Objections to Frigate/Cruiser/Capital Ship and the notion of largest ships having to always be explorers is silly and Starfleet-centric.
I
like having a Starfleet-centric term. It's not like anyone's going to confuse that big ship the Seyek have for a five-year-mission ship when it's obviously a battleship. We're not stupid.
"Capital ship" is a dry and generic term. Any old bunch of people might use it. The fact that Starfleet calls everyone's big ships "explorers" as a generic term
says something about Starfleet culture, and I like it that way.
Okay I'mma be straight with all of you.
USS Excelsior isn't an Explorer. Nor is USS Thirishar, nor USS Salnas, nor Endurance, Kumari, or Avandar. No more than literally any other ship in our fleet, and far less than the likes of Enterprise or Stargazer. It's honestly kind of silly that we call them that.
If you object to naming them Capital ships instead, come up with some third name that's better and I'll be first to vote for it, but I refuse to keep calling them Explorers unless they're in the Explorer Corps.
I don't remember you having a problem with this until just now?
People have been muttering unhappily about how our 'escorts' do almost everything BUT 'escort' other ships, for a long time now. There hasn't been the same kind of groundswell of opposition to calling the big ships 'explorers.'
I'm in favour of the new system - it clearly defines and differentiates between Size and Role. All of our Explorers will still be called Explorers, they'll be Capital Explorers instead of Explorer Explorers. Now that it's been brought up, it's faintly embarrassing the prides of our fleet are technically designated "Explorer Explorers". The informal name will still be Explorer, this is purely an administration-side cleanup.
Uh... we just call them 'explorers.' Nobody uses the phrase 'explorer explorers.' Sometimes we say 'Explorer Corps ship' to clearly distinguish ships that draw from that special crew pool and go on five year missions from other ships of the same class in regular fleet service... but realistically we will
always have that problem, one way or another.
So there will be Explorer Frigates and Explorer Cruisers too, right? And Capital sized ships, they'll include Capital Science ships and Capital Battleships that print Militarization points like they're going out of style, right? Like, We're gonna have So Many Classes of Capital-sized ships, you won't even believe it, right?
Or are we probably just gonna have two generalist platforms at the top of the scale, Generalist light-cruisers for the next 20 years, and only the Escorts are really looking at any design proliferation that justifies any sort of 'role:size' scheme?
That's basically it. We have the
Excelsior (which will probably be pulling five year missions well up into the 2320s if not later), the
Ambassadors (mostly five year mission ships), and that's it. Even if we design a "pocket explorer" of 1.8 to two million tons, there's no fundamental reason to call it a capital ship in the first place. We'll be using it as the 'big sister' to the one-megaton cruisers we already have, as a heavier sector flagship.
For the next few decades we're going to have explorers, and we're going to have everything else. That simple.
Warp 10 is the limit in TNG era. The question is what does that translate to in the OG system. Technically I suppose it doesn't matter because with the TNG system all they did was keep on adding decimal places.
That's my point.
Ships get faster, but instead of saying "Warp 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14" they say "Warp 8, 9, 9.2, 9.6, 9.9, 9.99, 9.9975." It's foolish.
Saying "Warp 10 is the limit in the TNG system" doesn't mean "In TNG, ships can't go faster than so-and-so." It means "In TNG, Starfleet forgot how to count to 11 without taking its shoes off."
In other news, from all the Master of Orion updates this year, it looks like the ASTF's operations are being abstracted out, since we're no longer seeing any details of how the ASTF has been continuing up on the world Freedom, or whether they're still sticking to the same minor world hopping strategy.
We also haven't seen any world corruption level updates, so that mechanic probably has been abandoned by now (which is good, because under a simplistic model, we only reduced total corruption from 59% at start of 2311 to 50% at end of 2312).
I actually kind of miss that because it gave us fairly regular tangible updates. When we reduced a world's corruption we felt like we'd
achieved something, something more significant than "+20 Impact."
We're not sure. Pocket explorers and a second cruiser class have both been floated.
Yes, but there's no compelling reason to class either of these as "garrison explorers" or "explorer cruisers" or whatever the heck.
Unless the galaxy itself becomes more dangerous as we expand outwards, this wouldn't be any more dangerous than it currently is; later on hypothetical smaller Explorer ships would have stats just as good as (and likely, eventually better than) our current explorers.
