The classic Battletech moment of "this thing is 150 years old and probably should have been taken out back and put down the day it was built but we found 100 of them in a shed so we're sending them in for refit"
150? More like 300. Many Mechs from the Star League era survived the Succession Wars. Mechs from Technical Readout 2750 have "downgraded" variants that use the introductory rules and omit all of their LosTech components like Gauss rifles, double heat sinks, and ferro-fibrous armor. Most of these Mechs that survived into the mid-31st Century were restored to their original configurations when LosTech was reintroduced. Other designs received upgardes over time. Some Mechs have undergone so many refits and repairs, they present a ship of Theseus problem.
The B-52 really is just the Miranda class of the USAF. I’ve heard it described as, “What ever they take out what’s old. They can install three times as much new.”
The B-52 BUFF would eventually make it to the 2550's where it participated during the Fall of Reach. Possibly reaching the 40,999's during the Fall of Cadia fighting alongside Marauder Bombers.
Refits and Rebuilds are something that should be seen more in Sci-Fi as it allows older and more plot important ships to remain relevant throughout narrative eras.
Also, without relying on copious amounts of plot armor for the old ship to justify surviving every increasing threats. It is so cringe to have the latest good guy ships be trashed by some super powerful enemy only for the old hero ship to defeat them with "pluck, determination, and genius tactics/strategy", despite being decades out of step (Or in Star Trek, last year's model).
Honestly, I think the greatest missed opportunity for refits is older ships being sold to more minor powers who modernized them rather than build new current ships due to budget. Sure, minor powers like this don't show up often, but imagine a major group like the resistance in Star Wars calling for any help they can get, and some minor outer rim power shows up with a handful of Victory Star Destroyers that's been modernized? Such a missed opportunity amongst many.
From the 1910s into WWII several aircraft carriers were made by taking a cruiser or a battlership, sawing off the gun turrets and bridge tower, scooping out most of the shell magazines and building a flight deck on top.
They weren't nearly as good as purpose built aircraft carriers, but that was the era in which the whole world was still figuring out these new fangled contraptions that fly. I really like that era of experimental figure things out as we go history.
Well a bit more than that, and very much inspired by treaty restrictions. I think only HMS Furious, Glorious and Courageous really converted from full functioning 'large light cruisers' to full fledged carriers, and that took decades. (and did not require THAT much armour to be removed); The Lexington class, Kaga and Akagi never got THAT far in their building process to be THAT heavily 'scooped out', but more that their design had to be resculpted around what was already on the stocks. Regarding efficiency, I think it is telling that an Essex class of 30.000 ton (standard) was comfortably more effective than a 36.000 ton (standard) Lexington, if a higher combat effectiveness wasn't already achieved on the 20.000 ton (standard) Yorktown's (honestly, it probably was.... although USS Saratoga was extremely unlucky always eating a torpedo).
@@Tuning3434 You should keep in Mind, when comparing the Essex class with a Lexington, that the doctrines and knowledge was basically at 0, when USS Lexington and USS Saratoga where build. As the Essex where laid down, the US Navy learned much about how to use a carrier.
@@Tuning3434When it comes to furious glorious and courageous I recall only furious being completed in it's original "large light cruiser" design (or being closest to completion anyway) but they were not fully functional whatever they were thinking when building them, which was big chunk of reason why those ships were chosen for aircraft carrier conversions. Glorious and Courageous went better as conversions because not only furious was converted first, but also they were still not finished when conversion started so changes were incorporated to construction of the ships easier.
@@MehrumesDagonYou're thinking of the other way around. Courageous and Glorious finished as "Large Light Cruisers" (Battlecruisers) and served as such during WWI, then were converted later on. Only Furious was rebuilt immediately but even then only the rear turret was removed and replaced with a flight deck, the rest of the ship was the same with its remaining turret and the regular superstructure before the more extensive rebuild removed everything and did it properly.
Let us not forget the ultimate refit/rebuild and upgrade, turning the wreck of the IJN Yamato into the great space battleship Yamato. I loved the fact that you could customize the initial build and then refit your ships in Master of Orion 1 & 2. As my tech improved I would refit the ships with better tech or simply more weapons if they were adequate for the mission.
"I started Desert Storm, I started Enduring Freedom and by God I'll start the next one. In the year 3000 it will be Me, Ozzy Osborne, Keith Richards, the 1911, and Browning 50" - Grandpa Buff.
@@jamesstevenson9056: I'd bet more on a Thunderbolt 3 (or Warthog 2) with the same gun than the A-10 itself. The thing is probably going to actually get retired at some point.
As an example, the US Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers have been built in four flights; Flight I, Flight II, Flight IIA, and Flight III. They vary in size, powerplant, crew, and weapons.
Or tranches and models like aircraft. "Oh, that's a Miranda J. It has isolinear circuits and a post-Defiant warp core design. Totally different thing."
A slight variant on this theme is the fixer-upper, often seen as a player ship in RPGs and CRPGs - an old, badly-damaged or stripped-down vehicle that can be slowly repaired and restored over time to unlock its full original capabilities.
Currently running a Star Wars DnD campaign set during the original trilogy, and this is exactly true. The group's ship is an old C70 Consular-class cruiser they captured from pirates. They've been slowly repairing the damage from lack of maintenance and turning it into the capable picket frigate it originally was.
I love when Sci-Fi remembers the steady march of technology is a thing, and that your hero ship needs to keep adapting with the times to remain a technologically relevant vehicle for your heroes to use. I'd like to see more of it in fiction in general
It depends on a setting's view on technology in general, if there are hard rules, then technological progression would have to end eventually, either because they've found the objectively best variant of every technology, or because they've fully explained every aspect of the universe and simply have run out things to research. From that point, it'd just be a matter of making ships bigger so more of the same systems can be crammed on them.
Swapping out and upgrading ship equipment is a mechanic I always enjoy, it really makes your vessel unique and personal, and gives it a progression along with you. Star Control 2/3, Star Trek Online, Elite: Dangerous all get points for allowing this.
The Honor Harrington series has probably the best refit/overhaul depictions in sci-fi. They include refits of captured vessels that takes into consideration the emissions of the original systems that allow enemy spies to track the movements of ships and the like. Really the best space opera series out there, in my opinion. I'm both glad and disappointed there is no video/game media based on it.
Also throws in lines about ships being designed to having room for those refits or old classes not having the room but kept because they needed the ship numbers.
@@earnestbrown6524 Also equipment "abandoned in place" in that it couldn't be accessed to be serviced or replaced without basically having to scrap the hull.
When your starting ships are still alive at game's end. Seeing a corvette that was one of the starting three roll off the refit line with the latest rare tech armor and shields being boldeted onto a frame thats been around since your civilization achieved FTL is quite the feeling. Mostly "how much luck does that ship have?" Its tussled with enemy navies, leviathans, killed off the barbarian stations before the Khan could ever be born, served in the conquest of a fallen empire and delt with the gray swarms from the L-gate. Yet one of my three starters survived until the very end.
I really like the interwar refits of british battleships like HMS WARSPITE. They had a still very good for WW2 gun (the 15inch BL Mk.I) and just brought the rest of the ship up to time. It is a nice contrast to the scifi tendency of almost always focussing refits on the weapons.
shout out to Victory Gundam, ships in the franchise as a whole aren't given nearly as much love except in one of the last and most chronologically distant UC series where the series' main hq ship, a relatively old and small light carrier, was combined with the remains of an enemy battleship they defeated creating one of the best looking warships in the whole series.
Both the hero ships of the main Late UC entries (F91 and V) are modified Clop-class ships, which were introduced 30/60 years before the setting of these stories.
And even far before that with the Salamis class. Compare their One Year War configuration to the Salamis Kai with a flight deck and different guns seen from Zeta onward.
