Starfleet Design Bureau

[Th3Saints]

So the Vulcans came through with playing the dreadnought role in the battle.

Us plus the Andorans are playing hammer with the heavy cruisers.

I looks like the light elements are going to end swinging result.

My read on this is clear both SF and it's members need a lot more ships.

A light patrol vessel seems to be in the thing to bring order to the space lanes and get us to the new nacelles.

Let's note that defense satellites impact was almost completely negated by the Klingons going for a hail marry. Hope it helps with the pirates.

 

[Cold Dust]

The member fleets are, by nature of belonging to individual members, limited in numbers (even if they can afford to specialise/gold plate in ways we can't) and the places they normally can or will deploy.

Starfleet is already much larger than any member fleet, as the text shows bigger than they were even at their peaks a few decades ago. It'll only continue to grow, and it can/will be all over the place.

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Which means it's absolutely critical that our next 2 or so designs must have full warp 8 and fighting capabilities. We really, really need fast ships.

As an aside, I was thinking about this and wondered if the v4 nacelle might have hidden nuances, like we could potentially make them more expensive for a speed buff, again making smaller ships less viable, or go the other way, have slightly less speed but cheaper nacelles making smaller ships more viable?

These decisions are tricky ones with nuanced consequences.

 

[Briefvoice]

Those notes about how angry the Andorians are afterwards make me worried about the outcome.

Not victory or defeat, but did some of the Klingons decide to launch a strike at civilian cities on the planet below in a desperate attempt to distract the Federation fleet when the tide turned against them? Hate to think what even one photon torpedo (or the Klingon equivalent) would do to a city of millions.

 

[uju32]

Klingon Taskforce Order of Battle
22x D7-class cruiser/battlecruiser
36x D6-class cruiser/battlecruiser
80+ Birds of Prey

Andorian Imperial Guard
3x Excalibur-class heavy cruisers
5x Shran-class heavy cruisers.
12x miscellaneous cruisers

Vulcan Explorator Corps
4x Kishara-class heavy explorers

Starfleet
140 ships


A task force of >140 Klingon warships matches the surviving Starfleet order of battle in numbers and exceeds it in firepower?
Yeah, this is just political malpractice. Not just on the part of Starfleet Admiralty's strategists, though there's some blame there, but on the part of the Federation and the people who decide Starfleet's budget and mission profile.

Because naval strategy is build strategy, and this series of events pretty clearly demonstrates that whoever has been doing build strategy and military budgets for the Federation has been asleep at the helm.
And I expect political heads to roll after this war.

So far the Andorians appear to be the only people who have not forgotten the realities of the setting they live in.

I mean, looking at the numbers, their 3x not-Excalibur-class heavy cruisers represent 25% of the 12x Excaliburs that Starfleet had ordered before the outbreak of the war.
And a significant chunk of the Federation's Warp 8-capable fleet.

Starfleet is not a military.
We leave that to the Member Fleets.

(No, seriously. If we can have something similar to was going on in the TBG quest, where Starfleet did all its stuff, but each member of the Federation also had their own technologically equal fleet of ships; at least in terms of combat. [Looks at the Kishara-class: Or better in terms of combat], that would be amazing.)
Ok, we do have that. My point is, I want us to keep having that.

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If in the event of a war, you are shoved onto the frontlines and expected to fight and die? You are a military.
If you are expected to run logistical missions under fire in an active war zone? You are a military.
If you are issued weapons of mass destruction as part of your standard loadout? You are a military.

If you are dispatched into the territory of another nation to bring down the government like we did with the Kzinti Imperium?
You are a military.

If the government feels entitled to court martial you for retreating from combat like they explicitly were talking about doing to Captain Paulson because he retreated from Arcadia in the face of overwhelming force?
You are a military.

Let's not dignify that particular brain bug OOC.
Starfleet might not be a particularly aggressive military, but thats a feature of the nationstate that birthed them. In all other respects they are a military.

And frankly, given the Federation's strategic posture in this scenario, with, for example, the Vulcans having dropped their ship strength from 20 all the way down to 7?
The Federation's core member worlds pretty clearly regard Starfleet as their military.

 

[zac1]

Those notes about how angry the Andorians are afterwards make me worried about the outcome.

