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ships, like the Jenolan, will still run rings around ships like the Enterprise, even though it is nearly a full century out of date.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.
I assume the restored Enterprise-D was lightly loaded and only had the bare minimum needed for it to operate and didn't have most of the working facilities of a fully-manned Galaxy class ship and there would have been a lot more power reserves available that allowed it to pull off crazy maneuvers.
Many areas of the ship likely didn't have life support and inertial dampeners would have only been used in parts of the ship that were habitable like the Bridge.
In other words, the restored Enterprise-D is a stripped-down hot-rod.
sorry mis-click, here's what I meant to say:
One thing that irked me about Picard S3 was how agile the ~~Millennium Falcon~~ Enterprise D was flying into the core of the ~~Death Star~~ Borg Cube. I found the ships being big lumbering hulks much more entertaining as they had believable weight to them.
Of course we have things like The Picard Manoeuvre, but look how much time they spent explaining a second of combat. One of the bigger flaws of new trek is how agile everything is, just a lot of visual noise with random shapes and sizes zooming around like fighter jests with no consideration for inertia. If we just had huge ships flitting around the battlefield like Nightcrawler then you'd lose all sense of relatability and it would just be pure visual noise.
Wait, didn't they do that in Discovery to beat the Klingon ship or something? That was not enjoyable Trek to me.
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.
However, we also know that their tech allows their ships to be extremely agile. They have inertial dampeners that let the ship come to a halt almost immediately, and can allow the crew to survive manoeuvres that would kill normal pilots.
It just seems like an odd limitation to treat Federation ships, with all their fancy future propulsion and inertial cancellation/artificial gravity technology, as the same as modern ship combat, where they will slowly float around, shooting at each other from a distance. It might be more relatable, given, but it also ties them down, when their ships should be moving in ways that we should find illogical/impossible, but is entirely feasible, given what their technology can do.
I mean we're usually seeing top of the line ships going toe to toe, even if they were to move around like that, the other ships can probably keep up.
It wouldn't be unbelievable to see the Enterprise D run circles round a slow private shuttle, but usually a tractor beam would get the job done and use less energy without said shuttle crashing or something.
As for inertial dampeners, maybe they need some charge up time and/or predicable movement. We often see people on the bridge getting thrown around from small sub-light nudges.
It seems to be the other way around, since mass is still a thing, and at least according to Geordi in relics, a small old ship like the Jenolan can still run circles around the Enterprise, probably because of its comparatively smaller size and lighter weight. There's less power that has to be shifted around the warp engine to shove the ship around.
But I could see the tractor beam making sense there. Fuel is expensive, and there's no need to increase wear and tear, and maintenance demands on the engines if you can get away with something like a small movement and a tractor beam instead.
Predictable movement seems to be where they work best, but I find them needing a charging-up time unlikely, as a small impact would instantly paste the crew, due to the gap leaving the crew subject to those immense forces.
Just in the spirit of shows underselling ship capabilities, I could see a federation flagship having a potentially better agility to mass ratio than a basic shuttle any civilian could pilot for leisure.