Remove ads

Starfleet Design Bureau

Linked contents
Starship Design Bureau Starfleet Design Bureau
Reader mode
jjffjhjf said:
What's a Century class? I'm not seeing it in our list of finished stuff?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Previous version of the quest

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Starship Design Bureau Sci-Fi

Design starships from Enterprise onwards, dealing with production capabilities and internal layouts to meet the demands of Starfleet as Earth takes the galactic stage. With art!
forums.sufficientvelocity.com forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Also I was wrong it was 5 attack ships, a Galor, and 3 Dominion Battleships


@Wootius
I don't think the phaser coverage matters until we get phaser strips, I think that's the point Sayle says we can fire more than one phaser at a time.
 
Last edited:
Skippy said:
It may be evidence that we need both offensive and agile strikey ships, and more robust "anchors" for our fleet formation, for whatever reason.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This is my assumption about what it means, yes. I don't think the anchors need to have immense amounts of guns and torpedoes, and of course they don't need agility, either; I think the big thing they need is just mass. And mass doesn't cost that much.

(The obvious issue with agility is that it's fairly straightforward to stay out of one ship's firing arcs, but multiple ships can cover more space the same way extra phaser banks do. Agility isn't a dodge chance, phasers and disruptors still hit just fine once you're in their arc for whatever reason.)
 
Hmm, yes that does seem like it would qualify, being an order of magnitude bigger than any of the ships we've built in this quest so far. I like it.
 
thepsyborg said:
I'm happy with the current state of affairs.

I'm happy with the performance of our recent designs.

I'm happy with the performance of our less-recent designs! Look, all that Science and Engineering focus that we went in on at the cost of firepower, all those lighter vessels that were cheaply rendered immune to casual piracy, all those colonies that got founded, got their biospheres analyzed and their infrastructure built out decades ahead of schedule, all those new minor species that joined the Federation instead of getting wiped out by disasters or enslaved by Klingons or Romulans or whoever and all the members of those species that got a little bit less oppressed when the Federation was sternly disapproving about certain socially discriminatory laws on their books, all those plagues and disasters that got responded to days or weeks faster because we had antimatter generation dozens of lightyears closer and the Cygnuses and Newtons could afford to max-cruise instead of efficient-cruise-

look, I'm seeing a lot of people real salty about "well I guess we fucked up and we were asking for it"-

No! You know what? The Cygnus, the Kea, the Archer, the Pharos? All that build-out-the-frontier, help-our-fucking-people feel-good shit?

IT FUCKING WORKED

It was the right call. It was better than canon. We have made a stronger Federation.

Like, sure, yes, it made the Klingon War inevitable- and it made it happen earlier, and made it more dangerous. Okay, whatever. Do you honestly think more people are going to die in the Four Years' War than would have died to plagues and disasters and Nausicaans and assorted miscellaneous pirates and raiders over the course of the last eight or ten decades, plus would have died in a 2260s Federation-Klingon War scenario? The Klingons not being given to things like cobalt bombs yeah no I'm not forgiving the Romulans anytime soon I very much doubt it!

IT FUCKING WORKED

It was the right call. It was better than canon. We have made a stronger Federation.

Our Excalibur came out a decade earlier and is five steps more expensive than canon Connie (A>A->B+>B>B->C+) and we still ordered MORE OF THEM and sure the "why" is "because the Klingons were saber-rattling and Starfleet was getting nervous" but stop and think about the "how"! We could afford to build and crew significantly more, significantly more expensive ships, significantly earlier! Our economy, our population, our scientific strength, the overall state of the Federation? We are kicking SO. MUCH. ASS.

That whole reckless 4x expansion and build up for lategame schtick that's been getting derided a lot lately?

IT FUCKING WORKED

It was the right call. It was better than canon. We have made a stronger Federation.

The Klingons were never not going to be an issue- but even if the Four Years' War costs more lives than the Federation-Klingon War would have, we're still ahead by decades of saving FAR more lives and livelihoods and worlds and species on the frontier. We're still- give or a take a lot in particular areas, but overall ballpark- a full decade up in tech progression. The snowball is just starting, but already we're dramatically better positioned to take on the Borg, the Cardassians, the Dominion, and so on into the future.

Yeah, the right-now kinda sucks. But you know what?

