Quote Originally Posted by EggKookoo View Post
At least semi-canonically, Vulcans have had warp drive for at least three millennia. Other races have had it for centuries. Yet it looks like Starfleet's ship designs all follow Earthling build patterns. Namely paired nacelles and an overall hull configuration. Sure, that could be due to the influence of humans over Starfleet, but what if it was more than that? What if that design was inherently better?
I realize it's a bit late to reply to this, but my take on this is that the United Federation of Planets is more of a confederacy than a federation (think Space United Nations, Space NATO, or Space European Union, not Space United States of America - or if you do think of it as Space USA then it's Space USA if Space USA operated under the Articles of Confederation rather than the Constitution) and that what we see in the shows is mostly centered around things happening in or near the (primary?) human member state's space and being dealt with by the (primary?) human member state's contribution to the common defense. From what little we see of the Federation's internal workings, member states seem to maintain a high degree of autonomy and quite possibly sovereignty after joining the Federation, the Starfleet that we see is very much a human-dominated organization (most of the personnel appear to be human, the primary training facilities and shipyards are seemingly in the human home system, the majority of the ships with known names are named after various things from human history, the ships use the USS prefix rather than something less blatantly modeled on the present-day US Navy ship prefix despite something like 'Federation Star Ship' making more sense as a Federation ship prefix than 'United Star Ship' (the 'United Space Ship' interpretation of USS might be slightly better, if 'United Space' or 'the United Space' or whatever is another name for the United Federation of Planets)), and the Federation starships we see pretty much all follow what Star Trek: Enterprise establishes as the human starship style rather than a fusion of the 'best' features of the Vulcan, Andorian, Tellarite, Human, etc. starship styles, so the Starfleet of the shows being the human member state's space navy operating under the aegis of the United Federation of Planets isn't much of a stretch to me.

Additionally, I personally find the idea that the human/Federation ship style is just 'better' somehow to be problematic; humanity (and thus the Federation) has had contact with at least the Romulans and the Klingons for a couple of centuries by the time of TNG/DS9/VOY and yet both of those empires maintain their own distinctive design aesthetics, so despite a long period of time where they're able to observe and presumably learn from a neighbor operating 'just better' starships they don't adapt any of the features of those 'just better' starships into their own designs? Are the Klingons and Romulans 'just stupid?' On top of that, there is the issue that when you look at the human/Federation ship style as a whole there are really only some general or broad similarities between the various ship types even within a single era - there's ships with one, three, or four nacelles instead of the common two; there's classes where the saucer and engineering sections are connected by a 'neck' and classes where the saucer and engineering sections are directly connected to one another and even classes that lack a separate engineering section; there's ships with dorsal nacelles and other ships with ventral nacelles and even a few ships with both dorsal and ventral nacelles; there's a lot of variation in how exactly the nacelles are connected to the ship (including some where the nacelles are built into the hull rather than being mounted away from the hull on pylons) and in the overall geometry of the ship; and so on. If there were clear advantages to a particular hull form for a particular set of design requirements, then you'd expect to see similar characteristics in ships designed for similar purposes - and even if the humans were the first to discover them you'd expect that after centuries of contact the Federation's neighbors would have started to adapt those advantageous features into their own designs where appropriate, especially when at least two of the Federation's neighbors supposedly have highly effective intelligence agencies.

There's also the issue that every now and then Star Trek features a starfaring species, such as the Borg, which is notionally more technologically advanced than the Federation, and yet when ships belonging to these groups are seen the ships tend not to have any particularly strong similarity to human/Federation ships.

Treating the Federation as a confederacy and the shows as dealing with things involving the human member state's space navy and happening in or around the human member state also helps address the issue that the stated size of the Federation (an interstellar union spanning 8,000 lightyears as of TNG) is too large for Federation ships to traverse in a reasonable time given the warp factor speed equivalency formulas in the writers' guides and supported by many (though by no means all) of the instances in the shows where a 'real' speed can be established for a given warp factor. Voyager expects to take 75 years to traverse 75,000 lightyears and DS9 tells us that the Federation's "fastest ships" would take 67 years to traverse the ~70,000 lightyears separating the endpoints of the Bajoran wormhole, implying a maximum (long-term sustainable?) speed of ~1,000c (Warp 10 under the TOS writers' guide scale of v = w3c, or Warp ~8 under the TNG writers' guide scale of v = w10/3c; it may bear mentioning that the TNG-scale equation supposedly only holds for w < 9) and often not supporting significantly higher speeds for higher warp factors when such can be established from an episode (e.g. several Voyager episodes supporting ~1500c to ~3000c for Warp 9.975). Having said that, there's more than a few examples of times when the show writers very clearly were not bothered about presenting travel times and distances at a given warp factor which are even vaguely consistent with either the writers' guide formulas or other time-distance combinations which can be extracted from the shows - and that's without getting into the messes that are Cochrane factors (a multiplier for the warp scale speed equivalency formula such that vtrue = fcochrane * vnominal(w), with vnominal(w) being given by either the TOS or the TNG writers' guide equation depending on era; supposedly the average Cochrane factor in Federation space is ~1200, and yet very few Star Trek episodes support warp speeds normally being equivalent to hundreds of thousands or low millions of times the speed of light) and TNG-scale Warp 10+ (arguably Warp 9+, since supposedly the speed equivalency is well-behaved enough to approximate as v=w10/3c below w=9 but then rapidly approaches infinity as w approaches 10; regardless, there are episodes in shows nominally using the TNG warp scale that don't involve (attempted) time travel and yet involve attempts to exceed Warp 10, despite this necessarily implying an attempt to exceed infinite velocity and thus involving either negative travel time (if the greater-than-infinite velocity has no imaginary component) or an imaginary component to speed (with no attempt made to explore what it would mean to have a nonzero imaginary speed component or to explain why such would be valuable or desirable, even if only in Star Trek's typical technobabble)).