Starfleet Design Bureau

[Tempest Warden]

It's not glamorous and it's appearance, but it's still a great ship overall that lasted for quite awhile. It probably would've lasted longer if the new warp engines were able to be refitted but unfortunately not. But still managed to live on enough for two to enter the civilian sector. So still possible to see them. Plus a mixed reputation where some don't see serving on them as that great with their captains being of lower rank to fellow Star Fleet ships calling them vultures, but at the same time many on the fringes commonly seeing them and viewing them warmly. Naturally would see the logistic ship frequently in certain areas.


Really, anyone else get the feeling that more would still be produced or at least still be serving Star Fleet for longer if it was able to have the new warp engines let alone the detail of spare parts?

 

[Valerian]

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.

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Honestly surprised the Logistics Admiral was complaining about looks. Logistics vehicles almost always look terrible.

 

[Mechanis]

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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Armor is effectively worthless though, until you get to the really high end stuff like Voayger's stolen 25th century replicator-driven armor system. "ablative armor" would have to be impractically thick to successfully absorb a nadion beam, the single most common direct energy weapon in the setting, or a contact or proximity antimatter detonation. physical armor has very decisively lost the arms race for most of Star Trek's history; Shields are the primary defense. It is far easier and far cheaper to just develop better shields, than to develop armor that can stand up to the kinds of thing that get thrown around in Star Trek combat at the scale of starships.

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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The Warp 8 transition is undoubtedly what eventually killed it, but I am actually pleasantly surprised as I expected it to last 50 years at best.

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..

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I am definitely in favor of this. One possibility, that I've brought up before, is the incorporation of dedicated fusion reactors--- we know that by Next Generation era, Starfleet ships incorporated a number of secondary fusion reactors throughout the hull. If our tendency to increase in size slightly faster than the canon timeline holds true, we might well be able to start incorporating such things earlier with the additional volume of larger hulls. This wouldn't even need any technology developed---fusion reactors are already a very mature technology by this point---merely a design change from increasing ship volume.

 

[darkstarling]

I love this stupid ship. A century of service life is amazing, and so is what it did for the Federation.

Vulture class. I get the resentment. What is probably less obvious is that hanging back to patch up after the battle means their engineering crews are going to need a lot of counseling for PTSD even without serving in combat. Because that job means pulling bodies out of wrecked starships.

Back on the subject of what to design next, the near-complete failure of the Radiant means there's an empty slot for a Long Range Cruiser. Something to keep in mind.


While that's true, I'd been under the impression our tactical investment was sufficient for the Archer to be a back-line combatant instead of a complete noncombatant. And it wasn't.

Part of that might have been that it was sufficiently useful after combat that "gank the healer" doctrine was in effect, I suppose?

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We knew the entire time it would never be functional as a combatant. People kept having dreams of it being a combat engineer, but they were never going to bear out once we went for the Orb. What the Orb bought us was enormous engineering capacity, and we used it well.

Nah, being able to swat random pirates and raiders is an absolute necessity in frontier regions. Otherwise we would've had stories of the Archer-Class being hijacked by random hillbilly spacer crews. And wouldn't that be a record to set?

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Now I want more stories of Federation life on the fringes, with the hillbilly spacers and the orion pirates the jerk collectors and the colonists.

Everyone hates it and hates serving on it, and it's too useful a design to ever die.

Stealth James Tiberius Kirk update, now with an even more traumatic childhood , because everyone knows they just had to ration for 12 weeks or so until an Orb could zoom over.

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I doubt they hate serving on it - it's a pretty cushy gig, all things considered. A lot of long boring trips on a well appointed ship, with regular interesting engineering problems to solve as you travel, doing work that actually matters and helps people in very real and tangible ways. Given the long haul nature of the job in fact it seems like it could get the same Flying Village feel that Voyager did. These ships being decommissioned would have been a whole community coming apart.

Which reminds me. The Boomer slow warp culture from before the first Enterprise never died out like they feared. They just moved into Starfleet. Heck, I like to think that Starfleet STARTED out of that culture.

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.

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Honestly, 'boring but incredibly practical' is a deeply satisfying aesthetic.