#WORTH

I am absolutely fucking thrilled with the overall outcome of all our choices up until this point, and with the exception of the Sagarmatha's quad nacelles🧂🧂🧂:p I would make all of them again in a heartbeat.

Edit: 😳thanks <3
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

If that's the case than mother of god have we not gotten the feedback for it. The main feedback we got that's not deep in the weeds of comparing ship numbers to cannon and making conclusions is "haha eat shit for overextending nerds." So, I guess @Sayle is the quoted post broadly correct?
 
Candesce said:
This is my assumption about what it means, yes. I don't think the anchors need to have immense amounts of guns and torpedoes, and of course they don't need agility, either; I think the big thing they need is just mass. And mass doesn't cost that much.

(The obvious issue with agility is that it's fairly straightforward to stay out of one ship's firing arcs, but multiple ships can cover more space the same way extra phaser banks do. Agility isn't a dodge chance, phasers and disruptors still hit just fine once you're in their arc for whatever reason.)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think we need more durable ships if we're intending defensive coverage of something or we have weaker ships in the formation. So I would be at least a little cautious, we could build a fleet composition and be in a strategic situation in the future that doesn't have a use for something of this nature and if lacking maneuverability itself, it would become a deadweight.
 
random_npc said:
If that's the case than mother of god have we not gotten the feedback for it. The main feedback we got that's not deep in the weeds of comparing ship numbers to cannon and making conclusions is "haha eat shit for overextending nerds." So, I guess @Sayle is the quoted post broadly correct?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's pretty clear to anyone who has properly digested the retrospectives and other bits of information Sayle has given us as time has gone on.
 
DeltaV11.2 said:
I think we need more durable ships if we're intending defensive coverage of something or we have weaker ships in the formation.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Right. Cheap "fleet anchors" will be terrible duelists, which is why something like the Archer - which was mostly going to be hauling stuff around in the Federation's interior, where it shouldn't be suffering serious ambushes and could always call for help - would be a decent pick.

I suspect trying to do the same with an Explorer would get... questionable... results. With those we should probably be producing heavy cruisers or fast battleships in the same lines as the Excalibur, only, y'know, bigger.
 
Candesce said:
This is my assumption about what it means, yes. I don't think the anchors need to have immense amounts of guns and torpedoes, and of course they don't need agility, either; I think the big thing they need is just mass. And mass doesn't cost that much.

(The obvious issue with agility is that it's fairly straightforward to stay out of one ship's firing arcs, but multiple ships can cover more space the same way extra phaser banks do. Agility isn't a dodge chance, phasers and disruptors still hit just fine once you're in their arc for whatever reason.)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The issue is fighting our innate temptation to put more armaments on a Big Chonky Ship and thereby pushing the cost up, really. If you build a 200kt cruiser with standard covariant shielding, one Type-3 Impulse Thruster, four phasers (which it will need at minimum with lower manoeuvrability), and two frontal standard torps, that's still going to cost a fair amount for a ship that can't really kill enemy cruisers. Might be worth it if it can absorb enough incoming fire and act as logistical support for the rest of the punchier elements of the fleet?

The Miranda might be our first opportunity to put some version of this theory into practice I guess? It's got to come into service sometime in the next thirty years, and is basically a cost-effective heavy cruiser in 23rd century terms, for all that we're used to thinking of them as frigates in 24th century terms. Although I'm not sure that in canon the Miranda was meant to be a sluggish ship, it seemed fairly zoomy in the Dominion War.
 
People seem surprisingly down over a war we've already been told the Federation won.

Like, all this stuff about pushing the Darwin out faster... don't worry about it! The Federation wins anyway.
 
Last edited:
Tank man said:
It's pretty clear to anyone who has properly digested the retrospectives and other bits of information Sayle has given us as time has gone on.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Really? because the ones I read was a series of ships saying "this helped the federation expanded" then a big update how the Klingons where able to do so much damage because they had more ship building capacity, and the federation was extremely underdeveloped outside of its core. Allowing them to easily tear off a chunk of the federation and bring its core into range of future attacks, with a specfic focus on how the federations expansion had left it over extended and venerable.

