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Starfleet Design Bureau

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Zimmerwald1915 said:
If Starfleet Command asks us for a patrol frigate, we'll design a patrol frigate. But if it asks us for something else, it's well beyond our pay grade to decide we really ought to give it a patrol frigate instead.
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At this point if they don't ask us for a patrol ship in the frigate/light cruiser range to help maintain and protect our borders, any sensible person would be accusing them of being bought off by the Klingons somehow. We need a huge number of hulls to both stabilize our borders after the Klingons waltzed in almost uncontested, as well as to secure the colonies which are so unprotected that pirates were fighting over who got control over them instead of against us. This is before we had a third of our fleet obliterated with more coming Soon™, which will only exacerbate the issue and further embolden extant pirates and likely generate new ones sensing weaknesses.


Frankly Starfleet was failing its obligations before the Klingons attacked terribly, and if it wants to fulfill them and maintain itself as a government that supports its members instead of a human first club that lords over other peers, it needs more ships. Not science ships (although if we can fit that in I am down) or an engineering ship (While having one that's faster would be great, other than speed the Archer is a one stop shop for Light industry on the move) or even a transport ship (which if we can fit in more, great, but it isn't essential in most cases and we do have Archers, Excaliburs and other who can do it if need be) we need something to keep those that would mean us harm off our lawn.

Science while essential, can't be performed if the Klingons bludgeon us over our heads when we try. Infrastructure that we cannot defend or at worst deny to the enemy is money in their pocket to do yet more harm to us. The Federation is a nation of scholar that has ostensibly surrounded itself with a ring of spears. Except now the spears are broken. Shattered, and the scholars are under threat. We need more spears lest the figurative beasts at our door slake their hunger out on us.

So, we are going to need to pull a Stingray if the prompt isn't for a patrol ship, because otherwise the Federation will get invaded again and we will have failed them in our laxity.
 
Steven Kodaly said:
The Stingray was explicitly something we were asked to do, though. It was one of two choices of project presented by our game master.
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It WAS an option, but the prompt United Earth gave was

Sayle said:
Enter Project Daedalus. It is a simple request: to create a starship capable of Warp 3. Ideally it will be capable of carrying cargo to reduce reliance on the 'boomers', the space-borne families who run the United Earth Cargo Service. But more importantly it should have basic tactical systems to dissuade pirates and provide simple defensive functions.
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and instead of the Cargo ship they wanted, they got the Stingray instead, because a patrol craft was and will always be a better deterrent than a freighter that's up armed, as seen with how the Archer is pants for combat but a hauling and engineering godsend to Starfleet logistics. Our very first ship has established that if a prompt isn't something we're sure United Earth, Starfleet or the Federation needs we can and have modified it to be a better fit.
 
CuriousRaptor said:
It WAS an option, but the prompt United Earth gave was
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Sayle said:
Enter Project Daedalus. It is a simple request: to create a starship capable of Warp 3. Ideally it will be capable of carrying cargo to reduce reliance on the 'boomers', the space-borne families who run the United Earth Cargo Service. But more importantly it should have basic tactical systems to dissuade pirates and provide simple defensive functions. United Earth does not anticipate any large-scale hostilities, but the inability for cargo ships to decisively see off pirates with their standard defensive plasma cannon has been an increasing theme in the last decade.
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Sayle said:
With that decided, you need to decide what shape Project Daedalus will take. The first option is to focus on the cargo request, using the minimum of material for maximum internal space. The ship will consist of spheres and circular elements, which will likely have a detrimental effect on warp efficiency and manoeuvrability but do a great deal to make a larger practical starship. The second option is to consider the tactical role more closely, focusing on a refined but low-mass design that can patrol freighter routes and the outer Sol system with a fast intercept time. This lower profile would have minimal cargo space and less endurance in exchange, however.
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It was explicitly one of two options presented to us by the game master.
 
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Steven Kodaly said:
It was explicitly one of two options presented to us by the game master.
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And it was NOT the prompt that United Earth desired and instead us going our own way. Yes the GM backed it, but it was not the prompt as given by the ostensible bosses we had. Ergo, just because we are given a prompt does not mean we need to color inside the lines all the time. Which is why people saying that's "Not our prompt" are especially short sighted. As the very first ship we made was us taking the prompt and using it as bathroom tissue then making what we knew they needed but didn't want.
 
