Look, the design thread is open to the public. It's
right there.
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/starfleet-ship-design-bureau-to-boldly-go.33039/
Thing is, our design process is very complicated- an entirely separate game in its own right, really. They've been through... I've honestly lost count, either three or four iterations of "how ship design should work" in roughly as many months. Unless you go in there and spend
many hours figuring out how it works, you will not understand how it works. I know I don't. There's a significant gap even among the designers in how good a design they can create, because some of them have more experience playing with the spreadsheet magic than others. I suspect that many of them have spent dozens if not hundreds of hours on various designs by now.
As a consequence, when someone shows you the statlines of, say, four possible
Keplers, without explaining the context... it causes a lot of confusion. People don't
know that 1.1 megaton escorts are or soon will be available. People don't
know that there's not much you can do to make crews smaller. People don't know that a Combat 2 ship is practically the minimum that can even be designed on the sheet. I certainly didn't know any of those things until I started looking at the most recent set of designs.
Moreover, the rules of what can and cannot be designed are being constantly rebalanced on the fly.
Put together, all of this means that if hypothetical random design exercises from the SDB thread 'leak' over here, it is very likely to set off conversations that involve a lot of wordage which isn't well founded in the rules of ship design. Because the rules of ship design are, quite frankly, too complicated for most of us to understand. Or at least too complicated to understand without investing a disproportionate amount of time.
My theory is that our seniormost ship designer (the one who IC comes up with SynchronizedWritersBlock's designs) is a Lecarre. But their Lecarre mimicry skills are so good that they're actually doing a better job
as our senior designer than the real person would, resulting in objectively better ship designs. So we should just roll with it.
So, in descending order from most to least obvious alien infiltrators we know and love...
AKuz is a Romulan, anon-user is a Cardie, Iron Wolf is a Klingon, and SWB is a genius Lecarre ship designer impersonating a less inspired Federation ship designer.
Did I leave anyone out?
