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Mechanis said:
I mean, materials fatigue probably means that you are having to do fairly major refits several times over that kind of service life anyway; and or scrapping outright an older vessel and new-building a Block K or Mark Sixty or whatever that includes the required design adjustments from the word go.


Also this. Like, Phased Poleron beams were a complete "HOW" that went right through shields like they weren't even there; it doesn't matter how good your ship is if its primary defensive system is about as effective as a wet paper bag.

On the contrary, it would be an absurd misallocation of hulls to send our rapid response beatstick battlecruiser haring off years away from our borders where it is of no use whatsoever for the job we actually designed it to do, which is keeping people from breaking our stuff. This design was not at all an Explorer conceptually and any ability it has to fill the role is strictly incidental to its actual purpose.

As I stated a few pages ago, an Explorer is absolutely a warship, but this is not its primary focus; indeed the Explorer design space is very much that of a do-everything generalist. It must be powerful in battle, yes, because it will generally be fighting alone and with no possibility of reinforcement or rescue in a timeframe that matters, but it also must possess top-notch scientific and engineering capability because it has to be able to solve any sort of problem it runs in to out of its own resources. In short: An Explorer is by neccessity a massively overbuilt generalist, and generally a design space where cost is not especially considered a serious matter.

And this ship, whatever we call it, was never going to be that, because the design space it was built to was "Warship for killing Klingon Battlecruisers" and even choices like fundamental hull configuration were made in support of that goal at the expense of other capabilities.

Re: new designs: I expect that we're either going to get a Selatchii replacement/successor or the Type Four Nacelle during the war, depending on how Sayle feels the current design performs in that context. Either way, I don't support doing any large or non urgent need vessels before we have a Type Four Nacelle so we aren't being limited by the old type threes.
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Well, we've effectively turned it into an effective long range surveyor too, and since this is starfleet we're talking about they're probably not about to have them concentrated at star bases all the time.

I doubt that Starfleet is going to order another run of dedicated explorers either, since we have both this Connie and the Kea to follow up.
 
grimely said:
You are acting like these are contrary design goals. They are not. Kirk's Enterprise was on a Five Year Mission of exploration as part of the Federation-Klingon Cold War, not a willful disregard of it. In TOS, the Federation-Klingon border isn't, it's a broadly uncharted frontier. At no point does anyone onboard act like it's a contradiction of their orders to partake in Great Game style shenanigans with their opposite numbers, because they know it's not. The principle purpose of the Five Year Mission is to expand the Federation's ability to keep the Klingons distracted Over There so they don't break our stuff Over Here. Keeping these vessels as a menacing stick as some sort of QRF behind our lines would essentially be ceding the strategic initiative, as well as the uncontacted worlds in the frontier, to the Klingon Empire.

And bluntly, you are selling this ship far too short. It is a massively overbuilt generalist. It has six modules that give it extremely robust capabilities. We might have gotten up to eight if we had gone with the canon Connie hullform, but I doubt it, because the entire impetus behind the thread picking the Type 3 engines was to recoup space lost by our hull decisions - Sayle has in fact already said that the canon Connie used Type 2s, so I wouldn't be surprised if we had about as much flexibility in our modules as canon did.
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The canon Connie also had maybe two engines in a centerline mount, if not a single engine. We pushed the Type Three explicitly because at the time that gave us a 200 kton median thrust, which was hoped to in combination with our fancy new warp cores improve our ability to manuver whilst potentially lowering the number of engines we mounted on it. We saved no room whatsoever with our engine choices when we decided not to take the triple type two design compared to our existing choice to take a half saucer, on the ultimately erroneous assumption that we would gain significantly more torpedo armament and might therefore be able to forego eating the cost of development for rapids by simply mounting a large number of standard tubes.

If we had been going for an Explorer, we almost certainly would have been taking the four deck full saucer; or more likely an even larger saucer because we would not be operating in a space of "keep it in the 200 kton ballpark please." We would have chosen the larger secondary hull as well, for more room. We would have chosen a configuration of Nacelles that favors efficient cruise for maximum endurance. We would have chosen an armament, in all likelihood, with significantly higher coverage value. We would likely have taken Covariant Shields, because for an Explorer, Cost is no object.

