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Starfleet Design Bureau

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Ash19256 said:
Yeah, twin RFLs fore and one aft feels like a good "sweet spot" for torpedo armament, offering 3 torpedoes in an aft volley and six forwards - the latter of which is only one higher than the forward throw weight of the Excalibur class anyways, despite using one fewer launcher slots.
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With the possibility of adding some standard launchers if we were willing to take the slight extra cost. Purely so when the refit happens and the tech increaces make the ship not as deadly anymore - we can easily swap them for more rapids without having to tear somthing else out.

As for how many impulse engines we'll want/need - it would help to either know how much a nacelle weight is, or fit the impulse engines after the nacelles.
 
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I don't know why anyone's assuming we can swap out a regular for a rapid in the future when we previously saw that medium shields can't be upgraded to large shields during refits. We'll only be able to upgrade single shot launchers into single shots that can fire newer and improved torpedoes, assuming new torpedoes even require new launcher setups. They might not!
 
Another point I just thought of, a reason we might want to go for quad nacelles: I think our warp drives tend to be a smidge faster than the latest Klingon drives, but only because they penny-pinch a bit. Sayle said their warp coils are straight up better and my personal impression is they're still adjusting to fighting an external peer threat so they're still kinda in "how to make this as cheap as possible while being a good enough murder-ship". That being said most of their fleet was stuck at warp 7 when we deployed the Excalibur-class, and that caused them no end of grief.

During the war, the Excalibur-class was able to go behind their lines and attack their convoys etc, it inconvenienced the Klingons and made the war very drawn out, bloody and expensive, so much the Great Houses started to grumble because of the stupid amount of losses. If we go with a quad-nacelle design, anticipating that future tranches of their ships might be faster, we can still use the unspoken threat of, "Our ships can outrun yours, and if you attack us again, we will still run circles around you and destroy lots and lots of very valuable, expensive ships, hardware and soldiers. And this ship has triple the shields, half again the torpedoes and better phasers than the murder-ship that routinely curbstomped your best war cruisers."

That capability will be re-enhanced when we update its warp drive, which is going to be hugely cheaper than making a brand-new fast ship. We don't need to use that capability, and really we should avoid doing so, but just having it will make us a less appealing target, to other polities as well <Squints suspiciously towards the Romulans>.

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Ebiris said:
I don't know why anyone's assuming we can swap out a regular for a rapid in the future when we previously saw that medium shields can't be upgraded to large shields during refits. We'll only be able to upgrade single shot launchers into single shots that can fire newer and improved torpedoes, assuming new torpedoes even require new launcher setups. They might not!
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Agreed. It seems a triple-fire launcher is basically the same size as 2x single-shots paired together, if we're judging by the Attenborough-class. So unless we want to put in 2x single-fire tubes in the same location we know it definitely can't be refitted, and we still don't know if a refit is actually possible. Plus, losing a whole module when we paid so much for this ship's size, eh...
 
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TheShadowDeamon said:
With the possibility of adding some standard launchers if we were willing to take the slight extra cost. Purely so when the refit happens and the tech increaces make the ship not as deadly anymore - we can easily swap them for more rapids without having to tear somthing else out.
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By the time those refits become necessary, we should have already designed it's warp 8 cruise successor, and it'll be relegated to the backlines and escorting Archer-2s.

We'll probably need three type-3 thrusters in order to have better maneuvering than medium, considering we're currently over twice the Attenborough's tonnage before nacelles. I was trying to be really optimistic about our prospects there. Before nacelles the Attenborough was 85,000 tons, so 2 nacelles would make each nacelles ~10,000 tons each. Though this design's nacelles are liable to be bigger per nacelle than the Attenborough's, maybe?

Even if this ships nacelles aren't proportionally larger, quads would put our final weight around 260kT. A 250% mass increase over the Attenborough, so a single thruster of the same model would probably be low Manuverabilty, 2 for medium, and 3 for high. Though it's only cost 5 per thruster, so a total of 15 for thruster cost probably isn't "gold plating"

Edit: Two nacelles would be 240kT, which imo would mean two thrusters would actually hit the upper medium threshold for maneuvering. I just get a feeling the line of having high maneuvering with type-3 thrusters is roughly 110kT per thruster. To push than 130kT (per thruster at 4 nacelles) would likely fall into medium maneuvering and 120kT (per thruster for 2 nacelles) would probably be a high Medium. Also certainly cost less.

