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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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Leila Hann said:
Too bad we don't know how to make those, yeah.
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Gear said:
That's what we have Starfleet Engineers for.
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Warp cores don't exactly grow on trees. Even assuming we could make a Federation core compatible with a Cardassian ship, it's going to cost a fair bit. Not to mention the obvious difficulties running a ship built by a different species, the diplomatic effects of the Federation having a functioning cloak ship, and the fact it reveals Miran and the others are alive. I'm not convinced it'd be worth it.
 
Torgamous said:
Now that I'm thinking about it, the most important question with the Risans is why they're both alive and not automated. They're unlikely to have given much credence to the various doombot scenarios, and they'd be really easy pickings for any AI that did go rogue. So they should either have friendly robots or have been driven extinct by unfriendly ones. Did they just not see the appeal? Everyone is so chill there that they don't feel any particular need to make more labor-saving devices, and everyone's so friendly that there's no demand for sexbots or platonic friend bots?
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Leila Hann said:
Paperclip maximizing doombots are very much the exception in Star Trek, not the rule.

Granted, so are robots in general.
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A significant fraction of all robots and AIs in Star Trek experience failure modes of the "go out of control," "work far too well," or "keep blindly functioning in a certain way long after their creators have left or wanted them to stop."

Also, Kirk's patented 'talk the computer to death' tactic usually revolves around convincing the computer that it needs to maximize paperclips... and that its own death would be a paperclip. His superpower is getting the robot to fall for this.

So paperclip maximizing robots aren't actually unusual in Star Trek. What's unusual is for those robots to build up into a giant self-perpetuating murderball, a la the Replicators from Stargate. The closest Star Trek has to that is the Borg...

And, hm, the Automated Personnel Units referenced in Voyager, where two civilizations built nearly identical killbot designs to fight each other, which then turned on both species and exterminated them when the species tried to sign a peace treaty, which would have threatened the killbots' survival. The catch being that said killbots could not reproduce themselves.

There may be a few other such examples. But by and large, AIs in Star Trek don't go rampant, they go sessile. The mind control computer doesn't build spaceships and copy itself on other planets, it just sits on its own planet controlling everyone's minds. The rogue space probe doesn't build more rogue space probes, it just wanders around blowing shit up.

So it's really not that surprising that the Risans were able to enter the computer age without somehow having a rogue AI wipe them out. They wouldn't necessarily build one. And there aren't enough rogue AIs wandering around the galaxy at random for that to be a common problem.

Leila Hann said:
We have to go deeper.
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The big problem with naming our ship Roddenberry is that all our ships' computers speak in the voice of Roddenberry's mistress-and-later-wife. That's going to get confusing.

pheonix89 said:
The reason for lack of strong/seed AI is twofold and fully meta-level: One, the idea in the modern sense hadn't really been conceived as of TOS. Two, they render settings utterly unrecognizable.
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I would like to note that the idea of rapidly self-improving artificial intelligence is itself speculative fiction. It's scientifically plausible fiction, but then, in 1940 it seemed scientifically plausible that we'd get ray guns and jetpacks. In 1950, nuclear engineers were assuring us that atomic power would make electricity safe, clean, and too cheap to meter, when in reality they never became able to deliver more than two out of three.

Knowing more about AI might cause us to worry less about this prospect, rather than more.

Briefvoice said:
If attempts to improve your species through genetic engineering is actually a bad idea that can easily lead to terrible consequences then it wouldn't be too surprising if everyone else had their own unique bad experiences. Not necessarily a Khan specifically, but something terrible.

Perhaps the Andorians screwed up their own fertility, the Rigellians ended up with plagues they have had to live with since, the Tellarites produced hyper-aggressive serial killers, etc.

It only seems weird if you assume humans are wrong to have been scared off.
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I like it. This is why my headcanon is:

The Vulcans engineered themselves thousands of years ago, and wound up losing so much emotional control that they've had to turn into a race of monks after nuking their own planet into a desert, in order to survive. Romulans are less genetically out there, but also better balanced and more in control of themselves so that they don't have to abolish love and fun in order to be sane.