Another good one to mention would be the Halcyon-class from Halo, the UNSC built 11 of them before going "Christ, these are really expensive" Then going on to build 39 cheaper 'Refit' versions, while keeping the original 11 in service. UNSC Halcyon was original UNSC Pillar of Autumn was one that used the original Honeycomb superstructure design and was further upgraded for Operation: Red Flag. These upgrades would eventually lead to a new class of ship, the Autumn class, while UNSC Dawn Under Heaven was a refitted type. It's a pretty in-depth history, and this comment is just skimming the surface
The refits also apply to trains/trams: in Munich we have the low floor trams of type R2 from the 90ies of which the majority had gone through a refit around arpund 10 years ago with new doors, reworked interior and better air conditioning 🥰
The Excelsior and the Miranda are Starfleet's B-52 I love that the good old great experiment hull is still cruising the stars a century after first chasing the Enterprise outside Spacedock
I'd agree the Excelsior is the B-52 but the Miranda is more like the C-130. Moves lots of cargo/people but can be armed for more offensive missions and is great in the support role.
The Queen Elizabeth class or the Italian dreadnoughts are great examples of a refitted ship standing up to contemporaries nearly 2 decades after laid down when just years before battleships were obsolete just a few years after commissioned
If you think the updates to the Essex class CVs were radical, go and have a look at what was done to HMS Victorious in the late 1950s, or how HMS Hermes evolved through multiple refits. There's another reason for refits that you didn't touch on. During a period of radical technological change, it can be hard to build _anything_ without it being partially obsolete before it's finished. In order to get _something_ built and out of the door, you have to build them in a whole series of intermediate standards with whatever new equipment is ready at the time. You then end up with a service fleet of multiple different models, with all the logistics and maintenance headaches that implies, so when things quieten down a bit, you may well choose to do a "level up" refit programme, which takes all the earlier ones and upgrades them to the latest common standard.
That the Halcyon-class cruisers from Halo (particularly UNSC Pillar of Autumn herself) never got a look-in here is criminal. Halo's expanded lore is filled with ships undergoing refits, rebuilds, and reclassifications.
The idea of technological progress that you mentioned here had me thinking about something out of science fiction literature: the Safehold series by David Weber. Granted it takes nine books, but the series nicely documents the technological progress of the fictional Imperial Charisian Navy from oar-powered galleys to steam-powered, screw propeller armored cruisers and the progress of the fictional Imperial Charisian Army as it introduces similar innovations on land. All in the space of six-ish local years, I think. There's a lot more to the story, though, but the basic idea is there.
Some say it was around in the 2550's under UNSC service during the fall of reach assisting in its defense by bombing covenant positions when the relatively more expensive-to-maintain Longswords aren't needed.
USS Lexington is a good example of an early WW2 carrier that underwent dozens of refits following WW2 , and lasted in service till the late 90's seeing almost every generation of combat aircraft landing on its deck
Prior to WW2, navies use to buy one ship of a new class as a prototype. After testing for a few years, they would accept the class and buy more. This is logic behind Star Trek's Constitution class. The USS Constitution NCC-1700 was the first of its class and served as a test bed for its class. When Starfleet bought more of its class, the Constitution became the test bed for new technology and upgrades. It wasn't deployed far away but hung around the shipyards so the new tech could be tested and improved before installed the the other ships. And that is why the Enterprise NCC-1701 became the ship of the show. It was the first ship deployed to do the real work of Starfleet.
Z-95 headhunter in star wars is a great example. Small snubfighter before the clone wars with basically triple handguns glued to it's wings was turned into a proper fighter during a clone war, then after the war it was modified so hard that late iterations were outclassing x-wings models in acceleration and maneuverability
Could please do a video on fictional (space) shipyards? By the way, about designs that have not changed much, there is the Cessna 152, Piper Cub and similar aircrafts. Those are unchanged since the 40s/50s, being upgraded only to address advancements in GPS and electronic controls.
I love it when being a refit/rebuild comes with its own quirks and shortcomings that can play into the story. Sure, you've now got the latest and greatest thingamabobs, but your whatchamacallits are now acting up because they weren't designed to interface with the newest generation of thingamabob and that's caused some inconvenient plot to happen.
Yeqh, like the experienced sensor reader not understanding the new controls and having to deal with bein irrelevant as a crewmember. All the while the ship as a whole gets lost all of the time.
My Guardian of the Stars setting has a lot of refits, upgrades, and rebuilds. With some designs being so popular with the public or had production so large, that people want to keep them in service for incredibly long times. One of the famous/popular examples is the 'hero ship' from one of the periods of war, it was seen in the settings own media so much that the government who used them couldn't actually retire the design and so it saw updates to keep it usable. But some of the other examples are designs that were produced in large numbers during the war period, retired to lesser governments from the big ones, and have such a number of parts out in the wild they just keep getting used. These ships are often sold for much cheaper compared to new models of the same type, even with refits to keep it roughly in line with new designs.
The Homeworld shot should have been from Cataclysm and the kidth samtaaw warship Kuun-Lan. The changes that ship go though are extensive and the game does a nice job of reminding you near the end because you encounter her un modified sister ship.
Start: "This is Kiith Somtaaw mining vessel KUUN-Lan. We have arrived in sector 112 and request targeting data." end: "Try to hold on, Republican Fleet. This is the Kiith Somtaaw warship KUUN-LAN."
an over 80 years old, former colony ship retrofitted with weapons during a shortage of warships, still fighting after being lost for close to 3 decades. the UNSC had quite the history of refitting ships during the human-alliance war
2:25 That retrofit is amazing! It's criminal we never saw this in Trek or some other property. A starship still in service hundreds of years later, through many upgrades.
Fiction-wise, a focus on refits can fit rebel factions that might lack the ability to construct enough ships for their needs but do have the facilities and expertise to modify the ships they do get their hands on. An example there would be the Rebellion from Escape Velocity Nova, with nearly their entire fleet being refitted Federation civilian or smaller military ships.
One of the key things about long-running designs is that the laws of physics themselves don't change. If something is well-engineered in the first place, there's not a lot of radical change you can make to the design to make it better. That's why planes like the B-52 and F-16 are still in service now, their original design was thoughtful enough that it didn't really need replacing. Upgrading, sure, for all the reasons mentioned, but they don't need to be retired entirely in favor of newer designs. The kind of things that get replaced on the other hand tend to be designs that have hit a "dead end". They might have been engineered to fit a purpose that doesn't exist anymore, so trying to upgrade is pointless. Though as mentioned, some of them might be refit and repurposed for a completely different role.
Something that needs to be remembered with aircraft is that they need aerodynamic hulls. The outer chassis needs to be one coherent piece by design. Starships only need to be airtight. A modern advancement in ship building is modular design. With the water hull being one coherent piece and all the internals being lifted into place from above and secured. This allows for fast dry dock refits in a couple of months adding new technology and capabilities. I use this concept in my own game. The starships all have a base hull that doesn't change, but the base hull is extended with modules that change the look and capabilities of the vessel. All the ships of a shipline share a resemblance, but can look radically different due to the change in silhouette. Just want to say as well that i love these videos. They provide so much food for thought for my world building.
There is something that can be considered as well in Sci-Fi ship concepts and that's reusing older parts. Even if new ships are introduced, older ships can be scrapped, and their parts can be used in the newer ships (depending on the story or price per maintenance vs refits). In my stories, refits happen, but it's not common either. Unless the technology introduced was revolutionary, most new warships are built with only minor updates. This allows the older ship's parts to be reused in the new warships to help keep costs down. It's not until war breaks out that refits will be considered as emergency programs to get every ship into full operation.
Which is funny because in the lore, they are constantly "rediscovering" old tech from the golden age to refit and upgrade tech all across the Imperium. 😅 Unfortunately, Bureaucracy is so bad, that the super secret prototype that is 30 years future proof; by the time you get through all the red tape and paperwork to have it installed on your gear/ship/vehicle, it is already 50 years outdated. 😜
The USS Oriskany, the first of the Essex class carriers to be refit was technically never launched as a original Essex, she was completed just as WW2 came to a close so was never launched, then had the angled deck and steam catapults added, which added so much weight that she had a permanent 14 degree list to the port side.
Another example of the "it's just too good at it's role to replace" is the A-10 Thunderbolt II (also known as the Warthog). It is just so good at it's role it has been in use since the late 1970s and is still in use.
