- Location
- France
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- She/They
May as well just build more of the combat satellites we already have.
Linked contents
May as well just build more of the combat satellites we already have.
So having a mull over the smaller ships issue. I do think that mass-inflation is something that Just Happens as tech improves, but the current system does kind of incentivise building the largest possible ships because of the flat costs involved massively outpace mass-based cost. There needs to be a reason to build light cruisers. Having a look at the sort of 'generations' of ships, you see a fairly clear size gradient, and that's only counting ships that look the same/reuse components or clear design philosophies, not the post-Wolf 359 shipbuilding burst.
For the Excelsior-generation, you have the Centaur (Light Cruiser/Heavy Frigate)/Resolute (Science Ship) and the Excelsior (Explorer/Heavy Cruiser).
For the Galaxy-generation you have the Niagara (Light Cruiser), Nebula (Heavy Cruiser), Galaxy (Explorer/Dreadnought).
The problem is those flat costs means you have no reason to build the Niagara rather than the Galaxy. Looking at the components some are dialed to mass (hull/shields), others relate to mass (thrusters), others are just the same across all sizes (standard nacelles). But that leaves the deflector, computer, and warp core. The deflector and computer I feel like are probably no longer relevant as cost, being pretty cheap. I'm inclined to reduce nacelle costs as well, as the previous cost-logic was largely based around increasing flat costs with advancement rather than increasing mass. Also allowing different sizes of deflectors allows interesting capability choices. So really the place to adjust things is the warp core.
So my thinking is the easiest way to fix that is scaling the warp core, with larger cores having higher sprint speeds and smaller cores becoming increasingly slower until they can barely make their efficient cruise. This creates a dynamic where powerful/larger ships can run places very fast ("you're the only ship in range"), medium sized ships can run at their maximum cruise (good for combatants/cruisers), while the cheapest specialist ships are effectively useless in maneuver warfare.
Current-system minimum 100k ship cost: 30
Alternate-system minimum 100k ship cost: 15
Comments or criticism welcomed, obviously.
For the Excelsior-generation, you have the Centaur (Light Cruiser/Heavy Frigate)/Resolute (Science Ship) and the Excelsior (Explorer/Heavy Cruiser).
For the Galaxy-generation you have the Niagara (Light Cruiser), Nebula (Heavy Cruiser), Galaxy (Explorer/Dreadnought).
The problem is those flat costs means you have no reason to build the Niagara rather than the Galaxy. Looking at the components some are dialed to mass (hull/shields), others relate to mass (thrusters), others are just the same across all sizes (standard nacelles). But that leaves the deflector, computer, and warp core. The deflector and computer I feel like are probably no longer relevant as cost, being pretty cheap. I'm inclined to reduce nacelle costs as well, as the previous cost-logic was largely based around increasing flat costs with advancement rather than increasing mass. Also allowing different sizes of deflectors allows interesting capability choices. So really the place to adjust things is the warp core.
So my thinking is the easiest way to fix that is scaling the warp core, with larger cores having higher sprint speeds and smaller cores becoming increasingly slower until they can barely make their efficient cruise. This creates a dynamic where powerful/larger ships can run places very fast ("you're the only ship in range"), medium sized ships can run at their maximum cruise (good for combatants/cruisers), while the cheapest specialist ships are effectively useless in maneuver warfare.
Current-system minimum 100k ship cost: 30
Alternate-system minimum 100k ship cost: 15
Comments or criticism welcomed, obviously.
Driven by Apathy
Formerly known as Brain_Caster
My thinking would be that this system still strongly favors large ships. Having a higher warp-sprint speed than your enemy is an immensely important strategic advantage, especially for dedicated warships.
How about this?
- Small warp cores can provide just a much power as their larger brethren relative to their size, but he large ones are more economical in terms of energy per cost. (Advantage to large ships)
- Engines, shields and structural integrity fields require energy to power them. The larger the mass of the ship, the more energy is needed to power them. (Advantage to small ships)
- The two-phasers rule is abolished. Instead, phasers need energy from the warp core to power them, which means the number you can fire at once is bottlenecked by the size of your warp-core and how much energy you're using for defenses and engines.
