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Starfleet Ship Design Bureau ("To Boldly Go...")

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sunrise said:
For the cruiser design made me think about why are where going for cruisers.
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They can operate as flagships that we won't be asked to send out on Five Year Missions.

Goat said:
For the same weight, comparing a cruiser and a capital, my understanding is that typically the cruiser will have more stats and crew, but lower SR and build time.
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Under certain conditions, the increased crew numbers can confer additional benefits. During the Anti-Syndicate campaign, ships were providing away teams as a function of their enlisted crew; our cruisers have more enlisted crew than our frigates, so they were able to provide more boots on the ground. The larger crew pool also makes them more resistant to being mission-killed by crew casualties during a fleet combat.
 
The main reason seems to me to reduce build time to below three years. This would allow a two year build time after the heavy industry and the upcoming single quarter discounts are adopted, or the minimum peacetime build time of six quarters after all tech tree discounts if they stack with heavy industry. This cannot be accomplished on an explorer.
 
Enerael said:
Would you elaborate on why that is so important? Do we need to compensate for too few berths? I thought that we have plenty of those.

Also, that would burn crew like crazy... do we really have enough intake?
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I would reply with a question: do you think we have enough ships? Our total throughput has yet to catch our demand and we've been producing ships constantly since the biophage. Furthermore, a ship a year earlier is a full year of coverage that an extra berth does not provide. If we had this entire year's production available last year would we have lost the Dawiar? If we had a previous year's a year early would we have lost the Kumari? Time is by far and away the most precious resource we have, and an increased crew rate hardly matters in comparison. Right now we are building a steady crew surplus, and if we need more income that is what academy expansions are for. We can't buy more time. Even commissioning berths doesn't do that. Besides, the crew efficiency per year is worse on 3.5y and 4y heavy cruisers, and not much worse than our new frigates overall. And we have a massive refit program of three classes to complete in the same timeline, which greatly changes the resource availability compared to full new hull production. I don't anticipate a resource/ crew shortfall due to these refits (especially crew) and I do anticipate a massive berth shortage on a scale greater than we've ever seen before.

Finally, why not both? The limits of our production ability don't prevent us from buying berths and finishing ships earlier in those berths. I would rather complete a ship a year early and leave the berth idle for the entire extra year, just as an example, than not have that ship at all for that year or have a few stats on that ship when it does launch.
 
Steven Kodaly said:
They can operate as flagships that we won't be asked to send out on Five Year Missions.
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If we put regular crew in them and not EC crew we will not be asked to send them on Five year missions, and i think sending them on a 5 year mission might be better once we have enough task force leaders, 5YM ships get more event rolls and this ship only uses 4/4/4 crew. But that all depends on if we want to spend the PP and the use of a team to research a light cruiser.
 
There's a reason we build our largest and best for FYMs. Difficulty can and likely will scale up. By the mid-30s, a light explorer will likely not be a good fit for FYMs.
 
Steven Kodaly said:
They can operate as flagships that we won't be asked to send out on Five Year Missions.
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? We dont get asked, we do as many FYMs as our EC crew intake allows.

If we could do more, we would happily do so, FYMs are the main ways of expanding our income.

sunrise said:
If we put regular crew in them and not EC crew we will not be asked to send them on Five year missions, and i think sending them on a 5 year mission might be better once we have enough task force leaders, 5YM ships get more event rolls and this ship only uses 4/4/4 crew. But that all depends on if we want to spend the PP and the use of a team to research a light cruiser.
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I... fail to comprehend this paragraph, except for the bit about EC crew.
 
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Enerael said:
? We dont get asked, we do as many FYMs as our EC crew intake allows.
If we could do more, we would happily do so, FYMs are the main ways of expanding our income.
I... fail to comprehend this paragraph, except for the bit about EC crew.
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Reading it again i am realizing i left some of the things i was thinking out of that post, so lets try that again.
If we decide to build light explorers i see their role in our fleet as leaders the smaller taskforces where there are no Excelsior/Ambassador availble.
They have better stats then an Excelsior-A and we can use the first few on 5YM if allowed where the low crew of 4/4/4 allows us more ships per EC crew.
The main drawback of adding a light explorer to our fleet is the PP cost of getting the design approved and the tech team needed to research it.
I think it might be worth building them in limited numbers as we can build the prototype + one wave before the cruiser prototype is ready.
Afterwards production will slow down as most of 2Mt yards will be used for the new cruiser.
I am not sure what the actual build times will be by the time we start the wave, between the heavy industry bonuses, the -1Qt from arsenal of liberty and possibly a bonus from Rapid Explorer Construction.
Do you think this ship would be something the federation members that can not afford a ambassador/only have 2mt yards would want as a explorer/flagship?
 