This ship (probably going to be the Excalibur class) is not an Explorer and anyone who says it is is huffing copium over the project name; it is an even more pure Warship than the OTL Constitution was! It is simply not especially suitable for doing an Explorer's job, because it isn't designed for that. It can do at least as good a job in the role as our fifty year old Sagarmatha class ships, true, but this is simply a matter of maintenance of existing capacity as we retire those, which is already noted as not really being sufficient for the tasking anymore. It can definitely sub in during the period where we don't have an actual purpose built Explorer in service, but I and a number of other people do not intend to allow that period to be particularly extended, barring any unknown unknowns yet to be revealed by future updates.
We built these ships to be guard dogs, and that's the thing they're good at. They can kinda do other things because we tacked on some basic science capacity in the leftover space, but a purpose built Explorer they very much Aren't.
 
It probably has a good chance of ending up in the Explorer role, however, for much the same reason the canon Connie probably ended up being used as one. It might not be specifically intended to act as an Explorer, but it's got sufficient capabilities to sub into the role if a specialist design isn't available- and seeing as our next projects are probably going to be making designs for the war, dealing with its aftermath, and creating nacelles that can stand up to our new warp core (as well as probably a few other tech upgrades), I suspect we won't be getting the opportunity to build a purpose-designed Explorer for quite some time.
 
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grimely said:
Those don't really exist until the Galaxy, which seems like it was designed backwards. As in they picked out what modules they wanted and then decided how big the hull had to be in order to fit all of them.
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TTL they have: Both the NX class and Sagarmatha class were conceived from the word go as Explorers. We have already well codified the design space for that mission role in the past. We did not build this ship in that design space - for completely valid reasons, mind - and ergo it is not an Explorer as we use the term. You also forget about Excelsior, which was arguably the earliest of the OTL's use of the design space we codify as an "Explorer" herein, or its successor and the immediate ancestor of the Galaxy, the Ambassador class starship.

I for one intend to push for the design of an Explorer as we have codified here at some point within the next ~10-15 years in universe, as a "we got through the immediate war, now it's time to get back to our roots" move.
 
Mechanis said:
The canon Connie
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Why do these three words matter here in the slightest? If this class of ship becomes a class that explores the galaxy, then it does. The amount of air wasted comparing this class to the canon one when we've gone so far off the beaten path compared to canon, and putting it down compared to such, is utterly exhausting. If I hear any more about a canon class that happens to have a ship named Enterprise in this thread, it'll quite frankly be too soon.
 
I strongly suspect our next project is going to be more along the lines of a superlight vessel, not a superheavy. All the heavy-capable yards are likely to be busy building the [checks tally] Excaliburs, we're not going to get the go-ahead on an even larger ship. I wouldn't expect any kind of 'explorer' project for at least one design cycle, at minimum - even if one presumes that the Excalibur is not the de-facto explorer of this generation, which given that it is the alternate universe version of the canon Constitution (which due to our choices is being produced a little over ten years early) and we crammed in two modules that directly serve a Five Year Mission profile, seems like wishful thinking at best.

So yeah, either a new frigate-scale project, a refit, or something that uses different infrastructure like a station.
 
Strunkriidiisk said:
I strongly suspect our next project is going to be more along the lines of a superlight vessel, not a superheavy. All the heavy-capable yards are likely to be busy building the [checks tally] Excaliburs, we're not going to get the go-ahead on an even larger ship. I wouldn't expect any kind of 'explorer' project for at least one design cycle, at minimum - even if one presumes that the Excalibur is not the de-facto explorer of this generation, which given that it is the alternate universe version of the canon Constitution (which due to our choices is being produced a little over ten years early) and we crammed in two modules that directly serve a Five Year Mission profile, seems like wishful thinking at best.

So yeah, either a new frigate-scale project, a refit, or something that uses different infrastructure like a station.
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It would be fun to do a station again in the near future. We'll probably have to replace losses after the upcoming war, and even if we don't, the Federation has grown.
 
