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Starfleet Design Bureau

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Strunkriidiisk said:
I will say it does feel weird that Starfleet isn't going to be ordering any more than the noted 14 Callies, what with the massive hull casualties we've been taking. I suppose they could continue plugging the gaps with Newtons, but that feels like poor decision-making when Newtons are verging on tactically obsolete and this war isn't going to neatly button up all the reasons we need fighters for. Like, sure we need raw coverage, but it would be nice if the ships we send out (and the extremely mortal crews aboard them) are less likely to get creamed by a modern peer opponent.
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I did bring that up quite awhile ago now I think an update or two ago, where I noted it would make more sense for them to continue slow building some more Excalibur class ships till a new large ship class was made. They need to make up the losses of their larger ships with something after all and it's hard to see what else it would be then an Excalibur or an Excalibur revision right now.


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In a similar vein it is to an extent to bad that some extra purpose hasn't been given to the current light cruiser design being made, as Starfleet definitely can use more light cruiser roles being picked up by a Warp 8 ship. This one is clearly better then the Warp 7 ships, so it would have given them a reason to not rebuild as many Warp 7 cruisers to make up the hole in their fleets. Admittedly it hurts the specialization, but it would have made sense for getting the fleet switched over to far more capable Warp 8 designs, rather then a limited smaller build out. I guess it can still do tac cruiser things, so that might get it a few more though.
 
Steven Kodaly said:
No, actually; strapping more torpedo launchers onto the ship also impacted available space for onboard equipment.
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Strapping more torpedo launchers is an unalloyed good that actually improved its ability to do its job, given what we now know about shipbuilding bottle necks and Starfleet ship deployment doctrine.

My point is that if we'd gone Cargo Bay instead of Arboretum, it would be both a science ship and a working utility cruiser that would go into mass production pretty much unaltered. As it is, Im half-expecting that the Federation is going to build it en masse anyway, but do a hasty mod to at increased cost to replace that arboretum space with a cargo bay.

Maybe farm that out to one of the other design bureaus.

Why?
Because they are going to need cargo haulers and utility support a lot more than dedicated biosciences ships in the aftermath of this war, and cant afford to wait another decade for the next Warp 8 design to come to maturity.
 
uju32 said:
My point is that if we'd gone Cargo Bay instead of Arboretum, it would be both a science ship and a working utility cruiser that would go into mass production pretty much unaltered. As it is, Im half-expecting that the Federation is going to build it en masse anyway, but do a hasty mod to at increased cost to replace that arboretum space with a cargo bay.
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A cargo bay is completely opposed to its mission profile, which will be to sit on uninhabited planets for months at a time and just poke everything with a stick. The aft torpedo would be useful if we hadn't gone RFL. With the RFL it just needed aft coverage to shake things off in combat, which an aft phaser would do better since it fires three times faster, without the cost of a module slot.

The Federation isn't going to order these for engineering because they're going to pump more Archers out for that role. That's our logistics ship, it does an exceptional job which lets other ships worry about specializing more.
 
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Sayle said:
As for this idea that if Starfleet just had more budget? It's not about budget. You can't just dig up some iron and coal for your steel manufacturing. It's all about strategic resources. The SDB Federation has greater resource-flows than the OTL Federation, so can build more ships. Duranium, tritanium, dilithium, parsteel, all these things are limited by extractive industry and natural supply, not money.
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This logic holds at any given point in time, but over time budget/money/demand is ultimately the determining factor in what kind of productive capacity exists. Had the Federation made the decision to build up a defensive force twice as capable starting from 2200, as was arguably warranted by then-extant threats, by 2230 public and private yard capacity would have been 30-40% greater and more extractive industrial infrastructure would have been devoted to military/fleet production and less to civilian consumption.

Given that Starfleet represents an investment of under a percent of GDP, based on the population and economic model we know exists and assuming that these vessels are as complex and costly relative to civilian consumption as a modern CVN, its very difficult to argue that budget wouldn't have made a difference over even a decade-long span of time, let alone three or four.
 
Shard said:
We just made a dedicated cargo ship right before we did the Excalibur.
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The Archer-class does efficient cruise at Warp 5.2/140c, supercruises at Warp 6.2/238c and sprints at Warp 7.2/373c.
For comparison, the Excalibur, our first Warp 8 ship, supercruises at Warp 7/343c and sprints at Warp 8.6/636c.
Yes, its supercruise is almost as fast as the Archer's sprint.

You can expect foreign classes of Warp 8 ships to display similar performance.
The Archer is slow in the face of the Warp 8 transition.
The fate of the Radiant-class ships is a pointed reminder about the fate of ships that can neither outrun nor outfight opposition.

