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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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Hazard said:
That may be so, but we are dealing with the same problem as we did when we had to decide what class to use as the basis for the new hospital ships. We could've gone for an Explorer class hull, but didn't because that would've left us with maybe 4 hulls. Hulls with the best modifiers possible, admittedly, but still only 4, in a Federation that was rapidly expanding in size and membership.
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Thing is, there's usually only one event per sector per quarter, which means that parking even a single explorer in each sector vastly increases the reliability of our event response. And there are only about 13 sectors in the Federation, and new sectors aren't being added very fast, either. Giving a regular fleet explorer flagship to all our border sectors and the interior sectors where we're most likely to have political problems isn't an unreasonable ambition.

That's why the Renaissance hull was chosen instead; it'd offer double the number of ships to be seeded through Federation space for emergency response even if it meant only a +2 on medical emergency rolls instead of +4 when a hospital ship was available to assist.
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Because we DO have thirteen sectors, and four hospital ships scattered across thirteen sectors is a losing game. But we already have at least six or seven regular fleet explorers and frankly we don't need many more to reach the goal I describe above.

However, explorer dominated fleets are expensive on a per hull basis, and one of the major constraints Starfleet is facing is lack of numbers to respond with. I seek to handle this problem by constraining the desired number of explorer class hulls, using freed up resources for increased number of cruiser class hulls.
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How favorable are cruisers, specifically the Renaissance-class, in terms of crew efficiency compared to Excelsior-As? I'm sure they have advantages, but I'm not sure the advantage is all that marked.
 
Well, I think our political will income has increased to the point where we can seriously consider doing that. And the moratorium on new memberships is now 'only' about 2-3 years from ending, The big problem is just finding enough targets to do it on. We can hopefully bring in the Seyek to counterweight Cardassian strength down around Bajor, the Qloathi to bolster the defenses down there and provide more security if the Cardies manage to get the Ittick-ka on-side, the Honiani to counterbalance the Yrillians a bit, and the Yrillians themselves to try and disrupt the process of them automatically 'flipping' Cardassian in case of war. That's a pretty expensive program of diplomacy, though, at 80pp/year.

EDIT:

One catch is that bringing those guys in would probably add another three sectors or so to Federation space, which will be a major stretch for our defensive commitments if we're still having to deploy fleets outside our actual member territory the way we are with the Gabriel and Licori border zones.
 
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aeqnai said:
If we push hard enough, we can get another four members in '17 when our moratorium ends...
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Simon_Jester said:
Well, I think our political will income has increased to the point where we can seriously consider doing that. And the moratorium on new memberships is now 'only' about 2-3 years from ending, The big problem is just finding enough targets to do it on. We can hopefully bring in the Seyek to counterweight Cardassian strength down around Bajor, the Qloathi to bolster the defenses down there and provide more security if the Cardies manage to get the Ittick-ka on-side, the Honiani to counterbalance the Yrillians a bit, and the Yrillians themselves to try and disrupt the process of them automatically 'flipping' Cardassian in case of war. That's a pretty expensive program of diplomacy, though, at 80pp/year.
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We shouldn't need to spend any diplo pushes on any of the current 400+ affiliates before the moratorium ends in 2317.Q3. We may not be allowed more than 2 or 3 ratifications per year, giving us about 3 years for all these major affiliates to reach 500.

Our 400+ affiliates (# years from 500 based off average annual roll + events => ~25):
Caldonia - 500, 0 years!
Orion - 457, ~2 years
Gaeni - 448, ~3 years
Seyek - 424, ~4 years (possibly 3 given all the events going on there)
Risa - 420, ~4 years
Qloathi - 410, ~4 years

So assuming a max of 2 ratifications per year, without any diplo pushes, I'd expect the following member ratifications per year:
2317: Caldonia, Orion
2318: Gaeni, Seyek
2319: Risa, Qloathi

Meanwhile, Honiani (251) and Kadeshi (265) are about 2 years away from major affiliate. Really curious to see how a Kadeshi major affiliate works out in terms of bonuses :p

So yeah, we have a lot of affiliate stuff in the pipeline that doesn't require any action from us. We can afford to just diplo push non-affiliates. Gretaria may now finally be a good idea, with how relatively weak the Sydraxians are. Though a potentially war-triggering diplo push in 2315 while we're busy with the Licori might be ill-advised.
 
