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Starfleet Design Bureau

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[X] Cruise Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.4) [Range: +20%]
[X] Linear Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.2, Maximum Warp: 7.6 -> 7.8) [Range: +10%]
 
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Tank man said:
Being meant to and being able to are two different things. At the far corners of our space/just beyond it at which this ship is meant to operate this ship will be getting into fights with the Gorn and Tholians, to say nothing of other more minor powers (or unknown major ones we'll encounter), and will frequently be the only ship in range - as such the ability to sprint is a useful one, either to run away from or to run towards trouble.
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Starfleet specifically requested a low-mass, low-ish cost dedicated science ship. Not a science-focused patrol ship.

Any navy worth a damn won't be sending a dedicated science vessel into potentially hostile territory without a proper warship escort. That's how you lose your dedicated science vessels.
 
Linear seems like a good compromise, it's faster efficient cruise than max Sprint but still gives us a sprint comparable to the Canon Enterprise during this time period.

[X] Linear Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.2, Maximum Warp: 7.6 -> 7.8) [Range: +10%]

Tank man said:
Being meant to and being able to are two different things. At the far corners of our space/just beyond it at which this ship is meant to operate this ship will be getting into fights with the Gorn and Tholians, to say nothing of other more minor powers (or unknown major ones we'll encounter), and will frequently be the only ship in range - as such the ability to sprint is a useful one, either to run away from or to run towards trouble.
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We know that a number of Excalibur's are tasked with flag flying duties around the contested borders with the Gorn and Tholians and given the fact that they can sprint at Warp 8.6 running to an Excalibur or having an Excalibur drop by as backup shouldn't be out of the question.
Sayle said:
After the war the surviving Excalibur-class ships faced an uncertain future. Lacking the facilities to participate in the rebuilding efforts they were assigned to suppressing the surge in piracy caused by the depletion of Starfleet's patrol roster and flying the flag near contested borders with the Tholian Assembly and Gorn Hegemony.
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SaltyWaffles said:
Any navy worth a damn won't be sending a dedicated science vessel into potentially hostile territory without a proper warship escort. That's how you lose your dedicated science vessels.
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As can be seen with the destruction of the Grissom (the Mutara Nebula/that area of space is generally considered to be very close to the klingon border/closer to its core than ours) Starfleet does send science ships out unescorted.
 
Sayle said:
The mass is directly computed from volume. I'm not sure what you're trying to say otherwise.
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I'm basically saying that the volumes aren't matching what you'd expect from a large ship compared to a small one. For example, taking out units and simplifying things, if we had a ship that had a volume of 64 and it was a perfect cube, we can extrapolate that it is a 4 by 4 by 4 cube. If we halve the volume (and thus mass), the ship is going to be 3.1478 units by 3.1478 by 3.1478. In other words a ship that is 50% less volume is only 21.3% smaller.

In an actual fleet that would probably be the difference between a Heavy Cruiser and a Light Cruiser. Both are units that you only produce in small amounts and ought to be escorted by smaller, cheaper ships because each of them is an investment. What we should be looking at here is probably a ship that has half the dimensions, and thus about 12.5% the volume/mass of our heavy cruiser. Or to use the simplified example, a 2 by 2 by 2 cube for a volume of 8. When looking at real life navies (I know it's not a 1 to 1 from sea to space, but it's the only actual example we have IRL) you'll find that the mass difference between an expensive heavy ship and a cheap light one is between 80-90%. For example, the late WW2 US Navy was making Baltimore class heavy Cruisers with 13,600 ton displacement, and Gearing class destroyers with 2,616 ton displacement, meaning the destroyer was only 19% the mass of the heavy cruiser. It honestly only gets worse if we bring in the battleships (Baltimore was 28% the mass of Iowa, and Gearing 5.4%).

I saw multiple people arguing that it's not a large ship if it's only half the mass of Excalibur, but I was trying to point out that a ship with half the mass of our largest ship, is still a big ship. When dealing with cubic relations a proper small ship has maybe 10-20% the mass of a large one, not 50%. A destroyer sized ship really ought to be about 30,000 tons, which was one of the options presented to us. Instead we've gone for an 85,000 ton design, which is 47% the mass and thus only a light cruiser to the Excalibur's heavy. It's very frustrating when it feels like we've totally blown one of the major design criteria out of the water because it can be hard to get our heads around the scales involved.
 
