I wonder how expensive the most expensive ship we could have built is? We weren't offered certain options that could have increased cost, so excluding that... 200kt saucer, 60kt engineering hull, call it 18 extra cost. Dual fore rapids, quad phasers, 18.5 extra cost. Triple Type-3 to move this all at Very High, 6.25 cost. Call it a cool 160. Man Starfleet would have thrown a fit if we presented something like that.
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Just for the record, you were right about the Kea's torpedo launcher. However at the time we were told we'd probably lose a science lab for the launcher. Afterwards we were told we could have had the lab and the launcher, and at the time people were saying if we knew we could have both, most of us would eagerly go for the launcher. We really, really needed an S-tier science ship and didn't want to compromise its primary mission.
I'd be very happy if the rapid-fire launchers became so cost-effective that our older ships were having them swapped in during their refits, and maybe they just become standard on cruiser sized ships. Could be quite amusing to see an Archer-class mission-kill if not outright kill a BoP that's cruising up behind them expecting an easy victory with a trio of antimatter warheads to the BoP's face.
I'm also wondering if us using a lot more torpedo systems might make class 2 torpedo launchers arrive soon? It'd be nice to buff our alpha strike even more.
grimely
Twink Death Sufferer
I don't think that the Kea refit has happened yet. The retrospectives are written in past tense from a future observer before we make further choices and can therefore be altered by those future decisions which are in the observer's past.
[X] Type-1 Heavy [36 Shields] --- (Cost 79.25 -> 97.25) --- [Second Tranche: 73.25 -> 91.25]
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- He/Him
I keep seeing this spelling of Selachii; is this an accepted spelling variant I don't know about? I'm not a huge marine biology buff, so I'm sure there's lots of terminology and jargon with which I'm flatly unfamiliar.
And an aft rapid (2 aft rapids? my lobes tingle), and a pair of aft phasers. Plus maybe a quad-nacelle configuration to further buff the warp speed and get around our current coil limitations. That adds a few more tons, that makes shields more expensive, maybe start contemplating a 4th type-3 impulse drive so we can still make ludicrous speed 🤣
All this talk about advancing our tech base... You know what is going to radically advance our tech base?
Blowing up some D7s and looting them of their "radically more advanced" shields and weapons. Send the wreckage to the Starfleet equivalent of DARPA and let them drag us into spitting distance of the Klingons.
Blowing up some D7s and looting them of their "radically more advanced" shields and weapons. Send the wreckage to the Starfleet equivalent of DARPA and let them drag us into spitting distance of the Klingons.
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Mechanis
Confirmed Extremely Screwed
- Location
- Absconding with Alacrity
IRL precident doesn't apply here. Trek powers refit their starships all the time, some designs have been ship-of-thesus'd through literally centuries of service. Because starships are expensive and costly enough to construct that, barring some kind of revolutionary technology that isn't backwards-compatable, the preference is almost always to refit existing fleet assets with new equipment either before or simultaneously to new construction.
edit: Topical, look no further than the K'tinga and its ancestors, which are all very clearly the same basic frame with incremental upgrades, it's likely that no few D7s, if not all of them, are just refit D6s.
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Tech is going to rapidly advance as the Klingons so generously donate samples of their more advanced shields in gently used condition for Starfleet to study.
Yes, the Kea's refit happened in 2240 in the retrospective. It could happen before then or never. Skippy is in communication with Sayle though and said it happened.
I was mostly going on the line of things we were or could have been offered. Certainly we could blow past 200 cost if we weren't limited to the voting options presented, but this design process was pretty controlled in terms of the range of options we could pick.
Sure, but if people appeal to IRL wrongly I will criticize it as such. And we do and don't see such refits. The Excelsior serves for a very long time, but we don't see much of the Ambassador. The Constitution-II vanishes in short order, but the Constitution served for a good 40 years before that. For that matter what we often see is not refits, but new ships on the same hull. We know this because their registration numbers are very high, and registration numbers are normally progressive. Enterprise-A is exactly that, for that matter, not a refit of an old ship but a newly-built ship.
Not agreeing or disagreeing, but some beta canon I'm familiar with states the Klingons started getting very careful with their ship designs. The BoP for instance isn't optimized for maximum performance per se but is designed highly modular, and the Klingons came up with a system of standardized modules, form factors etc, and every house's military shipyards had highly sophisticated robotic systems that could rapidly remove damage or obsolete sections, all made possible through Imperial standardization measures. A full refit of a BoP could be done in something like 5-6 weeks at a proper shipyard, from memory.
Ships could be refitted, repaired and updated for a long, long time. While you lose some cutting-edge performance, it gives you an enormous number of ships that can all share parts, and Klingon designers know what form factors etc things have to be designed for. Logistically it makes managing a large raider fleet extremely easily and cheap, and means those super-cheap ships can have surprisingly powerful or up-to-date parts given their date of manufacture, since you already know whether or not a new weapon module will fit, and you know it'll have strictly standardized connections.
Other Klingon designs kinda operated the same way, at least the ones made after the current (24th century) BoP model. They lose peak performance, gain staggering numerical and logistic strength and when a ship's too old (alloys outdated, hull severely fatigued) they can strip it for parts and slap them in other ships, recycling them very efficiently.
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- Location
- United States
[X] Standard Covariant [36 Shields] --- (Cost 79.25 -> 104.75) --- [Second Tranche: 73.25 -> 93.75]
[X] Heavy Covariant [44 Shields] --- (Cost 79.25 -> 116.75) --- [Second Tranche: 73.25 -> 103.25]
[X] Heavy Covariant [44 Shields] --- (Cost 79.25 -> 116.75) --- [Second Tranche: 73.25 -> 103.25]
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Standard Covariant [36 Shields] --- (Cost 79.25 -> 104.75) --- [Second Tranche: 73.25 -> 93.75]
Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Type-1 Heavy [36 Shields] --- (Cost 79.25 -> 97.25) --- [Second Tranche: 73.25 -> 91.25]
Mechanis
Confirmed Extremely Screwed
- Location
- Absconding with Alacrity
*heavy sigh*
Well, seems like even a literal war isn't enough to get the "We'll just do it later, this costs too much" crowd to not choke in the clutch, and we are for the third time sacrificing the best possible design on the altar of "but cost". *Sigh* and here I was hoping we could pull out the S rank Tactical ship to go with our S rank science and engineering ships. oh well.
Well, seems like even a literal war isn't enough to get the "We'll just do it later, this costs too much" crowd to not choke in the clutch, and we are for the third time sacrificing the best possible design on the altar of "but cost". *Sigh* and here I was hoping we could pull out the S rank Tactical ship to go with our S rank science and engineering ships. oh well.
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TortugaGreen
Constantly out of the loop
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- She/Her
cost is important though? effective combat utility of a ship is that ship's capabilities multiplied by the number of them that can be fielded at any given time, so the best possible ship for combat has to be the ship that concerns itself with both combat ability and cost. If we don't worry about cost, you'd get a wunderwaffe that doesn't matter because there's too few to do anything or too few to gain superiority over a cheaper and more numerous opponent with any regularity.
KnightDisciple
Brotherhood. Unity. Peace.
- Location
- Midwest, USA
[X] Standard Covariant [36 Shields] (Cost 79.25 -> 104.75) [Second Tranche: 73.25 -> 93.75]
- Location
- Earth
People looked at the arguments and made their decisions, then voted accordingly. They disagreed with your assesment, so attempting to guilt trip people is poor tactic to sway the vote.