Department of Starship Design (Trek-ish)

[X] Plan This Ain't Royal Caribbean

We do not need crew lounges on such a small ship, not to mention they would be operating with other ships or be working in system within reach of their warp drive that they wont suffer from long hours heck they would likely be operating in shifts so no one is really suffering for very long hours of keeping watch.
 
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I think we should maybe invest in Interphasic Alloy Theory next turn. I think it has the potential to greatly improve our ship's speed and durability, the former thanks to being lighter, the latter mostly because of the mechanics of shields, polarized plating, and Emergency Shields.

Sidenote, horrible idea. Think we could do a dual warp core Hyperspace shunt design if we went for that?
 
I don't understand as to why even put a crew lounges this ship as it is a small patrol or equivalent to a coast guard craft not a Cruiser or an exploration vessel that will be gone away on months but in home systems to patrol planets and stations
 
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I don't understand as to why even put a crew lounges this is a small patrol or equivalent to a coast guard craft not a Cruiser or an exploration vessel that will be gone away on months away but in home systems to patrol planets and stations

Because while they are not needed, our ships are pretty damn large, so even on a for us smaller ship we have the space to add one and i very much like improved moral.

See here a comparison to what we know other races field:
This ship is nearly the mass of the Battlecruisers we faced in the nebula. They were described as being almost half the size of the Star Seeker. The Star Seeker is 480ktons. Hence my estimate of 220ktons for them. The new Furious Winds are 200ktons.

This implies the upgraded Furious Winds are not a tiny ship. If we were building something like the nebula gunboats for local defense, then sure. But these are substantial warships, even if they are small compared to our monster Halberds.
 
Because while they are not needed, our ships are pretty damn large, so even on a for us smaller ship we have the space to add one and i very much like improved moral.

See here a comparison to what we know other races field:
That doesn't change the fact that it's fundamentally a small craft for us. It doesn't necessarily have the cargo space for long term travel given the tritium reactor, it doesn't have the manufacturing suite for long term travel, it doesn't have the science suite to really study things on it's own etc. It's displacement matters vastly less than it's role. A fleet destroyer can displace ~400 tons at the turn of the 20th century and the Forrest Sherman displaced 4k tons at full load. The Zummwalt displaces 16kt.

This refit seems to have been heavily compromised by the fact unlike the Halberds, there really wasn't a consensus on what this thing was supposed to be. I would have been more satisfied with a much heavier combat emphasis at the cost of range for instance. Given we were explicitly told there are plans to build 15 Halberds in 3 tranches for the time being- I've always been operating under the expectation anywhere important is going to have the facilities of a Halberd on hand- given we're spreading them across a single solar system and a handful of colonies we're being slow to launch. The Halberd can travel for 5 years at roughly ~5.33c. 2.5*5.33 gives 13.325 light years assuming we're planning for round trips. There's only 27 star systems within 13 light years of Sol, and it's unlikely we're going to want to exploit every single star system in that range- at least in the immediate future. You definitely *don't* need to garrison every single system given FTL communications and the fact Warp Travel is highly visible with stationary sensors.

The Halberd is faster, has the superior science, engineering, range, self-repair, etc. Then the only thing the Furious Wind is really offering is supplementary combat power and the ability to actually task Halberds to more important things.

EDIT: For further explanation on Halberd production, the three tranches of 5 that are hard confirmed as a minimum will be done in Month 40 of next year. ~4 years. The Star Seeker is unlikely to have returned from her voyage before all 15 confirmed Halberds are working up. And it's highly unlikely that will be the last of the Halberds either.
 
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On the topic of our cargo ship replacement, i wonder if we can put to use the outdated particle or even laser weapons we have left over to upgun them for cheap instead of making new disruptors for them.
 
On the topic of our cargo ship replacement, i wonder if we can put to use the outdated particle or even laser weapons we have left over to upgun them for cheap instead of making new disruptors for them.
We could. But those weapons are so utterly obsolete that there is no justifiable reason to ever use them again when Type 1 beam projectors are so cheap.
 
Then the only thing the Furious Wind is really offering is supplementary combat power and the ability to actually task Halberds to more important things.
That's...what I was going for, at least once hypermaneuverable fighting ship lost out in early votes. Combat power- enough to be a genuinely credible warship in the modern era, even if not minmaxed- but more critically it's the only hull we have in quantity to do miscellaneous odd jobs. So it's going to end up doing them.
 
When we need hulls in the 'water' as badly as we do right now, that's honestly a benefit. We don't need a do everything ship, we need garrison warships that aren't hopelessly obsolete.

So yeah, I see no problems with a no frills light warship.
 
Wait, are you still talking about the Furious Wind (in which case idk wtf you're thinking calling it no frills with transporter, medbay, lab, and lounge), or are you suggesting a no-frills light warship for the new build instead of the far-more-desperately-needed Gold Road replacement because the Furious Wind refit turned out too frilly?
 
