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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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Briefvoice said:
troublesome affiliate
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I certainly hope we would. That's part of the point of the Federation and the affiliate process. Just because our other affiliates haven't caused this much trouble doesn't mean we wouldn't go to bat for them if they needed us to.

We gave the Kadeshi an EC Excelsior, one fifth of Starfleet Medical's mobile assets, and a similar chunk of Starfleet Engineering's mobile assets.
We're about to wage a war on behalf of the Apiata. A limited war, confined to the Gabriel Expanse, but make no mistake, it's a war nonetheless.
 
And as aeqnai notes, in addition to SWB being totally right, the alternative would have been for us to sigh and resign ourselves to having our tent permanently pitched over a nest of vipers for the next 50-100 years. Not viable.
 
Briefvoice said:
In which case the deal we're making for a specific Orion cultural and financial aid package can only be to the good.

We certainly are investing a lot in this most troublesome affiliate.
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We decided to affiliate with a race notorious for its pirates and cutthroats. We decided to encircle their space. We knew what we were getting into. Now we're having to deal with it.

By "we" I mean the Federation, not our player characters.
 
The thing is, doing the things we've done for our affiliates, like the aforementioned Gabriel Warzone and dealing with the Syndicate, is the best we could possibly do. The UFP survives based on its reputation and trust. Minor powers look at us and see what we do for our people. Being ourselves is literally the best advertisement possible. Destroying the Syndicate and ending the slave trade is going to be useful as a propaganda puff piece for decades. I anticipate a very nice pile of PP and +relations when we finally declare Mission Accomplished.

Not to mention that both the Apiata and the Orions are very significant powers. I expect to that both will give us a lot of stuff upon joining.
 
AlphaDelta said:
Also, there may be issues with using the Auxiliary berths for warships (Fleet-grade assets, including the Oberth), whereas there are less issues with the reverse.
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I'd expect it to be quite the opposite, considering the issue of security and process control. In places like SFFY or UP, everybody is vetted and thus it's much harder for a foreign power to install a secret code to disable the shields or to smuggle a bomb onboard. Of all of the folks surrounding us, only the Gretarians ("Violence?") and the Klingons ("Dishonorable!") wouldn't do it in a heart beat.
 
NullVoid said:
I'd expect it to be quite the opposite, considering the issue of security and process control. In places like SFFY or UP, everybody is vetted and thus it's much harder for a foreign power to install a secret code to disable the shields or to smuggle a bomb onboard. Of all of the folks surrounding us, only the Gretarians ("Violence?") and the Klingons ("Dishonorable!") wouldn't do it in a heart beat.
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I don't think that's whay he's referring to. For one, there may be political issues if we start bumping civilian ships to build or repair warships. The Council is happy when Starfleet's first priority is not combat. For another, there are probably some technical issues you'd run into. Warships have significantly more advanced warp drives than civilian ships, not to mention actually having armaments. Engineers at an auxiliary yard probably haven't seen a phaser array since the Academy, let alone worked on one.
 
Uh... NullVoid, I'm not sure what you mean. I'm pretty sure what AlphaDelta was getting at is that if we build an auxiliary in a warship berth (e.g. at Utopia Planitia), we're more likely to have all the equipment we need to build the ship. Whereas a berth for auxiliaries might not have all the equipment handy to do a good job of building a warship.

What you say about security isn't wrong, but it also isn't opposite to his point. If anything it complements his point, because being a more secure facility would be yet another reason NOT to worry about building auxiliaries in military yards, while worrying about building military ships in auxiliary yards.

Though I suspect Amarkia Yard will be pretty secure anyway...
 
The point is fairly academic, given that if we're pulling civilian(ish) yards for military purposes, we have a war and in turn SoE to do so. This negates political concerns. Similarly, I would expect that a full-out shooting war that was tapping our resources to the point of needing those yards would result in secondment of equipment to the yards to do the work prior to needing them. And while said yards might be less secure, wartime measures would likely result in sufficient security that, if the need was dire enough, we'd end up using them regardless. Since, really, if things are bad enough that all of Starfleet's yards and all the member/affiliate yards are in use, then things are bad enough we will be scrambling for any berths we can have. Security and efficiency pale in comparison to sufficient need.
 
Nervos Belli said:
I don't think that's whay he's referring to. For one, there may be political issues if we start bumping civilian ships to build or repair warships. The Council is happy when Starfleet's first priority is not combat. For another, there are probably some technical issues you'd run into. Warships have significantly more advanced warp drives than civilian ships, not to mention actually having armaments. Engineers at an auxiliary yard probably haven't seen a phaser array since the Academy, let alone worked on one.
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No, what he said was that it would be fine to repair military ships at civilian yards. We have already done so, and even at foreign berths, which was a huge risk then, and is even more so now.

Although now I notice that the part I quoted was sort of misleading, and I apologize for that.
 
NullVoid said:
No, what he said was that it would be fine to repair military ships at civilian yards. We have already done so, and even at foreign berths, which was a huge risk then, and is even more so now.