That one's reaching the end of the line, though. It's role is a close-in attack craft, facing the latest in air and ground threats, but it's still a manned platform that isnt even radar-stealthed (though it does a decent job with IR emission control). It's slowly being replaced by stealthy multirole craft (who are better at surviving) and armed drones (which can be cheaper and more replacable than the missiles used to shoot them down)
@@ligerstripe99 If it's routinely taking damage in normal operation, that's a bad design. Especially since the A10 isnt actually focused on making the whole plane survivable, just the pilot. If it takes 2 F35s to do the job of 1 A10, but the F35s dont come back with half a wing missing every mission, and can do things OTHER than ground support when needed, that's a win.
A little odd that he kept showing the Tupolev TU-95 “Bear” bomber from Russia when he was talking about the B-52. Basically the same situation as the B-52 though.
Not really, IMO. During its lifetime B-52 had several substantial upgrades like changes to the engine (and US plans another one), cockpit, avionics. Tu-95... Its cockpit looks like it is stuck in the 1960s, new engines weren't made since before USSR collapsed, and I am pretty sure nobody even considers using it as a platform for modern smart bombs.
The NASA Space Shuttle orbiters all received multiple upgrades over their service lives, going from 1970s tech avionics to modern glass cockpits in the final years. They also got drag chutes and escape systems installed, and semipermanent airlocks for space station operations.
I like to think the Lakota was the old Enterprise-B decommissioned for the C and refit and renamed to Lakota in the 2330s or so.... only to be reactivated out of mothballs and reactivated out of mothballs and further refit for the Dominion War!
Plenty of WW1 post dreadnoughts refitted in the interwar and served in WW2. They would have faired poorly against a 1940's battleship, and were slow, but perfectly adequate for shore bombardment and defensive duty
The USS Texas agrees with this! PreWW1, did shore bombardment at Normandy. On Display for 70 years, currently being refurbished for 2025! Over a Century old!
Loved this video! A comment I would add about something real is the M1 Abrams. That thing has had 15 tons of upgrades and refits slapped on it since its introduction! That's why they canceled the next upgrade and instead are developing the M1E3 with aims to make it lighter. Also, I don't know if you realized this, but you showed 2 russian Tu-95 bombers during the B-52 segment (6:56 and 7:36)
I love how much Battlemechs in Battletech are refitted over time. I have a Banshee in MW 5: Mercenaries that I have fitted with an extreme amount of Medium pulse lasers, one or two large pulse lasers, an SRM-6 and a Heavy Rifle (Think of an artillery gun that got its barrel sawed down to be a mech mounted direct fire weapon). Its an odd mix of advanced equipment and outdated equipment. The pulse laser weapons are cutting edge for the game's time frame yet the SRM-6 rack lacks Artimis IV guidance and the rifle class of weapons may hit hard but they have a very outdated loading mechanism, though it saves in tonnage it slows rate of fire down greatly compared to Autocannons. Considering Banshees are among the earliest mech designs in the setting this personal refit is just another in a long line of them keeping the Banshee going for hundreds of years.
The Jupiter refit from bsg might be my favorite of all time with how you can easily see how the second one still looks like it was based on the first but made a lot of improvements both major and minor
The Normandy SR-2 got a few more refits in Mass Effect 3 as well, with more space for diplomatic meetings and a whole war room. Since it was initially built to serve as Hackett's personal command ship, but the reaper war brought it back into Shepard's command.
The SR-2 wasn't an upgrade or refit. It was an entirely new ship. The Sr-1 was destroyed and you even visit the wreck site. Shepard was extensively upgraded and refit though.
@blshouse You must not have finished the trilogy. ME3 makes it extremely clear that it was given a refit by the Alliance between 2 and 3. And the original comment said that the SR2 got a refit, not that it is a refit.
Funny timing for this video, as I’ve been working on sketches of starfighters for my sci-fi manga which are atmospheric aircraft retrofitted/upgraded for use in space.
Loved the refitting of the Normandy in ME2. Missed it so much in ME3, especially when they made a big deal about it being redo to alliance standards but your ship interior had so much half finished stuff throughout the whole game.
I think the incomplete Alliance refit was cool, but a MAJOR missed opportunity for the Citadel DLC to give us the complete version of the refit. After all, the whole point of the DLC (in universe, of course) was to refit the Normandy.
Ships like HMS warspite show this quite well, especially in how the secondary batteries were readjusted to be far more dual purpose, they added *waaayyyyy* more AA batteries as carriers became recognised as far more of a danger, and they also added radar
One of my favorite refit ships in all of sci-fi is off course the UNSC Pillar of Autumn. By the time of Halo CE, its nearly half a decade old, and had been decommisioned, but when they were prepong for Operation:RED FLAG, they found it and went, "hey, this ship classes honeycomb structure is actually really smart" and added a bunch of upgrades. The ship also went out as a hero unto itself, destroyed to save the galaxy.
Always like refits and retrofits. I remember in WW2 old valentine tanks remain in service through upgrades or retrofitting them to fit a 17 pounder, making it an ideal ambusher.
Something I think is worth noting on this topic as well is the sale/transfer of older equipment to poorer friendly nations. A lot of older US Navy ships and planes are in service in multiple nations around the world right now, dating back to the 50s and 60s. I could easily see this happening in Star Trek as well, with Miranda class ships simply being transferred in service to various Federation worlds.
I'm a big fan of the Nebula Class from Star Trek. Considered discount versions of the Galaxy class, the ship is extremely versatile. The fact that the module on top can be changed out to have extra torpedo bays like the USS Faragut that rescued Picard and the Enterprise D survivors after the crash, or the USS Phoenix with Captain Maxwell when he went rouge on the Cardassians, with what looks like and SWACS dish, indicating a more detailed sensor and electronic warfare suite. It even has the same saucer section as the Galaxy so it can go and link up with any Nebula or Galaxy class saucer that might have had to separate from their drive sections during an emergency. It's actually quite possible that a Nebula class oversaw the salvage operation of the Enterprise D saucer and brought it to the fleet museum.
You also have a type of refit that is very common (and necessary) for any class in most settings: the type that is about swapping out worn out components, analyzing the wear on other components, and doing basic maintenance on inaccessible areas of a ship. These range from the Enterprise being put into dock to have a energy wall basically degauss the ship (and the captain fight off thieves), to hauling a bronze age boat out of the ocean to clean the hull of barnacles, to the maintenance USS New Jersey is just finishing up to keep it afloat. This type has nothing to do with improvements or modifications, it is pure maintenance.
Honestly, my favorite example of sci-fi ship retrofits would be the Salamis Kai-class Light Cruiser from Gundam. Basically, after the Feddies lost a large portion of their fleet via a massive nuclear ball fired by a Zeon Ace with a stolen Gundam in U.C. 0083, they start taking out & retrofitting their One Year War Salamis ships to make up for the losses a year later. They replaced two of it's additional side bridges with larger & more powerful mega particle cannons, gave it a more powerful generator which ironically gave more power than it's more gun focused predecessor & turned the front into a hanger with a carrying capacity of 4 mobile suits. Despite the simple changes, it proves to be quite effective enough that it stays in service until Victory Gundam, which takes place in U.C. 0153, with little to no modification and likely even still stayed in service after that. That's about 70+ years since they were created & deployed.
83 years at least since the first Salamis class ships were in service in 0070. There was also an en-flute version (i.e. had the weapons stripped out to carry cargo.) which is something the video didn't mention.
In anime, most especially mecha anime there's something known as the 'mid-season upgrade' where mecha and ships undergo an interim upgrade in the show's mid season before getting their final/ultimate upgrade near the end of the show's run.
I immediately thought of Stellaris. The initial squadron of corvettes I built at the beginning of my last playthrough was still mostly in service at the end and they were some of the most deadly ships in the galaxy thanks to refits and upgrades, including role changes from "this is my primary attack/defense fleet" to "these are my patrol/quick deployment raiders" to "these are my stealthy flankers/backstabbers".
