On The Republic Incident.
In hard vacuum a man steps lightly through twisted metalwork. There is a quiet solemnity in this place, where the light of distant stars is the pale backdrop to his reverie. The organic floes of cooled, once molten metals makes a sort of artificial garden. Vast voids are marked in the framework around him like a cavern system, promising mysteries for any spelunker daring enough to try them. Well, Pegat Reynar has already traversed them, and learned much. But after six hours of non-stop inspection, he is ready to start collating what he has found and piece together the bigger picture.
Around a great breach in the outer skin, he lays back on the cold metal, feeling its bite through his thin pressure suit, and starts up his music. And then he is lost in thought, turning an image of the starship around in his mind. An Indorian man of peculiar talents, Pegat is famous on his homeworld, but he also has a rising reputation within Starfleet Tactical's Damage Review Office. A starship whisperer, of sorts. Although perhaps a starship medium is closer to the point. There is arguably no one better in Starfleet at the forensics of battle damage.
The music flows through him, as do the echoes of plasma plumes, the wailing of crumpling bulkheads. Time wheels through his mind's eye, turning back the clock on well over a hundred lives. What happened to the
Republic? What befell her and her crew? He talks to the ghosts who now live here, the soul of the ship that was. He owes the
Republic that much. He has always had a soft spot for her.
There is a popular Indorian game about Starfleet starships and
Republic is his favourite.
Republic:
"Thank you..."
Enterprise, her eyes darker than a Betazoid's, but smiling all the same:
"I
love Indorians."
"ka'Sharren to Agile."
"Captain Stol here, Rear Admiral."
"Get the Appleseed out here. And beam me up. I need to talk with you about a job."
It looks as though the Cardassians have managed to set limpet mines. Exactly how they did it is going to be an interesting question.
You're thinking Lecarre. Cardassians are more reptilian.
Anyway, sounds like the Republic was attacked by some kind of cloaked or otherwise undetectable minelayer unit.
The charges were too precisely placed. Someone put them
specifically where they needed to be to cripple the ship, without doing anywhere near enough damage to physically blow the ship to pieces or wreck it like the
Courageous got wrecked when it hit that Orion mine.
It sounds more like they somehow beamed commandos to the ship's surface and planted demolition charges without being detected.
TFW you've reached the stage in your career where you're assigning daring missions rather than carrying them out.
I'd lay pretty good odds on Nash coming along for this, though far from certain ones.
It's been noted that SF ships can generate fields that prevent ship-scale mind powers. At least one EC ship has. I suspect that it's not something our ships want to do constantly, though.
Sombre Boiys, Tartresis Shipmaster, grimly:
"Shipboard mind shields are a
very good thing to have. Very very good."
OTHER THINGS
In essence, think of this quote from World War 2. "A Tiger can easily shoot up 10 Sherman panzers, but the Americans always have an 11th ready to go." We need to not produce only superships.
It's actually more extreme than this quote indicates. See, that leaves the impression that to stop one Tiger,
ten Sherman tanks have to die. That's not even how it works in a fleet battle. If you bring ENOUGH effective cruisers that are durable enough that they're unlikely to be one-shotted by critical hits, it's entirely possible to beat a fleet of battleships to death without losing a single ship. If the Cardies threw eight or en stock
Jalduns at, say, two or three of our explorers, including
Ambassadors, they'd probably win without even taking hull damage.
[EDIT: To be clear, yes, I know you know this]
No, Cardassians
drink fish.
...I feel sorry for the Lecarre who learned this.
"Wait, when you say 'liquidate,' you don't literally mean
turned into a liquid, do you?"
For brought back there is Shey who was head of Intel before becoming chief of staff for two heads of Starfleet. He was not kept by Sulu and is an Andorian so not a human there.
I think he retired; seemed to get along well enough with Sulu when they were co-workers. He'd spent a LONG time in office, and he may be very tired. However, it does seem to be a option for us to bring back retired vice-admirals if they're interested, with Ablett being a good example. On the other hand, Shey ch'Tharvasse may not be interested; it's conceivable that N'Gir would get a "if nominated I will not run, if chosen I will not serve" from him.
Given cannon examples, a ship that's all transporters and an absolute fuckton of buffers could accomplish that fairly easily. Just store everyone in the buffers and you can evacuate as fast as the transporters will cycle.
Transporter buffers can be pretty temperamental; I wouldn't want to rely on
just a buffer system to keep everyone alive.
Once you cross out the multiple mass transporters as not available, you're left with a bunch of pods on a fast, tough ship. Obvious question- isn't what you really want a large stockpile of portable cryopods that can quickly be loaded into, say, the cargo bays of an Excelsior? It just seems to me that rather than a new ship design, you could accomplish the same thing with a more mobile cryopod design and our existing ships.
Excelsiors devote a lot of room to weapons and other systems that, on a dedicated evacuation ship, would be much more efficiently dedicated to more cargo space for cryopods. As in, that could make the difference between being able to evacuate tens of thousands of people and being able to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people.
Wait is Sulu really is going?
We have no indication of this in-game, it was just speculative discussion started by
@Briefvoice . Not even in the context of recent events, just "so who do you think will replace Sulu when he leaves office?" We had a pretty good idea Sulu was going to replace Sousa, though the time in rank requirement forcing Sousa in instead of Sulu as
Kahurangi's replacement kind of blindsided us. So what happens next, is the question...
Hmm. Actually, how about an example. If there's a natural disaster on the way that we can't stop, and have a large colony of 10 million people to empty out as fast as possible. What options do we have now, and if we built it in the next five years, what would be a better solution? Excelsiors and similar ships just don't have the capacity. I don't know how much cargo an actual super freighter would hold.
If you have to evacuate 10 million people you'd throw the entirety of starfleet at the problem and then some.
And it
still wouldn't be enough, not in any reasonable amount of time. Putting even a few thousand people on a frigate is borderline impossible, and despite an
Excelsior's much larger size I doubt the class can accomodate more than, say, ten thousand refugees. Remember, the normal crew size is only eight hundred; exactly how much life support space do you think they have? And how many parts of the ship do you think it's safe to set up bunk beds in? Where will all those refugees go to the bathroom? Where are the food preparation spaces? Even if we had replicators to feed them, replicators drain a lot of power and would drain more if they were being used at fifteen or twenty times the rate the ship's complement would normally require.
The only vaguely realistic way to physically move a million people quickly using spaceships the size of the ones we have is to freeze them in cryopods and stack them up in the holds like cordwood. Even that, you'd probably need multiple trips on multi-megaton ships, because the odds are that the mass of "person plus cryopod" plus the generator and maintenance equipment to keep them alive is going to mass more than a ton per person. And you can only have so many thousands of tons of cryopods and support equipment on a ship.
