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Starfleet Design Bureau

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[X] Expanded Shuttlebay

I'd love to do a big bulk hauler - in a dedicated design intended to succeed the Archer class. In ten to twenty years, it will absolutely be time to roll out a new platform to fill that role.
 
Reminder - if we wanted a cargo hauler we should have optimized Efficient Cruise. We didn't, we chose MAXIMUM cruise. That's first responder speed.

Fouredged Sword said:
And if we go cargo and construction with this ship I could see it escorting like 4 Archers to the Frontline to build some really impressive infrastructure. The Archer is vulnerable, but they can all hide in the phaser coverage of a Federation and feel pretty secure from ambush.



That's not a peacetime capability though. I think the problem is, in my mind, we already MET the tender requirement for fleet anchor. That's done. We could go for extra credit double plus, but I worry if we do so at the expense of the other half of the tender, deep capability in a peacetime need.
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Shuttles are a peacetime capability' responding to natural disasters.

ChaddicusMaximus said:
When Your healer is also your DPS.....
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Errantry class, nameship Paladin
Tempest Warden said:
I favor the increased shuttle bay both for the fact of fleet anchor with fleet tender function. But also for it's increased capability for evacuation stuff.

Also in general I really wanted the full hanger from earlier but that lost and this is the next best thing. I just really want the increase.
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Agree.

We keep saying we need synergy with both our brief and our modules. Shuttles? Shuttles are synergy.
 
Something else to consider with the expanded cargo bay, given that it'd let us take a decent bite out of the Starfleet exclusive extra-sized cargo segment (stuff that could be hauled by civilian bulk haulers if not for the time requirements/sensitivity)

At warp 5.2 (it's efficient cruising speed) the Archer would take 194 days or 6.378 months to transit 75ly - one edge of the Federation from the core.
At warp 6.8 (the efficient cruising speed of the Federation) it'd take 87 days or 2.86 months for the same distance, and at warp 7.4 (max cruise) it'd be 67 days or 2.2 months.

We'd have a much, much faster and much, much less fragile hauler for Starfleet critical resources, which would let the Archer get about to civilian infrastructure/rebuilding at a much greater pace. Even if only efficient cruise was used it'd still be 2.23x faster than the Archer, and god knows how many times safer/more able to fight.
 
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The shuttlebay option would give the Federation 4 extra shuttles and 2 worker bees, bringing the number of shuttles up to 8 - the Miranda-class, which this ship and many others will likely be operating alongside (and most likely be outnumbered by) will carry as many. That means the shuttlebay is just duplicating what another ship (one produced in far greater numbers) can do, and what most future ships will likely be able to do by default - consigning the Federation to a niche that will rapidly close, unlike the expanded cargo bay, which outside of supermassive ships like the Ambassador and Galaxy classes of nearly a century later will likely never be fulfilled by default by a ship simply existing.
 
I'm going to hold off on voting because I genuinely think either option would be good, and therefore don't actually care which one wins. I'm more interested in other modules we might get access to, and how they can be synergized with what we already have on hand.
 
Tank man said:
Something else to consider with the expanded cargo bay, given that it'd let us take a decent bite out of the Starfleet exclusive extra-sized cargo segment (stuff that could be hauled by civilian bulk haulers if not for the time requirements/sensitivity)

At warp 5.2 (it's efficient cruising speed) the Archer would take 194 days or 6.378 months to transit 75ly - one edge of the Federation from the core.
At warp 6.2 (the efficient cruising speed of the Federation) it'd take 87 days or 2.86 months for the same distance, and at warp 7.4 (max cruise) it'd be 67 days or 2.2 months.

We'd have a much, much faster and much, much less fragile hauler for Starfleet critical resources, which would let the Archer get about to civilian infrastructure/rebuilding at a much greater pace.
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you under shot the Efficient cruising speed on the Feddie. It's 6.8.
 
Here is the thing, there is never going to be a lot of federations, its a big expensive ship. It being able to do cargo doesn't change that.

Personally I think shuttles would be more useful, doubly so since we are attaching them to a fast ship, making the shuttles more useful on the federation then the miranda for fast response to disasters/evacuations/emergency construction/repair.

More cargo only useful for construction jobs for colonies, not so much for a fleet anchor as well as the shuttles can help for search and rescue, scanning large areas become easier when you have a squad of shuttles adding their sensors to the task.

