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Starfleet Design Bureau

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[X] Recommend the continued production of the Stingray as a mainline tactical vessel.

Putting a big juicy battleship out with all of our industry and years of development is just begging for it to get blindsided by a large group of romulan warbirds.

at the same time, there doesn't seem to me to be a significant advantage for making a cheaper, worse ship when we already have the design and industry set up to build Stingrays. They might not be perfect but they're here and we know how to make them.

Also, while I'm not sure if this is represented in the quest in any way, using a tried and tested ship means that we not only have the benefit of knowing how to build stingrays (supply lines for parts, experienced workers in the shipyards, etc), we also have all of the learnings from how to fly and deploy them (easier training for new crews, better tactical runbooks written from experience, etc)
 
StriderInCosmos said:
Last I recall, beyond Earth, we have three colonies of various sizes. Not all that much space to lock down in the large scale of things, and as long as these battleships are tough enough, they don't even need to win the fight. Just stay alive long enough to call for and receive any close-by reinforcements.
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The issue is that they would be hideously expensive. And it's not just three colonies, it's also the exploration, science, outposts, trade, diplomatic outreach, mining, etc. that reach beyond those colonies.

Three battleships would be very, very expensive. But if they're just going to be parked at three colonies, that's not a very good use of such enormous investments. So either Stingrays or combat frigates.

EDIT: Changing my vote to a preference vote for Stingrays and combat frigates (approval voting, in other words), since the Stingray option does have the advantage of already being in serial production, being tried and tested, and being a mix of capable and affordable.

[X] Advocate for the construction of a minimally expensive combat frigate capable of engaging the small Romulan ships one-on-one.
[X] Recommend the continued production of the Stingray as a mainline tactical vessel.
 
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SaltyWaffles said:
Alternatively, we could use such frigates and forgo a losing defensive battle against cloaked marauders and instead go on the offensive against meaningful military targets in Romulan space
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Even if we had the warp speed and logistics infrastructure to hit romulan targets, and if we were sure an offensive push wouldn't drive broad public support amongst the romulans for our extermination, going on the offensive against a technologically superior enemy in an entrenched position seems like a monumentally bad idea.
 
SaltyWaffles said:
*snip*
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And I have since changed my stance due to such facts. If we were going to build anything resembling a battleship, it would need to be an offensive vessel. Otherwise, the wisest thing to do is to make sure that our ships are able to cover each other, and that's really only happening with Stingrays or a different, similarly sized vessel altogether.
 
UraniumSpoon said:
Even if we had the warp speed and logistics infrastructure to hit romulan targets, and if we were sure an offensive push wouldn't drive broad public support amongst the romulans for our extermination, going on the offensive against a technologically superior enemy in an entrenched position seems like a monumentally bad idea.
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Which is why I like the battleship option the least. It's basically only really efficient if you use it for offensive operations, because otherwise cloaked Romulan ships just avoid it the entire time, and have the numbers to just hit elsewhere, while the battleships would be very expensive and few in number.
 
Now, if we were able to create drone craft of some sort that could be piloted from the vessel itself, I could see using a carrier or battle-carrier type vessel in a defensive action or hell even as part of a mixed task force like most major 21st century powers do. But that's an option that's not really on the table at the moment.
 
Also, as has been pointed out before, even in times of crisis like this, ships designed to the hilt to do nothing but war just aren't worth it once the immediate freak-out from Starfleet Command has run its course.
 
Jensaarai said:
Also, as has been pointed out before, even in times of war and crisis ships designed to the hilt to do nothing but war just aren't worth it once the immediate freak-out from Starfleet Command has run its course.
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Of course, with a carrier vessel, I could see refitting it and its drone ships to be something of a mobile repair and scavenge ship. A battleship has far less leeway.
 
If we want to look towards grand strategy, Earth is never going to win this war on our own. What we need to do is survive long enough to convince the other local powers to ally with us, to form a Coalition of Planets, you might say to fend off the Romulans.

So we want ships to survive in the short term, yes, but if you want to think medium term then hopefully we can eventually use already-built Vulcan and Andorian and Tellarite battleships as the centerpieces of fleet action that Earth can support. The battleship makes sense if you think it's necessary in the short term until the diplomacy can bring in allies.
 