To be fair, I was playing with friends. We formed a federation so that none of us ever had to fight alone and we were all boosting each others' economies and tech. And even then we were picking our fights carefully so every war was more of a curbstomp
i created a ship type back in the day, it was meant to be a super high speed single shot sniper type. It would fly in real fast, at some small % of light fire its main gun and retreat. But i eventually found the idea stale but didnt want to scrap the model, so i repurposed it into a long range scout and reccon ship. The big centerline gun went away and was replaced with all the things you need for snooping about, also the ships speed was reduced, still very fast in sublight though. Another design i have is an "old class" that was brought up to modern spec through a joint effort with my stories main good guys and its ally. The plot was ancient hull close to a century old stripped of its old tech and entirely rebuilt with new engines and a vastly better weapon loadout going from storage to a heavy brawler able to meet and defeat any ship of its class
It's just cool to roll up in an older looking ship, have your opponents scoff and laugh.. til they get wiped because while it looks old, it has all the modern bells and whistles. That's why, even though star trek is essentially dead, the Miranda class is my favorite ship design of the series.
There's also backwards refits in some scenarios. Where an advanced tech is lost or not maintainable and they cobble something together to keep it working. I think battle tech had some of this kinda activity
Some fun examples from Star wars versions of the hammerhead class cruiser, Invincible class Dreadnought and Aurek fighter we're in use until the Ruusan Reformation and even after that would remain in service in the planetary defence fleets of outlying systems until at least the clone wars each seeing a service life of over 3000 years, and of course I can't not mention the classic Dreadnought heavy cruiser it's whole lore is about it being a old ship that is so ubiquitous in so many factions navies that it can't be properly replaced and has to keep receiving upgrades and refits and of course many navies having their own special refits and redesigns of the ship
Traveller RPG has an excellent system for building and updating ships. What i like in these books is how easily quantifiable the data are and how easy it is to custom the rulesets to fit my games. I love a bit more the 2300AD (latest edition) ship building rules, because they allow for more detailed first steps although they pale in comparison to the variety of weapons of MgT2Ed.
Can't remember where it was said might have been a space dock video. If you want to make any piece of equipment more believable cover it in bolt on upgrades. Random wiring harness pipes and junctions running around the interior, different screens crowding each other, crowded ui with slow overstretched processes that can't handle all the new tasks given to them. Only if something proves its worth does it get the luxury of having all the new systems properly integrated.
As far as real world ships, I think the DDG 51 Arleigh Burke class would have been a really good example. Not only have the design undergone 4 major block changes (Flight I, II, IIA, & III) plus numerous smaller improvements (upgraded gun, select RMMV garage, etc) but the class is also undergoing retrofits to add some of the Flight III capability to select IIAs and its a great example of retrofits sometimes being much clunkier (and potentially less net effective) than even new build upgrades of an old design. And its been done on a smaller scale over the whole class (adding MK38 remote guns, NULKA, SeaRAM, etc). For scifi, there's some nice examples in several series of this upgrade including Jay Allan's Crimson Worlds where the ships see a lot of weapons and ECM changes or Evan Currie's Into the Black where the North American Confederation upgrades both their Odyssey class with the latest weapons and also retrofits their more powerful and advanced Heroics with weapons from the Odyssey that their allies originally considered... insane to mount in the hull of a ship when they built them for the NAC. Thinking about it now, I think every scifi series I've read and consider good has this trend, so nice to see something so fundamental baked into the foundation of such things.
@@mryellow6918 No, ships that are already built have to be upgraded with better tier equipment as you get more research done. The refit button makes the fleet travel to the nearest shipyard and start upgrading every ship that has equipment that has upgrades ready.
I think the best example of a full re-build you could find would be USS West Virginia. It was so badly damaged during the attack on Pearl Harbor that by the time its reconstruction was finished it more resembled its cousins in the also heavily rebuilt Tenessee class than its actual sisters. (Granted the two classes are quite similar, even among the collection of similar-ish ships that made up the standard type battleships) Other good examples include many early carriers, and not just their designs being overhauled to convert them from freighters, ocean liners, battle cruisers, battleships, and more. HMS Furious was launched with a 457mm canon! And the Japanese Akagi initially had THREE flight decks. Then you have USS Langley having a flight deck bolted to it to make it the first full-deck US carrier (admittedly just a proof of concept prototype, but still), then half of said deck removed to convert it to a seaplane tender once its experimentation was complete.
True, although it depends heavily on the kind of technological advancements that are happening in the setting. If jet engines somehow hadn't been developed, I could see the P-51 still being in service somewhere. A lot of sci-fi settings don't really have fundamental changes happen to core technologies like propulsion, (especially FTL) weapons, and shields. A lot easier/sensible to keep upgrading the same ship for a century if "new tech" continues to be just an incrementally more refined version of the old tech instead of some new, paradigm-changing system that operates completely differently from what came before.
The classic Battletech moment of "this thing is 150 years old and probably should have been taken out back and put down the day it was built but we found 100 of them in a shed so we're sending them in for refit"
150? More like 300. Many Mechs from the Star League era survived the Succession Wars. Mechs from Technical Readout 2750 have "downgraded" variants that use the introductory rules and omit all of their LosTech components like Gauss rifles, double heat sinks, and ferro-fibrous armor. Most of these Mechs that survived into the mid-31st Century were restored to their original configurations when LosTech was reintroduced.
Other designs received upgardes over time. Some Mechs have undergone so many refits and repairs, they present a ship of Theseus problem.
Praise be to the mighty Shed. Holder of 6 dozen Locust mechs.
Glad to see Battletech mentioned. It's fascinating how truly rare brand new battlemechs are in the setting and how each mech has its own history.
@@justinjacobs1501 Specially when the mech has custom bits on it to fit a pilots style or a families style of fighting.
I mentioned the lack of battletech in this refit series
The B-52 really is just the Miranda class of the USAF. I’ve heard it described as, “What ever they take out what’s old. They can install three times as much new.”
Miniaturized tech makes older bigger vehicles viable for all types of upgrades and refits.
Essentially yeah. When we get to it, The BUFF will become space viable. The BUFF is forever.
Eh, the UFP is just gonna slap some warp nacelles on the BUFF and keep it around for another thousand years
The B-52 BUFF would eventually make it to the 2550's where it participated during the Fall of Reach. Possibly reaching the 40,999's during the Fall of Cadia fighting alongside Marauder Bombers.
@@cleeiii357 And at that point, even Abbadon couldn't destroy them
The saying goes “the grandmother of the last B-52 crew hasn’t been born yet”
The "cling-on" sight gag was hilarious. 😂
Right! 😃
Refits and Rebuilds are something that should be seen more in Sci-Fi as it allows older and more plot important ships to remain relevant throughout narrative eras.
Yea I also watched the video
Also, without relying on copious amounts of plot armor for the old ship to justify surviving every increasing threats. It is so cringe to have the latest good guy ships be trashed by some super powerful enemy only for the old hero ship to defeat them with "pluck, determination, and genius tactics/strategy", despite being decades out of step (Or in Star Trek, last year's model).
Bonus for the TV executives: moar toys!!!
But seriously, I would kill for more NX-01 refit merchandise
It mostly happens with Hero-ships, but not often with anything else.
@@keanuxu5435 Check out egalemoss they have models of almost every star fleet ship including three different sizes of the nx refit.
Honestly, I think the greatest missed opportunity for refits is older ships being sold to more minor powers who modernized them rather than build new current ships due to budget. Sure, minor powers like this don't show up often, but imagine a major group like the resistance in Star Wars calling for any help they can get, and some minor outer rim power shows up with a handful of Victory Star Destroyers that's been modernized? Such a missed opportunity amongst many.
From the 1910s into WWII several aircraft carriers were made by taking a cruiser or a battlership, sawing off the gun turrets and bridge tower, scooping out most of the shell magazines and building a flight deck on top.
They weren't nearly as good as purpose built aircraft carriers, but that was the era in which the whole world was still figuring out these new fangled contraptions that fly. I really like that era of experimental figure things out as we go history.
Well a bit more than that, and very much inspired by treaty restrictions.