Chargone said:
Ehh, i was kind of baffled by the "this isn't a combat ship so we should make it suck at escaping" logic in the previous vote, but it was producing results I liked so...
Meanwhile for actal combat/war ships, sprint is Still relevant (escaping fights you can't win is still mportant, but so is running down fleeing enemies), as is max cruise, while efficient cruise only really matters when spending long periods away from supply, which explorers and raiders certainly do, but light ships like this aren't actually suited for either role and would instead either be part of large fleets as escorts, or defending points of interest, or patrolling between/near bases, where supply is less of an issue.
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Oh, to be clear, I was talking about impulse thrusters and weapons, not the warp vote. I'm somewhat agonistic about that and happy to split the difference with a linear nacelles, mostly due to aesthetics TBH.

darkstarling said:
Keep in mind that the Intrepid rather iconicly raises its nacelles when it goes to warp.

Side note, on the whole tactical sprint debate. One of the Intrepid's major design features is the ability to - in this game's terms - switch from Cruise to Sprint nacelle configuration on the fly. Which is great. BUT that the other major thing about the Intrepid is that it's cruise - optimized, able to sustain high warp for a very long time.
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Sadly I'm not sure that there is a medically safe level of horse tranquilisers we could give to @Sayle that would make him let us do variable-geometry nacelles in the 23rd century.

Anyway, that's a good point, but when I think about the distinctive "look" of the Intrepid-class, I tend to picture it as it appears normally, not when going to warp.

Thread said:
Actually, we shorten it's life span even more since we advance in tech so much. We can't refit the old ships with our new stuff.
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This is true regarding the Warp 8 core, but not our other systems. The Kea class is getting a refit in 2040, adding torpedoes (no idea if anything else is getting an upgrade or not).
 
[X] Linear Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.2, Maximum Warp: 7.6 -> 7.8) [Range: +10%]

Crazy idea, would it be possible to develop a none warp capable ship? Like a totally different FTL method, since if Im remembering correctly there is a whole area of space that is slowly being torn apart and it was a whole episode where someone blue up a warp core or something exposing the area of space and the fact its expanding with each warp travel ship in that region of space.

Also I kinda want to see what a ship that uses a different FTL method would look like in a starfleet design. It can just be an experimental ship.
 
Zulaq said:
I'm basically saying that the volumes aren't matching what you'd expect from a large ship compared to a small one.
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It feels like "large ship" and "small ship" are being used in an unclear way here that is causing a lot of confusion.

If you're trying to say we should have more variation in the sizes of ships we produce if we were matching a real-world navy then I'd agree with you to an extent - it's definitely true that our last few designs have all hovered somewhere north of 100kT. (Obviously there can be various reasons for this, and technological paradigms can be different and thus incentivise different ranges of ship sizes.0 But I don't think all the extra detail here adds to your point.
 
SaltyWaffles said:
[X] Cruise Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.4) [Range: +20%]

I think this is past moratorium. Anyway, for a science vessel spending most of its time either studying something or traveling between distant locations, cruise configuration makes sense. It's not a real warship, it's not meant to fight, and it's not meant to be a rapid response or patrol craft.
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Its intended area of opperations is generally around the border, meaning within reach of refueling stations, and in danger of hostile encounters. It spends most of its time sitting in place at a specific planet.

If it's not meant to Fight it needs to be able to Escape.

You are actively choosing the option that requires more combat capabiity in order to defend itself and makes it more (granted, I've not done the maths on how Much more, this might not actually be meaningful) able to accompany the excaliber class on raids into enemy territory and the like over the option that lets it Not Fight.

And no, the potential existance of escorts (and no, one of the Very Limited number of excaliburs will Not just be sitting around being useless for months on end while this ship studies a specific planet when it could be out doing something useful) doesn't actually change the equation.

This is Silly! It's actively counterproductive to your stated goals!

...

