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Starfleet Design Bureau

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A Slipspace Tree said:
That or having another chance at the defense satellites.
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Static defenses are a monument to the stupidity of man - George S. Patton.

I don't know what y'all expected to do with the defense satellites, because defense satellites suck. Their first appearance, "They wouldn't have helped anyways if they were online."

Do you think we're really going to design a better defense satellite than San Francisco?

If the answer is "Yes", then we can just write off all SanFran products as underperforming lemons that cannot be trusted with anything important.
 
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Skippy said:
Just again at the cost of being repetitive, the Newton has:
- Type-II Phasers.
- Type-2 Impulse Engines.
- Type-1 Shields.
- Standard Photon Torpedo Launchers.
- A Warp 7 Engine.

It is behind our state of the art now in literally every aspect. We cannot build more Excaliburs than the six officially confirmed to be build during the war in the Project Constitution Retrospective. Our chances of getting to design a whole new ship just for the war is... unlikely, although if someone wants to try and convince Sayle for that option than be my guest.

The Darwin is already nearly finished, and is vastly ahead of the Newton as a combatant in every respect whilst being a similar size and much cheaper than an Excalibur, as well as not being tied to any set build quantity. It's simply our best option. That's why I've been hammering on about this. Given we designed the Skate, Thunderchild and Selachii all during wartime, all making a great positive difference to their respective conflicts, it is frankly "You should all be court-martialled" levels of insane to suggest we would do nothing to try and deal with the greatest threat the Federation has faced since the Earth-Romulan War.

Otherwise we are just going to watch impotently whilst twiddling our thumbs for the next four years as more and more of Starfleet is destroyed, with its only options for replacing combat losses being a tiny number of Excaliburs and semi-obsolescent Newtons.
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It's going to take at least two or three more years to finish the Darwin, and at that point even if they rush out the first tranche it's only going to see the tail end of the war regardless.

There's already what, a dozen Excaliburs in service and six being crash-built? If we didn't know more or less what was going to happen perhaps you'd have a point, but as it stands there's no reason to hurry this out.

Also, the Selachii was designed and put into service shortly before the Kzin war, not during. Even that ship took a full five years to design.
 
Wootius said:
I'm happy with letting the QM proceed with their already planned actions and moving on with the plot and a new ship.
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Well I respect that, but I am speaking here for what I think is a significant chunk of the playerbase who will not enjoy sitting through three to four more war updates where we feel completely impotent.

I appreciate it if you want to spend less time on the war and not more, but that is not what we're talking about here.

random_npc said:
I feel like this is information we should have had when we where deciding what to make? This may have tilted things towards the defense satellite.
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The Pharos being such a lemon in terms of defensive abilities probably also distinctly did not help us there, to be fair.
 
I'd like for the story to progress as is without petitioning changes. We made decisions for this quest and we should see them through. Not beg for narrative changes because we don't like where it's going.

I do accept we'll need to slightly upgun our future designs slightly though to avoid the tactical gap we're experiencing now for the future.
 
KlavoHunter said:
Static defenses are a monument to the stupidity of man - George S. Patton.
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With all due respect to Patton, almost no one has the resources necessary to park multiple mobile assets everywhere. Static defense, while usually insufficient on their own to outright stop enemy advances, can still act as both speedbumps to slow them down and tripwires to know "Oh shit, better get some ships over there".
 
KlavoHunter said:
Do you think we're really going to design a better defense satellite than San Francisco?

If the answer is "Yes", then we can just write off all SanFran products as underperforming lemons that cannot be trusted with anything important.
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Iirc Sayle explicitly stated that they expected our defence satellite would be more than a gun and some power cells. So yes, ours would objectively be superior in all aspects but cost.

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KlavoHunter said:
Reply to the rest of my post you coward!
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It didn't exist when I wrote that!
:)
 
KlavoHunter said:
Static defenses are a monument to the stupidity of man - George S. Patton.
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I had a argument about placing fixed SUPERMAC guns in orbit of earth, it was a huge research sink, and someone spent months arguing for it and I just could never agree because its just static gun in orbit of earth.

