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Said ship cannot land onto a planet, the Archer for all it can do wondrous engineering things cannot land on the planet.
Said ship wasn't designed for such, but given you are not the QM who says what the future holds? Regardless a Cargo bay explicitly gives the ship a longer service life and Starfleet an incentive to build more of them this is word of qm here. Which in turn means more colonies because if things aren't going horribly wrong then they can do more surveys. With the mass loss of ships that the war has already made having a ship that can do one thing well and several other half decently is needed as we don't have the ability to make a dozen specialists for each use case. We've already compromised on all the Science for armament because we're scared of Klingons jumping the ship. Making the ship able to transport and land on colonies at a clip the Archer fundamentally cannot beat is not only useful, but it'll also extend these ships service life decades if not centuries.
Were this pre-four year war we could afford hyper specialized ships, but it's not. We're busy picking our teeth off the floor and need more frames fast. As such a ship that can help out in any circumstance given, we're not making more Excaliburs is good design. Not the prompt we're given, but much like the Stingray it's the prompt Starfleet needs.
[X] Medium Cargo Bay
We were asked to deliver a cheap science ship. We've already failed. We cannot change that, so we need to redefine what success is.
In this case, I think a reasonable success would be a ship that the Federation can mass produce to fill in the roles of the ships lost in the war. A stopgap fleet that can travel at speeds greater than the legacy fleet, and accomplish the same missions, albeit worse. I think our previous design decisions have made this too big to specialize, so we should go for a jack-of-all trades that can respond to missions while the specialized ships are away/being built in the future.
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The word 'cheap' wasn't anywhere in the design brief. We were asked for small and well specialised. Since we've kept the weight under 100k I think the former has been achieved. The latter is solely a question of modules, and the cargo bay is very much not a specialist option.
LunaMoth
Wings of Kynareth is my comfort song...
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I think that we can still try to acknowledge the design brief, we have less internal space, we should be putting it all towards science as best we can.
Honestly I think it would be ok to have a fail state of starfleet shelving the design because it wasn't even close to what they asked for.
Honestly I think it would be ok to have a fail state of starfleet shelving the design because it wasn't even close to what they asked for.
Do keep in mind that the Brief is outdated. Terribly at this point. It was made before a third or more of the fleet was destroyed, colonies were captured, critical infrastructure was put to the swrod to deny them to the enemy and the homeworld of a member race was captured. This is before the Climatic battle at Andoria, which even with a clean victory will, likely drop us to sub 50% fleet numbers, just from the sheer force the Klingons are going to be bringing to bear against us.
The brief is outdated, because who is going to want to be part of a new colony when the Colonies have gotten Shafted in the war terribly, and Starfleet is too small and slow to protect them? Who would care about an exotic bugaboo on world 35XC when no one is going to be there for the foreseeable future as Starfleet's expansionism bit them in the butt and the Klingon are lurking around the corner waiting to make you regret it? Why would a core world bother to try to make a new colony when all their colonies are under existential threat and Starfleet cannot protect them? A Bioscience cruiser was ideal for an age of expansion, when colonies were being made early and often. That time is gone, and it will likely be some decades if not centuries before it comes again. Starfleet is too few and too thinly spread to make Colonization feasible, unless polities are sending out settlers like a zerg rush in Civilization, unprotected, vulnerable, and highly likely to be sniped and/or enslaved, with sheer numbers being sent out being the only reason some colonies make it, only to be perpetually under threat by enemies or pirates or monster until their main body can muster up the forces to protect them, which Starfleet was doing a poor job of even before they got their fleet gutted.
So either we can be content to make a biosciences ship that will at best get one tranche of ships at best and then be relegated to history in short order, or we can bank on a decent Jack of All with a minor Bioscience focus so more can be made while hopefully keeping the academic roots of starfleet somewhere in the fleet, and help get Starfleet's legs under it and their butts or whatever they have in gear.
[X] Arboretum (+2 Science)
-[X] design expecting a later-life refit into a cargo bay
Arboretum →Cargo Bay seems like the world's easiest refit to me. Pull out the trees, turn off the water, and start stacking boxes. Someday, when the Darwin's science facilities lose their edge, this will be an easy way to extend their useful life.
