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Starfleet Design Bureau

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Ship did exactly what it was designed to do. No more, no less. And then kept doing it after all of its contemporaries were gone. Is it shiny? No. But neither is a forklift or an eighteen wheeler. Is it essential? Hell yeah.
 
Ooof, that tactical came back to haunt us a little. But looking back on the tactical vote, it seems there wasn't anything meaningful we could have done better there. The only better tactical option was to equip a singular phaser that requires jettisoning the cargo pod to be usable, which wouldn't have helped.

All in all, it seems like if we pick ORB we accept that it's going to be hampered in tactical.
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Anyways, I think it did its job wonderfully. The moniker "Vulture-class" is undeserved for it. Those ships should be appreciative of the fact someone would be on hand with that S-class engineering score to help repair the boo boos.

I think the Archer helping building out colonies and expanding the Federation is going to have large knock-on effects on the economy going into the future. All those logistical routes and colony development is going to build a strong Federation.

Unfortunately the Tarsus IV massacre still happened. Make me wonder if an improved cruise speed might have sped up the grain delivery. In OTL, the governor killed half the population during a famine which turned out to be unnecessary as a grain shipment arrived early. Doesn't seem like we made a difference there, but it maintains the timeline as this was part of Kirk's childhood as a survivor there.
 
This ship did well it seems. it didn't do well in combat but that's not what it was designed for, so of course it didn't do well; though it had enough to fend of pirates presumably: considering the note that it could handle a 1v1.

Not sure what major event is precisely coming up next on the timeline.
 
AntiSanity said:
Ooof, that tactical came back to haunt us a little. But looking back on the tactical vote, it seems there wasn't anything meaningful we could have done better there. The only better tactical option was to equip a singular phaser that requires jettisoning the cargo pod to be usable, which wouldn't have helped.
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It is not a front line ship, so if we increased tactical we would have been sacrificing elsewhere such as a higher cost reducing the runs and it was never going to compete with big ships in combat but then again it is focused on engineering work which it did really well.
 
Mechanis said:
Phaser Emitter's physical location is pretty clearly fore, by the MFD. so that's where they went.
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Sayle said:
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.
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In other news, we got some indication on upcoming projects. We now know there will be a Heavy Cruiser program next and a New Fleet program not long after.
 
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uju32 said:
All wars involve losses. Not all wars, and not all strategies are attritional.
There's a stark difference between a concept of operations that accepts that losses will happen, even with the best of will and one that specifically optimizes for it.
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"Optimising for losses" is simply not what "attrition" means in a military context. An attritional strategy is about breaking the ability of the enemy army to fight, not treating your own losses as some kind of high score counter. Militaries and strategies which focus on attrition over manoeuvre as the arm of decision tend to be more risk and loss-averse, not less. Compare and contrast the attitude towards casualties amongst the Western Allies in the Second World War with the Soviets and Nazis and their manoeuvre-focussed doctrines.

And of course not all strategies or operations are attritional. But all wars are by nature attritional, and even in the most manoeuvre-centric operations still require the manoeuvre elements to both inflict and take heavy amounts of attrition at the cutting edge - indeed in any kind of peer conflict these manoeuvre elements almost always suffer extreme, disproportionate amounts of attrition in service of their operational goals, versus forces fighting in a more risk-averse and attrition-focussed manner. This is pretty foundational stuff.

Which is why it does not really make sense to say "we aren't designing our warships for attrition". It's like saying you aren't designing a bucket to hold things. A ship that trades less efficiently against enemy ships will by definition get more crew killed, not less.
 
Pretty much exactly what we expected; the Newton was liked more when directly applied to its specific niche ("combat engineering", emphasis on "combat"), then decidedly second-rate outside of it.

Pour one out for the quartermasters and janitors.
 