Not victory or defeat, but did some of the Klingons decide to launch a strike at civilian cities on the planet below in a desperate attempt to distract the Federation fleet when the tide turned against them? Hate to think what even one photon torpedo (or the Klingon equivalent) would do to a city of millions.

Click to shrink...

one photon torpedo is enough to wipe out a city, and we talking "modern" cities here worse its done on a planet with a species sensitive to heat, going to have some major effects on the planet and to the surroundings for decades.

 

[landcollector]

Those notes about how angry the Andorians are afterwards make me worried about the outcome.

Not victory or defeat, but did some of the Klingons decide to launch a strike at civilian cities on the planet below in a desperate attempt to distract the Federation fleet when the tide turned against them? Hate to think what even one photon torpedo (or the Klingon equivalent) would do to a city of millions.

Click to shrink...

Annihilate it. Keep in mind that modern Photon torps eclipse atomic weapons signficantly in destructive capability on nonprotected targets.

 

[Alectai]

The ridiculous part is Still how the Klingons just shat out something like three dozen D7s in a single build order. Even with the handwave of "They got that by mortgaging all of their gains and plunder from the past century or two in a single crash building program and will struggle to produce any for a while", you'd figure the Federation being larger in this timeline would translate to more build capacity, but those benefits have been marginal at best.

And yeah, we keep getting hammered by "It's not the lack of backwards compatibility for Warp 8 that's killing us, it's the fact their last generation cruisers outgun all but our next generation warships, because Klingon weapon tech is just fundamentally better than ours, and they can produce just straight up more of these because they don't have to split their industry between building their economy and shipbuilding, because all of their industry is military industry". So we're losing on quality and quantity outside of our next generation dedicated Tactical Cruiser where we finally closed the gap thanks to the rapid-launch photons and their hilarious level of combat agility for their weight class.

I sincerely doubt after all that this is the entirety of the D7 fleet balled up here, minus combat losses (Which we already know have been a thing from Excalibur encounters and the fact that an Excalibur vs a D7 is a solved problem).

 

[MonkeyTypewriter]

Ok, we do have that. My point is, I want us to keep having that.

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I'd honestly expect that this war to result in a more powerful member fleet than in canon, at least on the part of the Andorians simply due to the political fallout of the war.

 

[Tank man]

Those notes about how angry the Andorians are afterwards make me worried about the outcome.

Not victory or defeat, but did some of the Klingons decide to launch a strike at civilian cities on the planet below in a desperate attempt to distract the Federation fleet when the tide turned against them? Hate to think what even one photon torpedo (or the Klingon equivalent) would do to a city of millions.

Click to shrink...

If I had to guess, they're probably going to demand a say in Starfleet tactical procurement, effectively establishing another bureau, and allotting their yards to it for production.

Not that much actually, a 'city' killer nuke is about 25 megatons of tnt equivalent, assuming we're going tech manual (and the numbers would kinda suggest at least some influence) that's only 2.56x the firepower and part of the reason why we went with MIRVS is because past a certain point focusing massive amounts of firepower on a city starts to become much less efficient for killing.

 

[random_npc]

you'd figure the Federation being larger in this timeline would translate to more build capacity, but those benefits have been marginal at best.

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It seems that the Federation has more colonies but either about the same or less actual industry. The war updates talked about how most Federation worlds are either minor colonies or resourcing operations. More focus on expansion ment less on internal development. Long term that might have changed, but this war may have derailed the long term gains of expansion due to direct damage and the resulting pivot to crash building ship building capacity.

 

[zac1]

I think we should focus on industry then, cause this is ridiculous we need more ships.

 

[Cold Dust]

A task force of >140 Klingon warships matches the surviving Starfleet order of battle in numbers and exceeds it in firepower?
Yeah, this is just political malpractice. Not just on the part of Starfleet Admiralty's strategists, though there's some blame there, but on the part of the Federation and the people who decide Starfleet's budget and mission profile.

Click to shrink...

That's not entirely fair or true though, while we have made sub-optimal combat designs for a while, the Klingons have straight up better military technology, and the ships they're sending are modern warships. Didn't Sayle say they have ~6x our industrial power? So their modern warships are going up against a mix of our modern warships and various flavours of utility ships or outright antiques (I'm once again looking at you, Cygnus-class).