Mechanis said:
The canon Connie also had maybe two engines in a centerline mount, if not a single engine. We pushed the Type Three explicitly because at the time that gave us a 200 kton median thrust, which was hoped to in combination with our fancy new warp cores improve our ability to manuver whilst potentially lowering the number of engines we mounted on it. We saved no room whatsoever with our engine choices when we decided not to take the triple type two design compared to our existing choice to take a half saucer, on the ultimately erroneous assumption that we would gain significantly more torpedo armament and might therefore be able to forego eating the cost of development for rapids by simply mounting a large number of standard tubes.

If we had been going for an Explorer, we almost certainly would have been taking the four deck full saucer; or more likely an even larger saucer because we would not be operating in a space of "keep it in the 200 kton ballpark please." We would have chosen the larger secondary hull as well, for more room. We would have chosen a configuration of Nacelles that favors efficient cruise for maximum endurance. We would have chosen an armament, in all likelihood, with significantly higher coverage value. We would likely have taken Covariant Shields, because for an Explorer, Cost is no object.

This ship (probably going to be the Excalibur class) is not an Explorer and anyone who says it is is huffing copium over the project name; it is an even more pure Warship than the OTL Constitution was! It is simply not especially suitable for doing an Explorer's job, because it isn't designed for that. It can do at least as good a job in the role as our fifty year old Sagarmatha class ships, true, but this is simply a matter of maintenance of existing capacity as we retire those, which is already noted as not really being sufficient for the tasking anymore. It can definitely sub in during the period where we don't have an actual purpose built Explorer in service, but I and a number of other people do not intend to allow that period to be particularly extended, barring any unknown unknowns yet to be revealed by future updates.
We built these ships to be guard dogs, and that's the thing they're good at. They can kinda do other things because we tacked on some basic science capacity in the leftover space, but a purpose built Explorer they very much Aren't.
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Genuinely I do not know what more we want on this thing to make it a better Explorer. Yes, we could've gone full saucer + integrated hull to max out for another 80k of tonnage, that is true. However, and apologies to Strider, but our actual design is only 10k fewer tons than the canon Connie - which I bring up as our only real point of comparison to what the OTL Federation at this time considered a competent explorer.
 
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Mechanis said:
We saved no room whatsoever with our engine choices when we decided not to take the triple type two design compared to our existing choice to take a half saucer
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What the fuck are you talking about, our choice of engine and saucer layout bought us an entire extra module space that we would have lost with the three engine layout, or the canon saucer with centerline engines.

EDIT: In combination with our more compact warp core I think we actually might have had more internal space than the Constitution.
 
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Horologer said:
It would be fun to do a station again in the near future. We'll probably have to replace losses after the upcoming war, and even if we don't, the Federation has grown.
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If it's a station, maybe some sort of border guard station? We've got the logistical largely down pat with the Pharos-type stations. I imagine some more tactically focused stations (especially with a war potentially looming) would be wise to spin up a design for.
 
DualFront said:
What the fuck are you talking about, our choice of engine and saucer layout bought us an entire extra module space that we would have lost with the three engine layout, or the canon saucer with centerline engines.

EDIT: In combination with our more compact warp core I think we actually might have had more internal space than the Constitution.
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It depends on how many engines it took, but unless it only took one I think we just break even with it.
 
StriderInCosmos said:
If it's a station, maybe some sort of border guard station? We've got the logistical largely down pat with the Pharos-type stations. I imagine some more tactically focused stations (especially with a war potentially looming) would be wise to spin up a design for.
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I think this is the last ship we'll build before the war kicks off, but I do like the idea of designing a cheap outpost station.
 
I wouldn't be sad if they just stick to building these in mass numbers as our primary ship for war, without a super heavy or super light with it. A super heavy wouldn't be able to keep up and super lights would cost too much to keep up. The only advantage would be lowering crew needed per gun. And honestly, this is a beautiful amount of fire-power for the mass allocation.

Then we could build the next nacelles
and have true warp 8 ships. Or design full military border stations in response to the Klingon threat.
 