QuarkBeast said:
The frigate seems useless? I can't think of any way to make it cheaper than the current stingray aside from pulling off one of the impulse engines and crippling it's manueverability, in retrospect we should have taken the 6phasers option for anti cloaking tactics.
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@Sayle is not going to offer us an option that is useless. What I would suspect is something like the alternate configuration we were offered for the Zheng-He, where it has all front-facing weapons and uses its agility and small size to keep them on target. But at a reduced size, given it does not really need to do anything than be a weapons platform. That seems achievable for 19 Industry.

Warfare at the end of the day is not about having the most chocolate-coated "best" ship around, it's about having platforms which are good enough to perform their tasks at a good price.
 
StriderInCosmos said:
Of course, with a carrier vessel, I could see refitting it and its drone ships to be something of a mobile repair and scavenge ship. A battleship has far less leeway.
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Something like that could work, but I feel like you'd need a much larger build-up of ships to have some serve as escort, along with justifying the carrier's role of mobile repair.

Maybe you could use it as something comparable to the future California-class, running around managing things inside United Earth/Federation space.

Carriers are usually huge as hell though, so that's gonna be expensive.
 
Yeah, and with the need to fatten up the fleet yesterday, I don't think anything resembling that is going to be coming along any time soon. Ah, well. A man can dream, at least, of a multi-purpose carrier vessel.
 
Wars are won through logistics, and I very much believe we can optimize our logistics. It's not like we'll stop building more ships during the year we create the new design, and if we do it right, we'll make something that will seriously help win the war.
 
Maybe we could make a modular frigate? So that after the war it could swap out equipment for other stuff? Basically like that ship I keep talking about. Lol
 
[X] Advocate for the construction of a minimally expensive combat frigate capable of engaging the small Romulan ships one-on-one.

Two reasons why. First, while I love the Stingray, its role and design frankly make it a horrible match against Romulan Cloaking and Ambush tactics. Sure it can chase down and destroy enemies, but having only foreward facing weapons means that it can't respond immediately if ambushed from the back, making it a bit of a sitting duck to cloaked ships. We can probably get by, but there would be a lot of lost Stingrays.

Second, I feel like people are really discounting the impact even a marginally cheaper design would have. So, back of the napkin math. The refit Stingray cost 25 industry. We currently have 67 this turn. That means we can make two Stingrays per year.

Let's imagine a ship about the same size as the Stingray, we'll call it the UES Hammerhead. Give it two Phase Cannons, one dorsal and one ventral. Have the hull purpose-shaped so both can fire both Fore and Aft, to give it full coverage. Only have one Atomic Torpedo Launcher. Overall, this decreases costs by 4 compared to the Stingray, giving a overall cost of 21 even without changing any other aspect. We can make 3 of them a year, a 50% increase in the number of ships we can output for only a minor loss in overall firepower.

Granted, Industry will grow slower, but we need more ships now, not later.
 
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What I suspect we might get with a frigate is something like this fan design by EC Henry of a Romulan War-era patrol ship:

(Although the scaling is a bit off given those are meant to be NX-class nacelles, the general "feel" of the ship seems right to me.)


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCIBcADjxV0

Just absolutely utilitarian, big engines, a couple cannons, torpedoes, and nothing else. No peacetime role, simply a warship designed to trade effectively against Birds of Prey and bulk up our fleet.
 
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Skippy said:
What I suspect we might get with a frigate is something like this fan design by EC Henry of a Romulan War-era patrol ship:
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My first thought was a dorsal/ventral pair of phase cannons for 360x360 coverage. Possibly twin double turrets for the necessary punishment.

Of course, you'd also want to fully automate those guns to hit before the enemy ship raises shields, which. Not exactly a popular option.
 
[X] Advocate for the construction of a minimally expensive combat frigate capable of engaging the small Romulan ships one-on-one
 
It's my understanding that Starfleet is seriously small right now, with no bulk or reserve to speak of. Which makes the cheap gunbrick frigates attractive to me, because they'll give us a good placeholder for bulk and reserves until Starfleet matures and grows into being able to bulk out with aging, past-their-prime ships.
 
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