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Still doesn't address the size issue, especially for "specialist" ships. It's really not an issue with the warp core (though it is a factor) the issue is "room for the good shit." Something that you'll only get with larger sizes. Something that would only be fixed with matured technology miniaturizing available systems into smaller packages to allow for smaller ships. It's predominantly why the Galaxy was a multi-role. It not only had room for all the systems, most of those systems were matured tech that was rather small. So it was able to fit all the science, all the engineering, and a not insignificant amount of Diplomacy facilities. Whilst still being able to dish out, and take, a beating at the same time.
What you need is a better tech availability system, and less finicky ship side control levers. (not none, just not so much focus solely on it)
What you need is a better tech availability system, and less finicky ship side control levers. (not none, just not so much focus solely on it)
Fabula Amanti
I want a Grimoire, but I got books.
- Location
- Singapore
Well, I'm not too sure about it mechanics wise but I was of the mind that there were limited shipyards to support the larger ship classes. With each ship class becoming larger than the next, it means the corresponding size yards need to be built ground up to support the new ships. And while that happens, the older yards meant for certain sizes get repurposed for next generations ships. Until the larger yards get up in number, I imagine there would be a period of build up for the yards for the larger ships and incentives to maintain size for a generation so as to not waste them.
Those smaller yards are the backbone of decades and centuries of industry, you don't just recomm them unless the ships for those size range become obsolete. Even then, I would imagine they would transition into the civilian industry instead of being decommed.
I think that's kind of the point that the small cores would then be reserved for speciality ships that aren't expected to run to the other side of the Federation to be part of a conflict. I find it difficult to picture the Oberth being involved in the Dominion War fleet actions.
1. I can buy this as an alternative. But it does work against the thesis of the correction being to make smaller ships less-bad/too expensive.
2. Engines and shields already kind of have this, with engines moving a set amount of mass and shield cost being by mass.
3. I think the main problem with this is the usual answer that you then stop building Starfleet-style pre-TNG phaser layouts. I think the answer to that is that some ships focused almost entirely on tactical applications should get the option of special weapon systems, like the Reliant-type Miranda having a pair of heavy forward phasers on the rollbar.
While cruise is important at the Strategic/Macro level, sprint is king at the Tactical/Micro level. It allows one to set the terms of engagement, and that is a huge part of winning a fight at the tactical level. We see that in the Age of Sail which Star trek was inspired by, with the Constitution of the Age being able to outrun anything it couldn't out fight and vice versa. We see that with the Kea class, whom despite the meager armament could outrun anything looking for a fight with ease. We see that with the Excalibur who stopped the Klingon juggernaut by forcing them to guard supply convoys instead of pushing in hard to smash apart more Federation infrastructure; D7s being nearby was not enough, if they were not nursemaiding the convoys on site the Excalibur would smash apart anything and run well before the slower Klingons could respond.
As for costs? The reason one would build smaller ships that are less capable is simple. Unit creation time and unit numbers. The problem with all the ships we've built now is that they are excellent for an intended purpose with no costs spared. Excepting the Saladin of course. Yet now Starfleet has a massive problem. It can't cover all it needs to cover much less what it wants to cover. We've lost a third of our fleet for a fractional amount of the Klingon one, and they have proven that with enough second/third line ships you can still wrack up an extreme body count.
Frankly put smaller ships should be easier to make and faster to make, allowing a polity to make more of them and field more ships total even if they are not as good as larger more ponderous ships. They are needed to fill TO&E gaps, especially now that our fleet is a shadow of what it once was. Doubly so since if there is not an outcry against the Federation's expansionistic tendencies leaving the frontier hanging bare cheeked in the wind I would be highly surprised. Frankly this should be the age of massive ship proliferation given how we are ahead of the curve in terms of warp and how our economy was booming and will recover soon. But it won't do that if we can't pump out enough hulls, and Starfleet was stretched super thin before the war, after it we need more ships and fast. Small ships are cheaper and much faster to build.
In short maybe incorporating a cost quota for designs would be both a good idea and necessary.
slybrarian
Creature of Fable
- Location
- A Far and Sunless Land
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think that having the option for tactical modules that improve phasers might work. One thing that sticks out to me though is that we've already stopped doing pre-TNG phaser layouts. If we built the Miranda now, it'd have a single forward phaser bank and maybe a single aft. Compare that to the canon: six twin phaser banks split in pairs fore/port/starboard and two sets of what fans say are heavy phasers. The Excalibur has one forward and one aft phaser bank. The TMP Constitution has nine phaser banks, and Excelsior has twelve or thirteen! Some of that may be the new TMP phaser-warp core power system, but even so the TOS Connie probably had at least three or four banks based on what we see in TOS/TOS-R, to say nothing of the SNW version with seven banks.
