You put in your order for Starfleet Tactical, who will work on finalising their designs over the next months and begin spooling up new production lines for the Mark II phaser. This is not a moment too soon, because you soon have a new project. With the increasing obsolescence of the Sagarmatha there is a dire need for a heavier line combatant capable of flying the flag in an ever-expanding Federation. Increasing tensions and incidents with the Klingons are only the start, with the Tholians becoming increasingly militaristic and provocative when it comes to ships near their claimed space.
Enter the Heavy Cruiser Project. This is a cooperative project with San Francisco, with your teams liaising with each other to increase pace and reduce delivery time. Starfleet has issued a challenging brief for Project Constitution, a heavyweight cruiser capable of going toe-to-toe with the threats of the modern era. The Klingon D6 has long been an awkward measuring stick to match ships like the Newton or Kea against, and with signs of increased resource flows to the Klingon interior there are concerns that there has either been a major uptick in production of an already tactically problematic design or even a new and more dangerous vessel.
The metrics are simple: it needs to take a punch and hit back, the cheaper the better. While Starfleet will never say no to engineering and scientific capability, what it really needs is something to dissuade the eruption of open hostility with neighbouring powers. Increased spending needs to be tactically justifiable, and the more ships the fleetyards can pump out of the resulting heavy cruiser design the better. For that reason the expectation is the ship should mass around two hundred thousand tons, which is what your cost and efficiency metrics are assuming.
