As we saw with the Romulan attack on Earth, a deep strike mission would also allocate antimatter for the last leg, where you'd sprint towards the target to hopefully catch them off-guard. The range efficient cruise gives isn't the range to get all the way there, it's the range to get you to that final sprint.
As we saw with the Battle of Andoria, the slower your approach speed, the more time longrange sensors have to see you coming, and the more time the defenders have to prepare and call in reinforcements. Similarly with your trying to retreat while pursued by converging defenders with higher Max Cruise and their own refuelling stations nearby
True if we want to extend the starships as navy metaphor. Chases for days trying to lose each other or do something clever are very much a part of that genre. And so even if they can outsprint us, if we can keep them on sensors we can catch up in twelve hours when their warp coils overheat.
If you're moving in force to capture or destroy a fixed target - the other side's shipyards, say - you're doing it in enough numbers that intercepting your force away from the fixed defenses is a bad idea. At that point, longer range means a fleet in being fixes the enemy's defenders to their fortifications from further distances, and locations that might have been immune to attack purely from distance get brought into reach.
And if you're slow rolling it you allow for the enemy to either mass more forces because they see you coming for longer away, or for them to sock you in the jaw before your blow lands. As Sensors, patrols, long range detection improves, being able to reach your target in a fast manner to deliver a damaging strike becomes more and more important. As such you'd still want Maximum Cruise over Efficient.
An Example of this can be seen when the Federation is fighting the Borg in the Ushaan retrospective, the Borg made it towards earth at best speed, and the Federation was sacrificing dozens of ships to make it slow down, so they could rally and beat it. Warfare simply doesn't happen over Efficient cruise unless you are Utterly certain your opponent can't react to the incoming strike or is unable too. Being able to strike from efficient Cruise is in essence treating you opponent as so far beneath you that they cannot and will not be a threat. It's either arrogance in extremis or punching down so hard it's Organians vs anyone you care to name in the TOS.
As we saw with the Romulan attack on Earth, a deep strike mission would also allocate antimatter for the last leg, where you'd sprint towards the target to hopefully catch them off-guard. The range efficient cruise gives isn't the range to get all the way there, it's the range to get you to that final sprint.
And as we saw, because the Romulans were arrogant in extremis what should have been a killing blow to humanity's rise was destroyed entirely on the backs of their arrogance. A fleet that outnumbered, outmassed, out teched, and surprised us lost because it went and ignored the combatants of an enemy fleet, and let them get into knife fighting ranges, follow them in the rear and shoot at them while they sprinted towards Earth and had their minimal rear armament as the only defense against us hitting them with everything including the kitchen sink.
As Sensors, patrols, long range detection improves, being able to reach your target in a fast manner to deliver a damaging strike becomes more and more important.
And if all you are is fast, you can reach just short of being able to hit your target in lightning time!
Don't expect conflicts to happen in your favor. If the red team can build their logistics outposts just out of reach of ours and still land punches, we're locked into defense.
Unless you think trying to transfer antimatter from a tanker ship into your warship in the neutral zone where a warbird might decloak on you sounds like a fun time.
And if all you are is fast, you can reach just short of being able to hit your target in lightning time!
Don't expect conflicts to happen in your favor. If the red team can build their logistics outposts just out of reach of ours and still land punches, we're locked into defense.
Unless you think trying to transfer antimatter from a tanker ship into your warship in the neutral zone where a warbird might decloak on you sounds like a fun time.
And if we slow roll our punches any attack we do launch will be intercepted by a massed force that will ratchet up the bloody bill paid immensely as they have more and more time to build a response. Efficient cruise might boost range, but all that range does not take into account any fighting done, or enemy movement. It is a purely on paper hypothetical in wartime. Planning on it and only it is a folly that even backseat admirals with no combat experience won't do.
As we saw with the Battle of Andoria, the slower your approach speed, the more time longrange sensors have to see you coming, and the more time the defenders have to prepare and call in reinforcements. Similarly with your trying to retreat while pursued by converging defenders with higher Max Cruise and their own refuelling stations nearby
The Battle of Andoria only happened because the Klingons didn't have the range to strike at our core.
To be clear, I'm not making an argument for a specific nacelle arrangement on this particular ship. Quad nacelles are a very close second for me. I'm also not arguing that maximum cruise isn't useful: it clearly is. It just feels like a substantial portion of the thread is dismissing efficient cruise as irrelevant during a war, which is wrong. Fleet ranges have defined the courses of wars.
And as we saw, because the Romulans were arrogant in extremis what should have been a killing blow to humanity's rise was destroyed entirely on the backs of their arrogance. A fleet that outnumbered, outmassed, out teched, and surprised us lost because it went and ignored the combatants of an enemy fleet, and let them get into knife fighting ranges, follow them in the rear and shoot at them while they sprinted towards Earth and had their minimal rear armament as the only defense against us hitting them with everything including the kitchen sink.
Sure. The Romulans also got perilously close to wiping the nascent Federation off the map. What I'm saying is that deep strikes of this kind can be devastating.
The Battle of Andoria was a direct strike at our core, though?
Making our efficient cruise a bit better will make our ships better in peacetime, but I seriously doubt the range improvement is anything like adding extra fuel reserves. Unless we want to launch deep strikes into enemy territory without logistical support, efficient cruise doesn't make any sense during wartime.
And we've won two out of three of our wars because our enemies were stupid enough to try that, so I don't know why we'd ever want to.
You sure this applies to NPCs?
I was under the impression there was elements not modelled for NPC nationstates
At least for Klingons, who explicitly have a better techbase
Acceleration is size-agnostic. The ability to turn to a new facing is reduced in larger ships, because centripetal force increases the farther you are from the center of rotation.
