Bad example, Britain's power was broken by the War, despite being on the winning side. And while the demise of the British Empire was an unalloyed good for the world, something similar happening to the Federation would not be.
Low cost does mean more ships in total, though. Having 50% more ships may be better than having an Excalibur-tier ship, since Federation space is big and ships are stretched thin as it is. This is especially true for internal ships like the Archer.
But yeah, for combat ships I think bigger is nonlinearly better. That's probably why the TNG ships look like flying cruise liners - if your engines can lift that much tonnage then you might as well make use of it.
The Defiant-class were pretty small and very, very powerful. I think it might be problematic condensing power that small though, and probably has issues beyond the purely technical ones of implementation; not much cargo capacity, nor passengers, nor extensive labs or medical facilities, poor crew comfort etc.
The Defiant-class was great at destroying the enemy, not much else. You can't ferry colonists, or run long-term long-range missions off it reliably, or do major scientific research.
I mean i was screeching since the first thread about building dedicated warships that only hang around our bases to beat any invader bloddy, something like that would have been rather usefull right about now right?
Multi-use is best. If it's a big fuckoff pile of guns and torpedoes, then there is internal volume to put useful modules inside it as well.
If we hadn't been forbidden from slapping more than a single torpedo tube onto the archer ot might have been something of a threat.
...
That reminds me, torpedo tube count seems dependant on having enough front real estate to actually squeeze in all those tubes. Could we make a big Orb with say 2 RFL and 4 or more regular torpedo tubes? It'll suck for phasers from our previous experience with that kind of hull, but building some kind of mini deathstar explorer capable of incidentally flash-banging people from the sensor return of the initial torpedo salvo sounds fun.
And since Orbs make for great module choices, it'll be useful for stuff besides Macross Missile Massacres.
Amusingly as per this concept/design art two less than the prime timeline starships got ordered.
7-8x Mk.I Type 2 phasers and at least 2x photon torpedo launchers by my count (just in front of the deltas), assuming it's mirrored it'd definitely be able to do 4x.
I'm gonna be real, I kind of hate this. It feels too big, even though if I didn't fuck up my math too badly it's actually undersized - I made it smaller after I started running out of things to put in and still had several module-sized holes in the diagram.
I might redo it at some future point, I might not. But for the time being, this is the Newton-class light cruiser.
Edit: retaining the original for posterity, but the new better version is in the spoiler below:
...not gonna lie, I am super confused; what the heck are those triple engineering hulls?
Edit: I admit I haven't actually scoured every threadmark about the Newton, but my mental image of it (given I knew it was a small half-saucer with a massive shuttle complement) had a just fat as hell inline secondary hull, with the warp core and associated systems along the centerline and gull-wing nacelle struts rising out of that central portion to reach over the two huge hangars and loading bays on either side (to avoid needing to run warp plasma conduits through them). Like if you flipped your nacelle struts so they went up and then out instead of out and then up, and then took the hangar bays off their struts and just glued them to the sides of the inline secondary hull.
Would be kind of a pain to diagram, though XD the hangar bays and so on would block the view of the warp core and main engineering on a side view
Another brilliant design. You're doing great work bringing these SanFran ships (which have a rather ridiculous range in styles, owing to their origins) to life in the SDB style!
The Newton per NuTrek canon and Sayle has two engineering hulls, each of which is basically just a very large shuttlebay. I was going to zhuzh them up by making them the mounting points for the Newton's torpedoes, but the main hull was emptier so no dice.
The rear inline one is purely for mass, and it was even bigger before I got rid of half of it.
"This is Madness!"
"...madness? THIS! IS! SAN FRAN!*
*San Fran Bureau personnel then kick the unfortunate UP Bureau interns off the Golden Gate Bridge.*
I appreciate that you made the art for it and I think you did a good job with what you had to work with.
That said looking at the Kelvin-verse images make me wish the visual design got lost in a fire or something. Every angle on the canon design has an element that leaves me scratching my head.
Double deflectors, huh? (on the canon one; ours has a blister inline deflector) Interesting. Wonder if that has potential in the future, particularly for a supercruise design...deflector placement is the big reason we struggle to utilize inline or no engineering hull, but if by vertically extending an inline engineering space* we could mount paired smaller deflectors above and below, like the small ones that we typically use for non-blister inlines? but with two of them to avoid penalizing our warp speed. Should be a sensible and imo attractive layout for a vertical-nacelle cruise-optimized design.
*the general idea would work equally well for vertically extending an inline engineering hull, or for a pure-saucer design without a secondary hull, to vertically extend the engineering spaces behind the bridge.
