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The problem is that the Magna Carta never led to a constitution. The UK stubbornly refuses to have one.
This is why I suggest the Articles of Confederation class.
The Magna Carta was the basis for the United States Constitution, however, and many similar documents.
I also don't get it: we just gave it 360LY of endurance, does no one want it to be able to "boldly go" and actually do shit once there?![X] Stellar Dynamics (+2 Science)
[X] Extra Crew Quarters
[X] Ice Cream Maker (+2 Scoops)
I've given up on Cargo. people keep repeating 'we don't need a hauler'.
If lack of supplies gets mentioned as producing anti-synergy reducing the capability that we designed for it, I plan on being obnoxious about it. There will be I-Told-You-So's.
"First is a stellar dynamics laboratory. As the Constitution has a high cruise speed and range it seems inevitable that it will spend time outside Federation space or on combined exploratory/investigative patrols near the border. Being able to catalogue the local stars and pick out any interesting spaceborne phenomena from range will be a useful feature."
"Although if an enhancement to the ship as it stands is more interesting to you then the outer saucer could be used to provide extra crew quarters that would move more of the personnel out of shared quarters and into individual living spaces, though the quality would stop short of the officer accommodations on the upper decks."
The first is self explanatory, but improved accommodation is important in increasing endurance (because being stuck in a room with someone else for years at a time can be rather taxing) which will help the ship conduct its long range missions.
- Location
- Earth
Guess I'll play the opposing side to the fighters argument.
The Federation Attack Fighter ended up showing up for only three fleet engagements and only past the mid-point of the war. The three were Operation Return which is the recapture of Deep Space Nine, the Second Battle of Chin'Toka which is when the Breen energy dissipator is first used, and finally the Battle of Cardassia where the TV show ran out of money for special effects and reused attack craft footage from Operation Return. Then fighters in general are never used in against military ships again. Especially not by any major or minor alien species past the Dominion war. That's because during the three fleet engagements, they didn't do much.
In Operation Return they maybe killed one Galor after 4 waves of attacks. (It could be argued it was only disabled from the CGI effects.) The fighters don't even manage to succeed in Sisko's objective of forcing the Cardassians to break formation, the Cardassians broke formation in a planned trap and Sisko had to throw in wings of Galaxy-class ships to counter it.
In the Second Battle Chin'Toka, they were visible only briefly and achieved no effects. To be fair, most of the fleet failed to do anything too.
What we do see fighters used pre- and post- Dominion war were on patrol, search-and-rescue, coast guard duties as we see in Lower Decks and non-state actions from the Maquis and Cardassian civilians.
So here's my thought: Starfleet only used attack craft in the Dominion War because they were short on ships. They pulled all the patrol craft from colonies all across the Federation to assemble a few wings out of desperation. Afterwards they weren't used in the same manner again. Fighter craft were ineffective and inefficient desperation weapons in a full out battle.
That's why the Starfleet doesn't build carrier craft and patrol around with them. The same ineffective and inefficiencies also see no other major species put them to use. I don't see a way to square the circle of canon not using them.
(That's not to say fighters don't show up. Shinzon had wings of Scopion-class attack fliers on his Scimitar, but it looks like they were used for ground attack. Shinzon didn't deploy them during the fight with the Enterprise-E, and continued to not deploy them even after the Ent-E and Scimitar were both damaged, without shields or weapons. Hell, the Ent-E didn't deploy its shuttles either.)
It makes sense to me that fighters aren't a thing in Star Trek, because defense and speed in Star Trek is a function of reactor power. It's always been a fact that the bigger the ship, the more powerful the shields. And the bigger the ship, the higher the warp factor it can go. Also more room for torpedoes. For fast attack craft to be viable, ships need to be a certain size. The Dominion, Federation, and Klingons figured that size out with the Jem'Hadar attack craft, Defiant and Bird-of-Prey classes in canon. In quest we have our Selachii and the Klingon/Romulan Birds-of-Prey.
In real life, offensive weaponry trumps armor. A single anti-shipping missile can mission kill a capital ship. The horizon also means naval ships can only see so far before the curvature of the earth blocks the view. So in real life a fighter can carry that missile above the horizon and away from a carrier to strike the enemy. In Star Trek, a ship can take multiple torpedo hits and has no horizon to block their sensors. Capital ships end up engaging each other to the extent of their weapons.
