To be fair I fully understand why the quest has small numbers, Its way more easy to manage, and coming up with NAMES for the ships is a pain. I was just having a giggle about area to ship ratios and how Stupid huge space is. Then had a thought about Ohh this explains why pirates would be such a huge problem, maybe I should post this...
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I mean, basically all of the Newtons and Selachi's are nameless. The solution there is just to not name them until you need to use a ship for something.
We explicitly are not allowed to build more Excalibur-class ships than the six which are confirmed to be built through the entire war.
The Excalibur is also frankly probably too expensive to be a great fit for our mainline workhorse combatant. I realise you may disagree, but this kind of high/low mix in our force composition has been consistent throughout the entirety of the quest. There always have to be a cheaper, smaller, "bread and butter "combatants to go alongside the "jam" of our less numerous NX/Thunderchild/Saga/etc.. In the last two wars we fought, these were the Stingray/Skate and the Cygnus/Selachii respectively.
That being said, I do agree it would be nice if we could build more than one and a half modern warships per year in an existential conflict, but there you go.
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- Canada
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Please only speak for yourself going forward. I imagine there are a sizeable number people who are silently enjoying this thread, maybe casting votes, maybe not. I am certainly one of them. You trying to say that because there is something YOU don't like means I won't like it is frankly offensive. This whole Starfleet on the back foot, followed by them rallying and coming back fighting is EXACTLY what I am looking for with this war. @Sayle is providing EXACTLY the content I want. If you don't like it go ahead and complain. But do NOT say that you speak for everyone when you do.
I stopped posting here because I was feeling attacked by a few people I will not name and my calling them out did little to stop that behaviour. So I'm going to tilt at windmills once again.
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- England
Yes I am. And I am not annoyed by this (I have blatantly said I am not dooming, why can't anyone read the post properly?)
We will survive this. Whats annoyed me is the fact that this can summerized as a mix of "I told you so" and "dropkicked in the face!"
The I told you so is because we were told by the QM we are behind canon in weapons and warships/tactical (which the quest has neglected so damn much the Pharos has come to haunt us for being a terrible defensive platform from literally February)
The other thing thats annoyed be is the fact that when presented with a war option and a science option the quest will go for the science option... even when we are told there is a war on the way (case in point, the defence satellite vote which died in the crib to a bioscience ship which will be functionally useless till post war as the excalibur retrospective showed ALL nonwarship orders to killed to build more warships/save rez for defence projects)
The final bit is the dropkicked in the face part, how did the klingons build such a massive armada without us getting ANY indication beyond , yeah a wars coming... we got: No stats on a ship beyond newtons roughly matching D6's, No ships number estimates (even if hopelessly wrong due to not accounting for the romulan help id be less annoyed by having something)... I was expecting to see the feds being pushed back in the opening months but not to lose a pharos
It doesn't MATTER that this is functionally all amounting to nothing for the klingons/they will run out of steam well before they can bring down the federation... I am annoyed by the factors Ive listed above
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It's your choice to harbor ill feelings wrt Pharos, but from the very outset the consensus was we wanted logistics and trade hubs, which meant limited at best offensive capabilities in order to not skimp on those primary and secondary goals.
So having gone and looked at the source of the ship numbers, HERE, a total active ship count for this period of around 700 ships is a fair estimate. The ship count of about 8000 ships is for the dominion war era ship count, not TOS ship count. They DID however do a mass buildup of ships during the Klingon cold war, and only ramped from there.
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I feel a bit bad about the Pharos, we were clearing huffing our own farts about "Professionals study logistics!" but there's something to it and I think there was a not unreasonable expectation that their actual functions would support a much larger fleet so we wouldn't be so overstretched.
We just kinda neglected to produce any ships worth much as a fleet anyway.
Keep in mind that's all fan speculation (from quite a few years ago). Discovery's example is the only time we've ever had the exact number of Starfleet ships (iirc, Enterprise might have but I'm not sure) stated, hell, the only time we've ever had the exact number of a major power's ships given - the closest before this was some statements regarding fleet (organisational unit) sizes in the Dominion War.
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[X] Two Forward Torpedoes, Two Aft (Cost: 53 -> 62) [-1 Modules]
[X] Forward Rapid Launcher, Two Aft Torpedoes (Cost 53 -> 69.5) [-1 Modules]
I want those aft launchers, and I want more torpedo armament on our ships in general. This is why I voted to skimp on the phasers and impulse thrusters.
