Well, if I'm not mistaken this may be Saavik's last event check of her five year mission, and she
really brought home the bacon with it.
o7
That would be great, but... again, can't do it. Right now all we have on the RBZ is the Excelsior and an Oberth. I don't know where we'd get the 6D to fill that hole if we tried to send the Excelsior in for a refit.
Maybe when
Endurance comes out of repairs, if
Kumari and
Avandar are still in shape, we can rotate
Endurance to cover the RBZ and
Excelsior into drydock?
You guys can start fights about the most...inane things, can't you? ... and 'we need a way to make diplomatic contact that won't actually improve our relations with icky imperialists-' isn't that called 'intel briefs?'
Vehrec, I respect you enough to know that you know the difference between "try and keep a bunch of neutrals neutral" and "get a spy report on how strong they are." They're not the same thing.
Look, the Cardassians picked up the Dawiar more or less
entirely because we ignored them for years. We basically forgot they existed until they up and attacked us and got into a war with one of our affiliates, by which time they were firmly in the Cardassian sphere in a way we haven't been able to crack. Now they've maneuvered us into a position where we can't even engage in diplomatic conduct with a species we first met in 2302,
before we even encountered the Cardassians!
This is exactly the kind of thing we do not want to see repeated over and over on our coreward and rimward flanks. Which means we really do need to at least maintain active diplomatic relations with foreign powers we're not planning to recruit. Not just pretend they don't exist, and not just covertly spy on them while otherwise making no approaches and hoping our enemies don't beat us to the punch.
Hopefully we'll see more of that kind of activity out of the FDS, because I
get that it's not our job, but it's definitely a job someone ought to be doing, and one that has gone largely undone from game start up through 2312 or so.
So who's with me to expand the Academy every year for four straight years? If you're not, then you better not vote for any berths, because we can't use them.
Given that now we're not totally crippled by cost inflicted by the Syndicate (we think-hope), I'm inclined to favor this.
I won't promise anything because I'll likely not remember that far ahead.
Hey here's an idea; For each Renaissance cruiser to come out of dry dock, we free up crew by handing one of our Constellations to one of our Members or Affiliates.
Good idea? Bad idea?
It's been discussed. The problem is that every time we retire a
Constellation we open up a hole in our deployment plans. Look up 'sector defense requirements' to get the overview. What it comes down to is that every time we retire a
Constellation in order to crew a
Renaissance, there is a high probability that the Rennie will just end up stuck sailing around whatever backwater sector the
Constellation used to be covering. This is a Bad Thing from the point of view of trying to get our highly modern and hella tanky cruisers out there on the front lines where we need them.
It's not that we don't want to replace
Constellations with
Renaissances eventually. It's that we actually have almost exactly the minimum number of ships we need in order to meet all our garrison requirements AND maintain a strong fleet in the Gabriel Expanse. Retiring any ship in a situation like this creates a lot of problems.
If the unwanted Constellations go to the Apiata, Indorians, or Amarki they'll see action in the Gabriel Free For All anyway.
We'd rather they didn't. A
Constellation is weaker than just about any ship the Cardassians or Sydraxians have, including their light escort ships.
The thing that's keeping the
Constellations in service is quite simply that 'any ship is better than no ship.' A
Constellation can still respond to events, save lives on patrol in interior sectors, do scientific missions, and so on. It may not do as good a job of that as a modern cruiser or even a
Centaur-A, but it'll do a lot better job than "no ship" would do.
Most of the member worlds don't have much reason to pick up a ship whose main qualification is "what the heck, it's better than nothing." Certainly the Indorions, Amarki, and Apiata aren't going to want crew-hungry ships that are very likely to die if sent into heavy combat against their main opponents. They don't have the warm bodies to spare for those kinds of games.
Well okay,
maybe the Apiata do.
