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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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aeqnai said:
So unrelated but I spent an inordinate amount of time working on the deployment chart as well as a shipbuilding chart and member fleet chart to go with it. Still not entirely complete (especially the member fleet one) but I've got it mostly down now.

Also @Briefvoice for some reason Lor'Vela's shipbuilding and a few others seemed inconsistent between your spreadsheet and word of Oneiros. I tended to side with what was written in the Shipyard Ops/frontpage when there was doubt.
Or at least, what sector commanders have been established thus far. I also noted ship names explicitly this time.
Seriously this is a lot of fucking ships
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Note: Commodore is abbreviated CDRE.

Wow. That's a lot of ships.

Idea for visualization: use rectangles with a height representing combat, and a width representing defense. Alternatively, use a color gradient for one and a dimension for the other.
KnightDisciple said:
Hm. But at that point (Qute being a hivemind of the entire Federation), that'd kind of limit how many Q there are, yeah? We get the idea that while there's not billions of them, there's hundreds to thousands, at least.
A single Q being a composite of a planet or a race, I could maybe see. But of a multi-planet multi-species composite? Eh, not as much.

Or there's the idea from the fanfic "A Captain and A Madman", where
the Q are the Time Lords if they actually enacted the Final Sanction and ascended into pure energy beings
.
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I think someone recommended that fic a while ago – I remember reading it, but not how I got there.

It's a good read.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Telepathy is a faculty of the biological brain and the living mind, much like sight or hearing- and like sight or hearing, you can't just casually "invent" new techniques that make you ten times better at it.
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Sure you can. As you yourself noted:

Simon_Jester said:
Vulcans, who don't like to talk about it because it's what made them super-strong, long-lived psychics... but also so emotionally unstable that they had to abolish love and fun from their culture just so they'd stop having nuclear wars every generation or so.
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Genetic engineering is demonstrably the technology that gets you better psychic powers. There is, in fact, a reasonably well-marked path that leads to fantastic mental powers and transcendence.

It's just that the markings come in the form of notable failures (see: Remans, Licori, etc...), and indicate the minefield of disasters awaiting those that would make the attempt.
 
A question arising from the design thread.

The stated intention appears to be for the Ambassadors to replace Explorer Corp Excelsiors.
I am currently picturing it as, 5YM mission finishes and, with perfect timing from BriefVoice, we have an Ambassador that is 1 year from completion and needs crew.
We shift the Excelsior crew to the Ambassador, topping it up with more from the unassigned EC pool. The ship leaves dock in a year, gets an Explorer captain and sails off for a 5YM.
We assign Regular crew from their unassigned pool to the Excelsior.

How long before that now regular Excelsior is available for use? Instantly? 1 year? Something in-between?

I assume that veteran ratings from the EC Excelsior will not carry over to the Ambassador - are Elite crews like that found on the Enterprise best left where they are instead of being transferred?
 
Goat said:
I assume that veteran ratings from the EC Excelsior will not carry over to the Ambassador - are Elite crews like that found on the Enterprise best left where they are instead of being transferred?
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Given even an elite Excelsior-A like a future refit Enterprise only has +2C +2S +1H +1L +2P over say aledeth's Ambassador design(not counting Mrr'shan's bonus), while the defense stat is 3 lower, I suspect we'd merely try very hard to leave replacing them till last. EC crew shortages are going to be an issue if we don't after all.

Edit: Of course I could be totally wrong about that and we end up keeping elite Excelsior-A's around for quite some time, which I hardly have a problem with doing. It just all comes down to how much crew we need, and perhaps the combat cap.
 
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Goat said:
A question arising from the design thread.

The stated intention appears to be for the Ambassadors to replace Explorer Corp Excelsiors.
I am currently picturing it as, 5YM mission finishes and, with perfect timing from BriefVoice, we have an Ambassador that is 1 year from completion and needs crew.
We shift the Excelsior crew to the Ambassador, topping it up with more from the unassigned EC pool. The ship leaves dock in a year, gets an Explorer captain and sails off for a 5YM.
We assign Regular crew from their unassigned pool to the Excelsior.

How long before that now regular Excelsior is available for use? Instantly? 1 year? Something in-between?
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I would assume one year, as that's how long it takes to crew a new ship.
 
