#my favorite designs are like the steamrunner/saber/akira family

[tanadrin]

I have great affection for the Enterprise-D, but the Galaxy-class design is just bad. It’s obviously a prestige design meant to flex the Federation’s shipbuilding power, but the result is a ship that’s not well-suited for any of the missions given to it.

Is it meant to be a GSV-like general-purpose support platform? If so, its size makes sense, and the civilian presence; you imagine it staying generally within core regions of the Federation, moving from planet to planet to support terraforming projects, do disaster relief, help colonies get off the ground, and help with big space-based construction projects. But then its weaponry and frontier science capabilities are largely wasted.

Is it an exploration vessel? Okay, then you’re crazy to put vulnerable civilians on it. It will regularly have to go into dangerous conditions and deal with novel threats. Its weaponry makes a bit more sense, but it’s still weirdly heavily armed. It is also insanely large, unless you’re going to devote most of its space to making it self-sufficient, like a kind of mobile starbase that can go out into unexplored space for years at a time, which it clearly isn’t. And it’s clearly not a small planetary science platform like the Oberth or Nova-class, a role in which 95% of the Galaxy’s capabilities would be wasted.

Is it a combat vessel, as it’s used in the Dominion war? The armament makes sense then, but most of its bulk is wasted. You should at least give over some of that space to carrying smaller combat craft, like fighters. You definitely don’t need all the civilian spaces, and in fact you’d be utterly insane to carry civilians into combat like that. It could form the core of a larger battlegroup, like an aircraft carrier, but again, it doesn’t really fulfill a carrier function, it’s just a big weapons platform. Smaller ships, like the Defiant-class, that are more maneuverable and punch well above their weight, are a much better investment. Presumably Galaxies only see combat because the Federation needs all hands on deck.

In short, it tries to be everything and does nothing, except show off Utopia Planitia’s shipbuilding capabilities. It’s a bit like the Space Shuttle. Later generalist ships like the Sovereign class pull away from the absurdity of the Galaxy, and for good reason. Its real function is clearly diplomatic, a way for the Federation to show off when encountering new species and getting into scrapes with old ones, which I guess makes sense as a lot of the Enterprise-D’s missions were diplomatic in nature like that. But it’s an awful mixup between a big starship and a small starbase. I’d much be on something smaller, with a more specific mission profile like frontier exploration.