- Location
- his hidden lair
I was referring to the nebula, and while on further reflection the shuttles were using impulse given the short distance entailed and the need for stealth no warp was involved by the shuttles (which allows me to casually shift my goal posts and point out everything they accomplished could have been done by a shuttle pod with a cloakI've spent like 15 minutes trying to figure out how to word this in a way that is unambiguously an honest question rather then hidden snark. I'm think I've failed, but please believe me that I am not trying to be snarky or anything.
Am I correct in thinking you were talking about where we needed the shuttles to return to the ship when we decided to leave the nebula? How would a higher warp speed made any difference there? If I'm thinking of the wrong thing, please let me know.
As best as I could tell there was no warp drive usage there at all. That was purely STL, as we had been going through the nebula at impulse speeds. There didn't seem to be enough room to flash to FTL without crashing through the clouds of the nebula.
Any distance that can we can cover via impulse is so short that even at warp 0 (The speed of light) a ship will cover that so fast that a higher warp factor won't really matter. I just don't see the extra warp speed coming up enough for it to be worth optimizing the hull for short distance sprints. It's just such a narrow focus that I don't see how it will make a situation better more often then it will hurt by having less equipment to do the tasks the shuttles are needed to do.
What I feel would have been to our benefit was more impulse speed. The fact one of the drives would be removed was one of the reasons I did not want to go with the 1b. As far as I can tell more impulse drives will be based on utility slots.
[Edit - It looks like I didn't address your other point. Frankly the shuttle is going to be the larger and more capable craft. The one that can do tasks beyond directly beside the ship. A warp shuttle can check out another planet with ease. A shuttlepod is going to take days, maybe weeks. Possibly hours if the fastest impulse speeds I've seen are accurate.]
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While my example in hindsight is bad, I think the point stands, and it's a point you seem to be unintentionally echoing. The point of the warp shuttle is to go places at warp and proceed to do things there. Anything else is better covered with a shuttle pod. If there is any urgency involved in the warp shuttle's deployment, then there is real value in the shuttle being faster. Whether it be in evacuating people as a warship lurks cloaked for extraction, evacuating people and material in harms way on a colony when the ship isn't directly in orbit, etc. If the use case for a shuttle is urgent, then the hemicircular might be sacrificing some capability but is undoubtedly the fastest to respond to the urgent situation. And while it's over valuing the use cases for the warp shuttle when the matter is urgent, I think that's fair because if things aren't urgent then it's likely going to be best a lot of the time to just bring the ship around for the shuttle pods to have at it as well.
Edit: At the end of the day, Utility Maximizer just seems liable to wind up with heavily overlapping capabilities between the two that wind up with one of the two being the odd man out. A shuttle expected to operate independently has different requirements than a glorified 8x8 truck.
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