Yeah, that's fair. I was just thinking about our specialty ship already floating about, but what you said makes sense.
Yeah...it's unfortunate, because that plan honestly feels like a one-ship colony foundation builder.
Honestly, I like this loadout myself - it's well equipped for doing basically anything that can be thrown at it, and looking at the stats we've already got, that would give us 6 Engineering and 9 freaking Science. Which is very impressive.
I feel like the real killer for the maximum range explorer is that we'd have to give up Astrometrics for extra crew quarters. If it was something like Geology or even Biosciences that would have been a way easier sell.
Briefly checking back at the Thunderchild updates, we skipped picking out any auxiliary systems. I think what happened was that we automatically grabbed engineering and cargo instead of going through an auxiliary system voting process.
The choice between mapping and putting the crew through potential FOUR YEARS of no personal space definitely hurts.
Our main cargo ship is currently the Cygnus--by the way, the cargo bay option we chose for it was this:
We can potentially have this ship have twice the cargo capacity of our main workhorse ship lmao
[JK] Plan Too Much Science
Oh right, I forgot.
A smaller cargo bay would probably be valid on a shorter-range explorer, yes. On the other hand, losing specialized geology loses out on learning about exotic materials that might be mined on potential colony worlds, including but not limited to the dilithium that is so crucial to warp power and which is not found in abundance on core Federation worlds, and the search for which might guide its expansion.