I think only HMS Furious, Glorious and Courageous really converted from full functioning 'large light cruisers' to full fledged carriers, and that took decades. (and did not require THAT much armour to be removed);
The Lexington class, Kaga and Akagi never got THAT far in their building process to be THAT heavily 'scooped out', but more that their design had to be resculpted around what was already on the stocks. Regarding efficiency, I think it is telling that an Essex class of 30.000 ton (standard) was comfortably more effective than a 36.000 ton (standard) Lexington, if a higher combat effectiveness wasn't already achieved on the 20.000 ton (standard) Yorktown's (honestly, it probably was.... although USS Saratoga was extremely unlucky always eating a torpedo).
@@Tuning3434 You should keep in Mind, when comparing the Essex class with a Lexington, that the doctrines and knowledge was basically at 0, when USS Lexington and USS Saratoga where build.
As the Essex where laid down, the US Navy learned much about how to use a carrier.
@@Tuning3434When it comes to furious glorious and courageous I recall only furious being completed in it's original "large light cruiser" design (or being closest to completion anyway) but they were not fully functional whatever they were thinking when building them, which was big chunk of reason why those ships were chosen for aircraft carrier conversions. Glorious and Courageous went better as conversions because not only furious was converted first, but also they were still not finished when conversion started so changes were incorporated to construction of the ships easier.
@@MehrumesDagonYou're thinking of the other way around. Courageous and Glorious finished as "Large Light Cruisers" (Battlecruisers) and served as such during WWI, then were converted later on. Only Furious was rebuilt immediately but even then only the rear turret was removed and replaced with a flight deck, the rest of the ship was the same with its remaining turret and the regular superstructure before the more extensive rebuild removed everything and did it properly.
Let us not forget the ultimate refit/rebuild and upgrade, turning the wreck of the IJN Yamato into the great space battleship Yamato.
I loved the fact that you could customize the initial build and then refit your ships in Master of Orion 1 & 2. As my tech improved I would refit the ships with better tech or simply more weapons if they were adequate for the mission.
Always fun to refit your missile frigates from the early game with photon torpedoes
Yamato makes no sense, would be far better if any fiction refit a submarine into a spaceship, has there been anything like that?
@@Napoleonic_S I hear bad things happen when spaceships are converted into submarines.
@@ArifRWinandar
That's the opposite of what I said
Even the Space Battleship version of Yamato got an upgrade in the Comet Empire arc.
"I started Desert Storm, I started Enduring Freedom and by God I'll start the next one. In the year 3000 it will be Me, Ozzy Osborne, Keith Richards, the 1911, and Browning 50" - Grandpa Buff.
I read that in buffs voice, damn it
I did not expect a HLC quote on a spacedock video
God bless the BUFF
For he is….ETERNAL
I can't imagine he didn't include the A-10 Thunderbolt II
@@jamesstevenson9056: I'd bet more on a Thunderbolt 3 (or Warthog 2) with the same gun than the A-10 itself. The thing is probably going to actually get retired at some point.
so sad knowing im just old enough to not be alive when BUFF gets its warp nacelles.
"BUFF will out-live us all", a man once said.
I'm pretty sure that was The Kid in the barn
Hey fellow Habitual Line Crosser fans
Grandpa Buff casually starting Star War 1 by bombing Mars.
@@VallornDeathblade grandpa buff doesn't start the war, he ends it 😈
@@shawnr6117 he ends them by starting them
Rumor has it The Imperium of Man is deploying their newest Mars-Pattern B-52s to fight the hordes of chaos in their latest crusade
I actually love the idea of refits and Flights within ship classes.
As an example, the US Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers have been built in four flights; Flight I, Flight II, Flight IIA, and Flight III. They vary in size, powerplant, crew, and weapons.
Or tranches and models like aircraft. "Oh, that's a Miranda J. It has isolinear circuits and a post-Defiant warp core design. Totally different thing."
A slight variant on this theme is the fixer-upper, often seen as a player ship in RPGs and CRPGs - an old, badly-damaged or stripped-down vehicle that can be slowly repaired and restored over time to unlock its full original capabilities.
Currently running a Star Wars DnD campaign set during the original trilogy, and this is exactly true. The group's ship is an old C70 Consular-class cruiser they captured from pirates. They've been slowly repairing the damage from lack of maintenance and turning it into the capable picket frigate it originally was.
I love when Sci-Fi remembers the steady march of technology is a thing, and that your hero ship needs to keep adapting with the times to remain a technologically relevant vehicle for your heroes to use. I'd like to see more of it in fiction in general
It depends on a setting's view on technology in general, if there are hard rules, then technological progression would have to end eventually, either because they've found the objectively best variant of every technology, or because they've fully explained every aspect of the universe and simply have run out things to research. From that point, it'd just be a matter of making ships bigger so more of the same systems can be crammed on them.
"... to even the softest of Sci-Fi."
*shows Babylon 5*
SHOTS FIRED!
Out of all the spacedock videos I'd never have expected this to be one of the few where they didn't mention SG-1
They showed the Daedalus pre and post Asgard beam weapon upgrades, though he didn't TALK about it, per se...
Me too considering how much was added on prometheus
I swear, at the heart of every Miranda space frame is a B-52 surrounded by progressive upgrades.
Swapping out and upgrading ship equipment is a mechanic I always enjoy, it really makes your vessel unique and personal, and gives it a progression along with you. Star Control 2/3, Star Trek Online, Elite: Dangerous all get points for allowing this.
The Honor Harrington series has probably the best refit/overhaul depictions in sci-fi. They include refits of captured vessels that takes into consideration the emissions of the original systems that allow enemy spies to track the movements of ships and the like. Really the best space opera series out there, in my opinion. I'm both glad and disappointed there is no video/game media based on it.
Also throws in lines about ships being designed to having room for those refits or old classes not having the room but kept because they needed the ship numbers.
@@earnestbrown6524 Also equipment "abandoned in place" in that it couldn't be accessed to be serviced or replaced without basically having to scrap the hull.
the great moments in Stellaris when you send your battleships for a long awaited refit and get 100K more fleet power.
When your starting ships are still alive at game's end. Seeing a corvette that was one of the starting three roll off the refit line with the latest rare tech armor and shields being boldeted onto a frame thats been around since your civilization achieved FTL is quite the feeling. Mostly "how much luck does that ship have?" Its tussled with enemy navies, leviathans, killed off the barbarian stations before the Khan could ever be born, served in the conquest of a fallen empire and delt with the gray swarms from the L-gate. Yet one of my three starters survived until the very end.
I really like the interwar refits of british battleships like HMS WARSPITE. They had a still very good for WW2 gun (the 15inch BL Mk.I) and just brought the rest of the ship up to time. It is a nice contrast to the scifi tendency of almost always focussing refits on the weapons.
Ah, Warspite. The ship so badass it nearly successfully fled scrapping with no crew and no power.
I'm surprised that Halo's Pillar of Autumn didn't come up because its refit is very plot relevant.
shout out to Victory Gundam, ships in the franchise as a whole aren't given nearly as much love except in one of the last and most chronologically distant UC series where the series' main hq ship, a relatively old and small light carrier, was combined with the remains of an enemy battleship they defeated creating one of the best looking warships in the whole series.
Both the hero ships of the main Late UC entries (F91 and V) are modified Clop-class ships, which were introduced 30/60 years before the setting of these stories.
And even far before that with the Salamis class. Compare their One Year War configuration to the Salamis Kai with a flight deck and different guns seen from Zeta onward.
@@exvaran I stand corrected, way WAY older than I thought lol rip
A good Refit is always something I love.
Another good one to mention would be the Halcyon-class from Halo, the UNSC built 11 of them before going "Christ, these are really expensive" Then going on to build 39 cheaper 'Refit' versions, while keeping the original 11 in service. UNSC Halcyon was original UNSC Pillar of Autumn was one that used the original Honeycomb superstructure design and was further upgraded for Operation: Red Flag. These upgrades would eventually lead to a new class of ship, the Autumn class, while UNSC Dawn Under Heaven was a refitted type.