Awesome I think we should build a patrol frigate next. Reinforce our shattered lines and project a united front as if the war was only a temporary setback that we recover from quickly and stronger then ever from it.
 
CuriousRaptor said:
And it was NOT the prompt that United Earth desired and instead us going our own way. Yes the GM backed it, but it was not the prompt as given by the ostensible bosses we had. Ergo, just because we are given a prompt does not mean we need to color inside the lines all the time. Which is why people saying that's "Not our prompt" are especially short sighted. As the very first ship we made was us taking the prompt and using it as bathroom tissue then making what we knew they needed but didn't want.
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I'd argue it's closer to focusing on one area of the prompt at the expense of the other - United Earth wanted something that could reduce reliance on civilians within the UECS by taking cargo and something capable of seeing off pirates, but given that "ideally" in the prompt I suspect they knew that getting one that could do both was probably going to be a bit of an ask.
 
Hot co co said:
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Personally, I think we need to design a new Shark class like ship... the issue is some people in this thread seem to a allergy to thinking of ways to creat patrol frigates
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The issue is under the current rules you can't make a ship that much cheaper than a generalist. We're not disagreeing with you conceptually so much as pointing out for only slightly less cost you're getting drastically less utility, including pure fighting. To a point, quantity has a quality all of its own (and we all agree we desperately need a bigger fleet), but not when the cost difference is so slight and the quantity just ain't that much more.

Edit: Added bracketed comment

Also there are issues because we've gone with vertical cores very fast, so our ships are taller than they'd otherwise be.

This has been brought to the attention of the QM, he's asked for ideas and floated some, maybe things will be tweaked down the line? Personally I prefer to leave him to it, his ideas are always awesome.
 
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Cold Dust said:
Also there are issues because we've gone with vertical cores very fast, so our ships are taller than they'd otherwise be.

This has been brought to the attention of the QM, he's asked for ideas and floated some, maybe things will be tweaked down the line? Personally I prefer to leave him to it, his ideas are always awesome.
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I have wondered if it would be possible to design a ship where the decks are reoriented 90 degrees - like the ships in "The Expanse" so we could have a "vertical core" running along the ship length.
 
Strunkriidiisk said:
with the Darwin at 105kt, is that cruiser or frigate-weight?
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while I am not Sayle (astonishing to everyone, I know), class sizes trend upwards over time and I've gotten the vibe that we're on the cusp of another rejiggering. I expect it to launch as a light cruiser and be reclassified as a frigate well before the end of its service life.
KlavoHunter said:
Isn't the D7 like 100ktons?
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The D7 is probably less than 100kt, actually, but you can't judge different techbases by the same standards; it's functionally a battlecruiser.
TheShadowDeamon said:
I have wondered if it would be possible to design a ship where the decks are reoriented 90 degrees - like the ships in "The Expanse" so we could have a "vertical core" running along the ship length.
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I mean, in principle, sure, but in a world where artificial gravity exists at all and so the decks can be oriented however you want it would be definitely sadistic and probably criminal to maximize stairs and elevators instead of minimizing them. Fewer, wider, flatter decks are always going to be more convenient and less accident prone than more, narrower, taller decks.
 
thepsyborg said:
The D7 is probably less than 100kt, actually, but you can't judge different techbases by the same standards; it's functionally a battlecruiser.
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You're probably right, the bops typically have what, 2 quarters? One for the captain, one for the rest of the crew? No holodecks, no unnecessary space or mass used. Their cruisers might be similar, they might be able to build a functional battle cruiser drastically smaller just because their usual military ships are so utilitarian by default compared to ours, even ignoring tech base reasons.

Gives them a huge numerical advantage over us.
 
Cold Dust said:
Gives them a huge numerical advantage over us.
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No, I expect even for the Klingons carving away most of the spare mass doesn't save them that much in resources. They just institutionally don't care about the utility they're giving up, so they go with the only slightly cheaper option anyway.

The Klingon advantage in numbers versus the Federation has to do with political and economic priorities. And having been around for much longer.
 
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Candesce said:
No, I expect even for the Klingons carving away most of the spare mass doesn't save them that much in resources. They just institutionally don't care about the utility they're giving up, so they go with the only slightly cheaper option anyway.

