This means you have a mostly fixed power budget but can play a bit with conduits to get a bit more or less. This also means you are encouraged to go high on engines and hull for design, so you can go back and push up the hull stat better with more SIF.
I do think we can replace the warp core, but it's gonna be damn expensive and add on a lot of refit time.
We certainly can rip out the guts of a ship and install new guts, but after a certain point we're just making a new ship. It does pretty clearly show where pocket explorer design is at right now, though.
There's definitely a threshold somewhere, but even if a refit costs a lot in terms of br/sr and refit time, they're still great for saving crew. New designs and refit designs are complementary in that sense. Building new designs gets us better ships but at the cost of crew, while the refitting ships could be less efficient in terms of stat improvement per br/sr, but at least they would be crew efficient.
I honestly think there isn't big enough stat differences between the different generations of ships at the moment. A degree of power creep, as long a refits keep up somewhat, would be a rather good thing, I believe.
So here's why I don't like power creep from a flavor and setting perspective: I actually find it hard to believe, in the suspension of disbelief kind of way, that tech can progress so rapidly to more than double ship effectiveness in a single century, yet other spacefaring powers that have been warp capable for several centuries, sometimes millennia, aren't galactic superpowers already with exponential tech growth.
There's only so much you can handwave away, like the Federation getting a head start from combining resources of at least 3 nations that have had centuries of warp tech, to Orions being in a constant state of dysfunction, to civilization ending catastrophes. Just imagine what the Federation in the 31st century would be like with the exponential tech growth both canon and TBG have.
It's like playing any of the current 4X space games and not expecting the galaxy to be dominated or at least be fully explored by a millennia.
I mean have people actually considered that with the current stats it only takes two baseline Escelsiors to match a Sovereign. If it can focus on one of them the Sovereign has a durability edge due to how stat penalties work, but a combat focused design from 90 years later with multiple game changer technologies should tear though anything short of an actual fleet.
With the way combat mechanics work and even with no focus firing, a single Sovereign is favored to win against two Excelsiors at those canon stat lines. In events, a single Sovereign would be superior at higher event DCs than two Excelsiors together.
Three Excelsiors would likely be favored against a single Sovereign. I'm fine with that.
And I do think that Sovereign (and Galaxy) may end up being more powerful than those early stat lines show. 40 and 60 years is a long time from now.