It's a pretty in-depth history, and this comment is just skimming the surface
The refits also apply to trains/trams: in Munich we have the low floor trams of type R2 from the 90ies of which the majority had gone through a refit around arpund 10 years ago with new doors, reworked interior and better air conditioning 🥰
The Excelsior and the Miranda are Starfleet's B-52
I love that the good old great experiment hull is still cruising the stars a century after first chasing the Enterprise outside Spacedock
I'd agree the Excelsior is the B-52 but the Miranda is more like the C-130. Moves lots of cargo/people but can be armed for more offensive missions and is great in the support role.
How did the video not even MENTION the Excelsior? Arguably, it's more well-known than the Miranda!
The Queen Elizabeth class or the Italian dreadnoughts are great examples of a refitted ship standing up to contemporaries nearly 2 decades after laid down when just years before battleships were obsolete just a few years after commissioned
If you think the updates to the Essex class CVs were radical, go and have a look at what was done to HMS Victorious in the late 1950s, or how HMS Hermes evolved through multiple refits.
There's another reason for refits that you didn't touch on. During a period of radical technological change, it can be hard to build _anything_ without it being partially obsolete before it's finished. In order to get _something_ built and out of the door, you have to build them in a whole series of intermediate standards with whatever new equipment is ready at the time. You then end up with a service fleet of multiple different models, with all the logistics and maintenance headaches that implies, so when things quieten down a bit, you may well choose to do a "level up" refit programme, which takes all the earlier ones and upgrades them to the latest common standard.
That the Halcyon-class cruisers from Halo (particularly UNSC Pillar of Autumn herself) never got a look-in here is criminal. Halo's expanded lore is filled with ships undergoing refits, rebuilds, and reclassifications.
Essex class mentioned: I was already going to give this video a like, but then you brought out the best CVs in history.
The idea of technological progress that you mentioned here had me thinking about something out of science fiction literature: the Safehold series by David Weber. Granted it takes nine books, but the series nicely documents the technological progress of the fictional Imperial Charisian Navy from oar-powered galleys to steam-powered, screw propeller armored cruisers and the progress of the fictional Imperial Charisian Army as it introduces similar innovations on land. All in the space of six-ish local years, I think. There's a lot more to the story, though, but the basic idea is there.
Grandpa Buff is going to outlast us all. He'll still be around as we expand beyond Earth to other planets and stars.
Some say it was around in the 2550's under UNSC service during the fall of reach assisting in its defense by bombing covenant positions when the relatively more expensive-to-maintain Longswords aren't needed.
USS Lexington is a good example of an early WW2 carrier that underwent dozens of refits following WW2 , and lasted in service till the late 90's seeing almost every generation of combat aircraft landing on its deck
Really got me with the Klingon symbol on the ship. Great video! I'd love to see some in depth reviews of life extending refits.
Prior to WW2, navies use to buy one ship of a new class as a prototype. After testing for a few years, they would accept the class and buy more. This is logic behind Star Trek's Constitution class. The USS Constitution NCC-1700 was the first of its class and served as a test bed for its class. When Starfleet bought more of its class, the Constitution became the test bed for new technology and upgrades. It wasn't deployed far away but hung around the shipyards so the new tech could be tested and improved before installed the the other ships. And that is why the Enterprise NCC-1701 became the ship of the show. It was the first ship deployed to do the real work of Starfleet.
Z-95 headhunter in star wars is a great example. Small snubfighter before the clone wars with basically triple handguns glued to it's wings was turned into a proper fighter during a clone war, then after the war it was modified so hard that late iterations were outclassing x-wings models in acceleration and maneuverability
Could please do a video on fictional (space) shipyards?
By the way, about designs that have not changed much, there is the Cessna 152, Piper Cub and similar aircrafts. Those are unchanged since the 40s/50s, being upgraded only to address advancements in GPS and electronic controls.
The joke about the B-52 is that it will be around long after we develop working warp technology, at which point it will be refitted with warp engines.
I love it when being a refit/rebuild comes with its own quirks and shortcomings that can play into the story. Sure, you've now got the latest and greatest thingamabobs, but your whatchamacallits are now acting up because they weren't designed to interface with the newest generation of thingamabob and that's caused some inconvenient plot to happen.
Yeqh, like the experienced sensor reader not understanding the new controls and having to deal with bein irrelevant as a crewmember. All the while the ship as a whole gets lost all of the time.
Also refits and rebuilds do sometimes extend the service life of a ship, aircraft, and even the tank.
My Guardian of the Stars setting has a lot of refits, upgrades, and rebuilds. With some designs being so popular with the public or had production so large, that people want to keep them in service for incredibly long times. One of the famous/popular examples is the 'hero ship' from one of the periods of war, it was seen in the settings own media so much that the government who used them couldn't actually retire the design and so it saw updates to keep it usable.
But some of the other examples are designs that were produced in large numbers during the war period, retired to lesser governments from the big ones, and have such a number of parts out in the wild they just keep getting used. These ships are often sold for much cheaper compared to new models of the same type, even with refits to keep it roughly in line with new designs.
6:27 Seeing Star Wars Armada is always a treat, especially after its cancelation not too long ago 😭
The Homeworld shot should have been from Cataclysm and the kidth samtaaw warship Kuun-Lan. The changes that ship go though are extensive and the game does a nice job of reminding you near the end because you encounter her un modified sister ship.
Start: "This is Kiith Somtaaw mining vessel KUUN-Lan. We have arrived in sector 112 and request targeting data." end: "Try to hold on, Republican Fleet. This is the Kiith Somtaaw warship KUUN-LAN."
Calling spirit of fire gonna be here
It wasn't there, genuinely over
Honorable mention to Pillar of Autumn too
an over 80 years old, former colony ship retrofitted with weapons during a shortage of warships, still fighting after being lost for close to 3 decades.
the UNSC had quite the history of refitting ships during the human-alliance war
2:25 That retrofit is amazing! It's criminal we never saw this in Trek or some other property. A starship still in service hundreds of years later, through many upgrades.
Fiction-wise, a focus on refits can fit rebel factions that might lack the ability to construct enough ships for their needs but do have the facilities and expertise to modify the ships they do get their hands on. An example there would be the Rebellion from Escape Velocity Nova, with nearly their entire fleet being refitted Federation civilian or smaller military ships.
One of the key things about long-running designs is that the laws of physics themselves don't change. If something is well-engineered in the first place, there's not a lot of radical change you can make to the design to make it better. That's why planes like the B-52 and F-16 are still in service now, their original design was thoughtful enough that it didn't really need replacing. Upgrading, sure, for all the reasons mentioned, but they don't need to be retired entirely in favor of newer designs.
The kind of things that get replaced on the other hand tend to be designs that have hit a "dead end". They might have been engineered to fit a purpose that doesn't exist anymore, so trying to upgrade is pointless. Though as mentioned, some of them might be refit and repurposed for a completely different role.
Something that needs to be remembered with aircraft is that they need aerodynamic hulls. The outer chassis needs to be one coherent piece by design. Starships only need to be airtight. A modern advancement in ship building is modular design. With the water hull being one coherent piece and all the internals being lifted into place from above and secured. This allows for fast dry dock refits in a couple of months adding new technology and capabilities.
I use this concept in my own game. The starships all have a base hull that doesn't change, but the base hull is extended with modules that change the look and capabilities of the vessel. All the ships of a shipline share a resemblance, but can look radically different due to the change in silhouette.
Just want to say as well that i love these videos. They provide so much food for thought for my world building.
There is something that can be considered as well in Sci-Fi ship concepts and that's reusing older parts. Even if new ships are introduced, older ships can be scrapped, and their parts can be used in the newer ships (depending on the story or price per maintenance vs refits).
In my stories, refits happen, but it's not common either. Unless the technology introduced was revolutionary, most new warships are built with only minor updates. This allows the older ship's parts to be reused in the new warships to help keep costs down. It's not until war breaks out that refits will be considered as emergency programs to get every ship into full operation.
"Refits? Upgrades? Rebuilds? WHAT HERESY IS THIS!!!!"