 

[Mechanis]

@Sayle oh, and for some random reasons, can I get an official word on the length-diameter of the Large cargo pod? I can guestimate from the Ptolmy but it would be nice if an official ruling on that could be made.

 

[SaltyWaffles]

Oof, damning with faint praise there.

The tactical shortcomings were the real killer it seems. I think the takeaway here is that unless some clever solution is found, Orbs can't really afford to have external cargo pods fouling their firing arcs. They have enough space to be getting on with, anyway.

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The real issue is that ships like these have no business being involved in warfare, period. Which makes sense, because it's a specialized engineering and cargo vessel armed for self-defense against low-tier threats. If you need to have your logistics ships armed to the teeth just to survive, you have much bigger problems.

Simply put, Starfleet dramatically underprepared for war. They were throwing logistics-focused ships into direct front-line combat with dedicated warships. Granted, the Newtons made enough sacrifices to improve their tactical ratings that they could be useful in a pinch, but the obvious consequences of such a measure is disproportionate losses among ships not designed for frontline peer conflict.

The takeaway is that Starfleet needs more teeth. Leave the logistics ships to logistics roles; if an ungainly logistics vessel is facing dedicated warships in combat, something has already gone extremely wrong.

If anything, ships like the Archer should be considered fleet tenders and resupply vessels, not warships.

 

[QuarkBeast]

end stages of the Heavy Cruiser project.

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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.

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Well i think we have our design brief, a Heavy Cruiser designed to fight a D7, hopefully San Fran gets on to designing the latest Tactical Escort because we are not going to have the time.

 

[darkstarling]

Armor is effectively worthless though, until you get to the really high end stuff like Voayger's stolen 25th century replicator-driven armor system. "ablative armor" would have to be impractically thick to successfully absorb a nadion beam, the single most common direct energy weapon in the setting, or a contact or proximity antimatter detonation. physical armor has very decisively lost the arms race for most of Star Trek's history; Shields are the primary defense. It is far easier and far cheaper to just develop better shields, than to develop armor that can stand up to the kinds of thing that get thrown around in Star Trek combat at the scale of starships.
*snip*

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Worth noting that Star Trek physical science is just as stupidly, implausibly advanced as the rest of their technology. Remember just how much punishment the Enterprise took from a full attack with its shields down. Remember how much ANY serious starship can take without shields. It's insane. Modern weapons wouldn't touch them. Modern industrial tools wouldn't be able to scratch them in a lab. You wouldn't even be able to take samples to try to analyze it.

And that's before you take the epitome of Star Trek material science of your era and run a structural integrity field and inertial compensator field through it. Especially if it's built to amplify and conduct that field. Then you've really got something.

The real disadvantage of armor isn't how effective it can be. It's that if it gets damaged you actually need to replace the stuff, whereas shields you can patch up the generator and you're good to go. That will stay a problem until you can print the armor with a replicator or service bots.

 

[Ebiris]

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.

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Yeah the war-time losses suck, but as far as I'm concerned the fact it was able to handle non-state actors is enough. If we'd skimped on the phasers we probably would be reading about losses to piracy neutering its effectiveness and shortening its lifetime, as it is it got a long of undistinguished career building out the frontier of the Federation all the way into the 24th century.

Definitely hankering for something with more teeth as our next project though.

 

[Zulaq]

I'd say the only outright mistake made was choosing the boost to Maximum Speed over Cruise Speed. It was never going to be able to outrun the Klingons, so making it even better at it's logistical role with 16 ly more range, and carrying supplies long-distance faster would probably have been the better choice. The maximum warp choice basically did nothing for it's actual role.

 

[aceraptor]

Worth noting that Star Trek physical science is just as stupidly, implausibly advanced as the rest of their technology. Remember just how much punishment the Enterprise took from a full attack with its shields down. Remember how much ANY serious starship can take without shields. It's insane. Modern weapons wouldn't touch them. Modern industrial tools wouldn't be able to scratch them in a lab. You wouldn't even be able to take samples to try to analyze it.

And that's before you take the epitome of Star Trek material science of your era and run a structural integrity field and inertial compensator field through it. Especially if it's built to amplify and conduct that field. Then you've really got something.