I think the plan is to replace our Excelsior EC ships with Ambassadors, freeing them to be sector flagships and/or TF leaders. There's a limit to how many FYMs we can run. (Mostly because the QMs already invest their time heavily into writing the many FYM logs, but there's plenty of fluff reasons we can come up with too.) No mass-producing dozens of ships for the EC to use.
 
I can see them removing the EC recruitment drives from the snakepit to reduce the amount of EC crew and reduce the amount of 5YM missions that way.
 
sunrise said:
If we decide to build light explorers i see their role in our fleet as leaders the smaller taskforces where there are no Excelsior/Ambassador availble.
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I do not. Cruisers can lead TFs just fine too. LEs role would primarily be high end generalist response and heavy metal combat phase. We do not need more then 5 or so TF leaders, asnd there are no bonuses to a ships performance when it leads a TF as far as I know. So long as we have a Rennie to spare, TF leadership is not a concern.

sunrise said:
They have better stats then an Excelsior-A and we can use the first few on 5YM if allowed where the low crew of 4/4/4 allows us more ships per EC crew
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What we want is a cheaper Excelsior, not a better one. The benefits of 7+ statlines are currently, to our knowledge, minimal, outside of certain niches where we would use the Ambassadors anyway.

If I were the GMs, I would make the EC benefit more from high stat ships then low crew ones, for numerous reasons.

sunrise said:
I think it might be worth building them in limited numbers as we can build the prototype + one wave before the cruiser prototype is ready.
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Why? The only reason I can see for building same tech level HCs and LEs is if we needed many more hulls for the heavy metal phase, and I am pretty sure that we do not.

sunrise said:
Do you think this ship would be something the federation members that can not afford a ambassador/only have 2mt yards would want as a explorer/flagship?
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Why wouldnt they build the HC for a flagship? As for an explorer, they will have to do with an Excelsior for now. Not worth it to design a ship for that alone, Excelsiors are not that bad.
 
Looking at the years techs finish i think we can build a single wave of Light explorers before the we can start on the cruisers(We want at least some of the cruiser construction tech before starting on it and we have completed the explorer tech).
I can try to design version with smaller frames and lower stats and a shorter buildtime, what kind of tradeoff would you like to see for the LE?
A 3 year build time with 1-2 lower C, S and L is probably possible.

Edit a fast version can be optimized more:
C[6.30] S[7.07] H[4.22] L[6.09] P[9.25] D[7.12] | [165.74]br [129.15]sr | O[3.53] E[3.72] T[3.33] | [3 ]years
Power[205.37/215.29] Internal[1605.35/1800.00] Tactical[268.50/270.00] Operations[445.00/450.00] Hull[167.00/180.00] Engineering[254.75/270.00] Warp Core[200.10/270.00]

Going to a 2,5 year by all small subframes gives:
C[5.16] S[5.95] H[4.41] L[6.09] P[4.05] D[6.96] | [147.50]br [108.51]sr | O[3.30] E[4.06] T[3.81] | [2 6/12]years
Power[182.44/215.29] Internal[1422.95/1800.00] Tactical[264.00/270.00] Operations[258.10/270.00] Hull[176.00/180.00] Engineering[254.75/270.00] Warp Core[200.10/270.00]
 
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With the HC project we have very little use for a LE at this time.

sunrise said:
C[6.30] S[7.07] H[4.22] L[6.09] P[9.25] D[7.12] | [165.74]br [129.15]sr | O[3.53] E[3.72] T[3.33] | [3 ]years
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The HC is significantly more capable then this. I wouldnt build an explorer without H5 at least at our tech level.

sunrise said:
C[5.16] S[5.95] H[4.41] L[6.09] P[4.05] D[6.96] | [147.50]br [108.51]sr | O[3.30] E[4.06] T[3.81] | [2 6/12]years
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This is the Rennie A in an explorer frame. Nope
 
If we were going to build both a LE and HC, I'd want to go for a HiLo mix. Fast build lower stat HC, slower build high stat LE.
 
Forgothrax said:
If we were going to build both a LE and HC, I'd want to go for a HiLo mix. Fast build lower stat HC, slower build high stat LE.
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That would make it C, not HC :). Also, there wouldnt be much difference between that and Rennie A I think.

