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If the Low-Power Warp Core was winning then I'd be tempted to vote for that and the Inline Deflector, to produce a ship which cannot sprint at warp, but is much cheaper, and can definitely hit Manoeuvrability: Very High on a single Type-3 Impulse Nacelle. With a frontal Rapid Fire Launcher and two Phaser Banks we'd have something that can serve as a fleet escort very capably in a pinch, and be a great cheap science platform otherwise. Almost a replacement to the Selachii really, just with lots of added usefulness in peacetime service.

But given there is no chance of us not voting for a secondary hull, it feels like the Inline Deflector is just compromising the design when this is already inevitably going to be a larger ship; more of a light cruiser than a escort-sized vessel. So I feel we may as well produce a good light cruiser, given we'll need to stick two Type-3 Impulse Thrusters in it anyway. Saying that, I am a bit worried about the thruster vote and people suddenly deciding to use only a single engine and leaving us high and dry with an underpowered ship.

But I will simply bide my time for now, and prepare for that fight when it comes...
 
I mean in terms of cost to warp speed it seems like lower powered warp core is more efficient than the inline deflector?

It's 2 cost vs - 0.4 Warp speed (1 cost per - 0.2 speed)
And
4 cost vs - 0.6 Warp Speed (1 cost per - 0.15 speed)

So it seems odd to me that of the two contentious options we could be having, it's blister vs inline instead of high powered vs low powered.
 
Given what Sayle has previously mentioned about the size/complexity of secondary hull integrations (namely that truly complex ones are the providence of the late TMP/TNG era, iirc), the standard warp core option should, imo, push that timeline forward a bit out of necessity (since it's 41.66% of the mass of the saucer, verses the ~28.5% of the Excalibur)
 
Skippy said:
I feel we may as well produce a good light cruiser, given we'll need to stick two Type-3 Impulse Thrusters in it anyway. Saying that, I am a bit worried about the thruster vote and people suddenly deciding to use only a single engine and leaving us high and dry with an underpowered ship.

But I will simply bide my time for now, and prepare for that fight when it comes...
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So I freely admit I'm going to be arguing to only have one thruster.
We've had multiple chances now to keep working on the small specialised ideally cheap ship requested, and we keep rejecting everything of the choices that let us do that.

And its sounding like you're gearing up for the argument of "because we already made it bigger and more expensive, we need to keep making it more expensive to justify that!"

The blister doesn't even give us more internal room. It specifically says that the bulk of the deflector is still on the main hull, it's just extra cost and weight that's going to make you want to add more cost and weight for an entire .2 sprint.

10k less mass is 20k less thruster power needed for max maneuvering. And one less thruster and one less blister is getting close to half of that rapid fire launcher paid for.
I know the engineering hull makes it impossible to hit max, but medium high is honestly good enough.

If we keep going max cost, I'm going to start arguing for a normal torpedo instead of a rfl to try to stop this blowing out.

But hey, I just woke up. I'll listen to your arguments at the time, though it feels like scope creep right now.
But if I read penny wise pound foolish again parroted to justify scope creep I'm going to throw something :p
 
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To be fair to the 'maximalists' here, we ARE entering an uncertain era with the sketchy boarders, some Klingons maybe not taking the hint, the Romulans coming out of their hidey hole, and us eventually hitting the TOS Series/Movies Shenanigans and bullshittery.

So while we can probobly afford to make this beauty somewhat cheap, we DO need to keep in mind that this ship might be dealing with firefights.
 
Skippy said:
But given there is no chance of us not voting for a secondary hull,
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I really don't think anyone should be counting on a secondary hull vote after this one.

Sayle said:
Alternatively if performance is something you are unwilling to compromise on then an engineering hull can be added. Much like the blister deflector this would primarily constitute a substantial mass addition, but it would also provide some extra interior space for engineering modules and a shuttlebay.
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Arguably this ship has decidedly less need for maximum manouverability than it does for sprint speed (though obviously you still want it Reasonably high)
 
Golgotha said:
So I freely admit I'm going to be arguing to only have one thruster.
We've had multiple chances now to keep working on the small specialised ideally cheap ship requested, and we keep rejecting everything of the choices that let us do that.