Probably best to just wait and see what the options are though.
 
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stakenbake said:
We haven't had type-3 thrusters very long though?
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Type 3s had actual numbers up for a while, 180kt thrust each. +50% for being Type 3s instead of Type 2s, and another 20% multiplicative for our Warp 8 Core design.

Another way to think about it: the Federation is going to be less than twice the Excalibur's mass. As such, given the same set of engines it's going to have more than half the Excalibur's agility, and the Excalibur capped things out at very high - or twice the thrust needed for average.
 
stakenbake said:
Edit: Two nacelles would be 240kT, which imo would mean two thrusters would actually hit the upper medium threshold for maneuvering. I just get a feeling the line of having high maneuvering with type-3 thrusters is roughly 110kT per thruster. To push than 130kT (per thruster at 4 nacelles) would likely fall into medium maneuvering and 120kT (per thruster for 2 nacelles) would probably be a high Medium. Also certainly cost less.
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The old cutoff line for 1/2/3/4 Type Three thrusters appears to be:

90/180/270/360 for Extra High
120/240/360/480 for High

Thats my recollection
So a three hundred kt Federation can reach High Maneuver with three thrusters
Two thrusters means Medium Maneuver
 
Candesce said:
Type 3s had actual numbers up for a while, 180kt thrust each. +50% for being Type 3s instead of Type 2s, and another 20% multiplicative for our Warp 8 Core design.

Another way to think about it: the Federation is going to be less than twice the Excalibur's mass. As such, given the same set of engines it's going to have more than half the Excalibur's agility, and the Excalibur capped things out at very high - or twice the thrust needed for average.
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uju32 said:
The old cutoff line for 1/2/3/4 Type Three thrusters appears to be:

90/180/270/360 for Extra High
120/240/360/480 for High

Thats my recollection
So a three hundred kt Federation can reach High Maneuver with three thrusters
Two thrusters means Medium Maneuver
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Then I would stand corrected, two nacelles would likely have high Manuverabilty while four nacelles would need three to have better than medium.
 
Candesce said:
There are no thresholds, it's a smooth line up to Very High Maneuverability.

270kt's probably the point where what we get starts getting called High Maneuverability, but it's not significantly more maneuverable than an otherwise equivalent ship on the other side of that number.
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Yeah but that takes more words to explain and I'm multitasking rn :V
 
I'm real keen to max out agility, after all we were told Klingon ships tend to be extremely agile and positioning to hit them is a major pain, so any edge we can get would be very nice... But the way you've grokked those numbers, looks like we're in a really weird place mass-wise so most of a thruster's output is wasted. While I don't care about the cost, the idea of losing a module doesn't sit well with me.

I suspect I'll be outvoted though, as you guys are voting solidly and have sound reasoning. So long as it's solidly above-average I'll grudgingly settle for it.
 
I would prefer if we preserve as many modules as possible to make this ship useful outside of wartime, which is most times.

And that, for our next ship, we make a hyperscience Orbtastic ship.
 
uju32 said:
Excalibur and the war it helped win have had profound effects on Starfleet, and arguably Alpha Quadrant strategic thinking
The comparison that comes to mind is HMS Dreadnought making all pre-dreadnought battleships obsolete. Any new peerstate cruiser designs or refits will have the Excalibur as a pacing threat, and will be aiming to defend against its armament
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Ash19256 said:
Yeah, twin RFLs fore and one aft feels like a good "sweet spot" for torpedo armament, offering 3 torpedoes in an aft volley and six forwards - the latter of which is only one higher than the forward throw weight of the Excalibur class anyways, despite using one fewer launcher slots.
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If the Excalibur-class is HMS Dreadnought, then the Federation-class is HMS Orion, the first Super-Dreadnought meant to significantly exceed Dreadnought's power.

We will want to give serious consideration to more firepower than 'just' 2 fore and 1 aft RFL and the 100%-or-close-to phaser coverage. The Federation-class may need to bust her Klingon Fleet Anchor counterpart straight to Sto'vo'kor in one pass.

