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Galors were basically jokes is a curious way to diminish their power. But kinda honestly, I agree with Hawke here: can we just not do this?
This is tediously close to arguing about points that don't matter yet because people dislike how other people have voted, and that's kinda.. well, can we just not?
Endorfinator
Awkwardly Social
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You had to deliberately ignore the three battleships it took down to make your "point"
[X] Inline Deflector (-Internal Space)
Scope creep would be picking the engineering hull. If we do something like the NX with its warp nacelles or take the smallest option for secondary hulls we will be pretty on track. Then it's just pick labs.
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Jensaarai
Sing Victory Everlasting
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Advantage of the engineering hull would be more space for Science stuff, like labs and computers.
I responded to someone, and they asked a question. I answered their question, and someone else took umbrage. I'm happy to let it lie unless someone tries to relitigate the issue. I just simply asked that the argument of scope creep not be thrown out as useless by people. Because it is a valid arguement.
Because it was legitimately impressive. The point still stands the ship itself for its titanic might was still deeply flawed and had we not tried to slam every experimental and prototype we could onto it instead of picking and choosing, the ship would have performed better and likely have been made in numbers, instead of the only initial tranche being present and the design needing to have the Defiant treatment to be viable. Which is bad design. The Ulhaan, the Endeavor, heck even the Ambassador never needed such. The fact the Century did means it was a flawed albeit powerful design.
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[X] Inline Deflector (-Internal Space)
[X] Blister Forward Deflector (200,000 -> 220,000 Tons)
Fine with either of these.
[X] Blister Forward Deflector (200,000 -> 220,000 Tons)
Fine with either of these.
Keep in mind, the class came out the YEAR before the war started, and with the battle of Bajor, the Federation-Klingon Alliance was able to hold the Wormhole! That HAS to shorten the war which means that the time for the Federation Admiralty to realize the potential of the Class and approve further work on it during the war was likely fairly minimal. It might have also honestly been a 'Too late to be decisive' situation. Starfleet was likely still feeling out the class when the war started, and with us being able to hold the wormhole, the war was likely shorter. The work may have also been predicated on lessons from the Dominion War and with the surviving Centuries in particular.
The point is that the post makes clear that WE DID IT! It may have taken Starfleet a bit to see it, but we made something amazing. Yes, it was flawed, but it worked better than anyone thought it would! We blew the Sovereign, as much as I love my Heavy Metal Slender Queen, out of the damned water. Yes, it had issues, but we did something amazing.
I have no doubt that the ship is impressive. I still view it(the initial design) as a failure because it was too good to risk and too hard to recreate to risk. It falls into the same problem the IJN had with the Yamato. Amazing ship that could do wonderful things, but we can't make more, at least not without great difficulty and it has some serious design flaws, some of which were never and could never be fixed. It's still an impressive ship. But i always feel as if we could have done better, you know?
I think this is the major point of difference - people going for the inline deflector think that we don't need that extra space for the survey ship to do its job, and making it smaller allows us to make more of them, because we will be wanting to build lots of them. Given that it's intended to be doing surveys and science stuff relatively close to friendly systems, I think we can afford to make it a little smaller in order to get more of them. Let the Explorer have the truly chonky science labs.
And can the discussion of stuff from the previous thread please die? It's a derail that also manages to be disrespectful to the people voting.
Jensaarai
Sing Victory Everlasting
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There's a difference between a large engineering hull adding more internal space, and the inline deflector taking away from the saucer hull's internal space.
If we don't go for a true secondary hull, or go for a minimalist hull like the Thunderchild's, the inline deflector just removes space we could've had for Science stuff.
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[X] Engineering Section
The problem is you use the work FAILURE.
You use the Japanese Yamato or the Defiant as a comparison. you take every chance and effort to knock the vessel down, while offering only the bare 'It was impressive but...'. You say we can't make more when they made a shitload, and even in the beginning threw out 4 when she was still a 'Failure'. She may have very well changed the course of the Dominion War, and that was when she was a 'Failure'. By the mid 2380s, the Century was Starfleet's Main Heavy Cruiser. Either the flaws were worked out, or they were worked out when the 'prototype' systems were standardized in the subsiquent production.
I don't know if we could have done better, but we did something amazing with what we had, and our Heavy Metal Queen is officially the meanest bitch we built. Our baby took out several smaller vessels before taking out 6 times it's mass in Dominion Battleship.
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[X] Inline Deflector (-Internal Space)
slybrarian
Creature of Fable
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[X] Inline Deflector (-Internal Space)
Once we see the engineering options we can think about adding more space to compensate, but I don't feel like getting locked into it.
Once we see the engineering options we can think about adding more space to compensate, but I don't feel like getting locked into it.
