I'd argue the Archer made a good choice at the time given the Kea at 7.6 could easily outrun a D6 and Archers needed to run from them or worse a D7, and the nacelles boosted maximum cruise which means it gets where it is going faster. But the Kea itself? Yeah Cruise would have been a better pick.
I do not agree.
We have had it emphatically reinforced that, with the exception of certain ship classes *cough* Archer *cough* whose non-combat duties are disproportionately important to Starfleet's strategic planning?
ALL starships are combat vessels and will be expected to carry their weight.
Starfleet cant afford many non-combat specialists.
Which means that all ship design bureaus have to keep in mind that, regardless of its other design functions, Starfleet will throw their designs into combat with peer navies and expect them to perform. That, when, say, Starfleet calls for all warships across tens of light years to assemble in the defense of Andoria, maximum cruise becomes a strategic imperative.
So no, the Kea very much warranted Sprint, both because higher max cruise and because sprint has tactical implications.
My goal wasn't to start an argument, I'm just trying to make others aware of a pattern.
I hate to disagree, but the Klingons had warp 8 earlier, we knew they'd probably be able to retrofit it onto their warp 7 fleet. By the time hostilities broke out and evasion would be valuable the Klingons were virtually guaranteed to have many warp 8 ships. It really was a weird bit of reasoning.
Again the tricky thing is maximum cruise vs efficient cruise, if we assume efficient cruise is purely for long range economy and within the federation everyone does max cruise it holds more water and cruise is useless, if there are elevated maintenance costs or really significant increases in fuel cost for max cruise then cruise is very valuable.
I strongly suspect this is not true.
Sayle has made it clear that the bottleneck on shipbuilding for us, and presumably for the Klingons as well, is the availability of strategic materials. Dilithium, et cetera.
Given as the aftermath of the Battle of Andoria has the Klingons currently cannibalizing D6s in order to finish newbuild D7s, I think it is sensible to question if the Klingon Empire had the strategic material supplies to perform warp drive upgrades for all, or even most of its D6s and Birds of Prey.
Certainly we see no evidence of any Warp 8 vessels in this war besides the D7s.
Similarly, there is the question of whether it would be financially or strategically sensible for the Klingons to upgrade a lastgen ship to Warp 8 drives and all the necessary improvements to make it work instead of building a currentgen warship design with currentgen systems.
A major refit is a pretty significant outlay of resources, both in manpower, shipyard capacity and time.
It might be technically feasible to do a refit, but still be a better idea to simply scrap the ship and recycle the materials to build a new one if you have a new design available. After all, the Klingons built the D7 instead of just upgrading the D6's warp drives.
And that brings us to the final factor: Build capacity.
Major refits require full shipyard capacity and subcomponent manufacturing for a significant fraction of the time it would take to build a new ship; for a RL example, scheduled maintenance and upgrades for the submarine USS Miami was supposed to take 20 months, or almost 50% of the time it took to build it originally.
Note that, starting in 2232, the Klingon Empire was mass-building D7s for most of the decade before the outbreak of the Four-Year War. I suspect that there was no spare shipbuilding capacity or resources to engage in a major fleetwide refit program for lastgen ships. Not and still accomplish regular day to day duties.