This is not to say that the Archer-class isnt a valuable and ongoing element of Starfleet, but it does establish that we had to make significant survivability tradeoffs for its capability.
Its not capable of operating in or within range of contested space, or responding at speed.

And we will need ships to do that.
Wootius said:
A cargo bay is completely opposed to its mission profile, which will be to sit on uninhabited planets for months at a time and just poke everything with a stick. The aft torpedo would be useful if we hadn't gone RFL. With the RFL it just needed aft coverage to shake things off in combat, which an aft phaser would do better since it fires three times faster, without the cost of a module slot.

The Federation isn't going to order these for engineering because they're going to pump more Archers out for that role. That's our logistics ship.
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Disagree.

Starfleet's needs have changed with the Four Year War, and they will be looking to adapt the tools they have at hand to meet the duties they have to fill. There will only be two Warp 8 designs available at wars end, and of the two, Project Darwin is shaping up to be significantly cheaper to mass produce than the Excalibur.

I do not see them waiting a decade for one of the design bureaus to come up with a brand new design.
Not when the need is immediate.


The Archer-class is the current MVP of Starfleet's interstellar logistics, and will remain so for decades, but it is SLOW.
Priority transport and rapid movement is very much not its forte. And its so underarmed that a BoP is a credible threat; it will not be able to operate outside of secure space for a very long time, at least not without an escort.

Same goes for the Newton, for that matter; the Warp 8 transition is here, and the fleet's ranks have already been reamed pretty badly by the war's casualties, a process thats looking to continue.
Starfleet isnt going to replace those holes with lastgen ships at war's end.

At least, I dont see them doing so.
 
Cold Dust said:
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).
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I don't think it's ever been said that they have 6x our industrial capacity. From canon we know that in the early 2200's they were larger but less developed on a per capita basis because they have large low-productivity subject populations.

What's clearly different is that despite much of their "GDP" consisting of subsistence-level and extractive industry serfs/slaves, they nonetheless devote a much larger fraction of output to warmaking.

In some ways this looks a bit like Classical-era Rome vs Greece. The former was poorer in most every way but also "harder." Greek colonies had slightly-above-replacement fertility and household incomes that wouldn't again be rivaled in Europe until the Dutch Golden Age, with low per capita taxation, while Rome consisted mostly of subsistence farmers with heavy tax burdens and high fertility that necessitated expansion and incentivized military service for loot. The Greeks had relatively small military classes with generous wages/land grants and state-provided equipment, where Rome had near-universal military service in exchange for small land grants and still required soldiers to purchase their own equipment from the state.

The net effect was that Rome devoted several times as much of its productive capacity beyond subsistence to warmaking as Greece did and had vastly better ability to regenerate manpower after what the Greeks believed to be crippling losses.

There are also deeply worrying parallels in this to the purchasing power of US defense outlays and make-up of high value-added civilian industry compared to those of the PRC…
 
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uju32 said:
The Archer-class does efficient cruise at Warp 5.2/140c, supercruises at Warp 6.2/238c and sprints at Warp 7.2/373c.
For comparison, the Excalibur, our first Warp 8 ship, supercruises at Warp 7/343c and sprints at Warp 8.6/636c.
Yes, its supercruise is almost as fast as the Archer's sprint.

You can expect foreign classes of Warp 8 ships to display similar performance.
The Archer is slow in the face of the Warp 8 transition.
The fate of the Radiant-class ships is a pointed reminder about the fate of ships that can neither outrun nor outfight opposition.

This is not to say that the Archer-class isnt a valuable and ongoing element of Starfleet, but it does establish that we had to make significant survivability tradeoffs for its capability.
Its not capable of operating in or within range of contested space, or responding at speed.

And we will need ships to do that.

Disagree.

Starfleet's needs have changed with the Four Year War, and they will be looking to adapt the tools they have at hand to meet the duties they have to fill. There will only be two Warp 8 designs available at wars end, and of the two, Project Darwin is shaping up to be significantly cheaper to mass produce than the Excalibur.

I do not see them waiting a decade for one of the design bureaus to come up with a brand new design.
Not when the need is immediate.


The Archer-class is the current MVP of Starfleet's interstellar logistics, and will remain so for decades, but it is SLOW.
Priority transport and rapid movement is very much not its forte. And its so underarmed that a BoP is a credible threat; it will not be able to operate outside of secure space for a very long time, at least not without an escort.

Same goes for the Newton, for that matter; the Warp 8 transition is here, and the fleet's ranks have already been reamed pretty badly by the war's casualties, a process thats looking to continue.
Starfleet isnt going to replace those holes with lastgen ships at war's end.

