My only concern is the Extra Outposts bonus in the Apinae sector. I know we built a few there when it was the CBZ but with all the new Apiata and Indorian colonies to protect, I'm not confident that we'd get +5 from those. Maybe consider moving the T'Kumbra/Shield from the GBZ to the Apinae Sector? Having three ships there would make me a bit less concerned about raids slipping through the CBZ.

Well we haven't actually been told what the Apinae requirements are so it is admittedly a guess. If we don't get the Extra Outposts, and the requirement is indeed D12 (it might be D10 for all I know) then we could pull a Miranda from one of the border zones (I'd prefer SBZ or CBZ; we need GBZ as beefy as possible) or even take the Torbriel away from the anti-Syndicate Task Force if they don't seem to be using it much.

I'd probably prefer the last option, since the entire point of the zones is to intercept raids before they make it through. Pulled a ship back so you can place it in a zone the raid is trying to get to seems counter-intuitive.
 
When he gets to deceive and outwit an enemy.

That is, maskirovka.
That's Kirk's schtick.

He could win a drinking contest using vodka?
Scotty's schtick.

Aside from space flight?
Literally everybody's schtick. Including the Pakleds. This is Star Trek, remember?

No, it's going to have to be something else. I'll need to think about this one...



Kirk: Finds a Klingon. Two fist punched him to knock him out. Steals the Klingon's uniform and uses it as a raincoat.
Commodore Leslie, in a conversational tone: "Yeah, I don't know why people who want to impersonate Kirk keep doing those linked fist things. The man himself was hell on wheels at martial arts, and had a lot less broken fingers than those guys who play him in the movies.* All those stories about him beating up seven foot giant aliens and mutants? Happened. I was there, and I used to spar with the son of a gun. Ow. Also, protip, do not fight a Gorn close up for any reason. Seriously. Klingons are doable. Romulans, doable. Gorn? Oh, hell no."

*[I am quite sure there are starting to be movies and documentaries and so on in which they hire actors to play Kirk, within Star Trek. :D ]
 


Commodore Leslie, in a conversational tone: "Yeah, I don't know why people who want to impersonate Kirk keep doing those linked fist things. The man himself was hell on wheels at martial arts, and had a lot less broken fingers than those guys who play him in the movies.* All those stories about him beating up seven foot giant aliens and mutants? Happened. I was there, and I used to spar with the son of a gun. Ow. Also, protip, do not fight a Gorn close up for any reason. Seriously. Klingons are doable. Romulans, doable. Gorn? Oh, hell no."

*[I am quite sure there are starting to be movies and documentaries and so on in which they hire actors to play Kirk, within Star Trek. :D ]

Didn't we just have this discussion on Kirk porn yesterday?
 
@Briefvoice, after looking at this for a couple minutes, it looks fine to me. But honestly, fleet distribution, like research and ship build planning, is getting too complex to analyze, verify, or come up with alternates, without actually putting it into a spreadsheet or equivalent.

It would be nice if we had such a spreadsheet. Problem is that it's hard to format this data into a spreadsheet table in an easy-to-manipulate way, since there are 3 "axes": sector, ship, quarter (unlike ship build planning which has just 2 "axes": berth and quarter). Best approaches I can think up at the moment are: a pivot table; or allocating a fixed # ship slots per sector/quarter to make it easy to move ships without having to insert/remove rows/columns.
 
@Briefvoice, after looking at this for a couple minutes, it looks fine to me. But honestly, fleet distribution, like research and ship build planning, is getting too complex to analyze, verify, or come up with alternates, without actually putting it into a spreadsheet or equivalent.

It would be nice if we had such a spreadsheet. Problem is that it's hard to format this data into a spreadsheet table in an easy-to-manipulate way, since there are 3 "axes": sector, ship, quarter (unlike ship build planning which has just 2 "axes": berth and quarter). Best approaches I can think up at the moment are: a pivot table; or allocating a fixed # ship slots per sector/quarter to make it easy to move ships without having to insert/remove rows/columns.

It's not actually that complicated. I do it all in a text document. I don't feel it needs a spreadsheet because usually the question isn't "how do we meet our requirements". It's more a question of where you want to put our reserves, and that's a more qualitative question. A spreadsheet can't tell you how many ships you need to put in the Gabriel Expanse since there will be no fixed requirement. You just have to decide what's "enough" to hold it.
 