I think we could stand to give the Seyek a tap to make sure they're on-side as quickly as possible after the moratorium expires. We need them, and we kind of need the Honiani too. I'd be happier if I thought we could bring the Honiani in by 2320 or so, and if it is very likely that they will be readily persuaded to enter a war on our side should the Yrillians become a problem.
 
Let's wait until 2317 before deciding whether we really want to do that. In any case, if a war with Cardassia starts in 2317 or 2318 and the Seyek are at 475 relations or so, I'm pretty sure we'll get an external diplomacy option to "fast track" membership, like we had during the Biophage crisis but with far lower risk of long-term consequences.
 
I'd rather not have to wait several fortnights for the 'fast track' process to proceed to completion. And I don't think investing 20pp in relations with the Seyek is a bad idea, especially seeing as how they're in the middle of almost having a civil war and could use some reassurances and support.
 
Judging by their low boil animosity with the Cardies and their clients, I'm pretty sure the Seyek would be very much on-side even if they weren't full members. I suppose it's possible that the internal issues could boil over, but our EC really have been on top of that particular cauldron.

A push would bring the major worlds = Councillor issue to the front, though, which is something the Seyek traditionalists are going to raise a stink about.
 
Maaaybe.

On the other hand, to be a bit more clear, I want the Seyek as members, not as co-belligerents, because we are really, really going to need the Seyek to act quickly and effectively as part of a coordinated whole alongside other Federation forces. And we're going to need that at the very start of the war, not four to six weeks later after our diplomacy teams have sorted out the lines of communications.

Look at how long it's taking us to get coordination with the Gaeni fleet, compared to how readily we were able to call up naval contingents from several of the worlds that are Federation members.
 
In my opinion, it'd be a massive payoff to consider pushing mines and shipyards along with our diplo whenever we can. We need more ships, civilian and Starfleet alike. I'm 90% sure that whenever we aren't able to use a berth, we can either keep it as a repair berth... or we can possibly even allocate it for civvie shipping.

It'd be nice if there was a PP option for encouraging and funding civilian shipbuilding. More freighters and the like are never a bad thing to have.
 
lbmaian said:
Now I am pretty worried that we're skirting the line on our defense needs (as an, defensive strength, not the reaction stat or garrison requirements) with the upcoming near-doubling of Cardassian shipbuilding capacity. With some basic modeling, I estimate the Cardassians producing about 40 ships worth around 450 C+H+L by 2320, and with your Starfleet shipbuilding plans around 2313ish, our production would only meet about 2/3 of that in C+H+L sum (and a bit more than 1/2 in ship count due to our explorer emphasis) in the same time frame. I haven't rechecked with your latest shipbuilding plans, but it's probably around the same ballpark.
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I think you're making a lot of assumptions, and ultimately I don't want to build our ships in response to how we think someone else is building their ships. We should build the ships we want to build. I'd rather have a fast, flexible fleet that has only 2/3 the C+H+L sum.

I'm tentatively willing to trade an Excelsior-A build for a Renaissance + Miranda-A + some repair resource slack. It's less event response potential, but more combat potential. And we'd still be constructing 5 explorers concurrently (4 Excelsior-A + Ambassador) alongside 2 concurrent Excelsior-A refits - that's plenty enough explorer construction/refitting in my opinion.
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Biggest problem with that is Chen. We need to be taking while the opportunity of her bonus while we can, and that means doing 'twin builds' so that we can build Excelsior-As in three years. Your dropping one Excelsior-A means the remaining one takes four years to build instead of three.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I'd rather not have to wait several fortnights for the 'fast track' process to proceed to completion. And I don't think investing 20pp in relations with the Seyek is a bad idea, especially seeing as how they're in the middle of almost having a civil war and could use some reassurances and support.
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Do you have a concrete proposal? There's little point in diplo pushing the Seyek in 2315 given the moratorium and their potential to reach 500 by 2317 or so just by events and rolls anyway. Talking about diplo pushing them is just premature.

