That thing is a beauty, my favourite Enterprise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.