[X] Forward Rapid Launcher, Two Aft Torpedoes (Cost 53 -> 69.5) [-1 Modules]
I want those aft launchers, and I want more torpedo armament on our ships in general. This is why I voted to skimp on the phasers and impulse thrusters.
[X] Two Forward Torpedoes (Cost: 53 -> 57.5)
[X] Two Forward Torpedoes, Two Aft (Cost: 53 -> 62) [-1 Modules]
The RFL is just not worth it here IMO, a significant increase in cost for a moderate combat improvement is not what we want for the cheap spammable science ship.
Aft torpedoes are ~neutral to me, the loss of a module is extremely painful but zero rear firepower is also very bad.
[X] Two Forward Torpedoes, Two Aft (Cost: 53 -> 62) [-1 Modules]
The RFL is just not worth it here IMO, a significant increase in cost for a moderate combat improvement is not what we want for the cheap spammable science ship.
Aft torpedoes are ~neutral to me, the loss of a module is extremely painful but zero rear firepower is also very bad.
Before the start of the war, we had ~34 Archers and Keas. If those had been functional combatants, it would right there make up almost our entire warship losses from this invasion.
(Though given the losses among the Cygnus class, we certainly could have done worse with the Archer. If nothing else it seems more capable of running away from raiders.)
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It didn't give a figure for United Earth Starfleet, but it did fortunately give a figure for Federation Starfleet: zero ships, throughout the entire run of the series
Point of order:
Starfleet is not allowed/going to build more Excalibur-class ships. Starfleet is not the only navy in the Federation at this point in the timeline. The fact that they only commissioned 6x additional Excaliburs in 2 years under wartime conditions, despite building 8x ships in 3 years under peacetime suggests to me that someone else was using that industrial capacity.
As for expensive, I do not agree. Not for a wartime vessel.
At C+/ ~91 pts per ship, its positively affordable to acquire given its combat performance and strategic speed.
An important thing to note is that Sayle gave an insightful rating to a post that posited the Andorian Imperial Guard is probably building its own Excaliburs, or at least a variant more suited to their needs.
For all we know the parts/slips to make more Excaliburs are being consumed by the member navies.
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And the Excalibur are one ship class that so far has been built in rather limited fashion (in comparison to other si fi ship classes) and while it's mostly a warship it's not being assigned the roles we need it to be in order to be used effectively. We need an internal patrol craft that we can mass produce. If this sounds familiar it's what we did with the Selachii-class. Something small cheap and combat effect in squadrons. Basically we need to create the escorts to our capital ships and then continue to update them so we have them on file for the next time we get into a brawel.
Tldr: we need to make the warp 8/9 equivalent of the Selachii-class and then keep the blue prints updated over time so we can mass produce them if/ when we have another war.
The issue is we never actually do the follow-up and design something punchy after designing a pure utility or science ship. If maximum armaments were the only viable, or even optimal option, we wouldn't be asked, they'd simply be applied. And I'm all for up-gunning this ship, I'm just worried it's gonna flop since we've turned our 2nd warp 8 ship into a warp ~7.5 one, and now we're gonna make something that's not the best science and survey ship we were asked to make, and instead make it a combatant that has negative combat synergy with our other choices.
If/when we get our next design, I'm gonna vote for a full warp 8 ship, with a minimum ability to put 3 torpedoes, preferably 4 and as many as 6 into its forward arc and at least 2 in its rear arc, maximum covariant or type 2 shields and max thrust.
I hope I'm wrong and this combination turns out well, I'm worried it's gonna be sub-optimal and it'll worsen our position.
If the Andorians are building their own Excaliburs, then that would be a wild swerve from when we were told that the member fleets were starting to lose the ability to conduct expeditionary warfare in this era, but it's not impossible that they since decided to re-arm? I suppose it is an elegant way to escape the trap we've constructed for ourselves here without violating the already-established number of Excalibur-class ships that got built.
However any of us may personally feel about the merits of the Excalibur, the quest to-date has always shown Starfleet having to match more expensive heavy warships with cheaper bread-and-butter combatants, and this is in fact backed up by the numbers of ships we know are produced for this conflict. It's simply how things have always been done in the Quest, whether for cost-effectiveness concerns, sufficient numbers of hulls, or for whatever other reasons.
If you want to argue with someone, argue with Sayle and tell him that Starfleet should build more Excaliburs and less Newtons, rather than me for simply being the messenger.
