@Leila Hann ,
@Narutosramen :
Yeah. Basically,
NOBODY has enough ships that they can concentrate a strong, high-performance groups as much as they'd like.
The Klingons have lots of ships, but the side effect is that they probably need to group together like four of them to accomplish missions we could do with one ship, because the individual ships are weak. Consequently, they don't actually profit much from having their horde of tiny ships, because they just end up spending the same resources on four little ships that we'd spend on one medium ship.
So the solution 'lol just build more ships' is not a solution at all, it's kind of an insulting joke.
Sure, though correct me if I'm wrong but there should be at least a small research project for the design which makes it more like 10-11 + 4-8 quarters. As for why I brought up the defense value, if we're going to build a dedicated combat escort (a Miranda-A replacement), we shouldn't bother with S and P so as to keep cost and build time down. After all, we could just mothball the ships until we need them again instead of using them during peace time which would solve the response problem.
Science score matters if we're fighting people with cloaks or using our escorts as scouts, both of which seem like things we need to plan for. I mean, two of our three main enemies have cloaking devices, and the Cardassians
MAY have cloaking devices since we know they had access to one for years and were able to integrate it into a heavy cruiser. They could break out a class of cloaked raiding vessels at any time and we might not even know.
An escort isn't designed to run around on it's own. It's meant to escort a more valuable ship, such as a cruiser or explorer. It's purpose is to add firepower and take hits meant for the more valuable ship.
If escorts
cannot operate independently, they are extremely limited in terms of what we can actually do with them. For example, you can't spread them out to look for enemy cloaked ships. You can't spread them out to block off the line of retreat for a fleeing cargo ship. You can't send
one of them to do a reconaissance mission.
Realistically, in the event of war we will never have more than, oh, several dozen ships on the front line at any one time. If a large fraction of those ships are totally powerless to do anything useful EXCEPT stick to a bigger ship like some kind of heavily armed limpet, it causes serious problems. I'd honestly rather trade off hull protection and shielding than sacrifice Science capability.
So, if you throw an escort down all on it's lonesome, you're misusing your resource. An escort should be part of a "wolf pack" and that wolf pack should be attached to a cruiser. Say 2-3 escorts per cruiser. That's pretty much a combined arms doctrine, however. Because you only need one platform with good sensors, tying the sensors from the cruiser into a battle network (such as AEGIS, as a modern example), should make the entire system more effective. Just my two cents, as a Navy vet.
That sort of invites the question: why don't real world navies build ships with negligible sensor capability but lots of missiles?
It turns out that in a realistic battle situation, you don't want to depend on having only one ship in your squadron or fleet that is capable of detecting and tracking the enemy. Your communications may be jammed, or interrupted by bad weather conditions. Your ships may have to split up to deal with a complicated problem. The ship with the good sensors may suffer a mechanical failure, or get blown up by a lucky enemy attack.
If all your ability to detect and track the enemy over long distances is concentrated on a single platform, you are very vulnerable to bad luck and accidents. And you're also more vulnerable to enemy action, if the enemy figures out your weakness and decides to neutralize your whole squadron by blowing up one ship, leaving you blind and vulnerable.
I stand by my vote; there wasn't going to be a better opportunity to gain influence with the Bajorans than when the Cardassians were busy. It didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, but them's the breaks.
The problem is that gaining influence with the Bajorans wasn't going to do us any good when the Cardassians were in such a good position to use force to make sure our 'influence' became irrelevant. And it was
predictable that they could do that, because we were in no realistic position to stop them directly from simply annexing Bajor. Therefore, while 'gaining influence' with the Bajorans might have seemed like a nice thing to have, nobody ever really answered the question "yes, and how are we going to get any advantages from having that influence?'
If we're going to learn anything from past events, we do need to recognize (among other things) the limits of a diplomatic push. They don't really work in situations where our diplomacy can be pre-empted by someone else's actions. They're most effective when we have years to build up the effects over time without interruption, and they're almost entirely
in-effective if we get violently interrupted early in the process.