At least, I dont see them doing so.
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If we didn't want an awkward warp transition period, we shouldn't have made the core refit incompatible. We have to work with what we have.

I really think people are panicking a bit too hard. The Federation isn't the biggest kid on the block. If the Klingons are the HRE we're like Aragon.

We've won two out of three wars and are going to stalemate/Status quo ante bellum the HRE while still being the lesser power. We're going to catch up in the next few years technologically. We are not a warrior culture so aren't dumping unsustainable amounts of our production into raiding and standing armies. It's going to be fine, it's actually nice not winning 100% of the time forever.
 
Aged_Urbanist said:
The former was poorer in most every way but also "harder." Greek colonies had slightly-above-replacement fertility and household incomes that wouldn't again be rivaled in Europe until the Dutch Golden Age, with low per capita taxation, while Rome consisted mostly of subsistence farmers with heavy tax burdens and high fertility that necessitated expansion and incentivized military service for loot.
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Um.

Roman subsistence farmers were wealthier than Greek subsistence farmers, and not by accident; the Romans intentionally intervened in local land distribution of their subject populations to ensure they had wealthier farmers.

This wasn't out of benevolence, to be clear; Republican Rome took its taxes and tribute in the form of trained and armed soldiers, and the kit of the standard Roman soldier cost more to acquire than the kit of the Greek elites.

The appropriate comparison for the Klingons here is Sparta.
 
Wootius said:
it's actually nice not winning 100% of the time forever.
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Be that as it may, it is also unpleasant and whiplash inducing to go from relative prosperity and peace to "we're getting our crap pushed in so far we are in danger of being outright conquered". Only the misread of the situation by the Klingon commander in the Battle of Andoria has saved us.
 
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Wootius said:
If we didn't want an awkward warp transition period, we shouldn't have made the core refit incompatible. We have to work with what we have.

I really think people are panicking a bit too hard. The Federation isn't the biggest kid on the block. If the Klingons are the HRE we're like Aragon.

We've won two out of three wars and are going to stalemate/Status quo ante bellum the HRE while still being the lesser power. We're going to catch up in the next few years technologically. We are not a warrior culture so aren't dumping unsustainable amounts of our production into raiding and standing armies. It's going to be fine, it's actually nice not winning 100% of the time forever.
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Doesnt matter what we wanted. What matters is that the current situation is now very different.
Dogmatic adherence to a set of requirements that were based on a no longer extant geopolitical picture does the Federation no favors. Or our design bureau's reputation for that matter.

And if Starfleet is going to work with what they have, I expect the Darwin is going to be altered right quick.
Whether we do it or someone else does.


RL is replete with examples of the same happening.
The Lexington-class aircraft carriers USS Lexington and USS Saratoga were both battlecruisers before they were converted mid-construction, because the geopolitical situation had changed with the US signing a naval arms control treaty.

Or the US SSGNs Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Georgia, which were already in service, and converted from ballistic missile submarines to cruise missile submarines and special forces deployment vehicles, because the geopolitical situation, the needs of the navy and its mother nationstate had changed.
 
If militarizing every ship is needed, why do we need to vote on ship weapons? We could save entire updates and writing space by just having it be done automatically. Similarly, if Cargo Space is so needed, why do we need to vote for it? It should be done automatically instead of us making us do 'eat your vegetables' votes.
 
landcollector said:
Be that as it may, it is also unpleasant and whiplash inducing to go from relative prosperity and peace to "we're getting our crap pushed in so far we are in danger of being outright conquered". Only the misread of the situation by the Klingon commander in the Battle of Andoria has saved us.
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I'm not sure it was so much a misread as they hoped to salvage a situation that wasn't particularly easy to win at all. They gambled it all and found that the other side refused to give in even in the local battle, that they basically understood the stakes and long term consequences of the various choice they could make in the battle. And so chose to do what would make the Klingons lose.

Basically they had a relatively bad hand as they were low on fuel and had to some how win with the situation they had rather then trying something else by going elsewhere.
 
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Wootius said:
If we didn't want an awkward warp transition period, we shouldn't have made the core refit incompatible. We have to work with what we have.

I really think people are panicking a bit too hard. The Federation isn't the biggest kid on the block. If the Klingons are the HRE we're like Aragon.