However any of us may personally feel about the merits of the Excalibur, the quest to-date has always shown Starfleet having to match more expensive heavy warships with cheaper bread-and-butter combatants, and this is in fact backed up by the numbers of ships we know are produced for this conflict. It's simply how things have always been done in the Quest, whether for cost-effectiveness concerns, sufficient numbers of hulls, or for whatever other reasons.
If you want to argue with someone, argue with Sayle and tell him that Starfleet should build more Excaliburs and less Newtons, rather than me for simply being the messenger.
I'm not sure why people are concerned about this whole thing? We've already got retrospectives that show the Federation do just fine during and after this. We are being shown early losses, but this isn't like how the whole war goes. So its not like we need to be worried here.
There is, point of order, no way to produce such a ship with the current cost math. This actually changed significantly from the Newton generation. We have a flat, baseline cost of ~28-32. This is before we build a ship capable of doing literally anything.
The Darwin is currently hitting a cost point around 2/3 that of the Excalibur, but is less than 2/3 the capability. It is less maneuverable, is smaller than 2/3 with the same durability per ton, and has less than 2/3 the firepower even with the heaviest weapons fit- at which point its cost would be more like 3/4 that of an Excalibur.
That certainly makes sense to me.
As part of a balanced peacetime fleet.
This isnt peacetime. Wartime just tends to max out industrial capacity as budgets balloon. The fact that we see fewer Excaliburs commissioned into Starfleet during wartime than in peacetime is very much the dog that didnt bark IMO
Especially since the Excalibur is the only mature Warp 8 ship design in the Starfleet roll to face the D7s.
Yes. Pure cost-per-firepower, we're best off building as big a ship as possible and mounting everything on it.
The problem with that strategy is that it leaves us too few ships to cover all our territory. We have to make lighter, less-efficient combatants just to make sure we're in as many places at once as we need to be.
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That or slow the Federation's expansion, but such a grand-strategic decision is way above our pay grade.
Sure, but I think that the Darwin is already getting to pretty significant diminishing returns. Going any further would result in very rapid loss of combat capability relative to cost. We could maybe save an additional 25% cost but it would mean something like half the shield output, no aft weapons, and even less phaser coverage.
Another thing, early in this Quest we had the ability to choose where to invest our resources. New tech or new factories, and we got to choose between technologies.
It might be good if we could choose some technologies specifically to develop. The rapid-fire launcher are really powerful but sometimes I feel the upfront cost is so high it puts us off. One thing that's occurred to me is something cheaper that fires 2 torpedoes, a burst-fire launcher. That way we could potentially mount 2 of them, and fire 4 torpedoes in 1 arc even on medium-sized ships. Dunno about cost, maybe 2.7x the cost of a normal photorp.
Alternatively type 2 torpedoes, something with more raw firepower but the same form factor. That'd mean we could go patrol frigates, give 'em 1-3 fore and aft launchers and hopefully make something that can take on D6s that isn't outrageously expensive.
The v4 nacelle early, maybe something like extended nacelles as an optional on a per-design basis that's more expensive but adds a +~0.1 cruise warp factor buff.
An early form of ablative armour, lets us spend more to make a more robust design?
Also at some point it'd be cool to design a system monitor, something that's pure nastiness but is intended to sit near its host planet, maybe a 1-nacelle design.
Any other thoughts?
It might be good if we could choose some technologies specifically to develop. The rapid-fire launcher are really powerful but sometimes I feel the upfront cost is so high it puts us off. One thing that's occurred to me is something cheaper that fires 2 torpedoes, a burst-fire launcher. That way we could potentially mount 2 of them, and fire 4 torpedoes in 1 arc even on medium-sized ships. Dunno about cost, maybe 2.7x the cost of a normal photorp.
Alternatively type 2 torpedoes, something with more raw firepower but the same form factor. That'd mean we could go patrol frigates, give 'em 1-3 fore and aft launchers and hopefully make something that can take on D6s that isn't outrageously expensive.
The v4 nacelle early, maybe something like extended nacelles as an optional on a per-design basis that's more expensive but adds a +~0.1 cruise warp factor buff.
An early form of ablative armour, lets us spend more to make a more robust design?
Also at some point it'd be cool to design a system monitor, something that's pure nastiness but is intended to sit near its host planet, maybe a 1-nacelle design.
Any other thoughts?
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