The real disadvantage of armor isn't how effective it can be. It's that if it gets damaged you actually need to replace the stuff, whereas shields you can patch up the generator and you're good to go. That will stay a problem until you can print the armor with a replicator or service bots.

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And with how we are limited by the phaser tech we have the only way we can compete against the D6s and D7s on anything like equal footing is to get a very chonky ship, slather on as much armor as we can and as powerful as shield as we can with reasonable phaser coverage and torpedoes since we can't stack the number of phasers that can fire at the same time.

 

[KlavoHunter]

I'd say the only outright mistake made was choosing the boost to Maximum Speed over Cruise Speed. It was never going to be able to outrun the Klingons, so making it even better at it's logistical role with 16 ly more range, and carrying supplies long-distance faster would probably have been the better choice. The maximum warp choice basically did nothing for it's actual role.

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it did make it look cool as hell though

 

[Skippy]

I am definitely in favor of this. One possibility, that I've brought up before, is the incorporation of dedicated fusion reactors--- we know that by Next Generation era, Starfleet ships incorporated a number of secondary fusion reactors throughout the hull. If our tendency to increase in size slightly faster than the canon timeline holds true, we might well be able to start incorporating such things earlier with the additional volume of larger hulls. This wouldn't even need any technology developed---fusion reactors are already a very mature technology by this point---merely a design change from increasing ship volume.

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Yeah I think there's a number of legitimate justifications one could come up with for it, from incorporating more secondary fusion reactors into our next-generation saucer, to bigger/better phaser banks, to the Warp 8 core itself having more juice to spare, to advances in EPS conduits. It would make perfect sense to trial this on a new battlecruiser, as well.

Worth noting that Star Trek physical science is just as stupidly, implausibly advanced as the rest of their technology. Remember just how much punishment the Enterprise took from a full attack with its shields down. Remember how much ANY serious starship can take without shields. It's insane. Modern weapons wouldn't touch them. Modern industrial tools wouldn't be able to scratch them in a lab. You wouldn't even be able to take samples to try to analyze it.

And that's before you take the epitome of Star Trek material science of your era and run a structural integrity field and inertial compensator field through it. Especially if it's built to amplify and conduct that field. Then you've really got something.

The real disadvantage of armor isn't how effective it can be. It's that if it gets damaged you actually need to replace the stuff, whereas shields you can patch up the generator and you're good to go. That will stay a problem until you can print the armor with a replicator or service bots.

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Yeah I think it's worth remembering that starship hulls are clearly built to take quite a bit of punishment. It's just that weaponry is so powerful that at a certain point it becomes more about damage mitigation than trying to deflect hits outright. But like the fact that new hull material boosts our Defence rating itself shows that we've never actually stopped having our hull be an integral part of what protects the ship.

Another issue with shields versus armour is that there are certain key systems on a starship you can't armour very easily. A torpedo hit to the nacelles or the main deflector will effectively mission-kill a starship unless it's very lucky, and you simply can't enclose those sorts of systems in ablative armour and still have them able to do their job. Unless you have something more along the lines of Voyager's 24th century armour, but that's obviously a bit beyond us now.

Adding more hull reinforcement and "crumple zones" to allow ships to continue fighting with damage or allow them to be repaired after otherwise-fatal hits is a good idea, though. I'm all for it, as much as the technological paradigm right now lets us.

 

[Rockeye]

Large Stationary Target, yes, but also a whale's worth of engineering if successfully escorted to place.

 

[Schlock]

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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True, but there were still two hull in private ownership and you can bet that the StarFleet Museum has a options on first right of refusal for when their owners can no longer keep them operational.

Really, anyone else get the feeling that more would still be produced or at least still be serving Star Fleet for longer if it was able to have the new warp engines let alone the detail of spare parts?

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What it shows is that there was a desperate need for them, as at the end of their useful service life, they didn't go into reserve and a static display at the Starfleet museum, they were cannibalised for spares to keep the rest of the Class in service for the best part of a century and that the last two remaining ships were sold off to private engineering concerns and just kept on keeping on right up to the TNG era.

