Daystrom Institute

I suspect there may also be some kind of tactical doctrine where federation ships are meant to hold their ground , give out some warnings, and take a few punches to the nose before going all out. Since they arent going to dodge a phaser anyway they might as well stand firm as a show of strength. Federation policy is very firm about starting a firefight so it's likely need to have the record be very clear that they arent aggressors.

That does make sense, considering that Federation shields are pretty tough, and the Federation itself probably doesn't want to seem the aggressor by firing first.

For the most part, a Federation ship can just tank a shot with barely a scratch (unless it's an equivalent power), and that might arguably be a better show of force than firing back.

Once CGI became more common in the mid to late 90s I think the opposite trend wound up happening. DS9 has clouds of federation ships that in theory should be sniping at each other from thousands of KM away charging into a dominion cloud. I think voyager wound up usually striking a better balance of old school staredowns with the occasional cool thing like coming out of warp right on top of someone and blasting them and tractoring another ship away. Enterprise also has quite a lot of maneuvering though the nx class is smaller than the other hero ships.

True, I think that many of the complaints are just the differences between the two, although at the same time, with CGI being as cheap as it is, it might also be nice to see them make use of that agility, rather than just having it just be something that only exists in theory.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Furthermore, if you spin the ship the inside of the spin will be moving less than the outside. Not only does the inertial dampener have a maximum capability, but it will also have a maximum gradient across the length of the ship.

bloody goo

If the inertial dampers fail and you go to full impulse, you don't get redmisted, you get converted into high energy plasma. Which is kinda the same thing but way more.

Starships are fast but they really shouldn't be that maneuverable. You do still have to worry about the inertial dampeners. If you're constantly changing directions, the inertial dampeners have to compensate for the acceleration. Keep in mind that starships can accelerate at rates that would flatten anyone into bloody goo without inertial dampeners.

On the other hand, the ship not being able to accelerate that quickly due to the limitations of its inertial dampening system, should also be factored in. There's not much point to saying that a Galaxy class starship can accelerate to Warp 9 from a standstill in a third of a millisecond, if the actual time it needs is about 10 seconds, because it would otherwise overwhelm its inertial dampeners.

Even if they're always using a warp bubble to change the ship's mass, it would not be easy to compensate for quickly accelerating to 0.1c, going down to 0, and then immediately accelerating to 0.1c to another direction.

We are given an example of a ship basically going -0.1c to Warp 9, since the specific example is "from slow reverse impulse to Warp 9 in 0.3 milliseconds". Logically, it should also be able to accelerate to only a portion of that speed, or use the engines to stop just as quickly.

undefined> Zipping around the battlefield has virtually no tactical advantage.

This is really the correct answer. If you aren't moving at warp, you might as well not be moving for all the good it will do you. If you are moving at warp you're moving in a straight line so quickly that unless the other ship is following you at warp, it doesn't really matter.