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- Location
- Cara Fahd
Not our design brief. Starfleet wanted a heavy cruiser that can "show the flag", patrol borders and overall be a big beatstick against the Klingons. We delivered that, with enough legs for it to zoom from one end of the federation to the other, smack some D7s and go back to its initial posting without needing to refuel, along with the capacity to moonlight as a survey ship on its patrol path. If Starfleet wants to use it to "boldly go" outside of its established logistics network, then Starfleet can damn well work out the logistics problems in order to make it viable.
[X] Stellar Dynamics (+2 Science)
[X] Extra Crew Quarters
Why are there so many people obsessed with chemistry? Proper chemical analysis takes time, both to find the samples and then to do proper tests on them, and time is the domain of follow-up ships, not the initial explorer. Now, I'm not saying Chemistry is useless, but we have limited space for two modules and one of those basically must be the expanded Crew Quarters to enable the long-duration exploration missions in the first place.
Meanwhile Stellar Dynamics helps identify systems of interest in the first place, so the ship can visit to establish that, yes this is a place worth sending a follow-up mission. Not to mention it's probably going to be more useful when dealing with things like subspace anomalies or strange gravitational waves (IE: the anomaly of the week) that are being encountered for the first time, enabling the ship to safely navigate in completely uncharted areas. And that's why Stellar Dynamics is so important, it doesn't matter if the ship can do more analysis once it arrives, if it doesn't arrive in the first place because it got sucked into a wormhole or something.
Not to mention it's more likely to be useful in a military context as well, given that Stellar Dynamics can be ranged, and probably includes emission analysis which might reveal enemy bases and the like. Admittedly that's more an edge case, but chemistry is only useful in areas you have both under control and have the time to analyze
[X] Extra Crew Quarters
Why are there so many people obsessed with chemistry? Proper chemical analysis takes time, both to find the samples and then to do proper tests on them, and time is the domain of follow-up ships, not the initial explorer. Now, I'm not saying Chemistry is useless, but we have limited space for two modules and one of those basically must be the expanded Crew Quarters to enable the long-duration exploration missions in the first place.
Meanwhile Stellar Dynamics helps identify systems of interest in the first place, so the ship can visit to establish that, yes this is a place worth sending a follow-up mission. Not to mention it's probably going to be more useful when dealing with things like subspace anomalies or strange gravitational waves (IE: the anomaly of the week) that are being encountered for the first time, enabling the ship to safely navigate in completely uncharted areas. And that's why Stellar Dynamics is so important, it doesn't matter if the ship can do more analysis once it arrives, if it doesn't arrive in the first place because it got sucked into a wormhole or something.
Not to mention it's more likely to be useful in a military context as well, given that Stellar Dynamics can be ranged, and probably includes emission analysis which might reveal enemy bases and the like. Admittedly that's more an edge case, but chemistry is only useful in areas you have both under control and have the time to analyze
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- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Chemistry has 18 votes out of 132 voters.
To boldly go… into Klingon space, beat up Klingon rear-area forces, and brutalize Klingon industrial capability is absolutely part of the brief.
The science labs are the most useless choice on offer and people are addicted to them like crack.
To be fair, we are the Starfleet Design Bureau, and very few Starfleet ships don't do science missions. Even the Defiant, the closest they ever really got to a full on pure warship on screen, still went on a lot of science missions.
Asking us to not build in at least some scientific capability is like asking a dog not to chase squirrels, it just doesn't compute.
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Basically the stats do what the stats say; Engineering does not let us create more Science, Cargo doesn't let us store antimatter charges in the hallways for increased Tactical or range, and larger warp intercoolers don't give us more Scoops.
Which is b******* our Scoop score is way too low.
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- Location
- being near locations is my passion.
"Is sir ready to order dessert, or would sir prefer to deliberate for another twenty lightyears?"
This an argument for including the Bistromathics Cafe; so we can make really nice coffee for our new friends/positive space wedige of the week.
