 species... so thats less ships per species than the others.

However, in the "modern" Starfleet/Federation, we have only once seen species-specific ships other than Federation-generic designs - that being the Vulcan ships in "Reunification."

Besides, we can't be expected to believe that while the Federation contains over one hundred member races, that there wouldn't be a couple of dozen species or more in areas the size of the Klingon or Romulan empires? That supposition would skew the "ships per species" equation, unless we were to be so specific as Mikey and assign ships to particular races.

*Though, each of these races must have at least had their own unique ships in the past, if not at present, to be viable candidates for Federation membership. We can suppose that we just never got to see some of these ships because Enterprise's job was to explore the frontier, though canonically we have no evidence of such ships. As to what conditions the Klingons or Romulans have for subjugate species within their empires, we can only speculate.

But since the Klingon and Romulan empires seem to hold the races in their territory as slaves alsmot you cant expect them to have ships.

Teaos wrote:But since the Klingon and Romulan empires seem to hold the races in their territory as slaves alsmot you cant expect them to have ships.

True. But by the same token, since we have seen LOTS of Fed ships and only one species-specific one, we can't use the diversity of the UFP as an excuse to have way too many ship designs either.

If anything the Federation has a good amount of ship classes. Its just the other races have far to few.