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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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I note with satisfaction that @Briefvoice is calling up a pair of Amarki battleships for the "hunt down the Empress" task force, like I wanted.

Finagle007 said:
We need to be careful with Chekov. His death would cause numerous time paradoxes.
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If we go with the Agents of Yesteryear chronology, remember how the TOS-era protagonist becomes a temporal agent in the first place.

Getting Chekov "killed" might actually be the beginning of his career as a time traveler, not its end.

nocarename said:
The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, but it doesn't have to be a shouted one. If Torg could read it, the truth is there. She named herself, on the hull as is appropriate.
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Nice catch. That said, note that Torg didn't ask her who she is, she asked her what she is. This was, to him, rather a more pressing question.

UberJJK said:
I'm kinda wondering what the point of Theater Fleets are. They are worse at event coverage, the thing we have to worry about 90% of the time with fleet deployment, then just cramming ships into our Border Zones and given our continual ship shortage seem unlikely to ever be used as a reserve fleet.
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I suspect that the next logical step, one which I would have been sorely tempted to enact already, is to set things up such that there are disadvantages to just randomly pulling ships out of sector fleets on short notice. So that the ships you actually want to be available and responsive to crises across a broad swath of the Federation have to be in the Theater Fleets.

If recruited member unit's can't response to events what good are they in Theater Fleets?

They can't respond to events and they can't fill in for damaged sector ships. All that leaves is being a pool to be assigned to Task Forces, in which case why not just directly assign the member ships to Task Forces as needed?
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I think this is a question that can be answered, given a bit of time.
 
@UberJJK to avoid spaghetti posting:

Theater fleets are entirely optional. You do not have to assign ships to them if you don't have them. You can also put forward Ship Deployment votes where you assign ships directly from build to a sector squadron. Akuz will edit in that clarification later.

The role they do serve is basically a ship reservoir. If something happens to a ship to take it out of the action, or you need to jump to form a new TF, you have an easy-at-hand pool of ships to quickly shuffle places. It allows the GMs to automate that process without asking y'all to submit a whole ship plan every time one of your ships trips over an anomaly or similar. As a balance to this so they're not just floating in the void doing nothing, they can respond as mutual support ships to events in the theater zone. But again, if you don't have enough ships to man this reservoir, then you don't have to use it. There are no minimum requirements for a theater fleet.

Possibly this isn't exactly the right time to introduce the mechanic as it is not a time of plenty but some beta-testing is likely required :V
 
Well, uh, put bluntly, if we can ignore the mechanic now, and we are incentivized to do so by our circumstances what makes you add it in the first place? It won't be beta-tested this way.
 
Or perhaps it will be beta-tested after the resolution of the immediate crisis, and the point here was to institute all the new mechanics at once rather than having to make random rule rewrites.

We've got a good reason for this rule to exist, I think that's good enough.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Or perhaps it will be beta-tested after the resolution of the immediate crisis.
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No? We will reduce our task-forces to improve sector event response again. As we usually do. We don't have enough ships even without the crisis to fill task force and sector roles to desirable levels.

Simon_Jester said:
We've got a good reason for this rule to exist, I think that's good enough.
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Where? It's adding complexity for...what? Rules exist to enable gameplay. Shuffling deployment is already more of a chore than most things, and draws a low level of interest, making it more complex and opaque is not going to help.
 
@Briefvoice
Do we really need Miranda and Constellation in Aqua? IMO, they can boost defensive part of fleet more than help in science. Also, how about Von Chad as a commadore can turn task force defense in a training ground for our blooded ships accelerating their experience gain.

I like your plan but I would move Docana and Agile to task force Defence, appoint Vol Chad to command the task force and maybe pull few Miranda's from GBZ to Task Force Defense for better coverage
 
Night said:
Where? It's adding complexity for...what? Rules exist to enable gameplay. Shuffling deployment is already more of a chore than most things, and draws a low level of interest, making it more complex and opaque is not going to help.
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I'm not sure how "put ships in this spot to automatically distribute them in case of a shortfall" makes it more opaque? It's designed to streamline ship deployments by introducing an automatic distribution mechanism that players still have some level of control over.