The graphical chart that someone made is really nice. Shows requirements, how those requirements are met, how much each ship makes.
This is absolutely pie-in-the-sky, but if we had something where we could drag ships around on it, that would be perfect.
 
The graphical chart that someone made is really nice. Shows requirements, how those requirements are met, how much each ship makes.
This is absolutely pie-in-the-sky, but if we had something where we could drag ships around on it, that would be perfect.

Ideally it would show total Combat as well as total Defense, as the numbers are not exactly identical, especially when it comes to Mirandas and Blooded ships. On the border zones we probably care more about Combat than Defense.
 
But when it does do that, worry quite a lot. Your hospital building might just be about to take an impromptu trip to Luna, after all.

Actually, the wind catches the rain near the ground and it swirls around the ground for a bit before falling. I grew up in a place where an umbrella or anything short of complete encasement in yellow rain gear was pointless.
 
I'm finding myself more attracted to the notion of Michel "Common Sense" Thuir getting involved albeit indirectly in the Syndicate fight, now that his attributes have been restored.

[X][FERASA] Commodore Michel Thuir
[X][SBZ] Commodore Gorac Crogan

Guys I've been thinking of what our next Vice Admiral position should be and came up with the following:

Commander, Super Sector/OverSector-Alpha (please come up with a better name)

Headquarters: Amarkia (most likely)

Jurisdiction:
Gabriel Expanse Border Zone
Syndraxian Border Zone
Cardassian Border Zone
Apinae Sector
Amarkia Sector
Ferasa Sector (drop?)

Role:
  • Directly oversee all Sectors and Border Zones directly bordering the Cardassian Union and its allies.
  • Serve as an intermediary between the the subordinate commands and the Chief of Starfleet Operations
  • Coordinate with affiliate and member world fleets
  • Assume overall theater command in case of hostilities with the Cardassian Union

I don't think this position is warranted in peacetime, or rather there's probably some sort of equivalent position already within Operations but handed by a Commodore, or at the highest, a Rear Admiral.

During wartime or a crisis, we'd charge a Commodore or Rear Admiral to take charge of the response, just like we did for the Biophage crisis (Commodore T'Faer) and the anti-Syndicate campaign (Rear Admiral Uhura). In practice, we'd get a vote on this.

*[I am quite sure there are starting to be movies and documentaries and so on in which they hire actors to play Kirk, within Star Trek. :D ]

Or we could have a movie set 3 centuries ago about filmmakers imagining what the 23rd century universe was like and making a series with the ridiculous name of "Star Trek".

META :V

It's not actually that complicated. I do it all in a text document. I don't feel it needs a spreadsheet because usually the question isn't "how do we meet our requirements". It's more a question of where you want to put our reserves, and that's a more qualitative question. A spreadsheet can't tell you how many ships you need to put in the Gabriel Expanse since there will be no fixed requirement. You just have to decide what's "enough" to hold it.

I mean something that automatically does checks for you (like ensuring you meet garrison requirements in each sector every quarter) and provides stat like total D and C (or some combat potential formula) at a glance, all while being easy to speculatively move ships around. This particular redistribution is not simply deciding where to put our reserves, because we barely have any - we're actually moving ships that are required to meet garrison requirements around.
 
Another point for Thuir, he needs to do a sector command before we can bump him to Rear Admiral. And we want that man on track for top-level command.
Yeah, but there are a lot of sector commands and new ones open up every year. He hasn't been eligible that long.

Heck, I'd push Thuir for the Cardassian Border Zone, which is in effect vacant because the nominal commander on the spot, T'Lorel, has been off doing something else that has her full attention for two years*.

It's just that he's not a very good choice for anything that involves contact with Sydraxians, because they hate him personally. I'd consider him a great choice for the other border zones that don't abut Sydraxian space, or for internal zones.
__________________

*(@OneirosTheWriter, what would we actually do in terms of a command structure if there were a serious problem on the CBZ demanding that our CBZ force act as a coherent squadron? Who'd be in charge? It's not so much of a problem with Eaton because her previous job isn't "critical," but in an emergency we might need the CBZ commander on the spot really fast)

@Briefvoice, after looking at this for a couple minutes, it looks fine to me. But honestly, fleet distribution, like research and ship build planning, is getting too complex to analyze, verify, or come up with alternates, without actually putting it into a spreadsheet or equivalent.

