Sure, and then the Federation took the name and made it its own. You say "Enterprise" across the galaxy, and it's not Earth that people think of.
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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Sure, and then the Federation took the name and made it its own. You say "Enterprise" across the galaxy, and it's not Earth that people think of.
- Location
- USA
HMS Courageous says high, I think we can count it as neutral, and it was one of the three we started with so not much we can do there. Stargazer is neutral though and that was probably best considering it is part of the Kadeshi expedition.
So what we need are: Andorian, Tellarite, Caitian, Amarkia, Betazoid, Apiata, Indoria.
We have-
Human: 2
Vulcan: 2
Rigellian: 1
Neutral: 2
The following is my desire to share an amusing mental image. It is not me weighing in on either side of the discussion or attempting to reignite an argument.
So, reading this post I had the mental image of @SynchronizedWritersBlock with a salt grinder seasoning the thread. There is a rumble from behind them. They turn, and there is @Simon_Jester riding an avalanche of salt boulders towards them.
Again, not weighing in, not saying one side is right or wrong, just a funny mental image.
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- Location
- Patriarchova
I'm not sure we're ever going to have 14 EC ships in service. Or even 10.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
@Random Member , @Joshrand1982 , @pbluekan , your "Briefvoice" votes ate the normal NAME/CREW votes you were planning to make. You might want to go back and copy-paste Briefvoice's actual build plan for the BUILD vote, because otherwise you're locked into voting for everything he voted for.
If you're cool with everything he said, that's fine- but basically, the voting engine doesn't support going "yeah, what he said" for one vote on a line-item vote, while having separate independent votes for everything else. It looks like if you go [-] SomePostersName at any point in a post, you are voting for EVERYTHING SomePostersName voted for, not just that one item.
If you're cool with everything he said, that's fine- but basically, the voting engine doesn't support going "yeah, what he said" for one vote on a line-item vote, while having separate independent votes for everything else. It looks like if you go [-] SomePostersName at any point in a post, you are voting for EVERYTHING SomePostersName voted for, not just that one item.
- Location
- Patriarchova
That, and quite a few of them got busted for Syndicate sponsorship. I suspect that those particular companies are now much smaller and poorer than they used to be, if they haven't been broken up entirely.
"Hoping for a price break is stupid, you're stupid, and you should always vote for Academy expansions, stupid idiot, shut up and vote the way I tell you." Mmmm, that's how that feels to me anyways. Like, we get it okay, you're the big doom-sayer, but I've never held out hope for the Academy-system in a state of war anyways. And we have gotten some smallish discounts, if you look, so a policy of non-stop buying expansions might be prohibitively expensive after all? Like, you're suggesting 'well we need seven continuous expansions if we get any new berths' which would wind up costing us something like 350 PP and have a final expansion that costs 65PP.
It just won't be able to produce both the personnel for new construction and replacements in a state of total mobilization. It takes four years to graduate an academy class anyways, even if we double classes we wouldn't see a response for at least that long if this was more simulationist. We'd have to lean on the generally excellent education systems of the Federation to have pre-produced civilians who have the skills and the ability to learn new skills that enable them to be quickly trained into spacers. They might turn out to be Ultra-Green or something, but you might be glad for that if we suddenly had access to all the shipyards of the Federation.
I don't even know what you're trying to accomplish here? Are you just taking pleasure in leaning out of your tower, waving receipts and saying "YOU FOOLS, I WARNED YOU!"?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
This is where my saltalanche came from.
I don't want to be telling the Apiata "sorry, it'll be another decade or so before we get around to naming an explorer after any Apiata thing, so just wait while we spam names like Berlin, Cairo, Farragut, Lakota, Melbourne..."
We're not realistically going to be able to ensure that there is an Explorer Corps ship for every member species. Too much depends on which years we happen to be able to provide Explorer Corps crew for our ships. It would mean artificially delaying naming other, regular fleet Excelsiors for the new member worlds.
