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ost_uid0]Actually, that's a good point, but let's see what Starfleet needs to control:
- Exploration. This encompasses ships as large as Galaxy and as small as Oberth-class. This alone could well amount to a few hundred ships, depending on how exploratory the Federation really is. While there may only be a couple of frontline exploratory ships, there have to be a lot more surveyors (Novas?) for detailed exploration of claimed territory. Sure, passing through a system and scanning a bunch for a few hours does the initial survey, but you can't tell me that's all she wrote about a specific system. Lifeforms, geological survey, possibly spatial phenomena or navigational hazards...that could take weeks, per system.
- Border Defense. Going by the official formula, a ship with a "normal cruise" of Warp 9.9 would go a bit over 3,000 times lightspeed. That's more than two *years* to cross the Federation, one-way, without resuppliying and ignoring that many (older) ships don't even reach Warp 9.9 as emergency speed; certainly, I haven't seen any ship that could sprint at Warp 9.9 for years without refueling, not to talk of the enormous material stress on the warp coils. Now, most of the border is probably protected by automated drones, but defensive fleets still need to be able to react to border incursions in a reasonable time. Even if we postulate that the Federation ignores intrusions that do not directly threaten colonies until it can send a reaction fleet to take their space back, this, at the very least, implies that each colony needs some sort of defensive measures - and probably a few starships near that can arrive within hours, seeing how Trek weaponry can utterly devastate a colony in relatively little time. (Perhaps ironically, the textbook example of a good planetary defense at Chin'toka was deployed by the Dominion and still taken down within the space of hours, at most. And the Romulan/Cardassian attack on the Founder's homeworld absolutely devastated the entire surface within hours, too - and that's a hell of a lot more firepower than you'd require to destroy a few major cities, which could probably be done in a minutes.) Now, going with a 8,000 ly Federation, 1000 "assets" (Picard said 150 members, not 150 systems, and I presume every major species has atleast a few colonies), with each getting the same slice of "space" to control, and fumbling that space back into a circle, I get a radius of about 126.5 lightyears for each "asset". Using Warp 9.9, it would take a ship over *two weeks* to cross that distance; were it based on a different colony right next to the attacked one, it would require a month to get there, not to talk of possible communications lag which is present even with Subspace communication.
Now, that ignores possibly crowding of colonies and is a very rough, worst-case scenario, but it establishes an order of magnitude that leads me to believe that defensive ships number *very* high, by the very virtue that a small reactive force can't possibly defend such a large volume at the given speeds.
I'll also grant that this could very well only be important for the outer colonies, and they probably have the strongest defenses next to coreworlds, but the Federation simply can't just leave a shell around their space and hope it isn't pierced somewhere - cloaked ships and Transwarp conduits, anyone?
- "Free" ships. While it is possible that defense ships and explorers are recalled in times of need and assembled into "free" fleets, this doesn't sound very feasible; the explorers are too far away, the defensive ships are needed elsewhere. I'll agree that this leaves a lot of wiggle room.
- Supply ships. Probably civilian, but fleet tankers are a feasible idea, particularly when one considers "gas guzzlers" such as the Defiant class. Galaxy-class vessels could probably help out due to their enormous fuel payload, but I think it would be stupid for the Federation to not have atleast a few mil-spec tankers they can send with their fleets for resupply.
An extremely fast fleet-buildup seems a bit fishy. One wonders: Where does the manufacturing capacity for THAT come from? Either you already have it because you need it to support your (big) fleet, you have it for no good reason with a small fleet, or you need to first crank up your production capacity by a large margin and then dish out starships like crazy. While I certainly agree that a lot of new ships were built for the Dominion War, they didn't come out of the blue, either. Raising manufacturing capacity by orders of magnitude in a manner of a few *years* stretches credibility. There's not a whole lot of time between FC and the Dominion War for that.
Having a big fleet isn't so difficult; it's building it up in a manner of years that poses a big pill I'm not ready to swallow.
If, on the other hand, you want to argue that fleet strength went up by a rather modest factor 2 from the first encounter with the Borg to the outbreak of open hostilities with the Dominion, that I could agree with, under the assumption that the Federation went to total emergency mode in terms of ship production. Still leaves us with a lot of starships.
In short, I believe that, with the established sheer size of the Federation, a few thousand ships under Starfleet's command *excluding* many more privately-owned or otherwise-operated ships in the Federation is definately feasible.
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