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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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lbmaian said:
If training ships ever become reified in the game later, such that we're occasionally requested to retire one of the T0+ gen ships (aka the ships we actually build) for Academy training usage, then we can use the excuse of advancing training simulator technology and later holodeck technology to help explain the lack of needing to do so for more than a decade.

That is, even with Academy enrollment increasing by 300% since 2300, the current (and unknown) fleet of training ships suffices because they're of such simulation tech, with the training ships perhaps being reserved for seniors or the equivalent of starship operation final exams.

The other excuse being that we got a surplus of old ships in the post-Khitomer and post-Rogers demilitarization.
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Demilitarization is the excuse I'm using.

I mean, our annual income is 14.2 O 17.65 E 18.55 T, with 3.95 O 2.95 E 2.7 T for the EC, for a total of 3k graduates every year, including the enlisted Recruit Training Center graduates. I estimate that only 20 units / 1000 are Academy graduates and thus commissioned officers. Still, training ships are useful for everyone, which is why I have some ships specializing in different tasks.

For the hypothetical cruiser-Ranger, I'd say that it requires ~6 crew units (2/2/2). Given that these are specifically for training, a much larger portion of the complement will be cadets. Even then, not many ships would be necessary - especially compared to the surplus.

Thus, another reason why they didn't need more is because they had more than enough ships to keep up with the expansion. The increasing pp cost may also partially represent the political cost of reactivating a mothballed ship - even as a training ship, it can't be cheap.

Simon_Jester said:
That last seems overwhelmingly likely. For example, I'm pretty sure Starfleet must have had a TOS-era frigate (that is, a 2260-era design, predating the Miranda but postdating the Soyuz). We have none of those ships in service, which suggests they were decommissioned. Some of them may be kicking around as training ships. Likewise for whatever ship filled the general purpose 'cruiser' niche in the 2260s, assuming Starfleet had a generalist ship smaller than a Connie in the first place. This would be the ship the Constellation replaced in service, more or less.
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I'm reluctant to introduce another class, partially because I don't want to come up with a name. :p I guess my explanation is that those ships ended up being like the Zumwalt - a one-off prototype that ended up being cost-ineffective. I'm guessing that modified rangers served as cruiser hulls. The Ranger is probably one of Starfleet's longest serving designs.
 
Simon_Jester said:
That last seems overwhelmingly likely. For example, I'm pretty sure Starfleet must have had a TOS-era frigate (that is, a 2260-era design, predating the Miranda but postdating the Soyuz). We have none of those ships in service, which suggests they were decommissioned. Some of them may be kicking around as training ships. Likewise for whatever ship filled the general purpose 'cruiser' niche in the 2260s, assuming Starfleet had a generalist ship smaller than a Connie in the first place. This would be the ship the Constellation replaced in service, more or less.
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Wouldn't the Soyuz itself be the TOS-era escort frigate? Its service life would be comparable to the Miranda today, 20 years in 2260 mirroring the Miranda's 20 years in 2300. Other candidates might be the Hermes-class, although that was likely the Oberth precursor.

A mid-sized cruiser would likely be about 500-600kt in that era, for the Constellation to be an upgrade and the Constitution and Ranger to out-weight it significantly.
 
AlphaDelta said:
I mean, our annual income is 14.2 O 17.65 E 18.55 T, with 3.95 O 2.95 E 2.7 T for the EC, for a total of 3k graduates every year, including the enlisted Recruit Training Center graduates.
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To be fair, that's our ship crew income; Starfleet is larger than the ships themselves. Someone like Anne Usha, for instance, would literally have not shown up in that, as her career track is entirely dirtside.

(Hell, even looking at the ships, Starfleet Academy probably also helps train crews for the ships of Starfleet Engineering Command and Starfleet Logistics Command and Starfleet Medical Command and Starfleet Colony Command and so on...)
 
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
Wouldn't the Soyuz itself be the TOS-era escort frigate? Its service life would be comparable to the Miranda today, 20 years in 2260 mirroring the Miranda's 20 years in 2300. Other candidates might be the Hermes-class, although that was likely the Oberth precursor.

A mid-sized cruiser would likely be about 500-600kt in that era, for the Constellation to be an upgrade and the Constitution and Ranger to out-weight it significantly.
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Suffice to say that if no other new frigate was designed between the time Soyuz was laid down and the time Miranda was laid down, then by the late 2270s Starfleet must have been really hurting for frigates. Likewise for cruisers unless the Rangers filled that role.

It's not so obvious that this makes a difference if we use 2300-era ship stats (by which standard there's not a lot of room for improvement between a Soyuz and a Miranda). But if we use statlines normalized to, say, 2250 (by which standards a stock Connie is a big impressive ship that was to them what the Excelsiors were to us in 2300)... there's likely to be a bigger gap.

This is something I explored when trying to rough out statlines for the "2235 game" idea I've been playing with. Basically, I started by roughly doubling everything's stats, except for Defense which is... complicated. I rounded up or down to fit some mathematical formulae I set up in an attempt for balance. The idea being that people were easier to impress back then; a "minimal science suite" corresponding to S1 in those days would be a veritable S0 now, whereas something like a Centaur-A would be an impressive ship with S5 to S7 by their standards- they couldn't duplicate its capabilities without building a dedicated science vessel.

