This sounds like you're trying to leverage your position as a Big Name in Ship Design Thread to threaten everyone with your refusal to take larger designs seriously, and I really hope you're not doing that. Because it sounds like a dire warning that 'you want a big Ambassador? Well I won't design it, you'll have to chose between a suboptimal ship designed by someone else or my choice of perfect svelte diet-ambassadors.'

Sorry, but that's a little ridiculous. I'm not going to spend half an hour to an hour making a ship on request that I don't even want to see built. That turns this from a game where I'm volunteering my time into to a job. We have plenty of perfectly competent designers to serve up whatever ship you want, even ones that are just as good as my best. So no, I'm afraid I do get to choose what I want to do with my time, not you.


To bring it back to the discussion, I don't see an issue with Garrison Capital Ships, nor with those ships getting Lone Ranger bonuses? Whether we want such a ship to go on 5YMs too is a matter of requirement setting, not a matter of design.
 
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I like the idea of the Ambassador and future Explorers being EC only, while the Excelsior becomes the workhorse of the fleet. It fits canon with the Excelsior spam they had there.

Nothing wrong with that, but we should probably have an Ambassador for each of our border zones to deal with Hard DC events. Especially if they aren't significantly more crew-heavy than an E-A.
 
Has literally anyone else but you used this term? ANYWHERE? Have we ever seen an Explorer-Cruiser or an Explorer-Escort? Are those in fact, nonsense ships, which I made up to show how nonsense they are? Is the role 'Explorer' so closely linked to being a Master-of-All-Trades that it must by definition a large ship, and concurrently, do the requirements for Science and Defense and the combat cap discourage us from building true Battleships?

What other roles for top-tier ships EXIST in our fleet, other than the Explorer type? Not carriers-they're a non-starter in Trek. Not Battleships, they're against Doctrine. Not specialist S or P ships, escorts can do single jobs almost as well as any capital ship. The only hat that they can wear better than any other is the hat of doing everything in all seasons. So we don't even need a hypothetical framework for suggesting ships that are so far outside our needs and desires. Fundamentally, a debate about 'First-Rates' vs 'Third-rates' is what we have right now. We are not having a debate about missile ships vs Carriers vs Battleships, so we don't need to distinguish between CVs, BBs, and CGs. We have Ships-of-The-Line. Debates about Big Ambassador Vs Small Ambassador are about if we want 130 or 120 guns on our First Rates, not if we want ships with paddle-wheels. Every hull number in the fleet has the NCC prefix after all.

I get the opinion you're jumping in without a sense of how the thread actually uses these terms and pretending there's a problem-or you think the problem's real and we're all just ignoring it.
As pointed out here, we've already almost built Capital/Explorer/ReallyBig Hospital 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.
And you never know what people are going to come up with in the future.

Side-note: did you get those ship classes from Honor Harrington? It's been ages since I read those. Did the author ever solve whatever legal stuff that held up the next book?
 
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.

And this is why, in the original sheet, I advocated for 99+ reliability. Sure, we save BR/SR, but we have a duty to build the best ships possible.

The thing is, there doesn't seem to be a close-to-home poke-stuff department.

That's regular Starfleet.

It's probable we'll never actually design a ship for this role, because refitted previous gen explorers are serviceable for it.



Nobody's proposing ill-equipped EC ships. MAYBE sacrificing one stat point from peak if hitting peak is crazy costly.

What is being proposed is pocket explorers as efficiency sector flagships. Forward Defense's cross-sector response techs a makes a high D Explorer scale response specialist extremely valuable because it can show up to a huge range of events.
That's actually a point of contention - given that we keep them out of areas where they might clash with a superior enemy (space near Cardassian territory, really far-ranging missions) then our hypothetical future smaller Explorers will be just as capable if not more so than our current Explorers (due to improved technology), which are not undergoing the catastrophic rate of attrition being suggested here.

We already do that - we have garrison cruisers for a reason. And once we begin phasing out the Excelsiors for Ambassadors, we will have Excelsior-As for the ship role of Explorer, Home Sector.

This sounds like you're trying to leverage your position as a Big Name in Ship Design Thread to threaten everyone with your refusal to take larger designs seriously, and I really hope you're not doing that. Because it sounds like a dire warning that 'you want a big Ambassador? Well I won't design it, you'll have to chose between a suboptimal ship designed by someone else or my choice of perfect svelte diet-ambassadors.'
Sorry, but that's a little ridiculous. I'm not going to spend half an hour to an hour making a ship on request that I don't even want to see built. That turns this from a game where I'm volunteering my time into to a job. We have plenty of perfectly competent designers to serve up whatever ship you want, even ones that are just as good as my best. So no, I'm afraid I do get to choose what I want to do with my time, not you.
There's not much support in SDB for XL ambassadors - the curve is such that the 8/9 designs are the peak of what's feasible with the diminishing returns.
And I personally will not build such a design either, without a bribe of some sort.

