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Starfleet Design Bureau

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landcollector said:
Then we're going to need more Temporal intervention since the six we're getting next year are it as far as the retrospective went.
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Or the Klingon fleets are about to feed themselves into a meatgrinder at Andoria.

They lost 20 ships at Arcadia, and they lost 4x D6s at Pharos 4.
They are farther from their logistics and support bases, they continue to suffer combat damage that has to be kludged in the field or limp back to Klingon space.

One fumble and this entire endeavor collapses.
Candesce said:
Keep in mind the Darwin has much better phasers than the Newton.

Unless we're trying to make a light cruiser that can take on a Klingon battleship, it doesn't need to measure up against D7s; I've been using D6s because, since the Klingons are even less able to throw obsolete ships away than Starfleet is, I expect the D6s to continue to be threats into the future. But they're, clearly, not going to have the same numbers as Birds of Prey - which the Newtons can kill just fine with two tubes. I expect, with better phasers, better agility, and better shields, the Darwin will also be able to handle the next-generation BoP as well as the Newton does the current generation. Better with the rear tubes.

... It does mean we want a line cruiser around for the Darwin to hide behind in fleet combat, though. I'm not willing to bet on Refit Keas and Excaliburs alone for that.
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And you can expect nextgen BoPs to have better shields and capabilities than the current ones, if only as the D7's technologies trickle down to the rest of the fleet.
Benchmarking tactical capabilities based on maybe matching lastgen ships puts us in this exact situation in a decade or two.

But yes, we need a Sagmartha successor. I think the Excaliburs are fine in their role, we just need a lot more of them.
But there needs to be a big mailed mace that can anchor the line if necessary.
 
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uju32 said:
Benchmarking tactical capabilities based on maybe matching lastgen ships puts us in this exact situation in a decade or two.
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Unfortunately, benchmarking based on past performance is all we can do. Sayle's purposefully stingy with feeding us information on the capabilities of modern vessels fielded by hostile powers - which makes sense, since they would have an interest in making sure that information isn't readily available - so we just have to assume the last-gen capabilities we do know about are our capability floor and guess for the rest, and try and balance capability against economy.
 
uju32 said:
they continue to suffer combat damage that has to be kludged in the field or limp back to Klingon space.
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Given how Klingon politics work, they might not be willing to let them go back to Klingon space unless equally balanced (so to speak). There's a risk that if enough of a houses ships get damaged and they're sent back they coup the chancellor.
 
KlavoHunter said:
@Sayle I don't suppose you have .png versions of your work anywhere? I'm making an MSD for the Conquistador (already have the side-view with decks finished!) and I keep noticing .JPEG artifacting ruining your gorgeous pixel art (As I try to re-use it for this beastie...)
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All the jpgs are at the highest level of quality so the artifacting should be pretty minimal, but it's unavoidable with single-pixel details I think.

mastigos said:
Personally, I think part of the real problem is that Sayle's approach to "have to make it seem like the canon designers had a reason to design that way" is ... deeply and fundamentally flawed for two reasons
  • Watsonian: what about the way that non-starfleet ships are designed? Surely their designers had reasons to design that way
  • Doylist: this is a game. How fun it is and player agency matter far far far more than "respecting" the original. The pastiche and flavor of the original is all the matters. The entire point of player action in this game is how we DEVIATE from canon.
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I've kind of come to the conclusion that I can't please everyone. I'm not going to trash people wanting some sort alt-timeline Federation where people run around with flying bricks or something that looks like out of Star Wars, but fundamentally this is about an alternate Federation that basically follows the same design rulebook as canon but can produce different things. I'm happy to adjust mechanics that people aren't a fan of (and have several times), but it has to fall within that remit.

Like right now the main pain point seems to be that the only 'cost' that matters is weaponry related. I'd like to change that. Don't know how yet, whether mass-related or introducing another step in the system like warp core size, but those will be things to consider. I don't mind experimenting and discarding things that don't work or prove unpopular.
 
I'm not really worried, because this does REALLY look like the Klingons are about to get their own Midway, and seem to be overcommitted.

The last update that could have concievably effected the War was the stuff with the Excalibur, and while I will agree with a few people that we need to keep a better eye on our military capability in the future, I think we're still set to win this.

