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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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Anyway that was quite the productive month.

25br, 30sr, 20pp, 25rp, partying happy Risans, mollified Caldonians.

OneirosTheWriter said:
To give the cliff notes version, we endured a collision with a Risan Heavy Corvette, that was running something tremendously ill-advised with their warp engines. When their highly unstable cochrane field intersected ours, we were obliterated in a subspace-temporal inversion ... which led to a temporal loop, which we only managed to get out of because of one of our Gaeni science officers was doing something equally ill-advised that was creating a stable temporal pocket within the temporal loop.
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As the (wrong) saying goes, two wrongs make a right :D

Also, unless that Dawn of Spring's warp signature was practically stealthing it, whoever is managing sensors on the Atuin needs to be reprimanded.

When we finally broke the loop and avoided the collision, I chased down the Risan Heavy Corvette and gave its Captain and Helm officer a sharp dressing down. Reports of competitive after-parties on the Dawn of Spring and Atuin are complete lies.

[Gain +5rp, +25 relations with Risa]
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Yes... I'm sure that's why the Risans are complimenting the Atuin [and its parties] so much in the wake of this "sharp dressing down"...

The ship that destroyed the independent Yrillian ship was an ancient battle drone of some fashion, an artefact of a war fought by a long forgotten species. While investigating some ruins in an asteroid belt, the Red Caravel activated the dormant system, which then destroyed it, and started up ancient programming that told it to destroy Vega. We met it in combat, and were able to scramble the ship's programming with a tight beam communication on a port that we determined was left open for a maintenance mode. The drone has been safely destroyed now.
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Is there something special about Vega that we don't know about? I'd be a bit concerned if I were the Vegans.

The Science Directorate of Caldonia has agreed to dispatch a top-level delegation to meet with some of the dissidents to discuss their concerns. However, while in orbit around Lomay II, Chief Marcel of our Intel detachment made an alarming discovery. There is a suggestion that one of the pseudoscience cults is convinced that any Directorate delegation will be coming to spread sterilisation gas or some such rot, and plans to ambush and destroy the delegation en route.

Or was it mind control gas? It's hard to keep track.
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Geez it's actually a bit depressing to read about these pseudoscience cults, what with ongoing RL anti-vaxxers and such.

Unusual energy fields emitted by the unstable Nolean star have indicated some promising properties for particle alteration. With my science officer, I have conducted an experiment by placing a cobalt-monocyllium jacket around the photon-torpedo casing we were able to convert a series of asteroid deposits into materials used in warp matrix bypasses.
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Another quarter, another T'Rinta torpedo macgyvering special.

The Halakk research station in Orion Space is dedicated to biomedical research, but recently went silent. We found it, still intact in orbit around the planet Halakk, or Maros IV, where it is tasked with studying biochemically active frog-like creatures. It appears, however, that one of their research samples escaped containment, and wiped out the crew. Together with the Zephyr we assessed the risks, but still came up short with how virulent this strain was. Our initial away teams, including my Chief Medical Officer and Head of Science, were infected, and diagnosed with barely a day to live. I led a team down to the surface with the doctor and chief of science from the Zephyr, and together we were able to find a specimen of the original creature, which we were able to use to synthesise a cure.
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Another year, another station crew wipe.

A deposit of a key component in the latest duranium alloys was located in a peculiar crystalline spire on Mocates II, not far from Wellbeck. The process behind the creation was some manner of nutrient leaching, which is not very effort effective as a process. I wouldn't recommend it for a larger exercise with our current technology, but we nonetheless obtained a considerable amount.

There were a few bashful faces among the Rigellian prospecting community when the news broke, apparently.

[Gain +25br]
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You bet they're embarrassed. They badly need those resources too, going by their MWCO report last quarter.
 
lbmaian said:
Also, unless that Dawn of Spring's warp signature was practically stealthing it, whoever is managing sensors on the Atuin needs to be reprimanded.
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Maybe that's what the Risans were experimenting with in the first place.

I mean, they're peaceful people in a galaxy full of heavily armed crazies. Figuring out a way to avoid detection for their ships so that said ships can escape and go about their business seems reasonable.