So I gotta go for the shuttlebay since I dont want to take the federation out of its main role in the frontier.

[X] Expanded Shuttlebay
 
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darkstarling said:
Reminder - if we wanted a cargo hauler we should have optimized Efficient Cruise. We didn't, we chose MAXIMUM cruise. That's first responder speed.
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Do you think that there are many emergencies which cannot be helped by bringing them a lot of stuff very fast?

Besides, if the only thing the ship is actually good at is emergency response, then we get the Radiant.

darkstarling said:
We keep saying we need synergy with both our brief and our modules. Shuttles? Shuttles are synergy.
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What will they synergize with?

They make us a better warship, certainly. They add very little peacetime utility on their own, so we need other modules that synergize with shuttles.
 
zac1 said:
Here is the thing, there is never going to be a lot of federations, its a big expensive ship. It being able to do cargo doesn't change that.

Personally I think shuttles would be more useful, doubly so since we are attaching them to a fast ship, making the shuttles more useful on the federation then the miranda for fast response to disasters/evacuations/emergency construction/repair.

More cargo only useful for construction jobs for colonies, not so much for a fleet anchor as well as the shuttles can help for search and rescue, scanning large areas become easier when you have a squad of shuttles adding their sensors to the task.

So I gotta go for the shuttlebay.

[X] Expanded Shuttlebay
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I mean, I don't see why the Federation can't build them in significant numbers, especially if they see reason to keep making runs of them. 8 ships a run for 5 or 6 runs adds up.

An Archer but twice as fast and also the toughest ship in the fleet is something worth the cost.
 
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zac1 said:
More cargo only useful for construction jobs for colonies, not so much for a fleet anchor as well as the shuttles can help for search and rescue, scanning large areas become easier when you have a squad of shuttles adding their sensors to the task.
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No, it's explicitly not.

This literally says it will be providing a transport and logistical capacity lacking in the fleet outside of the Archer class, which has to do double duty building and rebuilding civilian infrastructure alongside acting as a high (compared to civilian ships) speed bulk cargo hauler.

"The second option is to specialise towards the transport of extra-large cargo such as finished infrastructure or volatiles requiring heavy containment, which as a capability is in short supply in the fleet outside of the slow Archer-class and its bulk transport role"

We'd be both freeing up Archers to do that job and massively speeding up our fleet train.
 
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Tank man said:
"The second option is to specialise towards the transport of extra-large cargo such as finished infrastructure or volatiles requiring heavy containment, which as a capability is in short supply in the fleet outside of the slow Archer-class and its bulk transport role"
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Yeah but this isnt a cheap ship that can be made in bulk, so the utility is lost when you got 20 federations spread out across hundreds of lightyears from one another.
 
zac1 said:
Yeah but this isnt a cheap ship that can be made in bulk, so the utility is lost when you got 20 federations spread out across hundreds of lightyears from one another.
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Spread out across hundreds of light-years is exactly where you want your logistics ships anyway.

And Starfleet only HAS a couple of hundred ships. 20 ships is a lot of ships.

zac1 said:
when you need hundreds of them to make a dent in a useful capacity.
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I am pretty sure every single one would be noticable capacity. Self defending cargo transport is literally a capability no other ship in our fleet possessed.
 
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zac1 said:
Yeah but this isnt a cheap ship that can be made in bulk, so the utility is lost when you got 20 federations spread out across hundreds of lightyears from one another.
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If your stance is that we'll never be able to build enough to really spread them out then shuttles makes even less sense. It's okay if you don't have a lot of them but they can be used to rapidly move high value cargo. It's much less okay if they're all emergency first responders and you don't have enough to position them where they can actually respond to things in a timely manner.

If you think that we won't have many of them and we should spec into emergency response, you're essentially targeting the failed Radiant class? Why?
 
zac1 said:
Yeah but this isnt a cheap ship that can be made in bulk, so the utility is lost when you got 20 federations spread out across hundreds of lightyears from one another.
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Not particularly, we went with a very high max cruise (and high economical cruise), they'll be able to cover that distance in a very short time.

Meanwhile 4 extra shuttles and 2 worker bees don't give us anything the Miranda or future ships in general can't provide. Hell if you've only got a few Feddies spread out over incredible distances what good will a bunch of low warp shuttles do it? They won't be able to cover half the ground an equivalent cost of Miranda's could.
 
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