A bigger ship inherently contains points farther from that center. A rapid turn that merely stresses the inertial dampeners in a smaller ship, will smear crew across bulkheads in a larger ship.
(I generally consider larger ships to be blatantly superior to smaller ships. However, 'rapid turning' has now joined 'radiating heat' on my list of things small ships are better at)
Hm. Possible. I don't quite accept it as fact outright, as I think there are some points against it (primarily, if centripetal force at the extremities were a limiting factor on maneuverability, then the maximum thrust-to-mass ratio we could benefit from would be higher for smaller ships, rather than capping out at 2:1 regardless of size). But it's very plausible.
Possibly-interesting graph- the specific limitation was more or less pulled out of a hat, but the overall shape of the trend should be pretty clear:
Edit: Oh boy I did not even think about what resolution I was uploading the graph at, did I? Whoops.
Edit2: That should be marginally more legible, I hope.
Manouverability is relative, presumably (going by Picard S3) the 24th century has advanced to a level that would make even Kzinti craft from when we fought them look slow - at least if you didn't need to provide dampening for 1k+ people all throughout a ~5,820,983 m3 volume (and between 6.5 and 25.2 million tonnes, on the respective high and low ends).
Interestingly the lower end st volume rice value for the Excelsior-class (first variant) is about 976,700 tonnes, which fits Sayle's system reasonably well, imo, better than the few million often stated in canon.
Well, yes, obviously it's a thing, though I have absolutely no way of knowing exactly how effective it is in what time periods...if it's easier to apply on very large ships, though, then that would fly right in the face of "maneuverability ratings are relative to ship size" line of argument. And I feel like would also have some uhhhhhh unintended consequences when the Borg Cube suddenly becomes the Borg Beyblade.
For what it's worth, I'm not attempting to claim that the classes marked on the graph actually have the absolute or relative turning rates indicated on that graph (or even that they would given infinite thruster power). The graph really just shows "if centripetal acceleration is a limiting factor on maneuverability, then at any given moment in time and tech advancement, ship size affects maximum turning rate in a curve of this shape"- the labels on both axes will vary over time as inertial dampener tech advances, and we have no conceivable way of guessing how exactly they'll do so.
(Also, the radius used is a very simple "half the ship's longest dimension"; nearly all of these ships could be quite a bit more maneuverable if they're not bothering to fully damp centripetal acceleration in the aft portions of the nacelles, where nobody should be during combat maneuvers anyway.)
With how borg ships are spinning I feel they are 100% beyblades if anyone is dumb enough to get close to a borg cube while its in rotation its gonna end badly for the rammer.
I thought we'd get buffs all over the board for quad nacelles. It would increase combat effectiveness substantially with the extra speed, but this ship's still gonna be spending the majority of its life at efficient cruising speed. The cost for quad nacelles is so high and the gain so small I'm not sure I can justify it, after all that's 12 extra cost, that's enough to add a while photorp RFL.
I know quad's gonna win, and I hope it's objectively the right choice, but from where I'm sitting the advantage is too slim for that price.
Honestly they are all pretty good. It's just specialised towards a certain use case. In this case, quads are specialised in getting to a place to defend it as fast as possible. A full 20% faster even, which is huge.
I honestly value that higher than an extra rfl. I know that sounds nuts, but it's how I feel.
The four nacelles are slightly more expensive than expected due to unforeseen factors, but as the same complications would have affected the cheaper options it shouldn't mark against you. Still less costly than they used to be. You've already sorted out their final positions and began crunching the numbers on the warp geometry, but the struts will have to wait for a little longer. The impulse engines put out a lot of thrust, and until you have their positions and ratings finalised you don't want to risk completely occluding them with nacelle supports.
That brings you to the engines themselves. While there are promising noises out of Avidyne regarding the next-generation systems, they aren't ready for implementation just yet. With that in mind you see two possibilities. The first is a single central drive, which with the boost from the main plasma injectors will perform at above-expected parameters and give the design the linear acceleration it needs to maneuver.
Alternatively you could mount a pair of engine clusters on port and starboard, which would push the spaceframe to its maximum tolerances. While a ship of this size will never maneuver like the Excalibur, it would provide enough thrust and attitude control to engage most heavy cruisers in the warbook with equal agility. It's not the worst capability to have, though you never know what the future holds. If the steady inflation in size holds true, the Federation will be punching up on the mass scale in the second half of her service life.
In any case, the choice is a binary one. If phasers will be the main source of damage for the ship, then a better-than-standard engine output is all it needs to engage both peer opponents and any smaller vessels during fleet actions. If you expect a torpedo ship or one-on-one engagements are the more likely outcome, then you may want to absorb the extra cost of the engines to maximise on-target time.
Maneuverability measures the ability of a starship to accelerate and adjust its heading under thrust. The level of performance is still dictated primarily by mass, but a starship with a "maximum" or "very high" maneuverability rating would be considered to have an acceleration curve and turn time equal to the typical performance of a starship half its mass. Ergo, a 300kt starship with "maximum" maneuverability would perform equivalently to a 150kt starship with "standard" maneuverability. As a statistic it is measured as a fractional value between a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 1, with no thresholds determining higher or lower levels of performance. "Standard" is the median and generally expected rating.
As a rating, higher maneuverability increases a starship's ability to keep its highest damage weapons on target. As statistics are computed with the assumption that peer vessels are at least half the mass of the ship, this increases the single-target damage rating. Against vessels with standard maneuverability but less than half the design's mass, or during formation actions, the multi-target damage rating determines general damage output.