Is there something special about Vega that we don't know about? I'd be a bit concerned if I were the Vegans.
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There are at least a couple of references in Star Trek alpha/beta canon to an interstellar polity called the "Vegian Tyranny" that occupied Vega at some point in the past, possibly as (in-game) recently as the 20th century AD. If Vega was once the capital of a fallen alien empire (say, one that wiped itself out with bioweapons or something), then it would explain why we encounter alien drones that are intended to attack and destroy Vega.

Night said:
But not in the numbers you would use them in combat. Ones and twos mostly. The only case you'd actually use twenty or forty torpedoes outside a battle situation would be in a mass casualty event that would almost certainly send you back to a Starfleet outpost anyway because you need replacements for those people. (That would have been a significant fraction of your crew on a Connie as-built, and a lot of the things that would do that much damage in the first place require repair not possible with means aboard.) The controlling factor for the design is still how many of them you will fire in the average combat, and how many average combats you can make it through before you will have to return for repairs. Maybe you give them a whole extra fight's worth of torpedoes for misc. purposes, rather than a half. That could easily cover the sort of things they'd do between visits to a starbase or major colony that are actually seen/mentioned in the show.
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What it comes down to is that I can easily conceive of situations where the ship's supply of torpedoes becomes a major limiting factor.

Whereas the dilithium in the warp core is intended to last an extended and predictable time, it is difficult to predict hwo many torpedoes a ship will need. In a battle the numbers may be somewhat predictable, simply because the ship can only fire so many shots before being overrun. But outside of battle they are less predictable.

Again, what do you do if you need a ship to blow up an asteroid or deal with a gigantic (but weakly 'armed') cosmozoan? These are plausible threats in Star Trek and the Enterprise encountered at least one of each in a three year time span. What if you need to use modified torpedoes as probes, or use energetic blasts to 'comb' a volume such as the atmosphere of a gas giant?

At what point is it better to just say "okay fine, put 100 more inert unfueled torpedoes aboard the ship" than to say "well, too bad about that pre-warp civilization that had a fifty-mile asteroid headed for it, we couldn't get enough extra ships there in time" or "well, too bad the space amoeba just ate the Zabriska V outpost, but at least our torpedo budget looks pretty good this year!"

If torpedo ammunition actually seemed to take up a significant fraction of the ship's internal volume, your criticism would have more merit. But it doesn't. Torpedoes are relatively small and even four hundred of them just does not take up that much space. It makes a reasonable amount of sense to include enough of these things to deal with any known/foreseeable emergency.
 
Simon_Jester said:
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.
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I mean that it could be the difference between the Kelvin-verse Constitution and Constitution-A classes:
That is, not that much difference. (if images appear small, just go to the memory-alpha article)

TBH, I never liked the odd primitive details of the TOS Constitution, and I'm very willing to treat a modernized version of it (like the Kelvin-verse one) to look the spitting image of the Constitution-A, just with different nacelles. And nacelles are conveniently one of the more practical things to refit - heck, the ship design sheet implies their refitability.

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.
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What are you talking about? I just gave an objective argument on how to lump ship "types" together - refitability. This is not a subjective "lumper/splitter" argument. The best you could say is that there is a threshold to refitability, but there aren't any pairs of ship designs that would tread that line. Even the Connie-A could in theory be refit into a Connie-B at decent cost and time, if it weren't for the omake-ized peculiarities of their age and hull material.

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.
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I already did? "Just have Lor'Vela shipyard finished two years later." It's not like that shipyard had to be completed in 2288 or the Courageous launched in 2292 EOY.
 
Honestly I quite dislike the Kelvinverse redesigns, and rate the TOS Connie as my second favorite design in the whole franchise (The Sovereign class just barely beating it). It's got a quite elegant simplicity to it, IMO
 
I have some reservations on the Kelvin/Abrams-verse Constitution designs, mainly on how they seem focus on flashy sleek actiony hurrah, but the TOS Constitution? Seriously, it's like it's trying its hardest to look like primitive human space technology, with a deflector dish that look like a parabolic antenna dish. I mean, people complain about kitbashes, but the TOS Constitution itself looks like the epitome of a crude kitbash.

