The vote would be meaningless if the saucer cargo or shuttles had the same function. Here we can either have a really big cargo bay, or a bunch of shuttles. Presumably whatever we can squeeze into the saucer will be lower capability.
We cannot put shuttles in the saucer, probably. We can, however, get somewhat lower capability but still very large by starfleet standards cargo bays in the saucer. I'm not convinced that the extra capacity lost in engineering cargo>saucer cargo is more impactful than more shuttles.
For reference, here's the Federation next to the Selachii. Few components are the same, but parts of the thruster and the torpedo magazine are the same size.
Honestly it'd be cool if we could design a a ship combo where one or two Selachii sized destroyer/frigates could latch onto a Feddie sized heavy cruiser. Like Lampries.
The loss is in the specialty cargo that the smaller bay won't be able to fit, including fuel and other volatile materials as well as infrastructure or components that are transported whole, as opposed to simply having more shuttles.
Probably no point in that
Two Federation nacelles weigh 40 ktons.
Mass rework was right before the Kea, wasn't it?
Mirandas, responding? at a blistering Warp 7-at-best? lmao
The point of the Miranda is that they are cheep enough that they can be everywhere through over-production. It might not be able to race from one end of the Federation to the other as fast as other ships, but who cares? There are already a half dozen of the ships on the other side. It can respond by just having one close-enough. We're going to make plenty of the things over the next century after all.
Well, no. Our engineering assets are badly overstretched and only the maximum engineering orbs are allowing the Federation to avoid crash building more Newtons. Presumably the Miranda will help, but really we're deciding how much of the engineering pie we're going to get.
Fire ships were a real thing
