There's something I'd like to note. You know the
Tactical Roles vote we had just yesterday? It included this option:
That's a "pocket explorer" and it wouldn't have been offered as an option if the QM didn't legitimately mean to allow it. So if you guys want to build a pocket explorer, then vote for that option at the next tactical roles vote, and we'll design one and build it... indeed we'll be penalized if we don't design and build it.
So I don't want to hear any more talk about how a pocket Explorer is some kind of cheat that isn't meant to be allowed in the game.
I don't consider it a cheat, but I
do recall Oneiros warning us that if we end up 'abusing' it to cram huge amounts of extra Combat into the fleet, the Council (which is not stupid) will stop giving us discounts toward the Combat cap for that type of 'explorer.'
That isn't a problem with pocket explorers as such, just a problem with using them as an exploit, which isn't really what we should want anyway.
I don't have a problem with us developing a more cost-effective pocket explorer class in the future, preferably one that will fit in a two-megaton cruiser berth. It'd have to be pretty good to compete with our legacy
Excelsior fleet, but maybe it can be. That said, we probably won't design such a ship for quite a while.
Instead of wasting time designing and fielding a superfluous design, let's just build more Excelsiors, Renaissances, Centaur-As/Miranda-As, and whatever our Oberth-replacement will be.
Seriously, this is the same shit Nazi Germany pulled. They kept changing their tank designs every few months instead of picking a few and mass producing them like the American Sherman or Soviet T-34.
It's been thirty years since we designed a new Explorer. We can build a significantly better ship in every regard. It'll probably be another 20-30 years before it's worth designing a replacement for the Ambassador. We absolutely should start the Ambassador now, and we've already voted to.
I think
@chriswriter90 has some valid insight here. Not so much "we shouldn't design new classes," as that we shouldn't
bicker endlessly over new classes. Designing a straightforward, clear improvement over an existing design is a good idea. Fussing and fighting constantly over having a huge proliferation of science cruisers and garrison frigates and combat frigates and explorer capitals and garrison capitals and science capitals and combat capitals and so on is
silly.
New classes should be introduced to replace old ones, and as we see, chriswriter will agree. But new classes should not
proliferate out of control, lest we burn up political will and psychological energy that would better be used on something else.
The [WORD ONE] [WORD TWO] classification system that some seem so eager to adopt isn't very useful to us
unless we proliferate designs heavily. And not just for escorts, either, but for the cruiser and explorer classes we currently prefer to think of as generalists.
Actually, Battleships are perfectly in doctrine. Lone Ranger encourages them.
Our
construction doctrine is fine with battleships, but our
political doctrine isn't.
And we've seen the Cardassians use explorer-cruisers.
And it's going badly for them.
Gen 1 pocket Explorer is the Excelsior-A. Gen 2 pocket Explorer is probably an SDB Amby refit/varient optimised for increased D over other things.
Pocket Explorer/Garrison Explorer is a role.
And we have a perfectly good name for them already: "pocket explorer" or "light explorer." A ship that
theoretically could fulfill five year mission requirements, but is in practice not called upon to do so. We don't need some kind of arbitrary [WORD ONE] [WORD TWO] scheme under which
suddenly it is imperative to reclassify 'explorers' as 'explorer capital ships.'
Except that time we almost ended up with capital-grade hospital ships. Because you know, that happened. And things like it can happen again.
We would then have called them "hospital ships." Nobody would have been using the word "hospital capital." My point is that this concern that somehow the terminology will confuse people is just
not a real problem, it's completely fabricated and is not a good reason to stop calling our big ships 'explorers' as a way of expressing the primary purpose Starfleet sees itself as operating big ships for.