Not a glamourous class of ship, but one that was crucial in the development of the post TOS Federation

 

[random_npc]

honestly, the archer to me is a fantastic ship, even in a wartime scenario. It can't fight for shit, but its not really meant to, but it can carry supplies to the front and provide excellent in field repairs. Now we just need to design a warship to do the actually fighting.

 

[TheShadowDeamon]

C- is about in line with that. It can beat single birds of prey, but of course larger ships bully it fatally. This shouldn't surprise anyone, especially with the older shields and flawed first-run armor giving it limited time before damage accumulates.

One thing that does surprise me is that there was no effort to put together a Block 2 design for either ship with a Warp 8 engine.

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It could happen - I was wondering how @Sayle woulg get around the problem of details about our older ships history reports being contradicted by decisions and potential upgrades/refit our choices drive. However that recent report by the future Temporal Investigations indicates that somone (US) is using our knowledge of the prime timeline to travel back and change things to "Tweak" events. If we stick with that premise then it opens the possibility that the time traveller/s could influence Starfleet to retrofit the Archers with the Warp 8 core at some point. It could be a worthwile idea - sacrificing perhaps 10% of the orbs internals to double (or more) the cruising speed.

Or we could decide that the replacement should be another BIGGER BETTER ORB!!

Heres a question for everyone, can anyone figure this out?
1) Based on the diameter of the orb and the number of decks, how much floor area (ft^2 and m^2) it has?
2) If we had decided to make a saucer hull instead, how big would this muck deck space make it with:
A) 5 decks?
B) 7 decks?
C) 10 decks?

 

[Wootius]

We want the Connie, we want the Connie.

Joking aside, The Archer class being called the Vulture class as part of wartime black humor does sting a bit. If we had put the triage deck on it It could have been called the Angel class. 😇

 

[Skippy]

I'd say the only outright mistake made was choosing the boost to Maximum Speed over Cruise Speed. It was never going to be able to outrun the Klingons, so making it even better at it's logistical role with 16 ly more range, and carrying supplies long-distance faster would probably have been the better choice. The maximum warp choice basically did nothing for it's actual role.

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Well, hmmm, maybe, but this gives me pause for thought:

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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It seems interesting to me that the ship's best method of dealing with a Bird of Prey is jumping to warp, then shooting aft torpedoes at them. If a Bird of Prey were more easily able to quickly catch up with an Archer in a sprint, this might not be as viable a tactic. Of course it's possible that it still would be, but it's worth noting that this is basically the definition of a scenario where even a small difference in sprint speed becomes really important.

So yeah, to me this feels at least strongly indicative that the catamaran nacelles may have been really important. Like I honestly don't know how you could write a scenario where "warp sprint speed" is more important than a stern chase. Feels like a hint.

We want the Connie, we want the Connie.

Joking aside, The Archer class being called the Vulture class as part of wartime black humor does sting a bit. If we had put the triage deck on it It could have been called the Angel class. 😇

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Honestly I wish the triage deck hadn't been up against the fabrication workshop. We couldn't really afford to turn down 12 Engineering, but if the triage centre had been up against the antimatter stores, or the labs, there would have been more of an actual choice I think.

 

[darkstarling]

*snip*

Another issue with shields versus armour is that there are certain key systems on a starship you can't armour very easily. A torpedo hit to the nacelles or the main deflector will effectively mission-kill a starship unless it's very lucky, and you simply can't enclose those sorts of systems in ablative armour and still have them able to do their job. Unless you have something more along the lines of Voyager's 24th century armour, but that's obviously a bit beyond us now.

*snip*

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The Defiant pulled it off. But the Defiant did that by not having its nacelles on struts at all, and tucking them into the primary hull and then wrapping them in armor everywhere that wasn't critical.

Ironically it's closer to civilian designs that are more flying bricks, I'm wondering what they did with the warp field to have the tucked nacelles without sacrificing speed.

edit: A quick glance at specs tells me they didn't completely, with a max speed of Warp 9.5 compared to it's contemporary the Intrepid class having Warp 9.9 so there are clearly some sacrifices for an increased defense rating. But what it lacks in maximum warp it makes up for in punch, durability, and maneuverability. Most of its weapons are also forward facing, trading coverage for firepower.