Okay, that spiel is probably blasphemous to hardcore Trekkies. But I've always been a VOY fan. That's the Trek show I grew up with, so I'm partial to their designs. None of those obsolete 1960s design aesthetics.
 
lbmaian said:
What are you talking about? I just gave an objective argument on how to lump ship "types" together - refitability. This is not a subjective "lumper/splitter" argument. The best you could say is that there is a threshold to refitability, but there aren't any pairs of ship designs that would tread that line. Even the Connie-A could in theory be refit into a Connie-B at decent cost and time, if it weren't for the omake-ized peculiarities of their age and hull material.
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The list wasn't meant to be a final definition of what our ships are. It is instead a flawed and very subjective view about what Romulan fleet intelligence belives our ships are based on the information they have. (Or rather what information they belive isn't deliberate misinformation or uninformed sparkyesque internet ranting)
Such a view also incorporates some of thier own biases about what constitutes a class or type of ship, which is not necessarily relevant to Starfleet

This is somewhat based on cold war history, when NATO and the Americans had some very strange ideas about what some Soviet equipment was and vice versa.

As to the Rennaisance being referred to as a G-Type previously, I was unaware of that. Though the idea that the Tal Shiar and DNR have a disagreement over what to call it apeals somewhat, especially as the class is so new.
I would expect them to standardize somewhere down the line when more data and experiance is gained. (Again there is precedent for this in our own history. )

Though giving them the G-Type name does seem a little odd to me since up till now all the -Type designations were based on the first letter of the name of the ship in that class. (Or rather the first sound in the Romulan transliteration of that name, then transliterated back into Roman letters for our viewing conveniance. )
And as yet we have no plans to name a Rennaisance beginning with the letter G.

Perhaps G could be the Tal Shiar's name for the Rennaisance design program. 'G-Project' or such.
 
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On the topic of what Star Trek designs looked best:

Physical models a lot of effort went into (main ships on TV series and ships benefiting from movie budgets) > CGI > kitbashed physical models.

My personal favorite is the Galaxy class.
 
My list goes something like...

Sovvie>TOS Connie>Connie-A>Excelsior>Defiant>Miranda>NX>Intrepid>Galaxy>Most regular ships>Most of the kitbashes>Most of the STO designs>Oberth
 
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Captain's Log - 2316.Q2.M2
  • Threadmarks
    • Captain's Log, USS Courageous, Stardate 25999.2 - Captain Sabek

    Our sensors have given us a possible plan to build solidarity through common experience with the Padani of the Interstellar Commonwealth.

    A party practising piracy was picked up by Padani patrols, and partially pinned to this particular parsec. While their sensors seem insufficiently sensitive to seek out the system their suspects are seeking sanctuary in, science officer Shrai sh'Hasshan succeeded.

    I will take the Courageous in to join them.

    [Chief of Staff's NB: I know what you're thinking. I'll check with the Courageous' councillor quickly]
    [Admiral's NB: Isn't it a little early in all of our tenures to be going mad already?]

    -

    Captain's Log, USS Stargazer, Stardate 25999.5 - Captain Maryam Ajam

    The fleet is dropping to a low warp factor as we travel alongside a "pod" of interstellar space venturing biologicals. 'Space Whales' are what I believe some Starfleet wag named them when we encountered them some years back. I have just beamed back from Pride of Kadesh and I can say that the reaction among the Kadeshi to such a sight was first blind terror as their last major experience with biologicals in space was the Biophage. But their next reaction was wonder and joy. It has taken a long time for some of them to become comfortable with deep space again, but it is happening.

    [Gain +10rp]

    -

    Captain's Log, USS Rru'adorr, Stardate 25999.8

    A situation is brewing near one of the new Gaeni colonies, Panat V. Unknown ships have entered system and are approaching the star, escorted by a starship of Licori make. The USS Lexington has been in touch with the Arcadian Empire, and the word we are getting back is that one of the Minor Houses had owned the vessel, but it had gone missing. After we arrived in system and challenged them, they are now broadcasting House Kortennon frequencies.

    A Gaeni Tech-Cruiser and Tech-Frigate are in-system and approaching the star from the other direction. I'm sending this report by space probe, as after we scanned the AHS Fang some powerful jamming fell over the system, and I want to make sure the report gets out. Just in case the next people that visit this system find only free-floating exotic particles.

