There's a common and very sensible assumption that since most Star Trek technology involves field manipulation (many different subspace fields, structural integrity fields) and ship design changes and follows certain trends presumably to achieve the effects that design wants according to the current understanding of physics and engineering available, that you are unlikely to see the full performance of new technology integrated into older designs. After all, why radically change said designs if the older ones were infinitely upgradable? You'd just use the exact same shapes and proportions and never build new ships.
It's also probable that things like form factors for new hardware etc don't play nice with older designs, just like in the real world. Your phasers, shield generators etc aren't going to fit in the same sockets as the old ones if the technology isn't the same. Your computer core may be too thick, or too thin, or require different cooling that's just a hassle. New systems literally may not fit properly and be non-viable. Refits would then be a pragmatic balance between how complicated that refit is going to be and how much performance you want to unlock. This is a serious real-world problem and tends to get more complicated the higher the performance of your hardware. Show me something more high-performance than an antimatter-powered starship with energy weapons, humming with energy fields.
I think you probably can get most of the performance of new hardware if you're really determined or have no choice, but again, that'll be very tricky, time-consuming and depends on situation. If you're going to have to remove the entire hull plating, 40% of the ribbing, 50% of the internal sections etc... You wouldn't bother, you'd just build a new ship. Some designs probably play nicer with upgrades, some are probably dead ends when technology changes and evolves differently than expected. We probably aren't privy to all this going on.
Yes, I know it's an assumption, but it's a perfectly logical one consistent with the show and the real world. Older designs tend not to be as capable as newer designs, or they wouldn't change.
I mean, materials fatigue probably means that you are having to do fairly major refits several times over that kind of service life
anyway; and or scrapping outright an older vessel and new-building a Block K or Mark Sixty or whatever that includes the required design adjustments from the word go.
Remember Geordi talking about the Jenolin in Relics? It was a fundamentally sound design and could easily have still been in service in the TNG era doing low stress transport work. You know, exactly what it was doing before.
The Excelsiors are like that too, except for as a high end battleship/explorer that were honestly far more successful than the Constitutions ever were. A combination of a century of steady engineering updates Starship of Theseused them into functional modern ship. The Dominion being able to kill them doesn't tell us the Excelsiors were bad, it tells us the Dominion was really good.
Heck, the Dominion started the war like fifty years ahead of the Federation in technology. Among other things shields just flat out didn't stop their weapons or transporters, and they came it you in numbers. It didn't matter WHO you were, going into battle with them was suicide. Federation technology at the start of the war just was flat out not up for it.
And then, as the Federation does, they adapted. The shields started working again, Jem Hadar couldn't just beam onto your ship, they started being able to track them on sensors, all that good stuff. By the end they were peer powers, not least because of all those science labs we keep sticking on our ships. But they sure didn't start that way.
Also this. Like, Phased Poleron beams were a complete "HOW" that went right through shields like they weren't even there; it doesn't matter
how good your ship is if its primary defensive system is about as effective as a wet paper bag.
[X] Constitution-class.
I realize I'm tilting at a windmill here, but this thing is going to be an Explorer and it's best for the name to reflect such. There's no reason for the Federation not to use it as such, literally the only option we didn't take that would've made it superior for such was hydroponics but even that was a "there are three that would be perfect for this use case and we could only pick two" situation.
Forget the context of the Temporal Agent's notes. This is our fastest, longest legged ship and then we gave it the ability to manufacture the exact sort of parts that break under long-duration cruise conditions before also tacking on the capability to provide long-term medical care to crew members, conduct stellar cartography, and just be a generally comfortable ride.
This is a long-range, high-endurance, cruiser and it will conduct Five Year Missions post-war. It would be an absurd misallocation of hulls to not have it conduct them.
On the contrary, it would be an absurd misallocation of hulls to send our rapid response beatstick battlecruiser haring off years away from our borders where it is of
no use whatsoever for the job we actually designed it to do, which is keeping people from breaking our stuff. This design was not at all an Explorer conceptually and any ability it has to fill the role is strictly incidental to its actual purpose.
As I stated a few pages ago, an Explorer is absolutely a warship, but this is not its primary focus; indeed the Explorer design space is very much that of a do-everything generalist. It must be powerful in battle, yes, because it will generally be fighting alone and with no possibility of reinforcement or rescue in a timeframe that matters, but it
also must possess top-notch scientific and engineering capability because it has to be able to solve any sort of problem it runs in to out of its own resources. In short: An Explorer is by neccessity a massively overbuilt generalist, and generally a design space where cost is not especially considered a serious matter.
And this ship, whatever we call it, was
never going to be that, because the design space it was built to was "Warship for killing Klingon Battlecruisers" and even choices like fundamental hull configuration were made in support of that goal at the expense of other capabilities.
Re: new designs: I expect that we're either going to get a Selatchii replacement/successor or the Type Four Nacelle during the war, depending on how Sayle feels the current design performs in that context. Either way, I don't support doing any large or non urgent need vessels before we have a Type Four Nacelle so we aren't being limited by the old type threes.
