Its kind of hard to compare a wooden 2-3 mast ship with a modern frigate or cruiser and say that one wouldn’t be used in a conflict today, and have that be anywhere close to similar to two warp-powered starships who are really only different in size and a little bit of technology.
Then just look at today’s military. The ‘old’ Grumman F-14 Tomcat (the fighter the character Harmon Rabb of the JAG TV-series flew) was developed in the 60ies and had its first flight in 1970. It was heavily used by the U.S. Navy and is still in use with the Iranian Air Force. In the 90ies, the U.S. Navy ordered the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet and introduced them in 2001.
So, two multi-role air combat systems that are still in use by someone’s military. Why did the U.S. Navy order a new design in spite of just upgrading the old one? It’s still usable and can still do its job, after all (there are rumors that F-14 were involved in fairly recent Iranian air strikes in Syria).
The answer is: Because tech changed. And even if the changes are slight, a little size reduction here, a bit of a stretch there and some more or less power-use right over somewhere else – the tech needs different space. Not necessarily more, not necessarily less, but different. More, less, thicker or thinner wires, better insulation, higher protection against corrosives, etc.
If it’s not just a modification that you do to a system but ‘a newly developed warpcoil/nacelle/deflector dish/phaser bank/impulse thruster…’, it is sometimes easier to start from scratch than to rearrange everything in a given hull.
It is perfectly reasonable that older designs are still in use. A constellation class could be everything from an old workhorse in some federation member’s backyard over a training vessel to even a private-owned yacht or cruise ship. But new ships would still designed from scratch from time to time. Because there are so many small changes to the technology used that it would be easier.
And because mission profiles would change. And regardless whether Starfleet needs more phaser banks and torpedo lauchners or more and more accurate sensor arrays than the ones the Constitution Class provides – sometimes it’s just easier to start from scratch. To me, its perfectly plausible.
CHOKE, GASP - NEVER!
You’re referring to STO here, I assume?
But the analogy holds. You could not expect even a FRAM2 WW2 destroyer to compare with an Aegis class Arleigh Burke in a modern fight. The FRAM2 ship would be over whelmed by missile fire and unable to defeat them. Yes, the thicker WW2 armor might hold up better against missile attack, but I doubt it. Whereas the Arleigh Burke could handle it much more easily (take that with a grain of salt). Spy-1D radar, tracking and guiding hundreds of targets, including the Verticle Launch system defensive missile she fires, CWIS, and latter chaff and ECM might defeat missiles y themselves, rendering the wave massed attacks moot. My point is that designs change because mission demand change, equipment that was the latest tech gets outdated by newer tech. The newer tech, although smaller, might have differing power requirements and not be able to work properly on an older space frame.
This makes newer classes of ships mandatory. Who knows what kind of stress and strain on those space frames, let alone what kind of corrosive effects all the radiation, spacial anomalies, temporal displacements (I could babble on, but you get the idea, I hope)
If you want to have a venerable olde CONSTITUTION class starship in commission, by all means, do so. But, " There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio , Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" LOL
1 Like
You might want to look at the Exeter-Class from STO. Imo a nice adaptation for a Constitution-Class vessel in an more modern scenario
1 Like
Cool! Have fun.
But the analogy holds. You could not expect even a FRAM2 WW2 destroyer to compare with an Aegis class Arleigh Burke in a modern fight. The FRAM2 ship would be over whelmed by missile fire and unable to defeat them. Yes, the thicker WW2 armor might hold up better against missile attack, but I doubt it. Whereas the Arleigh Burke could handle it much more easily (take that with a grain of salt). Spy-1D radar, tracking and guiding hundreds of targets, including the Verticle Launch system defensive missile she fires, CWIS, and latter chaff and ECM might defeat missiles y themselves, rendering the wave massed attacks moot. My point is that designs change because mission demand change, equipment that was the latest tech gets outdated by newer tech. The newer tech, although smaller, might have differing power requirements and not be able to work properly on an older space frame.
except your comparison is based on an entirely new type of weapons and defensive systems something that doesn’t seem to be the case in Trek. the evidance is that since TOS tech has changed little, being evolutionary instead of revolutionary.
You can make arguments for both. I think it is reasonable to assume that there have been some changes in ship layout, hull armor, power distribution and so on so that that reusing a 100 year old ship does not make sense. Then again, the Mirandas and Excelsiors are still active and pretty popular.
After the Dominion War for example, maybe Starfleet feels that refitting mothballed ships is more efficient than building new ones.
Or they feel that it would be good for morale to construct a new ship that looks like the classic Constitution class, for nostalgic reasons.
1 Like
Unless you pay to have your ship model from the game 3d-printed, there are sadly none. Its a STO only ship for the time being. Maybe Eaglemoss will do a model for it in the future since they made one for the Odyssey…
1 Like
Odessy mind you has the “new enterprise” thing going for it
The FRAM2 destroyer had radar and fast firing guns. The AEGIS has newer radar and fewer fast firing guns. I think it holds up quite well. Since TOS, Photon Torpedos underwent a major upgrade, giving them programmable energy discharge from 64.4 MT to over 200MT, Mk VI, IIRC. In addition the Quantum Torpedo was introduced. The phaser went from a battery or single mount in TOS to a array in TNG, better angle of fire and higher energy rating.
Look for WIZKIDS Star Trek Attack Wing unpainted redesigned ENTERPRISE.
I’d be careful about assuming too much about numbers given in Trek (or any sci-fi TBH) as technology tends to move at rates that are unexpected. Just for example, in measure of a man Data stated he was capable of 60 trillion operations per second (or 60 teraflops) , an impressive number in 1989. but now the fastest computer is ranked at 34 pentaflops, over 500 times as fast. 
LOL and you still agree with me…
Try this then. The Boeing 737 MAX airliner is currently grounded due to a number of recent crashes. Fundamentally, it’s the same plane as prior 737s (with the originals being first used in the late 60s), but with iterative upgrades made over time to keep it competitive in an evolving market. The 737 MAX has larger, more efficient engines than its predecessors to make it better compete with the latest version of the Airbus A320. The 737 was kept in service because most airline pilots are trained for a single aircraft only, and an entirely new plane would require the massive cost to airlines of retraining pilots, making a new plane a less attractive proposition.
But there was an issue - the larger engine meant that they needed to redesign part of the wing, because the engine was too large to fit entirely under the wing due to the 737’s low ground clearance, so the engine on the 737 MAX is fitted higher and further forwards. This in turn led to slight changes in the aircraft’s flight profile - it pitches upwards more than previous 737s, which could cause a stall, so they compensated using software that would automatically compensate for this without the pilot’s knowledge. But a fault in the software’s sensors could cause the plane to go into a dive out of the pilot’s control.
It’s still essentially the same plane as was first rolled onto runways in 1968, but necessary design changes and new technologies created a bizarre perfect storm of inconsistences that made two planes crash, because Boeing chose to upgrade an existing design rather than build something new that incorporated the technology from the outset.
It’s part of evolutionary technological change, rather than a revolution in design, but it shows that there are reasons to replace older designs rather than perpetually upgrading them.
2 Likes
Yeah, good points. I wonder though. Does the Galaxy represent the average size of a ship in the TNG era? Did the Constitution represent the average size of a ship in TOS? If the scale of the constition represented a cruiser, the galaxy would represent something closer to a battleship on a size scale. A vastly more time and resource intensive endeavor to construct operate and maintain. It would seem like with new tech you’d probably keep a similar size scale, or even miniaturize your ships to some extent like we eventually got with the defiant.