I would honestly vote for vertical nacelles and then to have a back box for a shuttle bay ANYWAY. I don't see any reason why we couldn't have a secondary hull just to have a secondary hull.
See, I largely agree with the sentiment here; heck, I was the one that pitched a vertical nacelle design to begin with, but not at the expense of semi-hard role-critical equipment. If we go to a vertical design we may as well pull a Stingray and round file the original design brief to build a patrol boat instead, because lacking shuttles will make survey work a poor use of the ship.
I mean, that's exactly the same reasoning I'm voting for the parallel arrangement, and why I pushed for doing the survey ship first at all. That way we could have better, more reliable systems for the workhorse cruiser and explorer. It's just that I think going for the vertical nacelles would push the prototype so far I think it would start to hurt the ship's actual role of a survey science ship rather than just a prototype testbed, while the parallel nacelles would still trial new prototypes in the field without doing so, even if they not quite pushing as far.
Or... Hear me out.
On survivability basis, maybe, but a faster cruise speed means it surveys more places faster and less mass means it's cheaper. We could in theory use the mass savings here to add on a shuttlebay ANYWAY... maybe with double secondary hulls top and bottom. Turn our survey ship into a tiny carrier. Give it a fast enough cruise speed and enough cargo capacity that it can serve as a backup transport.
Somehow, I don't think we're getting much in the way of secondary hull with the vertical arrangement.
We can probably just add a shuttlebay into the primary hull. It would just take up some internal space.
No. If you can't outrun something in warp you can't outrun them. They can hop into warp and jump in front of you. Sublight is for evading attacks and keeping your guns on target.
I mean, instead of the normally spindly arm holding the nacelle we have a thicker secondary hull where we put a shuttle bay. It should be doable.
I would suggest that "running away from hostile ships" is different than "running away from spacial anomalies". If the former is your goal then fair enough, but I think my question stands for the latter.
Can you actually say we're going to get a chance to add these double secondary hull you talked about to fit the shuttle bays or other equipment? Can we get @Sayle in here so they can answer whether or not they're going to even give us a vote to add secondary hulls for the sake of adding secondary hulls after this before we go and base our votes around the idea? Because in every other design both this question and in the previous IIRC whenever we've had a vote on nacelle configuration that has been immediately followed by either the impulse engines or the tactical systems, with no other chance to add hull extensions to the ship after the nacelles.
Description in the update proper pretty much implies no secondary hull, period, should the Vertical configuration be chosen.