It's not bad that we're deviating from canon, but the combo of relying on photons for heavy alpha damage and expensive phasers has pushed us towards having manueverable ships with one or two phasers max.
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2241: Project Darwin (Auxiliary: Part One)
[X] Forward Rapid Launcher, Two Aft Torpedoes (Cost 53 -> 69.5) [-1 Modules]
With the weapons finalised you also complete work on the landing system. Structural elements have been reinforced beneath main engineering with a tritanium-parsteel scaffolding which provides extra rigidity to the underlying hull and also supports a pair of laterally extending landing legs. These legs will deploy out to the sides to keep the ship level even on uneven terrain and each leg is rated to support more than thirty thousand tons. While the belly of the ship still needs to support the majority of the weight it at least means that the crew won't have to deal with tilted floors if they can't find a perfectly flat surface.
While the Darwin is now technically spaceworthy there's not much point with launching it without the internal facilities to accomplish its mission. Your first area of interest is in the secondary hull, which has about four hundred square meters of floorspace to make use of below and behind main engineering, with the outer corridors providing a route directly to the main loading bay.
As you see it there are two options. The first is a cargo bay. With the area being readily accessible to the deployable ramp this would provide the useful freight capabilities it would with any other ship while being especially effective for colonial support given the landing system. This is your best opportunity to justify a larger build order than a pure biosciences mission profile would support, as well as extending the Darwin's overall lifespan with additional duties after its scientific suites become more dated and less useful.
The second option is instead to lean even further into the mission and build an exceptional science ship that will likely see only a small coterie of ships launched from the yards. The addition of an arboretum will support transplantation and longer-term analysis of planetary fauna as well as basic hydroponics. Both are useful capabilities that will keep the Darwin producing useful data and experimental results even while in transit, and the benefits to the crew morale from the green space and alternative food variety shouldn't be excluded from your consideration.
[ ] Medium Cargo Bay
[ ] Arboretum (+2 Science)
Two Hour Moratorium, Please
With the weapons finalised you also complete work on the landing system. Structural elements have been reinforced beneath main engineering with a tritanium-parsteel scaffolding which provides extra rigidity to the underlying hull and also supports a pair of laterally extending landing legs. These legs will deploy out to the sides to keep the ship level even on uneven terrain and each leg is rated to support more than thirty thousand tons. While the belly of the ship still needs to support the majority of the weight it at least means that the crew won't have to deal with tilted floors if they can't find a perfectly flat surface.
While the Darwin is now technically spaceworthy there's not much point with launching it without the internal facilities to accomplish its mission. Your first area of interest is in the secondary hull, which has about four hundred square meters of floorspace to make use of below and behind main engineering, with the outer corridors providing a route directly to the main loading bay.
As you see it there are two options. The first is a cargo bay. With the area being readily accessible to the deployable ramp this would provide the useful freight capabilities it would with any other ship while being especially effective for colonial support given the landing system. This is your best opportunity to justify a larger build order than a pure biosciences mission profile would support, as well as extending the Darwin's overall lifespan with additional duties after its scientific suites become more dated and less useful.
The second option is instead to lean even further into the mission and build an exceptional science ship that will likely see only a small coterie of ships launched from the yards. The addition of an arboretum will support transplantation and longer-term analysis of planetary fauna as well as basic hydroponics. Both are useful capabilities that will keep the Darwin producing useful data and experimental results even while in transit, and the benefits to the crew morale from the green space and alternative food variety shouldn't be excluded from your consideration.
[ ] Medium Cargo Bay
[ ] Arboretum (+2 Science)
Two Hour Moratorium, Please
TheShadowDeamon
Mighty Dragon
Could we possibly have Small, Medium and Large warp cores? Obviously the larger cores cost more but output more energy. Then on the core specs have it stated the maximum ship mass that it can achieve Warps 6/7/8, with every 10K tons over that the warp speeds reduce by 0.##. It could also go the other way- if we wanted to stuff a larger than needed core into a small ship it would increase the warp speeds by 0.## for every 10K tons UNDER the weight limit.