We have an Explorer role, and an Explorer size. How do you propose we refer to an Explorer-size Explorer-role vessel, if not as an Explorer Explorer? As discussion in this thread has shown, the two may not always line up, be it different roles for the size or different sizes for the role. Even for discussing hypotheticals (and in fact, especially for discussing hypotheticals) making the distinction by name is useful.
Explorer?

We won't build battleships - the council will sack us for it.
As pointed out here, we've already almost built Capital/Explorer/ReallyBig Hospital ships:

And you never know what people are going to come up with in the future.
And as for auxiliaries, well we won't build capital-grade hospital ships - we just chose cruiser-sized hospital ships. We probably won't build Excelsior derivative engineering ships - why bother when we won't have any 2.5mt auxiliary berths?

For a long time, the Amarkia Auxiliary Yards (too lazy to look up the proper name) will be our primary source of Auxiliary ships. And it only has 4x 1mt berths. We can expand it with 3mt berths, but that's a berth that we can't build an Excelsior or an Ambassador in. I've already given sufficient arguments upthread as to why it is better to have a regular berth over an auxiliary berth.
Honestly I am not a big fan of the way crew is being handled right now, creating a tiered military organization (and kid you not, Starfleet is a military organization, with peaceful aims, but military non the less) is generally a bad idea, having prestige postings is one thing, a parallel academy? that strikes me as less than wise
No. The EC crew pool is the pool of people who are suitable for EC - those capable of staring into the void, and walking forth. There is no separate academy. The separate income figure is an abstraction.
Actually, Battleships are perfectly in doctrine. Lone Ranger encourages them.
And we've seen the Cardassians use explorer-cruisers.
We can't build battleships - the council will sack us, and everyone involved, in a repeat of the Ares scandal.
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.
Side-note: did you get those ship classes from Honor Harrington? It's been ages since I read those. Did the author ever solve whatever legal stuff that held up the next book?
Ships of the line are a historic ship class.

Honor Harrington is an attempt to bring Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander series into space.
 
There's something I'd like to note. You know the Tactical Roles vote we had just yesterday? It included this option:

[ ][ROLES] A Light Explorer to supplement the Excelsiors

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.
 
Ships of the line are a historic ship class.

Honor Harrington is an attempt to bring Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander series into space.
Sure, but I was also referring to the use of CVs/BBs/CGs, which I thought I remembered from the series. Unless Master and Commander is a very different series to what I recall, it doesn't have those.
 
As pointed out here, we've already almost built Capital/Explorer/ReallyBig Hospital ships:
Dude, we did not 'almost' have 'Explorer Hospital ships' because they were voted down damn near unanimously and they're not part of our main fleet anyways. Even if we had Explorer-sized hospital ships, they're still Auxiliaries.

Side-note: did you get those ship classes from Honor Harrington? It's been ages since I read those. Did the author ever solve whatever legal stuff that held up the next book?
*Open mouth. Close mouth. SIGH LOUDLY*

No, those are from real life fleets from the 18th and 20th century. A CV is an Aircraft Carrier, a CG is a guided-missile cruiser, a BB a Battleship with big guns and thick armor. First Rates are ships like HMS Victory, Third-Rates are the standard 74 gun Man-o-War of the late 18th century, which was simpler and cheaper to build, but is also obviously inferior. Honor Harrington has a plethora of ship types ranging from Battleship to Dreadnought to Super-Super-Dai-Ichi-Dreadnaught(the last one is a lie) but they all do basically the same things.
 
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.
 
*Open mouth. Close mouth. SIGH LOUDLY*

No, those are from real life fleets from the 18th and 20th century. A CV is an Aircraft Carrier, a CG is a guided-missile cruiser, a BB a Battleship with big guns and thick armor. First Rates are ships like HMS Victory, Third-Rates are the standard 74 gun Man-o-War of the late 18th century, which was simpler and cheaper to build, but is also obviously inferior. Honor Harrington has a plethora of ship types ranging from Battleship to Dreadnought to Super-Super-Dai-Ichi-Dreadnaught(the last one is a lie) but they all do basically the same things.
Huh, TIL.

