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Starfleet Design Bureau

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NavySeel said:
That's not what starfleet is about. Those sort of dreadnoughts should be a response to a threat that needs them, not something we have at the ready.
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Roaming_Guardian said:
Thing is, battleships take TIME. It took a few in quest years just to design the Thunderchilds back when we had far less advanced technology to include in our designs. Then building them took more time still, and that was us rushing to get them into the field.
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luckless21 said:
There's a reason the canon Federation uses explorers as their line battleships most of the time.
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Everyone is making valid points. I've shifted positions more than once due to excellent logic and arguments you and many others have brought forth.

I still think the lead time to build and deploy battleships makes them impractical. If the Klingons are launching a war against you, you need ships deployed to the battlefield ASAP. That means small enough to build in a short(er) space of time.

I see a few issues with the whole thing. Any highly militarized ship has very limited utility, if you aren't using it to fight and it can't be a transport, science, survey or support ship, it's illogical to invest in it.

Too big and the ship becomes an enormous money sink that could be better spent on a brace of survey ships or a science outpost.

Smaller ships alleviate this problem, but you're still left with the fact a pure warship is only useful if it can win or prevent battles, if it's too far out of date it cannot, so preemptive building of warships can be dicey.

Too many experimental options and you don't have an economical warship to swell your fleet, you get yet another moneysink when less capable but more economical designs would do better. Failure to take experimental options will limit our technical advances that we desperately need.

We could possibly deter the Klingons with warships, but then be left with a whole lot of gunboats which aren't useful to us and waste resources. By the time we need them, our enemies may be so sophisticated those ships are irrelevant tactically. On the other hand patrol ships to deter pirates are a crucial asset.

If we don't increase our combat capabilities, we're going to be faced with a war that will go badly for us, and we'll scrape a win by the skin of our teeth, if that.

NavySeel said:
We literally designed two ships during our one major war.
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Hmm, quite possibly a counter that invalidates my entire argument, hmm...

Assuming I'm right only sane solutions I can see are:

1. Build some "patrol destroyers" that we use to increase our pure fighting ability, make them economical so we can increase numbers as needed. This can also be argued to support our super-strong economy we've been building up, we have a need for fast patrol ships to deter pirates and marauders anyway.

2. Build a generalist but increase its combat capability, maybe even go for an experimental weapon or shield improvement so that when the war kicks off our ships are better fighters.
 
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Deltamaster said:
Now that I think about it... didn't the feds vs romulans end with a treaty that didn't say fed get no cloaks? As I just realised I don't think we ever got an option for that tech at any point (not relevant atm but...)
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we should be gigachads, and have all our non-combatant ships zip around invisible, while letting our fighters be loud n' proud. Basically the opposite of the "honorable warrior" races.
 
Cold Dust said:
@Endorfinator , I personally don't think there's any need to be so provocative by comparing someone to Trump, or pick on anyone participating in this quest.
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Nah, I knew Triage had no chance lamo. Also I woke up and laughed so it's funny.

(I recognize the council has made a decision, but it's a stupid ass decision so I elected to ignore it.)
 
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I'm against making a pure combatant until things kick off. But a medium sized generalist with teeth is where I think we'd find the most value. Detailed second pass explorers that can respond to distress calls, show the flag at colonies, and be nimble / tough enough to handle a fight would be great. With the new hull material and shield options this seems achievable. Right now we'd aim for them to be more than a match for small raiders and overkill for pirates. If deployed internally it might not be a great deterrent but if it is fast enough to end a bunch of raiding efforts I do think rumors and missing ships might cause the Klingons to do some considering.

They're not necessarily finding dilithium but are investigating new biomes, doing archaeology, or actually surveying the systems that don't have high class M planet potential. It'd also let us get a whole wave of new captains and crews out gaining experience and doing useful work. If we can promote 20-30+ people and crews and they get opportunities to operate independently I think that'll do more for building competence and pushing forward our knowledge of the region than a handful of bigger prototype filled battleships.

