Yeah, but we did an entire design line without making anything to take it's place. The Skate is old enough now that even two generations old Birds of Prey would probably laugh at her. Seeing as how ships are going up a size or so about now, we could probably get a successor with a bit more room - maybe even enough to give her some utility without compromising her combat ability, to appease the Multirole lobby.
Yeah, Copernicus can do a lot of things. Hell if I'm reading it right she carries three times as much cargo as a Cygnus, and the Cygnus has cargo carrying as one of it's main jobs!
Twice as much, we took the Large Cargo Bay option which gives 3 cargo for Khufu/Cygnus and the large Cargo Bay option that is winning for Copernicus gives 6 cargo. Which means yes, it really is going to be 2 Cygnus and a Curiosity all in one ship, both for capabilities and combat.
Tactically what you want is a ship with a truly absurd maneuverability and an extremely heavy alpha strike. Basically you want to be able to spin like a top and point your photon torpedoes at the enemy ship all between the time they uncloak and can raise their shields.
You joke, but picture what an actual updates Skate could do. It's 20% lighter with upgraded thrusters and photon torpedoes, phasors, and shields.So either an updated skate or an updated thunderchild
Well at least we'd probably want to size up the hull to about the range of the Cygnus' primary if the idea is to stick in All the torpedoes. The Skate struggled to mount even two tubes of photonic, and the assemblages for photon torpedoes are explicitly larger.
Yeah, but that comes out as mounting 1 of them for every 2 photonic torpedo bays and still ending up with more damage. I think an upgrades skate would be able to mount a single forward photon torpedo tube and do 18 damage in an alpha strike just off that 1 torpedo. Not bad at all for such a tiny thing.
If we need to crash-build something Right The Hell Now, sure. Sizing the theoretical ship up though would also potentially let us put modules for sensors and the like in so that she's less of a one-trick pony, not to mention improving crew comfort - the Skate IIRC was borderline inhospitable and if we were to design a dedicated anti-cloak patroller we'd want to keep the crew from mutinying on longer patrols, especially along the Neutral Zone.
...*goes and rechecks some old posts and does some math*
With a wingtip mount we have basically recreated Birds of Prey layout from first principles.
With cloaked ships being slower to warp than non, we might be able to get away with the slower warp of a single nacelle.
I mean, the Cygnus is basically the picture perfect tender vessel for a neo-Skate attack force.
Christ Allmighty thats a hell of a thrust ratio.
🤔Interesting. Yeah, maybe so. Hmmmm.
Yeah, the hypothetical refit of the existing Skate hulls would probably skip the Warp upgrade entirely in favor of shields+impulse thruster+weapons; the modern warp drive won't fit and they don't have the supply range to need the speed anyway.
Yeah, but since we're not worried about upward mobility via murder, we don't have to do the otherwise-really-really-stupid long skinny neck 😂
Man, I gotta admit, I do kinda want to see some old Skates get Type-2 Impulse Thrusters bolted in and weapons stripped out for a precision acrobatic demonstration team along the lines of the Thunderbirds or Blue Angels. Maybe even one per Federation member, with the expectation being that each new species to joining the Federation will offer their most talented pilots to provide an additional crew.
I'd tend to favor something about half that size, actually; iirc maneuverability caps at Very High if you're at or above 2:1 thrust ratio per WoG, so a debugged Type-2 would give us maximum maneuverability up to 75kt after EC discount, or 93.75kt base size. A 73kt arrowhead (about 22% larger than the Skate, and with a tremendous percentage of its internal volume freed up by not running internal nacelles) could easily run normal-Starfleet-vessel levels of supply endurance, ~1.3x cruising range on the default single antimatter pod (-0.4WF cruise but half consumption from single nacelle), two photon torpedoes and about 6 phasers, and still reasonably expect two small aux slots for expanded sensor capabilities and comfy crew quarters (the latter helped by having a quite small crew).
Takes upgrades state... Adds a quad nacelle sprint layout. Give it an absurd sprint speed.