Kaze said:
Given even an elite Excelsior-A like a future refit Enterprise only has +2C +2S +1H +1L +2P over say aledeth's Ambassador design(not counting Mrr'shan's bonus), while the defense stat is 3 lower, I suspect we'd merely try very hard to leave replacing them till last. EC crew shortages are going to be an issue if we don't after all.
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On the contrary, it would be silly to retire veteran or higher Excelsiors when a green Ambassador replacement wouldn't even have higher stats overall and you'd need to retire 3 to have enough crew for 2 (roughly). Crew income should allow for a new EC Ambassador every two years or so by then anyway (+0.25 per new member and some more from techs), retiring severely damaged ships and any that are still just green or bloodied should be enough. The veteran+ Excelsiors can keep going until they are lost or break down. If the Enterprise B is still going strong in 30 years that's fine, too.
 
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Nix said:
On the contrary, it would be silly to retire veteran or higher Excelsiors when a green Ambassador replacement wouldn't even have higher stats overall and you'd need to retire 3 to have enough crew for 2 (roughly). Crew income should allow for a new EC Ambassador every two years or so by then anyway (+0.25 per new member and some more from techs), retiring damaged ships and any that are still just green or bloodied should be enough. The veteran Excelsiors can keep going until they are lost or break down. If the Enterprise B is still around in 30 years that's fine, too.
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If the Enterprise B is still around in 30 years, we might have Ambasador-As with phaser arrays and Iso-circuits and all the Pre-galaxy bells and whistles.
 
In twelve years, we've had one Explorer Corps ship destroyed and one badly damaged enough that we could easily have scrapped it. Plus one where we came with one digit of losing the ship (the S'Harien apparently tied on that Syndicate hijack attempt) and one where only a fortuitous program crash saved the Enterprise and its survival was utter RNG bullshit.

No need to retire EC Excelsiors. Attrition will handle it for us.
 
Nix said:
On the contrary, it would be silly to retire veteran or higher Excelsiors when a green Ambassador replacement wouldn't even have higher stats overall and you'd need to retire 3 to have enough crew for 2 (roughly). Crew income should allow for a new EC Ambassador every two years or so by then anyway (+0.25 per new member and some more from techs), retiring severely damaged ships and any that are still just green or bloodied should be enough. The veteran Excelsiors can keep going until they are lost or break down. If the Enterprise B is still going strong in 30 years that's fine, too.
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We are going to run into combat cap issues at some point between 1.5 and 2.5 decades from now, depending on how many new members join, what the threat level is, ect. Anyway, that's just after the time we would be capable of replacing our EC ships with Ambassadors. At that point we'd probably have to start trying to maximize the other stats we get for each point of combat we have by mothballing/scraping/giving away those ships that underpreform stat wise compared to others.

I know that an elite Excelsior-A would have better stats than a regular Ambassador in most areas(using aledeth's design for these comparisons), but a blooded Ambassador has equal or better stats than a veteran Excelsior-A and a veteran Ambassador would be the same vs an elite Excelsior-A, which is why I said that we would likely be trying very hard to leave replacing them till the last possible moment.

Keep in mind, the time scale I'm thinking about with regards to replacing our elite and veteran ships could easily be something like 2 and a half decades from now or more. We'd just be replacing the regular and bloodied ships at first which will probably end up taking quite some time.

Besides, if the logic is that we aren't going to replace our experienced EC ships with Ambassadors, why exactly are we creating this design? It certainly seems like overkill for just garrison work and the greater majority of our EC ships will probably be veteran or elite by the time we can build them!

Note: This entire post on my part is based on the idea that we aren't going to get much more than maybe 100ish more combat cap for whatever reason in the next couple of decades. If that's not the case, by all means you and the others are correct and we should definitely keep experienced EC Excelsior-A's around for as long as we can.
 
Kaze said:
Besides, if the logic is that we aren't going to replace our experienced EC ships with Ambassadors, why exactly are we creating this design? It certainly seems like overkill for just garrison work and the greater majority of our EC ships will probably be veteran or elite by the time we can build them!
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Bottom line, I have no idea what the game is going to look like by the time the prototype Ambassador rolls off the shelf, much less when the first non-prototype Ambassadors are out. Speculation that far out is a guess at most.

The main reason to move crew around is if we're producing Ambassadors faster than we're producing EC crew to fill them, and I don't know if that will happen.
 
Kaze said:
We are going to run into combat cap issues at some point between 1.5 and 2.5 decades from now, depending on how many new members join, what the threat level is, ect. Anyway, that's just after the time we would be capable of replacing our EC ships with Ambassadors. At that point we'd probably have to start trying to maximize the other stats we get for each point of combat we have by mothballing/scraping/giving away those ships that underpreform stat wise compared to others.

I know that an elite Excelsior-A would have better stats than a regular Ambassador in most areas(using aledeth's design for these comparisons), but a blooded Ambassador has equal or better stats than a veteran Excelsior-A and a veteran Ambassador would be the same vs an elite Excelsior-A, which is why I said that we would likely be trying very hard to leave replacing them till the last possible moment.