(Vertical engineering would let us use a very thin saucer without running out of decks for the vertical warp core, too, though it certainly wouldn't obligate us to go thin-saucer, and for a given diameter I would tend to favor thick saucer for module space on a hypothetical long-range explorer...if given the opportunity for an equal-tonnage, much-larger-diameter thin-saucer though I might take it, especially if it was just a touch oval [lengthwise orientation]; the vast, sleek hull would be amazingly elegant.)
Edit: lol, here I go getting all excited about dual deflectors just in time for them to get denounced as "deranged"...I guess that makes me an "absolute madman", doesn't it? 🤪
Bill Krause has a lot more photos of the physical models he's made of it and other ships (and more on Twitter but I'm not linking there): Bill Krause (@admiralbuck.bsky.social)
Double deflectors, huh? (on the canon one; ours has a blister inline deflector) Interesting. Wonder if that has potential in the future, particularly for a supercruise design...deflector placement is the big reason we struggle to utilize inline or no engineering hull, but if by vertically extending an inline engineering space* we could mount paired smaller deflectors above and below, like the small ones that we typically use for non-blister inlines? but with two of them to avoid penalizing our warp speed. Should be a sensible and imo attractive layout for a vertical-nacelle cruise-optimized design.
*the general idea would work equally well for vertically extending an inline engineering hull, or for a pure-saucer design without a secondary hull, to vertically extend the engineering spaces behind the bridge.
(Vertical engineering would let us use a very thin saucer without running out of decks for the vertical warp core, too, though it certainly wouldn't obligate us to go thin-saucer, and for a given diameter I would tend to favor thick saucer for module space on a hypothetical long-range explorer...if given the opportunity for an equal-tonnage, much-larger-diameter thin-saucer though I might take it, especially if it was just a touch oval [lengthwise orientation]; the vast, sleek hull would be amazingly elegant.)
Edit: lol, here I go getting all excited about dual deflectors just in time for them to get denounced as "deranged"...I guess that makes me an "absolute madman", doesn't it? 🤪
So I don't want to make a big thing of this, but @Tank man/ @DeltaV11.2 / @Driven by Apathy / whoever else I've forgotten to tag, I just wanted to say that I looked over my posts from the start of the argument the other night, and I wanted to apologise.
Like I haven't changed my opinion that much on the merits, but the way I expressed it was honestly really unnecessarily sort of passive-aggressively hostile in a situation that absolutely did not call for it? The discussion had basically been entirely chill before I parachuted in so looking back I'm a bit embarassed. Honestly I think I assumed everyone in the thread would be onboard, then got rather defensive when some of you were annoyed instead of supportive, when I should have taken the time to fully lay out my proposal and give everyone a chance to weigh in. Anyway, apologies.
The Newton per NuTrek canon and Sayle has two engineering hulls, each of which is basically just a very large shuttlebay. I was going to zhuzh them up by making them the mounting points for the Newton's torpedoes, but the main hull was emptier so no dice.
The rear inline one is purely for mass, and it was even bigger before I got rid of half of it.
"This is Madness!"
"...madness? THIS! IS! SAN FRAN!*
*San Fran Bureau personnel then kick the unfortunate UP Bureau interns off the Golden Gate Bridge.*
Honestly, reminding me about the double secondary hulls on pylons makes me realise that I was completely wrong to ever want us to expedite the Darwin to start to replace the Newton in the first place. There is simply no amount of newer technology which could possibly match the sheer psychological damage of seeing that flying towards you.
The Newton has a hullform straight from the black book of Nyarlahotep himself. The unclean power of the Demon Sultan Azazoth afflicts all who merely gaze on its form, let alone those benighted souls who actually have to walk its twisted corridors and turblifts. What possible terrors could the Klingons hold for men and women who have to serve aboard a Newton? Death would be nothing but a release, except that the MC Escher-like hyper-geometry required to simply take a move a pallet of cargo from the saucer section to a shuttle means that all of the crewmen of the Newtons in service will be serving forever, a closed time-like curve of singular majesty and horror.
(I both love and hate it at the same time lmao, but that is a really beautiful rendering @Strunkriidiisk.)
Dual deflectors is actually an element I don't have a problem with. The expanding pylons for the secondary hulls, spindly excessively high box (weapons pod?) arch, and thickness of the nacelle support hull extensions vs other elements all feel goofy.
Trek does have a long history of kitbashing but with a massive budget I'd have hoped the other Kelvin designs would become less kludgy not more. It's like they overshot on the swoop and quirky sliders for everything but the Enterprise and Mayflower.
Probably a quick and somewhat brute-force solution for allowing a ship to cruise/sprint at higher speeds, I'd guess? Especially if that ship had somewhat unusual warp geometry to begin with.