Briefvoice said:
I think you're making a lot of assumptions, and ultimately I don't want to build our ships in response to how we think someone else is building their ships. We should build the ships we want to build. I'd rather have a fast, flexible fleet that has only 2/3 the C+H+L sum.
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Everyone makes assumptions when there are unknowns. You're assuming that we won't be at war with the Cardassians for several years, that more Excelsiors will somehow help ward off war, and that we can risk producing what we want because of this. You gotta acknowledge you're taking a gamble.

Biggest problem with that is Chen. We need to be taking while the opportunity of her bonus while we can, and that means doing 'twin builds' so that we can build Excelsior-As in three years. Your dropping one Excelsior-A means the remaining one takes four years to build instead of three.
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...so what prevents us from taking advantage of her bonus with Mirandas or Renaissances?

If I drop one Excelsior-A, I can simply start building the other Excelsior-A earlier. The 40 Eridani Excelsiors have the berth slack to allow that.
 
I think we sshoild seruously start pushing for budget increases more often. Maybe some sort of Sousa deal if someone is clever.
 
lbmaian said:
Everyone makes assumptions when there are unknowns. You're assuming that we won't be at war with the Cardassians for several years, that more Excelsiors will somehow help ward off war, and that we can risk producing what we want because of this. You gotta acknowledge you're taking a gamble.
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There's no decision that's not taking a gamble we may regret, because there's no safe bet. Building a bunch of worse ships because they perform better when rolled up into a fleet ball in a war is still building a bunch of shittier ships, and we might regret that too.

...so what prevents us from taking advantage of her bonus with Mirandas or Renaissances?
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Nothing and we're doing so right now. We have three Renaissances in build using her bonus and two Mirandas in build using her bonus. You don't seem to be proposing twin builds of anything, though.

If I drop one Excelsior-A, I can simply start building the other Excelsior-A earlier. The 40 Eridani Excelsiors have the berth slack to allow that.
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I'd rather not do that. I like having a lot of Excelsior berths open in 2315 for repairs, and I don't want to eliminate the second Excelsior anyway.
 
Okay, here's a build plan that trades an Excelsior-A for an earlier Miranda-A (paired with prev incomplete build) and later Rennie and more repair slack:

Contrast that with a build plan that keeps that Excelsior-A:

The first plan delays a Rennie in favor of a larger overall Rennie wave (8 Rennies by 2320 instead of nearly 7 Rennies) and an earlier pair of Miranda-As. Excelsiors are crazy expensive.

Plenty of berth slack for repairs either way. I did some shifting of builds away from Apiata shipyards so that it can serve as a repair yard, but that's not relevant until 2317.

I also tried a build plan that trades an Excelsior-A for an earlier Rennie (paired with another Rennie) and a later Miranda-A (paired with prev incomplete build) but it didn't work out well due to O and SR income timings. I could get around them by abandoning the paired builds in favor of more staggered builds, but losing out on Chen's bonus means less berth slack, which isn't worth it.

edit: flipped the Miranda-A builds to maximize free 3mt berth space
edit2: hopefully valid build plan
 
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Our goal has been 1 Explorer per sector for a while now and we're finally getting close to that. I'd prefer to stay the course until we have that, with a 1-2 to spare given their 3-4 year build time and our projected ratifications and new sectors.

Our member fleets are building a big set of Renaissances right now and we can push to federalize them and Miranda-A's in the event of war easier because they are the best ships for fighting that we have and I'm sure the member worlds all recognize that.
 
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
We've yet to be seriously limited in resources, but we remain very limited in crew and in particular, in combat cap. Right now, the only thing that stops us from spitting out more Excelsior-As is crew.
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Well, to be precise, our current bottlenecks are both SR and O, and Excelsior-As do hit both of them. After a while E starts being a bottleneck too, and Renaissances hits that the hardest.