The Klingons engineered themselves, and it may or may not have made them crazy (crazier?) but they decided they liked it that way and kept doing it, optionally using further cosmetic engineering or surgery to restore their old pre-engineering 'look.'

Incidentally, that covers the two canon species we know have extremely long life expectancies (i.e. obviously live to be over 150 on a regular basis). Which may not be a coincidence.

Derek58 said:
:o Really?! I thought it was only to discover new and inventive ways of blowing ships up! :D
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The Kadak-Tor IS a new and inventive way of blowing ships up.

Other people's ships! :D

Nervos Belli said:
Warp cores don't exactly grow on trees. Even assuming we could make a Federation core compatible with a Cardassian ship, it's going to cost a fair bit. Not to mention the obvious difficulties running a ship built by a different species, the diplomatic effects of the Federation having a functioning cloak ship, and the fact it reveals Miran and the others are alive. I'm not convinced it'd be worth it.
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I'm not convinced, but we never promised the Romulans we wouldn't develop cloaks in this timeline.

The big problem is that, as @AKuz has pointed out, if the Romulans think we have a cloaked fleet, they are very likely to panic and attack us. Because they are very, very paranoid about the other side hitting first. I honestly don't know how they manage to not panic and pre-emptive-strike the Klingons with their full fleet, for that matter, because the Klingons DO have cloaks.

EDIT:

My solution to this problem was to allow a group of Romulan observers aboard the ship, which gives them a look at Cardassian technology and gives them the means to blow up the ship. We could even put the cloaking device on a permissive action link so it can't be activated without, say, two Romulans agreeing to it.

That might not be enough because Romulans are super paranoid, but it's at least the kind of idea that MIGHT convince them. It's analogous to how the Federation got away with Defiant having a cloaking device in Deep Space Nine.
 
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I'm not sure how thoroughly damaged the cloak was. I think the Cardassian defectors may have sabotaged it, but I don't remember. Anyway, it was blown up once before, at Khitomer, and yet the Syndicate and the Cardassians managed to patch it back together.
 
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Ah, well, a pity then. Because I assume when Gul Miran wants shit blown up, that shit will be quite thoroughly exploded beyond all feasible hope of repair.

We could still do the restoration project, though; Kadak-Tor is competitive with a Rennie even without a cloaking device. It would give us something to do in that two-megaton cruiser berth they keep talking about building at Utopia Planitia. At the moment we'd have to use an Excelsior berth for the restoration work.
 
Simon_Jester said:
We could still do the restoration project, though; Kadak-Tor is competitive with a Rennie even without a cloaking device. It would give us something to do in that two-megaton cruiser berth they keep talking about building at Utopia Planitia. At the moment we'd have to use an Excelsior berth for the restoration work.
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Well, the cloak was in its own separate module, and Kadak-Tor was operational after the cloak was sabotaged. So I'm not sure about a restoration job being necessary. If it is (and, to be fair, a refit might be) it certainly shouldn't be done until wartime.
We would need to crew her, and I imagine that the crew would need some time for familiarization.

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I'm thinking that we might want to reveal the defection on or soon after the outbreak of a true war with Cardassia. One, it might start a new round of internal purging; two, the defectors might be a tempting distraction for the Obsidian Order; three, cold-heartedly, if the war were going badly for us, we could use handing over the defectors as a bargaining chip in any peace agreement.

(Unless, of course, they're hidden among the crew on the Stargazer. I'm not sure we ever settled on whether that should happen or not.)
 
Given that the warp core is missing and that a considerable number of parts and systems were probably straight-up removed for testing, I'd say that the amount of work needed to fix the ship would constitute 'a restoration job,' but at that point we're arguably talking semantics.

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Also, I can't imagine the Cardassians offering anything in exchange for the Kadak-Tor defectors that would provide utilitarian grounds that might even begin to outweigh the wrongness of turning them over. A dozen officers who have probably already told us everything they know? Sure, the Cardassian government will have a desire to punish them, but what would they exchange for the fulfillment of that desire, which would justify us in such a treacherous action towards the people whose asylum request we accepted?

