I hope Oneiros canonizes Dizzy se we can have her running Utopia Planita some day.
She is utterly,
utterly unfit to actually command a large organization. She can do almost anything as long as she has someone else's authority to operate under, but independent command responsibility would paralyze her almost instantly.
There's a significant problem with this plan. You stock the ship with the number of torpedoes you expect it to use before it has to restock, yes. But Kirk's FYM wasn't out in the middle of nowhere. He was often near or even in Federation space, frequently returning to starbases or the like, and his ship certainly didn't carry enough supplies of much more critical materials like dilithium for the warp core to go for five years without restocking.
My understanding is that the ships were stocked with enough of SOME things that might not be available at every random outpost in the Federation (e.g. dozens of photon torpedoes) to last five years.
More seriously, though, there's a much harder cap on the number of torpedoes you carry. Torpedoes are used in combat. It is almost a certainty that the ship will only fight a relatively small number of engagements before it takes sufficient damage it
has to return to a base for repairs. (Especially since you're fighting alone as a FYM ship, so you can't even random-chance to "They shot everybody else.") The torpedo supply is only intended to cover it for that many engagements (and a half, maybe, just in case you use a lot in one). At that point it may need to have the entire magazine replaced, never mind restocking on torpedoes.[/QUOTE]Again, one issue is that torpedo casings can get used for a lot of things other than just blowing up enemy ships.
Torpedoes can be modified in various ways as probes and decoys.
Is there an asteroid headed for a friendly outpost? You might want to be able to fire like 200 torpedoes at it, rather than wait two weeks to whistle up a whole fleet of ships that have enough torpedoes to destroy the enemy ship by combined firepower.
Torpedo casings are a customary accoutrement in a burial-at-space. On the 2266 five year mission,
Enterprise took 56 casualties in the first three years alone. Another ship might do worse; some of our ships have (e.g.
S'harien on her first five-year mission under Saavik).
Furthermore, it is
very much possible that torpedoes of this era were significantly less powerful than those of the TMP/TBG/TNG era. Note that when Nomad was firing huge energy blasts at the
Enterprise, each blast was described as carrying the energy of 'ninety photon torpedoes' and it STILL took several to bring down the
Enterprise's shields. There may be a reason that Kirk usually ordered his crew to fire phasers, not torpedoes. If so, that would explain both the larger number of tubes, and the very large magazine- because the torpedoes weren't very decisive unless fired in large numbers.
Plus, photons aren't quantums, they share supply with ship's antimatter storage. How many photons you can drop until you are out of fuel in the middle of nowhere and forced to slowly crawl back home on fusion?
I don't know. It could be that the total antimatter supply required to detonate all 400 torpedoes at maximum yield would exhaust the ship's fuel supply. It could be that it would require only a small fraction of the fuel supply. If we take it as fact that 400 torpedoes were loaded, it is reasonable to suppose that the
Enterprise was designed with the ability to actually fire all 400 torpedoes, without anything going too badly wrong as a direct, inherent consequence.
Well I was actually thinking that the original Constitution didn't look like the TOS version, since it was so... well, it had 1960s production values, okay? I would've thought that the difference in looks between Constitution and Constitution-A would've been more akin to that in the Kelvinverse - that is, not a huge change.
I don't understand what you're getting at here. I mean, sure we can assume that the 2260s-era Connies 'really' looked different (and fancier) than the models used in TOS. But it seems reasonable to assume that the TOS-era models at least got the general size and shape and configuration of the ship right- that the nacelles really were round, that any glowy bits glowed red and not blue, et cetera.
Technically speaking though, ignoring looks altogether, I would group ship "types" by their refitability. Constitution can refit into a Constitution-A. Constitution-A likely could've been refit into a Constitution-B if it wasn't for the age and hull strengthening shenanigans of the remaining Constitution-As. Constitutions cannot be refit into a Renaissance at all.
Fine, but my point is that this is a "lumper/splitter" argument. It's not a case of "calling the Rennies
Constitution-Cs or Type C.IV is objectively wrong and dumb."
It's a case of you (and the Tal Shiar) saying "There are similarities between these two things, but not enough to trigger my own personal threshold of 'these are part of the same categories.' " It is
at best harmlessly wrong about a matter of taste and I'd strongly suggest we let the matter drop, with full awareness that it IS a lumper/splitter debate and inherently subjective.
Hm I don't think Enterprise would be rushed at all? 2290Q1 to 2293Q4 (or 2294Q1 by ETC reckoning) is a standard 4 year build time.
Only by a few months- the ship would launch in, like, October '93 instead of January '94 or something.
Right this is getting nitpicky, but: Honestly, I'm not sure why you don't just have Sarek start in 2294 in the San Francisco berth, right after the Enterprise is commissioned, and just have Lor'Vela shipyard finished two years later. It would avoid the gymnastics of berth migration.
Because then you need an explanation for why Lor'Vela wasn't
still there and available at game start. We had to start that shipyard up manually, and the best explanation I could think of was that the facility was badly damaged, associated with a political disaster (like Rogers' two-megaton
Ares berth), or both.
You need a second
Excelsior berth to have been in operation for at least four years somewhere in the Federation in order to explain how the Federation was able to construct five
Excelsiors by 2301Q4, but you also need to knock that berth back out of action prior to 2300. I could have done it differently (e.g. have the Lor'Vela berth be empty when the Andorian separatists attacked it), but I honestly like it better this way.
Remember, for me the goal isn't "dry minimum parsimony." The goal is "construct a viable narrative, one that takes into account the inherent complexity of real life things like building ships, while factoring in what was going on in the political background of the story." I'm not trying to construct a timeline to comply with Occam's Razor, I'm trying to construct one that's interesting and has bits and pieces someone can think about and play with.