The pure combat battleship as the last platform before the war should give us the meanest possible ship and demonstrate that we're going to be even harder to defeat than anticipated.
 
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Cold Dust said:
Everyone is making valid points. I've shifted positions more than once due to excellent logic and arguments you and many others have brought forth.

I still think the lead time to build and deploy battleships makes them impractical. If the Klingons are launching a war against you, you need ships deployed to the battlefield ASAP. That means small enough to build in a short(er) space of time.

I see a few issues with the whole thing. Any highly militarized ship has very limited utility, if you aren't using it to fight and it can't be a transport, science, survey or support ship, it's illogical to invest in it.

Too big and the ship becomes an enormous money sink that could be better spent on a brace of survey ships or a science outpost.

Smaller ships alleviate this problem, but you're still left with the fact a pure warship is only useful if it can win or prevent battles, if it's too far out of date it cannot, so preemptive building of warships can be dicey.

Too many experimental options and you don't have an economical warship to swell your fleet, you get yet another moneysink when less capable but more economical designs would do better. Failure to take experimental options will limit our technical advances that we desperately need.

We could possibly deter the Klingons with warships, but then be left with a whole lot of gunboats which aren't useful to us and waste resources. By the time we need them, our enemies may be so sophisticated those ships are irrelevant tactically. On the other hand patrol ships to deter pirates are a crucial asset.

If we don't increase our combat capabilities, we're going to be faced with a war that will go badly for us, and we'll scrape a win by the skin of our teeth, if that.


Hmm, quite possibly a counter that invalidates my entire argument, hmm...

Assuming I'm right only sane solutions I can see are:

1. Build some "patrol destroyers" that we use to increase our pure fighting ability, make them economical so we can increase numbers as needed. This can also be argued to support our super-strong economy we've been building up, we have a need for fast patrol ships to deter pirates and marauders anyway.

2. Build a generalist but increase its combat capability, maybe even go for an experimental weapon or shield improvement so that when the war kicks off our ships are better fighters.
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The compromise to me would be that Starfleet, by law, maintains an up to date task force of proper warships equivalent to either a percentage of total tonnage or total hulls of the rest of the fleet.

They dont necessarily need to be battleships, but they must be capable of reliably taking on the known vessels of peer powers in the event of unexpected hostilities. To man the lines while the yards retask to more of their line. And most importantly to ensure the Federations shipyards have a reserve of institutional knowledge on building combat vessels far into the future.

A small percentage mind, I'd be happy with as little as 5%
 
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Too granular for the quest, but I'd see it as reasonable to make designs for purely combat heavies, update them as new technologies become available, and keep them in the metaphorical back pocket until they are needed to actually be built and resources allocated. In the meantime, we'd actually continue to design and produce the workhorse frigate and cruiser sized hulls for general use/first response defense scenarios.
 
Honestly what I think you would do is determine how many warp cores you are building per year, then math out how much hull material /weapons / thrusters you build per warp core, the use that to calculate the force composition you build.

Make a lot of hull material per warp core? Dreadnoughts. Make a lot of weapons but not a lot of hull material? Little ships bristling with guns.

But at the end of the day warp cores are a hard limit on how many ships you can build.
 
landcollector said:
Too granular for the quest, but I'd see it as reasonable to make designs for purely combat heavies, update them as new technologies become available, and keep them in the metaphorical back pocket until they are needed to actually be built and resources allocated. In the meantime, we'd actually continue to design and produce the workhorse frigate and cruiser sized hulls for general use/first response defense scenarios.
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When we have reached the point that Utopia Planetia is no longer the only game in town? Nah, I think it would be fine.

If we dont pick military designs for a while, something I think is fairly unlikely looking back over what's already made, San Fran or another shipyard can pick up the slack.

It's certainly something I'd put forward on the UFP Parliament floor.

