KnightDisciple
Love God. Do Right. Fear No Man.
- Location
- Midwest, USA
We literally just made a "warship"! It was the Excalibur-class! The Excaliburs are warships!
Linked contents
- Location
- The Void
[X] Forward Rapid Launcher, Two Aft Torpedoes (Cost 53 -> 69.5) [-1 Modules]
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
[X] Two Forward Torpedoes (Cost: 53 -> 57.5)
- Location
- England
I think the biggest problem that arose from this is the way the buildup to this felt... In the romulan conflict the war was fundamentally "fair" as the battle was against a technologically superior opponent whom earth HAD to hold against with extreme losses from the tech gap...
Here we more or less got told, in spite of having a build up time due to the way the federation has been written and the way questers have voted (Looking at you I MUST HAVE SCIENCE WITH NO GUNS Crowd) we have effectively been told the efforts of those of us whom did not want this quest to end with "and the klingons burnt everything to the ground" that our efforts might as well have been spent sending the resources use to build ships to the klingons as "tribute" to keep them off the federations backs... would have done more because how the hell is anyone going to realistically fight off a peer power that has been mass producing warships that have near parity with our best ship at a rate of 2.5 times the number of hulls ordered PER YEAR... and are being backed by a second power.
While i get the quest is not, run the federation quest (its starship design bureau)... this feels like railroading (while part of it like the pharos falling is just long term consequences*), we asked about the specs of a D7, then build to attempt to handle a D6 (which we also had to guestimate the stats for because lord forbid we get numbers because we cant have an intelligence report because federation means no intelligence department... or find out the enemy is somehow building these things wholesale...)
Of course... we aint blameless either (I have made my point about the lack of defence picks people have taken citing this is federation not imperial quest... but this has just left us up the creak without a paddle in a leaky canoe... case in point the ship we are buidling now... Defence sat would have been a better pick 100%)
*People said the overly massive focus on utility to the extent of NOT BUYING the enhanced ring based weapons would bite us and most of the quest just ignored them... which is why a few of those stations are now scrap.
Here we more or less got told, in spite of having a build up time due to the way the federation has been written and the way questers have voted (Looking at you I MUST HAVE SCIENCE WITH NO GUNS Crowd) we have effectively been told the efforts of those of us whom did not want this quest to end with "and the klingons burnt everything to the ground" that our efforts might as well have been spent sending the resources use to build ships to the klingons as "tribute" to keep them off the federations backs... would have done more because how the hell is anyone going to realistically fight off a peer power that has been mass producing warships that have near parity with our best ship at a rate of 2.5 times the number of hulls ordered PER YEAR... and are being backed by a second power.
While i get the quest is not, run the federation quest (its starship design bureau)... this feels like railroading (while part of it like the pharos falling is just long term consequences*), we asked about the specs of a D7, then build to attempt to handle a D6 (which we also had to guestimate the stats for because lord forbid we get numbers because we cant have an intelligence report because federation means no intelligence department... or find out the enemy is somehow building these things wholesale...)
Of course... we aint blameless either (I have made my point about the lack of defence picks people have taken citing this is federation not imperial quest... but this has just left us up the creak without a paddle in a leaky canoe... case in point the ship we are buidling now... Defence sat would have been a better pick 100%)
*People said the overly massive focus on utility to the extent of NOT BUYING the enhanced ring based weapons would bite us and most of the quest just ignored them... which is why a few of those stations are now scrap.
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I don't imagine Starfleet suddenly went from 700 ships to ~7,500 in 15-16 years (2240-2256). Unless the Federation is able to pull a PLAN in space it's not really all that feasible (that'd be 425 ships commissioned per year).
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I mean, I hate it it too but numbers is numbers (especially when we can't even narrow down fleet size from the era that has the most TV shows/associated works and a full on war!)