 

[Tank man]

Commissioned: 30 [2225-2260]

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That doesn't quite add up, with an initial batch of 10 followed by a second batch of 12 and then 18 ships to replace wartime losses makes 40 (which incidentally means we lost 10 during the war, or 6 if the 'But following the conclusion of hostilities Starfleet was compelled by necessity to replace its losses, and between 2245 and 2260 another eighteen Archer-class vessels were constructed.' means we actually had 18 pre-war and they decided to expand the numbers rather than do a 1:1 replacement). Unless I've crossed some wires somewhere.

That being said, man did we make a winner with this ship!

While a scattering of Saladin-class ships continued production as increasing concern developed over Klingon encroachment the cruise speed of the single-nacelle ships was becoming increasingly concerning, the majority of drydocks switched to the Newton.

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I can't exactly say this was expected, though given it's meant to be the big fighty ship pre-whatever we make next I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised. Is this in addition to the 16 mentioned in the Kea/Saladin recap post?

The Archer-class UFS Stephenson was the first responder to the Tarsus IV Massacre, having transported over forty kilotons of grain to relieve the famine.

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Damn, I'd hoped we'd have been able to avert it, but I guess even with our increased speed compared to canon's transports space is still unfathomably big.

By comparison the Newton-class was shorter lived, heavy attrition during the Four Years War and the increasing obsolescence of its warp drive rendering its limited internal facilities an increasing hindrance to effective deployments.

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Ouch, even though it's spread out over four years assuming a similar crew to our ship and over half of the ships being outright lost that's still some 2,048 or so dead. Whilst definitely less than civilian casualties that sort of experienced manpower loss when the service is so small is gonna hurt.

Klingon D7 - a ship which had the unfortunate habit of outpacing Starfleet and the firepower to turn every engagement into an unequal fight

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Well, we know the sort of ship it takes to fight a D-7 1:1, or even worse odds, can't really see an argument against a big explorer thanks to this.

 

[Mulisa]

Good outcome for the ship. It did exactly what we needed it to do.

Also, the biggest problem and concern that we now face is that the Federation does not have the ability to face the Klingon D7s on a equal footing- its been stated again and again that the D7s have the advantage in every engagement against Federation ships.

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Which means, that it's time to dust off the old United Earth schematics for Dreadnoughts.

 

[Wootius]

The Defiant pulled it off. But the Defiant did that by not having its nacelles on struts at all, and tucking them into the primary hull and then wrapping them in armor everywhere that wasn't critical.

Ironically it's closer to civilian designs that are more flying bricks, I'm wondering what they did with the warp field to have the tucked nacelles without sacrificing speed.

edit: A quick glance at specs tells me they didn't completely, with a max speed of Warp 9.5 compared to it's contemporary the Intrepid class having Warp 9.9 so there are clearly some sacrifices for an increased defense rating. But what it lacks in maximum warp it makes up for in punch, durability, and maneuverability. Most of its weapons are also forward facing, trading coverage for firepower.

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We have done integrated nacelles before, on the Skate. It did boost the defense by 2, so like 20% for the era.

It just made it a really cramped ship, which tracks with the defiant.

 

[Th3Saints]

Good news we did good and created the logistics backbone of SF for nearly a century. The Klingons identified that threat that they send heavy vessels hunting them.

Ok news the Newton was decent has a bridge design at the combat engineer role.

Bad news the radiant was a complete flop fron Sanfran besides the data on quad nacelle design.

Its pretty obvious that heavy cruiser to beat the D6 is our next brief i just hope we are the only ones on the design since there is other gaps and time is limited. So we are building another "explorer" then?

For D7 and the War we need to give the Klingons the same lesson has the Romulans don't force us to build warships. the Leviathans of the Deep should be left to their slumber in the mist of history not roused by the drums of War.

 

[KarmaA]

Maybe we'll make a federation ship that looks a like a Galor class. Half saucer, massive inline secondary, tucked nacelles. Firing lines on a design like that should be fairly reasonable and internal volume wouldn't be completely awful.