Yeah, could some temporal shenanigans have happened? Sure, but part of this situation is on us, and I think we'll be fine.

Do we need to reprioritize a few things afterwards? Yes, but we'll fix it.
 
Sayle said:
All the jpgs are at the highest level of quality so the artifacting should be pretty minimal, but it's unavoidable with single-pixel details I think.



I've kind of come to the conclusion that I can't please everyone. I'm not going to trash people wanting some sort alt-timeline Federation where people run around with flying bricks or something that looks like out of Star Wars, but fundamentally this is about an alternate Federation that basically follows the same design rulebook as canon but can produce different things. I'm happy to adjust mechanics that people aren't a fan of (and have several times), but it has to fall within that remit.

Like right now the main pain point seems to be that the only 'cost' that matters is weaponry related. I'd like to change that. Don't know how yet, whether mass-related or introducing another step in the system like warp core size, but those will be things to consider. I don't mind experimenting and discarding things that don't work or prove unpopular.
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Honestly, warp drive cost being somewhat tied to mass (a 50kton ship wouldn't need a huge core like a 1mton ship), and the number of phasers able to be fired being variable partially based on mass, partially on cost (invest more for stronger grid to fire more phasers, or have an option to reduce costs if combat isn't a priority) would be really awesome. Also more cost being centered on mass, so ship size becomes more a tactical choice would be nice.

I just don't want to bring it up much because I'm afraid it'll become incredibly irritating to read very quickly, and I don't want to sound ungrateful when you're running such an engaging and well thought-out Quest. Also I could never make a Quest even approaching this level of quality, so it sounds hypocritical even writing this...
 
mastigos said:
Personally, I think part of the real problem is that Sayle's approach to "have to make it seem like the canon designers had a reason to design that way" is ... deeply and fundamentally flawed for two reasons
  • Watsonian: what about the way that non-starfleet ships are designed? Surely their designers had reasons to design that way
  • Doylist: this is a game. How fun it is and player agency matter far far far more than "respecting" the original. The pastiche and flavor of the original is all the matters. The entire point of player action in this game is how we DEVIATE from canon.
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There's actually a quest that… sorta does this. It's really good too, everyone has converged on Raygun Gothic for the ship design and we've built some bangers.

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Department of Starship Design (Trek-ish) Sci-Fi

In a universe that isn't quite Star Trek, shape the course of a fledgling interstellar power through the lens of its ships. Will you be a rising superpower, or merely a footnote in history?
forums.sufficientvelocity.com forums.sufficientvelocity.com
 
Tank man said:
Given how Klingon politics work, they might not be willing to let them go back to Klingon space unless equally balanced (so to speak). There's a risk that if enough of a houses ships get damaged and they're sent back they coup the chancellor.
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In which case you have a lot of ships that are deceptively fragile
Where Andoria is likely to be a nightmare scenario for that sort of fleet management.

Im guessing the loss of Arcadia is somwhat along the lines of losing Singapore in WW2
Lets see if we get to turn Andoria into their Midway.
Or their Leyte Gulf.
Strunkriidiisk said:
Unfortunately, benchmarking based on past performance is all we can do. Sayle's purposefully stingy with feeding us information on the capabilities of modern vessels fielded by hostile powers - which makes sense, since they would have an interest in making sure that information isn't readily available - so we just have to assume the last-gen capabilities we do know about are our capability floor and guess for the rest, and try and balance capability against economy.
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Sure thats all we can do.
But we dont make the mistake of using a lastgen ship as our pacing threat; it should be the capability floor.
 
Sayle said:
the only 'cost' that matters is weaponry related
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I think a way to fix this, is to add stressors that aren't war related, have the Alt!federation of this quest meet the Ferengi earlier than normal or something. I think people are just feeling like this because the quest is currently in the Klingon war part of the timeline.
 
MS-21H 'Hawke' said:
I'm not really worried, because this does REALLY look like the Klingons are about to get their own Midway, and seem to be overcommitted.

The last update that could have concievably effected the War was the stuff with the Excalibur, and while I will agree with a few people that we need to keep a better eye on our military capability in the future, I think we're still set to win this.

Yeah, could some temporal shenanigans have happened? Sure, but part of this situation is on us, and I think we'll be fine.

