Well maybe. The big uncertainty is how many years the Ambassador research takes before we can start the prototype. I'm becoming more and more doubtful that it will only be a two research phase effort. If it takes 3 research turns then we don't have to pay the massive cost of the Ambassador prototype in 2315, and we can afford to spend more in 2314. Luckily we're about to find out the time the research will take very soon, so we'll finally be able to lock down the year we have to shell out for the prototype.
Oh good point.
Largest question is whether the Ambassador is going to take more than 2 years of research (or more than 1.25 years of research due to how research apparently completes in a single quarter). That is, whether it's going to take longer than the Renaissance design project, which took 2 (1.25) years.
I'm starting to suspect it may take 3 (2.25) years of research, since even without a concrete design, all the speculative designs have incorporated a LOT of T2 tech that has never been used before.
Recent relevant post from Oneiros on this:
I'm still deciding on the best way to address project design time, and there's a few different options. For the moment, the important thing is that parts that have already been used in an existing design would take half as long to design. I'm probably going to split the project up into four slides , one for each sub-frame. If you are reusing a previous sub-frame+parts combo entirely, you skip that slide entirely.
Compared to the Renaissance, the Renaissance is arguably less of a generational advancement over its predecessor, because:
a) Constellation and Excelsior were both designed in the 2270s, considering their introduction year and prototyping time
b) Renaissance straddles T1 and T2, while Ambassador is much further into T2
c) Renaissance project could reuse some of the research done for the Centaur-A refit (T1-ish); although on the other hand, the Ambassador project could potentially use the research that's being done in parallel for the Excelsior-A refit (T1/2-ish)
Furthermore, there's good reason to believe that explorer design projects will take longer than cruiser design projects, all else being equal, since that's how ship design tech trees work.
