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Starfleet Design Bureau

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Cold Dust said:
Actually it does kinda make sense if it were technically practical. Those sections have to be secured, it always seemed weird to be you'd have ~15 areas of a Federation ship that had to have extra layers of forcefields, secure doors, guards, intruder sensors etc. Obviously totally necessary but big drain on resources. If you could reduce that even slightly it'd make things a lot more efficient.
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Starfleet builds its ships to engage in and survive combat. Like all military designers, they prioritize resilience and redundancy over efficiency. Ship designers will try to avoid things like putting all of a particular capability on one deck where a single depressurization or power failure could result in losing all function.

That means that among other things, you wont see them trying to do shit like concentrate all their weapons on one deck.
Not if they can avoid it.
 
[X] 120 Meter Flat-Bottom Saucer (Mass: 60,000 Tons) (Cost: 36)
[X] 140 Meter Expanded Saucer (Mass: 160,000 Tons) (Cost: 54)
 
Cold Dust said:
[X] 80 Meter Saucer (Mass: 30,000 Tons) (Cost: 32)
[X] 120 Meter Flat-Bottom Saucer (Mass: 60,000 Tons) (Cost: 36)

Either of these would be fine. We either build a secondary hull to our specifications, or go with the flat bottom saucer. If we go flat-bottom, I'll vote that we don't do landing capability but instead go for vertically oriented nacelles, go super cruise. Would be nice to have something that min-maxes cruise performance for a change, max out the long-range capability and utility rather than sticking drag-racing nacelles on cargo haulers or something.
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I definitely want to see this thing set up for Cruise, and I'll take the best option for cruise the nacelles give us... with the complication that I want to cruise while still being able to land.

So if I have my way we won't be minmaxed for cruise, but we'll be good at it.
 
Tank man said:
Unless some other bureau comes in out of the blue with them that's probably going to be the case. Though I suspect that since the refit for the Excalibur is expected to come in 2260 we're either going to design them right after the war and then have another generation done by 2260 (unlikely) or we're gonna be waiting until like 2254/2256 to design them (gets us another ship in prior, and also lines up with the roughly 4 year design phase for prior nacelles/warp engines).
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Yeah, my vague expectation based on absolutely no evidence that we'll get one postwar ship, then the Type 4 Nacelle design, and then the first purpose-built flagship explorer class after that (as the standard-bearer for the "New Fleet Program"[1] of 2270-2280 that saw the Keas refit and the final Newtons and Saladins obsoleted and replaced).

I've been amusing myself by speculating about what that first postwar ship class will be, actually. Possibilities I've considered include:

  • a Selachii-replacement frigate, adding to its traditional wolfpack hunter-killer role that of a cost- and crew-effective garrison & patrol ship (to crack down hard on opportunistic raiders and pirates who might otherwise sense weakness as the Federation licks its wounds, and also to shore up the morale of the outer colonies after a bunch of them got savaged in the war by just letting them see Starfleet being around more places, more often). I think this is the least likely idea not only because it'd be another dedicated warship but also because our impulse drive tech is so good right now that we don't need a tiny frigate to get a swift and ultra-maneuverable combatant, and we don't have stately heavy fighting ships that need their flanks guarded- unlike the Skate's Thunderchild or the Selachii's Sagarmatha, the Excalibur is a full-on lightning bruiser, and quite capable of guarding its own flanks.
  • a dedicated diplomatic ship
  • (the most likely option imo) a light/medium cruiser as a general internal workhorse (and spiritual heir of the Cygnus-class) to replace the Saladin and Newton- especially the Newton. We know the Keas get refit in '70, and between those and the current bioscience project I don't imagine we'll need another dedicated science hull before the 2280s or even 90s.
  • as an outside possibility, we might also get to design the Kea refit itself, if it's substantial enough to benefit from our input. I wouldn't be opposed to working around the incompatibility of the Warp 8 engine by just scrapping its entire engineering hull and mounting the refitted saucers to an entirely new one.
  • To minimize thruster balance problems, the new engineering hull is the same length and mass and only slightly taller and narrower. It is, of course, laid out completely differently, and now also fits a substantial cargo bay in addition to the now-much-more-compact warp core and no-longer-needed additional antimatter storage.
  • Old saucer means you're stuck with bog-standard electroceramic (no duratanium-alloy) and centerline thrusters, with little reason to replace them with Type 3s as their position means maneuverability gains would be underwhelming. Still, reinforcing the primary power conduit to get those old thrusters the (rather substantial) benefit of the new warp core's boost plasma might get your maneuverability up to Medium-Low. As a longshot alternative, a single boosted Type 3 might be barely sufficient to retain the Kea's former...er...stately grace (?) while freeing up a bit more space internally.
  • The Type 2 Mark II phasers aren't too much more demanding than the Mark Is, but the EPS grid saucer-wide just isn't beefy enough to support the presumably-upcoming Type 3 phaser, and replacing said grid in its entirety would be far too involved for a practicable refit.
  • At least covarient shields are a straightforward upgrade.
  • The old monotronic computer cores have got to go- both of them. Modern duotronics are the obvious replacement, but this is around the right time to prototype multitronics, too...:drevil:
  • With so much more compute on tap, adding a cutting-edge lateral sensor suite would augment the ship's data-gathering capability far beyond the rather finite upgrade potential of its aging main sensor grid.
  • General science, geology and astrometrics are all due for a thorough- like, rip-and-replace-outright thorough- modernization.
  • Biosciences can go; the new project we're currently working on just does that job so much better. The updated general-purpose labs will enable the Kea refits to dabble in a bit of biology when needed while being far more useful the rest of the time, and the bio lab's removal will free up space for some of those general-purpose labs that were displaced by the new lateral sensors.
    • The old engineering hull's arboretum really isn't needed either, but removing it might be unpopular. Still, relocating the geology labs down here would let you expand the astrometrics department with a proper stellar cartography suite, to put those shiny new sensors and computer cores to their best possible use. Alternatively, a bigger shuttle bay would also be convenient to have located down here right next to the new cargo bay.
 