Mechanis said:
On the contrary, it would be an absurd misallocation of hulls to send our rapid response beatstick battlecruiser haring off years away from our borders where it is of no use whatsoever for the job we actually designed it to do, which is keeping people from breaking our stuff. This design was not at all an Explorer conceptually and any ability it has to fill the role is strictly incidental to its actual purpose.

As I stated a few pages ago, an Explorer is absolutely a warship, but this is not its primary focus; indeed the Explorer design space is very much that of a do-everything generalist. It must be powerful in battle, yes, because it will generally be fighting alone and with no possibility of reinforcement or rescue in a timeframe that matters, but it also must possess top-notch scientific and engineering capability because it has to be able to solve any sort of problem it runs in to out of its own resources. In short: An Explorer is by neccessity a massively overbuilt generalist, and generally a design space where cost is not especially considered a serious matter.

And this ship, whatever we call it, was never going to be that, because the design space it was built to was "Warship for killing Klingon Battlecruisers" and even choices like fundamental hull configuration were made in support of that goal at the expense of other capabilities.
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Mechanis said:
The canon Connie also had maybe two engines in a centerline mount, if not a single engine. We pushed the Type Three explicitly because at the time that gave us a 200 kton median thrust, which was hoped to in combination with our fancy new warp cores improve our ability to manuver whilst potentially lowering the number of engines we mounted on it. We saved no room whatsoever with our engine choices when we decided not to take the triple type two design compared to our existing choice to take a half saucer, on the ultimately erroneous assumption that we would gain significantly more torpedo armament and might therefore be able to forego eating the cost of development for rapids by simply mounting a large number of standard tubes.

If we had been going for an Explorer, we almost certainly would have been taking the four deck full saucer; or more likely an even larger saucer because we would not be operating in a space of "keep it in the 200 kton ballpark please." We would have chosen the larger secondary hull as well, for more room. We would have chosen a configuration of Nacelles that favors efficient cruise for maximum endurance. We would have chosen an armament, in all likelihood, with significantly higher coverage value. We would likely have taken Covariant Shields, because for an Explorer, Cost is no object.

This ship (probably going to be the Excalibur class) is not an Explorer and anyone who says it is is huffing copium over the project name; it is an even more pure Warship than the OTL Constitution was! It is simply not especially suitable for doing an Explorer's job, because it isn't designed for that. It can do at least as good a job in the role as our fifty year old Sagarmatha class ships, true, but this is simply a matter of maintenance of existing capacity as we retire those, which is already noted as not really being sufficient for the tasking anymore. It can definitely sub in during the period where we don't have an actual purpose built Explorer in service, but I and a number of other people do not intend to allow that period to be particularly extended, barring any unknown unknowns yet to be revealed by future updates.
We built these ships to be guard dogs, and that's the thing they're good at. They can kinda do other things because we tacked on some basic science capacity in the leftover space, but a purpose built Explorer they very much Aren't.
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So I have tried repeatedly to suggest you drop this before. There are a set of related misconceptions you have been wedded to throughout this project; that we have not been designing Kirk's Enterprise, that we have been designing some form of purely utilitarian warship very different from the original Connie, that we will have the opportunity to design a "real explorer" later on, etc.. Being subtle has not worked, so I am not going to beat around the bush here: You are wrong about all of this.

Please move on from this now. It has become an albatross around the neck of the thread, and I suspect it will be less personally bruising for you when we get to the next few updates. This isn't something I'm saying as an attempt at a dunk or to score points, which is why phrasing this in quite a frank way rather than trying to be witty. I genuinely would like the thread to be able to move on, and I enjoy your contributions and don't want you to be too upset by having to come to terms with this.

Please let's move on.
 
Strunkriidiisk said:
Oh, that's a possibility I hadn't thought of.

Hrm. I don't really like the 'build a specific part' votes, I generally like just building whole ships.
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I find them interesting because of how they manage to shape our ships' capabilities in some remarkably fundamental ways (see the Type-2 phasers as an example). But I could definitely see them as being rolled into a ship design's component votes, something like them being developed in parallel with the current design process.
 