Although now I notice that the part I quoted was sort of misleading, and I apologize for that.
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We've never repaired a warship using a civilian berth. We've used foreign berths twice, because there were no other berths capable of holding an Excelsior. And like I was saying, security concerns aren't the only or even the primary factor in that decision.
 
NullVoid said:
No, what he said was that it would be fine to repair military ships at civilian yards.
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[Rereads AlphaDelta's post]

I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of what he said. He said "Repairs, maybe, but there are far less issues with using a SF fleet-grade berth."

That doesn't sound like him saying "it would be fine to do that, no problem at all." More like a grudging "well, okay, if we really have to."
 
Actually, I'll be honest, we've repaired Excelsiors at foreign berths, but I don't think there's a single Excelsior-sized berth anywhere in the galaxy right now that could be considered civilian-controlled.
 
Night said:
Actually, I'll be honest, we've repaired Excelsiors at foreign berths, but I don't think there's a single Excelsior-sized berth anywhere in the galaxy right now that could be considered civilian-controlled.
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What do people even mean by "civilian" berths? All of our member worlds and affiliates use the berths they control interchangeably to build warships or cargo ships as fits their need. United Earth builds its Centaur-As and its freighters in the same shipyards.

It's not clear that there's any such thing as a "civilian berth", which is to say a shipyard not controlled by the government and/or never used to build combat-capable ships. Maybe the Orions have some hyper corp-controled shipyards because of their commitment to private enterprise? Maybe the Yrillians have some "private" shipyards because they love space travel so much? But neither has ever been confirmed in a canon game post.
 
Briefvoice said:
What do people even mean by "civilian" berths? All of our member worlds and affiliates use the berths they control interchangeably to build warships or cargo ships as fits their need. United Earth builds its Centaur-As and its freighters in the same shipyards.

It's not clear that there's any such thing as a "civilian berth", which is to say a shipyard not controlled by the government and/or never used to build combat-capable ships. Maybe the Orions have some hyper corp-controled shipyards because of their commitment to private enterprise? Maybe the Yrillians have some "private" shipyards because they love space travel so much? But neither has ever been confirmed in a canon game post.
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We know Starfleet has hospital ships, freighters, colony ships, engineering ships, and other auxiliary ships. Unless they haven't built any in the past thirteen years, I think it's safe to assume there are some berths dedicated to those. Like the yard we're building over Amarkia, although smaller and more spread out.
 
Nervos Belli said:
We know Starfleet has hospital ships, freighters, colony ships, engineering ships, and other auxiliary ships. Unless they haven't built any in the past thirteen years, I think it's safe to assume there are some berths dedicated to those. Like the yard we're building over Amarkia, although smaller and more spread out.
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I think the "haven't built any in the past thirteen years" is the correct assumption. Starships for those purposes seem to last a long time. Likely they built the necessary quantity for servicing the original four member world sectors a long time ago and only ever had to make a replacement here or there when a ship was lost in an accident. Then the Federation underwent this massive expansion and more are required, but we've kept the Starfleet berths so busy for the past ten years or so that there hasn't been a good opportunity.

The Development faction has been bitching about exactly that.

EDIT: The evidence is strongly in favor of this since with the MCO we get updates whenever any member world or affiliate builds so much as a cargo ship, and we've gotten zero info that any such are being built for Starfleet. Which says they simply aren't being built.
 
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There probably are civilian yards, but it's likely that they're only producing small passenger ships, bitty little tramp freighters, and in-system craft.

We know that warp-capable ships can be relatively small (say, no bigger than ocean-going ships in real life), in which case it's entirely possible that most civilian ships in the galaxy mass, say, less than 400 kilotons. That still provides a lot of space for cargo, especially since shipments of crude bulk materials aren't likely to be profitable. And yet shipyards that small might well be totally beneath our radar for military purposes.
 
Briefvoice said:
I think the "haven't built any in the past thirteen years" is the correct assumption. Starships for those purposes seem to last a long time. Likely they built the necessary quantity for servicing the original four member world sectors a long time ago and only ever had to make a replacement here or there when a ship was lost in an accident. Then the Federation underwent this massive expansion and more are required, but we've kept the Starfleet berths so busy for the past ten years or so that there hasn't been a good opportunity.

The Development faction has been bitching about exactly that.

EDIT: The evidence is strongly in favor of this since with the MCO we get updates whenever any member world or affiliate builds so much as a cargo ship, and we've gotten zero info that any such are being built for Starfleet. Which says they simply aren't being built.
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You're probably right. At any rate, we're going to have dedicated auxiliary berths soon, so it's worth thinking about how we want to use them. Like is it worth using them to crash build Miranda A's if we're at war? Obviously in peace time we want them working on auxiliaries, but that might change.
 
In wartime we're liable to need things like repair ships (to reduce the burden on our permanent repair berths) and looots of transport/cargo ships to replace ones blown up by enemy raiders.

I suspect our auxiliary yards will have plenty to keep their hands full without worrying about warship production.
 
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