We shouldnt forget the needs of our member fleets as well. All these proposed frigatte costs are really costly if you have an income of 45/45
Though maybe we should just create some explicit "Budget Garrison Frigatte" and "Budget Garrison Cruiser" once our tech advances enough that the Patrollers, Mirandas and Constellations stop being acceptable.
Thing is, those aren't roles
WE need in our own fleet; we'll be actively unloading such ships onto member world fleets by then. Starfleet doesn't need to have roles for member world ships.
For example, if we were playing Apiata Quest, we'd have roles like "Parasite Frigate" and "Mothership" covered by the
Stingers and queenships, respectively. But Starfleet has no such roles because it operates no such ships. Likewise, we operate nothing like the
Patroller and have never operated anything like the
Patroller-A. There has never been significant, consistent support in Starfleet for building modern patrol craft of less than half a million tons. And since we don't use those ships and they don't fit into our tactical and deployment doctrine... it's not our job to have roles for them.
If members can't afford such ships, they are free to design their own ships or share among themselves the most cost-effective designs. We still have to design the ships that enable us to do our own jobs.
I wish. Can you imagine what Trek combat would look like if ramming multi-kiloton remote/AI-controlled starships filled with M/AM was in vogue? If torpedoes are so damn deadly in Star Trek, imagine M/AM quantities orders of magnitude larger. It would then be completely rational and efficient to send such "fire ships" against all the juicy expensive targets on the battlefield.
Fortunately, that's mostly not a thing in Star Trek, except the handful of cases I recall with Jem'Hadar fighters (and I think Klingon Birds of Prey?)
Leslie:
"First problem. Each of those ships needs a warp core. Costs rack up. If they're impulse-only designs, then they need a warp-capable mothership that flies around the galaxy with umpty thousand tons of antimatter bombs strapped to the
outside of the hull. Instead of tucking the fuel pods inside the protection scheme. You don't need pointy ears to work out the problem with
that. Besides, impulse-only suicide ships are pretty easy to outmaneuver if you have warp engines and an antimatter reactor of your own."
"Second problem. Build the suicide ships light and flimsy and an explorer can rip them apart with the main phasers or a torpedo spread. If they come in packs, t some point, the enemy just counters by sending in a swarm of runabouts with a couple of torpedoes each; I've seen proposals like that for hunting some of the punier Birds of Prey."
"Third problem. If you bulk the suicide ships up to avoid that, make them big and rugged? They become, again, expensive. And since they're completely useless except in a major war where attrition losses can't be avoided, that's an expense no one wants to take."
"Fourth problem. Suicide ships like that can't be used anywhere close to planetary orbit because they're so big they'll scar up the planetary surface itself. If you're a genocidal lunatic I guess that wouldn't matter, but most people aren't. Plus..."
"Fifth problem. Because of the third problem, the suicide ships cannot defend territory. They cannot patrol space, they cannot handle any problem other than "big high value target floating in space, go kill it." They are
only effective as an offensive weapon platform against the enemy fleet. If your enemy is not an idiot, he'll notice you building this kind of fleet and counterattack before it wrecks
his fleet."
"Sixth problem. The last time some idiot decided to build a robot warship capable of punching out an explorer, it took Jim Kirk's magical power to talk computers into suiciding to stop it from wrecking half the fleet. I wound up hauling the bastard responsible off the bridge myself. I'm too old to haul idiots who build robot warships off of bridges anymore, so I say we don't do that anymore."
