Fair enough, but I really really can't wait for the chance to build the Federation's first dreadnought. A proper successor to the Thunderchild class.
We're never going to build another dreadnought. Dreadnoughts are bad. In order for a dreadnought to make sense, very large ships would need to be offensively deadlier than medium to medium-large ships. With the two-phasers-at-a-time limitation, they are not, can not be, and never* will be.
If our weapons were tremendously advanced and our thrusters and shields far behind, a dreadnought might make sense. Were we fighting an opponent whose ships tended toward horrifyingly-deadly glass cannons, such that we needed every scrap of durability we could muster, dreadnoughts might make sense. Presently, and for the even-
remotely-foreseeable future, they do not.
The
Thunderchild was an extraordinary moment in history, when we were outclassed in every technological way by an opponent whose own technology was still low enough that its weapons
could be soaked by sufficient tens of meters of polarized plating, and when our own weapons were still primitive enough that we could power a weapon firing in every direction at once. We're past that point; even should we find ourselves so outclassed in the future, there is no concievable quantity of hullmetal that will not be effortless transmuted to an expanding vapor cloud by weapons as comparatively powerful to us now as the Romulans were then.
We're never making a dreadnought.
We're never making a very large ship that devotes every inch of its being to making war. Even if the vast majority of the thread didn't find the very idea sad, bad, or thematically-inappropriate-for-Trek, our techbase doesn't support it, our in-setting culture doesn't approve of it, our superiors will neither ask for it nor- if presented with the plans- build it, and our foes don't call for it.
We're never building a dreadnought.
*Larger ships do eventually become deadlier than small ones again when phaser strips come out in...I forget, a few centuries? But that's just about having sufficient linear meters of exterior surface for a very long phaser strip, and that means an even bigger saucer to fill with even more multirole noncombat capabilities.
We're never, ever, ever, ever building a dreadnought.