I don't think we can count on event DCs remaining constant as ship stats increase. There are narrative justifications for it, too- a lot of what our ships do is routine or nearly routine missions to survey and explore. When we've explored the tame stuff, what's left to look at is likely to be more dangerous.
My argument is to make each individual unit as strong as possible. And this goes double for ships whose entire Business is risk.
I don't like the idea of "Pocket Explorers" on 5YMs because it's this corporate penny pinching mindset that uses phrases like "Acceptable losses" and "return on investment" to spend as little as possible and then is surprised when it gets back as little as possible. And then not realising that you end up spending three time as much as before to make up for the losses in cured because of less capable units.
I want our units that by definition will be operating without support as much as possible to be as individually capable as possible.
When we push a crew out into vast unknown stars as distant from the Core as any Federation citizen has ever been I want our crews to have as many tools as possible at their disposal. I don't want to come up short because some Desk bound corporate drone decided to keep quarterly expenditures down as casualties aren't his problem.
Like I see those little points of crew as people and I don't like risking them more than there is any need to and using "Pocket Explorers" to bulk up 5YMs is letting our people down out of some misguided sense of thriftiness.
Edit: Like yes I understand not eeking out every last point of state. That's fine. But deliberately underbuilding the ships that go into danger to save $$$ is monstrous.
I think what it comes down to is that we may not want to build
the strongest ship imaginable. Not if it means we can't build them in some reasonable quantity- we're not in the business of building Just One Ship and piling all our eggs into that singular basket.
But I don't think that's what you meant. And I agree with you entirely that for our purposes, we want explorers to steadily increase in strength, not remain constant in strength and just get cheaper. We might design a 'heavy cruiser' with
Excelsior stats and a 1.5 or 1.8 or whatever megaton hull... but that's not an Explorer Corps ship, that's a flagship for our existing sector fleets.
I'm with you on the whole "not knowingly building 'economy' ships for the Explorer Corps." That's not a good approach and it's not going to be rewarding for us over the long haul.
EDIT: This has gotten entirely out of hand from a tangent regarding renaming the Explorer Explorers to Capital Explorers. The fact that it's up for debate at all is a point in the name-change's favour, but even if you double down and say "no, there's no way the thread will ever vote to make non-Capital-size Explorers" we should change the name anyway, because right now they're technically classified as Explorer Explorers, which is ridiculous.
You are literally the only person I can ever remember using "explorer explorers" as a term for our heavy starships.
One stat doesn't make a difference nearly as much as you think. If we had elite or veteran Connie-As, as we should if they had been in service that long, then we would have passed every single check you refer to except 33 Fujit. We aren't likely to replace our existing Excelsiors either as the net effect would be a drop. Putting out a 7 and 8 ship rather than a 8 and 9 one, if the crew was reduced, would not have nearly the effect you claim on event passes. And especially more ships would be a huge benefit in crisis situations, where the stakes are much higher anyway.
Uh...
Enterprise, Courageous, and
Sarek all started out Veteran. They were performing a lot better than a Veteran
Constitution-A or even an Elite one could have done, unless we go with the overpowered game start statline Oneiros had for the
Constitution-A that later got retconned.
I don't think it's feasible to deny that our ships would be failing significantly more events if they got hit with a -1 to all stats. They wouldn't perform "just as well." We would almost certainly have lost
at least one other ship (
S'harien, in particular, was nearly stolen by the Syndicate). There are a lot of events for which we simply have no idea what our margin of superiority is. Given that typical die rolls are either 2d6 or 3d6, we almost certainly have examples of events where we'd have lost a ship or had some disaster befall us if our ships had lower stats.
We aren't going to produce ill-equipped 5ym ships. That is a blatant mischaracterization of the position being argued. If you think it makes such a difference, then why not an argument that EC ships should get seasoned in regular service until blooded? That's the same tier of difference you're arguing is ill-equipped, and we throw such ships to the EC mission all the time.
The main argument against doing exactly that is how long it takes a ship to reach Blooded in regular service (at a typical event rate of 1/year or less) compared to how long it takes to reach Blooded in the Explorer Corps (at a rate of 4/year). Explorer Corps ships starting out Green actually is a problem for them, but they shake it off quickly.
