and this is also a deceptive argument, because you are talking about maybe losing one or two ships in a tranche of twelve or more. And I think we have afford one or two fewer ships to make all the rest outclass Klingon Battlecruisers as much as our technology allows them to. I do not even this to have a critical impact on the coming conflict.
Refits are expected post war, not in the current. Type-1 shields are plenty for the current war so fr I can determine. No one has made any argument at current why they would not be.
We have only done a single refit despite a lot of retrospectives listing ships getting refits.
We've only ever explicitly voted for 1 refit, other ships have gotten refits
Dunno about Tholians. Romulans we probably actually are on even ground with. The Romulans weren't ahead of Vulcans/Andorians and Starfleet tech is a mix of Human/Vulcan/Andorian. We also beat them up pretty bad which likely inhibited their development.
How does outclassing a ship harder help? We're not going to kill them deader or something. And it's two ships in the first tranche if it's 12 ships, but I think that the first tranche could easily be significantly larger than that. A 1500 budget would give a tranche of nearly 16 ships. If Starfleet raises the budget considerably due to increasing tensions, we could easily see an 18 or 24 ship first tranche.
A couple of years at most and then this ship is still stuck with obsolete shields because it's using standards and not heavies.
It's because there isn't much to take serious about it. The only cost saving step done in the entire design process was choosing a smaller ship. That is all. That isn't much of an argument for everything else being the most expensive.
To me it seems like the sort of upgrade a repair yard can make while working on a damaged ship, which is valuable.
The only two reasons to vote for type 1 are a lower tranche 1 cost and better refit capability. Refit is absolutely a good reason to vote for type 1, especially if you consider the possibility of replacing our standard launchers and old nacelles down the line. Since our warp 9 core will probably be backwards compatible, this ship should be able to be refit quite a few times.
Between lower costs now to get the ships built and field refits in the Pharos stations and other dry docks close to the front. The heavy type 1s are better than the same shields but more expensive with no shield upgrades on the horizon.
Shields are integrated with the ship so I think it'd be a pretty extensive tear down to replace them. Possible, but not easy. And you'd have to pay for the entire shield grid too. And you wouldn't get a modern level of firepower or agility. Would Starfleet pay like 25-30 cost for a shield and torpedo refit on a Kea when they're getting a ship that's still slow, still can't respond anywhere near as quick as a Warp 8 ship, and has less than half the firepower of a new build?
Shields in Star Trek are not like shields in a video game. Ships get banged up badly through their shields in almost all depictions of ship combat in Star Trek. There is a difference, but I wouldn't say "immense."
Sayle has explicitly stated that our sheild technology is generally poor and "nakedly inferior" to its Klingon equivalent (as are, relavently, our respective weapons technologies.) unlike in canon, we will not have a warp 8 fleet able to support this vessel in a conflict, as we cannot refit our existing fleet to the new engines. Additionally, whilst we have a larger torpedo armament and far greater manuverability, our phasers are barely more than half as powerful as the canon ones, ergo, it will take longer to destroy anything that isn't ripped up by torpedoes, requiring the ship endure more fire outside of ideal conditions. This being the case, it is therefore wise to invest in more powerful shields than the canonical Constitution design, as it is likely to endure more fire, more often, and more quickly than the canon design ever did.
The standard type 1 shouldn't even be in contention, you might as well cripple it with the standard covariant from the offset and then the heavy type 1 is cheaper with the same "health".
I don't understand why you're so caught up on that. We already know the stats of the canon Connie that was able to defeat D7s, and we have no reason to believe that this alt-timeline D7 will be significantly different.
