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[X] 140 Meter Half-Saucer (140,000 Tons)
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And I wouldn't be terribly happy with a two forward - two rear mount like the Miranda.
But the 1v1 case is the one where I think our cruiser absolutely needs to win, and fairly hard. I'm a bit less worried about fleet actions, because our Warp 7 ships can actually be helpful in those.
I mean, that's sort of what I was saying before? The bulk of our fleet not having Warp 8 is definitely a major cause of the divergence, but for all we know everything but the D7 and the newest Birds of Prey could be a Warp 7 ship, and it could still lead to the Federation doing worse in the war as we observe. Perhaps in the OTL, the Federation was on average faster, and this is what allowed them to intercept raids despite Klingon stealth. We simply don't know for certain right now.
In any case, in terms of what we can actually do, we just need to design a really cool battlecruiser. Then hopefully a smaller Warp 8 frigate/destroyer to back it up before the war starts.
I think the main tactical difficulty in the 1v1 is the merge. We can hit high maneuverability targets reliably, and therefore once we and the Klingon cruiser are alongside, I don't see them being able to avoid us getting into their flank or rear and I doubt they have super heavy armament there. They're probably not Very High or even the higher end of High. The issue is we need to be a combination of shooty enough they don't want to go head-on against us, and tough enough that they can't atomize us if we do.
The issue is cost. We can I think confidently build a ship that can see off a D7 if we use all the prototype components we have. The issue is that this ship will be very expensive(something like 30-90% more). We need something cheaper so they can be built in numbers before the outbreak of hostilities, and that means setting up to use multiple mature components instead of a few prototype ones. That means spaceframe choices to maximize the mounting space we have available.
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Probably a combination of canon having faster average warp, stronger phasers, slightly buffed shields and a couple key designs having more armaments.
We have advantages in speed, our next-gen fleet will be a lot faster, we can arm our ships more economically, our armour is ahead of where it should be. Putting them side by side we come up short, but we can still leverage that and turn it around.
Speaking of, I think maybe it'd be an idea to ditch the volley-fire torpedoes, provided we can mount at least 4 regular torps on the frontal arc and combine with 4 type 2 impulse drives, but we should seriously consider covariant shields. Combined with our armour that makes our ships annoyingly tough.
If we can combine those 3 factors, I think the Klingons might decide to leave us alone for a bit, then our next design can also be up-armed and reinforced. After all, the only thing the Klingons like more than fighting is winning.
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It's a technology limitation that didn't exist in canon as it was entirely made up on the basis of "the show only ever shows it firing two" (nevermind that said show didn't even have them firing from consistent locations or was operating on a shoestring budget for most of its run), which is directly contradicted by other canonical Star Trek products set during the same time period with higher animation budgets, and several people, myself most prominently, have proposed multiple technical solutions to said problem, which is specifically fluffed as a power transfer issue with the EPS grid not being able to handle the load of more than two at once.
Obviously "Design capacitors that aren't more trouble than they're worth" and "build better EPS conduits" would both require new technology be developed, but "Run a direct power feed separate from the main grid from the warp core to the phaser" and "Stick a local fusion reactor with a direct tap" are both things that require no new technology, literally just design changes. You even have an easy explantation why the Federation didn't bother in canon; they developed their phasers for maximum power and never ran into the problems we are output wise. But apparently we can't do any of those entirely logical things For Reasons™.
It's just frustrating, because it diminshes the way we were developing a very different doctrine and technology base only to be railroaded into "Actually, this was a technical dead end and you should have gone for the canon tech." A lot of us liked the idea of getting back to phase cannon type discoballs eventually and assumed we would be able to overcome that technical limitation relatively quickly.
We probably can justify the shields if we manage with purely standard tubes, and since it's my understanding we're behind on shield tech, we probably should. But that's really dependent on getting enough standard tubes.
If we have to buy multiple rapid launchers, we're going to need to cut everything else we can.
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I like the two-phasers-at-once. It's an interesting limitation to design around. And if it wasn't in place, well, our enemies wouldn't have any similar limitations either.
I remember seeing in the recent Star Trek movies ships rapid-firing phasers all over, and while it did look cool, it also filled the screen with visual noise. The 'submarine warfare in space' of Star Trek works best as slower, more considered combat - and intentionally or not, the TV show's lack of phaser budget played into that nicely.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
The problem is that it didn't exist until we were committed to the current iteration of the Type-2, and it removed the entire potential benefit of having wide arcs of fire letting us get overlapping guns on target, and once you take that off, going high coverage becomes a sucker bet, which was even born out in that all of our advancement options were "Narrow the firing arc to get a bit more power". With the choice being if we wanted a lot more power but at a heavier cost in arc, or a straight 1-1 conversion of arc to power.
