Out of curiosity, would retiring some of the constellations help much?
It'd mainly help with enlisted. Each
Constellation takes four units of redshirts but only two each of blue- and goldshirts. Trouble is, we're suffering from a serious goldshirt crunch
in addition to our redshirt crunch. Even the blueshirt supply isn't that impressive.
So retiring one
Constellation might mean we can afford to, say, crew one
Renaissance a year or two earlier than would otherwise be possible. But that's about all it would accomplish. To address the problem in the long run we're going to need recruitment, not just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Meh, not trying to be blood thirsty, just practical. A destroyed ship is one less ship they can use in the event of war. My intent was more along the lines of making sure our ships fight as if they are trying to destroy the enemy, not just give them a bloody nose. If a ship escapes, no problem.
There isn't a lot of difference between trying to blow a ship up and trying to bloody its nose, at least until the shields fail.
Kumari acted EXACTLY as it should have done in order to destroy that
Jaldun, right up to the point where it 'let them get away,' and letting them get away serves our purposes just fine under the circumstances.
As I said in my last response to you, this skirmishing is not about the
purely tactical objective of depriving the Cardassians of a single starship. They have dozens of such ships; them having 39 instead of 40 or whatever isn't going to make a decisive difference. This is about a
strategic objective. Namely, serving notice to the Cardassians that yes, we are prepared to fight them, and we think we can
win that fight.
The strategic benefit we gain by having a Cardassian ship flee to report just how badly outclassed it was and the fact that we openly attacked them after they did whatever the heck they did to bring this on... That benefit is greater than the tactical benefit we gain by reducing the (already outnumbered) Cardassian fleet by a single ship. Besides, if war blows up in the next few months due to this particular crisis, that ship is out of action anyway, because it'll probably be in the hospital for at least three months.
True, though I wonder if they will react the way we are all hoping. It occurs to me that news our ships are acting like that could be used as a diplomatic weapon by playing up how hostile we're being with some of the neutrals.
At which point we start posting pictures of all the Apiata foragers with holes in them from Cardassian spiral-wave weapons.
Our best xenopsych people, in Oneiros-posts, have told us the Cardassians aren't even going to bother seriously negotiating with us until they're convinced we're willing and able to fight back against them. And canon evidence supports the same conclusion. So I believe that.
'sighs' Honestly, we should probably just bite the bullet and retire them.
No, we really shouldn't. The
Constellations provide 21 Defense towards our requirements, they pass event checks far more often than not. They're ships we're comfortable leaving behind when the rest of the fleet goes to red alert and dashes off towards the Cardassian border. All these are important and valuable things.
If we could replace them with a comparable number of Rennies, it would make sense to retire them. But we can't. Not soon. All that would happen if we retired them right now is that our Defense total would go down by about twenty points and we'd suddenly have considerably more trouble covering everything.
And it's that increase to our Defense totals that's even given us the flexibility to have an anti-Syndicate task force and reasonably strong squadrons covering our threatened border zones.
Creating another refit will cost PP?, RP?, resources, and yard time.
The refit will cost a modest amount of PP and resources up front, and a modest amount of yard time. But it adds to our overall fleet strength in useful ways, as demonstrated by the
Miranda refits.
Better to just scrap or mothball them when we need to crew a Renaissance. That would make the first 7 of them only need 1 new crew unit of each type. Scraping would also give us some resources if we went with that.
Yes, but the effect wouldn't be that different from upgrading the ship. We'd be removing a Defense 3 ship from play and replacing it with a Defense 5 ship, one that will take 2.25 years (at best) to build. Realistically, we'll end up stuck keeping the Rennies filling the same posts that are now filled by
Constellations, instead of having them on the front lines where they belong.
A decent
Constellation refit would give us ships that can hold down our internal sectors quite effectively. This enables us to concentrate our modern cruisers (the
Renaissances and ConnieBees) on the frontiers, taking advantage of their "can beat a
Jaldun" combat stats.
While I'm not fundamentally opposed to mothballing a
Constellation or two if we have to, we really should model their crews as serving a necessary function, not just as a big pinata we can hit to knock loose crew for new construction.