Edit: By sound of it, torpedo launchers are also something of a bottleneck right now.
 
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I don't think our tech is well set up for building a frigate as our main combatant. We have wide-arc phasers, high powered Impulse, but not quite as much shield power. If we built a frigate it would be really fast, but a D7 probably has the all-round coverage to put fire on it and the shields to endure attacks. It'd be hell on BoP's, but if Klingon cruisers are something we can't stop they will just go for core worlds and with our cruisers being slower it will be hard to stop them.

A heavy cruiser will give us something to act as a mobile reserve against Klingon fleets, and can still react to raiders even if it won't be as efficient doing it. We should have at least some time to build them and the large hull will enable more torpedo firepower and durability. Having lots of engine power we can afford a big hull without breaking the bank, impulse drive is the big cost center on large ships.
 
Yeah, with us only getting one ship type before the war we should make it a medium to heavy cruiser. Something powerful enough to take on raiders, tough enough to take some hits, and punchy enough to challenge bigger ships in wolf packs of 2 or 3.
 
A battlecruiser design, if properly handled during the design phase, may serve well as both a combatant and an explorer (after all, it is meant to hunt down enemy cruisers and commerce raiders*, perform heavy reconnaissance**, pursue enemy fleet formations should they run from battle and prevent enemy cruisers from harassing the fleet), since it'd already embody most of the features attractive to an explorer with its speed and range.

*as well as having the firepower to kill cruisers outright with the Klingon's use of BoPs as raiders a battlecruiser may also be able to fit more comprehensive counter-cloak systems.
**cruisers are the traditional country given their endurance, but they are limited by the fact that they're rather vulnerable to being killed if found by faster or more heavily armed vessels. A battlecruiser sidestep this by being faster and more heavily armed than a cruiser.
 
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Tank man said:
A battlecruiser design, if properly handled during the design phase, may serve well as both a combatant and an explorer (after all, it is meant to hunt down enemy cruisers and commerce raiders*, perform heavy reconnaissance**, pursue enemy fleet formations should they run from battle and prevent enemy cruisers from harassing the fleet), since it'd already embody most of the features attractive to an explorer with its speed and range.

*as well as having the firepower to kill cruisers outright with the Klingon's use of BoPs as raiders a battlecruiser may also be able to fit more comprehensive counter-cloak systems.
**cruisers are the traditional country given their endurance, but they are limited by the fact that they're rather vulnerable to being killed if found by faster or more heavily armed vessels. A battlecruiser sidestep this by being faster and more heavily armed than a cruiser.
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And if you are going to stick a powerful sensor suit to hunt down cloaked ships it also doubles as a useful thing to have on an explorer.
 
I kind of saw the LRC design from the last vote as filling the battlecruiser role. Not as well as a warp 8 platform would but basically the same concept.
 
One of the reasons I say to make a lighter combat ship next is the lack of weapons to take high value targets. We speced into wide area but lower damage, and not able to bring all weapons to bear that ARE on target. We need at least one or more likely two rolls to get the heavy punch hit them with everything and the sink weapon emplacements. Before we have that kind of thing is making a Dreadnaught that will have its weapons almost outclassed by its escorts a good idea?

And add to that one of the Major challenges we would face fighting Klingons is the fleets of BoPs. Just letting them fly around smashing all the stations and colonies would not be a good thing. They don't really have That Many heavy ships, and the ones they do have we need all the advantages we can get against them.
 
If you were going to make a heavily armed warship, it only makes sense to put a lot of science suites on that warship so it can explore dangerous locales, I suppose.
 
The tech threadmark has no year listed for our next phaser improvement. And the Type 2 Phaser was pretty recent.

I'm not expecting a Type 3 phaser anytime soon, and Starfleet is "very resistant to producing both simultaneously rather than focusing on a single variant," so we're not getting a second bite of the apple from Type 2; a forward-focused phaser has to wait until the Type 3.
 
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