Honestly I really like the fact that there are differences between the Kelvin-verse model and @Strunkriidiisk's reimaging for the Quest. The singular inline deflector on the saucer feels like San Franciso wanted to save on cost, as does the lack of the rollbar with torpedo launchers. Which feels very in-keeping both for San Fran as a designer, but also for the time period we designed it in.
..Actually that gives me an idea we could discuss in terms of the war? If we or San Fran could design a Newton Flight II refit which basically adds a rollbar and two extra standard torp launchers to the Newton's nacelles (or maybe underneath between the secondary hulls so ours remains distinct), and could be refitted easily to damaged ships using yard time... that would immediately punch it up significantly in terms of Alpha Strike and Max Sustained Damage. This isn't changing anything that's already been established in the quest, so I'd be interested to see what people think.
Probably a quick and somewhat brute-force solution for allowing a ship to cruise/sprint at higher speeds, I'd guess? Especially if that ship had somewhat unusual warp geometry to begin with.
Honestly I really like the fact that there are differences between the Kelvin-verse model and @Strunkriidiisk's reimaging for the Quest. The singular inline deflector on the saucer feels like San Franciso wanted to save on cost, as does the lack of the rollbar with torpedo launchers. Which feels very in-keeping both for San Fran as a designer, but also for the time period we designed it in.
..Actually that gives me an idea we could discuss in terms of the war? If we or San Fran could design a Newton Flight II refit which basically adds a rollbar and two extra standard torp launchers to the Newton's nacelles (or maybe underneath between the secondary hulls so ours remains distinct), and could be refitted easily to damaged ships using yard time... that would immediately punch it up significantly in terms of Alpha Strike and Max Sustained Damage. This isn't changing anything that's already been established in the quest, so I'd be interested to see what people think.
Honestly, as a firepower boost, using the rollbar module to install an RFL (and the extra power generation + AM storage to make it work) would be a heck of a shot in the arm, combined with upgrading the phasers to the latest spec that the Newton's power grid can support - IIRC, that'd basically give it the forward firepower of an Excalibur, which even with the Newton's lower maneuverability would still make it a lot more capable of smacking D6s and the like to pave the way for Excaliburs in a fleet action.
EDIT: Also, if we're talking a Newton Flight II refit anyways, adding an aft torpedo launcher in the space below where the transit shafts to each of the secondary hulls connect to the primary hull might also be useful, as that would enhance its ability to see off pursuits from behind while at warp, and bolster its ability in a fleet battle. If we really want more aft firepower, you could pair that with any aft launchers in the rollbar, but frankly adding a forward RFL and a single aft tube seems like it'd be about as much as Starfleet Tactical would be willing to justify, even with the Federation going to total war footing and ramping photorp production way up.
Honestly, as a firepower boost, using the rollbar module to install an RFL (and the extra power generation + AM storage to make it work) would be a heck of a shot in the arm, combined with upgrading the phasers to the latest spec that the Newton's power grid can support - IIRC, that'd basically give it the forward firepower of an Excalibur, which even with the Newton's lower maneuverability would still make it a lot more capable of smacking D6s and the like to pave the way for Excaliburs in a fleet action.
That would be lovely and definitely a boost in terms of firepower, but given the Newton is our bread-and-butter workhorse ship, and two standard launchers come to 4.5 Cost versus the 12 Cost for the RFL, I'm not sure the extra torpedo's worth of damage is necessarily worth the cost increase? But if enough players prefer the idea of adding an RFL then sure. Like I would hope maybe we could discuss this and then if enough players are in favour, we could ask @Sayle about it.
There's a torpedo rollbar on some Miranda and Nebula class starships but not others IIRC, so in-universe being able to refit a torpedo rollbar to ships not initially designed for one must be plausible engineering-wise to some degree. But honestly even if it was only for the ones we build to replace losses during the war, it'd still be a shot in the arm for an older design.
Not unlike the 76mm Sherman or upgunning the Spitfire to use the Hispano cannon, if we're pulling from wartime analogies. And much easier on our logistics than designing or rushing into service a whole new ship.
Dual deflectors is actually an element I don't have a problem with. The expanding pylons for the secondary hulls, spindly excessively high box (weapons pod?) arch, and thickness of the nacelle support hull extensions vs other elements all feel goofy.
Trek does have a long history of kitbashing but with a massive budget I'd have hoped the other Kelvin designs would become less kludgy not more. It's like they overshot on the swoop and quirky sliders for everything but the Enterprise and Mayflower.
The Kelvin itself is great looking ship, and the Enterprise has things I don't like but the model is well-executed. However, all the background 'redshirt' ships were kitbashed from Kelvin parts in weird arrangements or cut up. It's understandable given that they were all seen only from a distance and for about ten seconds, but boy are they ugly when you get a good look at them.
