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[X] Inverse Slope Configuration (Mass: 170kt) [Cost: 33.5]
[X] Rising Slope Configuration (Mass: 190kt) [Cost: 37.5]

I want triple nacelles too :)
 
Current tally:
Adhoc vote count started by uju32 on Dec 18, 2024 at 8:47 PM, finished with 245 posts and 97 votes.
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Command is ahead by 9 votes.
 
uju32 said:
Current tally:
Adhoc vote count started by uju32 on Dec 18, 2024 at 8:47 PM, finished with 245 posts and 97 votes.
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Command is ahead by 9 votes.
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ten votes if you count the one that was voted wrong
 
uju32 said:
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I read and understood your position perfectly - super-sizing and coloring your words just makes you look like an ass screaming your head off, and leaves me more inclined to tell you to fuck off.

You're trying to apply hard numbers where they don't belong (trying for total limits before we've even seen all the mass components), and you're picking the wrong numbers in the first place. Sayle, in the position of Starfleet/Federation contract givers, is the one who decides what is and is not an acceptable size limit for any given hull or part.

If we so chose, we could be making this ship over 300ktons at this stage between the primary saucer and the top section, and we haven't even gotten to the bottom and secondary sections yet. And as long as we made it worth the price, Starfleet would like it, and probably buy it in fairly large numbers because they are desperate for hulls. That problem cuts both ways.
 
I am not too concerned. This is going to be one of the bigger saucers we build and it's going to have plenty of internal space even without a bulging top and bottom.

I hope we get a super chonky secondary hull option. I would even like to go for double secondary hulls now that SanFran has broached that concept.

Imagine it - an inline deflector with top and bottom 80kton secondary hulls.
 
Karugus said:
We explicitly have the options for more nacelles. That's more mass on the table right there. To say nothing of a secondary hull. That, and it's entirely uncharitable to call the command crowd penny pinchers. Most of its voters are advocating for it because a smaller exposed profile and better firing angles. A disinterest in treating a means as an end is not the same thing as being cost adverse.

Afaik we have never gotten this degree of options for the saucer of a ship. Assuming we can expect similar amount of options for the other key ship sections seems a lot more credible than just dismissing this as a random one off fad.
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Secondary hulls are limited by the mass of the primary hull, we've only once had an option for a secondary exceeding half the mass of the primary and they're often considerably smaller.

And I think that voting for a hull whose primary advantage is tactical at the cost of other capabilities with the expectation of then driving the remaining budget into mass is bad. The warning we got was about building a very expensive ship which didn't have good reasons to justify itself. This is how we end up with a ship that is overbudget, but doesn't have a good justification for its role other than being tanky and having good firepower.

The Command option would cut us off from the potential of a large saucer for fitting oversize modules, and cut down the total module count, which is not what we want on a big, expensive ship.
Fouredged Sword said:
I am not too concerned. This is going to be one of the bigger saucers we build and it's going to have plenty of internal space even without a bulging top and bottom.

I hope we get a super chonky secondary hull option. I would even like to go for double secondary hulls now that SanFran has broached that concept.

Imagine it - an inline deflector with top and bottom 80kton secondary hulls.
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Taking an option with the premise of "we will get an option unlike anything we've gotten before to undo the issues" doesn't seem sensible. I don't think we will get subsequent options that let us build a ship with as much space if we take options that reduce how much space we have available.
 
Fouredged Sword said:
I am not too concerned. This is going to be one of the bigger saucers we build and it's going to have plenty of internal space even without a bulging top and bottom.

I hope we get a super chonky secondary hull option. I would even like to go for double secondary hulls now that SanFran has broached that concept.

Imagine it - an inline deflector with top and bottom 80kton secondary hulls.
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Secondary hull(s) massing more than 50% of the saucer section is unlikely, this isn't the era of the Excelsior in TMP nor is it TNG, we're probably looking at 70,000 tonnes at best with the command style saucer. So ~210,000 tonnes.

The inverted slope meanwhile would likely produce an 85,000 tonne secondary hull. So ~255,000 tonnes.

Note that both of these values factor in 2x nacelles.

Furthermore an inline deflector would also eat up further valuable saucer volume, which would already be lacking with the command style saucer.
 
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DeltaV11.2 said:
Secondary hulls are limited by the mass of the primary hull, we've only once had an option for a secondary exceeding half the mass of the primary and they're often considerably smaller.

And I think that voting for a hull whose primary advantage is tactical at the cost of other capabilities with the expectation of then driving the remaining budget into mass is bad. The warning we got was about building a very expensive ship which didn't have good reasons to justify itself. This is how we end up with a ship that is overbudget, but doesn't have a good justification for its role other than being tanky and having good firepower.

The Command option would cut us off from the potential of a large saucer for fitting oversize modules, and cut down the total module count, which is not what we want on a big, expensive ship.

Taking an option with the premise of "we will get an option unlike anything we've gotten before to undo the issues" doesn't seem sensible. I don't think we will get subsequent options that let us build a ship with as much space if we take options that reduce how much space we have available.
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Even without a unusually large secondary hull this will not be a small ship.

