One factoid I think is also worth remembering:
Pharos stations are not built to sustain more than a fraction of the navy's fuel needs at a time
In the event of a crisis or war that pulls ships from all across the Federation and into 1-2 sectors like clowns piling into a clown car, having all the Feddies refuel in their home sectors before heading out vastly simplifies local Starfleet logistics by freeing up local tankage for the shorter-legged Mirandas
Which means we dont have to wait for Starfleet Logistics to ramp up our op-tempo; we can go from 0 to 100 real quick
It makes for a much nimbler and responsive organization
Incidentally, looking at the diagram I think we've got enough room for perhaps 2-3 modules after this.
Kea had 7 modules
So Im assuming we have at least 5 more
At this point I'm wondering why we even bothered building the Pharos stations.
Repairs.
The Pharos-series are not equipped for full-up shipyards, but we did specifically kit them out with the docks and fabrication modules for the maintenance and repair of non-critical ship systems.
Logistics is not just refuelling antimatter, its repairing battle damage and picking up ammunition(torpedo casings)
And the Attenboroghs, Mirandas, Archers, Newtons and Keas certainly benefit from the fuelling capacity even when the Feddies dont
Let me ask you something: are you expecting a Fed to stay out in the sticks for its entire fuel lifetime at a time (i.e. six months or a year) without coming back for a resupply of, say, cargo? Or even just for shore leave? Y'know, places where it's likely they can get a fuel top-off as well? A year's supply of antimatter is excessive if the ship is nearly always within 1 month or less of a refuelling site. Having the ability to sprint clear across our territory twice is great, but how often is that going to be useful? If the ship would be required to run across the whole Federation to deal with a crisis, then clearly A) it's not that time-sensitive, or B) there's almost certainly another ship closer - and if there isn't, that's a failure of Command to properly allocate responders, not a failure of the ship itself.
If the Federation is spending so much time on the border with this range maybe it'd be a good idea to have the Federation with 2 crews like SSBNs
I think one mistake being made is assuming that fuel consumption is constant, and that you wont burn significantly more fuel at Sprint vs when you're at Max Cruise vs Efficient Cruise
Its quite plausible for a Feddie at max cruise to burn a year's worth of fuel much faster than envisioned
And as for duration on station? In the TNG episode Pen Pals, Picard and his crew had been on one uninterrupted science mission in range of a single planet for several months, after spending an indeterminate amount of time examining other exploded planets in the sector; long enough for Data to strike up an eight week old friendship with a child over radio
Then there's RL examples
The aircraft carrier USS Hornet(CV-12) spent 495 consecutive days at sea during WW2 - 18 months
In 2020 during COVID, USS Stout spent 215 continuous days at sea - 7 months
True. Whether it's significantly more per distance covered since Max Cruise is sustainable is one of the big question marks to me. Another is how much an AM bladder can hold. If it's less than 50 LY for a Excalibur then extending the Federation's range really doesn't get you much. If it's over 100LY then it could be more useful.
It does open possibilities for a buddy raid instead of some extended Excalibur commerce raiding. That's a threat that does need to be honored.
It sucks that we'll not pursue any scanning synergies though. Getting another computer core upgrade or an advanced dilithium lab type that gave us a bonus would have been neat and felt like we were actively working to help deal with the crunch we have around strategic materials.
We should have a bunch of modules to go
Do we? Are any Sagarmatha-class ships still functional? The only ship that's even arguably capable of exploration would be the Excalibur-class, and I hate to burst your bubble but it ain't exactly science-focused. It can do some astronomy and astrogation, that's about it.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that we spec the Federation-class heavily into science. I think a pharmacology suite for researching and distributing vaccines and cures out on the frontier would be amazing, but I don't think it'd necessarily be a great idea to try to turn it into a science ship.
The 9x Keas are in service for the next 40 years, and have their science modules refit and upgraded
There are also 6/15 Saladins that survived the War, but they dont get refit and retire in 2271
We are short on dilithium scanning ships, but more general Science does exist, if not to my level of comfort as a Science stan
