Slapping all the prototypes on this one was very much the plan from the start on the basis that for most of those things it was in the least trouble if they didn't pan out. It was a large part of why we went for the survey ship over the other options.
And for this instance, I agree, because we have a massively changed tech pool here. But in the prior quest? Most times it only ended up shooting us in the foot. I won't argue against it here, but slapping the biggest and best everything onto a ship has long been a thing we would and have done which can cause issues.
Now I'm interested in what ships you think didn't work out. Because the only one I can really think of is the Reliant, and she tried to dethrone the Miranda, which is a goddamn beast.
But still, yeah sure, we've taken risks on some prototypes, and they haven't always panned out. But are you really going to try and say that we should be making the cheapest, most minimalist crap, just so we don't have to roll the dice? So the books can be balanced? Where's your sense of adventure? Of risk?
I think all the ships we've designed were awesome, big or small.
Century is the first and easiest to think of. We slapped so many prototypical items on it that if not for a Heroic death it would have easily been considered a non-starter design from the myriad flaws it presented. The cost to make it was utterly immense and difficult and were we actually having to balance a shoestring budget, it'd not be made at all. Like how it wasn't fixed and mass produced until after the Dominion war at all because of how badly we turfed the design from feature creeping it. A design you can't look at and say "WE can use this" without another couple of decades of RnD isn't a great desgin at least imo.
The Ambassador was another. Oh no mistake it was a beast of a ship, and I adored that about it. But it was tetchy and hard to make. If it wasn't for the era of relative peace, it'd also have been a non-starter ship when we had to balance production. Like when we caught up? Amazing for its era but until then it was a boondoggle. Just the Century was worse, as the Ambassador at least worked, just not as well as we wanted in terms of availability.
The last was the Endeavors, but looking back, they were nowhere near as bad as I thought so I am willing to drop that entirely. On the matter of the Reliant, that was less feature creep and more audience tone deafness. We made a decent desgin, but not the one starfleet wanted and it didn't have a pressing need for either at the time.
You all voted for the blister deflector option, so none of you even disagree about how much internal volume to leave in the ship for science and medicine and engineering. It seems like you are disagreeing about what prototype options to take on a vote that we don't have yet and therefore don't know what the tradeoffs are? This just all seems too hypothetical to be arguing about right now.
No, i'm just saying feature creep is a very real threat in this quest as Questers here seem to want to slap all the prototypes/ experimentals onto ships all the time, sometimes needlessly. Which drives up cost and issues substantially. So far we've made some sub-optimal designs choices imo, but it's not gotten bad yet. But a continued disdain towards a very real threat as a buzz word sets an ill precedent.
I will say that in this quest at least, while nothing has outright failed, our tiny ships have done a bit better than the large ones.
I hope that in the preceding options after this deflector vote, there's a little blurb by Sayle explaining why each option could be useful on a Survey ship specifically (even if it doesn't turn out to be accurate). Would help us decide I think, and prevent some arguments if we know more or less why Starfleet 'thinks' the option would be useful on the type of ship we are making.
Not quite. Stingrays were even with the refit too behind the curve to be a threat to the Romulans except in numbers, which we did not get the time to make. They performed poorly and would have been run over without the NX and Thunderchild class giving them a spine to hold against. The Nx were likewise out classed tech wise, but had enough bulk to at least be a credible threat in a one on one. The Thunderchildren were at or near tech parity and massive and were a huge help in keeping us in the fight. Point of fact only one was ever truly destroyed by the enemy, the other if not for taking a critical hit in the second worst place possible, with the worst being the made of explodium engine/AM containment, would have walked off the field fine. As it stands the stingrays still took the worst casualties of the fight and every other class didn't get above a 50% survival rate.
