Size and scope of Starfleet

[Flake]

Starfleet is a vast organization. Thousands of Starships and probably countless smaller ships, starbases etc. There are probably other parts of the Federation we don't see like organizations that control colonies, trade, dilithium mining and god knows what else. There must be lots of people building the ships and building parts for the ships on Earth alone. There are millions of people in Starfleet & associated arms.

Even the Starbase in Earth orbit must have tens of thousands of people just in that.

Yet what we see of it on TV and film seems to indicate something much, much smaller than the US Army. A tight knit organization with just an academy in San Francisco with a few thousand people in it at anyone time, a small Starfleet command building and an office in Paris. All the captains have either served together or know one another.

This bugs me! Does it bug you? The new movie did little to rectify this annoyance for me.

 

[Tigger]

Well the folks behind Deep Space Nine stated that the Star Fleet at the time of the Dominion War approached 8000 ships, though they didn't break it down by type nor whether that was just "big ships" like the Galaxy / Nebula / Excelsior / etc. or also included smaller vessels and maybe "affiliated" ships like the one Seven of Nine's family operated.

 

[Flake]

Yup I realise that, I am saying they have never conveyed on screen an organization of that magnitude. Are we to believe that the crews of 8000 vessels passed through Starfleet Academy in San Francisco?

2,400,000 people to man those ships assuming an average crew of 300.

Then they have to build the ships, repair them, maintain them. Many millions more would be involved in that.

They all got trained in San Francisco?

Starfleet might have 50,000,000 people directly and indirectly involved with it. Sure doesn't *feel* like it. The combined population of the Federation must be hundreds of billions of people so even 50 million people would be very small especially with a war on!

Is Starfleet infact 'Special Forces' consisting of the best of the best, does this explain it? If so where are the 'regulars'. The grunts. The police forces. Infantry etc etc etc

 

[SchwEnt]

I see your point, I also have considered that Star Fleet ships must number in the thousands and personnel in the millions. Is it logistically feasible?

I chalk it up to the fact that Star Fleet can draw upon the combined resources of not one planet, but dozens and dozens of worlds...even though we only see or hear about a small segment of that.

 

[The Badger]

Not all members of Star Fleet are officers. There are enlisted personnel, like Miles O'Brien and Simon Tarses. These seem to join up, get some basic training, and then further training whilst on assignment.

So I should imagine only the officers actually attend the academy.

 

[T'Girl]

Star Fleet may have a relativity small professional officers corps. Star Fleet has other officers, people like doctors McCoy and Bashir, also other jurior officers, technicians, who never rise above the rank of lieutenant, think Picard during "Tapestry". These officers went through reserve officer training course (ROTC) while in in college or university, but do not attend "the academy". Or a officer training course (OTC) after they became enlisted personel.

The captains and first officers of the big ships seem to know each other.

8000 ships might refer to combat vessels. During the big battles of DS9, there seem to be only a few hundred real big ships like the Galaxy, Nebula, Excelsior with small, medium ships (i.e. Defiant) making up the bulk of the forces. Star Fleet's pure science, survey, freighters, passager ships, which probably have phasers too, aren't combat vessels.

 

[Strider]

Yeah dude what if San Fransisco is just the main campus? They could also be training officer at satellite campuses all over Earth and other member worlds. Plus, most of the lower decks people would be enlisted, though you wouldn't know it from watching the shows. The lowest rank in Starfleet is apparently Ensign. Totally stupid.

 

[Vance]

Well, TOS made this a little easier in establishing that most the member worlds of the Federation still maintained their own fleets. (And, Earth did as well, until Season Two at least) The UNIFIED Star Fleet may not need to be that big if a lot of the 'daily patrol' duties are handled by member worlds on their own.

Also, Strider, we do see 'non-officers' in Trek on occaision.. but they're all just called 'Crewman' or 'Chief'. We don't see a lot of the enlisted side fleshed out.

