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Starfleet Design Bureau

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Godwinson said:
I have a compromise position:

[X] Three Type-3 Thrusters (33 -> 51.75 Cost) [Very High Manoeuvrability]
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If you leave this vote in until Sayle closes it, do you think finance will actually wake up in tears in-quest?

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Godwinson said:
[X] Five Type-3 Thrusters (33 -> 64.25 Cost) [Very High Manoeuvrability]
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This is silly.
It's a complete waste of Thruster due to inertial dampner limitations.

[*] Five Type 3 Thrusters, and make the ship bigger.
 
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Strunkriidiisk said:
If I might make a case for four Type-2 thrusters, they provide the following ancillary (and admittedly very small) benefit, in theory. If things are truly dire and our shipyards need to start cutting corners for emergency production, simply not installing two thrusters is much more doable than with the Type-3s, which as symmetrical thrust are both load-bearing.
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Consider, however, the gods-defying speed that is Five Type-3 Thrusters. The entire rear half of the ship? Engine. My inertia? Undamped. My torpedoes? Already in their targets. Have you ever wanted to break the lightspeed barrier before you powered up your nacelles? Vote Five Type-3 Thrusters and not only will you, but you'll go back in time to vote for it again.
 
notgreat said:
The Type-3s are a long term improvement, as they make using type 3s cheaper faster and generally push tech forward a bit. Once they become mature tech they'll be significantly better than the Type-2s and even once they're standard they're only slightly less efficient when space isn't a factor (that is, for ships that are half-saucers, for full saucers the space savings can be significant even now). Right now though, as I understand it we're eating the prototype cost.

The larger problem is that between the Warp 8 engine being fully incompatible and our previous projects somewhat skewing away from tactical capabilities means that the Federation is in a weak military position, one that the Klingons have noticed and are moving to exploit. The long-term benefits of a Type-3 engine doesn't matter if we take more damage from the war than those benefits would be worth. That being said, the cost difference isn't much either, so it's hard to say.

(That being said, 100% agreed that the mass pinging was wrong and it's totally fine to keep the vote as a pure spite choice)
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Did you miss that I DONT CARE about the result of this vote and am just saying hey you crossed the line here have a minus internet point.

Any winning option is Fine, and I was leaning towards 3x2s because Mechanis made good points. But you know, MULTIPLE PAGES OF WHINING about a vote not going your way is BAD. Then Doubling Down on it with Mass Ping is Cross the line for me.
 
KNakamura said:
*somewhere Starfleet Logistics and Finance wakes up screaming from a nightmare in a cold sweat*
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Someone upthread suggested four Type Threes because apparently cost saving is edible, ha.
7th Hex said:
So I had this question cross my mind, so I thought I'd toss it to the thread to get your ideas too, and maybe give us something else to discuss a bit than another knife fight over components with the levels we reached. I don't really expect it to change anything this time, even I'm still voting for a version of VH Maneuverability, but it might be something to take into consideration for future designs depending on the conclusions reached.

So since practically the very start of this design, it feels like it's been pretty axiomatic that we will be pushing this to the absolute max for Maneuverability so it can do good with it's torpedoes. Even a lot of the arguments for the now-deleted initial saucer vote were focused on how many of each engine were needed to reach that coveted 200% benchmark. For very understandable reasons, since that would give a notable fighting edge to these ships in the combat they will be seeing. But thinking back on how much we've ended up warping every other aspect of this design from the start in service of pushing one particular very variable stat to the highest level possible as a sort of default position, it's made me start to question how much Maneuverability is actually the requirement for what we're wanting these to do?

Our most recent experience with making a slower "combatant" was the Kea, but even with 2 Type-2s a Kea this design ain't. And the Kea still would have been reliably bring tubes to bear against at least other heavy cruisers that would need the extra firepower, which was apparently good enough capability for Starfleet to issue them a tube in their first refit. Plus our new T2M2 phaser bank has reached the level of instantaneous damage of a single torpedo, while still retaining the ability for significant "off-bore" through keeping a wider arc of fire off the bow and avoiding the need to as precisely bring the entire ship to bear for a shot, not even mentioning the possibility of mounting other banks further off centerline as well. With a general assumption that in most cases extreme maneuverability comes at the cost of mass and bulk that can help absorb damage, and our phasers reaching the point where they punch like a photon while being much less difficult to point at a target, how nessecary do we think it is for our ships to be able to put a photon torp on every dragster frigate?

or
TL;DR: Do we think any more than Medium-High/High Maneuverability is required for a future design to be able to reliably aim torpedoes at the targets that really need the extra boom?
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The reason we are focused on putting warheads onto foreheads is because our phasers can't do the job. as it turns out, we ended up having picked an evolutionary dead end for phaser development that assumed we would be able to bring multiple batteries into single arcs, but have effectively been told we're not going to be able to do that until we invent strips. as a consequence, slow and stately capitals that eligantly pick apart enemies with phasers before delivering a coup de grace with a torpedo or two aren't a paradigm we can do, we are stuck with "phasers are for supressing shield regentation while we line up another salvo."

edit: Additionally, having not gotten a free shield boost with our Warp 8 engines, we need the "Speed is Armor" dodge-tanking ability and being able to consistently outmaneuver hostile vessels to stay out of their most dangerous fire arcs in order to remain competitive functional durability wise.

