I saw this rant/complaint over on Reddit, and it got me thinking a bit.
We know that at least on paper, Federation starships are insanely fast and agile. Data has stated that the Galaxy-class Enterprise was able to achieve Warp 9 from , and some ships, like the Nebula class, don’t seem to use impulse engines at all, favouring the warp engine for sublight speed usage at all.
Despite that, we also know that impulse engines aren’t simple thrusters, and are able to move the ship in a way not directly in line with the output thrust (Relics), and from the same episode, we also know that smaller ships, like the Jenolan, will still run rings around ships like the Enterprise, even though it is nearly a full century out of date.
However, from what the show itself portrays, the ships tend to be fairly slow and sluggish when in combat, sedately drifting along the battlefield, while weapons fire goes every which way. The most recent and active thing we’ve seen a big starship do is maybe the fighter run in Picard.
In my opinion, by trying to keep to the slow and seemingly logical expectations for starships to be slow, hulking metal structures that slowly fly around shooting each other, Star Trek ends up underselling what Federation starships are able to do. They would be more realistically portrayed flitting about the battlefield like dragonflies, instead of being like “real boats” today, that have more of a sense of mass.
It seems wildly unintuitive, but it would also help show Federation propulsion technology being more advanced than what they are now. Starships can instantly stop and reverse course, or move in ways that would be impossible with modern technology, and the show not showing ships capable of doing just that might be to its detriment.
What is “weight” relative to a civilisation with advanced gravity manipulation? Starships have been proven to go from FTL to a full stop in less then a second or two, with that level of cancelling out inertia why can’t a Galaxy-class dance around across six degrees of freedom?
On top of that, the most restrictive factor in manoeuvring is how much G-force a pilot or crew can take. In Star Trek, that G-force is always zero.
The Doylist answer is simply that when Trek started an audience couldn’t have been expected to understand 6DOF movement and so the ships handle like aircraft and are governed by the same restrictions. We’re conditioned to think of larger starships as lumbering beasts akin to the old battleships of yore but there’s no in-universe reason for it.
Well yeah I was getting at the more Doylist balance of having the things on screen be relatable. Certain concepts would work better in books but be confusing on TV.
In universe, if a ship is using impulse engines to turn 360 on the spot, even at the speed of light with no acceleration, a bigger ship still has more distance to physically turn. In reality the difference would be imperceivable to the human eye, but with computer aided aiming etc. it would still represent a significant difference in manoeuvrability. Data being able to fly a galaxy class like that is at least believable, but humans would not be able to keep up. Bigger ships also presumably require more energy to turn, so they may do it slower to conserve power.
I would rather have it presented in an intuitive way than just flashes on screen. I’ve always considered the space battles in Star Trek to be representations of ships much farther apart. Some of the distances they mention, there’d be no way you’d even see the other ship with the naked eye.