I don't want to be telling the Apiata "sorry, it'll be another decade or so before we get around to naming an explorer after any Apiata thing, so just wait while we spam names like Berlin, Cairo, Farragut, Lakota, Melbourne..."
Thirishar is named for the mythical first Andorian, Avandar is named for something Betazoid, and Salnas for the Amarki version of Galileo (only with more badassery and a lot less passive-aggressive nonsense).
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- Location
- USA
Heh, I think that might the drive the GM insane with that number of EC event. But we have 7 now, with an 8th joining next year. In general I like the idea of spreading names around as much as possible
- Location
- Patriarchova
For one thing, as you said, the QM is not going to want to have to write that many captains' logs, and I'd rather read a smaller number of inspired ones than a huge pile of rushed, mediocre ones.
For another, the Ambassador is going to be replacing the Excelsior as our 5YM ship eventually. We haven't finalized the stats yet, but odds are its going to be even more crew hungry than the Excelsior.
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- Mid-Atlantic
Well, we already had/have names for the founding four members, the Amarki, the Betazoids, and now the Rigellians. It looks like one way or another we're going to get the Caitians (maybe twice), the Tellarites won't be too far behind even if they don't get this year, and we'll probably do ships for the Apiata and Indorions soon enough.
They're not all Explorer Corps ships, and that may be just as well, but they're all explorers.
They're not all Explorer Corps ships, and that may be just as well, but they're all explorers.
Okay, that mental image just about makes up for the-
Look, I'm not just bitching, I've proposed solutions and future precautions.
Given that a berth takes about 1 to 2 years to finish, getting the crew for the ships expected from that berth just makes sense! And if you're crewing an average of 3/3/3 two years after the berth finishes, I'm actually being conservative in my proposal. Four years is 2/2/2 for an expansion. Account for empty time and refits and we might be close.
So yes, our berths do cost us 65 pp each, or whatever estimate you'd use for academy plus berth cost. That is a fact by the cold hard numbers.
- Location
- USA
I think we need a mechanic to transition EC crew into normal Starfleet vessels. And maybe cap the EC at say 9 active (not counting special circumstance like the Stargazer accompanying the Kadeshi). Still the Ambassador is likely a 7.5 year prototype at the shortest and we still likely have two years of research to do. In that time frame we would still have the EC crew to outfit a few Excelsiors at least.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Good point.
I think I once suggested, or at least thought of, setting up a situation where we agree with the Dawiar to have a big ship or fleet-sized duel.
Ships disabled in the duel are to be interned or demilitarized, uh... somewhere. If we can think of any neutrals we trust, which is admittedly going to be a problem.
Point is, they get to say they tried, and they take some of our ships out of action for the duration of the war. But nobody dies and the ships are all still there to be reactivated after the peace treaty is signed. Honor is satisfied, and in a manner much more palatable to the Dawiar than having us just roll up and blow up all their space-based infrastructure while destroying their entire navy in the span of a couple of months.
...
Also, are you planning to do anything about how the 'Caitian names as frontrunners for both NAME votes' thing that happened on account of all the people who just vote 'Briefvoice' for build votes due to your ludicrous shipyard ops skills, after you picked your own Caitian name for NAME1?
It will be amusing if that happens.
Capping the Explorer Corps ship total is something I think Oneiros will handle himself if he feels like it; the main argument for doing it is by definition something that affects him far more than anyone else.
As to your other proposal... why would we want to transition Explorer Corps crew into regular Starfleet ships? What's in it for us? Are you saying this is what we should do after we hit a 'cap' on Explorer Corps size that may or may not even materialize?
- Location
- Earth
This is very silly reasoning. The federation, and by extension starfleet, will continue expanding in the years and decades to come. We could very well have twice the members we do now by 2325-2330, and that's obviously not going to suddenly decrease the amount of auxiliary ships of all types that we need.