Do we need to reprioritize a few things afterwards? Yes, but we'll fix it.
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They have very specifically put themselves into a Death Or Glory situation. Cortez burning the ships, no retreat. They take Andoria or die trying. This is very, very dangerous ground for the Federation. Enemies who are physically incapable of retreat are the most dangerous. On the other hand, this is setting them up to lose everything if they fail.

There's another factor that may matter as well. Starfleet takes prisoners, and the Klingons know that. Now, there are doubtless many Klingons who truly buy the rhetoric of death before surrender. At least in theory. Do you think they all do? Enough that the crews won't mutiny if pushed too far? Duras forgets that Klingons don't take prisoners, and that the Federation does, so his fleet will break significantly before he expects it to.

Hell, this is why you take prisoners in the first place. Why it's pragmatically important to accept surrender. Because you never, ever want to force your enemy to fight to the last. The Federation's 'weakness' may well be a strength here.
 
A way to test out a system change is if we designed something species specific and didn't advance the main timeline. Keep aspects for "federation compatibility" and the new things are due to member organizational differences.

I'd enjoy attempting a current tech Kumari. I'd also be down for designing a Miranda. If it's a project in this thread, I'm game.
 
Sayle said:
Like right now the main pain point seems to be that the only 'cost' that matters is weaponry related. I'd like to change that. Don't know how yet, whether mass-related or introducing another step in the system like warp core size, but those will be things to consider. I don't mind experimenting and discarding things that don't work or prove unpopular.
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What if you were to model the Federation Congress's politics and its effects on the Starfleet budge--

*is threadbanned*
 
SaltyWaffles said:
We seem to have had a time traveler intervene to save the Federation from total conquest by the Klingons. That's a failure state, not a success story.
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We were wrong!

Sayle said:
No, just some good old heroism from a resourceful engineer who couldn't evacuate off the station and knew full well the consequences of it falling into Klingon hands. They'd make movies about him if his identity was ever known, but the first the Klingons knew about it was the power spike of a phaser overload.
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At the risk of sounding like I'm brown nosing... I am really enjoying the quest. Only take criticism as an attempt to improve a loved thing, not as a complaint about the thing as a whole.

And I think people underestimate how many different changes to the cost system have occurred. I was a fan of the starfleet/civilian version, but it was pretty clear there were too many numbers for most people to comfortably vote on.

My current feeling is you need to abstract the classes away from each other, and cost from sizes from the players, or have a reason that sizes matter and don't care about cost except in the same size category. I think I mentioned before, but the two main reasons from my point of view for smaller ships are the crew savings/ specialisations and being able to be built in smaller, cheaper space docks. Even if the cost of the ship is higher per phaser, being able to build those small ships anywhere instead of the main shipyards, and being able to crew it with people that haven't needed six years devoted to specific science degrees would allow for vastly more ships to be built if the resources are sent that way. Say like, in war, or for a big pirate problem.
The problem is we don't see this cost from the designer side. Ships are just crewed and all of them come from the same construction yard/ budget pool.

So that makes big ships the winner in every metric every time. Which, I'm fine with, because I love my hero ships. If we had a thousand small ships we wouldn't be having episodic problem of the week stories, called in to discover why a colony hasn't sent a signal for two months.

But this is less about a dramatic Kirk save, and more foundational for Starfleet as a whole.

So tldr: Make ships limited mostly by where they can be built. Excaliburs are core worlds, and thus limited in numbers built and compared for build orders in terms of cost and capability only against other ships requiring core world ships.
Smaller ships can be built in smaller docks, and are compared in cost and capability only to other ships in the smaller docks.

You can abstract bigger or smaller maximum builds however you wish and the line of big vs small, or big vs medium vs small should change in time
 
KarmaA said:
A way to test out a system change is if we designed something species specific and didn't advance the main timeline. Keep aspects for "federation compatibility" and the new things are due to member organizational differences.

I'd enjoy attempting a current tech Kumari. I'd also be down for designing a Miranda. If it's a project in this thread, I'm game.
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Test out a new system designing a ship for the Andorian Guard...
 