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darkstarling
Brilliantly Crazed
- Location
- Columbus, Ohio
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The Preservers did a few of them, but they weren't so obsessed that they recreated continents perfectly.
The phasing planets could be natural. I just like the idea of the universe being so old a lot of nonsense is actually technology so advanced it doesn't look like technology
Yeah, ToS era has a bit of a problem lionizing dictators. I blame historical distance plus the budding utopia leading to thoughts of 'SURELY they can't have been as bad as portrayed...'
[X] Stellar Dynamics (+2 Science)
[X] Extra Crew Quarters
[X] Ice Cream Maker (+2 Scoops)
I've given up on Cargo. people keep repeating 'we don't need a hauler'.
If lack of supplies gets mentioned as producing anti-synergy reducing the capability that we designed for it, I plan on being obnoxious about it. There will be I-Told-You-So's.
And it would be justified! But I think that's specifically EXTRA cargo not our base needs.
I think this is what the Enterprise did in Balance of Terror, trying to find it with motion sensors.
That's a fair position, and we passed on Hydroponics so some crew comfort options aren't a bad choice. But I think shared quarters are an acceptable price for enhanced chemistry. It's not as if the base ship is hot bunking.
KnightDisciple
Brotherhood. Unity. Peace.
- Location
- Midwest, USA
What about Declaration-class? Gives room for other species names, too, since it's a broad concept.
Nailing a single Galor, given the tiny size of the Federation Fighter, means that even if they killed zero more ships in the entire war and there were 1000 fighter losses means that they already are breaking even, tonnage-wise. There's also the Terran Raider, in a similar size class, which can kill a Bird of Prey according to Memory Alpha, the Danube-class runabout, which is about ~23m long (15% larger than a modern 5th gen like the J-20) being capable of carrying and launching multiple full size photon torpedoes, which definitely can hurt a warship. There's enough reason to believe that small ships are quite valid and threatening in canon, and the explanation for them not showing up that much is more 'budget' than anything else.
The fact that fighters are usable in a patrol situation, where they will be quite potentially the first line of defense against a hostile incursion - because 'patrol ship' in Star Trek is not the same thing as a coast guard cutter in real life - is evidence against the argument that they're "inefficient and ineffective" - especially because the complete lack of crew comfort and the lack of indication of any long endurance ability (which is also part and parcel of crew comfort) and thus would have very little selling them as patrol vessels unless they are very cheap for the combat power and presence they provide.
Fighters can operate mostly offscreen, just like the vast majority of the Federation's presumed warfighting technology unless we actually do assume it just bumblefucks military engagements by sending endless waves of redshirts, which may be funny but is kind of grossly out of character and is trying to insist on a Watsonian framework to explain something that can easily be explained by the Doylist effect of 'war is expensive to shoot, space war is also expensive, and the Star Trek setting designers didn't want to create a massive field manual of how combat worked in the setting.'
Moreover, fighter-size craft continuously show up as vessels which are used for planetary defense, a situation which makes little sense if they're "ineffective and inefficient desperation weapons" (because then you're spending a lot of money for ships that aren't capable of performing their role) - and in fact most of the deployments of fighters we see are actually in full-scale battles. The canon suggests the opposite is true - fighters are common when you're already assembling the logistics lines and accepting the losses which come with large-scale battles, but vanish outside of that context. And the fact that fighters have at least one confirmed kill of a ship literally a thousand times their size (which was not swarmed down by hundreds of fighters focusing on that one vessel) mean they've acquitted themselves fairly well already.
If you absolutely need an explanation which isn't "real world budget," fighters may well be logistically difficult to employ offensively due to their short legs and high levels of miniaturization, using components with a fairly low mean time before failure at full combat power (so you need to recheck and repair fighters after every sortie, while a starship keeps chugging along). A major benefit of fighters would be that you can build them outside of full-size yards, which is less relevant during non-wartime conditions. You have to deploy them in the engagement itself, because fighters' short legs and slow FTL speeds (if they can even FTL) mean you can't stand off, so a fighter carrier also has to be built as a warship in its own right. And obviously, they have no other use but combat operations.
All of these factors can easily result in a world where fighters are generally deployed 'offscreen' in most situations while still being functional and effective in their niche of "short-range strike platforms."
