Well, outside civilian advisors are a reality in any design bureau, if nothing else, even military ones. It'd be interesting to see their further input here. Is this a sign that they should make an account and join this wonderful nonsense? I leave that up to them.
My only problem with the proposal is that it's not only is the ship penalised for selecting prototyping if it doesn't go well it's the entire generation of that technology regardless that doesn't properly mature regardless of time passing. Basically it all becomes mild or regular chedder instead of a strong mature it would otherwise.
We're currently building an engineering cruiser not a frigate. That presumably means that when the tactical systems vote comes we'll have a minimum of one photon torpedo tube as a mandatory part of its armament. Either that or this line will be retconned if we vote for a pure phaser loadout.
I think QM said the histories flow on as though we're sorta following expected canon "after" the design was finalized. If we go in another direction things change and they may not apply.
That being said, while that torpedo vote for the Kea was contentious, and based on the info we were given at the time it looked like the right decision, I'm certainly perfectly happy to have single fore and aft torpedo launchers become standard going forward. Hopefully it'll make us look less like prey to the Klingons, and maybe accelerate torpedo-related improvements.
Also, re our next design, which may be a warp 8 war destroyer, erm... I mean, escort ship, or similar for use against the Klingons and other threat forces, I strongly recommend to anyone who reads this, we should !NOT! build an uber-dreadnought or battleship. We should start up building a war frigate, destroyer or cruiser. Too big and we won't have the numbers, and we need numbers and heavy weapons. Also if we can spec into that other type of phaser that has the higher damage but smaller arc that'd be good, in hindsight I think our current phasers were a mistake. As many torpedo launchers as is practical should also be integrated, any combat technologies should be scrutinized carefully and given serious consideration but critical thought (I'm giving double-shot torpedo launchers bedroom eyes btw), we should also avoid quad nacelle or other expensive configurations for our workhorse battleship as, again, we need numbers and it needs to be cost-effective.
For the lulz, I'm curious to see what happens, and given our military is so lacklustre, I'm thinking the only way we can get some quick gains is luck. That, and I'm very tired and have just finished a large amount of beer.
Preliminary checks on the impulse thrusters are good, with a projected footprint well within margins. Only time will tell if the thrust and initial shakedowns go just as well, but at least there isn't an immediate disaster. The Halley is now hypothetically mobile, but it will just be going out into danger if it has no means to defend itself, and that's your next job.
It would be a lie to say the tactical fitting out for the Halley isn't shaping up to be a bit of a nightmare. The spherical main hull doesn't play especially well with clear firing lines, and both the bridge and navigational sensors rule out the usual ventral/dorsal split. In the end you decide that the minimal acceptable loadout is a pair of phaser banks on the port and starboard poles of the sphere, situated on decks thirteen and fourteen. This allows the ship to fire into its flanking arcs, and a torpedo tube beneath the main deflector allows it to see off any marauders from the bow. The rear arcs are rather more compromised because of the cargo pod, but an aft launcher at least protects the space above it.
But that's the bare minimum. You could further enhance the defensive armament by adding a forward bank to supplement the primary launcher and an aft set of phasers above the main shuttlebay. Unfortunately the cargo pod still leaves a major blindspot, and the final effort you can make on that front would be to add a largely useless phaser bank beneath the main shuttlebay. In the event the Halley is attacked from below it can jettison the cargo pod and free the ventral phasers to fire into the newly opened firing arc. It would very much be an expensive addition for a fringe case, but that is the maximal armament you can justify. Just getting approval for the second launcher was enough of a pain once Tactical got the preliminary plans for the ship and its role. They guard their photon production jealously.
That leaves the matter of the shield grid. There are some promising trials underway with new covariant shield systems, an effort to essentially pack more graviton particles into the same shield vectors by having two simultaneous standing waves in the shield perimeter instead of one. It's very much a stop-gap measure to further improve the operating principles of the Type-1, but with current efforts in identifying a new field-generation method falling far short of success it seems to be the only way forward to the improved defence shields Starfleet badly needs. But given the production costs attached the Halley might not be the ship that can afford the extra expense. The choice is yours.
Covariant has a nice potential to it (and is my go to in STO) but it costs way too much for a second line vessel that's already expensive to justify. Unless it explicitly gave a bonus to operating in hazardous space conditions that a deflector couldn't provide its best to skip it for this ship, imo.
With the mature T1 shields we could justify getting a second torpedo tube, but otherwise we'd have to sink all the defence budget into the covariant if we took it.
The way we're going, we'll give this backline ship maximum armament and shields and give our next-gen warship a couple of rusty phase cannons with Ferengi for "surplus stage props" stenciled onto the sides.
I'm thinking standard shields and either base or +2 phasers would be best? What do people think?
The bare minimum feels like the best thing to do here. This is a truck, not an MBT, and if your trucks need to be upgunned you're already in enough shit that the trucks probably won't be shooting their way out of it.
Edited the table to be more transparent that the prices are per 100kt of ship. Also halved the weapon cost and brought shield costs in line with hull costs because weapons/shields being half the cost of a ship is silly. Now a substantial portion, but not most of the budget.
Halley's cost with the basic shield and weapons (2x banks, 2x launchers) is 47, even just 2x more banks would push it up to 51.
The basic weapons and the covariant shield would make it 52.
We can either get the extra phasers or the new shields but I don't think we can justify both unless some intelligence report on some klingon ship made to hunt these things is revealed.