If there's any member core world that it's the least good idea to attack, it's probably Andoria. (From the point of view of winning the battle, I mean)
 
Sayle said:
Like right now the main pain point seems to be that the only 'cost' that matters is weaponry related. I'd like to change that. Don't know how yet, whether mass-related or introducing another step in the system like warp core size, but those will be things to consider. I don't mind experimenting and discarding things that don't work or prove unpopular.
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Adding "power systems" as a step, for addressing warp core systems, antimatter storage, and auxiliary/fusion power, and power distribution could be worthwhile, yeah.

Having the Type-4 Nacelle have variations, so that there can be different sizes of nacelles for different designs of ships, could also work to include more questions on cost for the basic engine systems.

You could also look to start having high performance modules include costs. High-end computing systems start requiring enough power and rare materials to actually matter on the budget sheet?

Actually, sensor systems would be a potentially useful place to look, given that they tend to be distributed across the ship and take up comparatively minimal space, while also being ideal for a high-cost system? You'd need a standard disclaimer on this phase that none of it meaningfully ever interacts with cloaking devices, of course.
 
Another idea is to go back to some of your previous ideas... Complexity.

Rather than gate by size for where it could be built, gate by complexity. Or do both. Have a idea of how many cutting edge small space docks there are compared to massive primitive ones. One is your cargo hauler constructor, the other your Darwin builder.

Or. Leave those ambiguous. High complexity means long build speed. A high complexity ship takes two years, but a low one? With simple, old established technology? You can do that in one, and pump out twice as many.

Running some Eps in a straight line from the warp core to some forward phasers can be done anywhere.
Adding to the aft through engineering adds some complexity, but still pretty manageable for most docks.

But adding those same grids throughout the ship for phasers everywhere? That's starting to be a precision job.

Same with light shield emitters. The tolerances for construction through the entire hull are comparatively lax compared to current technology. But those heavy emitters, with massive powerflow, integrated throughout everything? Difficult.

Suddenly we have more options for modules. You can put a cutting edge sensor suite on the patrol ship, but now you are restricting either where, or how fast, it can be built. A big ship can have a ton of space for modules, but at the potential risk of adding a lot of complexity. A big ship with lots of moderately complex labs, or a small ship with the bleeding edge? Or, for the flagship, lots of bleeding edge? (But how long would it take to build, or repair? It is the flagship not the work horse for a reason)


Either way (I favour the build speed, for ease of comparison and less management of docks) suddenly there are very different design constraints other than cost per torpedo.
 
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Sayle said:
All the jpgs are at the highest level of quality so the artifacting should be pretty minimal, but it's unavoidable with single-pixel details I think.
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Are you aware that .PNG is lossless and does not have .JPG artifacting? I think we'd all love to see your art exactly the way you drew it, instead of losing the crisp detail of your pixel art.

Golgotha said:
Another idea is to go back to some of your previous ideas... Complexity.

Rather than gate by size for where it could be built, gate by complexity. Or do both. Have a idea of how many cutting edge small space docks there are compared to massive primitive ones. One is your cargo hauler constructor, the other your Darwin builder.

Or. Leave those ambiguous. High complexity means long build speed. A high complexity ship takes two years, but a low one? With simple, old established technology? You can do that in one, and pump out twice as many.

Running some Eps in a straight line from the warp core to some forward phasers can be done anywhere.
Adding to the aft through engineering adds some complexity, but still pretty manageable for most docks.

But adding those same grids throughout the ship for phasers everywhere? That's starting to be a precision job.

Same with light shield emitters. The tolerances for construction through the entire hull are comparatively lax compared to current technology. But those heavy emitters, with massive powerflow, integrated throughout everything? Difficult.

Suddenly we have more options for modules. You can put a cutting edge sensor suite on the patrol ship, but now you are restricting either where, or how fast, it can be built. A big ship can have a ton of space for modules, but at the potential risk of adding a lot of complexity.


Either way (I favour the build speed, for ease of comparison and less management of docks) suddenly there are very different design constraints other than cost per torpedo.
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Ooh, I'd love to come up with a modern, not-useless design that could be made at a smaller, less-capable shipyard...
 
The complexity distinction even fits as becoming an increasing issue in the era to ahead, because it's when a lot of the colonies made over the past century will start to grow capable of some limited local shipbuilding of their own, rather than relying on their homeworlds and pre-existing major colonies. So the current yards are the higher complexity yards, while the new profusion of frontier yards are lower complexity.
 
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