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Starfleet Design Bureau

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TortugaGreen said:
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.
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If we waste saucer space on cargo I'm going to burn the building down
The expanded shuttlebay presumably also comes with a certain amount of cargo capability attached - no sense advertising its possibility for maintenance and repair work if the ship can't carry spare parts.
 
Current tally
Adhoc vote count started by uju32 on Jan 15, 2025 at 2:03 AM, finished with 370 posts and 102 votes.
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Strunkriidiisk said:
If we waste saucer space on cargo I'm going to burn the building down
The expanded shuttlebay presumably also comes with a certain amount of cargo capability attached - no sense advertising its possibility for maintenance and repair work if the ship can't carry spare parts.
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Would it?

Sayle's pretty consistently declined to provide compromise options. There's no reason to believe that we'll get more than the usual basic cargo space for free. We're almost certainly going to have to take a saucer cargo bay because being able to carry things to emergencies is super important, even if we can't bring anything like bulk supplies or infrastructure.
 
KlavoHunter said:
Mirandas, responding? at a blistering Warp 7-at-best? lmao
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Doesn't matter if you're half as fast, if you start thrice as close.

There's gonna be a bajillion Mirandas kicking about. If a distress call goes out, odds are it's going to be a Miranda that's closest, and can respond soonest.

Besides, you want to flip that script, have Freddies respond and Mirandas running derlveries? at a blistering Warp 7-at-best?


(It just feels weird to me, to build a ship for cruising, and then outfit it for a mission of short dashes)
 
Lohjak said:
We're almost certainly going to have to take a saucer cargo bay because being able to carry things to emergencies is super important, even if we can't bring anything like bulk supplies or infrastructure.
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Trying to have our cake and eat it too re: this vote, by compromising on primary module space, is going to bite the design on the ass in the long run. The Fed needs to justify its existence both now and later using the Miranda as a measuring stick - if we go so hard on shuttles and cargo capacity, then ultimately we've just created a more expensive Miranda. And once the Miranda gets its TMP-era upgrades (the new phasers, rollbar torpedoes, better nacelles, and potential warp core/deflector efficiency upgrades), the Fed's various advantages will have had the gap closed. It'll still be faster, tougher, and have better phasers, but not nearly as much as now - and will Command bother to keep producing it in light of that? Will they be interested to produce a third more materials, a double-sized warp core, and twice as many nacelles per build for a ship that is no longer twice as good at the job as its competitor, or will they just consign the blueprint to our archives and build two more Mirandas?

The Fed will only achieve longevity by carving out its own niche. Emergency supply runs are not sufficient - the Miranda will be doing those long after the Fed is retired, at this rate. The Miranda has an expanded shuttlebay, cargo, and general science labs as modules - we will have one of the first two regardless of how this vote goes, and instead of wasting everyone's time cramming in the other we should instead look for synergies that are not being filled by existing hulls. Dilithium scanning (after the Keas removed theirs), Advanced Medical (Sickbay Expansion + Bioscience labs), and Pharmacology (Sickbay Expansion + Bioscience + Chemistry) are the ones we know about in that vein - there may well be others.
 
It'll be very good at short dashes, but it is probably kind of questionable to design it with a peacetime role of sitting around doing nothing and hoping that it's close enough to an emergency to respond in time. I'm not sure what else it'll be able to do, though? Presumably if we take shuttles, we're also taking some kind of triage deck and a small cargo bay? There's not a lot of mission profiles that really want to sit around the frontier near our colonies. Survey is the only thing that comes to mind.

Strunkriidiisk said:
Trying to have our cake and eat it too re: this vote, by compromising on primary module space, is going to bite the design on the ass in the long run. The Fed needs to justify its existence both now and later using the Miranda as a measuring stick - if we go so hard on shuttles and cargo capacity, then ultimately we've just created a more expensive Miranda. And once the Miranda gets its TMP-era upgrades (the new phasers, rollbar torpedoes, better nacelles, and potential warp core/deflector efficiency upgrades), the Fed's various advantages will have had the gap closed. It'll still be faster, tougher, and have better phasers, but not nearly as much as now - and will Command bother to keep producing it in light of that? Will they be interested to produce a third more materials, a double-sized warp core, and twice as many nacelles per build for a ship that is no longer twice as good at the job as its competitor, or will they just consign the blueprint to our archives and build two more Mirandas?

The Fed will only achieve longevity by carving out its own niche. Emergency supply runs are not sufficient - the Miranda will be doing those long after the Fed is retired, at this rate. The Miranda has an expanded shuttlebay, cargo, and general science labs as modules - we will have one of the first two regardless of how this vote goes, and instead of wasting everyone's time cramming in the other we should instead look for synergies that are not being filled by existing hulls. Dilithium scanning (after the Keas removed theirs), Advanced Medical (Sickbay Expansion + Bioscience labs), and Pharmacology (Sickbay Expansion + Bioscience + Chemistry) are the ones we know about in that vein - there may well be others.
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If we want it to be good at emergency response, which is the winning vote as of this moment, we're going to need to take a cargo bay. I doubt there's too many emergencies that won't be helped by being able to bring a bunch of stuff, and plenty of emergencies that probably boil down to "we need supplies".

Being a fast, heavily armored and heavily armed colony support ship would be a pretty clear niche to fill, but we seem to currently be leaning towards a fleet tender and emergency responder, so if that wins we probably end up with cargo, fabrication, medical, science, and maybe fuel? A bit scattershot and probably vulnerable to being replaced, but this class of ship was a dud in canon so we probably can't do worse than that.
 
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TeaMug said:
(It just feels weird to me, to build a ship for cruising, and then outfit it for a mission of short dashes)
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Max Cruise is "short dash" speeds for actually getting between stars, it's just limited by fuel consumption rather than hardware failure. Max Warp is a 12 hour sprint... that isn't actually fast enough to make it between stars in that timeframe.
 
[X] Expanded Cargo Bay
I take it, just because i hate Star trek shuttles, no other reason needed. (There are other reasons like wanting to see the face of the first pirate captain wanting to steal high value cargo and looking at a Federation instead of the usual Archer.)
 
[X] Expanded Shuttlebay

In any major fight we win, I expect the Federation to be left standing if anything is. Being able to help ensure other StarFleet ships aren't a right off, or that a civilian ship can recieve emergency repairs just feels useful for a ship that wants to be the Big Damn Hero or at the center of the action.
 
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