 

[aceraptor]

I think we should focus on industry then, cause this is ridiculous we need more ships.

Click to shrink...

We can't affect that, at least not directly. Designing the Archer helped build up logistics and allow spreading out of Starfleet logistics and prevented the Klingons from having easy access to fuel to loot.

And most likely after the war is over we will likely be tasked with a heavy orbital defense station.

 

[uju32]

Those notes about how angry the Andorians are afterwards make me worried about the outcome.

Not victory or defeat, but did some of the Klingons decide to launch a strike at civilian cities on the planet below in a desperate attempt to distract the Federation fleet when the tide turned against them? Hate to think what even one photon torpedo (or the Klingon equivalent) would do to a city of millions.

Click to shrink...

Its pretty clearly established that at least one Klingon ship crashlanded on Andorian terrain, and that the Andorian state response was disorganized enough in the aftermath of this battle that they froze to death.
That suggests Bad Things happen.

Might not even be deliberate.

Uncontrolled reentry by portions of a single multikiloton warship over a population center will cause almost as many deaths as a deliberate strike by a military captain who chooses to expend ordnance on civilians over military opposition. Open any asteroid impact calculator online and see the potential damage from a single ten thousand ton ship fragment at terminal velocity.

And bear in mind that this is the first fight with the potential for damage to core Federation industrial infrastructure.
The economic and industrial damage is likely to be non-trivial as well.

The ridiculous part is Still how the Klingons just shat out something like three dozen D7s in a single build order. Even with the handwave of "They got that by mortgaging all of their gains and plunder from the past century or two in a single crash building program and will struggle to produce any for a while", you'd figure the Federation being larger in this timeline would translate to more build capacity, but those benefits have been marginal at best.

And yeah, we keep getting hammered by "It's not the lack of backwards compatibility for Warp 8 that's killing us, it's the fact their last generation cruisers outgun all but our next generation warships, because Klingon weapon tech is just fundamentally better than ours, and they can produce just straight up more of these because they don't have to split their industry between building their economy and shipbuilding, because all of their industry is military industry". So we're losing on quality and quantity outside of our next generation dedicated Tactical Cruiser where we finally closed the gap thanks to the rapid-launch photons and their hilarious level of combat agility for their weight class.

Click to shrink...

Pretty much.
The D6 issue was known for years, if not decades previously, and that sort of tactical inferiority is the sort of thing you press to address immediately. Someone, or a group of someones, decided it wasnt worth spending the resources to do so, either technology-wise, or in ship numbers.

I sincerely doubt after all that this is the entirety of the D7 fleet balled up here, minus combat losses (Which we already know have been a thing from Excalibur encounters and the fact that an Excalibur vs a D7 is a solved problem).

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It almost certainly isnt.
I dont think an extractionist imperialist state like the Klingon Empire can afford stripping its rear areas of military ships without insurrection among its tributaries or inviting the interest of predatory neighbors.

And I find it entirely plausible that they are spending a larger portion of their GDP on the military, if only because their tributaries have a lower standard of living than the Klingon Houses.

 

[OmegaS]

part of the reason why we went with MIRVS is because past a certain point focusing massive amounts of firepower on a city starts to become much less efficient for killing.

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Past a certain point, making a bigger boom only results in the blast leaving the atmosphere faster. The actual damage profile would depend on local atmospheric conditions, but the laws of physics place a hard cap on how far a single (non-exotic) device can propagate its destructive effects. Antimatter is 'just' a strait up matter to energy conversion, so it doesn't sidestep around these barriers without external assistance that frankly wouldn't be included on a torpedo casing that wasn't explicitly manufactured for that sole purpose. For all the Kingon's war mongering, they place far more emphasis on the purely combat part of things, so they'd almost certainly rather carry more normal torpedoes instead of a few that are only useful at saturation bombardment. Concurring a glass crater isn't very glorious after all.

 

[CuriousRaptor]

We can't affect that, at least not directly. Designing the Archer helped build up logistics and allow spreading out of Starfleet logistics and prevented the Klingons from having easy access to fuel to loot.

And most likely after the war is over we will likely be tasked with a heavy orbital defense station.