High stat (L)E is unnecessary as I understand it. We need cheaper Excelsiors, not better ones, thats what the Ambies are for.
 
I'd caution against assuming all-7s are going to be good enough when we know for the QMs have all but confirmed that event difficulty is rising in some way.

I'd also like to remind people that "explorer" does not necessarily mean "sent on FYM". It means they're capable of doing so, but in practice the majority of them do not. They instead garrison our sectors and head TFs and otherwise act as our capital ships.

Anyway, I'm just not seeing much room in our fleet composition for both HC and LE in the same tonnage during the 2330s. Even disregarding all the role issues*, with near same stat lines, the shorter build times of HCs is their killer feature. If I had to choose between an HC that would be out a a couple quarters earlier (several for the prototype) vs a 5pp reward and +1 response bonus, I'd probably choose the former. SR vs crew trade-off is hard to gauge that far into the future, but shorter build times is always better.

* Some are claiming that the QMs have vetoed explorers in vanguard, but I can't find any source on that. If you do have a source, please quote it.
 
We are currently using our 2mt yards to build keplers/rennies the LE can be build 3 years sooner as the HC and that would allow us to build one wave of them while we wait for the cruiser prototype to finish.
Building 2 waves of them delays the cruiser project enough that it can be build with an isolinniar core + other tech researched in those 3 years to reduce its subframe size while maintaining its stats or have a higher stat version.

Forgothrax said:
Forgocruise | Evasion Chance: 15.72% Warp Core Breach Chance: 36.50% | Parts: Starfleet Forgo 4 (2/17/2018, 6:30:11 PM)
C[8.03] S[8.00] H[4.04] L[8.01] P[8.02] D[6.86] | [157.97]br [119.51]sr | O[3.71] E[4.74] T[3.78] | [3 6/12]years
Power[177.78/179.00] Internal[1499.65/1500.00]Tactical[321.50/450.00]Operations[447.25/450.00] Hull[110.00/225.00]Engineering[219.00/450.00] Warp Core[171.90/225.00]
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sunrise said:
H5 version
C[8.10] S[8.04] H[5.03] L[8.12] P[8.20] D[8.64] | [182.38]br [138.90]sr | O[3.64] E[3.96] T[3.15] | [3 6/12]years
Power[208.36/229.94] Internal[1771.85/1800.00] Tactical[359.25/360.00] Operations[436.75/450.00] Hull[176.00/180.00] Engineering[324.75/360.00] Warp Core[205.10/360.00]
Might get D9 if upgraded to T4 replicators
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Enerael said:
That would make it C, not HC :). Also, there wouldnt be much difference between that and Rennie A I think.

High stat (L)E is unnecessary as I understand it. We need cheaper Excelsiors, not better ones, thats what the Ambies are for.
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I'll finish tuning later, but I'm fairly certain I can get close to all-7s H5 on a 1500kt 4/5/4 cruiser with 3yr build time costing 115SR. In the event of war we can build those as our cruiser at the minimum build time (-3Q HIP or Rapid Cruiser Production, -1Q Arsenal of Liberty, the rest gets chopped by wartime production). We could then build a LE with higher stats that still wouldn't cost anywhere near an Ambie.
 
Briefvoice said:
But surely not to the level that a 7 in a stat is insufficient! That would be crazy; frigates would be unable to accomplish anything.
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I've already discussed a few times how I envision this happening without screwing over Mirandas. Specifically, that additional higher difficulty events will be added to the event distribution, balanced such that either:
a) have response DCs are comparable to their success DCs to preclude lowly ships from responding; or
b) have low response DCs yet failures are not that painful (i.e. usually no penalty at all)
...and frigates and such will still be able to support event responses throughout, while still being able to respond singly to the lower DC events.

Anyway, we're talking about designs that will come to fruition a decade from now, so who knows what the average event difficulties will look like.
 
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lbmaian said:
I'd caution against assuming all-7s are going to be good enough when we know for the QMs have all but confirmed that event difficulty is rising in some way.
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While true, the HC statline is what we need now, and will still be useful even when they no longer can be expected to ace every garrison mission. When that time comes we design a LE to do what the HC will be doing now and move on.
 
I can remember something about tiers of success like
DC5: you save the miners but not their ship
DC10 you save both
DC15 you save both and find something nice.
 
No one would get anything done if 7 wasn't sufficient, sorry, DCs might rise but 7 will be well above what's considered "good". If that wasn't the case, Cardassian space would be overrun with evil robots or something in like 3 years flat. Nevermind the rest of them who don't even try to build generalists.
 
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