It's a permanent upgrade. The result is actually a pretty decent ship for 400kt. Especially for a crash refit. It's not that unreasonable a cost to get a frontier member world something meaningfully better than freaking Soyuzes.
I quite agree.
I am fine with that. Just want people to be aware of where we stand currently. We have two captains logs for this quarter and all of next quarter for additional RP but we are going to be tight and may have to deactivate a team or two depending on how much RP we gain (or we could have one of those crazy quarters and gain 50 RP rendering the issue moot)
That doesn't address the political dimension of the request.
Well, they know their current ships are not up to date, and will probably want to do something about that eventually. They might delay for a few years and they might decide to go for more general purpose refit (which would probably be the better long term choice anyway), or to retire their patrollers and replace them with an entirely different design, but they almost certainly aren't going to want to still rely on the current patrollers in 10 years.
The Betazoids may be pessimistic about the likely duration of the war. Indeed, that would help to explain why their war support is so low in the first place. If they don't share the general optimism about how easy this will be, or foresee having to spend many years carefully patrolling their own borders to catch any rogue mentats in shuttlecraft with a grudge and a trilithium bomb... That might be a factor in their analysis.
It would be a good gesture. But one frigate, however capable, would hardly be a replacement for the long-term benefit of major sensor and shield refits on half a dozen Betazoid ships. Furthermore, all existing tech-frigates are already serving in the war, either aggressively or in direct defense of Gaen. Taking Gaeni ships to secure Betazed would be a very good example of 'robbing Peter to pay Paul.'
Probably not ideal for Starfleet? 40br/45sr, 1/2/1 crew, 2yr build time, counts as a frigate.
But when she's on song, there's only one Kahurangi
Hah.
Eddie Leslie:
In my version of the fight, Harmony closed to practically point-blank range,* because Betazoid telepathy has range limits.* At the given range, they were dodging attacks by extremely small margins, a tactic that worked mainly because of just how easily they could read what their opponents were going to do next.
Hah.
I won't pretend I didn't think of Boskonian primaries while writing it, but... Honest answer, nothing so serious. The 'burning out' aspect is meant more in the sense of 'If you keep this up for twenty minutes you won't have a zapper cannon anymore,' not 'turn your gun into a one-shot bomb-pumped laser'
Basically, the best they can come up with given bastard psychic enemies who keep predicting and sidestepping their every move is to fire broad-front pulses that are, say, a few hundred meters wide. That's (at the range in question) big enough that the Betazoids can't just sidle out of the way in time, even if they know the shot is coming. But then they have the problem of getting something that diffuse to actually do any damage, even against a broad target like "the Harmony's shield bubble." So they have to ramp up the power output to the point where they cannot possibly keep this up long enough to actually wear down said shield bubble. And even if they did manage to bring the shields down that way, they'd have very little chance of doing more than superficial damage to the Harmony's hull.
At least in the specific context of this fight, it's just too damn hard to use direct-fire weapons designed for pinpoint targeting against an enemy who can sense, in real time, how you intend to aim those weapons, before you pull the trigger.
No, captain Boiys was really placing his hope on the deflector dish gambit that the mentats in Engineering were working on. Which would totally have worked if not for Betazoid scry-and-die hacks. Whatever it was.
Eddie Leslie:
"Son, let me tell you a secret about transporter accidents. In my experience, about two times out of three you fuck it up and get the captain's evil opposite. Now, you may be curious to know what Sue Kahurangi's evil opposite is like. I'm not."
The thing to remember is, from our point of view, Mirror, Mirror is the story of Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura being stranded aboard the evil opposite of their own spaceship and having to improvise a way home while trying to impersonate their own evil opposites.
From the point of view of everyone on the Enterprise EXCEPT Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura, it's the story of how they accidentally beamed aboard the evil opposites of four of the ship's senior officers. And of how Chekov and a couple of redshirts caught on to the danger but got their asses kicked, followed by Spock and Sulu putting their heads together and heroically restraining the impostors.
Way I figure it, with Leslie's luck he was one of the redshirts Mirror Kirk beat up in the mirrored version of this scene.
That was one of my secondary objectives in writing this omake, yes.
Leslie:
