Hyper-militarizing sounds too far for me; that's Starfleet sacrificing its soul in the altar of security.
Still, I can see Starfleet aiming for increased tactical/defense capability anyway in light of the war with the Klingons, while remaining capable of performing diplomacy, utility, science and exploration.
In both of those cases, the SanFran design had better scores on Cost. Which is what I said.
I did not say they had better bang for the buck... outside of the fact that our ships were noncombatants, and took up too much of Starfleet's total displacement for that fact.
Yes, it is our job to fulfill the design brief as well as possible, not to take the design brief and twist it into something it isn't. Putting a cargo bay and expanded medical labs onto a small ship that was ordered as a biosciences ship is not fulfilling that design goal.
When we and San Francisco were both asked to build engineering cruiser designs, the same brief produced the Newton and the Archer. The Archer ended up being used as a bulk hauler and dedicated engineering , while the Newton was used to play tactical troubleshooter.
Between 2225 and 2230, the berths at Utopia Planitia and San Francisco were dominated by two ships: the Newton and the Archer. Of these the Newton was the more popular design, being a much needed intermediary in mass between the austerely kitted and last-generation Selachii and the heavier Saladin. As interior transport and emergency response ships they were well suited thanks to their doubled shuttle complement, and the manoeuvrability provided by their twin impulse engines allowed their heavy forward armament to engage both Klingon raiders and Orion pirates on if not equal terms then at least practicable ones.
Starfleet Tactical considered the Newton as an acceptable replacement for the Saladin in terms of capability, if not in terms of cost. While a scattering of Saladin-class ships continued production as increasing concern developed over Klingon encroachment the cruise speed of the single-nacelle ships was becoming increasingly concerning, the majority of drydocks switched to the Newton. Despite the Newton massing less for the same cost it became the favoured tool for plugging the increasing patrol and control issues the Federation was facing with the accession of new member worlds expanding its territory. The accession of the Arcadian, Deltan, and Zaranite homeworlds bringing Federation membership to a round twenty species was straining the service to its limits.
Starfleet would launch sixteen Newton-class ships in the six years leading up to 2230, with a further fourteen in the decade thereafter. This blistering pace consuming more than half of the Sol System's fleetbuilding capacity would persist until the end stages of the Heavy Cruiser project. The time before the Four Years War was the time of the Newton-class, its pearlescent-white hull and distinctive silhouette becoming the face of Starfleet for an entire generation. Unfortunately it would struggle in the high-tempo campaigns of the Four Years War due to its top speed and inability to face the fearsome Klingon D7 - a ship which had the unfortunate habit of outpacing Starfleet and the firepower to turn every engagement into an unequal fight.
Less sung but perhaps more groundbreaking was the Archer-class. Sometimes classified erroneously as a tug by unofficial sources, the Archer class would quietly become the backbone of Starfleet logistics for the next fifty years. Credit should also be given for its pioneering efforts in the adoption of new technology: it perfected the Duranium-alloy hull and made massive strides towards standardising new impulse engines. Starfleet was not enthusiastic about the Archer, viewing it as underarmed for anything beyond self-defense against non-state actors. This capability nonetheless served it well over its lifetime against piracy, but the number of Archer-class ships that survived direct engagements during the Four Years War can be counted on one hand for good reason. Those that did manage to repel the Klingons were those accosted by individual Birds-of-Prey which could be drawn into warp and then dissuaded by aft torpedoes. Encounters with heavier-weight vessels were universally fatal.
Tactical capabilities aside, the Archer nonetheless filled a vital niche in the expanding Starfleet. With Federation territory now encompassing an uneven bubble of over 150 light years across it could take over a year for the current cadre of Starships to transit from one border to another. This was even more pronounced in the civilian sector, where a ship launched from Earth could expect to take over a year and a half to reach the border, and almost certainly more than a year to arrive at new colonies. By comparison the Archer could handle similar loads to the majority of the cargo service and make the trip in a third the time. Reasoning that an improved logistical situation in general and improved response time in particular would reduce the strain on Starfleet deployments in the border regions, Starfleet Logistics ordered a run of ten Archer-class ships.