And unusual options do crop up from time to time. We never saw an option for a cargo container ether, but it happened.

Will will get at least something like 3-5 module slots regardless, and we CAN pick an option OTHER than an antimatter tanks for once.
 
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Fouredged Sword said:
Even without a unusually large secondary hull this will not be a small ship.

And unusual options do crop up from time to time. We never saw an option for a cargo container ether, but it happened.

Will will get at least something like 3-5 module slots regardless, and we CAN pick an option OTHER than an antimatter tanks for once.
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With an unusually large secondary hull this would be less massive than the Kea. Your idea of two 80,000 tonne secondary hulls, for a total of 160,000 tonnes, has no basis in anything Sayle has said up to this point - we've been told in the past that it won't be until this era is long over that we'll get ships with secondary hulls of a significant/greater than saucer mass.
 
Fouredged Sword said:
Even without a unusually large secondary hull this will not be a small ship.

And unusual options do crop up from time to time. We never saw an option for a cargo container ether, but it happened.
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It won't be a small ship, but 210kt isn't really a large ship either. It's not that much bigger than the 180kt Excalibur.

And we do get unusual options, but these options are not of the form "undo what you just did". The Archer unusual options all offered to double down on the consequences of an orb hull, including the cargo pod.
 
The first option is a novel idea that's being called a command configuration. Rather than creating slopes or rises from the periphery of the main saucer, the upper deck will be extruded more abruptly from the center of the saucer and elongated with a spinal ridge that then runs back to the stern.
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Ah, yes, the Pizza Cutter design.

[X] Inverse Slope Configuration (Mass: 170kt) [Cost: 33.5]
 
I'm primarily advocating for a larger saucer so that we can fit more non-tactical capabilities rather than over concerns about durability or firepower.

So far both of our choices (Heavy Shields, Thicc saucer) are ones that will raise costs significantly and I expect this to be one of our most expensive ships even if we go with the lightest saucer.

The Heavy Shields especially will makes every bit of additional mass we tack on that much more expensive and I've seen no indication that the thread is planning to trim off mass elsewhere judging by the talk of quad nacelles and extra large engineering sections to get this thing's mass well into the +200kt range.

Trimming down now may somewhat stem the bleeding Starfleet's budget will go through but in this particular case it comes at the expense of compromising on the non-tactical facilities that would help justify spending so much in the first place.

What I am aiming for with this thing is to make it a proto-Explorer that can effectively acts as a Sagarmatha successor (which just retired) until the Excelsior project kicks off since the already large saucer and inevitably large engineering section should give us a lot of room to play around with for engineering and science facilities.

The Saucer and Engineering Section are the two places where we can most easily justify investing a lot of mass since this update explicitly mentions that adding extra mass just for firepower and durability is unacceptable and those two sections are the ones where all the non-tactical facilities go.
Sayle said:
Given the need for raw hulls in the near future, Starfleet is unlikely to look kindly on a ship bloated by mass just for the improved defensive functionality if that's all it brings to the table.
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Unfortunately this means nacelle's are probably the best area to cut mass on especially since we're still stuck with +60 year old nacelles and I doubt Starfleet's going to be okay with us justifying quad nacelles using the excuse of refitting the ship with brand new nacelles in the future.

Going by how much of a boondoggle the Radiant was and the fact that we're capped at Warp 7 for cruise I really don't see a reason to go for quad nacelles over a bigger Saucer.
 
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As much as I like the idea of the command layout's aesthetic, I have been convinced by the arguments to change for the sake of chonk.
 
CanYouMeme said:
If we so chose, we could be making this ship over 300ktons at this stage between the primary saucer and the top section, and we haven't even gotten to the bottom and secondary sections yet. And as long as we made it worth the price, Starfleet would like it, and probably buy it in fairly large numbers because they are desperate for hulls. That problem cuts both ways.
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We're voting between the total mass of the saucer, not an additional mass on top of what we already have. We chose a saucer that's 114kt before designing the top, and after adding it, it will weigh 140kt, 170kt, or 190kt total depending on which we choose. (That's an additional 26kt, 56kt, and 76kt for each of the different top designs.) We are not putting a top on this saucer that weighs so much more the bottom section.
 
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Derpmind said:
I'm going to be really sad if we end up with yet another medium-sized ship.
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Same.

Karugus said:
We explicitly have the options for more nacelles. That's more mass on the table right there.
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...okay, the idea of extra nacelles as a mass-adder is insane. They are so, so expensive that comparing "more nacelles" to "bigger hull" on the "ways to get more tons of total ship mass" is just. Farcical. Absurd. EVEN BEFORE one brings strategic resource bottlenecks into the equation (hullmetal uses zero strategic resources; warp nacelles almost certainly use a substantial amount). Why would anyone even think the two are remotely equivalent? Good lord.

tl;dr technically correct but irrelevant
Karugus said:
To say nothing of a secondary hull.
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The secondary hull scales to the primary hull. You cannot vote for a smaller saucer and make it up on the secondary hull, because the smaller saucer must also have a smaller secondary hull. This argument is absolutely, utterly invalid.
Karugus said:
That, and it's entirely uncharitable to call the command crowd penny pinchers. Most of its voters are advocating for it because a smaller exposed profile and better firing angles. A disinterest in treating a means as an end is not the same thing as being cost adverse.
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...okay, I suppose I should apologize for tarring all the command crowd with the same brush...? I sure didn't mean to.