Deontology says "no," consequentialism says "this isn't worth it."
 
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I can imagine the Federation handing over defectors; it's not fundamentally all THAT different from being willing to cede planets that Federation citizens have colonized so that their inhabitants become Cardassian subjects.

I can't imagine it being either right or worthwhile.
 
As a demoralization ploy, refurbishing the vessel as a Frontline combatant against the Cardassians might be worthwhile. If we weren't the Feds, using it to false flag raid others (play nicely on the Lecarre's paranoia) would be nice too.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Plus, there'd be a major inconvenience involved in switching over to a new kind of ship designed by a totally different industrial base, and it wouldn't be worth it for just a small performance change. Note that this (these) are the same reasons the Apiata didn't just switch over to building our ships.
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In practice so far, that doesn't seem to be a huge concern. Plenty of canon examples abound, from all the shit Voyager integrated in to the Defiant getting a Romulan cloaking device, but more importantly TBG itself has several examples. Amarkians are starting to build Centaur-As in their own berths apparently without issue. A berth supposedly optimized for Starfleet vessels handled repairs for a Caitain Fathership. Hell, a Gaeni berth handled repairs for an Excelsior.

Technology and parts and logistics seem to be fairly interchangeable, at least among most of the Federation ship designs. There might be a couple exceptions, like it is conceivable that Apiata ship designs are less compatible and would require some delay to refit our berths and negotiate supply lines to handle them, but I'd find that unlikely or otherwise not important enough to model at the game level.

The Apiata most likely aren't switching to our ships not because of logistical issues but rather because their ships are superior for their purposes. Or rather, any logistical issues play second fiddle - and an apparently small fiddle at that - to concerns about ship capabilities.
 
There's also a sort of brand thing. Starfleet ships are almost all recognizable as Starfleet designs. It probably gives us a free presence stat or two.
 
lbmaian said:
In practice so far, that doesn't seem to be a huge concern. Plenty of canon examples abound, from all the shit Voyager integrated in to the Defiant getting a Romulan cloaking device,
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I wouldn't count one-off exceptions because it's too easy to make any kludged-together machine work if you're willing to give it extensive, constant maintenance and treat it like a unique special snowflake. It's when you need a dozen of them and you need them serviceable that things get tougher.

...but more importantly TBG itself has several examples. Amarkians are starting to build Centaur-As in their own berths apparently without issue. A berth supposedly optimized for Starfleet vessels handled repairs for a Caitain Fathership. Hell, a Gaeni berth handled repairs for an Excelsior.
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The Gaeni and the Amarki could get all the parts they needed directly from us, because we mass-produce them. If we try to take an Apiata design and put it into serial production on a scale larger than the Apiata themselves do, it's more of a problem.

Member worlds building our ships is inevitably going to be easier than us building theirs, because we build more ships than several member worlds combined..

Technology and parts and logistics seem to be fairly interchangeable, at least among most of the Federation ship designs. There might be a couple exceptions, like it is conceivable that Apiata ship designs are less compatible and would require some delay to refit our berths and negotiate supply lines to handle them, but I'd find that unlikely or otherwise not important enough to model at the game level.

The Apiata most likely aren't switching to our ships not because of logistical issues but rather because their ships are superior for their purposes. Or rather, any logistical issues play second fiddle - and an apparently small fiddle at that - to concerns about ship capabilities.
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The catch is that our purposes aren't their purposes. Which is why I explicitly mentioned this- that Apiata ships are designed to requirements that don't match ours. Their ships may not be able to do things that we require our ships to be able to do (like cross the entire Federation at a reasonable cruising speed of one sector per week without having to stop for an engine overhaul).
 
A Kaldar class heavy cruiser has combat stats broadly comparable to a Conniebee or Rennie. Even assuming that it'll be tricky to train a Starfleet crew to operate it, and to fit it with a compatible warp core, I suspect that doing so will be cheaper and less time consuming than any other way of adding 5 Combat to the fleet we send against the Cardassians.

And that's just combat stats. Q only knows how much its presence on the battlefield would hurt the enemy morale.
 
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