It might optimized, but those same ships would be useless if needed for a combat situation, which does happen. In addition they could get pulled into events and we sometimes fall those, which can have a second test occur, which can be combat or hull to survive. So skimping on any stat makes it more likely the ship is lost.
Yes, but if "roll to not die" checks are most likely to occur when the main event check
fails, the best defense is to not fail the main event check in the first place.
I suspect that a ship with all 2s in its combat stats and all 4s in its noncombat stats is at least as likely to survive
peacetime interior garrison duty as a ship with straight 3s across the board. They'll be rolling combat stats less often than peacetime stats, so the imbalance works in our favor.
Are you basing this off the bonus we are getting from medical ships as that is different from what we were told when we got a peek behind the screen.
Enlighten me.
A specialized escort would be better than a generalist, but we would need wartime escorts to which would reduce the number of peacetime escorts allowing for fewer to respond. Crew wise I doubt there will be much difference if any between escorts of the same generation, maybe a different distribution but total crew cost would likely be within 1 of each other. Resource wise it could vary, but a generalist only requires one request to the council, not two so that is PP we are saving. It also only is one research project not two so that is research that can go into improving escort design. Finally it would only have one refit, not two so once again saving PP for other snakepit options.
The specialized peacetime escorts count very little toward our combat cap, enabling us to build more (combat-deducted by Lone Ranger) explorers.
Furthermore, if you're arguing that it's better to design one ship class than two... why not just
not design the wartime escort? Our cruisers are fairly effective fighting ships, not quite as deadly as a swarm of escorts might be, but pretty good. For the upcoming generation of ship designs, we could just
not have a fighting escort, using the
Miranda-A or a notional
Miranda-B as our "emergency war escort" design.
By the time the TNG era rolls around, our peacetime garrison escorts will still be at least adequate at what they do (peacetime garrison). We'll need a better wartime escort of course... I know! We can call it... the
Defiant!
Problem solved.
What it comes down to me is that Starfleet has several roles we need to fulfill: exploration, diplomacy and defense, and we need ships that can do all three. While a generalist escort is not as good at anyone, it can be called on to do all of them. Also given time we should have at least one Explorer class ship assigned to each sector, at which point the escort is there to complement it and by having a generalist then it can help out no matter the situation. There are also benefits to good science scores since that helped us find cloaked shuttles on suicide runs during the biophage, Enterprise was doing this for the Romulan fleet since it had a much better science score than any of their ships.
A good wartime
Federation ship will of necessity have good science, because two of our three main potential opponents use cloaking devices.
What it comes down to is that there's nothing but dogma telling us that it has to be
the exact same ship providing the exploration, the diplomacy, and the defense, every time. Real life nations use very different kinds of ship for survey and policing in their internal territory than they use to project military power out to the edges of their sphere of influence. Why can't we?
Rennies have Defense 5, which is going to feel like overkill if we're committing it to fill a gap of two or three Defense points.
It's desirable to have
something that is cheap, that is effective on peacetime garrison duty, and that has a defense of "about 3," but exactly what we build to fulfill this role is defined by other requirements.
These can also be the ships that we leave behind "guilt-free" during High Alert conditions to fill out minimal defense requirements in the few sectors that still have them even on high alert. Right now that role is filled by our
Mirandas (which, after refit, we DEFINITELY want on the borders) and our
Constellations (which aren't very good garrison ships, and which we will PROBABLY want to retire in the next 10-15 years if not sooner).
EDIT: Another reason not to use Rennies to fill in the gaps like that is that they're... not really very good event response ships. They're more likely to show up, but once they get there, they have S3 P4, not much better than a
Centaur-A. I'd really love to see how cheap we can make an escort with, say, C2 S4 H2 L2 P4 D4, or a cruiser with C3 S5 H3 L3 P5 D4, or something along those lines.
