Starfleet Design Bureau

I... dont think this ship would be capable of replacing the archers can it? the cargo hold is in the secondary section right?
Per Sayle's post

"The second option is to specialise towards the transport of extra-large cargo such as finished infrastructure or volatiles requiring heavy containment, which as a capability is in short supply in the fleet outside of the slow Archer-class and its bulk transport role"

It won't be replacing it outright, but it will be able to supplant it in a great many roles.
 
when you need hundreds of them to make a dent in a useful capacity.
By definition, critical materials simply outright don't exist in such numbers.

Which makes them ideal targets for things like pirates.

Pirates that can prey on the Archers and most escorts they can field, given the Orion Pirates and their ilk. As compared to handing the transportation of such valuables to Federation...Which has throw weight and coverage sufficient to swat entire swarms of pirate craft and raiders into space dust

Thats not a capability that the Archer can replicate - safety in the Second Golden Age of Piracy
 
It's way bigger than an Archer. That secondary hull being mostly cargo is a LOT of cargo.
well be as it may its an expensive ship and we hadnt even gotten to the other modules which is going to rank up the price even further I dont think making this a cargo hauler is going to be as effective when at best it can maybe dance between 2-3 star systems.

Not in sufficient numbers doubly so when we want this thing at the edges of our space.
 
well be as it may its an expensive ship and we hadnt even gotten to the other modules which is going to rank up the price even further I dont think making this a cargo hauler is going to be as effective when at best it can maybe dance between 2-3 star systems.

Not in sufficient numbers doubly so when we want this thing at the edges of our space.
Modules don't add cost. We have already basically finalized the cost.

And the Federation can haul cargo from Earth to the Frontier in 2 months. That's nothing in terms of travel time. It can cover more space in less time than literally any other ship in the fleet and it's not even close.
 
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well be as it may its an expensive ship and we hadnt even gotten to the other modules which is going to rank up the price even further I dont think making this a cargo hauler is going to be as effective when at best it can maybe dance between 2-3 star systems.

Not in sufficient numbers doubly so when we want this thing at the edges of our space.
At least I think we're done on price - modules don't add to it
 
It would be replacing the Archer when it comes to frontier and time sensitive cargo where the Archer is too slow and undefended.
Plus as a part of the fleet train, via:

Basically super-containers. I suppose you could fit a neutronic fuel tank in half the main cargo bay, given you're looking at something like 3-4 decks high. So potential for refueling capabilities in a pinch, yeah.


well be as it may its an expensive ship and we hadnt even gotten to the other modules which is going to rank up the price even further I dont think making this a cargo hauler is going to be as effective when at best it can maybe dance between 2-3 star systems.

Not in sufficient numbers doubly so when we want this thing at the edges of our space.
The price is set, modules are more or less free under our system.

Dude, it can go from the core to the border in literally less than half the time the Federation can (and 4x faster than a civilian cargo ship), it's going to be going around a lot of systems.
 
[X] Expanded Shuttlebay

I think it'll be more immediately useful for colony support and putting out brush fires in small task forces in the after war years and any major conflicts or border incidents in at the very least the first half of its life.

The more that are built, the more justified a refit in the second half is.
 
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A Federation (the ship) could be on the opposite side of The Federation (the polity) and race back to Earth, pick up a cargo, and race to the entirely opposite side of The Federation (the polity) before the Archer waiting in orbit of Earth could get the cargo to the destination.
 
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I'm seeing a lot of good arguments for why starfleet needs new/more/better cargo ships. The arguments for using the Federation class in that role are Very weak.
Mind you, the arguments in favour of shuttles aren't much better and the arguments against aren't completely without merit...
 
A Federation (the ship) could be on the opposite side of the Federation (the polity) and race back to Earth, pick up a cargo, and race to the entirely opposite side of The Federation (the polity) before the Archer waiting in orbit of Earth could get the cargo to the destination.
To say nothing of the fact that it's going to be able to purely carry out Starfleet missions, it's not going to be stuck on the rebuilding or future infrastructure building like the Archer (indeed, if it does anything with infrastructure it'll just be taking pre-made stuff out there), so it's probably got 2-3x the availability rate from Starfleet's perspective.
 
I'm seeing a lot of good arguments for why starfleet needs new/more/better cargo ships. The arguments for using the Federation class in that role are Very weak.
Mind you, the arguments in favour of shuttles aren't much better and the arguments against aren't completely without merit...
Valid, most of the ideas around shuttles are about options that come later and not really the shuttlebay itself
 
I'm seeing a lot of good arguments for why starfleet needs new/more/better cargo ships. The arguments for using the Federation class in that role are Very weak.
Mind you, the arguments in favour of shuttles aren't much better and the arguments against aren't completely without merit...
If I knew the next ship we built could be the Archer 2.0 I would not be picking cargo, but we can't know that and the QM isn't going to give us that kind of assurance.

The Archer had enough issues that I don't think Starfleet will let us just build an upgraded version, and the QM has an unnatural dislike of spheres.
 
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The arguments for using the Federation class in that role are Very weak.
I wouldn't necessarily say that, the brief for this phase does note that Starfleet doesn't really have much in the way of extra sized cargo transport outside of the Archer, which has been depleted by the war and is currently doing a lot of work in undoing the damages of the war (which means it's availability for Starfleet is going to be very low, even lower than it would normally be).
 
I'm seeing a lot of good arguments for why starfleet needs new/more/better cargo ships. The arguments for using the Federation class in that role are Very weak.
Mind you, the arguments in favour of shuttles aren't much better and the arguments against aren't completely without merit...
I mean, obviously if we were given the opportunity to design a cheap ship with great efficient cruise and a decent armament and a huge cargo bay it would be better. But that's probably not happening anytime soon, so the Federation can fill that niche.

Meanwhile the shuttlebay is a capability the Miranda already has, so we would need to spec into synergistic modules to not be completely redundant. But the obvious synergy is emergency response, which has the obvious problems of needing to take a broad spread of modules instead of specializing properly, which risks a low order size, which harms response time.

Besides, if we take the cargo bay we can also throw in even more engineering and build an Archer except it can actually defend itself on the border this time.
 
The Archer is gonna win on volume. The Federation is gonna win on delivery time and survive in riskier areas. These are different niches. The difference between air freight and a cargo ship. They complement each other. There's a reason I keep saying that the Federation is the Express Overnight Shipping.
 
And all the time spent racing racing through the interior is time spent having Mirandas patrol the border instead of this. :V
Not necessarily, thanks to it speed it's going to be fairly simple to assign a Federation to pick up a big bit of vital cargo that's needed in its patrol area/adjacent to it, have it make the delivery and then go about patrolling in the area until the next cargo task comes in (which is probably going to be at the end of the patrol, when it's being relieved by another cargo carrying Feddie).

Though as Sword notes most patrol missions are probably going to be Miranda ones anyways, since its kinda sat in an area it can effectively operate in once it gets there, unlike our endurance queen.
 
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