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Starfleet Design Bureau

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Cavalier said:
We should probably not talk ourselves into making a general cruiser after selecting a science vessel. Spending a lot of industry on weapons and impulse engines would be contrary to our purposes. Going with the full saucer might save industry in the long run by avoiding the need for a secondary hull, while the sphere offers the lowest cost. Working toward a half-saucer with a secondary hull and full torpedo and phaser armament is something more like the utilitarian cruiser needed to replace the Stingray-class.
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I agree that people should keep in mind intended doctrinal roles and technological capacity when designing a spacecraft as well as important factors such as ease of mass production, even if this seems like it might be a futile way of thinking sometimes.
 
Nyvis said:
This is not how Star Trek goes. You don't get to let people die because you were waiting on a patrol ship to answer the call in your place. You don't get to choose that the science anomaly you're investigating is peaceful. You don't get to carefully curate your disasters so there's always better ships to answer them.

Sure, this isn't a large exploration cruiser and this will limit how multipurpose it can be, and it definitely should be weighted towards its primary function. But the idea that it will never answer a distress call is totally out of touch with the crap the galaxy throw at us and need us to react to.
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Let's be fair here. The only times a survey/dedicated science ship has ever gotten involved with a dangerous event in canon was because of one of four things:
1. Our warp drive malfunctioned
2. Our scientists are stuck
3. Weird Shit happened
4. It's a trap

And, excluding 4 as it doesn't count, what did our intrepid ship do? Wait for backup and, in the mean time, use its significant science ability to figure out what went wrong so that when back up arrives, it is (hopefully) a relatively easy fix.

So yeah. It kind of is how Star Trek goes. The shenanigans the Enterprise gets up to are supposed to be the weird outliers, not the every day, especially within starfleet controlled borders.

It is our explorers that need to be prepared for all the crap the universe can throw at it.
 
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Alectai said:
Again, Half-Saucers do not have less space than the Orb, they have the same amount. The difference is that their base cost is 50% higher.

The upside is that ORB is a sitting duck against anything that breathes on it wrong, in exchange for being insanely cheap, while the Half-Saucer at least has excellent maneuverability
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A dedicated noncombat survey vessel is going to be a sitting duck even if you add a bit of maneuverability to it since you're presumably going to want durable and reliable warp drives over fast ones, defenses tuned towards dealing with space weather rather than space combat, and weapons intended for deterring the occasional space orca and doing a bit of mining or something.

Adding maneuverability is unlikely to make it survivable against anything that could beat it already in the first place.
 
Mgunh1 said:
if we maximise science as much as possible while keeping costs down, you can simply field two sphere survey ships for the cost of one full saucer and get equal or better results.
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This is not how industry scaling works. Most of the cost is in the warp drive, nacelles, deflector, impulse engines, and weapons. A 2 point difference in hull cost so we can fit enough medical bays so that it can have a second role as a hospital ship and an extra science lab and computer so that it is really good at science is not going to come close to covering the cost of a second ship, but those extra capabilities will make it noticeably better at the job it is supposed to do.

We don't need a science ship to be as cheap as possible, because it is not the workhorse of the fleet and doesn't have to be built in the greatest numbers. A little extra cost to increase flexibility and effectiveness while not going all the way to heavily armed multi-role explore means that Starfleet can get maximal use out of the ship while still being able to afford more hulls than they can afford of the big multi role ships. The Full Saucer option is 200,000 tons, smaller than the canon NX let alone our NX, while the Sphere is 120,000 tons, or the size of the Stingray.
 
[X] Full Saucer (Industry: 4)

Jensaarai said:
Only prototype tech it might have is the new type-1 phasers. Everything else has started moving into mass production.
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I don't know where you're getting that? While the non-phaser new tech is noted as having started the process for mass production, it's noted that we still need to field-test the final prototypes first before that can go ahead.
 
Strunkriidiisk said:
I don't know where you're getting that? While the non-phaser new tech is noted as having started the process for mass production, it's noted that we still need to field-test the final prototypes first before that can go ahead.
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Ah, you're right. I had misremember Sayle's post about the phasers being available for prototyping as they were the only prototypes we needed to worry about.

...that honestly makes me dislike the sphere even more, tbh. I don't want to cheap out on the primary hull for something that might be testing one or more prototypes.
 
This is going to be another contentious vote I can tell. I think that a dedicated science/survey ships warrants a full saucer section. It's going to be a limited production run and we want it to have the best facilities possible, this isn't the place to skimp. Save the economical options for the utility crusier.
 
If we're throwing advanced tech on the ship or doing sensitive research, monitoring science, or scanning places an enemy doesn't want us to have good scans of. I could see reason for someone to try and jump one. Even if it's just to delay a project by killing key members or causing loss of the most recent data.

We also don't have a lot of hulls capable of science support so ignoring survivability seems odd to me. Once we crank out 30 utility ships I'd be a lot more comfortable with the assumption any ship we make is going to be safe all the time.
 
Endorfinator said:
Save the economical options for the utility crusier.
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I'm not even sure I'll want to skimp on the utility cruiser, because that will need to be our workhorse starship for doing stuff all across the Federation. I think that's gonna need to have a pretty robust design in terms of function and operational lifetime, and I'm not sure cheaping out will give us that.
 
2 science labs, an auxiliary computer core and an expanded shuttle bay, 1torpedo launcher 1 fore and aft phaser array, small impulse engines.
 
Strunkriidiisk said:
Full saucer being better for basically everything capability-wise irritates my aesthetic sense. I don't want to constantly ape the most basic Fed aesthetic.
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Keeps seeming to be the case, pancake isn't bad, but I hope that at least whenever we get pancake the QM includes some sort of nonstandard secondary hull and nacelle option. There are enough saucers with two nacelles in cannon tbh.
 
[X] Half-Saucer (Industry: 3)
this is star trek, science ships are going to have to deal with some wild crazy and dangerous shit. So the extra cost is worth being better able to deal with it.
 
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