[sighs]
I'm calling them 'explorers' no matter what anyone says. I liked that name, and I never saw anyone confused or bothered by it until 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.
So we'd call them "big new hospital ships" or "the new hospital ships" or "hospital
Excelsiors" or some made-up class name. And that's in the hypothetical case of lots of voter support for
Excelsior-sized hospital ships... which as I recall only got limited support.
The point is,
none of this is hard. No one has suffered ambiguity or confusion as a result of people calling big ships 'explorers' and not some generic term like 'capital ships.'
And you're accusing people of arguing in bad faith willy-nilly now.
The only people I'm accusing of arguing in bad faith are the ones who literally
made up a nomenclature scheme so that they could come up with a silly designation for the existing
Excelsior class, and then claim that everyone 'has to' use it. When in reality, literally no one uses it.
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.
I don't think we can assume that our force field technology (used in the generic sense to include SIF, inertial damping, artificial gravity, deflectors, etc.) lets us
assume that ships don't experience structural wear and tear during active service.
Certainly, nothing from canon gives us a reason to assume that ships can be operated continuously for long periods without structural wear and tear.
It's actually kind of hard to believe the Romulans sailed out for a Non-Aggression Pact on their own accord. I guess this is maybe the result of us managing to de-escalate to a limited war with the Cardies instead of kicking off Quadrant War 3. They aren't 100% certain that we wouldn't stick our nose in their business, but they're certain enough that they feel that negotiations would favor them.
This may be the Romulans trying to set up their equivalent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: the treaty they sign to secure their flank against us
right before the war with the Klingons. Which would actually make a great deal of strategic sense for them.
Terrible morning all!
What in the hell has been going on here
?
You bundled the "escorts renamed frigates" vote with an "explorers renamed capital ships" vote. The former seemed relatively noncontroversial even if some people opposed it. But the latter option was controversial enough to spark a very heated argument that wound up dragging in all sorts of miscellaneous issues related to explorer design and construction.
A Cat-5 shitstorm, that's what.
PS. Isn't it 9:50 PM?
PSS. You're Avatar is perfect for this situation.
OneirosTheWriter comes from the land down under. As an Australian, his early morning is an American's evening, and vice versa. It imposes interesting dynamics on the quest and post timing thanks to his ludicrous godlike update frequency.
They must not be looking hard enough, we've been practically tripping over them.
We have Explorer Corps ships with science stats of like
eight looking for them. Doing
literally nothing but looking for resources and saying "hi there!" to anyone who looks interesting. Plus we have people like "Rock Whisperer" Straak, "reroll all your mapping failures" Eaton, and "literally cannot fail a sensor check to save his life" Zaardmani on those explorers.
They have
Jalduns and such with science stats of like... three looking for them, with Glinn Whozit operating the sensors. And a handful of science vessels. But they've got such a fixation on building big nasty cruisers and heavily gunned escorts that it's costing them a lot of resources, and they
don't build very many of the science vessels.
As a result of this combination of factors... we find a LOT more resources than they do, it would seem.