This also means that if we were creating a budget ship that remains inside the Federation and we weren't bothered about reaching the same high speeds, we could use a smaller core to save on costs. (Once we have the next generation of nacelles of course, as has already been mentioned the current ones are at their performance limit).
Here is a table of values I created. Note that while the M & L cores have increacing costs, they have a better effeciency and have reduced penalties:
View: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cEiZ0se0hVg0FapiYTJ5prFLU_nq0T9y/view?usp=sharing
View: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_9HJGRkCVrFb2P9QlOaCoOYzuIr9ud8L/view?usp=sharing
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- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[ ] Medium Cargo Bay
Turns the design into a general colony support ship. It's well armed, very fast at warp, can land (!!!) to deliver cargo more rapidly than any other ship (for both normal use and in emergencies,) and it does the in-depth bioscience analysis of planets to enable safe colonization in the first place.
[ ] Arboretum (+2 Science)
It's an arboretum on a space ship. It's an arboretum on a space ship. That's the kind of Star Trek-style awesomeness I wanna see.
I'm sorry, sober practicality. These trees need a starship.
Turns the design into a general colony support ship. It's well armed, very fast at warp, can land (!!!) to deliver cargo more rapidly than any other ship (for both normal use and in emergencies,) and it does the in-depth bioscience analysis of planets to enable safe colonization in the first place.
[ ] Arboretum (+2 Science)
It's an arboretum on a space ship. It's an arboretum on a space ship. That's the kind of Star Trek-style awesomeness I wanna see.
I'm sorry, sober practicality. These trees need a starship.
Mmm.
The Darwin certainly has sufficient armament that filling out the hole in our ranks of light cruisers with them wouldn't be terrible, and the combination of "can land and offload cargo easily" is quite nice. But +2 is going to be a significant chunk of our total science score and this is a ship intended to solve an existing problem none of our current ships are fit for.
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- He/Him
Well, we were asked to build a fairly focused design. Archers and civilian freighters between them can handle the bulk cargo needs of Starfleet fairly well, so I'm inclined to focus on cranking that science rating.
I certainly won't be heartbroken if the thread disagrees with me; a bunch of these carpeting the Federation and surrounding space would be quite nice.
- Location
- Most likely California
I'm honestly split between the two decisions. Normally, I would go all in for the Arboretum, on the grounds that this is a ship explicitly meant for bioscience research. However, between the losses from the War, and this being the second Warp 8 ship after the Excaliburs, which are notably lacking in cargo space, using the cargo bay for general use would help fill gaps.
Slightly leaning towards the Arboretum, since looking at the Archer retrospect, it was still produced post-war up until the 2260 and used until 2310, so Starfleet will still have a cargo & logstical focused ship design. But I am still concerned is that the bulk of the fleet will still have outdated armaments until our next cruiser design is produced.
Slightly leaning towards the Arboretum, since looking at the Archer retrospect, it was still produced post-war up until the 2260 and used until 2310, so Starfleet will still have a cargo & logstical focused ship design. But I am still concerned is that the bulk of the fleet will still have outdated armaments until our next cruiser design is produced.
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- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We were asked for a specialised biosciences ship, arboretum is pretty much a mandatory pick here. It doesn't matter if we don't build many Darwins so long as the ones we do build are good at their job. There'll be other designs to bulk out the fleet.
[X] Arboretum (+2 Science)
[X] Arboretum (+2 Science)
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TREEEEEES. That is all.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A valid concern, though any industrial output not going into Project Darwin could be poured into a simpler platform more suited to mass production. An Akula equivalent, perhaps - a simple saucer with modest cargo and lab spaces, and a rapidfire launcher ahead. It would also be another opportunity to do something interesting with nacelle configuration.
Though this is predicted on our game master being willing to do another design after Project Darwin.
- Location
- Outside the Box
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- She/Her
We did see our older ships getting wartime refits to modern armaments. The only thing they can't be refit with is Warp 8 engines.
- Location
- Canada
well maximum after all that firepower we threw into this thing.
- Location
- Dragyxx
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
It's called the Darwin, after Darwinian selection, which it applies to any fauna that gets too uppity.