    -

    Captain's Log, USS Docana, Stardate 25999.9

    It was supposed to be a routine hop on behalf of the FDS, conveying a Tellarite team to meet a Vulcan one in Vulcan orbit. And somehow it ended up feeling rather like a pre-Federation battle. I am at wits end attempting to discern what is so all-consuming important about nomenclature between the dairy production of certain traditional staple livestock on these planets, but someone pulled a phaser before I had everyone beamed to the brig.

    To the surprise of many delegates, I was quite entitled to do so. After letting them sober out a little, I let them resume their negotiations.

    From the brig.

    Via comm-link.

    [Gain +10pp]

    -

    Captain's Log, USS Courageous, Stardate 26000.2

    It appears that the Interstellar Commonwealth puts great stock in the concept that safety and effectiveness outweighs the importance of efficiency. They are bringing a battle group of four of their large Guardian-class cruisers to this battle. With the addition of the Courageous our anti-piracy task force has become very formidable.

    -

    Captain's Log, USS Huascar, Stardate 26000.6

    A cargo ship from United Earth on Starfleet service conveying components to Ferasa appears to have had the ill-fortune to collide with a waystation at 78 Para system. Thankfully, the damage is minor and the crew is safe, but extricating them required a delicate touch with the tractor beam. My tactical officer handled this process admirably, and the SS Joseon Star has been returned to its voyage.

    [Gain +5pp]

    -

    Captain's Log, USS Courageous, Stardate 26001.5

    As a positive, the battle has been carried, and surrendered pirates loaded into brigs on the ISC ships.

    However, during the battle, we suffered a statistically improbable strike causing disproportionate damage. A phaser beam pushing through frequencies caused a minor burn-through, that in turn destroyed part of the second dorsal radial EPS trunk, causing an explosion that resulted in a number of casualties, and damage to the ship.

    Despite this regrettable result, we have made a positive impression with the Padani.

    [Courageous damaged, -1 T, 1Qtr repair required, -30br, -10sr]

    -

    Captain's Log, USS Gale, Stardate 26002.3

    A distress call was picked up recently not far from Andor, and we were sent to investigate. The beacon and its code were ancient, approaching two centuries in age, and we discovered that it was an Andorian Guard vessel from pre-Federation times. One that went missing during combat with Vulcans, in fact, a sobering thought to many of both species aboard. It seems that a meteor impact nearby had caused solar panels to no long be obscured, and the distress beacon to restart.

    The Andorian government has been alerted, and a team is heading out to recover any remains for appropriate committal.

    [Gain +5pp]

    -

    Captain's Log, USS Rru'adorr, Stardate 26003.8

    No battle for phasers and torpedoes that!

    It was deflector dish to deflector dish at five AU. Us on one side, the Gaeni on another, and the Kortennon on a third, everyone performing the sort of operations on an active star in an inhabited system that would make a theoretical astrophysicist operating on a supercomputer blanch. They attempted the star degenerency pressure nullification, we amplified thermal output pressure, they attempted to cause runaway tholian particle creation among the convection currents, we dropped coronal reflect phased radiation ... it went on like that for days, with each force unable to turn away from the star to properly pursue the other, thus leaving an opening.

    Finally, the Lexington was able to engineer a feedback loop back through one of the Kortennon mentat tricks, and destroy a number of their ships, ending the siege of the star after gruelling days of effort.

    [Destruction of remaining House Kortennon assets, +25 with Gaen (no effect), +25 with Ked Paddah, +10 with Licori]

    -
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Ato said:
    The list wasn't meant to be a final definition of what our ships are. It is instead a flawed and very subjective view about what Romulan fleet intelligence belives our ships are based on the information they have. (Or rather what information they belive isn't deliberate misinformation or uninformed sparkyesque internet ranting)
    Such a view also incorporates some of thier own biases about what constitutes a class or type of ship, which is not necessarily relevant to Starfleet

    This is somewhat based on cold war history, when NATO and the Americans had some very strange ideas about what some Soviet equipment was and vice versa.

    As to the Rennaisance being referred to as a G-Type previously, I was unaware of that. Though the idea that the Tal Shiar and DNR have a disagreement over what to call it apeals somewhat, especially as the class is so new.
    I would expect them to standardize somewhere down the line when more data and experiance is gained. (Again there is precedent for this in our own history. )

    Though giving them the G-Type name does seem a little odd to me since up till now all the -Type designations were based on the first letter of the name of the ship in that class. (Or rather the first sound in the Romulan transliteration of that name, then transliterated back into Roman letters for our viewing conveniance. )
    And as yet we have no plans to name a Rennaisance beginning with the letter G.