Maybe if you track down every single statement by the GM and look under the hood at the hard numbers it tells a different story, but that would be kind of my point now wouldn't it? the post very much reads like the consequences of a strategic misstep, with a specific focus on how the federation overextended.

edit: ok reading what I just wrote this comes off as more aggressive than I intended, I apologize. but I do stand by my point that the tone of the last update, intended or not, is one of telling the players they fucked up,
 
Last edited:
random_npc said:
If that's the case than mother of god have we not gotten the feedback for it. The main feedback we got that's not deep in the weeds of comparing ship numbers to cannon and making conclusions is "haha eat shit for overextending nerds." So, I guess @Sayle is the quoted post broadly correct?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Random I'm not sure where you are looking for feedback at? Each individual ship gets its own feedback section in the retrospectives threadmark. So far they all seem quite positive. This most recent threadmark about the war is a background story thing, and not meant as a measure of how well we are doing designing the ships. Especially not for just the first year of a 4 year war. The retrospective clearly shows that we win this war. The threadmarks don't really follow the timeline of events properly, which is rather confusing so I can definitely see where the confusion comes from. But this most recent threadmark is just us taking a sucker punch before the fight properly starts.
 
Briefvoice said:
People seem surprisingly down over a war we've already been told the Federation won.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I guess it's a result of the fact the post (well, the war part of it at least) ends on a dour note, where over a quarter of the fleet has been wiped out with the Klingons ready to start moving deeper into the core of the Federation.

It's like the Second World War after the Evacuation of Dunkirk. All hope seems lost, a great portion of our fighting power has been reduced to nothing and we can only hope to endure the second strike the enemy unleashes upon us.

This is in spite of the fact that when observed objectively, and with future knowledge, we know the enemy has no hope of winning, that whilst we will get even bloodier ultimately they cannot finish us off and are on a timer. Yet even with that knowledge it's still seen as a dark and hopeless time even to us today.
 
Briefvoice said:
People seem surprisingly down over a war we've already been told the Federation won.

Like, all this stuff about pushing the Darwin out faster... don't worry about it! The Federation wins anyway.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

We're definitely not winning, but it's not going to horrifically cripple us either. We have a lost decade, which means honestly we come out positive or net zero in terms of the warp core being early vs losing some of our earlier economic growth.

Skippy said:
The issue is fighting our innate temptation to put more armaments on a Big Chonky Ship and thereby pushing the cost up, really. If you build a 200kt cruiser with standard covariant shielding, one Type-3 Impulse Thruster, four phasers (which it will need at minimum with lower manoeuvrability), and two frontal standard torps, that's still going to cost a fair amount for a ship that can't really kill enemy cruisers. Might be worth it if it can absorb enough incoming fire and act as logistical support for the rest of the punchier elements of the fleet?

The Miranda might be our first opportunity to put some version of this theory into practice I guess? It's got to come into service sometime in the next thirty years, and is basically a cost-effective heavy cruiser in 23rd century terms, for all that we're used to thinking of them as frigates in 24th century terms. Although I'm not sure that in canon the Miranda was meant to be a sluggish ship, it seemed fairly zoomy in the Dominion War.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Starfleet just going to have to accept the strategic reality that ships need guns and stop being so stringent on the cost of larger vessels. The only thing the bean counters have gotten us is dead men with all that extra economic growth we gave them. :V
 
Last edited:
Wootius said:
Starfleet just going to have to accept the strategic reality that ships need guns and stop being so stringent on the cost of larger vessels. The only thing the bean counters have gotten us is dead men with all that extra economic growth we gave them. :V
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I mean okay but we only have finite resources for shipbuilding. That's always going to be true, especially when fighting peer opponents.

You can give Starfleet shit for a number of things but I'm not sure it's entirely fair to say that like, they could build ships that are twice the size and are twice as well-armed and are simply choosing not to do so. If that were the case I suspect we'd have built a lot more than six Excaliburs once the war started, and relied less heavily on the Newton.

Briefvoice said:
People seem surprisingly down over a war we've already been told the Federation won.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I mean for me personally, it was more motivated specifically because I would like us to have more agency in the war. Whether that's getting to design a ship for it, expedite the Darwin, refit an older design, or something. It's not lots of our ships getting blown up or adversity that bothers me per se, I am normally very in favour of that.

It's more the juxtaposition of there being this horrific war going on, whilst meanwhile the only thing we're able to do is decide between:
[] Arboretum and Shisha Combined Botany/Oncology Research Centre
or
[] Zero Gravity Cephalopod Disco
 
Skippy said:
If you build a 200kt cruiser with standard covariant shielding, one Type-3 Impulse Thruster, four phasers (which it will need at minimum with lower manoeuvrability), and two frontal standard torps, that's still going to cost a fair amount for a ship that can't really kill enemy cruisers.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
48.5 plus hull costs. And the cost to bump it up to High, if not Very High, agility is pretty cheap, with our drives; we'd mostly be saving by keeping the number of torpedoes low slash sticking with Standards over Rapids. Mmm.