 

[Longinus]

I think there is a bit of a paradigm shift on the writing department concerning the size of Star Fleet between TNG and DS9. In TNG a fleet of forty vessels is considered a significant concentration of force, loss of which is a serious blow. That really do not sit too well with an idea of a military with 8000 ships in it's disposal.

 

[Timo]

Well, TOS made this a little easier in establishing that most the member worlds of the Federation still maintained their own fleets.

Where? How?

The captains and first officers of the big ships seem to know each other.

Do they? We have rather little evidence of even this.

* Picard knew fellow Galaxy class skipper Varley, but there's no indication anybody else in Picard's crew knew him or any of his crew. It would only make sense that the skippers of these leading Starfleet vessels would know each other by reputation at least - and that was as far as the Picard/Varley thing ever got.

* Picard also knew the skipper of the ship that had "donated" Riker to him. But again apparently only by reputation - and for the obvious reason that he had had previous dealings with DeSoto.

* Sisko knew Picard by reputation. Everybody in Starfleet would.

* Riker met his former captain Pressman once. This was by deliberate design, not by chance meeting - Pressman sought him out.

So far, then, we have zero cases of officers "unduly" knowing each other. Let's see if we can scrape together some:

* Riker met his former classmate Rice in "Arsenal of Freedom" by chance. Or then his ship was sent out exactly because he knew Rice...

* Dax and Keogh, with previous bad blood between them, met by chance in "Jem'Hadar". However, Dax apparently was know to Keogh through its civilian Curzon persona, as Keogh e.g. asked if Dax had ever considered serving on a starship and got a satisfactory "no" for answer. The skipper of a diplomatic gunboat would have every right to know the famed ambassador-at-large.

* Sisko and his good, close friend Hudson met at the DMZ by chance in "The Maquis". I can think of no excuse here.

* Sisko met Sanders in "For the Uniform" and Reynolds in "A Time to Stand", but there's no indication that they were close friends, and it would be justified to have Sisko eventually learn to know skippers who operate in his area.

It's not really a small Starfleet in TNG, then, and obviously not in VOY where only one fellow skipper is met and is said to be known only by reputation. It's not necessarily a small Starfleet in TOS, either, as none of the fellow Constitution skippers Kirk meets by chance are said to be close friends despite this being perfectly allowable for "stablemates". Sure, Kirk is on a first-name basis with them all - but he's that with basically anyone he meets "on his level". He has also gathered at least two close friends of his, Mitchell and McCoy, to serve with him, but that's not an issue left to chance.

Basically, then, we only get these chance encounters once in TNG and twice or thrice in DS9, which IMHO doesn't yet prove that Starfleet would be a one-horse town.

In TNG a fleet of forty vessels is considered a significant concentration of force, loss of which is a serious blow. That really do not sit too well with an idea of a military with 8000 ships in it's disposal.

That is easily excusable by saying that it takes years to assemble those thousands of ships into a fighting force. We see as much in DS9, where Starfleet desperately stalls before launching its attack against the Dominion.

I don't see a paradigm shift, either. The writers of TNG knew that the VFX people could never show even forty ships simultaneously on the screen, let alone a hundred. So they wrote in all sorts of excuses for showing fewer ships, while at the same time making it clear that these were just excuses. When there are two dozen ships in "Redemption" (portrayed by just four on screen!), the villains express amazement that Starfleet would try and invade with such a minuscule force. When there are forty in "Best of Both Worlds", that's again the best they could assemble in a short time. When Starfleet sends reinforcements of six to nine ships to DS9 (portrayed at best by four ships again), it's because the station is so distant, a lone beacon in the night and all that.

And when the VFX evolves, the writers still keep at it. Forty Klingon ships are shown attacking DS9 in "Way of the Warrior", yet they are said to be part of a force where "even the first wave" featured 150 ships. OTOH, the writers still overcompensate: the VFX shows the station spitting out enough fire to discomfort dozens of enemy ships, but Kira only mentions something like eight hits...