As it is, we already need to build 10 medical ships each taking 3 years with the first prototype one taking 3.75.(which let's say is rounded to 4) Assuming we start the prototype now and then use all 4 berths when it finishes to build them as quickly as possible, it would still take until 2324 for all but one of them to finish.
If you wanted just 10 cargo ships in addition to that, given each of them would take 2 years to build, you could build 6 of them while the medical ship prototype finishes, and then 3 of the 4 remaining would be started in 2324 with the last in 2326, finishing in 2328. I will be very surprised if all we need is 10 cargo ships though, and other auxiliaries will take even longer for each to build.
Finally, any free berths we have will almost certainly get used by member worlds who very clearly have their own constantly expanding needs.
Thus I support somehow getting another 4 berths for auxiliaries. If we can use regular ship yard berths to build auxiliaries, I wouldn't have a problem with building them instead. However, despite being asked about it several times, Oneiros has never given us an answer one way or the other.
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- Germany
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- He/Him
And if we ever have nothing to build, we can still trade/gift auxiliaries to affiliates/big powers as part of diplomacy.
- Location
- USA
For transitioning from EC to regular Starfleet, yes that would happen once we hit whatever cap size Oneiros is comfortable with not something that would happen before that. The benefit for us would be that we could get experienced ships moved into regular Starfleet for deployment.
We already have a cap on Explorer Corps ships. It's the Combat cap. We can only have so many ships, and we need most of them to garrison sectors, and EC is limited to whatever is left over.
See... the thing is, the player base isn't being asked to manage auxiliary production. Thank god. I appreciate the detail that the QM puts into economics behind the screen, but it's too much for me. Do we need another 4 berths? Is that enough? Too many? I got no clue, and I suspect neither do you, other than a feeling it's probably important/urgent because the narration keeps mentioning it.
So if an additional auxiliary berth is required, we'll be told it's required and presented with clear options to vote on. I'm happy with it being not our problem until that day comes.
USS Courageous' personification is now a stoner, pass it on.
More seriously, while Earth has associations with the name, I would be seriously surprised if the Andorians (and Amarki) don't have comparable names for historical vessels. I'd associate names like Warspite, Ark Royal, Yorktown etc with humans more. Enterprise falls into this as well, but it was also the name of a ship that spearheaded the formation of the UFP so arguably it's been uplifted to being an all-Federation name.
No doubt like how the Enterprise ready-room has models of the USS Enterprise carrier, the Courageous ready room has models of the Andorian and Human Courageous-es. And the crew gets into endless debates about which would win.
Some Tellarites grumble that the Industrious would beat either, and what's more if it was at all historically accurate to Tellarite production capacity they would include her sister ship, the Indefatigable. WHICH THEN SETS OFF AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT DEBATE.
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By the way, there's something I'd like to point out to you guys. You've been all, "We need an EC ship for every member world." However only one of these two ships will be EC. Per the current voting:
NAME1 = EC Ship
NAME2 = Regular Excelsior
So the Rurradador name will be going to the regular Excelsior, not the EC Excelsior. Not sure if that matters to anyone.
EDIT: At least I won't have to read it in as many Captain's Logs... maybe I should just accept that and vote for the Voshev, which I can at least pronounce.
NAME1 = EC Ship
NAME2 = Regular Excelsior
So the Rurradador name will be going to the regular Excelsior, not the EC Excelsior. Not sure if that matters to anyone.
EDIT: At least I won't have to read it in as many Captain's Logs... maybe I should just accept that and vote for the Voshev, which I can at least pronounce.
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- Location
- USA
Looking back I don't think we will ever have the EC numbers to have one named for each member. At best we can avoid doubling up, though we probably need to keep a list of honors, like the Enterprise, where we will always have a ship of that name in the fleet.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Some people want Explorer Corps ships for every member world, but we are a LONG way from achieving that goal.
Others just want explorers for every member world, which is achievable and we're only a year or two from getting there.
The cap is a purely hypothetical concept; at the moment we have no cap, only a floor. SO how about we wait to see what form this hypothetical cap takes, or if it even exists, before we start asking for a mechanic to 'demote' Explorer Corps crew units to regular Starfleet?