And its sounding like you're gearing up for the argument of "because we already made it bigger and more expensive, we need to keep making it more expensive to justify that!"

The blister doesn't even give us more internal room. It specifically says that the bulk of the deflector is still on the main hull, it's just extra cost and weight that's going to make you want to add more cost and weight for an entire .2 sprint.

10k less mass is 20k less thruster power needed for max maneuvering. And one less thruster and one less blister is getting close to half of that rapid fire launcher paid for.
I know the engineering hull makes it impossible to hit max, but medium high is honestly good enough.

If we keep going max cost, I'm going to start arguing for a normal torpedo instead of a rfl to try to stop this blowing out.

But hey, I just woke up. I'll listen to your arguments at the time, though it feels like scope creep right now.
But if I read penny wise pound foolish again parroted to justify scope creep I'm going to throw something :p
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No, what I'm saying is that with the secondary hull and full deflector we need to acknowledge that we've basically decided to design a light cruiser here rather than an escort-sixed ship. That's fine, and Starfleet has a lot of use for good light cruisers - so let's design a good one. We were given a fairly open brief for a reason here.

Trying to economise on combat capability when will end the war with literally only fifteen modern Warp 8 combatants in the entirety of Starfleet is not a wise choice, or even an economical one when you look at Starfleet's needs going into a troubled 23rd century. If we're looking at cost-cutting, then it would be better to ensure Very High Manoeuvrability, and then economise on phaser coverage, which we need vastly less on a more manoeuvrable ship which can turn faster.

If an extra Type-3 Impulse Thruster saves us mounting two extra two phaser banks, for example, then we've essentially saved 3 Cost. If it saves a single phaser bank then it's 1 Cost.

Strunkriidiisk said:
I really don't think anyone should be counting on a secondary hull vote after this one.
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You're misreading the part you quoted; this is talking about adding a secondary hull to the design to fit in a larger warp core. That's what the rest of the paragraph is talking about. Those extra twenty five thousand tons aren't coming from nowhere.
 
Skippy said:
and then economise on phaser coverage, which we need vastly less on a more manoeuvrable ship which can turn faster.
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I figure that if we go for a RFL then 2-3 phaser banks (providing forward/side coverage) should give us a pretty potent fighting fit, an alpha of ~72 (compared to the 78 for the prime universe Constitution) on a cost of 20-24 (compared to the 30.25 of the second tranche Excalibur's weapons fit).

Though I suppose we could always sub out the RFL for the standard type 1, that'd bring the cost down to 8-12 but the alpha down to 36 - or about 87.8% of the Newton's)
 
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Skippy said:
No, what I'm saying is that with the secondary hull and full deflector we need to acknowledge that we've basically decided to design a light cruiser here rather than an escort-sixed ship. That's fine, and Starfleet has a lot of use for good light cruisers - so let's design a good one. We were given a fairly open brief for a reason here.
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I see your argument, and while I'm not agreeing yet I understand your point.

But I'll also point out that the vote for the blister at least is still fully competitive, so we haven't gone all in on our theoretical light cruiser yet.


(Also this really should have been a plan vote, but I got in too late to try to get that working)
 
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Skippy said:
No, what I'm saying is that with the secondary hull and full deflector we need to acknowledge that we've basically decided to design a light cruiser here rather than an escort-sixed ship. That's fine, and Starfleet has a lot of use for good light cruisers - so let's design a good one. We were given a fairly open brief for a reason here.
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I think a dedicated light cruiser is a good idea, and I want to design one as soon as possible, but this isn't a good project to do that.

We want our light cruisers to be cheap (or at least cost-efficient) and produced in large quantities. Grafting a light cruiser to a dedicated biosciences ship is going to be expensive. And since Starfleet is also asking for a ship to fill a specific niche, it's not going to have a large run of ships anyway.
 