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- Location
- Reno Nv
[x] Forward Rapid Launcher, Two Aft Torpedoes (Cost 53 -> 69.5) [-1 Modules]
I have no issues with setbacks and losing sometimes, but I do think that if Federation is bigger, it should have built more ships.
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Oh, stop dooming, we've basically been previewed the narrative of the war ("get smacked hard due to overextension, concentrate a defense/counterattack fleet, force at least a status quo ante bellum peace) as well as some of the reasons for it (the Klingons' Great Houses are essentially competing economies, each of which depends on conquest and plunder to build resource stockpiles which can be spent all at once on mighty feats, but which cannot be sustained except through continuous and rapid conquest, while the Federation is a single if somewhat decentralized economy which can actually sustain a long-term effort; likewise each Great House has political rivals waiting to plunge knives into its back at the slightest setback while the Federation hangs together for the long haul even in forbidding circumstances and has since the Romulan war). Up-arming a second-string ship that won't be ready for any actions isn't going to change that narrative, nor will it probably change the dynamics of the cold war that follows the hot. Buckle up. Enjoy the ride.
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- Location
- EcksEcksEcksEcks
[X] Two Forward Torpedoes, Two Aft (Cost: 53 -> 62) [-1 Modules]
Honestly if the concern is no one thought we were designing a ship for the war, a simple solution would be to just put it to a vote. That way no player won't have been given a choice of whether to press the Darwin into service as it stands, or put it on the backburner live with watching the Newton explode on loop for four years.
We're the Design Bureau, we don't run the Federation but we do absolutely get A Vote in these kinds of decisions.
We're the Design Bureau, we don't run the Federation but we do absolutely get A Vote in these kinds of decisions.
Huge numbers like that just reek of writers trying to win vs debates. Or I guess the perception that bigger numbers = more epic, especially with modern CGI enabling stupid big numbers in scenes.
- Location
- England
If I was dooming I wouldn't have posted a few pages back stating we needed people to stop slamming their bleeding head into BUT ITS FEDS SO NO GUNZ button and build allot of warships or defences.
No what im annoyed about is amix of long term consequences (which we were told would happen like the pharos being a terrible defensive point because its barely armed for its size) and the fact that kronos somehow built enough ships to be an existential threat... and nobody somehow noticed (in setting...)
beyond that im abstaining from voting (I didn't agree with the science ship vote and dont really care given that) so will wait till it gets dropped out (into irrelevance as its a science vessel in a war) and we get the option to build something actually useful (that will be fun as the quests been at its best when up against a wall)
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Driven by Apathy
Formerly known as Brain_Caster
I'm sorry, but where do you get all of this from? Are you pulling it from thin air? Are we actually reading the same quest?
The Federation has been clearly described as a rapidly expanding civilization with a vast and barely populated frontier surrounding the developed core. Under circumstances like this, a Klingon surprise offensive smashing right through that frontier is simply the expected result. It should not be any sort of surprise.
The painful part - for the Klingons - begins now. They're at the end of the their supply lines, the Federation (whose military-industrial complex has basically suffered zero damage so far) is no doubt hysterically gearing up for total war, the Federation member fleets haven't even entered the fray yet, and our primary warship design has just handed theirs' its ugly green ass, in spite of the tactical circumstances of that battle favoring the latter. Sword > Bat'leth. And by the way, that sword is also a commerce raider par excellence. Did I already mention that the Klingons are at the end of an extended supply line?
The Klingon War reaching the Federation core territories (which AFAIK it never did in canon) will leave lasting psychological scars that will likely have repercussions for Federation policy centuries from now. But there is every reason to expect the Federation to survive this invasion.
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To be clear, I'm completely happy with us suffering adversity in the quest. You can look back to when I was saying against quite a lot of opposition that the Earth-Romulan war was going to be gnarly. I enjoy us seeing serious losses and consequences from our decisions more than I suspect most players do. It's more the specific combination of a major extended conflict which takes place live over multiple updates, and minimal player agency whilst it is happening which I find odd and also relatively unprecedented for this quest.