We didn't get any options that were "Keep your wide arcs of fire but make it a bit stronger", we're effectively being railroaded back to canon, but worse because we made the Objectively Wrong Decision based on information that didn't exist until after we were committed.
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The issue is that we can't reasonably match a D7 without using the Rapid Fire Torpedoes since it is incredibly unlikely that any of the current saucer options will give us enough room to fit 4 regular photon torpedoes.
I've brought it up before but the Sagarmatha saucer which is supposed to be comparable in size to the 200kt saucer/nacelle combo option only has enough room to fit 2 torpedoes.
If the largest available saucer doesn't have enough room for more than 2 launchers then none of the smaller ones will either.
We know that the main thing holding the Sagarmatha back against the D6 was it's lack of sustained damage compared to the D6. The D7 should be superior in every way compared to the D6 so in order to compete we need a significant increase in both sustained and alpha damage which is only possible with the Rapid Fire Launchers.
Personally I don't think we can design something cheap enough to match a D7 in both capability and cost due to the price disparity between regular Torpedo Launchers and the Rapid Fire Ones (2.25 cost vs 15 cost per launcher) but with heavy investment into multiple Rapid Fire Torpedo Launchers per ship I believe we can design a ship that can comfortably solo multiple D7's (S rank Tactical means being able to beat multiple peers at once) through a combination of leveraging "Maneuverability: Very High" and the insane alpha damage potential of multiple Rapid Fire Launchers (on the low end 2 Rapid Fires will give us an alpha strike of 72 before we factor in the Phasers, 108 if we roll well).
Such a ship would be extremely problematic for the Klingons because unless it's actively going Warp 8 you won't be able to tell if you're looking at a juicy Archer class or a Constitution until it's coming at you at Warp 8 to shove a bajillion torpedoes down your throat.
It would force the Klingons to be far less aggressive unless they want to risk having entire raiding fleets getting turned to space junk when what should be a milk run against some lone Federation Engineering or Science ship turns out to be a cage match against a Constitution.
If the Klingons can't raid as aggressively it should have some follow up effects like less casualties among our older ships and more resources that can go into building new ships.
[X] 140 Meter Half-Saucer (140,000 Tons)
slybrarian
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I agree, it really feels like the phasers were a trap option. It's particularly frustrating that there's no reason that the phaser limit is "two phasers" rather than the total phaser power. Why is a ship able to fire of the heavier canon phasers but not a larger number of our wider-arc phasers? Being able to use multiple weaker beams would make them useful against smaller targets like we thought they would be, and even fit what's seen in canon where the Enterprise does just that.
To me, a better mechanic would be "a ship with X reactor and Y tonnage has a total available phaser power of Z, and can split that as desired", even if there's some inefficiencies included for the different emitters so that the higher-density options did more damager per unit of power. This would also mean that ships of different sizes wouldn't be stuck with the same firepower, reflecting room for more robust power conduits and heat exchangers.
Given that the best tactic for the Archer when attacked by a Bird of Prey was to turn tail and bait it into a Warp chase and use its rear torpedo launcher, the bulk of the Klingon fleet is likely not Warp 8. The big problem is D7s work perfectly for the Klingon doctrine of scary spearhead cruisers supported by a ton of smaller ships.
Example scenario could be this: D7s go in first to hunt down Federation ships and force Federation task forces to respond and then once they've been pulled out of position, the Birds of Prey and other ships go in and wreak havoc. Then when the word reaches Federation ships that were responding to the D7s and their attention is split between the two threats and there's plenty of chaos, D7s can use their superior Warp speed to concentrate and crush the disoriented Federation ships in detail.
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I didn't respond then but the 200kt saucer+nacelle is 100% dimensionally bigger than the Sagarmatha saucer. It is 4 decks at the rim and 8 decks maximum, while the Sagarmatha saucer has a large section of 2 decks at and near the rim and is 8 decks maximum, but it is only 8 for a very small area around the bridge and nav. Maybe we figure out some lightening to do on the way, but it's bigger.
Also, that's not the only place we can potentially mount photons. One of the reasons I've been plugging for half saucer is that we can mount all the engines on the saucer itself. That leaves the hull neck and the engineering hull free of any obstruction. These are potential photon locations- a number of canon classes mount photons here(Refit Enterprise, Excelsior, Miranda torpedo pod). With a requirement for a tall engineering hull anyways due to our vertical warp core, I think we can at least try for 4.
And at the time photons were new, expensive equipment. We may not have been offered more for that reason.
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Chargone
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One of the jobs phasers do is point defence, yes? Is shooting down incoming torpedos a thing? Because if so, high coverage phasers Should still provide significant benefit if they also cycle quickly, even only firing two at a time. Just have to think of (and stat!) Them primarily as part of the ship's defences rather than primarily as an actual weapon and focus on the torpedos for actually exploding the enemy... Of course that would retroactively make our more recent pick of the higher power option something of a ... Well, maybe not a trap, but not the best... And in fact make the new phasors arguably worse than the old ones....