He made good points like how this can free up ships guarding the homeworld to allow them to do more actions outside.

I argue that improving ships just means we are making SMACs mobile once we upgrade to that point but he just wanted these for the fact they can destroy motherships. All good points but I just couldnt do it.

But he finally got his way and convinced enough people and I slept in that day to wake up to having SMACs research done.
 
KlavoHunter said:
Static defenses are a monument to the stupidity of man - George S. Patton.

I don't know what y'all expected to do with the defense satellites, because defense satellites suck. Their first appearance, "They wouldn't have helped anyways if they were online."

Do you think we're really going to design a better defense satellite than San Francisco?

If the answer is "Yes", then we can just write off all SanFran products as underperforming lemons that cannot be trusted with anything important.
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All SanFran products are lemons, my cat could do better. 👀
 
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@Skippy perhaps just campaign then for an off-screen emergency refit design of the Newton-class?

Speed build this, off-screen the improvements, Sayle let's us know how the war is going, and advance the timeline forward so we can get to the ships that won't bore him to build.

I admit, in this case I would find it boring to spend a real life week or more making the newton again the same but with bigger number better.


(But honestly, I think that after this sucker punch, we are going to come back swinging with fury in our eyes. )
 
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Static defences appear to work in Star Trek in at least certain contexts.

Like the Romulan and Klingon Neutral Zones (the Klingon border also had one before the détente after Proxima) are both defended by belts of Federation starbases. I think this is more about power projection for a forward defence than like, actually static defensive installations because of course an attacker could fly around. But presumably there are reasons why they work on the defensive, like being able to support ships to attack enemy logistics if they aren't first taken out.

Deep Space 9 despite being rather obsolete also handles itself fairly well against a Klingon attack, and we also have the weapons platforms seen later in DS9. Both of those are defending somewhere important rather than just sitting out in the middle of nowhere, so I think contesting key orbitals is another role for defensive installations.

Golgotha said:
@Skippy perhaps just campaign then for an off-screen emergency refit design of the Newton-class?

Speed build this, off-screen the improvements, Sayle let's us know how the war is going, and advance the timeline forward so we can get to the ships that won't bore him to build.

I admit, in this case I would find it boring to spend a real life week or more making the newton again the same but with bigger number better.
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That's also worth considering, and thank you for proposing a constructive alternative. It does have the limitation of still having a Warp 7 engine, but it would still definitely be a distinct improvement.
 
[X] Two Forward Torpedoes (Cost: 53 -> 57.5)
[X] Forward Rapid Launcher (Cost 53 -> 65)

The bird has flown. We had the opportunity to give this a warp 8 emergency thrust for evasion. We had the opportunity to give it max thrust to make it as fast and nimble as an Excalibur. We had the opportunity to give it rear phasers. We chose neither.

Let's not sacrifice much-needed scientific capabilities by making this a pocket war destroyer. Right now, as the war ends, we need a bio-survey ship, preferably with the ability to do full surveys solo. 2 torpedo launchers on a survey ship is a step up from what we had without being excessive. Let's shelve these lessons, and the next design we'll max out covariant or even type 2 shields, and give it potent fore and aft torpedoes and full phaser coverage.

We definitely shouldn't be slapping rapid-fire launchers on a design where we've been cost-cutting, reducing max warp and sublight speed etc because we're getting negative synergy, a malus on its effectiveness. Save the expense for our next design where we can build it from the ground up to be a real nasty fighter.

Edit: I'll also vote for a forward rapid-fire launcher, because that gives it more firepower without reducing scientific capability, despite the cost, and also because it will speed up the maturation of rapid-fire launchers, making them more viable for future designs.
 
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Golgotha said:
@Skippy perhaps just campaign then for an off-screen emergency refit design of the Newton-class?

