Yep. Being good at everything generally happens as a side effect, or as a result of throwing absurd amounts of money at a problem. It's also something that only has happened with fighter aircraft and tanks.
With fighter aircraft it happens because fighters tend to have highly specific missions: fly to point, release munition, munition blows stuff up. Tanks, likewise. And both tanks and fighter jets have
categorical weaknesses that make them nearly useless without various kinds of support.
Our ships are at least adequate as jacks-of-all-trades, but if we want things to be
good, we need some kind of coherent semblance of a specialization plan.
And we can't make an escort that is much good at event response. But we provably can and already have made escorts good at fighting. So guess what I'm proposing we do?
Ahem.
Did you notice me trying to agree with you and explain your stated position to others?
My point is aimed at all the people who say "just have one explorer, one cruiser, and one escort design." Which is kind of simplistic, but it has advantages that are quite reasonably appealing to some people (ultimate political will economy)
"
Great! Now, going with the basic principles of good design, let's plan ahead and decide what we want each of those ship types to do, instead of just uncreatively saying 'give me some of everything!' "
We probably could make an escort that was satisfactory at event response
if we were willing to optimize ruthlessly enough- if not right now, then in the 2320s or 2330s. Not as good as a cruiser or explorer could be, but not bad. And it would be very economical to supply all our sectors with two or three such ships.
If that was what we wanted to do.
Thinking in terms of the message you've been trying to get across, SWB...
Which is more important? That people understand the value of tailoring a ship to its intended mission? Or that they specifically agree that escorts are for fighting and cruisers are for peacetime garrison duties?
Tell you want. You convince people to start building some Miranda-As (our most cost effective combat escort), right now, at a time when we've been explicitly warned that there will likely be war within a few years. There will be seven berths opening up in 2313. Do that, and I'll admit there might be some value in designing a combat escort. Do it especially in convincing them to build the Mirandas rather than Excelsiors.
But if you can't convince the thread to do it now, you'll never be able to, so there's no point in designing a combat escort that people will refuse to vote to build.
Give me infinite berths first, then. Or don't put stupid scenarios in front of me like Mirandas versus Excelsiors.
Uh... Briefvoice had a point, although there are some mitigating factors.
[EDITED OUT SOME BITS THAT SEEMED REDUNDANT IN HINDSIGHT]
[snip first point I'm pretty sure you already get]
Secondly, [snip], Briefvoice didn't say a single thing about "one
Miranda-A is better than one
Excelsior." Although quite frankly, you could make a case that building a pair of
Miranda-As in a single berth in the time it takes to finish one
Excelsior is beneficial to us. They use up a lot less crew. Combined, they pack about as much punch in a fleet battle, and in wartime we tend to assemble our ships into fleets. They may not be so great for skirmishing, but they can definitely fight. Anyway, all this isn't even the point. That is:
Thirdly, we've been given about as clear a "war is likely soon" warning as we're ever going to get. The
Excelsiors starting in 2313 won't be ready until 2317, as they don't benefit from Chen's bonus due to being in singleton berths. And given how the Gabriel Expanse issue is likely to escalate, we may well already be at war before that happens.
So the question is,
under these circumstances, can we get support for building up a sizeable force of combat-focused escorts that will come off the assembly line in 2315, '16, and '17, years when we are highly likely to be at war? If we can, then that upholds the logic of the "keep combat escort designs in reserve" idea. If we can't, it suggests that the support simply isn't there among the playerbase for us to actually
build the combat escorts until war has already broken out... at which point we are unlikely to be able to build them in sufficient numbers to be decisive during the war itself.
That, I think, is Briefvoice's conclusion, and it is not without merit.
______________________________________________________
However, I do think Briefvoice's analysis is missing one important pieces of the puzzle.
One is that of those aforementioned seven berths, in the plan Briefvoice already has (which enjoys wide support) five of those berths will be committed to
Miranda refits! Refitting an existing
Miranda to the -A standard may not be as good as building a whole new ship, but it does a lot to turn the
Miranda into the efficient combat escort it has the potential to be. Without the refit, the
Miranda is the most "glass hammer" ship we have, with heavy firepower but extremely poor durability, and it has one of the least favorable ratios of durability to crew numbers. So in wartime, we could expect to lose a lot of un-refitted
Mirandas. Refitting them is a key part of our "have a strong combat escort force" strategy all by itself... but it just happens to be taking up most of the berths we'd otherwise use to build new
Miranda-As.
Therefore, Briefvoice is arguably mistaken to say that there isn't support for using our existing one-megaton berths to prepare
Miranda-As for the war we foresee coming. It's just that we're planning to use the berths to make our existing ships more effective and ready, rather than to build entirely new ones while keeping the old ships in their present "fragile flying bomb" status.
So even if the player support is there for a "design fighting escort, put them into service and roll out more of them when war is near" strategy...
RIGHT NOW it almost doesn't matter, because we can refit old
Miranda-As from subpar fighting escorts into tough little battlers for half the effort it would take to build a new one. If that option were not available, or if we'd already refitted the existing
Miranda-As, I bet it would be a lot easier to drum up some support for a wave of
Miranda-As to go in before the Rennies come due.
