That isn't the same as needing a torpedo launcher to launch probes, though, yeah?
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Yes. Just because it has a safer job doesn't mean it's never going to be in danger.
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And also, just from a meta perspective, Starfleet science ships having a surprisingly nasty bite is a long tradition, just like the multirole exploration cruisers that can hand other people's dedicated battleships their own heads.
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Regardless of armament, what I ultimately want for this survey ship is a shuttle pod bay for away teams and double down on SCIENCE.
I think when you're talking about your self-defense city destroying nuclear missile launcher you're stretching the concept of defensive armament just a little bit.
The problem there is, especially with later photon torpedoes which are verifiably using antimatter engines for propulsion, that any such probe system would either need to be shoved out an airlock or shuttlebay by some hapless ensign, or need a dedicated launch system. And if we're going to be using a dedicated launch system for probes anyways, we might as well design for the possibility of needing to fire things that go boom out of the launcher and just use a standard torpedo tube - which would also allow us to re-use a photonic torpedo's propulsion and guidance systems as a payload bus for the probe in question, thus negating the need to carry entirely separate probe casings (ie., make the photonic torpedoes modular, and swap the warhead module for dedicated sensor packages or other payloads as needed for a given survey to turn them into probes, instead of needing to carry separate torpedoes and probes).
Worth noting that atomic torpedoes/photonic torpedoes, while capable of destroying cities in a single shot, are only single shot/single kill weapons against unshielded spacecraft - and considering how ubiquitous shields are in the rest of the galaxy, it's safer to assume any given hostile ship will have shields than it is to assume that they won't. And, as I've mentioned further up the thread, there are legitimate non-combat applications for large quantities of explosives, scientific and otherwise.
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I'd be down to put the minimum number of phasers offered on this, maybe not even a prototype if we have one depending on how many others we've manage to fit in by that point. Prototype weapons are one of the few things I'd be willing to trial on the Utility Cruiser if we're doing that next.
There's only one non-science thing I'm even thinking of trying to fit on this though, and that's a shuttlebay (which counts toward Engineering IIRC). Mostly to more easily put an away team on a planet's surface to grab samples to bring back an analyze in the ship labs if they aren't using the transporters for whatever reason. Maybe they could do some parallax stuff with a shuttle a few hundred kilometers to the side of the survey ship or something too. With this not being for construction and meant to stay within the Federation it's pretty much always going to be near a dock it can get serviced at, so I've got no desire to throw a workshop like one the NX has on this. And if it needs to move anything around that can't be stored in whatever sample containment it has in the labs, just get a cargo ship out there to grab it, don't throw a big empty box of a cargo bay into this.
There's only one non-science thing I'm even thinking of trying to fit on this though, and that's a shuttlebay (which counts toward Engineering IIRC). Mostly to more easily put an away team on a planet's surface to grab samples to bring back an analyze in the ship labs if they aren't using the transporters for whatever reason. Maybe they could do some parallax stuff with a shuttle a few hundred kilometers to the side of the survey ship or something too. With this not being for construction and meant to stay within the Federation it's pretty much always going to be near a dock it can get serviced at, so I've got no desire to throw a workshop like one the NX has on this. And if it needs to move anything around that can't be stored in whatever sample containment it has in the labs, just get a cargo ship out there to grab it, don't throw a big empty box of a cargo bay into this.
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Oh yeah we definitely want some shuttles on this thing, no question.
And also, the Trekverse is not safe. especially in the c irrent, pre Kirk Early Federation era. It's a wild, dangerous galaxy out there, and this is one of the ships explicitly poking it with a stick. Having reasonable combat ability is just common sense.
Basically this.
And also, the Trekverse is not safe. especially in the c irrent, pre Kirk Early Federation era. It's a wild, dangerous galaxy out there, and this is one of the ships explicitly poking it with a stick. Having reasonable combat ability is just common sense.
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Jensaarai
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That can apply just as much to our "nuclear-force disrupting particle beams." In the day and age of Star Trek, that's what counts as self-defense for starships.
edit; it's also not a nuclear missile launcher anymore... it launches antimatter missiles now
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You don't need a launcher designed to deliver explosions at combat-effective ranges and against combat countermeasures to do some local geographic remodeling. Also, remember that you're still putting a single launcher on a survey ship. Token armament can make you just confident enough to take a fight you will probably lose without actually giving you enough oomph to win that fight. Alternatively, you're going to end up with the absolute same scope creep issue.
Just make a dedicated escort ship next and assign one or two to surveyors if you think they're going to be at risk.
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Not really? Space isn't a safe place. Even if we only send these ships into systems that the Federation has influence over, there is still a chance it could be attacked by pirates, raiders, or something else. It isn't going to be able to just run away from everything every time.
I think it says something when city destroying nuclear missile launchers are considered standard armament for most starships, no matter what job they have.
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This is the merchant freighter having a half dozen five pounders a-broadside, MJ, it's not like we're arguing for an Akira's dozen launchers.
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Photonic torpedoes may be a WMD on a planetary scale. That said... One. Single. Tube. Does not a warship make. This thing won't out-tech an Oberth.
There is a simple and easy solution for this. It's called "design an escort ship."