Of course, we still need to balance it with non-combat utility, otherwise the skinflints at San Francisco will crow forever about their victory over us goldbricking bastards at Utopia Planitia!
 
Honestly, if a fleet battle with a Federation plus escorts versus a D8/D9/D-whatever the Klingons call their answer to the Federation and its band of BoPs develops, I'd be inclined to actually have the Federation focusing phaser (and where possible, torpedo) fire on the escorts - swing the numbers in the Federation's favor, and then simply death of a thousand cuts the Klingon battleship.

That's not to say I'd be mad if 3+ RFLs fore won, mind you - just that I'm probably not going to be voting for it unless a very convincing argument emerges for it, and even that only if going for more than two doesn't cost us module slots.
 
KlavoHunter said:
We will want to give serious consideration to more firepower than 'just' 2 fore and 1 aft RFL and the 100%-or-close-to phaser coverage. The Federation-class may need to bust her Klingon Fleet Anchor counterpart straight to Sto'vo'kor in one pass.
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Imo up-gunning the phaser to above 100% phaser coverage (i.e. some areas having greater overlapping fields of fire than others) would be a bigger boon combative role that would outweigh having more than three RFLs. Like 4 dorsal, 3 ventral saucer and 2 aft for 9 total (triple the total of the Excalibur) would be enough laser grid that (combined with high maneuvering) would Swiss cheese both swarms of current gen klingons, and also be dangerous to to Excalibur equivalents.

If I understand things correctly, by being 260kt-300kt our phasers will hit much harder than the Excalibur's do, which makes being able to shoot roughly everywhere with 1 or more beams even better. We should be able to cut through K'Tingas like they were D7's no problem. It'll be funny to seem our enemies maneuvering around us only to keep getting hit by more phasers the whole time.
 
stakenbake said:
Imo up-gunning the phaser to above 100% phaser coverage (i.e. some areas having greater overlapping fields of fire than others) would be a bigger boon combative role that would outweigh having more than three RFLs. Like 4 dorsal, 3 ventral saucer and 2 aft for 9 total (triple the total of the Excalibur) would be enough laser grid that (combined with high maneuvering) would Swiss cheese both swarms of current gen klingons, and also be dangerous to to Excalibur equivalents.

If I understand things correctly, by being 260kt-300kt our phasers will hit much harder than the Excalibur's do, which makes being able to shoot roughly everywhere with 1 or more beams even better. We should be able to cut through K'Tingas like they were D7's no problem. It'll be funny to seem our enemies maneuvering around us only to keep getting hit by more phasers the whole time.
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Not really possible, I'm afraid.

There's a 2-phaser-beam-at-a-time limit for firing, and our phasers already come in double banks.

All that above-100% phaser coverage might do is provide extra redundancy against battle damage, except Star Trek style battle damage is more like "Weapons offline sir!" instead of "We lost the #3 Phaser Turret!"
 
KlavoHunter said:
Not really possible, I'm afraid.

There's a 2-phaser-beam-at-a-time limit for firing, and our phasers already come in double banks.

All that above-100% phaser coverage might do is provide extra redundancy against battle damage, except Star Trek style battle damage is more like "Weapons offline sir!" instead of "We lost the #3 Phaser Turret!"
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Well, damn.

Cause Landing a four beam focus fire would be cool, if it were possible. Ngl I would prioritize a module that allowed us to circumvent that limitation, if it existed.
 
Which leaves an interesting thought: we can't Volley more than two beams at the same time, but how long is a single beam sustained, how fast does a phaser emitter cycle... And how fast can we switch which one is firing?

Those numbers could result in anything from "might as well just turn the ship and use the same emitters again" through "an enemy ship stupid or unlucky enough to fly a perfect pattern through our phaser coverage is never not being hit"
 
The limit is "two phasers emitters in a given firing arc are relevant in the design", because it's fundamentally an OOC limitation to ensure designs remain similar to Starfleet. Frankly, it's similar in nature to the need for exposed nacelles as "they have a good damn reason for doing this in-universe, but any out-of-universe explanation runs into the physical limits being completely unknowable due to being fictional".
 
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