The postings were not prestigious, as demonstrated by the fact that the majority of Archer-class captains held the rank of Commander, but in the following years a rapid perfusion of supply and infrastructure into the extremities of the Federation's influence resulted in a sharp drop in colonial emergencies and accelerated the deployment of Starfleet border outposts. In 2232, after a two-year gap in the construction of the Archer-class, a further twelve ships were ordered. Another run was being planned but the outbreak of the Four Year War spelled an end to construction. But following the conclusion of hostilities Starfleet was compelled by necessity to replace its losses, and between 2245 and 2260 another eighteen Archer-class vessels were constructed.
The ships became a common sight at both the Pharos Bases and smaller Starfleet outposts, forging logistic routes from port to port as they travelled from the core member worlds out towards the edges of Federation influence. The majority of their duties consisted of bulk transport, but the ships soon developed a warm reputation in the outer colonies as the ships that would arrive to assist with major infrastructure or supply shortages. The Archer-class UFS Stephenson was the first responder to the Tarsus IV Massacre, having transported over forty kilotons of grain to relieve the famine. Their reputation was somewhat less warm among the crews of combatants in the Four Years War, where the Archer-class was sometimes derisively referred to as 'the Vulture-class' due to its assignment of hanging back a fifth of a light year behind its accompanying fleet and then only moving in to assist with repair and rescue after any victorious engagement had concluded.
So no, I am positive that you are pretty wrong about that.
Starfleet demonstrably gives its design bureaus a pretty free hand in determing how their designs are built.
The Archer compares much more favorably in terms of cost than the Kea and the Saladin at only a B- to the Newton's B, and SFB delivered a reasonably budget friendly phaser emplacement while we all know what would've happened if we designed a defense satellite.
Both the Archer and the Kea outlived their San Fran rivals by quite a bit.
The Kea was in service for two decades longer than the Saladin, and the Archer straight up lived so long that surviving hulls went into civilian service in the 24th century after being decommissioned from Starfleet.
18 of those Archers were procured post-war to replace losses, which there were presumably a fair number of. As of 2240 Starfleet fields 30 Newtons, which make up something like a third of Starfleet's combat capable vessels. They also operate 16 Saladins. Of the combat capable ships that we've designed, we have 22 refit Selachii, 12 refit Kea and 10 Sagarmathas, which are either ancient or very expensive. The Excalibur was a collaboration between the two bureaus, and I'm pretty sure San Fran did some of those refits.
Maybe the SFDB will give ships a bit more punch after the war, but if I were Starfleet I'd note that the SFDB seem to err towards the side of skimping on tactical capability more often than not. There was a 35 year period between 2190 and 2235 where we didn't design a single reasonably capable combatant, which was made up for largely by San Fran's Saladins and Newtons.
Starfleet Logistics already planned a third run of Archers before the war breaking out, so only some of the new ships would have been to replace losses. I quote:
By comparison the Archer could handle similar loads to the majority of the cargo service and make the trip in a third the time. Reasoning that an improved logistical situation in general and improved response time in particular would reduce the strain on Starfleet deployments in the border regions, Starfleet Logistics ordered a run of ten Archer-class ships.
The postings were not prestigious, as demonstrated by the fact that the majority of Archer-class captains held the rank of Commander, but in the following years a rapid perfusion of supply and infrastructure into the extremities of the Federation's influence resulted in a sharp drop in colonial emergencies and accelerated the deployment of Starfleet border outposts. In 2232, after a two-year gap in the construction of the Archer-class, a further twelve ships were ordered. Another run was being planned but the outbreak of the Four Year War spelled an end to construction. But following the conclusion of hostilities Starfleet was compelled by necessity to replace its losses, and between 2245 and 2260 another eighteen Archer-class vessels were constructed.
We've lost 4 out of 22 Archers so far as of 2240, due to all the ships caught out of place by the surprise attack.
I expect those loss rates are going to sharply fall as deployment patterns change.
The Sagmarthas were a class of 12x explorers and predate the letter-based rating system; there is no basis for cost comparison. The Keas were pretty standard cost, and pretty cost-effective.