Sayle said:
…of the three ships entering service in the second half of the 2220s, the Radiant deserves a small mention for its production run of only four ships and for being the first ship to be built with an additional set of nacelles for cruise-cycling. The Radiant-class was able to cruise at a maximum of warp 6.7 by alternating the nacelles generating the warp field, allowing one set to cool while the other took up the load. The 25% increase in raw speed proved useful when time was short, but ultimately did not justify the extra expense. Faced with a classical dilemma where the ship could not showcase its advantages unless it was one of the closest ships to an emergency but could not be the closest ship to an emergency without a much larger production run skewing probability in its favour, Starfleet opted to scrap the idea entirely.

The Radiant finally got its day in the sun during the Four Years War, during which three of the four commissioned vessels were destroyed while undertaking vital relief and emergency efforts during the opening stages of the conflict. It is estimated that prompt delivery of supplies and medical assistance prevented the deaths of thousands to preventable illness and resource scarcity before the increasingly dangerous forays into Klingon-overrun territory eventually caught up with the ships and their crews.
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Unfortunate that the Radiant was a bit of a trainwreck, being stuck on a Warp 7 engine but needing to be fast meant it was too expensive to field in reasonable numbers given it's capabilites.

Would have been nice to have a solid and numerous combat cruiser but quad Nacelle designs are rarely affordable.
Sayle said:
Starfleet would launch sixteen Newton-class ships in the six years leading up to 2230, with a further fourteen in the decade thereafter. This blistering pace consuming more than half of the Sol System's fleetbuilding capacity would persist until the end stages of the Heavy Cruiser project. The time before the Four Years War was the time of the Newton-class, its pearlescent-white hull and distinctive silhouette becoming the face of Starfleet for an entire generation. Unfortunately it would struggle in the high-tempo campaigns of the Four Years War due to its top speed and inability to face the fearsome Klingon D7 - a ship which had the unfortunate habit of outpacing Starfleet and the firepower to turn every engagement into an unequal fight.

Less sung but perhaps more groundbreaking was the Archer-class. Sometimes classified erroneously as a tug by unofficial sources, the Archer class would quietly become the backbone of Starfleet logistics for the next fifty years. Credit should also be given for its pioneering efforts in the adoption of new technology: it perfected the Duranium-alloy hull and made massive strides towards standardising new impulse engines. Starfleet was not enthusiastic about the Archer, viewing it as underarmed for anything beyond self-defense against non-state actors. This capability nonetheless served it well over its lifetime against piracy, but the number of Archer-class ships that survived direct engagements during the Four Years War can be counted on one hand for good reason. Those that did manage to repel the Klingons were those accosted by individual Birds-of-Prey which could be drawn into warp and then dissuaded by aft torpedoes. Encounters with heavier-weight vessels were universally fatal.
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Gonna echo my previous sentiment that we're going to need something big that can stand up to the D6s and D7s that the Klingons will be fielding as we don't have a real answer against either other than mobbing them with a bunch of smaller ships.

Also noticed how there wasn't any mention of BoPs stirring up major problems.

My guess is between how numerous the Newtons were (30 were built), the fact that Archers could ward off lone BoPs, and the fact that the Selachii's should still be able to stand up to them meant that we had enough of ships capable of handling them that they just weren't able to find enough soft targets to exploit.

I'm hoping based on the fact that we didn't get a ship design vote this retrospective that we're being given the opportunity to design some new weapons systems as the Type 2 Phasers and Type 1 Photon Torpedoes are getting pretty old.
 
Skippy said:
Which is why it does not really make sense to say "we aren't designing our warships for attrition". It's like saying you aren't designing a bucket to hold water. A ship that trades less efficiently against enemy ships will by definition get more crew killed, not less.
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its why I'm hoping if we go for a Thunderchild successor we make sure to have it stock up on ablative armor around critical systems. That's going to be obscenely synergestic with the Archer-Classes raw ubiquity along with upping survivability against peer throw weight opponents.

