@Sayle; what capabilities/facilities does a given ship need in order to successfully transport a whale THROUGH TIME AND SPACE in order to save planet earth?
Hey, blame the people who uniformly thought my post was "funny" and not Insightful. Because I wasn't making a joke when I compared this debate to a religious debate. Star Trek is our religion and the Enterprise is the chief deity of the pantheon. Religions are things that people have emotional investments in. I'm stating facts.
At this point you're just using the latest buzzwords to try and get someone in trouble and it's not impressing me.
I feel like you're making light of both religion (which I hold to), and the attachment I and others have to the "classic Enterprise" and such.
Star Trek is not "my religion", it's a series of stories that inspire and entertain me. I know to some people those things are "the same", but to me, they really aren't, and you trying to factually assert that Star Trek and my religious beliefs are one and the same is insulting, frustrating, and demeaning.
@Sayle; what capabilities/facilities does a given ship need in order to successfully transport a whale THROUGH TIME AND SPACE in order to save planet earth?
Engineering to overclock the transporters. Science to develop a technique to re-crystalize Dilithium. Transcendence for a mind that can do the time travel math, but that's a crew issue and down to plot.
Side note, love the compliment to Spock in Picard that his enlightenment is comparable to a borderline ascendent being like the Borg Queen. Turns out only a very small number of people can do temporal math.
Seriously, explorers (which aren't really a class of ship anyway, as I've learned) have pretty consistently been a robust scientific/diplomatic suite taped onto a ferocious asskicker. The Galaxy was basically a cruise liner and a battleship stuck together.
It's more about mission priority. An Explorer needs to be able to kick large amounts of ass, because it's going out into the interstellar wilds all on its onesy and has to be able to get out of any trouble it gets in to, but "kick large amounts of ass" isn't the main focus of the design. In point of fact, Explorers generally aren't tightly focused on any single role, because the mission they're build for might require them to fight off Krenorbian attack ships on Monday, solve the mystery of the Disappearing Moon of Galtraxia on Tuesday, build a long-range communications relay on Wednesday, cure the Dedrotirte Plague on Thursday, negotiate a peace settlement between the Krenorbians and the Xanaxians on Friday, and survive accidentally ending up in the Mirror Universe over the weekend. An Explorer has to do it all, and do it all well, because of how its mission profile works.
A warship, on the other hand, is tightly focused on exactly one thing: killing other people's warships, as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible, and with as little risk to itself as is manageable. Everything other than that is frippery.
anyway, for people who have been wondering why I am... let's say, concerned, about Klingon Battlecruisers, this is a D6 next to a Sagarmatha:
The Klingon D6 is a very substantial ship. It is, in point of fact, used to being the Big Fish in this era. This is why I sincerely doubt the assertion that it will be half the connie's mass. I, in point of fact, assume that it is going to substantially oughweigh any ship we can produce for some time.
Pick Two
[X] Expanded Medical (+2 Science)
[X] Science Labs (+4 Science)
Having expanded the medical bay with a surgical suite and some rarer but useful forms of medical equipment the Constitution should now be better able to deal with all things health-related than the average starship. The science labs will likewise enable the crew to conduct a better-than-usual surface investigation of whatever they might be interested in.
With that done you move to the forward saucer where two sections remain empty. This seems a good place to focus on the non-military factors that will give the design greater longevity or improved conditions. With that in mind you have a few contenders for the floorspace.
First is a stellar dynamics laboratory. As the Constitution has a high cruise speed and range it seems inevitable that it will spend time outside Federation space or on combined exploratory/investigative patrols near the border. Being able to catalogue the local stars and pick out any interesting spaceborne phenomena from range will be a useful feature. By the same virtue a chemistry laboratory would be able to carry out useful experiments and analysis on samples from new worlds or interesting resources the ship may run into, those being life bearing planets or not.
On the other hand if you foresee more of a service life in the Federation interior or as a reaction vessel, then a cargo bay would be useful for ferrying supplies of either the mundane or emergency variety. For some time at least the Constitution will be the fastest vessel in the fleet, and the capability may come in handy. Although if an enhancement to the ship as it stands is more interesting to you then the outer saucer could be used to provide extra crew quarters that would move more of the personnel out of shared quarters and into individual living spaces, though the quality would stop short of the officer accommodations on the upper decks.
Pick Two
[ ] Stellar Dynamics (+2 Science)
[ ] Chemistry (+2 Science)
[ ] Extra Crew Quarters
[ ] Cargo Bay (+3 Cargo)
Can we just stop the whole 'classic Enterprise' topic of discussion, right now? It's not productive, not fun, and just makes the people involved feel worse.
(this isn't saying 'don't discuss what we want from this ship', just 'stop talking about it in the context of the canon Connie')
I'm very much in favour of chemistry given the mention of "By the same virtue a chemistry laboratory would be able to carry out useful experiments and analysis on samples from new worlds or interesting resources the ship may run into, those being life bearing planets or not."
Could go any way on the other choices, for the most part, but chemistry is absolutely needed for the benefits it could bring to the Federation and Starfleet.
Although if an enhancement to the ship as it stands is more interesting to you then the outer saucer could be used to provide extra crew quarters that would move more of the personnel out of shared quarters and into individual living spaces, though the quality would stop short of the officer accommodations on the upper decks.
Extra crew quarters are a must here, I think. Both because of the expanded range of the ship, and because for a ship that's going to be seeing a lot of combat giving the crew the maximum possible comforts is going to be extremely valuable for keeping up morale. I could see a case for any of the other three, but I'm currently leaning either cargo bay or Stellar Dynamics.
Yeah, if you're going on a long term voyage, you don't want to cram your crew in like sardines, so Extra Crew Quarters and Stellar Dynamics feel like the way to go. When not in war, this is a pathfinder and a long range survey cruiser.
I think this is the perfect place to extend an olive branch to the cargo bay mafia, and then I'd say the stellar dynamics lab will probably be most useful long-term! (Also, kudos to our ice cream patriots for amazing results )
hm. that is actually genuinely hard for me. well, at least for three of the options, chem lab can go hang. but Stellar Dynamics, Cargo, and Crew accommodations are all very, very tempting.
Well, one of my picks will be cargo either way, so really it's the dynamics lab or crew quarters that is the choice for me. let's see some arguments on the subject!
My thoughts exactly. SCIENCE and crew comfort. Clawing 12 Science (before synergy and counting the default computer) out of the design is pleasantly surprising.
Chem lab, by virtue of this "By the same virtue a chemistry laboratory would be able to carry out useful experiments and analysis on samples from new worlds or interesting resources"
For all we know the thing holding back the shields is some resource we could uncover with this.
I think the Stellar Cartography (as much for the "oh shit" ability to deal with Negative Space Wedgies) and the Extra Quarters. I like cargo, I do, but giving our folks a bit of extra room seems prudent since we've made this a very long-ranged vessel.
No ice cream maker or bowling alley, so I'll take the crew quarters.
A happier and more rested crew is going to be more effective in combat, so please everyone bear that in mind for the ship's tactical brief as this is the only module that can have any effect on the ship's direct fighting ability.
I'll also go for the cargo bay because we've had three opportunities to put it in and that feels like a hint to me. Could still change that one if I see good arguments, but the crew quarters are locked in for me.