Generally speaking, Starfleet has always been a force that can in theory challenge the known universe, but in practice never manages to send more than one ship to respond to the crisis of the week. A three-digit number of ships is a good compromise for that, IMHO.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[USS KG5]

I think there is a bit of a paradigm shift on the writing department concerning the size of Star Fleet between TNG and DS9. In TNG a fleet of forty vessels is considered a significant concentration of force, loss of which is a serious blow. That really do not sit too well with an idea of a military with 8000 ships in it's disposal.

The loss of a single aircraft carrier would be considered a serious blow to the US Navy, and they currently have eleven in commission. Hell the USS Cole was considered a tragedy and she didn't sink.

40 ships out of 8000 would be 0.5% of the whole of Starfleet, not a huge proportion, but it probably was every starship within seven days of Earth at the time. It would be a shocking loss for that part of the fleet, most of the surviving Starfleet personnel near Earth would doubtless have all known at least one officer or crewman who died.

Now the OP is correct that until DS9 there was no sign whatsoever (apart from common sense) that Starfleet was massive, but nothing on-screen contradicts it.

The modern US Navy might only have a couple of frigates fighting pirates off Somalia, but overall they have several hundred vessels, you just dont see their forces concentrated very often.

 

[JuanBolio]

The 8,000 ship figure during the Dominion war was likely reached after the Federation had been on war footing for sometime, not to mention the buildup in anticipation of another Borg invasion. Starfleet's regular peacetime numbers are likely a good deal smaller.

 

[Timo]

But that doesn't really make sense. In peacetime, Starfleet is always short of ships, and there are countless tragedies due to only a single starship arriving, a tad too late, to solve a situation calling for starship assistance. If it were possible to build more ships, Starfleet would build them in peacetime, not in wartime.

Indeed, we have no evidence that ships would have been built in wartime - save for the Defiant class midgets, of which we saw one definite newbuild up close (the second Defiant), and enough sister ships to suggest that these had been completed after the initial two prototypes (the first Defiant and probably also the Valiant). All other ships were of older types, had older registries - even most of those seemingly being worked upon at Utopia Planitia in VOY "Relativity", just before the war.

The Dominion had no trouble building warships, including giant battleships, with what amounted to portable factories and facilities confiscated from one of the more backward local powers. A few years into the war, Starfleet knew this perfectly well. If the Feds could do the same, they surely would have. But apparently, they were all maxed out already.

I'd thus argue the peacetime numbers are no smaller than the wartime ones - to the contrary, the Fleet at war is likely to become smaller than the Fleet at peace for the first few years of a given conflict, until something major gives and the resources for increased shipbuilding are found from somewhere. What this means in practice is unknown: do the citizens lose one warm meal per week for the effort, or are entire planets shut down? Back on Earth, we saw no inconveniencing as the result of the war, save for Leyton's brief coup attempt. Things may have been different on more distant colonies, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BK613]

well we did see a starbase number in the 700s. Assuming 10 starships assigned to operate out of each starbase would give 7000+ ships in all.

Of course not all of those 10 would be "capital" ships like Excelsior, Galaxy, or Sovereign.

 

[Mysterion]

well we did see a starbase number in the 700s. Assuming 10 starships assigned to operate out of each starbase would give 7000+ ships in all.

But are Starbases numbered consecutively? Or could, for example, Starbase 712 actually refer to the second base in Sector 71 or the like?

 

[BK613]

well we did see a starbase number in the 700s. Assuming 10 starships assigned to operate out of each starbase would give 7000+ ships in all.

But are Starbases numbered consecutively? Or could, for example, Starbase 712 actually refer to the second base in Sector 71 or the like?

/shrug I suppose. I was just showing that 8000 wasn't really all that outlandish a number.