By contrast, if we start four more auxiliary berths at Amarkia right now... those berths come ready around, oh, early 2317.
Starfleet Medical doesn't have the budget to do eight hospital ships at a time, so we'd be looking at two tranches of four hospital ships (or maybe only three) between 2318 and 2324. We build six cargo ships between 2314 and 2318, as you say... But then we have four empty berths doing nothing but spamming cargo ships between 2317 and 2325 or so.
In 2325, our shipyard will have turned out twenty-two cargo ships, nine hospital ships with ongoing construction of one more or however many more we need, and be starting its seventh tranche of freighters- another seven of them, assuming we don't start more than one hospital ship that year.
...
While I fully recognize that four auxiliary berths may not meet our needs, it is entirely possible that eight auxiliary berths would greatly oversupply those needs.
My argument is that in general, after having just made a large expansion to our auxiliary facilities, we should not immediately double down and build more and more of those auxiliary facilities simply because 'we just built an auxiliary yard and we're still short of auxiliaries.' Building the yard doesn't fix the problem immediately; that takes time. We should make permanent investments to meet a permanent need, not in reaction to the urgency of a short-term need that we already addressed by making the same investment a few years ago.
Let's wait a few years before further expanding the auxiliary yard, then make up our mind whether we need even more expansions. Maybe it will become feasible to build more auxiliaries in our military yards, for instance- which would render the extra auxiliary berths at Amarkia superfluous.
Others just want explorers for every member world, which is achievable and we're only a year or two from getting there.
So basically... we 'need' this demotion mechanic becuase of the Explorer Corps cap.
The cap is a purely hypothetical concept; at the moment we have no cap, only a floor. SO how about we wait to see what form this hypothetical cap takes, or if it even exists, before we start asking for a mechanic to 'demote' Explorer Corps crew units to regular Starfleet?
This still isn't the type of thing we should blow a Sousa deal on (they're best used for things we can't get just by spending pp on normal options).
Simultaneously, in the later part of the 2310s we're going to have a lot of military berths open and unoccupied throughout our space. We may be able to squeeze cargo ships in there.
By contrast, if we start four more auxiliary berths at Amarkia right now... those berths come ready around, oh, early 2317.
Starfleet Medical doesn't have the budget to do eight hospital ships at a time, so we'd be looking at two tranches of four hospital ships (or maybe only three) between 2318 and 2324. We build six cargo ships between 2314 and 2318, as you say... But then we have four empty berths doing nothing but spamming cargo ships between 2317 and 2325 or so.
In 2325, our shipyard will have turned out twenty-two cargo ships, nine hospital ships with ongoing construction of one more or however many more we need, and be starting its seventh tranche of freighters- another seven of them, assuming we don't start more than one hospital ship that year.
...
While I fully recognize that four auxiliary berths may not meet our needs, it is entirely possible that eight auxiliary berths would greatly oversupply those needs.
My argument is that in general, after having just made a large expansion to our auxiliary facilities, we should not immediately double down and build more and more of those auxiliary facilities simply because 'we just built an auxiliary yard and we're still short of auxiliaries.' Building the yard doesn't fix the problem immediately; that takes time. We should make permanent investments to meet a permanent need, not in reaction to the urgency of a short-term need that we already addressed by making the same investment a few years ago.
Let's wait a few years before further expanding the auxiliary yard, then make up our mind whether we need even more expansions. Maybe it will become feasible to build more auxiliaries in our military yards, for instance- which would render the extra auxiliary berths at Amarkia superfluous.
They also have their own berths; the only thing we've had them using our berths for is Excelsiors because most of the member worlds don't have lots of explorer berths. For one-megaton ships they've been doing their own construction and refits without difficulty.
No one has ever voted for a plan that involves building civilian ships in Starfleet berths.
- Location
- USA
To my knowledge we have never had the options to build civilian ships in regular Starfleet berths.