Briefvoice said:
There's no decision that's not taking a gamble we may regret, because there's no safe bet. Building a bunch of worse ships because they perform better when rolled up into a fleet ball in a war is still building a bunch of shittier ships, and we might regret that too.
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Building more Excelsior-As takes the very long-term view. They don't provide great value early on, but our investment into them pays dividends over time with successful event responses. There are diminishing returns to that though, depending on how many sectors and how many events there are, so once we hit an Excelsior-A per sector, we definitely should consider slowing down.

Conversely, building Renaissances and Miranda-As, especially the latter, are a hedge against shorter-term conventional threats. If we can hold off from a war for at least half a decade or so (note: gut estimate), than the Excelsior-As should in theory pay off; if not, it's better to get that combat power.

To borrow some RTS terminology (or maybe just Starcraft terminology), it's kinda like the difference between a greedy build and a safe build. Safe build beats the greedy build if the enemy is attacking imminently; otherwise, the greedy build surpasses the safe build.

So it all hinges on when we think we'll be at war with Cardassia.
 
Briefvoice said:
There's no decision that's not taking a gamble we may regret, because there's no safe bet. Building a bunch of worse ships because they perform better when rolled up into a fleet ball in a war is still building a bunch of shittier ships, and we might regret that too.
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It's far too great a gamble to not try to keep combat parity with the polity we know is going to jump to war the moment they have the advantage in strength. The Excelsior-heavy build plans were nice, but we really can no longer afford them. Once the first wave of ships comes out of that Cardassian shipyard push, we lose the war they kick off then and there. You're trying to make that comparable to missing a few event checks, but it's not. We'd likely be consigning the Apiata and Indorians to a long occupation, at the very least.

lbmaian said:
Conversely, building Renaissances and Miranda-As, especially the latter, are a hedge against shorter-term conventional threats. If we can hold off from a war for at least half a decade or so (note: gut estimate), than the Excelsior-As should in theory pay off; if not, it's better to get that combat power.
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Ha!

Our Excelsior-As take 3y to build with Chen and get into maybe one event a year in regular garrison, and nothing in war garrison. At that pace, it would take about 10 years or more for them to benefit us more than combat power. And make no mistake, we will be at war with Cardassia within 10 years.
 
lbmaian said:
Okay, here's a build plan that trades an Excelsior-A for an earlier Miranda-A (paired with prev incomplete build) and later Rennie and more repair slack:
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@OneirosTheWriter is the quoted build plan valid? It looks like it's transferring the bumped off NCC-1665 Miranda-A build in SF 3 mt-A berth over to Andor LOCF 2.5mt-A, but what I really intended was to basically start a double Miranda-A build with one of them reusing the resources that were allocated to the bumped off NCC-1655. Only a quarter year was spent building NCC-1665, supposedly just the start of the sub-assembly construction. The old Ghost & Whispers status post and I think the "Miracle of Starship Birth" series indicates that many of the sub-assemblies aren't necessarily even built at the shipyard anyway, so I figure this is all feasible.

Anyway, assuming it is valid...

I might not be around for the vote, so I'll post the build plan that corresponds to this:

[ ][BUILD] Base Plan 2315 3 Excelsior-A, 2 Miranda-A (1 cont), 2 Miranda-A refits
-[X] SF Berth A (3mt) – Leave empty after Kumari completes repairs (ETC 2316.Q2) and do not resume NCC-1665 Miranda-A build here. Advise berth to prepare for Ambassador prototype in 2316
-[X] 40 Eridani Berth A (3mt) – Leave empty after Courageous refit completes (with rush, ETC 2315.Q2)
-[X] 40 Eridani Berth B (3mt) – Begin Excelsior-A in 2316.Q1 as single build (ETC 2319.Q1)
-[X] 40 Eridani Berth 1 (1mt) – After Intrepid completes refit as Miranda-A in 2315.Q3, switch out with Dryad in Sol sector and begin refit of Dryad in 2315.Q3 (ETC 2316.Q3)
-[X] 40 Eridani Berth 2 (1mt) - After Eketha completes refit as Miranda-A in 2315.Q3, switch out with Calypso in Licori Border zone and begin refit of Calypso in 2315.Q3 (ETC 2316.Q3)
-[X] LOCF Berth A (2.5mt) – Transfer built sub-assemblies of NCC-1665 Miranda-A to here and start/resume the parallel double build with LOCF Berth 1's Miranda at 2315.Q3 (ETC 2317.Q1)
-[X] LOCF Berth 1 (1mt) – Begin Miranda-A build in 2315.Q3 (ETC 2317.Q1)
-[X] UP Berth A (3mt) – After Excelsior completes in 2315.Q2, begin Excelsior-A in 2315.Q2 as double build using Chen's bonus (ETC 2318.Q2)
-[X] UP Berth C (3mt) - After Excelsior completes in 2315.Q2, begin Excelsior-A in 2315.Q2 as double build using Chen's bonus (ETC 2318.Q2)