The Klingon advantage in numbers versus the Federation has to do with political and economic priorities. And having been around for much longer.
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Yeah, you're right, mass is only a nominal part of cost compared to other systems.

Even though I was wrong about that, it is an interesting doctrinal choice. Maybe the Klingons avoid generalists not for cost reasons, but maybe to make the ships more dependent on local infrastructure that the Empire can maintain control of? Ya know, not having the best medical or self-repair facilities forces them to be dependent on Imperial facilities, makes renegades etc less likely or at least less effective compared to Imperial warships supported by surface or orbital facilities. Any thoughts?
 
Cold Dust said:
Maybe the Klingons avoid generalists not for cost reasons, but maybe to make the ships more dependent on local infrastructure that the Empire can maintain control of? Ya know, not having the best medical or self-repair facilities forces them to be dependent on Imperial facilities, makes renegades etc less likely or at least less effective compared to Imperial warships supported by surface or orbital facilities. Any thoughts?
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Plausible. Certainly they're at greater risk of their captains going off and conquering a world of their own than Starfleet is.

That said, keep in mind they're not getting provided their ships by the central empire but being independently built by various competing Houses. A bigger pressure to squeeze out that extra ship every ~however many is that they need to constantly maintain some degree of parity with the other Houses, or someone's going to take chunks out of them - or, alternatively, that one extra ship might let them take a bite out of one of their rivals.
 
thepsyborg said:
I mean, in principle, sure, but in a world where artificial gravity exists at all and so the decks can be oriented however you want it would be definitely sadistic and probably criminal to maximize stairs and elevators instead of minimizing them. Fewer, wider, flatter decks are always going to be more convenient and less accident prone than more, narrower, taller decks.
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And the reason we can't just flip the new vertical core on its side to make it fit in smaller ships is probably interactions with that artificial gravity field, at a guess - it's hard to make the field not go into a specific area inside the volume of the ship, perhaps, and the containment fields that help contain and direct the matter/antimatter reaction are close enough to their performance limits that having the core horizontal (and thus having the reaction be constantly pulled into the side of the warp core) would cause stability and safety issues.
 
Ash19256 said:
And the reason we can't just flip the new vertical core on its side to make it fit in smaller ships is probably interactions with that artificial gravity field, at a guess - it's hard to make the field not go into a specific area inside the volume of the ship, perhaps, and the containment fields that help contain and direct the matter/antimatter reaction are close enough to their performance limits that having the core horizontal (and thus having the reaction be constantly pulled into the side of the warp core) would cause stability and safety issues.
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If that's the techno blabbering you want to use we could turn off artificial gravity in engineering.

At this point I think we need a rule chang, that or some technology we can "barrow" from the klingons to figure out how they managed this because this paradigm of few but general ships is just not working. We need to be able to create patrol ships without feeling like we are wasting money.
 
The main issue with making a 'patrol frigate' is twofold. One, we can't (currently) shrink down the deflector or warpcore without significantly impeding the ship's maximum warp (which while not the be-all-end-all is still important in certain edge cases) and thus to an extent its capabilities as a patroller and interceptor - having the full-size versions necessarily increases the ship's mass. The other part of the issue is that combat capability is the part of a ship's design that is rendered obsolete the fastest, so a pure combat vessel is usually going to stop production sooner than anything other than extremely specialised science vessels, and be retired sooner than any other ship that isn't a complete lemon. This behooves us to make something with more mission capability in order to make it more useful for longer, which again would result in a larger mass for module space - such as cargo capacity.

Basically I think the Darwin represents our current economical floor for ship mass, which (probably) would make a light cruiser and would have ~2-3 spaces by default (not accounting for a rear torpedo like the Darwin has but assuming a full-scale deflector would take up about that same amount of internal volume) depending on hullform. Anything smaller than that is still possible to build, but you're starting to compromise on performance while still making the ship more expensive per capita.
 
If we took the Darwin hull and put the Deflector onto a Blister separate from the main saucer (we had that option in exchange for an extra 10kt of mass) it might give us enough room for a second facility in the saucer along with an extra +0.4 maximum warp factor to bump us up to a Warp 8.2 sprint assuming we stick with the linear nacelle placement.

3 Facilities (1 in secondary hull, 2 saucer) should be enough space to give us a comparable facility count to the Newton (cargo, extra shuttles, and a 2nd computer core) while offering significantly superior warp speed, durability, and firepower.
 
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