Also, if the fleet was spread out amongst a large number of starbases, then any one ship might only bump into a small number of that vast fleet in a given year, giving the impression to a casual "outside" observer of a much smaller force.

 

[EmperorTiberius]

The galaxy is vast, stars are like sands on the beach. 8000 ships is a small number and would fit in perfectly with what we see in all the shows - never enough ships. The 40 ships in BotBW can be considered significant for two reason, either:

A. It takes a year to build them, so that's a year of effort and resources gone, when they could have used that time and resources to build more or into something else.

B. The fleet refers to the fleet that was defending the area around Earth, sector 001.

In Redemption, it is telling that they can assemble such a large force (19 ships was it?) so quickly, within 24 hours. That is very fast and points to a large number of ships in total.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Try this on for size:

"Starfleet Command" or "Federation Starfleet" are both shorthand for "Federation Joint Star Fleet Command." It may actually be a bureaucratic entity under which a number of otherwise independent organizations collaborate under the joint authority of the Federation Council.

The solution I usually work with in fanfics is a Federation bylaw that states that Federation member worlds are not allowed to operate their own Starfleets outside of their own exclusive economic zones (i.e. the 5 lightyear sector around their home world) unless they do so as a representative of ALL Federation worlds. To put that another way: it is illegal for a vessel belonging to a Federation member world to fly the flag of that particular member while traveling in interplanetary space; official vehicles must strike their own colors and fly the Federation flag in those situations.

So an Andorian warship is a "Federation Starship" anywhere but Andorian space. A tellarite warship is a "Tellarite Starship" unless it goes outside of the Tellar system. Earth Starfleet might be unique in this case, though, since the majority of their operations were always limited to space beyond the Sol sector and a larger-than-normal portion of it is under Federal jurisdiction.

In Redemption, it is telling that they can assemble such a large force (19 ships was it?) so quickly, within 24 hours. That is very fast and points to a large number of ships in total.

Assembling these ships was by no means easy; half of these ships were shorthanded, a few didn't even have captains, and some were literally pulled out of space dock with half their systems disabled.

And all this for an action on the Klingon-Romulan border after several days advanced warning of an impending Klingon civil war. Starfleet had plenty of time to mobilize its defensive forces incase the war spilled over into Federation space... and this in a region remarkably close to Romulan space as well.

As Sela put it, 20 starships isn't enough to WAGE WAR, but it's plenty enough for a solid fleet action. For confirmation, see how many ships were involved in the Obsidian Order/Tal-Shiar attack in the Omarian Nebula; the loss of that fleet amounted to the total destruction of BOTH organizations.

 

[thew40]

My assumption was that 8000 was simply the number of starships that have been developed since xx date. Not all of those vessels in the Dominion War are as freshly minted as Voyager, Defiant, or Enterprise-E.

It always seemed to me that Federation starships are long-lived and undergo many major refits during their operating time.

I guess an example would the original Enterprise. It had at least one five year mission with Pike, one five year mission with Kirk, two years of refit, then (what?) eight years of active duty, then it was destroyed. And that's just canon. That's not counting a potential first five year mission commanded by April and a supposed post-TMP five year mission that's been debated. Some of those vessels are probably pretty well seasoned in a way similair to 1701.

I don't personally believe there are more than 1,000-2,000 actual Federation starships in operation during the Dominion War.

 

[ProStar]

I would say that before 2365 that federation fleet was scattered far and wide and beyond Federation space but when the borg were first encounted Starfleet pulled back a lot of its exploration fleet back closer to Federation Space. When post W359 starfleet left minimal ships out on the frontier (some of them would be out of range months away from earth at high warp) Starfleet also increased a huge amount of fleet production. These fleets were albe to take on the Dominion. But once the Borg and Dominion threats were at a minimal level (post What You Leave Behind and Endgame) These fleets resumed exploration duties hence the small group who went to help the Enterprise in Nemesis. can you imagine if a DS9 size fleet toke the Schimitar the result would been a lot more differrent