Click to shrink...

We need a modern Line Cruiser before that. Those stations take a while to get up even with Archers on the job, we'll need ships to both protect and build them. Which means new line cruisers as the Newtons and Keas are not cutting it now, and won't in the future either. Unless the Darwin is pressed into such that or a patrol ship needs to be our next design. We can't afford less now.

 

[zac1]

Photon apparently are easy to change their yield, with a theoretical yield of 25 isotons with a maximum rated yield of 18.5 isotons. A single isoton is 5.14 megatons. So yeah photon torpedoes are pretty dangerous.

 

[Candesce]

Which means new line cruisers as the Newtons and Keas are not cutting it now, and won't in the future either.

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I think the Kea Refit is doing decently at the moment, actually.

Still needs to be replaced - it's got a Warp 7 Core and there's not that many of them. And our replacement needs to be better than "just for now."

 

[CuriousRaptor]

I think the Kea Refit is doing decently at the moment, actually.

Still needs to be replaced - it's got a Warp 7 Core and there's not that many of them. And our replacement needs to be better than "just for now."

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Keas are still in the "Losing against D6" bracket, which means they are still in dire need of replacement. They're just the least worst alternative right now. A replacement line cruiser for what should be our science cruiser is needed, if only so the Kea can go back to work on its bread an dbutter.

 

[Candesce]

Keas are still in the "Losing against D6" bracket, which means they are still in dire need of replacement.

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Mmm, fair. They mostly need to exist as a wall for more fragile vessels in a fleet action to hide behind, and most of what they fight is likely to be Birds of Prey, but D6s are going to be common enough raiders that "can face them in a 1v1" is an important metric.

Something bigger than an Excalibur with a single Rapid Launcher and either standard or light shielding depending on just how big it is could probably take on D6s, but if we want lots of them to be around and stay around long enough to really fill out a fleet, they'll be around long enough for D7s to age enough to take the role D6s are in now. Especially since the Klingons spread the schematics for that ship pretty widely.

 

[uju32]

That's not entirely fair or true though, while we have made sub-optimal combat designs for a while, the Klingons have straight up better military technology, and the ships they're sending are modern warships. Didn't Sayle say they have ~6x our industrial power? So their modern warships are going up against a mix of our modern warships and various flavours of utility ships or outright antiques (I'm once again looking at you, Cygnus-class).

Click to shrink...

Fairness doesnt come into it.
You either acquire better tech, or you increase your military budget and build more ships to compensate for technological inferiority. Or someone conquers you, and you dont have to worry about military budgets. Or budgets at all.

And even within the given numbers, they could have done much better.


The Sagmartha-class explorer is sixty five years old, and we only ever built 12x of them.
More than a third of Starfleet's numbers at the beginning of this war appear to have been composed of Selachiis and Cygnus-class ships. Antiques.

The D6 was known to be superior to everything in the Federation OOB, and there was no attempt to address this prior to the Excalibur.

And even the Excalibur wasnt exactly ordered in overwhelming numbers. If the retrospective remains valid, the Federation ends up building fewer Starfleet Excaliburs over the design's entire lifespan than the Klingons currently have D7s at this one battle.
As in, they literally build none after the war ends.

Thats not a Klingon superiority issue, thats a Federation political issue.

EDIT
As in, you'd expect massive rearmament in the aftermath of a war that has already killed more than a fifth of Starfleet's pre-war complement of warships, never mind the Warp 8 transition.
But its not being represented in the class numbers of the primary ship that Starfleet ordered to deter its neighbors.

 

[aceraptor]

Another thing to bring up is that Federation's intelligence and strategists have dropped the ball on at least three big occasions. First when they initially failed to warn about a potential Klingon invasion (plus the intial confusion about whether this was a big raid or a actual invasion), second when they failed to determine that a attack against Arcadia was a potential likelihood, and a third time when they failed to understand the Klingons and thought the war would enter a attritional phase where instead the Klingon leadership decided to go for a all or nothing knock out blow.

Federation's conduct throughout this war has shown a complete lack of understanding of how the Klingons think and their strategic and political priorities.