Which is funny because in the lore, they are constantly "rediscovering" old tech from the golden age to refit and upgrade tech all across the Imperium. 😅 Unfortunately, Bureaucracy is so bad, that the super secret prototype that is 30 years future proof; by the time you get through all the red tape and paperwork to have it installed on your gear/ship/vehicle, it is already 50 years outdated. 😜
These Omnissiah damned error-shunt-abort tech heretics have committed the unspeakable crime of being Scientists & shall face the wrath of Holy Mars
Sully not the purity of the Machine Spirits!
"The Flight of the Old Dog" was a great book.
The USS Oriskany, the first of the Essex class carriers to be refit was technically never launched as a original Essex, she was completed just as WW2 came to a close so was never launched, then had the angled deck and steam catapults added, which added so much weight that she had a permanent 14 degree list to the port side.
Another example of the "it's just too good at it's role to replace" is the A-10 Thunderbolt II (also known as the Warthog). It is just so good at it's role it has been in use since the late 1970s and is still in use.
That one's reaching the end of the line, though. It's role is a close-in attack craft, facing the latest in air and ground threats, but it's still a manned platform that isnt even radar-stealthed (though it does a decent job with IR emission control).
It's slowly being replaced by stealthy multirole craft (who are better at surviving) and armed drones (which can be cheaper and more replacable than the missiles used to shoot them down)
@@rakaydosdraj8405 none of those have the durability or the smarts. there will always be a place for human piloted craft.
@@ligerstripe99 If it's routinely taking damage in normal operation, that's a bad design. Especially since the A10 isnt actually focused on making the whole plane survivable, just the pilot.
If it takes 2 F35s to do the job of 1 A10, but the F35s dont come back with half a wing missing every mission, and can do things OTHER than ground support when needed, that's a win.
I am disappointed. You didn't include the Space Cruiser Yamato. Best rebuild ever.
A little odd that he kept showing the Tupolev TU-95 “Bear” bomber from Russia when he was talking about the B-52. Basically the same situation as the B-52 though.
Not really, IMO.
During its lifetime B-52 had several substantial upgrades like changes to the engine (and US plans another one), cockpit, avionics.
Tu-95... Its cockpit looks like it is stuck in the 1960s, new engines weren't made since before USSR collapsed, and I am pretty sure nobody even considers using it as a platform for modern smart bombs.
The NASA Space Shuttle orbiters all received multiple upgrades over their service lives, going from 1970s tech avionics to modern glass cockpits in the final years. They also got drag chutes and escape systems installed, and semipermanent airlocks for space station operations.
The B-52 is why it's not weird that the Excelsior class is around for a century 😅 (also, the canon Lakota upgrade to that class)
I like to think the Lakota was the old Enterprise-B decommissioned for the C and refit and renamed to Lakota in the 2330s or so.... only to be reactivated out of mothballs and reactivated out of mothballs and further refit for the Dominion War!
Plenty of WW1 post dreadnoughts refitted in the interwar and served in WW2. They would have faired poorly against a 1940's battleship, and were slow, but perfectly adequate for shore bombardment and defensive duty
The USS Texas agrees with this! PreWW1, did shore bombardment at Normandy. On Display for 70 years, currently being refurbished for 2025! Over a Century old!
Loved this video! A comment I would add about something real is the M1 Abrams. That thing has had 15 tons of upgrades and refits slapped on it since its introduction! That's why they canceled the next upgrade and instead are developing the M1E3 with aims to make it lighter.
Also, I don't know if you realized this, but you showed 2 russian Tu-95 bombers during the B-52 segment (6:56 and 7:36)
The M1E3 is exactly what I was thinking of when I mentioned rebuildings being required when there's too many upgrades!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Battletech would like to say hello, in 18 different ways using the same chassis over several centuries.
Banshee says hi,that thing is obscenely old. Yet fit it with a buch of pulse lasers and double heat sinks and you got a dangerous mech.
I love how much Battlemechs in Battletech are refitted over time. I have a Banshee in MW 5: Mercenaries that I have fitted with an extreme amount of Medium pulse lasers, one or two large pulse lasers, an SRM-6 and a Heavy Rifle (Think of an artillery gun that got its barrel sawed down to be a mech mounted direct fire weapon). Its an odd mix of advanced equipment and outdated equipment. The pulse laser weapons are cutting edge for the game's time frame yet the SRM-6 rack lacks Artimis IV guidance and the rifle class of weapons may hit hard but they have a very outdated loading mechanism, though it saves in tonnage it slows rate of fire down greatly compared to Autocannons. Considering Banshees are among the earliest mech designs in the setting this personal refit is just another in a long line of them keeping the Banshee going for hundreds of years.
The Jupiter refit from bsg might be my favorite of all time with how you can easily see how the second one still looks like it was based on the first but made a lot of improvements both major and minor
Iowa-class battleship modernization was a power move and still super-cool!
One thing stands true: Grandpa Buff is eternal.
The Normandy SR-2 got a few more refits in Mass Effect 3 as well, with more space for diplomatic meetings and a whole war room.
Since it was initially built to serve as Hackett's personal command ship, but the reaper war brought it back into Shepard's command.
Actually meant for Anderson, not Hackett.
The SR-2 wasn't an upgrade or refit. It was an entirely new ship. The Sr-1 was destroyed and you even visit the wreck site. Shepard was extensively upgraded and refit though.
@blshouse You must not have finished the trilogy. ME3 makes it extremely clear that it was given a refit by the Alliance between 2 and 3. And the original comment said that the SR2 got a refit, not that it is a refit.
@@ALLMINDmercenarysupportsystem yep, guess I was having a Biden moment
@@blshouse Ah. Ye, that happens sometimes.
Cosmoteer is a fantastic game and I think everyone should play it, although I am biased as one of its hardcore players
Funny timing for this video, as I’ve been working on sketches of starfighters for my sci-fi manga which are atmospheric aircraft retrofitted/upgraded for use in space.
Loved the refitting of the Normandy in ME2. Missed it so much in ME3, especially when they made a big deal about it being redo to alliance standards but your ship interior had so much half finished stuff throughout the whole game.
I think the incomplete Alliance refit was cool, but a MAJOR missed opportunity for the Citadel DLC to give us the complete version of the refit. After all, the whole point of the DLC (in universe, of course) was to refit the Normandy.
Naval vessels are basically floating ships of theseus cycling from one upgrade pack to another in order to have the advantage.
Ships like HMS warspite show this quite well, especially in how the secondary batteries were readjusted to be far more dual purpose, they added *waaayyyyy* more AA batteries as carriers became recognised as far more of a danger, and they also added radar
One of my favorite refit ships in all of sci-fi is off course the UNSC Pillar of Autumn. By the time of Halo CE, its nearly half a decade old, and had been decommisioned, but when they were prepong for Operation:RED FLAG, they found it and went, "hey, this ship classes honeycomb structure is actually really smart" and added a bunch of upgrades. The ship also went out as a hero unto itself, destroyed to save the galaxy.
Always like refits and retrofits. I remember in WW2 old valentine tanks remain in service through upgrades or retrofitting them to fit a 17 pounder, making it an ideal ambusher.
Something I think is worth noting on this topic as well is the sale/transfer of older equipment to poorer friendly nations. A lot of older US Navy ships and planes are in service in multiple nations around the world right now, dating back to the 50s and 60s. I could easily see this happening in Star Trek as well, with Miranda class ships simply being transferred in service to various Federation worlds.
I'm a big fan of the Nebula Class from Star Trek. Considered discount versions of the Galaxy class, the ship is extremely versatile. The fact that the module on top can be changed out to have extra torpedo bays like the USS Faragut that rescued Picard and the Enterprise D survivors after the crash, or the USS Phoenix with Captain Maxwell when he went rouge on the Cardassians, with what looks like and SWACS dish, indicating a more detailed sensor and electronic warfare suite. It even has the same saucer section as the Galaxy so it can go and link up with any Nebula or Galaxy class saucer that might have had to separate from their drive sections during an emergency. It's actually quite possible that a Nebula class oversaw the salvage operation of the Enterprise D saucer and brought it to the fleet museum.
