So, having read through this thread now finally, I have to say that I think a lot of it is fluff, but I'm going to start out by basically calling the entire premise of this thread as being unnecessary. What I mean by that is that it comes down to one of the oldest conflicts in the Star Trek fandom outside of the TOS purists arguing about only the first two seasons of TOS and TMP being canon - whether Starfleet is actually a military or not. I'd argue it is, based simply on how the organization was actually presented, because as I maintain, actions speak louder than words, and Starfleet is always presented as acting in the defense of the Federation and its colonies, just as a military would. We also see, several times, a separate civilian organization that does the pure science work, which has their own uniform, often going around in old
Oberth class ships that sported a civilian registry. But the main thing that no argument against Starfleet being a military can ever penetrate is that we always see Starfleet fighting wars when they happen. The reason the argument even exists comes down to real-world politics, as the show is made by Hollywood liberals who don't like the military and thus don't want their heroes to be in the military, and their arguments are often based on ignorance. For example, the "muh explorers" argument is based in the ignorance of militaries, the British Royal Navy being very prominent among these, being involved in exploration, as well as many other roles. Hell, the modern military is often still involved in exploration, even when it's under civilian oversight - just look at how many astronauts were also military officers, not to mention who went out and collected them and their capsules when they came back to Earth. They also do a lot of humanitarian aid. This is also why everyone in the Star Trek universe is so incompetent at combat and tactics - because the people writing them are ignorant, and often have an aversion to learning it to improve their writing. So Starfleet already
is a military, it just needs to pull its own head out of its ass on the matter in universe, and for the writers and a good section of the fans to do the same out of universe.
Also, I don't like you punks picking on my girl, the
Galaxy class. She was a tough ship. Hell, it got to be a matter of humor in a way, especially on the whole Kirk vs. Picard thing, in that the
Enterprise-D would often just sit there and tank multiple shots before Picard would get annoyed enough to return fire, and even then he'd have Worf pull his punches and try to only disable the enemy ship instead of just bitch-slapping them. Hell, at one point she flew into a star where a Borg ship wouldn't dare to go. So don't you be bad-mouthing my girl. 🤬
As for some of the other stuff you all have been arguing about for all these pages, a lot of it just comes down to writing by ignorant people. I doubt any of them ever thought of the ships having a CIWS until the first Abrams Trek movie. After all, why would they need something like that when they have shields? Of course, even shields have not been depicted consistently. On TNG, the
Enterprise was typically shown to have multiple layers of shield bubbles around her, but on DS9, in spite of all the talk of shields, they were rarely ever actually depicted in the VFX except early on in the show, and by the time of the Dominion War it was like nothing had shields except when it was specifically a plot point, like those automated Cardassian weapons platforms.
Speaking of the Dominion War, it seems to me that there is some confusion over the matter of the "war
Galaxies." Now, I could be wrong, but from what I remember reading at the time, this was not a reference to the ships being upgraded, but was an explanation for why there were suddenly so many of the ships when they typically took a very long time to build. So what the case was supposed to be with these wartime ships was that they were actually mostly empty inside, and were only fitted out enough to support reduced crews that were much smaller in size thanks to having no civilians aboard, and just enough to run the ships. I saw the
Venture brought up and used as an example, but while I liked the idea of having the AGT-style phaser strips on top of the nacelles, for some reason they stuck them on backwards on the model which looked pretty shit to be honest.
I also don't recall any of the CGI models used for the Dominion War ever having them, though I was actually annoyed a bit with them because they always showed the saucer section's impulse engines as being in use all the time.
Anyway, another aspect is that often times you have writers who make stuff like the technical manuals, or even in-universe codecs, who are entirely separate from the people who write the story, and an entirely different staff who work on what actually ends of on screen, which is how you get stuff like phaser beams coming out of the
Enterprise's torpedo launcher. Another example I'll use is how in the first Mass Effect game, the in-game codec describes the
Normandy having a laser-based point-defense CIWS to help defend against missiles and drones, yet they are never depicted, even where it really would have made sense to have them (like the second
Normandy battling with Collector drones during the suicide mission), or even discussed in dialog as being a thing.
So really, the upshot of all of this is that there doesn't need to be a separate military fleet in Star Trek, there just needs to be better writing with what's already there in the lore. If you were planning to continue on from the end of the original canon (NEM, I guess, though I personally hate the TNG films), you have the Dominion War as a kind of wake-up call that was even more of a slap in the face to the Federation and Starfleet than the Borg were, which was already getting Starfleet to design and put out ships like the
Defiant and the
First Contact ships like the
Akira,
Sabre, and
Sovereign, if only because the Dominion War was long and protracted in comparison to the first Borg incursion.