It would be nice if we had such a spreadsheet. Problem is that it's hard to format this data into a spreadsheet table in an easy-to-manipulate way, since there are 3 "axes": sector, ship, quarter (unlike ship build planning which has just 2 "axes": berth and quarter). Best approaches I can think up at the moment are: a pivot table; or allocating a fixed # ship slots per sector/quarter to make it easy to move ships without having to insert/remove rows/columns.
It's only that bad if you ignore Briefvoice's First Law:

A starship at rest remains at rest, unless you have a good reason to move it. At any one time, 90% of our ships are exactly where they're supposed to be, and we're only making two or three ship movements a quarter. It becomes slightly complicated when you're trying to plan ahead and integrate future construction into the plan... but a spreadsheet with programming would be kind of a waste of effort.

You could BUILD one, but I totally believe that Briefvoice doesn't need one, and if he got shanghaied to go join the Space Patrol or something I know I could more-or-less do it without the spreadsheet.

So it's okay, really. The time when it gets confusing is if one tries to keep track of where all our ships are, instead of just taking that as a default condition and moving only the ships that need moving. Or when all the ships really DO need moving, e.g. during a war mobilization.

[I'll do an updated Plan Epsilon-3 for war mobilization once we have the Apinae Sector and GBZ fleets well defined, by the way]
 
It's mostly situations like these where we're already stretched thin, have lots of new requirements coming soon, and also a large wave of ships and refits going on, that it gets most onerous. It's going to get worse with more sectors and more incoming ships. And yeah, war mobilization is gonna be a pain, as was proven when Oneiros tried to manage it at the ship level back in the Kadak-Tor incident and that wasn't even a full-blown crisis. Sure it can be hand-managed, but well, as the saying goes for engineers, "laziness is virtue".
 
Alright made a very rough proto of a google images version of the chart, building off @aeqnai 's version. Literally it's the background. I just used the version they had in their most recent post with it, so it might be out of date but a good proof-of-concept.

Chart Proto
Use this version to save to your GDocs to tinker with.

For Sharing
This version anyone -- anyone -- can edit to their anarchic desires.

Problems:
  • is that text too small? Because...
  • If it is we're going to have problems putting shipnames in the boxes, unless we make the google image much bigger.
  • Might be able to use comments to get around this -- tried experimentally with a few ships
 
[X][FERASA] Commodore Michel Thuir
[X][SBZ] Commodore Gorac Crogan

Changing my vote due to Thuir's updated stats.
 
Yeah, but there are a lot of sector commands and new ones open up every year. He hasn't been eligible that long.

There are other Commodore slots; starbase commands were implied earlier. While I suspect a Sector Command is considered a more direct route to a Rear Admiral promotion in most cases, there are undoubtedly Starbase commands that are still considered promotion-track. At the very least you'd expect Earth Spacedock and other high-traffic Starbases to be considered qualifying.

And it's not as though Commodore is a particularly heavy attrition rank in reality. The heavy attrition ranks are traditionally Lieutenant Commander, because it's the first rank where you're likely to assume responsibility for more people than you can directly supervise, and Rear Admiral, which is a very large jump in scale. (Something like fifty percent of one-stars are asked to retire within two years of attaining the rank in the USN.)
 
*[I am quite sure there are starting to be movies and documentaries and so on in which they hire actors to play Kirk, within Star Trek. :D ]

Do you think Spock has released his tell-all autobiography 'I am Spock' yet? Just how many pages of it are blanked out until Linderly or one of his successors declassifies the missions he's discussing? Are any other members of the Enterprise writing their own memoirs? And is Lesslie's working title for his book 'GET ME OUTA THIS RED SHIRT'?
 
There are other Commodore slots; starbase commands were implied earlier.
While there are many Commodore postings other than sector commander (chief of staffs and commanders of particular divisions for various starfleet branches, commanders of the smaller shipyards, heads of institutes and so on) Starbase commands in particular go to Rear Admirals, they were probably mentioned in this context because experienced Commodores are being promoted away to fill those postings.
 
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While there are many Commodore postings other than sector commander (chief of staffs and commanders of particular divisions for various starfleet branches, commanders of the smaller shipyards, heads of institutes and so on) Starbase commands in particular go to Rear Admirals, they were probably mentioned in this context because experienced Commodores are being promoted away to fill those postings.

...it seems rather backwards to place a sector resource under a flag officer who outranks the sector commander.
 
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