    Perhaps G could be the Tal Shiar's name for the Rennaisance design program. 'G-Project' or such.
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    Right, I wasn't saying that the DNR was aware of the details, or had to use for classification, of Federation ship refitability. But that refitability itself is a fairly objective measure. It's understandable that they have their own classification based on a mix of ship roles, ship capabilities, ship tonnage, introduction dates, etc along with their own biases and misinformed data. It's also reasonable that they'd revise and settle on a classification when info about a new ship class is mature and widespread.
     
    So a Licori hardliners remenant tried a revenge play. But our ships beat theirs in the S rolls, so no stars blowing up today.
     
    OneirosTheWriter said:
    partially pinned to this particular parsec
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    ...did you just pull a Star Wars? Except rather than as a unit of time, it's a unit of area/volume now? :oops:

    [Chief of Staff's NB: I know what you're thinking. I'll check with the Courageous' councillor quickly]
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    Counselor. No sane Councillor would stay aboard the Courageous with how often she gets blown up.

    Captain's Log, USS Courageous, Stardate 26001.5

    As a positive, the battle has been carried, and surrendered pirates loaded into brigs on the ISC ships.

    However, during the battle, we suffered a statistically improbable strike causing disproportionate damage. A phaser beam pushing through frequencies caused a minor burn-through, that in turn destroyed part of the second dorsal radial EPS trunk, causing an explosion that resulted in a number of casualties, and damage to the ship.

    Despite this regrettable result, we have made a positive impression with the Padani.

    [Courageous damaged, -1 T, 1Qtr repair required, -30br, -10sr]
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    and speak of the devil!

    Do you have a combat log for this? I'd love to see it.

    Captain's Log, USS Rru'adorr, Stardate 26003.8

    No battle for phasers and torpedoes that!

    It was deflector dish to deflector dish at five AU. Us on one side, the Gaeni on another, and the Kortennon on a third, everyone performing the sort of operations on an active star in an inhabited system that would make a theoretical astrophysicist operating on a supercomputer blanch. They attempted the star degenerency pressure nullification, we amplified thermal output pressure, they attempted to cause runaway tholian particle creation among the convection currents, we dropped coronal reflect phased radiation ... it went on like that for days, with each force unable to turn away from the star to properly pursue the other, thus leaving an opening.

    Finally, the Lexington was able to engineer a feedback loop back through one of the Kortennon mentat tricks, and destroy a number of their ships, ending the siege of the star after gruelling days of effort.

    [Destruction of remaining House Kortennon assets, +25 with Gaen (no effect), +25 with Ked Paddah, +10 with Licori]
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    Well, I'm pretty sure this won't have a combat log, unless you're somehow modeling a three-way science battle :p

    It's also good that despite the LBZ draw down to just Rru'adorr, Lexington, Hood, Stalwart, and Torbriel, they were sufficient, and we caught and solved this before it could explode. Literally, in this case.

    Captain's Log, USS Stargazer, Stardate 25999.5 - Captain Maryam Ajam

    The fleet is dropping to a low warp factor as we travel alongside a "pod" of interstellar space venturing biologicals. 'Space Whales' are what I believe some Starfleet wag named them when we encountered them some years back. I have just beamed back from Pride of Kadesh and I can say that the reaction among the Kadeshi to such a sight was first blind terror as their last major experience with biologicals in space was the Biophage. But their next reaction was wonder and joy. It has taken a long time for some of them to become comfortable with deep space again, but it is happening.

    [Gain +10rp]
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    This is both sad and uplifting...
     
    OneirosTheWriter said:
    However, during the battle, we suffered a statistically improbable strike causing disproportionate damage. A phaser beam pushing through frequencies caused a minor burn-through, that in turn destroyed part of the second dorsal radial EPS trunk, causing an explosion that resulted in a number of casualties, and damage to the ship.
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    I can't help but wonder which ship has worse luck. On one hand every Miracht gets destroyed all too soon. On the other hand Courageous has been seriously damaged/crippled how many times now? I think we've probably spent enough time and resources repairing Courageous that we could have built at least one additional Excelsior.
     
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