You also have a type of refit that is very common (and necessary) for any class in most settings: the type that is about swapping out worn out components, analyzing the wear on other components, and doing basic maintenance on inaccessible areas of a ship. These range from the Enterprise being put into dock to have a energy wall basically degauss the ship (and the captain fight off thieves), to hauling a bronze age boat out of the ocean to clean the hull of barnacles, to the maintenance USS New Jersey is just finishing up to keep it afloat. This type has nothing to do with improvements or modifications, it is pure maintenance.
Honestly, my favorite example of sci-fi ship retrofits would be the Salamis Kai-class Light Cruiser from Gundam.
Basically, after the Feddies lost a large portion of their fleet via a massive nuclear ball fired by a Zeon Ace with a stolen Gundam in U.C. 0083, they start taking out & retrofitting their One Year War Salamis ships to make up for the losses a year later. They replaced two of it's additional side bridges with larger & more powerful mega particle cannons, gave it a more powerful generator which ironically gave more power than it's more gun focused predecessor & turned the front into a hanger with a carrying capacity of 4 mobile suits.
Despite the simple changes, it proves to be quite effective enough that it stays in service until Victory Gundam, which takes place in U.C. 0153, with little to no modification and likely even still stayed in service after that. That's about 70+ years since they were created & deployed.
83 years at least since the first Salamis class ships were in service in 0070. There was also an en-flute version (i.e. had the weapons stripped out to carry cargo.) which is something the video didn't mention.
In anime, most especially mecha anime there's something known as the 'mid-season upgrade' where mecha and ships undergo an interim upgrade in the show's mid season before getting their final/ultimate upgrade near the end of the show's run.
It's pronounced time skip
Glad to see you showed the CV deck refit pictures.
I immediately thought of Stellaris. The initial squadron of corvettes I built at the beginning of my last playthrough was still mostly in service at the end and they were some of the most deadly ships in the galaxy thanks to refits and upgrades, including role changes from "this is my primary attack/defense fleet" to "these are my patrol/quick deployment raiders" to "these are my stealthy flankers/backstabbers".
Idk practically impossible for a ship to last that long in that game.
To be fair, I was playing with friends. We formed a federation so that none of us ever had to fight alone and we were all boosting each others' economies and tech. And even then we were picking our fights carefully so every war was more of a curbstomp
i created a ship type back in the day, it was meant to be a super high speed single shot sniper type. It would fly in real fast, at some small % of light fire its main gun and retreat. But i eventually found the idea stale but didnt want to scrap the model, so i repurposed it into a long range scout and reccon ship. The big centerline gun went away and was replaced with all the things you need for snooping about, also the ships speed was reduced, still very fast in sublight though.
Another design i have is an "old class" that was brought up to modern spec through a joint effort with my stories main good guys and its ally. The plot was ancient hull close to a century old stripped of its old tech and entirely rebuilt with new engines and a vastly better weapon loadout going from storage to a heavy brawler able to meet and defeat any ship of its class
It's just cool to roll up in an older looking ship, have your opponents scoff and laugh.. til they get wiped because while it looks old, it has all the modern bells and whistles.
That's why, even though star trek is essentially dead, the Miranda class is my favorite ship design of the series.
There's also backwards refits in some scenarios. Where an advanced tech is lost or not maintainable and they cobble something together to keep it working. I think battle tech had some of this kinda activity
Some fun examples from Star wars versions of the hammerhead class cruiser, Invincible class Dreadnought and Aurek fighter we're in use until the Ruusan Reformation and even after that would remain in service in the planetary defence fleets of outlying systems until at least the clone wars each seeing a service life of over 3000 years, and of course I can't not mention the classic Dreadnought heavy cruiser it's whole lore is about it being a old ship that is so ubiquitous in so many factions navies that it can't be properly replaced and has to keep receiving upgrades and refits and of course many navies having their own special refits and redesigns of the ship
I never knew about the Essex class living so long. Seeing the Images of Lexington from her 1944 state to her 1991 state is kind of surreal.
Loving any opportunity to bring up The Expanse.
The C-130 is another great example of a long lived carrier aircraft that has received tons of refits
Traveller RPG has an excellent system for building and updating ships. What i like in these books is how easily quantifiable the data are and how easy it is to custom the rulesets to fit my games. I love a bit more the 2300AD (latest edition) ship building rules, because they allow for more detailed first steps although they pale in comparison to the variety of weapons of MgT2Ed.
Can't remember where it was said might have been a space dock video. If you want to make any piece of equipment more believable cover it in bolt on upgrades. Random wiring harness pipes and junctions running around the interior, different screens crowding each other, crowded ui with slow overstretched processes that can't handle all the new tasks given to them. Only if something proves its worth does it get the luxury of having all the new systems properly integrated.
Of the 24 Essex class ships, four of the carriers: Yorktown, Hornet, Lexington, and Intrepid, have been preserved as museum ships.
Very good military information and advice for Outer Space and terrestrial environment yes
As far as real world ships, I think the DDG 51 Arleigh Burke class would have been a really good example. Not only have the design undergone 4 major block changes (Flight I, II, IIA, & III) plus numerous smaller improvements (upgraded gun, select RMMV garage, etc) but the class is also undergoing retrofits to add some of the Flight III capability to select IIAs and its a great example of retrofits sometimes being much clunkier (and potentially less net effective) than even new build upgrades of an old design. And its been done on a smaller scale over the whole class (adding MK38 remote guns, NULKA, SeaRAM, etc).
For scifi, there's some nice examples in several series of this upgrade including Jay Allan's Crimson Worlds where the ships see a lot of weapons and ECM changes or Evan Currie's Into the Black where the North American Confederation upgrades both their Odyssey class with the latest weapons and also retrofits their more powerful and advanced Heroics with weapons from the Odyssey that their allies originally considered... insane to mount in the hull of a ship when they built them for the NAC. Thinking about it now, I think every scifi series I've read and consider good has this trend, so nice to see something so fundamental baked into the foundation of such things.
You gotta love the refit button in Stellaris. Sure as hell beats upgrading several 100+ ship fleets by hand.
Do you mean building.
@@mryellow6918 No, ships that are already built have to be upgraded with better tier equipment as you get more research done. The refit button makes the fleet travel to the nearest shipyard and start upgrading every ship that has equipment that has upgrades ready.
For fighter sized stuff (relatively) refits and upgrades happen pretty frequently to mobile suits in the Gundam series.
Still one the best ship upgrades, in my opinion is the daedalus class ship asgard upgrades in stargate
Another category where Gundam really goes nuts with the amounts of upgrades and refits across the entire franchise.
2:51 The Lexington is on Display as a Museum Ship in Corpus Christi TX. If you ever get the chance, it is a must see!
I think the best example of a full re-build you could find would be USS West Virginia. It was so badly damaged during the attack on Pearl Harbor that by the time its reconstruction was finished it more resembled its cousins in the also heavily rebuilt Tenessee class than its actual sisters. (Granted the two classes are quite similar, even among the collection of similar-ish ships that made up the standard type battleships)
Other good examples include many early carriers, and not just their designs being overhauled to convert them from freighters, ocean liners, battle cruisers, battleships, and more. HMS Furious was launched with a 457mm canon! And the Japanese Akagi initially had THREE flight decks. Then you have USS Langley having a flight deck bolted to it to make it the first full-deck US carrier (admittedly just a proof of concept prototype, but still), then half of said deck removed to convert it to a seaplane tender once its experimentation was complete.
The TOS Enterprise got a massive refit going into the movie era
Refits have a limit though, one reason we dont have P-51 mustangs with sidewinders under the wings...
But within the limit, we've got the F-15EX which is just some of the coolest shit
I think the Irish airforce has something very much like this, a propeller aircraft with either sidewinder or stinger or something similar.
True, although it depends heavily on the kind of technological advancements that are happening in the setting. If jet engines somehow hadn't been developed, I could see the P-51 still being in service somewhere.
A lot of sci-fi settings don't really have fundamental changes happen to core technologies like propulsion, (especially FTL) weapons, and shields. A lot easier/sensible to keep upgrading the same ship for a century if "new tech" continues to be just an incrementally more refined version of the old tech instead of some new, paradigm-changing system that operates completely differently from what came before.
Tell that to the b52 and the new CAS crop duster prop plane