Mind you, what the voters actually do with any given choice rarely has much to do with Why the previous one was made, instead focussing on which current option either maximises what they want the design to do or most mitigates what they see as its current weaknesses, so this probably won't actually affect its armament one way or the other in practice, but still.

[X] Sprint Configuration (Maximum Warp: 7.6 -> 8)
[X] Linear Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.2, Maximum Warp: 7.6 -> 7.8) [Range: +10%]

Even Linear is probably something of a waste, honestly, but so far there seems to be very little support for sprint this time.
 
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Zulaq said:
I was trying to point out that a ship with half the mass of our largest ship, is still a big ship.
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Point of order, the Excalibur isn't our largest ship. The Kea is at 225k tons. (The Excalibur actually matches the Saladin in mass, and that was termed a light cruiser).

edit: Actually the Kea is outmassed by the Thunderchild and Sagarmatha at 280k and 290k respectively, and the Sagarmatha isn't quite out of service yet since that appears to be 2250 when they get decommissioned.

Anyway, picking the compromise option which hopefully will also look the coolest.

[X] Linear Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.2, Maximum Warp: 7.6 -> 7.8) [Range: +10%]
 
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[X] Linear Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.2, Maximum Warp: 7.6 -> 7.8) [Range: +10%]

Like others said, it's going to be sciencing around the frontiers, with all the travel times and dangers involved in that.
I also just think the nacelles will look better along the side.
 
Skippy said:
Oh, to be clear, I was talking about impulse thrusters and weapons, not the warp vote. I'm somewhat agonistic about that and happy to split the difference with a linear nacelles, mostly due to aesthetics TBH.



Sadly I'm not sure that there is a medically safe level of horse tranquilisers we could give to @Sayle that would make him let us do variable-geometry nacelles in the 23rd century.

Anyway, that's a good point, but when I think about the distinctive "look" of the Intrepid-class, I tend to picture it as it appears normally, not when going to warp.



This is true regarding the Warp 8 core, but not our other systems. The Kea class is getting a refit in 2040, adding torpedoes (no idea if anything else is getting an upgrade or not).
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I guess my main point is supposed to be mass = cost. And we've blown past the point where the ship is cheap enough that it can be afforded to spend months on bio-science singular missions because it needs to do more in order to justify that extra cost.
 
Ebiris said:
Point of order, the Excalibur isn't our largest ship. The Kea is at 225k tons. (The Excalibur actually matches the Saladin in mass, and that was termed a light cruiser).
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Small point of order: The Kea's mass may be somewhat iffy due to the Great Mass Adjustment. (I swear there are even different values given in different places, could be imagining that however.)

But I don't disagree with your broader point - it seems like the Thunderchild or Saga must logically be heavier.

Zulaq said:
I guess my main point is supposed to be mass = cost. And we've blown past the point where the ship is cheap enough that it can be afforded to spend months on bio-science singular missions because it needs to do more in order to justify that extra cost.
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Eh, Starfleet definitely builds larger ships to do science missions. Like I brought up the Kea earlier, and this is actually what the Excalibur will be spending most of her service life doing as well. Starships don't spend most of their time fighting after all.

The loading bay and shuttle bay definitely do give this design more versatility and multirole functionality, so to some extent you're right - the increase in weight class has made this more of a classic multirole starship than a small specialist. Personally I'm fine with that. Either way, it's done now.
 
[X] Cruise Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.4) [Range: +20%]
I really don't see the need to make this thing sprint. Give it a gun, a distress beacon, and enough defences to last until something comes to save it.
 
Linear is a compromise options that fails to deliver the best possible for either rating, and thread consensus semes to lean toward "Nah, high sprint is low priority for this hull" so the only choice that is left imo is:

[X] Cruise Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.4) [Range: +20%]

For all the good it will do. I see the trend already.
 
[X] Linear Configuration (Efficient Cruise: 6 -> 6.2, Maximum Warp: 7.6 -> 7.8) [Range: +10%]

I've been persuaded by the aesthetic argument of the "flat is justice" people.

Also, a little bit of extra max warp is nice in order to GTFO when a Klingon force says hello.

At 7.8 it should be able to out-sprint a D7, no?
 
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