Not totally satisfied with this build, but it does accomplish the "more firepower more quickly" goal a bit.
 
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Shadows said:
In my opinion, it'd be a massive payoff to consider pushing mines and shipyards along with our diplo whenever we can.
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We already do that. Right now, the main limiting factor on how many military ships we build is finding crew for them all. Our ability to construct civilian ships has been expanding so rapidly it's hard to even describe in an intellectually honest way, because that ability level was "zero" back in 2310-11, because civilian ship numbers weren't really being tracked by the game engine back before that time era.

We need more ships, civilian and Starfleet alike. I'm 90% sure that whenever we aren't able to use a berth, we can either keep it as a repair berth... or we can possibly even allocate it for civvie shipping.
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I'm not sure anyone here has ever believed otherwise... were you worried about people thinking that if we weren't constructing a ship in a berth, that the berth would somehow be destroyed or taken away from us?

It'd be nice if there was a PP option for encouraging and funding civilian shipbuilding. More freighters and the like are never a bad thing to have.
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About the only form of civilian shipbuilding we can influence is the member worlds' construction. We DO have an option to push them to build more transports- that's the sort of thing you can do with the MWCO. The problem is that transports in member world hands only become available for us if we take the unpopular step of conscripting them.

Briefvoice said:
I think you're making a lot of assumptions, and ultimately I don't want to build our ships in response to how we think someone else is building their ships. We should build the ships we want to build. I'd rather have a fast, flexible fleet that has only 2/3 the C+H+L sum.
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...

.....Um.

Thaaaat is, um... I'm trying to be polite here.

That is very much at odds with the kind of logic people normally use to design their navies.

From the way you're talking, it sounds as though you are proposing to deliberately ignore questions like "how does this fleet composition stack up against our most probable opponents' ability to fight and threaten us?" And yet in real life that is exactly the benchmark people use to decide how many fighting ships they need, and of what classes.

Biggest problem with that is Chen. We need to be taking while the opportunity of her bonus while we can, and that means doing 'twin builds' so that we can build Excelsior-As in three years. Your dropping one Excelsior-A means the remaining one takes four years to build instead of three.
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Honestly it's difficult for us to make full use of Chen's bonus in building Excelsiors because we have only two shipyards in the whole Federation that can build two of the things at once in parallel. Which means we are either forced to commission them in extremely expensive pairs, in inefficient singletons, or not at all. And the decision keeps recurring every one to two years.


Hm... let's see. We have the following berths opening up:

-San Francisco A in 2315Q2 (completing Kumari repairs)
-Vulcan B in 2315Q1 (completing an explorer)
-Vulcan A in 2315Q3 (completing Courageous refit)
-Vulcan 1 and 2 in 2315Q3 (two Miranda refits)
-Andor A in 2315Q1 (completing an explorer)
-Andor 1 in 2315Q2 (completing the Last ConnieBee)
-Utopia Planitia A and C in 2315Q2 (completing two explorers)

So in effect, what it comes down to is that we have four Excelsiors finishing construction within about a six-month period around the start of 2315. We can either 'double down' by continuing to build Excelsiors at this rate and having four more explorers come out of those berths 3-4 years from now, or we can shift our production emphasis a bit. I'm wondering if there's a way to shuffle things around profitably, given that we ARE crew-limited and DO urgently need to make sure we don't get badly outbuilt by the Cardassian navy.
 
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