Like. Ablative Armor is uniquely suited for this moment for converting our attrition from lives to raw material, now that we've confirmed the "vulture-class" as a thing. This is the moment. We can make ablative armor feasible to incorporate into general doctrine.
 
LOLROFL said:
I'm hoping based on the fact that we didn't get a ship design vote this retrospective that we're being given the opportunity to design some new weapons systems as the Type 2 Phasers and Type 1 Photon Torpedoes are getting pretty old.
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Part of the motivation for the Type 2 Phaser design project was trying to mimic the aesthetic of phasers in the TOS/TMP era. Given that's the case and we have not really left the TOS era yet, let alone the movies, I think we're likely to be stuck with it for a while. A new photon torpedo seems more possible though - our current ones are a bit older than the phasers IIRC.

One thing I do think we could move away from though @Sayle would be the "only fire two phasers at once" limitation. Honestly I sympathise with the motivation behind it, but I think it's maybe not productive to try and spend too much time rationalising what is obviously a difference in VFX between the TOS/TMP era and the TNG/ENT. To a certain extent all the visuals of ship combat on screen in Star Trek have to be taken as evocative more than literal - unless we think ships are really fighting at such hilariously close ranges, in blatant contradiction of dialogue - so I don't think it's that much of a stretch to increase the number of beams a ship can fire in the Quest.

This does not need to be a hard retcon, it can be a soft one. One justification would be the development of better phaser banks which can hold more juice - or the Warp 8 core and the power systems designed for it simply being able to output a lot more power. Either way, I think freeing ourselves from this limitation would be helpful, as it would allow more meaningful difference between ships,and more interesting choices about concentration of firepower versus coverage, etc..

TehChron said:
its why I'm hoping if we go for a Thunderchild successor we make sure to have it stock up on ablative armor around critical systems. That's going to be obscenely synergestic with the Archer-Classes raw ubiquity along with upping survivability against peer throw weight opponents.

Like. Ablative Armor is uniquely suited for this moment for converting our attrition from lives to raw material, now that we've confirmed the "vulture-class" as a thing. This is the moment. We can make ablative armor feasible to incorporate into general doctrine.
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Yeah, it's not only small shooty zoomy ships that are needed for an attritional war. (Whilst they tend to trade highly efficiently.) There's definitely a role for heavy metal as well, and the canonical Constitution certainly seemed well-regarded as a warship. The bit I want to push back against is more the idea that we get a choice whether or not the iron laws of attrition are going to apply to our ship designs in warfare. If only it were so...

Ablative armour seems cool. It does seem to be incorporated into regular Federation starship hulls to some degree (it's even mentioned in schematics of the hull of the Enterprise-D, IIRC.). Or if you look at the Wrath of Khan fight, the fact that the Enterprise actually survived two direct hits to her engineering section, and a photon torpedo, all without shields, is actually kind of impressive when you think about it. But it would be worth seeing if there's more we could do in that direction.
 
Oh, checked the timeline, we are coming up on TOS; which takes place around the 2260's. Not sure how that would effect ship building for this quest though.
 
Notice how every time they made a new batch they ordered more?

That right there is another indication we gave them a great design. It might chafe for the captains that're science first or battle hungry but for those interested in building the federation and supporting it's people as they expand onto new worlds it's phenomenal.
 
If we can't get better phasers than the only way we are going to go for countering D6s and D7s is chonky tough ships to even the odds. We can't really increase our damage output without putting ridiculous amount of torpedoes but we might be able to make a ship tough enough to outlast a D6 or D7. Maybe.
 
Sayle said:
It's ugly and I hate it. I'll take ten.
-- Admiral Wright, Starfleet Logistics
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Translation: it's clunky, inellegant, overspecialised, and goes against every design philosophy we have, but it's so damn effective we can't help but build them anyway.
 
Glad to see the range upgrade worked out well.

Is it hubris to be disappointed with only 85 years of official service? I was hoping for a full century. 👀
 
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