The Selachiis were average cost for their class and pretty austere, and yet Starfleet built 38 of them.
As the QM has pointed out, cost is not the bottleneck for shipbuilding; strategic materials is.
I completely forgot that Callie was a collaborative project, so mea culpa there.
Regardless, the Darwin is pretty heavily armed and shielded for its class, and most importantly, is mostly good to go already; having started design in 2235, an estimated 8-years design work and 1-2 years to build means that the first ships will come out of the dockyards in 2043-2044, right as the Four Year War ends.
Given Starfleet's post war needs, Im pretty strongly suspecting that it will get tapped to do the same things that the Newton was tapped to do in the leadup to the War.
SanFran, they basically take all briefs and produce a ship for it from what we can tell. Only example otherwise is the defence satellites, possibly, and they were doing a lot of other work then.
Certainly no one made a spinoff about how the Gorn were ontologically inimical to humanity and we should ethnically cleanse them to sleep soundly in our beds. That would be ridiculous.
There's an entire saga of stories about Kurtzmans shenanigans regarding Kelvin timeline Star Trek and his desperation to get a Sector 31 show greenlit. Arguably a more interesting one than the shows themselves tell.
As a guy who likes lizardfolk, fucking hate strange new worlds for going the mindless beast route with them. Much prefer their Star Trek Alien Spotlight comic version, its a bit silly but its a much kinder take on them.
There's an entire saga of stories about Kurtzmans shenanigans regarding Kelvin timeline Star Trek and his desperation to get a Sector 31 show greenlit. Arguably a more interesting one than the shows themselves tell.
"Weird stories people made up about Kurtzman" is an entire genre at this point, so I'm skeptical about such things, and that goes double when people use the word 'timeline' in relation to streaming-era Trek.
Because (if you don't want to just trash Disco, which I don't) the Klingons were taking advantage of strategic confusion. Each Klingon house was an independent state in their own right, able to support a full war against other Klingons, and had managed to be wrangled into all getting credit by proving their valor and power on an external enemy. And getting loot while they were at it.
That was backed up by the new cloaking device, which they had early because one house had one. They were keeping it as a secret weapon, but then the new Klingon leader got it and made it mainstream by releasing it to all his supporters. Discovery cracked that version of cloaking technology, but vanished for six months before they could share. It's worth noting at this point that there's a constant arms race with cloaks, it's not something discovered once. There's a new cloak, there are better sensors, there's a new cloak... we see this dance back and forth a few times.
During that six months Starfleet wasn't fighting one nation but a dozen, each with independent warfighting capability and their own strategy. The Klingon Great Houses system has many disadvantages, like how prone it is to splintering and civil war. But it does mean they've got massive redundancy - and therefore resilience - in their industrial capacity. Less efficient, less streamlined, but also no major points of failure. No specific targets. And because they're already set up to defend against each other that means that they're already geared up for massive defense in depth, while a martial culture means everyone has already been through basic combat training. Again, the reason Starfleet doesn't do this is because it's really inefficient resource wise... but that isn't always what counts. And they've been building their fleets and defenses against each other longer than the Federation has existed.
And that leads us to Starbase 1, where a bunch of Klingons - acting with complete disregard for any overall plan, one assumes - launched a cloaked attack on Starbase 1 and then hauled ass before Starfleet could respond. It didn't mean that the Klingons had fought all the way to the Kuiper Belt, it means the Klingons aiming for glory got lucky and made Earth vulnerable.
Certainly no one made a spinoff about how the Gorn were ontologically inimical to humanity and we should ethnically cleanse them to sleep soundly in our beds. That would be ridiculous.
Funny thing is, the behavior of the Gorn in Strange New Worlds is entirely of a piece with their behavior in Arena. What happens there? Gorn attack with no warning, refuse to communicate, won't accept surrender, and then set a trap for the next Starfleet ship to come and attack them too.
The whole POINT of the Gorn is 'empathy on hard mode' and that's what we're getting.
As a guy who likes lizardfolk, fucking hate strange new worlds for going the mindless beast route with them. Much prefer their Star Trek Alien Spotlight comic version, its a bit silly but its a much kinder take on them.