Ehh, whatever.
Ehh, whatever.
According to @Sayle previously in the thread the canonical Constitution was armed with ventral phasers (I don't know how many individual phaser banks this would be in our system, probably between two and four depending on how much coverage they were going for?), and one Type 1 Rapid Fire Launcher. We know that the Enterprise was reasonably confident about being able to defeat a D-7 cruiser one on one. So it's not unachievable.
This would come to 24-28 Cost depending on how much we want to add phaser arcs, and gives us a baseline to work from. If we could pack in a bunch of regular torps instead of the Rapid-Fire Launcher then it's an option which decreases cost, but personally I do like getting the technology unlocked for other ships, and dislike the idea of a Constitution with less advanced armaments than her canonical equivalent.
Realistically it's going to depend on what our actual options for torpedo launcher slots are at the time, I think. If we have only two launcher slots, we could consider going for two ventral phasers with a slight overlap, giving us a concentrated 36 phaser damage to our front, and 18 either side in a 150 degree arc, and two Rapid Fire Launchers. That comes to 34 Cost which is more expensive, but not insanely more than 28, and we have a ship that will simply eat anything it encounters for breakfast.
But we'll have to see. We can't decide now without more information.
This would come to 24-28 Cost depending on how much we want to add phaser arcs, and gives us a baseline to work from. If we could pack in a bunch of regular torps instead of the Rapid-Fire Launcher then it's an option which decreases cost, but personally I do like getting the technology unlocked for other ships, and dislike the idea of a Constitution with less advanced armaments than her canonical equivalent.
Realistically it's going to depend on what our actual options for torpedo launcher slots are at the time, I think. If we have only two launcher slots, we could consider going for two ventral phasers with a slight overlap, giving us a concentrated 36 phaser damage to our front, and 18 either side in a 150 degree arc, and two Rapid Fire Launchers. That comes to 34 Cost which is more expensive, but not insanely more than 28, and we have a ship that will simply eat anything it encounters for breakfast.
But we'll have to see. We can't decide now without more information.
No, we stopped being able to shoot down torpedoes after we moved on from phase cannons. It's justified in the story as anything about as advanced as a photon torpedo from all sides has enough shielding and is evasive enough not to be hit.[/spoiler]
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Chargone
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Ahh. Right. Well, so much for that thought. Wasn't really panning out anyway.
Three banks, six emitters. Somewhat punchier than our phasers at 24 DPS, but since they also had fewer and weaker impulse thrusters they'll have been eating a damage debuff verses many targets.
If we were using standard Rapid Launchers instead of a prototype that might still roll badly and give us only 2/3s the expected firepower, I think it would be an iffy option but not necessarily unacceptable. As it is, though...
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basically this. I didn't actually mind the basic idea of "the power grid we have can't take the load of more than two at once", I was just expecting to get mitigation measures within two or three design cycles, because Time Marchs On and we definitely were starting to lag tactically behind the Klingons, our Next Big Opponent.
I was expecting to get something like
"While the standard power grid can only handle two phasers at once, a dedicated high-capacity EPS feed to the phaser bank could allow more to be fired at once, at the the expense of complicating maintenance and of course extra manufacturing cost for the additional high density conduit. Alternately, a group of Bolian, Andorian and Tellarite engineers have been prototyping a new field-based capacitor system that could potentially restore that technology to prominence, allowing power load to be 'eavened out' by cycling multiple capacitor banks, though it is not certain if the technology has any unforseen problems at full scale.
Finally, given the increasing size and power requirements of modern starships, some of Starfleet's designers have suggested incorporating secondary fusion reactors into the ship rather than powering all systems from the Warp Core. This would of course require additional space in the hull for the reactor itself, and additional hydrogen tankerage, but is proven and widely available technology, requiring the least expense. A direct feed from such a reactor could power a phaser bank or perhaps even two, whilst a more standard EPS connection could allow it to supply extra reserve power to the ship."
Part of the issue might be that we kept designing noncombat hulls, limiting the amount of tech advancement weapons got?
I think that phaser banks have been rationalized to being two mounts covering a given arc. So two banks can't overlap for double damage. We can't know until the armaments vote but Sayle's description of the Constitution in canon having three ventral banks is suggestive as most canon sources give 6 ventral phasers in fore/left/right banks.
Chargone
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So. Phasers are useless defensively, barely relevant offensively, and we can only fire two at a time... On a ship with high enough manouverability to reliably bring the torpedos on target is there actually any point in having more than one phaser bank, and even that only because phasers are similar to deflector dishes in their ability to be arbritrarily relevant to random problems?