I do want to keep it sorta cheap if we basically got a blank check, it could hint that more can be built in bulk and I do like the idea of having fleets of ships instead of a couple of super ships filled to the brim with guns and torpedoes and other stuff.
It's mostly in how fast one can spin up the required infrastructure. Senla, your main fleetyard, has a total of twenty five slips suitable for Guardian- five of those will probably be occupied with the second or third tranch of Iron Roads, five more with that year's batch of Gold Roads, some number of them will probably be tied up regular maintenance of existing ships, and then there's however many end up getting occupied by the refit programs.
But we don't even know what we need. All solid info on possible ops we have is on the scavenged birds of preys and warbirds, and for those the Star Seeker was enough.
Gabarghl. So i guess we just build a super warship with all the guns and then look smugly at Finance when they fail to budget for it.
Just to clarify, Star Seeker could absolutely bushwhack small patrols of GS-1 BoPs; the things are tiny comparitively, and she could definitely clobber a BC-1 Warbird over the head from cloak if it's not expecting it, but note that she came within
inches of losing to a full-up Warbird in a straight fight,
after said Warbird heavily depleted its shields going on a straight-line course through the nebula. Star Seeker as she is can absolutely punch up against technologically superior opponents, between her cloak, size, and substantial torpedo battery, but if she got jumped by, say, Klingons, and had to take them in a straight fight she'd be in
serious trouble.
Granted, the already planned refit when she gets back is definitely going to make her quite formidable, even with a minimal investment, but even then, Star Seekers are
very expensive to build. So far, the Guardian has been pretty restrained; there's definitely some eye-popping at the costs of the new weapon systems but with the sheer gain in capabilities even the most miserly penny-pinching bean-counter can't really argue against them, much. "Welcome to the new normal" is the sentiment, there, so in a large part, you are currently
establishing what a reasonable weapons budget looks like, in the face of the significant price hike.
@Mechanis where is the Nacelle ring mounted? I'd like to propose a fairly light secbat that can provide some all round coverage, but the aft guns need to be able to shoot behind the big fat ring and I'm not sure how far back they need to be.
Ring is currently not super static, and may be shifted forward or back depending on final configuration; rest assured that I will be excercising reasonable consideration in where arrays are placed. That said,
currently 1D, 2C and 3C are expected to have the most coverage for the rear aspect, while 1C and 3B have somewhat lesser arc coverage there (because some part of the ship is in the way, generally.)
I
am building out the actual model as things get voted for, after all, so the exact dimensions are still rather variable. Though obviously I do have some idea on where things will be going.
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