Understood, so your theory is that they proposed something that does not get them much useful then.
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Its a graphical representation.
Its not a 1:1 to-scale map.
Sayle is a great QM, but he isnt a ship designer, nor does he pretend to be.
Increasing evidence that the people arguing with me did not in fact look at the pictures. Unfortunate.
I've removed the relevant image from the spoiler so you can't miss it:
That is quite a lot of volume. It is also very unfortunately shaped volume, since our stuff is rectangles which do not efficiently pack into triangles. That means that it will be quite heavy due to the raw volume, while being much less useful than our main decks.
The extra 30kt from adding this instead of consolidating the useful bits into a big brick on top of the ship in the command config doesn't add much useful space compared to the command config.
Like, if you have a triangle that's 6x6 feet as opposed to a square, you can fit like three times as many people into the square because most of the triangle is not tall enough. It's the same idea here. Sloped volumes are just not very good for putting things in. It's why no tank has bothered with sloped side armor since the T-34, and why a hatchback has a much larger trunk than a sedan.
...Because most of our fleet was stuck with obsolete Warp 7 Cores.
My phrasing may have been a little too blunt. It was mainly meant as a warning to not pick the biggest possible option every time just because it's the biggest and to look at what it brings to the table as well, but I was in-universe writing mode at that point so it got reformatted into something more general.
Theunderbolt
"Prepare for trouble..."
- Location
- USoA
[X] Inverse Slope Configuration (Mass: 170kt) [Cost: 33.5]
May be too late but May as well
May be too late but May as well
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Right, but strategic speed is still a matter of cruise speeds.
Our orb was super efficient in terms of volume. If only Starfleet tactical wasn't so narrow minded… maybe once we get phaser strips?
I have a question, with the adhoc Mass Restrictions now in place, does The Federation Project even have a point?
It's max cruise, so set at 7 due to our nacelles needing an update.
The problem was most of our fleet was using warp 7 cores with maximum cruise speeds near warp 6.
This isn't really something we need to think about for this design because it is largely not something we can do anything for. Max cruise will be warp 7 no matter what we do.
At worst we make a somewhat bigger tougher Excalibur to act as fleet anchor while having more civilian utility than the Excalibur.
Starfleet needs that and it would at least be made in decent numbers.
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Depends on how it will end up I guess. For now maybe it will still go somewhere ok, but I'd probably personally consider it a some what failed design if it ends up with less useful interior space then the Kea. As in that case it'll probably never manage to fulfill its design goals well. It might still be a fine ship, but it would just feel like a lot of lost potential.
This is of course just my personal opinion on it, everyone has their own feeling on things. Still we have a ways to go still on this, so let us first see how it might end up mass wise. Though if it did actually end up substantially smaller then a Kea I'd probably personally as such just want to cancel it as a... why did we make this when we could have just made more Excalibur then. Just another medium ship, which I guess admittedly could be differentiated by modules. But you could have just made an alternate Excalibur then really... that would have saved a lot of design time.
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The Kea uses a 140kt saucer, although it uses the rising slope which should give it a bit more space. Not really sure where the extra 100kt comes from on that one, but even our smallest saucer option is not actually meaningfully smaller than the Kea, and the largest one is quite a bit larger.
NSMS
Probably evil, unfortunately.
- Location
- A rapidly widening tear in the fabric of reality
For the Inverse Slope, even if all the extra space gets used for is crew quarters or tiny extra personal storage, that's either less room elsewhere that needs to be used for that stuff, or increased space per crew member so they have a boost to personal comfort. Regardless, either way it's not a waste.
You can see the crew quarters. The diagram is presumably not 1:1, but assuming that a deck is vaguely related to how tall a human is people can't even stand in significant parts of the slope.
I don't know how Starfleet maintenance works, but you wouldn't want to put anything that needs to be regularly serviced by a person in those spaces, and it's hard to use that space for crew when they can't comfortably fit into a lot of it.
I don't follow the question. What mass restrictions?
