- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Generally votes where there's no budgetary implications tend to be a lot more chill. No one can accuse the other side of gold-plating/penny-wise-pound-foolishness that tends to get tempers up.
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TheShadowDeamon
Mighty Dragon
Star Trek: Shattered Universe - on the PS2. It's an ok fighter combat game, I mostly got it because it was star trek and it had Walter Koenig & George Takei do the voice acting for Chekov & Sulu.
- Location
- Somewhere and somewhen in time and space
The shuttlepod vs cargo pod vote is one of the closer votes I've seen on this thread.
Whichever choice wins, it'll be fun.
Whichever choice wins, it'll be fun.
Onionjones
The LCAF's best social general
- Location
- Tharkad
It's still tied - so that's about as close as it gets
[JK] Why not both?
Clearly we need a secondary secondary hull.
Or a cargo pod strapped to the underside of the roll bar.
Endorfinator
Awkwardly Social
- Location
- California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Let's make this a super!newton
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
[X] Expanded Shuttlebay
Yeah, I think either way the ship will be good at whatever we want it to do, but being able to carry almost anything is a lot more generally useful than emergency response. Of course you want both, but you only need emergency response when something has gone wrong whereas carrying things through space is the entire raison d'etre of starships.
- Location
- The Void
[X] Expanded Shuttlebay
Something I was thinking about re dilithiun prospecting, there is (theoretical) negative synergy if the ship doing it is very expensive (not saying don't choose it here!) but only an expensive ship can tick all the science boxes and defend itself adequately to avoid having weak ships or sending multiple ships to the same place to finish surveys.
Are we thinking of having general science explorers with heavy defenses and specialist followup survey ships, or just general full science and survey cruisers going forwards?
Because I'm very keen to get some ships with dilithium prospecting deployed. We need those sweet strategic resources if we're going to grow enough to neutralize the Klingons' numerical advantage.
Edit: a strategy we could employ, is make very, very big science ships, give them light shields but 2x fore and aft type 4s, 6x type5 phasers and 1/2 impulse drives. That way they're ok durability by grace of mass, can participate in fleet actions but stay very cheap. We can saturate our borders with powerful science and survey ships that are very cheap but can dish out nasty damage as a swarm and have high durability relative to cost. They can double as patrol cruisers since we'll have so many hanging around.
Are we thinking of having general science explorers with heavy defenses and specialist followup survey ships, or just general full science and survey cruisers going forwards?
Because I'm very keen to get some ships with dilithium prospecting deployed. We need those sweet strategic resources if we're going to grow enough to neutralize the Klingons' numerical advantage.
Edit: a strategy we could employ, is make very, very big science ships, give them light shields but 2x fore and aft type 4s, 6x type5 phasers and 1/2 impulse drives. That way they're ok durability by grace of mass, can participate in fleet actions but stay very cheap. We can saturate our borders with powerful science and survey ships that are very cheap but can dish out nasty damage as a swarm and have high durability relative to cost. They can double as patrol cruisers since we'll have so many hanging around.
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The problem with trying to saturate our borders with survey cruisers is that Starfleet just doesn't seem to like ordering them. The Attenborough had 6 built, 10 if you include the variant, while the Kea had 12 and the Saladin 16. Meanwhile they built 30 Newtons and forty Archers. I'm pretty sure Starfleet has produced more Archers than every single survey ship combined.
So if we want a lot of orders, we should probably go for logistics.
Onionjones
The LCAF's best social general
- Location
- Tharkad
to be fair most of those survey ships didn't have much in the way of defenses so their probably not really the best to have on the border
except for the Saladin and that was pretty bad everywhere else
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/They
[X] Expanded Cargo Bay
Miranda has shuttles covered. Don't duplicate a capability that already exists, especially when you know there's demand for fast, defensible cargo transit.
Like it's real simple. You want Starfleet to order more of these instead of just more Mirandas? Make it good at something the Miranda isn't.
Miranda has shuttles covered. Don't duplicate a capability that already exists, especially when you know there's demand for fast, defensible cargo transit.
Like it's real simple. You want Starfleet to order more of these instead of just more Mirandas? Make it good at something the Miranda isn't.
Yeah, but neither does the Archer and that's far and away the most successful class of ships we've designed yet. It just doesn't seem like Starfleet needs as many science ships as they do logistics.
Which isn't that surprising. Explorers are only going to discover so many planets that need to be surveyed, but moving stuff around better and faster will always be in demand.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The Miranda is a generic generalist that only specializes in being cheap. Anything else this ship specializes at is something the Miranda isn't doing. Even the extended shuttlebay is going to give us more shuttles and functionality than the Miranda's shuttlebay has, on account of how much bigger our engineering hull is. Neither option here is redundant.
Onionjones
The LCAF's best social general
- Location
- Tharkad
I mean the archer shouldn't really be on the border like a survey ship so that works better I think
so it doesn't need as much defensive rating unlike a survey ship which would likely be on the border
so I'd say that's probably the capability the survey ships have been missing until now that has prevented large orders
After all we know that the main bottleneck is resources here - so survey ships definitely have a place
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The Saladin was a survey ship with decent tactical, and it didn't see an especially large order size. The only ships with really standout orders are the Newton, which was built en-masse as a generalist cruiser for tactical and engineering use, and the Archer, which is the single most successful ship in the history of Starfleet. Starfleet loves logistics.
Besides, if you build a large ship that goes out to the frontier with a bunch of science equipment and some engineering for sustain, you've just built an explorer, and it's going to be big enough that you might as well buy the weapons and shields too.
EDIT: It also seems like we're more or less deciding between building a giant newton or a heavily armed archer here. Shuttles will steer us towards response, which means we'll be doing the Newton thing, whereas cargo will steer us towards an engineering focus.
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Onionjones
The LCAF's best social general
- Location
- Tharkad
but the Saladin only had a science rating of C- when it came out and was classified as a tactical cruiser by the time of the 4 years war
so is it really a survey ship?
it defiantly didn't have the science rating required for the job - it only had the tactical rating
I mean, Starfleet used it for surveys so...
It's pretty much what the proposal of a large cheap cruiser with some survey gear and okay tactical is? We'd be able to stick a lot more science in now because our ships are getting bigger, but it's the same fundamental idea. Unfortunately it would be competing with Miranda for the position of cheap tactical bulk.
Survey is probably another thing we could spec this ship into, but I feel like we'd get even fewer orders than giant newton would. At least giant newton frees up a few Mirandas from patrol duty.