In short, defensively we invested heavily into the "Don't Get Hit" part of the defense onion and less into the "Don't Get Penetrated" part.
 
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Godwinson said:
Consider, however, the gods-defying speed that is Five Type-3 Thrusters. The entire rear half of the ship? Engine. My inertia? Undamped. My torpedoes? Already in their targets. Have you ever wanted to break the lightspeed barrier before you powered up your nacelles? Vote Five Type-3 Thrusters and not only will you, but you'll go back in time to vote for it again.
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Reputable sources* have informed me that Five Mark 3 Thrusters can be engaged while a ship is travelling at warp 8 to make it travel at warp 9!


*me, making it the fuck up.
 
7th Hex said:
TL;DR: Do we think any more than Medium-High/High Maneuverability is required for a future design to be able to reliably aim torpedoes at the targets that really need the extra boom?
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Maybe, maybe not, though it certainly Helps. Though that maneuverability is also making up for our shields being insufficient as well. If our phasers and shields were meaningfully better relative to our enemies capabilities it would matter less, but for now they're not, so...

Also, I wouldn't call our current phasers a dead end, exactly, they hit as hard as our torpedos on a per shot basis as is, and the larger arc Does have its uses/advantages, but it does mean that they take longer to get through stronger shields than would have otherwise been the case and we do need to account for that.
 
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Godwinson said:
Consider, however, the gods-defying speed that is Five Type-3 Thrusters. The entire rear half of the ship? Engine. My inertia? Undamped. My torpedoes? Already in their targets. Have you ever wanted to break the lightspeed barrier before you powered up your nacelles? Vote Five Type-3 Thrusters and not only will you, but you'll go back in time to vote for it again.
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*Section 31 is dispatched, and their data deleted*
 
KNakamura said:
I dunno. I think we didn't pick an evolutionary dead end as much as a "it'll take longer to be a primary weapon, but worth it."
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I mean, it kind of is? Phaser strips are an entirely different design paradigm than phaser turrets, the latter cannot turn into the former. At best, one can say we had the idea early but could not achieve it.
 
DragoonPreston said:
Did you miss that I DONT CARE about the result of this vote and am just saying hey you crossed the line here have a minus internet point.

Any winning option is Fine, and I was leaning towards 3x2s because Mechanis made good points. But you know, MULTIPLE PAGES OF WHINING about a vote not going your way is BAD. Then Doubling Down on it with Mass Ping is Cross the line for me.
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I was clarifying the actual upsides and corresponding issues of the type 3 engines since you (and a few others, but you were both the clearest and most recent) seemed to not know them, and then acknowledged that those arguments weren't what you were basing your vote on anyway with the aside at the end. Clearly you are choosing to keep the spite vote which, as I specified in my prior post, is a perfectly reasonable choice.
 
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Godwinson said:
Consider, however, the gods-defying speed that is Five Type-3 Thrusters. The entire rear half of the ship? Engine. My inertia? Undamped. My torpedoes? Already in their targets. Have you ever wanted to break the lightspeed barrier before you powered up your nacelles? Vote Five Type-3 Thrusters and not only will you, but you'll go back in time to vote for it again.
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"Where we're going, we don't need bones, or a ship!"

"And where's that, Doc Captain?"

"Straight to hell!" Engages the USS Dante's engines
 
[X] Four Type-2 Thrusters (33 -> 42 Cost) [Very High Maneuverability]
I personally like this option vastly better than the type 3s and it gives us a red line button and costs less, but we have a chance for refit in the future. That said since @thepsyborg pinged me I'll throw him a bone.
 
Chargone said:
Maybe, maybe not, though it certainly Helps. Though that maneuverability is also making up for our shields being insufficient as well. If our phasers and shields were meaningfully better relative to our enemies capabilities it would matter less, but for now they're not, so...

Also, I wouldn't call our current phasers a dead end, exactly, they hit as hard as our torpedos on a per shot basis as is, and the larger arc Does have its uses/advantages, but it does mean that they take longer to get through stronger shields than would have otherwise been the case and we do need to account for that.
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They hit as hard as our torpedoes because we walked back from the "wide arc with weaker beam" paradigm we originally had chosen---on the assumption that we would be able to bring 4-5+ of them to bear into single arcs if we configured a ship appropriately---to the "Narrow arc with stronger beam" paradigm; except that because we didn't just pick that in the first place we've effectively ended up with the worst of both worlds. It'll probably take a Mark III or proper Type Three phaser to get them back to just being where the narrow arc Type Two design would have been at adoption, missing out on any refinement that might have otherwise taken place over that development period and likely adding a cost and complexity tax we would not have otherwise had.

So yes, we can pretty definitively say that the wide arc phasers were an evolutionary dead end and with the benefit of hindsight we should have taken the narrow arc Type Two design.
 
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