The tone of the writing has led a fair portion of the playerbase to believe that they are being warned away from the heaviest options full stop, it seems.
Sure. You're probably right with that.
Well perhaps I should explain it a bit better though. It's just a personal feeling, but if the design idea whiplashed through several totally opposing ideas and then ended up as smaller then the Kea with no design dream or coherent design philosophy... Well in that case all the excitement for the design would have ended up dissipating and I'd just feel like we'd have ended up with a soulless design that had no proper focus at all and kind of felt like it might end up doing everything kind of poorly.
In which case I'd rather have just done a quick refit of an existing design, or just reset and start from scratch now that we hopefully actually know what we should have done, rather then continue on with what had become a mess of a design.
We'll hopefully avoid such an outcome. But basically I don't mind if others follow their own preferred design idea, that's fine, at least there is a plan. But if it became a mess of non-design, and more just reactions to sudden plan changes... that would not be great.
NSMS
Probably evil, unfortunately.
- Location
- A rapidly widening tear in the fabric of reality
Have you ever slept in an attic room? Some of those aren't that different to that shape.
You can see the crew quarters. The diagram is presumably not 1:1, but assuming that a deck is vaguely related to how tall a human is people can't even stand in significant parts of the slope.
I don't know how Starfleet maintenance works, but you wouldn't want to put anything that needs to be regularly serviced by a person in those spaces, and it's hard to use that space for crew when they can't comfortably fit into a lot of it.
Aside from that, you could also turn it into personal storage spaces. Or fill it full of electronics, or use it install the back-ends of TVs or speakers or other equipment. Point is, it's space that can be used for something, and that you'd have to be very uncreative to find absolutely nothing that can go there, even if it's not full rooms. And the things that do go in that space don't need to be installed elsewhere.
That diagram isn't exactly accurate for the saucer we're using, with 40m more length it'll get up to full height comparatively quicker.
There's also the face that you're forcing on the slope too much - yes at a point it will be too small to put modules in (though as has been said small electronics/storage spaces could go there), but if you look behind unlike the command style saucer it's actually going to give at least two full decks, perhaps even 3 when the size of the saucer is considered.
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- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
As opposed to the tone of the posters relentlessly insisting that picking anything except the heaviest mass will result in a useless ship that everyone hates?
Posters can be ignored, an official post by the QM that's broadly interpreted to mean 'we can't go big' can't be.
I mean, we chose the design brief that only had a vague tactical goal and literally no specific peacetime goal beyond "don't suck" so it's to be expected that the design is a bit confused. We're only like three votes in though, so I'm not terribly worried.
Sure, I'm not saying it'll be totally useless. Like the update said, it's wiggle room, not module room. Personally I don't think it's worth it just for that, so it's up to whether or not the extra tactical justifies it.
The command saucer also extends behind. It basically shoves all the crew quarter into a big long rectangle from the center to the back of the saucer, rather than sloping as far as I can tell.
Now the command saucer does seem to only put the crew stuff in there, so it doesn't get that extra not quite deck space, but I don't think it's worth paying for 30kt of volume that's not deck space.
See @NSMS and @Tank man for essentially my reply.Increasing evidence that the people arguing with me did not in fact look at the pictures. Unfortunate.
I've removed the relevant image from the spoiler so you can't miss it:
That is quite a lot of volume. It is also very unfortunately shaped volume, since our stuff is rectangles which do not efficiently pack into triangles. That means that it will be quite heavy due to the raw volume, while being much less useful than our main decks.
The extra 30kt from adding this instead of consolidating the useful bits into a big brick on top of the ship in the command config doesn't add much useful space compared to the command config.
Like, if you have a triangle that's 6x6 feet as opposed to a square, you can fit like three times as many people into the square because most of the triangle is not tall enough. It's the same idea here. Sloped volumes are just not very good for putting things in. It's why no tank has bothered with sloped side armor since the T-34, and why a hatchback has a much larger trunk than a sedan.
No need to make you read another couple paragraphs.