Like, in SFB, where pirates, raiders, and "something else" show up all the time, survey ships are not armed with a plethora of photons and phasers, they have like, a couple of defensive phasers to shoot down missiles and that's it lmao. They don't put photons on non-military ships, and this is an explicitly more militarized Federation than the standard ST canon.
As a bonus, if your escort ship is fast, well-armed, and affordable (because it's designed as a primary combatant and doesn't expend resources on other things) it's also useful if you need to fight a defensive war.
Hell, if the hullform and baseline systems for the survey ship turn out to be pretty good, you could make a dedicated warship variant on the same hull, if necessary, which would also be a better solution than scope-creeping your non-hostile-environment surveyor into another do-everything-mobile.
Jensaarai
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I think any such escort or rapid response starship will likely be the future utility cruiser that we might be making after this one is done.
I don't know what SFB is, but a single torpedo launcher isn't a bad thing lol. And it's certainly doesn't count as a "plethora."
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That is dependant on if we will even have the industry to design and build a new escort ship on top of these new survey ships, the next generation explorer and the utility cruiser.
Or if we use the utility cruiser for this role, that we build enough of them to escort the survey ships and do all the other jobs they are supposed to do as well.
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BungieONI
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I do understand the idea to make something that is able to launch antimatter warhead torpedoes and survey probes. However, these are two different systems with completely different launch profiles and engineering requirements and that sounds like trying to invent a prototype on the spot for this design that will be rather more complicated than necessary to do either job.
The only thing this ship needs in launcher terms is a probe launcher, which Sayle will probably offer as an optional slot. Trek is dangerous, but you don't need to have a fleet of survey ships armed with antimatter torpedoes to keep them safe.
E: Among other things, I can just point at the Skates, which will probably be close to a number of systems being surveyed. A Skate is at least able enough to go to a system next door to protect a survey crew while a science outpost is set up.
The only thing this ship needs in launcher terms is a probe launcher, which Sayle will probably offer as an optional slot. Trek is dangerous, but you don't need to have a fleet of survey ships armed with antimatter torpedoes to keep them safe.
E: Among other things, I can just point at the Skates, which will probably be close to a number of systems being surveyed. A Skate is at least able enough to go to a system next door to protect a survey crew while a science outpost is set up.
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2 to 3 phaser banks + 1 torpedo launcher is fine on a survey ship. I want the utility cruiser to be one step more heavily armed. The explorer even more
Jensaarai
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The thought for using the same launcher for both torpedoes and probes draws mainly from TNG and on, where Starfleet just uses normal torpedo casings filled with whatever sensor equipment they want, rather than antimatter warheads.
I think people should consider designing a small combatant first, to test-drive your new paradigm-shifting technologies, before making the be-good-at-everything-boat. There is significant value in having a small dedicated combatant, the least of which is that it's cheap to run in peacetime and you can have a lot of them, while they can still be useful in wartime as parts of fleet actions.
If you abjectly refuse to design and construct small combatants to fill escort roles, you're going to be creating a situation where firepower is going to be locked up in civilian ships you can't risk in military actions, and at this point people should worry about that hypothetical conflict. Meanwhile, having small combatants means you can reassign firepower and combat effectiveness more flexibly than having "self-escorting" vessels.
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The Skate-Class then? We already made that.
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And how much effort does tying up this escort, which you also need to design, build, and crew, babysitting this effectively helpless target tie up, instead of a single ship that can at least shoot back enough to run, thereby getting itself out of trouble, cost?
And you also have to consider the era; this isn't the Picard era, with a literal generation of peace and the Federation as a 300 pound gorilla stabilizing things, this is the wild and wooly pre-Kirk era with the Federation having literally just started out. It's the wild west out there, and going around unarmed, or poorly armed, is asking to get shot. A single torpedo launcher is perfectly reasonable for a ship of this size, role, and era.
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I don't think most ships that Starfleet operates would count as civilian.
And we've hashed out this "dedicated design/multi-role" debate several times now, and it generally tips in the favor of multi-role being better than dedicated. I think the Skate might have actually been the first design that was intended as nothing but a warship.
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Maybe it should be separate, but it very explicitly is not in Star Trek. Torpedo launchers are used to launch probes (as well as caskets) on a regular basis, it's their second use point, and can be seen repeatedly in the show. In any case, I absolutely do not think that an armament that barely exceeds that of the Zheng He is a particularly combative survey ship, just one that is vaguely capable of defending itself against marauders. While perhaps operating in groups with small escorts would be better, Starfleet right now absolutely does not have the ships necessary to do that, so a very limited defensive armament is perfectly reasonable. The Skate is not a good ship to point to, because this craft is going to be something like 3 times faster and several times larger.
As to SFB, which MJ12 brought up, I would honestly argue that the point-defense limited armament of survey ships in that universe is a sign of increased militarization, and not the opposite. It's a war game setting where regular Starfleet vessels aren't doing all the exploring they really do, and where there's a lot more escorts around.
Yes, and now we have shields and phasers and things, so now we need to make a better Skate.
Well, more accurately a better Stingray, since the Skate is a short-legged war frigate, and the Stingray is a proper light cruiser patrol ship.