A large exercise at this point would contribute significantly to their refit projects. I don't see that as a downside, and I don't see the current Indorian feet paradigm as viable anyway so we better get some proper experience in.
What, precisely, do you think is wrong with it?
The best timing would be 1.5y in advance. So if we can sketch a design not for next Snakepit but for the one after, then we should order it that Tactical Operations so that we have the opportunity to modify it once if we don't like the exact requirements that come out. In addition, a 1.5y window is more than enough to predict exactly what research would be available. I can't currently say exactly what research will be available for the later years in our window for the next few designs, so I can't make a year prediction, but I can say that it's beyond the predictable window and therefore we should sit tight this year.
In addition, the sweeping tactical review is an outlier that basically changes everything, and we should order it the turn before we order our next ship design project.
What I mean is... do you know
roughly, to within an accuracy of plus or minus, say, one year, when you think we will have the technologies we need to design a combat frigate you deem satisfactory?
How about a generalist frigate that supplants the
Centaur-A and can, hopefully, do well in fleet actions as a scout/skirmisher?
How about a heavy cruiser of the sort I saw bandied about earlier, the
Victorias and so on?
I know you can't predict with absolute confidence, but can you at least give us a clue? Are we talking about ships for which the technology will probably be ready in 1-2 years? 3-4? 5-7? 9-11?
We were more or less able to do this with the
Kepler-class- to make meaningful projections about when the technology would be ready. I think it would be good to have that out in the open, rather than being in a perpetual state of "wait for it... wait for iiiit... NOW!" when dealing with a subject where there is constant discussion and no small sense of urgency (due to the wave of alarmingly powerful designs coming out of our rivals' shipyards).
We know nothing about the Horizon ships, Horizon planets, Horizon fleet bases, defenses, nothing. A tactical report that includes them will be useless and say nothing. We were barely able to get a useful Diplomatic Posture report! The level of detail here in the readiness report is multiple orders of magnitude beyond that. We simply don't have the information available.
I agree. We wouldn't have been able to get this kind of detail about the Cardassians, either, until
1) The
T'Mir spent years sneaking around their space identifying key Cardassian colonies and installations, AND
2) A defector with high-level knowledge of their military told us virtually everything there was to know about them, at least in broad.
We're just not there yet with respect to the Harmony.
If you want data on the Horizon, might try asking the ISC? Their diplomats apparently recognize Horizon ships on sight, and if they have fought a war in the past they're likely digging out and refreshing old tactical reports as we speak.
True. On the other hand, if the Commonwealthers knew the whereabouts of Harmony worlds and shipyard infrastructure and so on,
AND IF the Commonwealth and Harmony had fought a war in the past, then we would not be having this conversation.
Because the Commonwealthers would have phasered the Harmony until they didn't know up from purple anymore, or failing that, just kept trying until they succeeded. We'd be having a conversation in the aftermath of either the ISC bombing the Harmony into the Stone Age, or the Harmony conquering the ISC.
The fact that both empires are still extant strongly suggests that they never really came to grips with one another.