Speed build this, off-screen the improvements, Sayle let's us know how the war is going, and advance the timeline forward so we can get to the ships that won't bore him to build.

I admit, in this case I would find it boring to spend a real life week or more making the newton again the same but with bigger number better.


(But honestly, I think that after this sucker punch, we are going to come back swinging with fury in our eyes. )
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I mean the problem with that is that that would take longer than just speeding up Darwin production. The lines for the Newtons are cold, whereas the ones for the Darwins are just now getting spun up and finished. Much easier to increase production speed there rather than try and restart a cold line or find slip space for a bunch of hulls that are all over the place.
 
EternalStruggle said:
I mean... we did. We knew the Four-Year War wasn't going to go well for us. We didn't have all of the specifics, but this isn't some massive surprise or anything.
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The Federation-Klingon War is explicitly mentioned in the Kea retrospective. That the Saladin is at best a second-line combatant, vulnerable to the agile Birds of Prey and without enough firepower to face off against D7s, is explicitly mentioned.

In the Warp 8 Engine retrospective, after we choose to develop a drive that can't be retrofit to our existing fleet, we get explicitly warned that events have brought the war forward and we'll have much less time before it hits. We promptly decide to build a non-combat engineering cruiser.

After that, we get an explicit request for a heavy cruiser. This is more-or-less the same brief as the Constitution, but that the context is less favorable for the Federation is fairly explicit. (There was also lots of salt about building a military ship. Lots of salt.)

The Excalibur retrospective makes it clear we survive the war, and without losing too many Excaliburs. But we still have lots of voters who strongly object to designing military ships - see: the long streak of choices we've made to de-prioritize the military - so it's not exactly surprising that we turned around and said "good enough" after that. I'm just happy we're actually making an armed cruiser here instead of a noncombat frigate.
 
zac1 said:
Then having a quest thats pretty much that was a terrible idea to do then.
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Nah, because we don't just do pretty much that. Every time we have made a new science ship, for example, we went both a different scientific focus, context and technology level. And often very different designs. I mean look at the Darwin compared to the Kea!
Every few ships we tend to mix it up with a technology like the phasers or warp engine. And I suspect that's a lot of work to draw, but it's honestly a lot of fun, and probably our biggest vector of change for Starfleet as a whole.
And we rarely do ships with the same role right after each other.
 
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Sarpedon said:
I mean the problem with that is that that would take longer than just speeding up Darwin production. The lines for the Newtons are cold, whereas the ones for the Darwins are just now getting spun up and finished. Much easier to increase production speed there rather than try and restart a cold line or find slip space for a bunch of hulls that are all over the place.
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In fairness I think the Newton production is either winding down but still ongoing at this point in time, or is going to be reactivated during the war to replace losses. We're definitely likely to alter the timeline there to replace combat losses. Like we will be forced to do so; otherwise Starfleet would just not replace any of its losses in the war, which is insane.

A bit frustrating that our workhorse combat cruiser is one we had no hand in designing and is semi-obsolete when the war starts.
 
[X] Forward Rapid Launcher, Two Aft Torpedoes (Cost 53 -> 69.5) [-1 Modules]

While I do think we need to more thoroughly weigh the merit of tactical systems in the future- a huge part of our losses in the war aren't because of bad ships, but because of an over extended military and a government that isn't actually funding it enough to meet the demands placed on it.

"The Golden Age of Orion Piracy" makes it abundantly clear that Starfleet was underfunded and overcommitted. These terrible losses aren't just some categorical inferiority in our ships, it's case of a prepared and concentrated force hitting an unprepared and scattered force, and the ensuing slaughter as the latter tries to consolidate. We could have given them the Excaliburs a decade earlier and Starfleet would still be getting it's ass beat initially. Obviously we can't directly influence Starfleet's institutional policies and commitments, so it's an unsatisfying answer to say 'blame the government and the Admiralty', but it's important to understand that part of this genuinely was outside of our purview.
 
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