I didn't address the "smaller profile and better firing angles" voters because I don't have any beef with their position; it's not the same as mine, but it's a sensible enough vote to make on sensible enough grounds. There are people voting for command on cost grounds, though, and those are the folks I was mostly talking about- if they're already showing up for such an insignificant cost difference as these hull sizes, I can only expect the screaming about cost and procurement will be unbelievable when quad nacelles come up.
CanYouMeme said:
and we haven't even gotten to the bottom
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Nope; there is no separate vote for bottom profile; it'll be determined by the top profile vote:
Sayle said:
No, it'll just be in the same style but not exactly identical.
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LOLROFL said:
I'm primarily advocating for a larger saucer so that we can fit more non-tactical capabilities rather than over concerns about durability or firepower.
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Same. Module space is the one true god. All bow before her. orz
LOLROFL said:
Unfortunately this means nacelle's are probably the best area to cut mass on especially since we're still stuck with +60 year old nacelles and I doubt Starfleet's going to be okay with us justifying quad nacelles using the excuse of refitting the ship with brand new nacelles in the future.

Going by how much of a boondoggle the Radiant was and the fact that we're capped at Warp 7 for cruise I really don't see a reason to go for quad nacelles over a bigger Saucer.
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Actually, the 60 year old nacelles are the reason nacelle-cycling quads are actually worth doing at all. The Radiant was a boondoggle because it was stuck on the last-gen core- a core that was already obsolescent when they were designed and outright obsolete by the time they entered service. The current warp core's cruise speed is limited in practice because sustaining high warp factors overheats the old nacelles. Under normal circumstances- meaning, with nacelles and warp core of the same generation- nacelle-cycling quads are a very expensive way to squeeze out a tiny bit of max cruise speed. However, the nacelle-cycling concept just so happens to also fix the specific thing capping max cruise right now, turning it into a very expensive way to get a FUCKING LOT of max cruise speed.
 
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This discussion has gone on for a while - why don't we talk about names

I like the Rickover Class (after Admirals)

This ship should - even with a lower weight be a leap forward in StarFleet defensive capabilities and will hopefully replace the Excalibur for safer exploration.
So why not name the class after Hyman G Rickover who spearheaded the development of naval nuclear reactors and the culture of safety in the nuclear navy - where there hasn't been a single reactor accident - and after the USS Thresher sank was heavily involved in the development of the SUBSAFE program, which, after implementation, hasn't seen a single USN submarine sink.

Also, Submarines are really the type of ship starships are most similar to anyways.
And if this doesn't get used in the explorer role, safety and scientific development are always relevant, and I like naming ships after admirals

I'm changing my vote
 
I do have a question:

If this thing is only going to be a bit bigger than the Excalibur, what's the point?

I mean, unless we pull insane shit, how does this thing justify itself? Other than the fact that the Federation is oddly allergic to continued production of the Excalibur for some reason(one that I may have missed).

I mean, we can't really putt THAT much more OOMPH onto a frame not even 50Kt bigger than the Excalibur, so what's the point in doing anything other than what we did with the 'Callies' and make 'em VERY FAST? At that point, it's just an Excalibur. Have the Federation build more of THEM.

Yeah but we can put more weapons on it! At the cost of Module Space, and that's going to cause drama and likely cost us a few Torpedo Launchers and Phasers,. Then there's the issue of us maybe skimping on modules, that leads into the issue of this thing loosing out on lifespan and capability, and again: risks this thing just us spinning our wheels on designing a Second Excalibur.

And yes, maybe we can stuff more guns and shields on this thing than the Excalibur had, on a similar Speed Profile. It's not really going to be enough to justify itself against the Excalibur: Who's design is RIGHT THERE, who has a Successful War Record, and who's CHEAPER.

Maybe we can justify it with a different mission profile and loadout? Maybe? *Shrugs* I just worry that this thing won't have the hutzpah to be a real Fleet Anchor if we don't give it a bit more mass.
 
Sayle said:
You begin with the largest configuration available to you, although this is a trap you should be careful not to fall into - this will hurt you when it comes to engines (and the space they take up), not to mention making it less likely that the design will have a large production run. Given the need for raw hulls in the near future, Starfleet is unlikely to look kindly on a ship bloated by mass just for the improved defensive functionality if that's all it brings to the table.
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The thing about this section that bugs me is that while I believe its intention is to tell us to be aware of costs, the feel of it is telling us that we chose wrong. Like the prose is scolding us the players for going too big. The rest of the update comparing the different options almost doesn't matter after what feels like being directly told by the QM that we screwed up.
 
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