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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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kyuden said:
You've made an assertion that I don't believe you have the ability to back-up. You've also seemingly decided that Base Strike only sets the strategic intent of our war planners to being attacks on outposts, when I see it being a wider intent to attack infrastructure, of which outposts are only a small component.
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I'll assume that the strawmanning is just a accidental misinterpretation due to my lack of clarity.

I'm asserting that Cardassian military installations are staffed by military personnel, with far less civilians than Starfleet.

Even Starfleet's shipyards are run and staffed with Starfleet crew. Remember, starships are Weapons of Mass Destruction. They will not have civilians there.

I draw the line at working in a military installation. Where do you think the line should be? Are Galaxies not fair game because of the families? Are Kepler not fair game because of the handful of scientists?

We send scientists out to war. We consider scientists and technicians acceptable losses. Tragic, but ultimately acceptable, in the long run. If we consider one category of losses acceptable on our side, we should consider them acceptable collateral.
 
AlphaDelta said:
I'll assume that the strawmanning is just a accidental misinterpretation due to my lack of clarity.

I'm asserting that Cardassian military installations are staffed by military personnel, with far less civilians than Starfleet.

Even Starfleet's shipyards are run and staffed with Starfleet crew. Remember, starships are Weapons of Mass Destruction. They will not have civilians there.

I draw the line at working in a military installation. Where do you think the line should be? Are Galaxies not fair game because of the families? Are Kepler not fair game because of the handful of scientists?

We send scientists out to war. We consider scientists and technicians acceptable losses. Tragic, but ultimately acceptable, in the long run. If we consider one category of losses acceptable on our side, we should consider them acceptable collateral.
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If you'd like to discuss how I parsed your statement your welcome to PM me. I don't believe I misrepresented the position conveyed by the word you wrote.

In answer to where I draw the line, I think that they are all valid military targets. I also think that attacking infrastructure will cause more casualties, and I think that Starfleet, as an organisation, would shy away from an offensive doctrine that is more likely to cause casualties, even if those casualties are enemy ones.
 
kyuden said:
In answer to where I draw the line, I think that they are all valid military targets. I also think that attacking infrastructure will cause more casualties, and I think that Starfleet, as an organisation, would shy away from an offensive doctrine that is more likely to cause casualties, even if those casualties are enemy ones.
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I believe that a victorious war will cause less casualties than several long stalemates. See: Dominion War

The only way to prevent a fleet from being an issue in the future is to keep them from building a fleet. I believe that we can sustain one War Fleet that can overmatch any Cardassian Combined Fleet even if we go with Base Strike and small task forces.

I am thinking about the long run, and long term peace is worth the price.
 
What I don't understand about the doctrines - why we have to adapt ONE. Why not analyzing the opponent and then decide on the most effective way? When fighting Borg, hitting infrastructure won't help. When fighting the Dominion without access to the wormhole, dito. When fighting the Klingons, winning a string of fleet battles might work. Etc. etc. .
 
My understanding is that we can change, but there is a significant time delay between doctrines. As the way that Oneiros has posted, it isn't just how the fleet is grouped together, it is also the academy training, the agreements signed with the members etc.
 
I feel with Decisive Battle our grand fleet could easily be sent on wild goose chase that it would be far out of position to respond once the Cardassian hit multiple smaller fleets holding the line.
 
Jrin said:
I feel with Decisive Battle our grand fleet could easily be sent on wild goose chase that it would be far out of position to respond once the Cardassian hit multiple smaller fleets holding the line.
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What makes you believe it would be easy to do this?

The Sensor Pickets tech in Decisive Battle is specifically designed to make avoiding fighting our doomstack difficult, and it looks like those rolls are based off of Science, which we in general have the advantage in compared to our enemies.
 
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Derek58 said:
What makes you believe it would be easy to do this?
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Cardassian are not the type to go for a simple attack run considering how much they plan so they would have something to deal with our numbers like they could create a supernova to destroy our large fleet even if they sacrifice a fleet in exchange.
 