TBH, I think that either one is an extremely valid choice and both could result in a very effective ship. I chose the Blister design, primairly because I didn't want to loose all that lab space in the hull, and a bit because I didn't want the warp speed penalty. I wasn't too worried about the extra cost or weight, because it's currently, 90Kt (without nacelles), with an estimated (10kt - 20Kt) for the nacelles and the type 3 impulse has (150Kt?) thrust.
If we used just 1 type-3 impulse, that would give us a 15/10 (1.5) - 15/11 (1.36) thrust/weight ratio. I can't remember where, but I think it was mentioned somewhere that High and Extremely High maneurvering were 1.5 and 2.0.
If I've remembered all this correctly, then we might be able to reduce the cost by only using 1, as unlike the Excalibur class- this isn't a front line combat ship and "just" high should be good enough to keep it out of trouble.

BTW - I couldn't find the chart with the actual specifications and thrust/weight performance ratios, @Sayle any chance you could have a post in the informational tab where you have tables for the various component? I think it would help a lot with the voting if we can easily look at the deets and not just choose what we think "looks cool", or has "MOAR POWAH!!"
 
I'm pretty sure the weight is final, with nacelles already baked in. The Excalibur's weight was finalised at 180k after we chose the engineering section well before the nacelle vote, and I think it's been the same for every prior ship except when we did weird stuff with quad nacelles.
 
TheShadowDeamon said:
. I chose the Blister design, primairly because I didn't want to loose all that lab space in the hull, and a bit because I didn't want the warp speed penalty.
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Sayle said:
By maintaining the bulk of the deflector in the main hull the vertical space should be kept manageable for the landing system,
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So I'm not saying that we don't free up some space with the blister design, I can't say that because I don't know.
But it does say the the majority of the size of the deflector is still in the main hull, so it's certainly not saving much if at all - I think it's extending it just enough to fit in the full size we otherwise couldn't.

Ebiris said:
I'm pretty sure the weight is final, with nacelles already baked in. The Excalibur's weight was finalised at 180k after we chose the engineering section well before the nacelle vote, and I think it's been the same for every prior ship except when we did weird stuff with quad nacelles.
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I got direct confirmation last update from Sayle that it does not include nacelle mass so far. Which I agree is unusual, but given we could be voting to make this a flying saucer right now makes sense.

Sayle said:
No, they don't include nacelles.
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Unless Sayle is going to go to the extra trouble of drawing the blister to the design... Given the strong lead on a Engineering (Secondary) hull, I'd assume that the blister vote would just shift the deflector to the Secondary hull to save room (and simplify the design layout)

{Edit} *sighs* I was really hoping to not make this a author question... @Sayle, What, then, would be the effect of both an Engineering hull, and the blister deflector vote, on the shape of the ship? Since, apparently, some people assume you'd still put the deflector in a separate blister if we get the Engineering Hull (as it's currently leading)
 
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Golgotha said:
I got direct confirmation last update from Sayle that it does not include nacelle mass so far. Which I agree is unusual, but given we could be voting to make this a flying saucer right now makes sense.
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I really dislike important stuff being hidden away in random conversations, this actually changes my vote since I want to stay under 100k. Inline deflector it is!
 
Sayle said:
By maintaining the bulk of the deflector in the main hull the vertical space should be kept manageable for the landing system, but the additional mass will be a cost factor.
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I just re-read the original post and finally saw this bit, I originally thought it meant that we could have the landing system either way, but that the extra complexity of making it work with the blister would increace the cost. However as I read it properly now and understand that if we want to be able to land then we can't have the blister, I've decided to change my vote. I'm happy that we can still reach warp 7.6 and that max cruise will stay at warp 7.0.

[] Inline Deflector (Maximum Warp: -0.4)
edit - was pointed out i might be mistaken, will change if that's true - will leave blank in the meantime
 
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[x] Inline Deflector (Maximum Warp: -0.4)
[X] Low-Power Warp Core (Maximum Warp: -0.6)

tired of people trying to make this into a combat frigate :sad:
 
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