We've won two out of three wars and are going to stalemate/Status quo ante bellum the HRE while still being the lesser power. We're going to catch up in the next few years technologically. We are not a warrior culture so aren't dumping unsustainable amounts of our production into raiding and standing armies. It's going to be fine, it's actually nice not winning 100% of the time forever.
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What I'm concerned about is that we tried to make good ships. And by all accounts we did make good ships. And we still lost. Losing stings, but it's normal, what I'm really concerned about is that without mysterious intervention to blow up the Pharos station the Klingons captured, we're done. Full stop, they roll over the whole federation with the captured logistics capacity. It's not that we're not winning, it's that we're apparently so mismanaged that we should be dead by now if not for a whole bunch of luck. Like the Klingons if they had a birds eye view would be calling bullshit on our survival multiple times, and they would be right. They played their cards well and the fact we are surviving is because luck broke badly for them, despite the fact that they seem to be doing everything right. It doesn't feel like we're surviving on our own merits.

Edit: You know what going back and rereading, it does seem that what I attributed to luck wasn't as much of a factor. And that on reread it was just a guy at Pharos that blew it up, not an outside force.
 
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Aged_Urbanist said:
This logic holds at any given point in time, but over time budget/money/demand is ultimately the determining factor in what kind of productive capacity exists. Had the Federation made the decision to build up a defensive force twice as capable starting from 2200, as was arguably warranted by then-extant threats, by 2230 public and private yard capacity would have been 30-40% greater and more extractive industrial infrastructure would have been devoted to military/fleet production and less to civilian consumption.

Given that Starfleet represents an investment of under a percent of GDP, based on the population and economic model we know exists and assuming that these vessels are as complex and costly relative to civilian consumption as a modern CVN, its very difficult to argue that budget wouldn't have made a difference over even a decade-long span of time, let alone three or four.
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I don't think there is much civilian consumption of starship-grade materials. They don't need dilithium for antimatter reactors or tritanium for super-alloys. This is still predicated on the idea that if you need more of something, more investment will get you more of it over time. If you run out of dilithium your FTL infrastructure slows down to needing two years to get from Earth to Vulcan. The answer isn't "invest more in dilithium mining" because as a vital resource as much of it is being mined as is possible already. The answer is 'commit more ships to finding dilithium deposits'. Which you did. So you found more, so you can build more ships. The same applies for most of the other super materials, too.

SoHowAreYou said:
What I'm concerned about is that we tried to make good ships. And by all accounts we did make good ships. And we still lost. Losing stings, but it's normal, what I'm really concerned about is that without mysterious intervention to blow up the Pharos station the Klingons captured, we're done. Full stop, they roll over the whole federation with the captured logistics capacity. It's not that we're not winning, it's that we're apparently so mismanaged that we should be dead by now if not for a whole bunch of luck. Like the Klingons if they had a birds eye view would be calling bullshit on our survival multiple times, and they would be right. They played their cards well and the fact we are surviving is because luck broke badly for them, despite the fact that they seem to be doing everything right. It doesn't feel like we're surviving on our own merits.
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Everything has been entirely on your own merits with no luck involved. I'm not sure where this is coming from.
 
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Shard said:
If militarizing every ship is needed, why do we need to vote on ship weapons? We could save entire updates and writing space by just having it be done automatically. Similarly, if Cargo Space is so needed, why do we need to vote for it? It should be done automatically instead of us making us do 'eat your vegetables' votes.
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If every starship needs FTL engines, why do we still need to vote on warp drive optimization?
If every ship needs to move, why do we need to vote on normal STL drives?
Some systems represent large enough portions of the design that their exact configuration is always up for debate.
 
CuriousRaptor said:
We go any smaller than the Excaliburs we end up losing on warp factor. Which is a huge issue that no one seemingly wants to even contemplate. You're basically proposing an Excalibur with slightly less weapons and cruise nacelles.
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and we can compromise on Warp Factor now that the Excalibur is a vessel we have in reserve. The Excalibur is a vessel that moves like a scalded rabbit at STL and Warp, but it's also a ship that only has one production Tranche for some reason. Why? I have no clue. Maybe cost? Maybe post-war production will be prioritized towards rebuilding lost capabilities?

What we need is a Responder that can:

1. Reach across the Federation reasonably(Cruise lets us prioritize Range, and some extra antimatter might help if we can fit it)
2. respond to a variety of Crisis'(This is where the mix of Science and Engineering Capability would be lovely)
3. Both defend itself in a fight AND act as a Combat Vessel if needed(thus the balance of Weaponry commiserate to it's size and cost profile)
4. Be cheap enough that Starfleet will actually produce enough of them to protect the Federation.

None of those require us to get within spitting distance of Warp 9.

There is also another factor here about Warp Factor.

Once we do next gen nacelles, our Warp Factors will go up anyway.
 
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