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Strunkriidiisk said:
The main issue I have with this concept is that 'diplomatic vessel' is a pretty narrow design brief. Like, how do you fill an entire ship with that?
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What's the Cerritos filled with? Sure, it's not quite going out and doing first contact sort of diplomacy, but it's still an important thing to do, especially for the planets of the week beyond our present reach.

Kinda a baby explorer, in a way.
 
TeaMug said:
Hospital, disaster relief supplies, conference halls, embassy areas for if we're hosting negotiations between other polities (peace talks etc), five-star dining, and a giant arboretum featuring plants from various member worlds.

And weapons. Big stick, speak softly.
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Weapons very important. Officially to protect diplomats and other VIPs. But, yes, also to facilitate 'stubborn' governments seeing reason.
 
Also because people like to see that you have good weapons to back of your words when they are talking about joining a federation that says it will protect it's members.
 
Strunkriidiisk said:
Workshops and engineering equipment. Per the showrunners, most of what Cerritos does is infrastructural improvements.
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Whilst the Archer has most of that covered it is rather restricted in where exactly it can go. The Newton can go basically anywhere (fuel permitting), but it's kinda crap at engineering.

So that means our second contact ship is probably best made out of our
thepsyborg said:
(the most likely option imo) a light/medium cruiser as a general internal workhorse (and spiritual heir of the Cygnus-class) to replace the Saladin and Newton- especially the Newton.
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Newton replacement.
 
ScyBlade said:
Weapons very important. Officially to protect diplomats and other VIPs. But, yes, also to facilitate 'stubborn' governments seeing reason.
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We're the Federation, we don't do gunboat diplomacy. We do send the message that we will leave if you ask, because we respect you, and this is a choice on our part. Also that if the treaties come with military obligations we can and will defend you.
 
darkstarling said:
We're the Federation, we don't do gunboat diplomacy. We do send the message that we will leave if you ask, because we respect you, and this is a choice on our part. Also that if the treaties come with military obligations we can and will defend you.
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Kirk outright threatens a to glass a planet in response to him and his party being taken hostage by the locals, this mind you occurred because they proceeded to the planet despite being told to go away.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8-I9nRAnDk
The Federation during this time period is entirely willing to throw hands when provoked.
 
darkstarling said:
We're the Federation, we don't do gunboat diplomacy. We do send the message that we will leave if you ask, because we respect you, and this is a choice on our part. Also that if the treaties come with military obligations we can and will defend you.
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LOLROFL said:
Kirk outright threatens a to glass a planet in response to him and his party being taken hostage by the locals, this mind you occurred because they proceeded to the planet despite being told to go away.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8-I9nRAnDk
The Federation during this time period is entirely willing to throw hands when provoked.
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Adding on to this, Picard had his own elements of gunboat diplomacy, of which this one is one of the better regarded;

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA7t62JvlA8

And of course, The Sisko, in one of his more subtle moments;

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWMUUAMVEnM

To my recollection, there has never been an era of Star Trek where they didn't deploy gunboat diplomacy.

It's probably the only thing I truly and unreservedly respect the Federation for aside from their shipbuilding - even when they screw it up by choosing the wrong method, they thoroughly understand that diplomacy means "put up or shut up".
 
Speaking purely in universe, and setting aside all the IRL...catastrophe...it was...I wonder how Code of Honor from TNG's first season would have gone if that was Kirk's Enterprise instead.
 
God damnit
Strunkriidiisk said:
The main issue I have with this concept is that 'diplomatic vessel' is a pretty narrow design brief. Like, how do you fill an entire ship with that?
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Here me out here build a Dreadnought has a de facto mobile embassy. In war it can double has a cc center.

fit it with all crew conforts possible plus medbay then slap max protection and good tactical, warp settings ?.
Cramm all the proto tech we can on the design.

We build 5 max.
 
It probably depends; since Kirk's Star Trek enterprise is from the 22nd century compared to Picard's late 24th-century enterprise. A few things in-universe may have shifted since Kirk's time: Scotty is the best example of this; when he was freed from the transporter energy converter buffer aboard the runabout he was trapped on when it ran afoul with the Dyson sphere, he had no idea how things worked or operated in the 24th century since much time had passed.
 
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