Mass and volume clearly matter for relative defensive capability and maneuverability. Star Trek engines do not have speed dependent entirely on engine power, irrespective of mass. It still exists in a realm where 'smaller' is generally associated with 'more maneuverable.' Star Trek shields don't really show clear mechanics and may well require greater power for the same effect over a larger surface area, which relatively favors large ships (more mass per volume) but means smaller ships scale well. And of course, the survivability onion exists, and if you don't get hit - something which is easier with a smaller sensors signature and smaller profile, because phasers and photon torpedoes are clearly not 100% accurate 100% of the time guaranteed damage weapons, to say nothing about other weapons systems like the (inaccurate) disruptor cannons - you can't exactly take advantage of weak shields.
The Daystrom post points out that an attack fighter took two phaser shots to kill - they don't exactly pop at the first sign of any sort of hostile fire, either. And Danube-classes show that a 20-meter long vessel can deploy a full-size photon torpedo, even if there are presumably limitations (range, sustained rate of fire) which hurt it.
The paradigm you're sketching out where there is no horizon and fighters in Star Trek would be relatively slow, relatively poorly armed, and relatively fragile already exists. It's the paradigm of the Star Fleet Universe, and even then fighters are extremely viable and useful weapons systems because as it turns out, a 20 meter long ship that can launch a single photon torpedo or equip a weaker but still functional phaser and survive a little bit of fire and you can carry a dozen of is a huge force multiplier even if it is slow enough that you can try to outrun it, because they restrict your ability to maneuver, force you to keep speed up (which means less power to shields and weapons), and their ability to pounce on and gut you the moment you show any weakness is a great deterrence to an engagement. They just aren't so useful as to obsolete all non-fighter carrier warships. Which is fine, nobody wants that, but there's a wide region for fighters to be broadly useful enough in wartime that they show up there and not so overwhelming that every ship needs to carry them.
Similarly, the thing about SFU-type fighters is that they're an attrition unit. Attrition units are not something which meshes well with the Federation's doctrine of not throwing large numbers of guys at an enemy. Similarly, they're logistically intensive enough that they aren't great for invading people.
I think the main issue here is calling them fighters, it evokes an image of the better part of a hundred Corsairs coming in screaming with .50cals and thousands of pounds of bombs/rockets between them or dozens of F-14s lofting long ranged anti-bomber missiles against larger formations of larger but still smaller than ship sized foes.
As used (and as use cases for them go) they're more comparable to either the early torpedo boats* or motor torpedo boats (as the USN called them, patrol torpedo boats), hell they're even roughly the same size as many of them!
*which were often carried on the deck and put down when at anchor to defend the ship.
As used (and as use cases for them go) they're more comparable to either the early torpedo boats* or motor torpedo boats (as the USN called them, patrol torpedo boats), hell they're even roughly the same size as many of them!
*which were often carried on the deck and put down when at anchor to defend the ship.
Mechanis
Confirmed Extremely Screwed
- Location
- Absconding with Alacrity
I mean, a phaser is a nadion particle weapon; they're not reliant on pure energy transfer for damage. Like most Star Trek weapons, they've moved past the paradigm of "put thermal or kinetic energy into the target" and are in the realm of "hit target with physics breaking Bullshitions" for inflicting damage. given we see hand phasers being able to straight up desintegrate fairly large volumes of starship bulkhead more than a few times on screen, albiet on the "you need a new battery after like three shots" maximum power setting, I would rather question the assertion that anything armed with a phaser, including an unlucky rating in a space suit with a hand phaser, is a trivial threat. Certainly the Peregrine exists later down the timeline, as do a few counterparts from various other groups. The primary reason why you wouldn't see many on screen, and don't see them at all in ToS era, is because a fighter carrier is by neccessity a very large and logistically burdensome vessel, and the fighters themselves require a high degree of miniaturization to make work-both things that the ToS era isn't great at.
Quite a bit earlier, I'm not sure the exact timeline but the first self-propelled torpedo saw use in the late 1870s, aboard HMS Lightning the first modern torpedo boat (I.e. that used a self propelled torpedo rather than a spar torpedo).