The worst part is that I think we made an awesome ship* and would be genuinely curious to see how the original Constitution would have been statted out in this thread to compare. But given how toxic the thread has gotten over the subject that seems like either a non-starter or a bad idea.

*I'd have gone pure science, but what we picked is solid

Strunkriidiisk said:
Oh, that's a possibility I hadn't thought of.

Hrm. I don't really like the 'build a specific part' votes, I generally like just building whole ships.
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Picking the next priority for research would make sense even if we don't specifically make design choices for it. And yeah, I'd also vote nacelles because they're what's holding our warp cores back now.

Setting up for the Excelsior, bleeding edge prototype transwarp** nacelles!

**The terminology changes in the next hundred years
 
StriderInCosmos said:
Why do these three words matter here in the slightest? If this class of ship becomes a class that explores the galaxy, then it does. The amount of air wasted comparing this class to the canon one when we've gone so far off the beaten path compared to canon, and putting it down compared to such, is utterly exhausting. If I hear any more about a canon class that happens to have a ship named Enterprise in this thread, it'll quite frankly be too soon.
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Because niether design is what we have codified as an "Explorer" previously, but the Canon Connie is far closer to such a vessel than the one we have designed here in its basic design and configuration, in part because of the very different external environment around its creation in setting. It therefore serves as a reasonable point of comparison when discussing relative mission capabilities.

Steven Kodaly said:
And they both brought a respectable amount of asskicking with them.
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Oh yes absolutely. but as I have stated, the Explorer design space includes the ability to engage in high volume kinetic impacts with posteriors, but is not designed primarily to accomplish this over all other concerns.

Whereas the (probably) Excalibur, even in its fundamental hull configuration, is always asking first "how does this help me kick in the face of a D6" and asking about anything else generally not at all, or as an afterthought. This is why we picked a four deck half saucer, rather than the similarly massed two deck full saucer, or even a four deck full saucer. This is why we chose the bullpup engineering hull which slightly improved the ship's maximum warp speed, in spite of the smaller amount of space it would have compared to a larger engineering hull in a more traditional configuration. This is why we elected, for the first time in a while, to forego maximizing our efficient cruise speed and instead picked a sprint configuration, explicitly so it would (we hope) be able to outrun the D7, either in pursuit or retreat. This is why we gave it the most manuverability the frame was physically capable of, and the cost conscious "good enough" twin type two design was immediately discarded by literally everyone. And so on. At every step, any consideration for things like doing five year missions or having lots of module space were secondary concerns at best, if they came up at all.

And there's nothing wrong with that! We built the ship that was needed to the best of our knowledge and ability and within the constraints we were given, even if it wasn't really the ship no few of us, myself included, wanted to build. But calling it an "Explorer" when it explicitly wasn't built as one, not even in the design brief, is disingenuous at best, and outright disrespectful at worst; both to many of us who still want to do a real purpose built Explorer in the near future, and to the in universe legacy of the NX and Sagarmatha classes.
Skippy said:
Please just move on.
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Please see the above. Please also see the QM's previous statements about taking the thread's desires into account when project selection comes up. I am trying not to be rude or angry with you, but your characterization and that of a few other people comes off as very dismissive of the genuine desires of a great many of us, and very much reads as "Lol cry some more." even when you yourself seem to be operating on the assumption that Sayle will cleave to the canon railroad tracks mindlessly and without a single thought to the sentiment of the playerbase, which is demonstrably not the case in any quest they have run.
 
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...I just really want to know if we broke even on space or not. I'm so curious as to how much that warp core's bonuses actually give!
 
Mechanis said:
Because niether design is what we have codified as an "Explorer" previously, but the Canon Connie is far closer to such a vessel than the one we have designed here in its basic design and configuration, in part because of the very different external environment around its creation in setting. It therefore serves as a reasonable point of comparison when discussing relative mission capabilities.
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Y'know what, maybe it's time for me to step away from the quest for a bit. You've missed my point by focusing on the 'why does this matter' comment, and we're likely to see some form of madness grip this place until this ship is past. I've got better things to do than hear about the sanctity of an explorer named Enterprise.
 
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