 

[Alectai]

The problem I'm seeing here is that Starfleet is just fundamentally unwilling to procure dedicated Tactical Cruisers for anything less than a literal existential threat, and even when there is one, they're not willing to procure as many as they might actually need (The aforementioned "There are more D7s in this one battle than Excaliburs commissioned total, and this cannot be the entire fleet of D7s still afloat), even at risk of annihilation, and we still were expected to have it be able to serve an adequate secondary purpose if we wanted to justify even average expense despite its hardware.

And like, it's not like it's just us--even the Saladin, the El Cheapo "We can shit these out in job lots and while they're not a match for a D6 we can throw three in for everyone one", wasn't procured in particularly significant numbers, nor was the Newton really built in great numbers, and the fact that even with a Core World being threatened (And presumably damaged to boot), there's still apparently no will to build more Excaliburs than are already in the crash build session!

I just don't get it, this isn't even a "Suffering from success" where the core should be complacent, these fuckers thunder ran at a Core World, and even if we largely repulsed it through what's apparently marked heroics, it wouldn't have gotten this bad if we actually had the resources to match our responsibilities. But it's starting to feel like we're expected to produce miracles based on cash in the back of the couch.

 

[CuriousRaptor]

Mmm, fair. They mostly need to exist as a wall for more fragile vessels in a fleet action to hide behind, and most of what they fight is likely to be Birds of Prey, but D6s are going to be common enough raiders that "can face them in a 1v1" is an important metric.

Something bigger than an Excalibur with a single Rapid Launcher and either standard or light shielding depending on just how big it is could probably take on D6s, but if we want lots of them to be around and stay around long enough to really fill out a fleet, they'll be around long enough for D7s to age enough to take the role D6s are in now. Especially since the Klingons spread the schematics for that ship pretty widely.

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True, but warp 8 ships have boosted Phaser power, boosted impulse, and when the type 4 nacelle drops boosted warp. To say our warp 8 fleet is a monumental leap isn't understating things. Frankly were we told in no uncertain terms we are not getting any more Excaliburs, I'd say they are ideal for a patrol ship. Expected average cost and Engineering, slightly below average science, and a monstrously high ability to shred enemies to into modern art.


I'd probably recommend something in 200 to 220 range, one RFL, a few more phasers for coverage, Standard Covariant and 2 type 3s. Which should be a solid all-around design that can do almost everything if we design it right. Smaller than the Kea, but faster, better defended, with better teeth, and enough room to install enough slots to get multiple modules for science and engineering. If we can get B scores all around i'd call it a win.

The problem I'm seeing here is that Starfleet is just fundamentally unwilling to procure dedicated Tactical Cruisers for anything less than a literal existential threat, and even when there is one, they're not willing to procure as many as they might actually need (The aforementioned "There are more D7s in this one battle than Excaliburs commissioned total, and this cannot be the entire fleet of D7s still afloat), even at risk of annihilation, and we still were expected to have it be able to serve an adequate secondary purpose if we wanted to justify even average expense despite its hardware.

And like, it's not like it's just us--even the Saladin, the El Cheapo "We can shit these out in job lots and while they're not a match for a D6 we can throw three in for everyone one", wasn't procured in particularly significant numbers, nor was the Newton really built in great numbers, and the fact that even with a Core World being threatened (And presumably damaged to boot), there's still apparently no will to build more Excaliburs than are already in the crash build session!

I just don't get it.

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Yeah, at this point it feels like the Federation is venturing into too dumb to live. They got complacent because we handled the Kzin so easily because they were actually fucking terrible at warfare against anything approaching a peer and now, we're getting obliterated for it. The Excalibur is an amazing ship, and it's basically forbidden from being built again except one crash build in the face of annihilation. At this point the Andorians and even Vulcans would be looking heavily at other options. Because the Andorians are still fairly militant and likely got thier homeworld bombed because Starfleet was asleep at the wheel, and the Vulcans are only going to be able to look at the Federations extreme unwillingness to police its own borders and protect its own populace as illogical.

 

[LunaMoth]

But it's starting to feel like we're expected to produce miracles based on cash in the back of the couch.

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To be fair that is very Star Trek, and fits the federation.

That and everything in star trek is operating under planet of hats at least a little.
-Federation = scientists
-Klingons = Warriors
-Romulans = Spies