There's not a lot of savings to Cost that we can pull out by making cheap anchor cruisers, you're right. I think the big thing we're going to have to keep in mind is that we just can't afford to make "noncombat" ships very often at all, because we've got 22 Archers sitting around that we just can't bring into combat and that's far more Cost down the drain than what we can trim off of dedicated combatants.

I'm really regretting not going for the prototype shields on the Archer, in retrospect.
 
Tank man said:
For the record I'd go for this, DJ Zuza seems to be cephalopdic/related and she throws amazing discos.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Hmm, distinctly torn between that, or going for the ASCBORC, and seeing if our ships can grow that Andorian Crystal Ice Dragon Pack and use it for First Contact Missions. :thonk:

Candesce said:
48.5 plus hull costs. And the cost to bump it up to High, if not Very High, agility is pretty cheap, with our drives; we'd mostly be saving by keeping the number of torpedoes low slash sticking with Standards over Rapids. Mmm.

There's not a lot of savings to Cost that we can pull out by making cheap anchor cruisers, you're right. I think the big thing we're going to have to keep in mind is that we just can't afford to make "noncombat" ships very often at all, because we've got 22 Archers sitting around that we just can't bring into combat and that's far more Cost down the drain than what we can trim off of dedicated combatants.

I'm really regretting not going for the prototype shields on the Archer, in retrospect.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I think the point about non-combatant ships is very fair, and I'm glad it's something we rectified on this project, whilst it is too late (before anyone yells at me 😅) for the current war.

Like it's not unreasonable to look at the Halley or Galileo briefs and go "well that's a science/logistics ship, we can leave fighting up to the Real Warships". But actually part of Starfleet's rather unique position is that when SHTF, basically every ship suddenly discovers that it has to serve as a Real Warship in extremis. There is not some secret fleet of arse-kickers we get to call in to rescue us if things go south. It's our regular boring workhorse ships who have to roll up their sleeves and bear the brunt of it.

This doesn't mean we have to gold-plate every design to be some sort of lethal hunter-killer, and in fact this would be a mistake, but probably there is some basic modicum of ability to serve during wartime that we don't want to ever fall below, at least until our neighbourhood is more peaceful. The Newton is a pretty good example here. It's not amazing as a warship by any means, but it can both serve a valuable peacetime role, and is Good Enough to pull its weight during a war.
 
I'll be real, every single choice the thread has ever made has been justified and vindicated by the Kzinti being conclusively defeated and their practice of eating sentients ended a century early.
 
Wootius said:
We're definitely not winning, but it's not going to horrifically cripple us either. We have a lost decade, which means honestly we come out positive or net zero in terms of the warp core being early vs losing some of our earlier economic growth.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
A decade of rebuilding doesnt mean we didnt win.
Britain spent at least a decade recovering from WW2; IIRC they only stopped rationing in 1954.

The fact that we ended the war and didnt immediately jump into a massive program of rearmament within the next five years, as evidenced by the number of Excaliburs, tells me that we won.
People who get lose wars generally do something about preventing repeats.

Especially given who our neighbors are in this neighborhood; the lack of a Romulan rematch or Tholian encroachment speaks volumes to me.
 
grimely said:
I'll be real, every single choice the thread has ever made has been justified and vindicated by the Kzinti being conclusively defeated and their practice of eating sentients ended a century early.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I can't recall the specifics of the update, but I imagine as well as that the Federation was likely very strict on the whole fucking "female Kzinti have been engineered into sub-sapience" thing ending too (if that was a thing for our Kzinti). So that's another big thing.
 
Last edited:
As far as I'm concerned, we are and have been doing just fine. Starfleet asked for an engineering ship and we built a really great one. Starfleet asked for a battlecruiser and we gave them that too. Now we're building a neat mid-sized bioscience ship. It is not a destroyer or an emergency wartime light cruiser, and it's not supposed to be one. If Starfleet wanted a new combat frigate, they should have asked for one, and maybe fired everyone at SanFran responsible for the Radiant being so crap.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top