The thing is, I think it's obvious from Strange New Worlds that the Gorn AREN'T mindless beasts. They're consistently using sophisticated strategy and tactics. The crew is falling into thinking of them as mindless beasts driven by instinct, because their experience is with baby Gorn. And it costs them several times when they forget the enemy is also smart.
I think that instead they've created an interesting situation. An intelligent species whose babies are deadly and feral. And the culture among the Gorn we're interacting with has come up with some evil responses to that pressure, but it really is cultural.
Both the Archer and the Kea outlived their San Fran rivals by quite a bit.
The Kea was in service for two decades longer than the Saladin, and the Archer straight up lived so long that surviving hulls went into civilian service in the 24th century after being decommissioned from Starfleet.
The Keas were explicitly noted as being quite costly due to their sheer size, and were in fact the reason that San Fran was split off into its own design team:
But its sheer size and expense, even with the cost-cutting measures inherent in its design, prompted consideration of other designs by Starfleet Command.
When we and San Francisco were both asked to build engineering cruiser designs, the same brief produced the Newton and the Archer. The Archer ended up being used as a bulk hauler and dedicated engineering , while the Newton was used to play tactical troubleshooter.
Yes, and that brief did not mention a desire for a small, well specialized vessel. Both the Newton and the Archer work well as replacements for our aging Cygnus fleet, and even then we're still so overstretched that they kept 22 Cygnus around by 2240.
Cost represents how many of those we need to build the thing. Cost is literally our bottleneck, because we can't just magic up more materials out of nowhere.
"Weird stories people made up about Kurtzman" is an entire genre at this point, so I'm skeptical about such things, and that goes double when people use the word 'timeline' in relation to streaming-era Trek.
Then you should look into the actual stories. What can be definitively stated though is that he rode JJ Abrams coat tails better than any of his contemporaries. Which is indictment in its own right.
Personally I like the new gorn, sure the babies are a bit of a weird thing but we did see adult gorn trying to steal intelligence from a ship they wrecked
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.
This is not really how capital allocation works. Spending money on a problem is, most fundamentally, a means of focusing the attention and effort of people on it. It doesn't magically solve problems, but you can bet that if Starfleet were to commit to doubling its yard capacity tens of thousands of mineral exploration and mining outfits across the Federation would pay a bit less attention to finding platinum-group metals for civilian use and a bit more to finding dilithium.
For a present-day analogue, there's basically no civilian application for an SSN nuclear reactor, but if the US decided that it was going to build up to seriously contest the Western Pacific in the event of a war and decided that by 2030 we should be capable of building 6 Virginia-class submarines simultaneously, there would be strong financial incentives for the firms which build them to poach skilled people from civilian industry and train them to build more.
And is there really no privately-owned merchant capacity in the whole Federation, such that all demand for these materials is public-sector?
Out of curiosity… how many people do you think would be dead as a result of a war like this proceeding how this one has, and what's it worth to keep them alive next time?
That's the actual question that policymakers have to answer here.
Sayle to be clear I don't think any of us were under the impression that there was a significant civilian demand for dilithium or those other strategic resources that we'd be reallocating to Starfleet. Rather we'd be investing in additional extractive capacity at existing mining sites, or developing previously passed over sites to build up our fleet.
Out of curiosity… how many people do you think would be dead as a result of a war like this proceeding how this one has, and what's it worth to keep them alive next time?
That's the actual question that policymakers have to answer here.
How enjoyable is a quest where there is a clear correct vote option for every vote and any deviation is punished?
If not hyper-militarizing every ship is a mistake, then we shouldn't be given votes on military arnaments, it should be maxed out for us. Doing otherwise is just providing trap options for the players to pick.
How enjoyable is a quest where there is a clear correct vote option for every vote and any deviation is punished?
If not hyper-militarizing every ship is a mistake, then we shouldn't be given votes on military arnaments, it should be maxed out for us. Doing otherwise is just providing trap options for the players to pick.
We didn't just not hyper militarize every ship, though. Have we been reading the same quest? The Pharos was barely armed. The Kea was barely armed. The archer was barely armed. The Excalibur is the first ship that doesn't cut tactical to save cost that we've designed this century.
We didn't just not hyper militarize every ship, though. Have we been reading the same quest? The Pharos was barely armed. The Kea was barely armed. The archer was barely armed. The Excalibur is the first ship that doesn't cut tactical to save cost that we've designed this century.
How enjoyable is a quest where there is a clear correct vote option for every vote and any deviation is punished?
If not hyper-militarizing every ship is a mistake, then we shouldn't be given votes on military arnaments, it should be maxed out for us. Doing otherwise is just providing trap options for the players to pick.
There's a lot of options that aren't traps if you pick them in moderation. Gambling that your militaristic neighbors won't be aggressive for instance. We are often given options to course correct when we do lean too far in any direction. When the thread ignores clear hints though getting smacked on the nose should be expected.
Sayle to be clear I don't think any of us were under the impression that there was a significant civilian demand for dilithium or those other strategic resources that we'd be reallocating to Starfleet. Rather we'd be investing in additional extractive capacity at existing mining sites, or developing previously passed over sites to build up our fleet.
Sayle has indicated that there is no slack below maximum sustainable extraction rate. Rate of exploitation isn't capped by investment, it's capped by resource surveying and colonization speed. Both of which are capped by starship capacity. If we want more resources, we should build ships that are better at helping to find resources, more readily develop colonies to gather those resources, and prevent disasters from undoing that development.
We didn't just not hyper militarize every ship, though. Have we been reading the same quest? The Pharos was barely armed. The Kea was barely armed. The archer was barely armed. The Excalibur is the first ship that doesn't cut tactical to save cost that we've designed this century.
The Pharos's armament was decided last century. We've had three designs so far this century, one which had been armed under the presumption of greater phaser effectiveness than proved to be the case (and was designed while the Selachii was still brand new), the second which was a non-combatant engineering ship to contrast San Francisco's combat-oriented engineering ship, the third was the Excalibur.
It's entirely possible to both require that ships have a reasonable tactical capability and still make decisions. We're no longer allowed to build cruisers without torpedoes, but we still decide how many and where.
We simply can't build enough ships to keep sending out these designs that can barely fend off a single BoP. Not everything has to overmatch a D7, sure, but if Starfleet has to spend like 20% of annual production capacity per ship they gotta at least be able to fight a D6. Which probably just means decent maneuverability, solid shields, and an rfl + phasers, so nothing we weren't going to do anyways.
Personally I like the new gorn, sure the babies are a bit of a weird thing but we did see adult gorn trying to steal intelligence from a ship they wrecked
And they're consistently very smart. Among other things they're the only faction in Star Trek who understand electronic warfare. What's most interesting, I think, is that they consistently either can't or won't speak to non-Gorn. The only time we see them able to talk is through god-alien super translators.
The test of how Star Trek you are is if you can see the Xenomorph Queen in Aliens as a feral child in dire need of therapy and a universal translator.
And we know, in the same canon, that an adult Gorn just like the ones in Arena can be running a noodle stand on a starbase in a hundred years. First contact is EASY when they're humanoid and just have rubber-looking foreheads.
In fact the precursors may have accidentally shot us in the foot, creating a false sense of commonality between all alien species. The real test of IDIC isn't seeing the value in people who are more or less the same as you, it's if you can see the value in someone who at first glance is inimical. It's not 'we're really all the same' that should be the moral* but 'we're all different and that's a good thing.'
*except inasumuch as it's an allegory for humans I suppose
The Pharos's armament was decided last century. We've had three designs so far this century, one which had been armed under the presumption of greater phaser effectiveness than proved to be the case (and was designed while the Selachii was still brand new), the second which was a non-combatant engineering ship to contrast San Francisco's combat-oriented engineering ship, the third was the Excalibur.
The vote for the Pharos's weapons ended this century, and the stations wouldn't have entered service until 2200+ regardless. The Kea's lack of torpedoes was, at least on my end, a vote made with the understanding that we would surely be designing a more combat oriented ship next (lol) as it was explicitly stated that phasers only would be insufficient to engage enemy cruisers. Instead we designed the Archer.