Also frustrating given the Darwin is right there, nearly complete, and it is essentially only an arbitrary limitation preventing us from using it. We could straight up leave the labs until after the war and rush it into-service as is once the torpedo systems are finalised and save ourselves an extra six months. That is what a real nation facing an existential conflict with a peer would immediately do if it found itself seriously outmatched, so the whole discussion around it becomes surreal.
@Tank man I was working with numbers pulled from one of your posts earlier today that I utterly mangled in remembering, It was pre-caffeine and the numbers I remembered were "If we had like this many it wouldn't be such a huge problem" Numbers. Not how many ships canon had. MY BAD.
And yes, there's no way for SF to go build 12X the amount of ships in like 15 years.
And yes, there's no way for SF to go build 12X the amount of ships in like 15 years.
Being a QM must be fun because you can just decide at any point to make every decision the players have made the wrong ones, no matter what they are.
I'm sure that if we had gone hard-specced into Tactical that Sayle would just pull six Borg Cubes out of the future and have them show up in Earth orbit.
I'm sure that if we had gone hard-specced into Tactical that Sayle would just pull six Borg Cubes out of the future and have them show up in Earth orbit.
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That's a suboptimal choice when one can just build more Excaliburs - the modern warship design is right there.
Huge?
In 1945 the United States Navy had some 833 surface warships (out of 6,768 total active ships), whilst the circumstances are somewhat different (we depend on dilithium, we represent 20 unified planetary governments/economies and countless colonies) if we kept things 'proportional' (each member being a United States) Starfleet could easily support 16,660 ships.
Going for the more age of sail/exploration feel of TOS, we can look at the Napoleonic Royal Navy (Napoleonic Britain being our closest comparison as far as industrial, economic and bureaucratic development goes), in 1805 it possessed 103 ships of the line, 120 frigates and 420 sloops-of-war/other minor warships (643 ships total), with the same assumptions as above you'd get a rather comfortable 12,860 - or 4,460 ships if you discounted the sloops.
If you want huge senseless numbers in Star Trek the only real example I can think of is the Mars orbital ring from Picard S1, before the destruction of the Martian orbit/surface, which comes out to about 63 million starships. ~7,500 starships is perfectly reasonable assuming a late TNG era fleet size of 20,000-40,000 (which is, iirc, broadly accepted)*.
*Keeping in mind the Federation is a polity with far in excess of 900 billion citizens at that point.
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Ah, fair enough, no bother, I've been in similar situations before.
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So what I hear, we could get ship orders in hundreds? (I want that a lot)
Because they're an authoritarian power devoting 10% of GDP to warmaking and we devote 0.5% to defense.
And thus lots of our people die every single damned time.
If we were talking purely about show canon, yes, but Sayle has quite clearly taken a lower number point of view when crafting this continuity. I'm not sure we'll get that as a possibility, outside of our Miranda equivalent.
Though funnily enough the technical manual does give like 50-55 Saladin's.
Linear scaling like that doesn't really work out. Sure, Starfleet is way more people and economic output than any real-life nation, but your own example demonstrates how more people and economic output didn't translate into proportionately more warships(the 1945 USA was about three times bigger and had nine times the GDP than 1800 Britian). Rather, it meant that that individually, warships were far larger, more expensive, and had larger crews.
Outside of technical takes like that, stuff like 7500 ships tends to just wash out the importance of individual commands, raise lots of weird questions about how the command structure works, and results in a visual morass where a huge blob of ships fights another huge blob of ships.
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The point of the Federation is that they are an economy faction in RTS terms
They spend 0.5% of GDP but match your defense spending.
Because their economy is that much bigger due to all that investment compounding on economic growth.
Its just that in RTS terms, we are still fairly early game.
And the Klingons are attacking our expansion bases before we have had time to build them up properly