There is one major weakness in the Cardassian fleet, poor science values. They have the science Takaaki which has a value of 5, after that the Jaldun, Kaldur and Lorgot have a value of 3. The rest of their fleet has a value of 1. That means in general our own ships will boost our fleet evasion while reducing theirs, not to mention all the science traps we can pull on them. Furthermore mines will work well against them as those are a science test. In fact a priority in conflict should be eliminating the science Takaakis.
To be fair, the bulk of
our combat fleet has Science 3 or lower as well. Our main fighting classes are:
Miranda-A: Science 2
Constitution-B and
Renaissance: Science 3
Excelsior(-A): Science 5+
Centaur-As may show up in small numbers during battle but don't change the game.
Constellation-As are unlikely to be fielded in quantity.
Oberths might but it's a lot riskier doing that against the Cardassians; we specifically did it against the Licori because we were REALLY afraid of their superscience, much more so than we were of their conventional weaponry.
The one area where we really have advantages is in the science checks of our fleet flagships, and we'll only have a few of those present in any given battle. The Cardassians may simply be planning to drown us in hulls during key engagements at the point of contact, put a lot of our
Excelsiors in the hospital, and then exploit their individual ship-to-ship superiority over much of our fleet.
Cruisers are pretty good ships, but the implication to me here is that the Cardassians are betting on a merchant raiding strategy of their own, using cruiser wolf packs or scattered, singular cruiser weight ships to evade or saturate our lines with too many targets to deal with at once. Another option is cruiser death balls to take the fight directly to isolated Explorers.
Either way, they are intending to exploit a numbers and mobility advantage. And the latter option would be especially painful for Starfleet given how much we depend on those Explorers politically and otherwise.
The problem is that they outnumber our explorers but not our frigates. Honestly, they seem to be simply
standardizing on a ship type that is effective in all roles and numerous enough to fill all roles, while we've been diversifying across several ship types.
Like SWB, I don't think we can read from "the Cardassians are building a lot of
Jalduns" that the Cardassians are planning to use them in any particular way. Indeed, that itself might be part of the point- by building a fleet that can profitably pursue almost any strategy they wish, the Cardassians stop us from being able to deduce their strategy in advance and counter it.
As is said in my post, we have been warned that due to the logistics SNAFU our options/costs will be different this Snakepit, So I think we need to see the updated options first.
Okay, well, could you at least prioritize things? Like, you could have three lists:
1) Things you would like to see done
specifically in 2317, and will push for in each subsequent year. PP budget may not allow it, but these are things you would specifically like us to commit resources to in the immediate future.
2) Things you would like to see done in the near future, and have reason to think can be done, but which it isn't practical to do
yet. Either because the pp budget simply isn't there, or because some other condition (like Seyek ratification) has to be met first.
3) Things you would like to see done, but which you know cannot be done under present conditions and may never be possible. Things that simply are not a snakepit option and never have been, for instance.
...
Now, "Amarkia Planitia" would fall under (3). We got Utopia Planitia as a special option and have no strong reason to expect that option to arise again. It's pointless to even discuss it in the near future.
An Amarki heavy industrial plant would fall under (2); there probably won't be support for spending 100+ political will on it, but some day there might be. It's worth talking about the merits of such a thing, but unlikely to win much support in the short term because people know it can't happen.
Things like construction at Indoria would fall under (1); a good enough argument easily COULD convince us to do that next year.
If you would clearly differentiate which things fall under which category for you, it would be a lot easier to have a meaningful conversation. Right now you've just got this huge wishlist of ambitious development projects and it's a bit like
Project Atlantropa or something, in that you can excitedly talk about how awesome it sounds but other people aren't going to engage with it very much.
Our outposts are best used with our fleet support, which is going to be stretched incredibly thin across the border zone, but if we had more warning of where they are about to hit we could maximise our responses.
"More warning is better,"
while true, is not sufficient justification for spending 120pp. For that matter it may not even be possible to spend the relevant pp on what you want, because we've already been told we HAVE listening posts on the border. And we can't just keep building more indefinitely, nor should we.
Yep. The second was alluded to by OneirosTheWriter as a benefit of getting on top of the logistic debt. The third could be simplified as fix logistics so we can build, and open up capacity so we can mobilise for war if needed (which increases freight demand).
So... which buttons do we push, in order to make your goals happen?
To be clear, I'm talking about "Deploy war reserve stock in Apinae, Indooria, Rethelia; Logistic/Engineering ships to fortify and support war mobilisation" here.
The supply chain question is more that we don't know if Critical Ship infrastructure has already done this for us, and if not, can we do more so that it does. the whole logistic model is still unclear, but if there is any way we can make Amarkia a spinward hub, we should take it.
The key question is, hub
for what? There's a big difference between making Amarkia a center of ship construction and making it a center of industrial output.
I think we're a lot better off thinking in terms of distributed repair infrastructure (and the Amarki auxiliary yard already gives considerable flexibility on that front, since we CAN presumably bump those builds in a war emergency). Sol is a good place to build huge numbers of ships precisely because it's a long way from the front lines of our most probable opponent. There's very little reason to build a second such major shipyard node, unless the Federation as a whole,
including our revenue stream, roughly doubles in size- which isn't happening soon.