Keep in mind, the time scale I'm thinking about with regards to replacing our elite and veteran ships could easily be something like 2 and a half decades from now or more. We'd just be replacing the regular and bloodied ships at first which will probably end up taking quite some time.

Besides, if the logic is that we aren't going to replace our experienced EC ships with Ambassadors, why exactly are we creating this design? It certainly seems like overkill for just garrison work and the greater majority of our EC ships will probably be veteran or elite by the time we can build them!

Note: This entire post on my part is based on the idea that we aren't going to get much more than maybe 100ish more combat cap for whatever reason in the next couple of decades. If that's not the case, by all means you and the others are correct and we should definitely keep experienced EC Excelsior-A's around for as long as we can.
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When the USS Ambassador launches we will probably have at most 10 EC Excelsiors. Right now we still have the same number of veteran+ Excelsiors as we started out with (and a lower one than we had 10 years ago), so I doubt we will have more than 5 by the time all less experienced ones are retired from the EC, tying up 25 max combat (7 -> 5 per ship). We can probably expect about a 1 in 3 chance to be destroyed or severely enough damaged to knock down veterancy per decade per ship, so after 2 decades there'd probably only be 2 of those left. Assuming we budget 100 max combat for the EC that would mean we'd have room for 8 of them right away (8 -> 6 per ship), for 12 with green/bloodied retirements, and for 15 within two decades of stopping introducing Excelsiors to the EC.
 
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Besides, if we go with one the Awesome Ambassador designs with long build times and high costs, we may end up just continuing to build Excelsiors for all our non-EC needs.

Which would be symmetric with TNG/DS9 amusingly enough with the Eternal Excelsior.
 
I wouldn't be surprised that as time goes on there's political pressure applied to get us to pull Excelsiors out of the EC. Nowhere near immediately, but as time goes on, or if one of the Excelsiors suffers something bad/embarrassing enough, we will likely be forced to deal with it.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Oneiros seems to be taking a lot of inspiration from Rule the Waves, and many of the core elements of this process could be automated. The big problem would be turning the procedurally generated event rolls into something interesting; what makes this quest fun is the characters and the captains' logs.
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If this is Rule the Waves, who's the Spaghettis then?
 
Night_stalker said:
But they don't steal our tech.
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They have Lecarre on the payroll. Are you sure you want to assume that?

Blackshard said:
Sure you can. As you yourself noted:

Genetic engineering is demonstrably the technology that gets you better psychic powers. There is, in fact, a reasonably well-marked path that leads to fantastic mental powers and transcendence.

It's just that the markings come in the form of notable failures (see: Remans, Licori, etc...), and indicate the minefield of disasters awaiting those that would make the attempt.
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I said you can't casually do it. That's my real point- that it's not easy, many species try it and things go wrong, and it takes centuries to make significant advances. "Research how to evolve into energy beings" isn't a realistic option any more than the ancient Greeks could have a "research warp drive" project. There is no direct connection between any of the science and technology on their horizon, and the science and technology they need to finish the product.

That's not to say they don't have categories of things to learn that will lead to the project (inventing algebra, learning how to work with steel, architectural techniques). But none of it's directly applicable and it'd be stupid for them to say "we're bee-lining for warp drive." It would be equally stupid for us to try to "bee-line for godhood."
 
Simon_Jester said:
I said you can't casually do it. That's my real point- that it's not easy, many species try it and things go wrong, and it takes centuries to make significant advances.
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"It'd take centuries" is handwaving by people with no idea how long a thing would actually take. The Licori, for instance, don't have that kind of scientific horizon on anything; their scientists don't live that long. That's the terrifying thing about them, in fact. My point is that the universe has plenty of powerful entities, artifacts, and technologies in it already. If you actually decided to prioritize transcendence, there's no shortage of shortcuts. The only problem with that approach is that it's ridiculously dangerous, to both you and everyone around you.

If we, in this quest, wanted to 'bee-line for godhood', we could nab the Gaeni and the Licori, and convince them to work together with us studying such things as those nasty relics that summon post-physical possessing ghosts, or the old-folks home for the non-transcendent. The reason why we don't do that kind of research is that it's rather likely to backfire in terrible ways. But the attempt could nonetheless be made. It just requires a certain reckless attitude, coupled with a lack of concern over the inevitable consequences.

Of course, we are not currently the kind of polity that is willing to condone or pursue such research. But by admitting the Gaeni to the Federation, we'd be taking a step in that direction.
 
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