Wait, are you still talking about the Furious Wind (in which case idk wtf you're thinking calling it no frills with transporter, medbay, lab, and lounge), or are you suggesting a no-frills light warship for the new build instead of the far-more-desperately-needed Gold Road replacement because the Furious Wind refit turned out too frilly?
The former, but I now realize the plan for the lab and lounge is winning and I thought it wasn't so... fuuuuuu.

Transporter and medbay both are useful extra capability on a warship. Pretty sure I even advocated for it back before I learned that occluding does NOT mean a ship outright lacks transporters.
 
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That's...what I was going for, at least once hypermaneuverable fighting ship lost out in early votes. Combat power- enough to be a genuinely credible warship in the modern era, even if not minmaxed- but more critically it's the only hull we have in quantity to do miscellaneous odd jobs. So it's going to end up doing them.
I don't think it's actually going to be doing that many 'odd jobs' depending. It needs to patrol a system more than anything else, that means decent sprint, a teleporter, some shuttles, and some sensors. Maybe a single lab to examine contraband. If I could go back, I'd give it less cargo, more guns, and probably a double core + a few aux for emergency power. And aside from the aforementioned things it would have been guns and engines.

Halberds just aren't going to be so precious we need to send this thing far out, but they are precious enough that we don't want Halberds to be stuck on all that much garrison duty or be forced into mass deployments for combat power. Somewhere along the way, it seems the System Defense Boat that can go to other Systems to Defend Them became a pocket cruiser.
 
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I don't think it's actually going to be doing that many 'odd jobs' depending.
Yeah. The Furious Wind class might have enough range to travel five lights before it runs out without support; it won't have enough to make it back without resupply. Unless the "odd jobs" take place in our home system, we'd need to include supply vessels as well... and at that degree of investment, we're probably sending out a Veiled Halberd instead.
 
Obviously the odd jobs are going to take place in our home system. So are the normal jobs. And the emergency jobs. 99.999% of our science, 99.999999% of our population, and 100.0% of our industry is there. It is thus obvious that- even if life on the frontiers is two or three orders of magnitude more :turian: exciting:turian:!- 99.999% of the stuff that happens is going to happen in our home system.

Look, outside our system? We've got low-to-mid-single-digits of "colonies" of a couple hundred people living in tents getting very excited about lichens. We're- very optimistically- a generation away from having colonies that matter at all to anyone besides lichenologists, two or three from the first interstellar colony that's self-supporting in basic needs, and probably at least five from the first interstellar colony capable of building a warpship. It could easily be ten. And designing current- or next-gen warpships is likely twice as far off as that.

Meanwhile our home star system has an only-slightly-dinged-up-by-nuclear-fire homeworld and many, many offworld habitations, both planet/moonside and space habitats which are actively thriving. Virtually all have significant and stable or growing civilian populations. Quite a lot of them are self-supporting in basic needs, major contributors to our species' overall scientific and/or industrial capability or both. A couple are even mildly terraformed, iirc, though not to the point of being comfortable outside in shirtsleeves. I would be amazed if we had less than twenty billion people in our home star system, with more than a third but (post-Unification-Wars, at least) probably less than half of those on the homeworld.

The furthest I expect a Furious Wind to have to go on an odd-job is a couple weeks out past the Oort Cloud to do maintenance on a sensor buoy in the warp-travel-detection shell that I'm assuming we have around our homeworld. The furthest I expect any of them to go if they *are* stationed in other systems (as their colonies start to matter to anything besides species pride) is a couple weeks out past those stars' Oort Clouds to set up a similar detection bubble.

I do, however, expect them to be very busy indeed running all over the system patrolling and making themselves useful.
 
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See that big round middle round dome part? Thats a torpedo, meant to be fired at a ship, this thing can be the size of a shuttle craft, as long as it carries a anti-ship torpedo. It doesnt have to carry any other weapons its a modifier for support fire.

The major advantage is that in larger groups it can be a legit threat. Also means we can replace a shuttlecraft with a torpedo craft, gun boat? I donno.
 

See that big round middle round dome part? Thats a torpedo, meant to be fired at a ship, this thing can be the size of a shuttle craft, as long as it carries a anti-ship torpedo. It doesnt have to carry any other weapons its a modifier for support fire.

The major advantage is that in larger groups it can be a legit threat. Also means we can replace a shuttlecraft with a torpedo craft, gun boat? I donno.
Can we not have another fighter craft debate?
 
I do, however, expect them to be very busy indeed running all over the system patrolling and making themselves useful.
The thing is, the Furious Wind was perfectly capable of patrolling the Home System before the refit, there's never been any inkling 23 Furious Winds wasn't enough to secure our system's internal issues- hell there weren't even more being actively built until the Torkan nebula indicated just how obsolete the SUN was. The refit was absolutely about making the Furious Wind interstellar, and ensuring our navy wasn't capable of being casually solo'd aside from the Halberds.

This seems to have lead to a very weird situation where we've put a fair amount of cargo capacity onto this thing (it might actually have comparable range to a Halberd depending on if double power cores heavily impact range) in order to let it go places besides garrison and in system operations, where it can't do much, and with an armament that was the absolute lightest the thread seriously considered before we stuck on a bunch more power we're not taking advantage of with weaponry.
 
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