More generally, I feel like many of our ships could benefit from being built with an expectation to a later life role-shift.
Or even a multi-fit from the start. This ship in particular, I bet Starfleet would love to be able to build a few with extra science, and several more with cargo capacity.
(This probably sounds like an attempt to have my cake and eat it too, and I suppose it is. It just feels like some of these modules (especially this case) would be really easy to design to work both ways. I have no idea how to balance this as a game mechanic - maybe it takes longer to design?)
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Actually, that might be one way to encourage smaller ships: Starfleet wants a ship with A capability and B cost, but they want it by CCCC date. Bigger ships (and fancier systems?) would take longer.
The risk of overshooting a delivery date would be... increased rate/odds that SF's less-capable model gets adopted?
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Edit:
A mid-process emergency design brief change would be a fun twist to (very) occasionally have thrown at us.
At least, I would enjoy it. I could see part of the thread getting very upset at unforseen redirection.
-[X] design expecting a later-life refit into a cargo bay
Arboretum →Cargo Bay seems like the world's easiest refit to me. Pull out the trees, turn off the water, and start stacking boxes. Someday, when the Darwin's science facilities lose their edge, this will be an easy way to extend their useful life.
More generally, I feel like many of our ships could benefit from being built with an expectation to a later life role-shift.
Or even a multi-fit from the start. This ship in particular, I bet Starfleet would love to be able to build a few with extra science, and several more with cargo capacity.
(This probably sounds like an attempt to have my cake and eat it too, and I suppose it is. It just feels like some of these modules (especially this case) would be really easy to design to work both ways. I have no idea how to balance this as a game mechanic - maybe it takes longer to design?)
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Actually, that might be one way to encourage smaller ships: Starfleet wants a ship with A capability and B cost, but they want it by CCCC date. Bigger ships (and fancier systems?) would take longer.
The risk of overshooting a delivery date would be... increased rate/odds that SF's less-capable model gets adopted?
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Edit:
A mid-process emergency design brief change would be a fun twist to (very) occasionally have thrown at us.
At least, I would enjoy it. I could see part of the thread getting very upset at unforseen redirection.
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[X] Arboretum (+2 Science)
This is a spite vote. To be clear, it's not a psyborg-spite-at-the-thread vote. This is a "Starfleet Design Bureau spite at the current state of existence" vote.
To quote a clip somebody posted a while back, "WE JUST WANNA STUDY FUCKIN' QUASARS!" This is our quasar-studying ship. If the galaxy has a problem with that, then dammit, we'll put as many goddamn guns on it as we have to so we can go study our quasars without getting mugged every five minutes. But we're not gonna stop making quasar-studiers.
Just, y'know, trees instead of quasars, in this case. They wanted a bioscience ship; they're getting a bioscience ship. If they wonder why their bioscience ship looks like it could take at least some less-notable entire species in a knock-down drag-out, well, because CLEARLY IT'S GONNA HAVE TO AT SOME POINT.
This is a spite vote. To be clear, it's not a psyborg-spite-at-the-thread vote. This is a "Starfleet Design Bureau spite at the current state of existence" vote.
To quote a clip somebody posted a while back, "WE JUST WANNA STUDY FUCKIN' QUASARS!" This is our quasar-studying ship. If the galaxy has a problem with that, then dammit, we'll put as many goddamn guns on it as we have to so we can go study our quasars without getting mugged every five minutes. But we're not gonna stop making quasar-studiers.
Just, y'know, trees instead of quasars, in this case. They wanted a bioscience ship; they're getting a bioscience ship. If they wonder why their bioscience ship looks like it could take at least some less-notable entire species in a knock-down drag-out, well, because CLEARLY IT'S GONNA HAVE TO AT SOME POINT.
Empress_Boog
Grand Empress
[X] Arboretum (+2 Science)
TheShadowDeamon
Mighty Dragon
Thats a good point, a refit from Arboretum to Cargo would be very easy, just pull everything out and fit a load of heavy duty shelves.
This ship's brief is to prevent disasters before they happen, given how many in TOS are agricultural/related what we'd be doing is mopping up after a disaster we couldn't prevent comes about.
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[X] Medium Cargo Bay