Well, I stand by my principal that the purpose of language is clarity of communication, and that any possible confusion in the meanings of words - like, say, one term being used for multiple distinct meanings - should be avoided if at all possible, and in this case we have a trivially easy vote to do so. I'm pretty sure I'm just arguing with people who are set against it for flavour reasons (I think the flavour is retained, but it's a perfectly valid view to take) and we're arguing over points in-between that we aren't really going to change our minds over, so I shan't argue the point any further.
 
We would then have called them "hospital ships."

We would have called them explorer-weight hospital ships to distinguish from our previous Ranger-based hospital ships because we wouldn't have built enough of the new ones to retire the old ones and yes, that actually does have a risk to it.

And you're accusing people of arguing in bad faith willy-nilly now.
 
We would have called them explorer-weight hospital ships to distinguish from our previous Ranger-based hospital ships because we wouldn't have built enough of the new ones to retire the old ones and yes, that actually does have a risk to it.

And you're accusing people of arguing in bad faith willy-nilly now.
And the Ranger-class probably would have been retired ASAP.

And we won't refer to them at all (barring this discussion) since they're not under our control.
 
If it wouldn't cause the many, many problems that it would, I would be terribly tempted by an opportunity to buy a large stack of surplus (cloak free) ships from both the Klingons and the Romulans and throw those into Gabriel.
I really do feel like the D7 was the Trek version of the AK-47. Simple, rugged, easy to use, cheap to build and employable in outrageous numbers.
The Council and Starfleet both would never go for it, but the looks on the Cardassians faces as we flooded the whole area would be a thing of joy.
 
And the Ranger-class probably would have been retired ASAP.

And we won't refer to them at all (barring this discussion) since they're not under our control.

We can't retire the Rangers in that situation because then we only have four hospital ships for the entire Federation and that's nuts.

And we will refer to them regardless because they have mechanical effects on our game that played a significant role in why we chose what we did, i.e. they give a bonus if they respond to an event alongside one of our ships. So if for no other reason than "this one didn't give us a bonus" "well it's a ranger not the Excelsior-hull one" they will get mentioned.
 
I'd rather have fewer, more successful 5YM than more plentiful but ill-equipped ones. The flipside of the rewards for 5YM being so great is that the cost of failure is extremely high.

Plus, our crew pool for EC grows extremely slowly. We can't afford to be regularly replenishing losses and crewing many new ships. Fewer, stronger ships seems the smart way to go.

Eh, considering the varied snake pit options in that regard and the high likelihood of 5ym gaining significant amounts of pp I actually think that on average those explorer mission would pay for themselves, even if we take soem losses.
 
We can't retire the Rangers in that situation because then we only have four hospital ships for the entire Federation and that's nuts.

And we will refer to them regardless because they have mechanical effects on our game that played a significant role in why we chose what we did, i.e. they give a bonus if they respond to an event alongside one of our ships. So if for no other reason than "this one didn't give us a bonus" "well it's a ranger not the Excelsior-hull one" they will get mentioned.
The Ranger hulls are over-aged though, and they can't continue on forever. I don't know how long they were supposed to last in the first place, but metal fatigue and capability creep are going to render them obsolete and force them into retirement at some point.
 
Has literally anyone else but you used this term? ANYWHERE? Have we ever seen an Explorer-Cruiser or an Explorer-Escort? Are those in fact, nonsense ships, which I made up to show how nonsense they are? Is the role 'Explorer' so closely linked to being a Master-of-All-Trades that it must by definition a large ship, and concurrently, do the requirements for Science and Defense and the combat cap discourage us from building true Battleships?

What other roles for top-tier ships EXIST in our fleet, other than the Explorer type? Not carriers-they're a non-starter in Trek. Not Battleships, they're against Doctrine. Not specialist S or P ships, escorts can do single jobs almost as well as any capital ship. The only hat that they can wear better than any other is the hat of doing everything in all seasons. So we don't even need a hypothetical framework for suggesting ships that are so far outside our needs and desires. Fundamentally, a debate about 'First-Rates' vs 'Third-rates' is what we have right now. We are not having a debate about missile ships vs Carriers vs Battleships, so we don't need to distinguish between CVs, BBs, and CGs. We have Ships-of-The-Line. Debates about Big Ambassador Vs Small Ambassador are about if we want 130 or 120 guns on our First Rates, not if we want ships with paddle-wheels. Every hull number in the fleet has the NCC prefix after all.

I get the opinion you're jumping in without a sense of how the thread actually uses these terms and pretending there's a problem-or you think the problem's real and we're all just ignoring it.