Yes. And I think that we likely have space to remove, and still have enough for the ship to do its job.
StriderInCosmos
Wanderer in the Worldsea
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I've been brought around by the arguments for an inline deflector. We've got a solid amount of space, more than half that of an NX-class, and as large as the deflector is, there's no reason at the moment to doubt that the hoped-for scientific equipment and sensors would be otherwise lost or diminished in some capacity.
Jensaarai
Sing Victory Everlasting
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I just don't see a reason why to do so, when we voted for the advantage of space that the full saucer offers, when even things like the blister deflector are right there for no cost to room.
Not to imply that voting to spend internal space to keep costs down is an invalid vote, but do we get another chance to add more internal space to the ship? Every other time we've gone straight from deflector placement to nacelle configuration/impluse engines then internals.
[X] Inline Deflector (-Internal Space)
This class is not meant to replace the NX's and we shouldn't treat it that way. The NXs, and pretty much any good multi-role ship, is expensive, which limits the number we can make. It's fine that they're like that, but we also need some cheap and quick ships to fill in the gaps that our fewer but more flexible ships aren't able to cover because they can't be everywhere. This is meant to be a ship class that is meant to follow after the NX's have done their initial charting and spend weeks or even months in one system mapping it to the smallest detail and finding every possible point of interest which might (probably) got missed in the initial quick look. In order to do that we're going to need lots of these ships, because space is big. The Federation might be new and only a tiny fraction the size it will grow to, but there are a astronomical number of stars that need surveying. I don't think many of us are considering the sheer scale of what needs to be surveyed. There are roughly 130 stars within 20 light years of Earth (about 2 months at Warp 5), with about 100 of them estimated as having star systems. Multiply this by the 5 Federation members and you get 650 stars within 20 light years of the Federation core worlds. Assuming each survey takes about two months (some will be faster, some slower, and travel time varies, so two months to average things out) then it will take about a dozen ships 9 years to survey all of them. But the problem is that space is 3 dimensional and increasing the radius gives an exponential growth in the number of stars needing a visit. Expanding to 50 light years gives you 1800 stars with an estimated 1300 star systems near Earth alone and 9000 for the Federation as a whole (although I'm sure most of the Federation worlds are within 50 light years of each other, but it's still going to be thousands), it would take that dozen ships over a century to survey all of them. Assuming 2 months per survey mission a dozen survey ships can do 72 full surveys. We need at least at least two dozen of these ships just to cover the stars right next to the Federation, and probably about 100 to reasonably survey each system within about 6 months travel time (at warp 5, at warp 7, 50 light years is 2 months).
TLDR: We can't afford to make this too expensive because we need a lot of them, and the numbers needed is only going to grow because space is big. Even a small cost savings matters at the scales we're talking about.
This class is not meant to replace the NX's and we shouldn't treat it that way. The NXs, and pretty much any good multi-role ship, is expensive, which limits the number we can make. It's fine that they're like that, but we also need some cheap and quick ships to fill in the gaps that our fewer but more flexible ships aren't able to cover because they can't be everywhere. This is meant to be a ship class that is meant to follow after the NX's have done their initial charting and spend weeks or even months in one system mapping it to the smallest detail and finding every possible point of interest which might (probably) got missed in the initial quick look. In order to do that we're going to need lots of these ships, because space is big. The Federation might be new and only a tiny fraction the size it will grow to, but there are a astronomical number of stars that need surveying. I don't think many of us are considering the sheer scale of what needs to be surveyed. There are roughly 130 stars within 20 light years of Earth (about 2 months at Warp 5), with about 100 of them estimated as having star systems. Multiply this by the 5 Federation members and you get 650 stars within 20 light years of the Federation core worlds. Assuming each survey takes about two months (some will be faster, some slower, and travel time varies, so two months to average things out) then it will take about a dozen ships 9 years to survey all of them. But the problem is that space is 3 dimensional and increasing the radius gives an exponential growth in the number of stars needing a visit. Expanding to 50 light years gives you 1800 stars with an estimated 1300 star systems near Earth alone and 9000 for the Federation as a whole (although I'm sure most of the Federation worlds are within 50 light years of each other, but it's still going to be thousands), it would take that dozen ships over a century to survey all of them. Assuming 2 months per survey mission a dozen survey ships can do 72 full surveys. We need at least at least two dozen of these ships just to cover the stars right next to the Federation, and probably about 100 to reasonably survey each system within about 6 months travel time (at warp 5, at warp 7, 50 light years is 2 months).
TLDR: We can't afford to make this too expensive because we need a lot of them, and the numbers needed is only going to grow because space is big. Even a small cost savings matters at the scales we're talking about.
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