Jrin said:
I feel with Decisive Battle our grand fleet could easily be sent on wild goose chase that it would be far out of position to respond once the Cardassian hit multiple smaller fleets holding the line.
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The Cardassians also have Decisive Battle, and fleetballs don't really lend themselves well to denying combat. It's not like they have Wolf Pack. If we pick Decisive Battle, we get a boost to rolls for initiating combat anyway.
 
Jrin said:
Cardassian are not the type to go for a simple attack run considering how much they plan so they would have something to deal with our numbers like they could create a supernova to destroy our large fleet even if they sacrifice a fleet in exchange.
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Then we will have to use our brains to avoid obvious traps of the super-science variety, to send the Grand Fleet only to important targets, and to use economy of force while retaining our margin of superiorty (as in, counter the enemy's Combat 80 fleet with, say, a Combat 160 fleet, not with Combat 300, so as to limit the risks if it's some kind of horrible trap).

I mean, the Cardassians can't automatically force our Grand Fleet to go to places of their choosing, or just insta-trap us in ways our ships are somehow unable to detect or avoid. They can trap us, but we can trap them.
 
Jrin said:
Cardassian are not the type to go for a simple attack run considering how much they plan so they would have something to deal with our numbers like they could create a supernova to destroy our large fleet even if they sacrifice a fleet in exchange.
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You mean like how the Licori and their Mentats were even more prone to do? Which we stopped them from being able to do even once in our very short war with them. And didn't use nearly as many ships that we'd be able to gather with Decisive Battle.
 
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Jrin said:
Cardassian are not the type to go for a simple attack run considering how much they plan so they would have something to deal with our numbers like they could create a supernova to destroy our large fleet even if they sacrifice a fleet in exchange.
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*looks at Science stat of Cardassian ships*
*looks at Science stat of our ships*

I say, bring it!
 
Winged One said:
Random Number Q fucking us over is always a possibility.
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Okay, but by that standard, they have an even greater reason to fear us doing the same thing to them.

We've already succeeded in using stellar anomalies to zorch their ships and bases, more than once. We've got a history of planet-remaking weapons. We've fought a successful war with a race that was researching methods to detonate stars, and for all the Cardassians could know, we might have captured the Licori's notes.

It's not that there is literally zero chance of the Cardassians sucking our fleet into some kind of horrible trap. It's that anything they can do along those lines, we would be just as likely to succeed in doing to them, if not more so.
 
Gnarker said:
Hmm. Our most constrained crew income, Officers, is just a bit short of 12 points per year.
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Gnarker said:
Okay. Enlisted are currently about 16 per year.
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Where are you getting these numbers?

2316 EOY annual income: 16.4 O, 20.1 E, 21.2 T
Current annual income so far: 17.75 O, 21.55 E, 22.65 T
edit: this includes the about-to-be-researched "Rehabilitation I" tech and excludes unknown Orion ratification benefits

The main reason we've been constrained by officers is a combination of O income on average being ~80% of E income throughout TBG history and our crewing of over a dozen Excelsiors with their O-6 E-5 costs. Connie-Bs also didn't shift crew bottlenecks because they have O-3 E-4 costs and we only crewed 8 9 of them.

The upcoming enlisted bottleneck is a consequence of our waves of Renaissance builds (O-3 E-5) supplemented with some Mirandas (O-1 E-2) in the past years, and Constellations (O-2 E-4) and/or Centaurs (O-1 E-2) in the next few years. Indeed it's the enlisted bottleneck and recent SR gains are causing us to consider new SR-inefficient Centaur-A builds.

SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
- Ships that are damaged in space don't often get away. Industrial output isn't to the point where it can out-produce losses. Battles can be genuinely decisive, or can be attritional instead.
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Eh... I'm pretty sure the majority of ships that get damaged do in fact "get away". Some damaged ships don't get destroyed or manage to retreat. Some damaged ships become disabled, and such ships are rescued if the fleet is victorious (or otherwise drives off the enemy fleet).

And depending on the scale and pace of the war, it's possible for industrial output to keep up with the war, especially under the massive production benefits of total war economic mobilization. Of course, such a level of mobilization can't be sustained for long without incurring equally massive war support penalties.