I think the Gaeni Tech cruiser function as explorers and the same should be true of a lot of the smaller/lesser races/nations that simply lack any ship of such a large scale. Plus the the Oberth is also very much a small scale explorer...
 
This argument is getting stupidly heated, so I'm not going to try to participate.

In the meantime, I haven't seen a recent vote in pages, so a vote tally:

Vote Tally : Sci-Fi - To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) | Page 1349 | Sufficient Velocity
##### NetTally 1.7.10.1

Task: ACADEMY

[x][ACADEMY] Custom - Shift 1 Tech to Officer
No. of Votes: 44



Task: EXPLORER

[X][EXPLORER] Custom - shift .25 from Tech to Officer
No. of Votes: 34

[X][EXPLORER] No Change
No. of Votes: 4

[x][EXPLORER] Custom - Shift .125 from Tech and Enlisted to Officer
No. of Votes: 2

[X][EXPLORER] Custom - Shift 0.1 from both Techs and Enlisted to Officers.
No. of Votes: 1



Task: WARP

[X][WARP] Keep to the old system.
No. of Votes: 50

[X][WARP] Adopt the TNG system
No. of Votes: 5



Task: SHIP

[X][SHIP] Adopt the new Frigate/Cruiser/Capital system
No. of Votes: 34

[X][SHIP] Keep to the existing Escort/Cruiser/Explorer system
No. of Votes: 21

Total No. of Voters: 59
 
I think the Gaeni Tech cruiser function as explorers and the same should be true of a lot of the smaller/lesser races/nations that simply lack any ship of such a large scale. Plus the the Oberth is also very much a small scale explorer...
The Oberth has a statline of C1 S5 H1 L2 P1 D1-it can pass Science events, but nothing else. Anything it cannot fight, it can also not run away from, and it's shields are so weak it could be knocked out in three shots from an Excelsior A, giving a combat length of five rounds in the new combat engine, one of the shortest fights we've ever seen simulated. It can't do negotiations either, so any claim it's an 'small scale explorer' is highly questionable. When you find a new species in an Oberth, your one hope for diplomatic relations is '7 minutes in heaven' with a green skinned lady in the broom closet.

The Tech-Cruiser with it's C4 S5 H3 L6 P3 D3 isn't much better off. Good science, okay presence-for a cruiser, great shields-until you realize it's nearly the same size as the 'pocket Explorer' for 150br, 150sr, so it's also more expensive pound-for-pound than the almost-as-capable Renaissance.

For a species with Swarm doctrine, the real Explorer is a fleet configuration, not a ship class anyways.

Funny that. The Ranger is technically an Explorer.
Well it is, but it is one in the sense that USS Iowa (BB-4) - Wikipedia and USS Iowa (BB-61) - Wikipedia are the same kind of ship. I mean, they have the same classification, right?
 
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The Ranger hulls are over-aged though, and they can't continue on forever. I don't know how long they were supposed to last in the first place, but metal fatigue and capability creep are going to render them obsolete and force them into retirement at some point.

I'm really not sure that's true. We have inertial dampners/artificial gravity and gravity nullification and the like which remove most of the obvious sources of stress on the spaceframe, regular maintenance to fix those parts of the external hull or internal fittings that are exposed to sources of damage, and navigational deflectors that protect against radiation altering the structure of the materials over time. The only real bar on our ships soldiering on to a century or more of age is an inability of the hull's available space limitations to support a useful mission.
 
Despite its apparent classification as "long-range explorer", I wouldn't call the Oberth or even a Kepler an explorer.

"Explorer" to me is a role that requires good science and presence, and has the strength and durability and speed and stamina to, well, explore far out there with no or minimal support.

Intrepid would be a proper explorer that is less than a megaton, but we don't have the capability to build something like it until a couple decades now. Kepler does get closer to that though.

Ranger may have been designed as an explorer, but they would not be pressed into an explorer role if built today. (That's why I've been wondering when the Constellation will have to change its ship role.)
 
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Despite its apparent classification as "long-range explorer", I wouldn't call the Oberth or even a Kepler an explorer.

"Explorer" to me is a role that requires good science and presence, and has the strength and durability and speed and stamina to, well, explore far out there with no or minimal support.

Intrepid would be a proper explorer that is less than a megaton, but we don't have the capability to build something like until a couple decades now. Kepler does get closer to that though.

Ranger may have been designed as an explorer, but they would not be pressed into an explorer role if built today. (That's why I've been wondering when the Constellation will have to change its ship role.)
Kepler's viable in a kind of second-line explorer role - poking things in space secure enough that combat is unlikely. The planned designs are in S7 P5 range.
 
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