So for them, the Soyuz-class is a modern escort with a statline of...

[checks]

C3 S2 H2 L2 P1 D3.

By contrast, a Ranger has C4 S4 H3 L3 P4 D4

Of course, Starfleet of that era has its own obsolete 'dog' ships, including classes that are refits of what the member worlds were using at the founding of the Federation. But things are starting to look up.
 
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Remember our Soyuzes are in the post-Connie-A style. Presumably they were refit in the 70's, and originally looked a lot more like pre-TOS ships.
 
My head/quest canon is that the Ranger design from STO's temporal agent stuff is the design that was used. The one with engineering section jammed forward and twin aft protrusions, NX style.

Briefvoice said:
Three separate benefits related to combat seem like an awful lot compared to the other fleet design doctrines. I bet it's just the shield penetration we've already been told about, and the other benefits are design/political/response related (more in line with other doctrines).
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I did keep that balance in mind. It did feel somewhat weird to make bonuses related to stuff I don't even track for the Gaeni though, lol.

I'll write it up when I get the chance, it's on paper notes.
 
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Keep in mind that the Licori are also a tech-ship faction. Have they been inflicting disproportionate subsystem damage on us?

Iron Wolf said:
In addition to all these I am really enamored with the concept of Yan-Ros Science Officer Hange. I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it earlier or I would have put her on the Atuin. Although maybe she'd be better off finding weird critters to study with Noran Sael!
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Still trying to decide what happened to Sael's career after the Calcis incident.
 
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Tech-Ship in Gaeni terminology is any ship where their Science equals or exceeds their Combat.

Technical Doctrine ->
->Way of the Mind
->Way of Reason
->Way of the Stars
-->Into Tomorrow

Way of the Mind
Collaborative Research: +1 to Event Attendees allowed
Cutting Edge: +1 to Response roll for Tech Ships

Way of Reason
Science-Industrial Complex: For Tech-Ships, -1 Qtr Frigate / -2 Qtr Cruiser-Capital Build Time
Attack Pattern Sigma: +5% Fleet Weight when fleet has more S

Way of the Stars
Attack Pattern Phi: Add S to burnthrough chance
Dedication: >Must< work to have more tech-ships than other ships, unless at war or under war warning

Into Tomorrow
Progress to the Future: Cost and time penalty of prototyping reduced by 50%
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
Tech-Ship in Gaeni terminology is any ship where their Science equals or exceeds their Combat.

Technical Doctrine ->
->Way of the Mind
->Way of Reason
->Way of the Stars
-->Into Tomorrow

Way of the Mind
Collaborative Research: +1 to Event Attendees allowed
Cutting Edge: +1 to Response roll for Tech Ships

Way of Reason
Science-Industrial Complex: For Tech-Ships, -1 Qtr Frigate / -2 Qtr Cruiser-Capital Build Time
Attack Pattern Sigma: +5% Fleet Weight when fleet has more S

Way of the Stars
Attack Pattern Phi: Add S to burnthrough chance
Dedication: >Must< work to have more tech-ships than other ships, unless at war or under war warning

Into Tomorrow
Progress to the Future: Cost and time penalty of prototyping reduced by 50%
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Is this paradigm orthagonal to normal doctrinal choices and therefore something we could unlock and use alongside our current choices? if not which doctrine slice does it replace?
 
The points spent to learn the Tech-Ship Doctrine could be used for an offensive or defensive doctrine instead.
 
UbeOne said:
...Aside from the Oberth, I don't think we have tech-ships.
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True, though a lot of our designs come close. Also, I think the stats are 'normalized' to Federation assumptions. A 'balanced' ship with "all fours" or whatever has just about the right balance of good features from the Federation's point of view- right number of guns, right number of labs, and so on. If this were Klingon Quest, odds are that Federation ships WOULD be portrayed as "tech-ships,.. because by Klingon standards a 'normal' amount of scientific capability on a ship is rather lower.

SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
Yeah, but the Gaeni get to build our ships once they're ratified. So we'll see Keplers for sure operating under their doctrine, and may even see an Ambassador doing that eventually.
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True. Moreover, it is likely that the Gaeni will never adopt our designs if we don't supply them with designs that work under tech-ship doctrine. They'd just keep building better versions of what they already have within their existing design paradigm like the Apiata and the Amarki.
 
Eddie Leslie:

"Yeah. I'm not sure if the Gaeni had really never seen an espresso machine for concentrating Terran coffee before I paid them a visit back in '09, but I'm even LESS sure it was a good idea to teach them how to build one. Weird thing is, it seems almost like it made them more mellow. Like they'd been missing something before, and now they've got it, so they care more about their own lives and stuff like not gargling antimatter for giggles."

[Pauses for a minute, musing]

"Unless they're just saving up all the crazy for one coffee-fueled burst of ultracrazy. Thaat's probably what they're doing, isn't it? Crap."
 
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