I agree with Gatac that this fleet more evolved than was constructed - otherwise why keep on Miranda and Excelsior class ships, which are out-dated? And why keep on as training vessels constitution class ships? (I got this I think from the non-game Starship Creator, lol. Also, looking at SFC3 (which is an excellent game - the Starfleet Command series is one of the best sets of games I've played in a looong time...
) the Sovereign is longer than the Galaxy, but not as fat. a 16km Sovereign is insane - I mean it's not
so much larger than the Galaxy....from what ya can see. Also, take into account that new ship types take a long time to be tweaked and perfected. Oh, and in theory, you can replicate anything, with a) enough resources, and b) a big enough replicating space. Oh, and c) enough time - if you think that it takes time to replicate Jake's camera equipment in WYCBT, then building a DN from scratch would take quite a lot of time and energy. All in all, it is probably cheaper in time and energy just to build one manually than create on from hydrogen atoms bit by bit....
On the subject of large ships (drawn from SFC, the earlier 3 having been set in TOS/TMP time....), the federation battleship (BB, being larger than DN....) had two deflector dish-hulls, about six warp nacelles, and I think i read somewhere that either it or its romulan counterpart needed it's nacelles replacing about every six months...if we assume that would be about 16km long, and about 10km wide, we have a ship of enourmous size, which, (from personal experience, here..
) is too slow to do anything in a fight with anything other than another BB....so they would be useless except for Starbase or homeworld assaults (by homeworld, i mean as in starbase is to space station as homeworld is to planet kinda thing...) you can picture a fleet of 'em closing in on a planet, and the captains chair, "The Battleship is cleared to fire" (-recognise the quote?)
But a ship that size is overall vastly inefficient, ridiculously slow, and overall almost entirely useless. So it makes sense that from that, ALL the major empires reduce the size of their starships, for a more all-rounded approach to combat (ie more maneuverability). So, in conclusion - Sovereign= tiny by comparison to BB, which was massive. :wink:
just my opinions based on what i've picked up, tho.... :wink: