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Starfleet Design Bureau

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Captainwolf said:
Honestly kinda cool, although I will note a few things:
1. the Nacelles feel oversized relative to the rest of the ship.
2. With 1 Type 3 thruster, the design could be up to 90,000 tons while still being very high maneuverability.
3. Why light shields? this is a warship, it should have at least standard shields.
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1 - maybe, but using the standard nacelle size theoretically helps out with the logistics, rather than needing to create and maintain tooling for a special undersized nacelle pattern.
2 - you are correct, but I didn't feel like trying to go through the hassle of figuring out how big something like that would be.
3 - I was hedging my bets. I don't know if there are certain breakpoints for shield strength - the Darwin wasn't offered heavy emitters, and by that logic it would seem plausible that a sub-100kt ship might not be able to mount more than light shields.
 
Ebiris said:
Yeah, I remember when we were designing the Kea I was actually quite optimistic about the synergy it would have with the Selachi, just being a big brick that can hold the centre and fire in every direction while the Selachi would be able to swoop around putting torpedoes where they're needed felt like it would've made for a strong combination.

Unfortunately the Kea's phasers are basically the Imperial Guard flashlight meme, and the Selachi is woefully out of date by the time an actual war starts.
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IIRC that's exactly how they were used, to set up a base of fire and shoot in every direction, basically blap any bird of prey that decided to slip into weird angles in the line of battle, and provide a consistent zone of fire. Starbases in miniature, and while they might not have had the same phaser spec as the Excaliburs, they have the sheer mass to push enough power into the phasers to make dents that no amount of bondo will ever fill.
 
Strunkriidiisk said:


I got bored and decided to revisit my pie-in-the-sky 'Warp 8 Selachii' idea. Assume this to be the scribblings of some anonymous engineer with too much time on their hands.

Falcon-class destroyer FRIGATE
Mass: ~70,000 tons (generous estimate, probably smaller)
Warp speeds (assuming catamaran is +0.2 to max cruise/max warp as it seems)
- Warp 6 efficient cruise
- Warp 7.2 maximum cruise
- Warp 8.2 maximum warp
Armament: 2 phasers, 1 rapid torpedo launcher
Defence: light covariant shields
Manoeuvrability: Very High (2 type-2 thrusters, thrust ratio somewhere between 2.9 and 3.4)
Auxiliary: antimatter tanks, dilithium laboratory, shuttlebay.

Approximate cost: 58 to 61, depending on the hull/shield cost rounding.

Behold, a line/patrol destroyer frigate for bullying Birds of Prey, shaking down pirates for their lunch money, and looking for dilithium to feed our industrial maw. Antimatter for range, catamaran nacelles for a high cruise.
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A solidly good design, though if i were to minmax? 90 ktons, Type 3 Engine, and use the extra room/weight to slap in some useful bits and bobs like a small cargo bay, maybe some sensor coverage, or some crew amenities or some more weapons.

Bigger yes, but also due to a more maximized hull size while keeping Very High Maneuverability, more durable and has a few more points of use to keep it around even as a second line vessel when we make the mock 3.


Ignoring my inner desire to maximize hull efficiency. That's a very good looking design and very nice art to go with it. I like.
 
Strunkriidiisk said:


I got bored and decided to revisit my pie-in-the-sky 'Warp 8 Selachii' idea. Assume this to be the scribblings of some anonymous engineer with too much time on their hands.

Falcon-class destroyer FRIGATE
Mass: ~70,000 tons (generous estimate, probably smaller)
Warp speeds (assuming catamaran is +0.2 to max cruise/max warp as it seems)
- Warp 6 efficient cruise
- Warp 7.2 maximum cruise
- Warp 8.2 maximum warp
Armament: 2 phasers, 1 rapid torpedo launcher
Defence: light covariant shields
Manoeuvrability: Very High (2 type-2 thrusters, thrust ratio somewhere between 2.9 and 3.4)
Auxiliary: antimatter tanks, dilithium laboratory, shuttlebay.

Approximate cost: 58 to 61, depending on the hull/shield cost rounding.

Behold, a line/patrol destroyer frigate for bullying Birds of Prey, shaking down pirates for their lunch money, and looking for dilithium to feed our industrial maw. Antimatter for range, catamaran nacelles for a high cruise.
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At 70 ktons and light covariant shields, that thing is going to have a total Defense score of about 20, and only field three for the cost of two Excalibur-class cruisers (which have a Defense of 74).

This is an excellent demonstration of just how the current techbase of the Federation is most cost-effective at a particular weight class, which the Excalibur is damn near exactly at.
 
Again though I'm not sure going Higher Tactical All the time is gonna be the answer. Because as I said, the problem, as with all militaries is political. Starfleet has this weird brainbug where despite being the military they do not consider themselves to be a Military and its lower ranks resents having to act as a military.

This is a constant problem for Starfleet and the Federation. Where inevitably that attitude gets them punched in the face by the likes of the Klingons, Borg and Dominion. So you get a generation of actual military officers who rise up through the ranks, who then decides to engage in illegal military projects like Cloaks and AI Fleets, and then they get overthrown by idealistic lower officers who proceed to reform Starfleet back into peace time configuration.

And then they get punched in the face again.

Starfleet officers just seems to tend towards only two extremes once they reach Admiral. Cartoon Mad Scientists or Peace Copers.

The sheer mass of the Federation meant that it could survive such blows and eventually outlasts foes like the Romulans, Klingons and Borg. So there are trade offs to that, though honestly maybe they shouldn't have won the Dominion War so hard? Eh, quibbles.
 
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Deadly Snark said:
Because as I said, the problem, as with all militaries is political. Starfleet has this weird brainbug where despite being the military they do not consider themselves to be a Military and its lower ranks resents having to act as a military.
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I imagine that owing to the Federation core breaching nature of this war, and a member planet fell, we should get a decent 40-60 years of military minded recruits (to say nothing of the civilian government getting more war minded officials in the short and long terms), so we should be doing a bit better on that front for a while after this.
 
Tank man said:
I imagine that owing to the Federation core breaching nature of this war, and a member planet fell, we should get a decent 40-60 years of military minded recruits (to say nothing of the civilian government getting more war minded officials in the short and long terms), so we should be doing a bit better on that front for a while after this.
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I mean in the timeline that's effectively the Kirk-Era, in which yes Starfleet was fairly militaristic and had fleets in positions to trade knife blows with the Klingons, and several potential Klingon wars were avoided, but only via big stick diplomacy

The problem is the Picard-Era in which Starfleet fully drank it's own koolaid.
 
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As much as many among our number recoil somewhat in horror at it, having a truly Tactical arm of the fleet that in peacetime, polices and patrols the Federation's territory, and in wartime, has the stiff upper lip to really look a peer threat in the eye and tell them exactly what the business is to give time for the rest of the Federation to get into gear and not have to worry about crash building projects too often, would be a solid idea.

But that drifts from the realm of starship design and into political policy, and thus beyond the quest's ken. Not that this pop in the mouth wouldn't be a good piece of evidence for the creation of such a thing.
 
StriderInCosmos said:
But that drifts from the realm of starship design and into political policy, and thus beyond the quest's ken. Not that this pop in the mouth wouldn't be a good piece of evidence for the creation of such a thing.
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TBH we have 3 examples including this war. the Romulans where only stopped from killing earth by luck and us designing some defensive craft as a our first ships, the cat people ( I keep forgetting their name) would have likely hurt us more if we didn't have patrol frigates that held them off so the rest of the federation could join in, and then we got this war which has been a brutal war because we kind sort of weren't building enough ships to properly patrol our colonies.
 
The problem with building a pure military arm, of course, is that if I remember my Trek history correctly basically every attempt at having a pure military ship or organization inevitably goes rouge, kills a bunch of people for no real reason, and then loses embarrassingly to a nominally civilian Explorer.

It doesn't exactly have a good reputation in universe.

In fact based on the Mirror Universe(s) and such the Federation may be dealing with real, provable fears that the moment the Federation embraces militarism and builds pure warships they will go mad with power and humanity will demonstrate that the Romulans, Klingons, Orions, and the like are all rank amateurs at being truly evil as they go full Neo-Nazi on the galaxy and become all that they hate. Given that all most Mirror Universes need for the Terran Empire to do so is a single madman/woman with an unusually advanced ship, you have to wonder how afraid the Federation leadership is of falling into that kind of thing.
 
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Part of that is the utopian core of the Star Trek universe: we're supposed to have grown beyond the need for a purely military arm, along with the desire for such conflicts. Often, that means taking the piss out of those that feel that violence is a viable tactic, even in the defense of that which they care for deeply. We've seen plenty of episodes across TOS and TNG that focus on this (Project Pegasus in particular comes to mind, a marked leap in terms of cloaking technology, a technology that has no need to be used offensively at all if Starfleet is particularly concerned about such applications).

Unfortunately, that runs into the nominal political reality that as high-minded and willing to try peace as we are, not everyone else, even within our political space, feels as we do in terms of cultural viewpoints. Defending ourselves and having the comfortable capacity to do so, especially in the aftermath of a war that has carried itself to one of the core founding worlds, needs to be at the forefront of someone's mind, at the very least.
 
Godwinson said:
At 70 ktons and light covariant shields, that thing is going to have a total Defense score of about 20, and only field three for the cost of two Excalibur-class cruisers (which have a Defense of 74).

This is an excellent demonstration of just how the current techbase of the Federation is most cost-effective at a particular weight class, which the Excalibur is damn near exactly at.
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[Shrug]
The numbers are made up and don't matter anyway. I had a good time drawing, which is what matters to me.
 
Godwinson said:
At 70 ktons and light covariant shields, that thing is going to have a total Defense score of about 20, and only field three for the cost of two Excalibur-class cruisers (which have a Defense of 74).

This is an excellent demonstration of just how the current techbase of the Federation is most cost-effective at a particular weight class, which the Excalibur is damn near exactly at.
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Okay but the cost should be lower because this would be a retrofit not a new build right?
 
A pure military arm, within the quest's mechanics, is also completely lacking in utility. The Excalibur had basically none built after the Klingon conflict, likely because of that. And it wasn't even complete pure military either.
 
Even still, it gets kind of exhausting to watch the Federation get slapped over and over again any time a major power decides we're worth the challenge before we get a miraculous second wind by the power of science or engineering. Having a tactical edge to shut things down early before we get to a scene of a captain having a dramatic monologue looking out over a debris field centered on the terrible nature of war would be a nice change of pace.
 
Razzocnor said:
goes rouge
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Ah, our soldiers just must get pretty when the going gets tough. :) Pass that powder puffer, it's essential next-gen military hardware!

StriderInCosmos said:
Even still, it gets kind of exhausting to watch the Federation get slapped over and over again any time a major power decides we're worth the challenge before we get a miraculous second wind by the power of science or engineering. Having a tactical edge to shut things down early before we get to a scene of a captain having a dramatic monologue looking out over a debris field centered on the terrible nature of war would be a nice change of pace.
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I reckon that's what happened with the Kzinti. We curbstomped their empire and barely broke a sweat. Aside from magically having more combat ships, there's not much we could've done to get a better outcome.

And we got a better outcome than canon from the Romulan war, mostly because we started with more combat ships and better weaponry, if memory serves.
 
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StriderInCosmos said:
Even still, it gets kind of exhausting to watch the Federation get slapped over and over again any time a major power decides we're worth the challenge before we get a miraculous second wind by the power of science or engineering. Having a tactical edge to shut things down early before we get to a scene of a captain having a dramatic monologue looking out over a debris field centered on the terrible nature of war would be a nice change of pace.
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Okay this is sort of what I keep talking about.

Sorry. That's the core of Star Trek melodrama.
 
Cold Dust said:
And we got a better outcome than canon from the Romulan war, mostly because we started with more combat ships and better weaponry, if memory serves.
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This one is interesting.

Sayle said:
Monitoring Report [2160]
Earth-Romulan Armistice

Cause-Effect Analysis: Increased performance by United Earth Skate-class frigates versus Daedalus-class cruiser results in improvement to Coalition of Planets position after the Battle of Cheron
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Because the distinction is between the Daedalus-class (which was our first ship project) and the Skate-class (which was our fifth project, sixth if you count retrofitting the Stingray, which we had build instead of the Daedalus). The Zheng He wound up being our cargo ship design, then the beefier NX, the Stingray retrofit, and then the Thunderchild, and only then once the war was underway already did we design the Skate.

This suggests that the primary timeline's choice of a larger ship to serve as an armed merchantman meant that a second design wasn't considered necessary, instead resulting in simply building more ships that weren't quite specialized for patrol or pure cargo, and that refitting and repairing them leading up to and during the Earth-Romulan War occupied most of the existing naval capacity which prevented both Thunderchild and Skate design response slots from being able to be used.
 
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Razzocnor said:
The problem with building a pure military arm, of course,
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The actual problem with a pure military arm is that, the way ship costs work, it wouldn't represent sufficient savings to let us get away with dis-arming our science and engineering ships.

The savings of downgunning the science and engineering ships is just much, much too small, and we need sheer numbers rather than a small pack of the most murderous ships in the quadrant anyway.
 
What the Navy needs by the looks is have the strategy of designating some ships from the start of their design should fill specific roles in a battleline, like one being like the Excalibur which can move cargo fast or explorer or something but is a big damage dealer and something that other ships can rally around, and have one or two other ship designs that do what their intended roll they were made to do but can support the rallying ship design, and not saying just only have three ship designs just that starfleet should have at least three that synergize well in a battle.
 
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Manowl said:
not saying just only have three ship designs just that starfleet should have at least three that synergize well in a battle.
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We've got three obvious combat roles that we've seen in practice:

A heavy brick. Lots of shields & hull, doesn't need to be too maneuverable; individual enemies might be able to dodge but the fleet as a whole can't. The anchor the rest of our fleet fights around.

Agile daggers. Smaller, faster, more agile ships that bring torpedoes to bear from unpleasant angles. We need lots of these, but without anchors we lose lots of these, too.

Fast-response murder blenders. The closest thing to a dedicated military ship, these are our commerce raiders and line-breakers, ships powerful enough to take on several times their displacement in opponents. They're also too expensive to make in bulk. Our Explorers will probably meet this role by default if we don't try to shave down their armaments for cost purposes.

The Darwin and Darwin refits will be daggers. The Kea refit works fairly well as a tank for a ship as old as it is, we just don't have enough, so we should consider stealing elements of its design the next time we're making a a big ship (that isn't an explorer).
 
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