Goat said:
Taking the numbers from the To Boldly Go Ships & Deployments page, I don't know how up to date it is, where I can remember changes I am including them (like UES is bringing their Miranda-A count back up to 4)
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Yeah that's a bit out of date. A better source that includes stuff under construction: To Boldly Go-Member and Affiliate Fleets

Iron Wolf said:
Also basing the doctrinal choice based on one opponent is poor decision making.
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I agree.

[X][DOCTRINE] Games & Theory Division : Wolf Pack Doctrine

:V

Seriously, that's the optimal strategy against the Cardassians knowing their large logistics shortfall, better than the advantage that decisive battle doctrine is supposed to have against forward defense doctrine.
 
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UberJJK said:
Yes but as you said it's always a possibility. It doesn't matter what Doctrine we pick; if we roll sufficient snake eyes we are screwed either way.
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Oh, I don't mean anything relevant to the Doctrine discussion. I just mean it's arrogant to welcome the deployment of a theoretical Cardassian superweapon.
 
Clearly we need to integrate the Klingons into the Federation ASAP so we can steal their Special Ability to use all Offensive Doctrines.
 
lbmaian said:
And depending on the scale and pace of the war, it's possible for industrial output to keep up with the war, especially under the massive production benefits of total war economic mobilization. Of course, such a level of mobilization can't be sustained for long without incurring equally massive war support penalties.
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War support penalties for us, I think it's important to note. We don't know if the Cardassians will have similar issues; and it's also quite possible they won't care as much about the economic downturn afterwards if they carve out their little niche of space. Similar logic applies to other powers -- I believe it was mentioned the ISC, as an example, will literally Not Give Up until an opponent is vanquished.

The mobilization benefits are particularly why I favor Base Strike, and it's something I don't think has been brought up. It's quite possible if the Cardassians can go to higher mobilization for longer than us, our decisive battle fleet will be either attributed, or unable to bring the war to a conclusion before a dozen other problems attract our attention.
 
Random Member said:
Clearly we need to integrate the Klingons into the Federation ASAP so we can steal their Special Ability to use all Offensive Doctrines.
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We already have that. We can have the Apiata and Caitians send out Wolf Packs and the Amarki and Rigellians conduct sneaky Base Strikes while using Starfleet and the other member fleets in a fleetball to force a Decisive Battle.
 
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Goat said:
Taking the numbers from the To Boldly Go Ships & Deployments page, I don't know how up to date it is, where I can remember changes I am including them (like UES is bringing their Miranda-A count back up to 4)
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*winces*

I always mean to update that. There's a box in the Class sheet that says the date versions-- SF is accurate to 216Q4, Member fleets are... a mess. Being entirely honest I'm not sure where to get the info to update them fully. I half-wish there was some way to automate the updates on both of them...

e: Even worse than getting MF numbers is trying to find their names and registries, and half of the fleets themselves aren't named >_>
 
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Iron Wolf said:
War support penalties for us, I think it's important to note. We don't know if the Cardassians will have similar issues; and it's also quite possible they won't care as much about the economic downturn afterwards if they carve out their little niche of space. Similar logic applies to other powers -- I believe it was mentioned the ISC, as an example, will literally Not Give Up until an opponent is vanquished.

The mobilization benefits are particularly why I favor Base Strike, and it's something I don't think has been brought up. It's quite possible if the Cardassians can go to higher mobilization for longer than us, our decisive battle fleet will be either attributed, or unable to bring the war to a conclusion before a dozen other problems attract our attention.
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On the other hand, the Cardassians by virtue of their government and society are probably already at a higher level of mobilization, relatively speaking, than most of the Federation. I'm halfway expecting their mobilization level to stabilize at "limited mobilization" (150%) like our Amarkian friends. (And that although such level of mobilization would decrease building times by 2qtr for us, it's possible that the Cardassians could have calibrated their shipbuilding to match conventional yearly schedules.)

In other words, I'm saying that the Federation could have a far higher potential and capacity of mobilization than the Cardassians. While they may only be able to increase their military budgets by another 67% percent and reduce build times by about 33%, the vast majority of the Federation could increase their budgets by 150% and reduce build times by 50%.

That's all speculation, but it's reasonable to suppose that the Federation's post-scarcity claim has something to it, and that there's far more total economy available to divert from peacetime industry to wartime industry. That would help counter the speculated Cardassian war support advantages.
 
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