As for introducing it early, I think it's going to be useful to have this sort of discussion now at a low-priority time rather than springing it unexpectedly.
 
As I read it theatre fleets are a much needed simplification to the ship assignment vote. Now rather than shuffling between individual sectors you just put the minimum in each sector, and keep them there and then the only shuffling is ships in and out of theatre fleets.
 
Night said:
Where? It's adding complexity for...what? Rules exist to enable gameplay. Shuffling deployment is already more of a chore than most things, and draws a low level of interest, making it more complex and opaque is not going to help.
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Much of the opacity and complexity comes from the lack of any intermediate level of organization between "whole fleet" and "specific sector squadron," and the lack of any place to allocate reserve ships to.

It would be a looot simpler to think about deployment of ships if we were only voting on which of three theaters our newly completed ships go to, and only occasionally worrying about the micromanagement of which individual sectors those ships go to.

Ukrainian Ranger said:
@Briefvoice
Do we really need Miranda and Constellation in Aqua? IMO, they can boost defensive part of fleet more than help in science. Also, how about Von Chad as a commadore can turn task force defense in a training ground for our blooded ships accelerating their experience gain.

I like your plan but I would move Docana and Agile to task force Defence, appoint Vol Chad to command the task force and maybe pull few Miranda's from GBZ to Task Force Defense for better coverage
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I don't think you realize just what those ships are capable of. Docana, as a blooded Constellation-A, has the statline C4 S5 H3 L4 P4 D4. She's basically a light "science cruiser," significantly better suited to event response than to heavy combat. And better suited to supporting archeologists, explorers, and diplomats than to heavy combat with a powerful alien battleship.

Remember that we lost her sister ship, the Sappho, which had the same statline, in the Battle of Celos... precisely because refit Constellations aren't designed to tank battleship fire.

The Agile is more of a borderline case; as a Blooded Miranda-A her statline is C4 S3 H3 L4 P2 D2. Allocating her as a fighting escort isn't the worst thing we could do. On the other hand, as a Miranda her designed cruising speed is low, and we'd be tasking her with keeping up with a very, very fast enemy ship. Even as a defensive task force, she'd still be having to reposition in response to a more maneuverable enemy.

...

As to drawing down the Gabriel Expanse, it's worth remembering that it's been... at least a year, I think, maybe more, since the end of Nash's offensive. It is far from a certainty that the Cardassians won't go back on the offensive if they scent weakness relative to the size of their own fleets there.

Sure, we now have the threat of closing the Strait of Themis to them, but we already had that threat on a de facto level before. It's not like the Cardassians could have stopped us from doing that and forced a passage. Not without hammering through a lot of our defenses and seizing many Indorian and Seyek worlds.
 
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Iron Wolf said:
I'm not sure how "put ships in this spot to automatically distribute them in case of a shortfall" makes it more opaque?
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Because you're putting it on the players to decide, again, what's needed and adding another thing to drain ships into. More options necessarily increases complexity and difficulty.

kyuden said:
Now rather than shuffling between individual sectors you just put the minimum in each sector, and keep them there and then the only shuffling is ships in and out of theatre fleets.
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Simon_Jester said:
It would be a looot simpler to think about deployment of ships if we were only voting on which of three theaters our newly completed ships go to, and only occasionally worrying about the micromanagement of which individual sectors those ships go to.
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Did...did you guys not read what Akuz wrote? Because it's clear things are still slated towards sector event response, which makes sense given it's one of the core mechanics of the quest with the Captain's Logs being the main driver of interest and all. This is a fantasy you're concocting, where we don't still juggle individual sector response needs most of the time.
 
...Of course, @Night. Of course.

I did NOT read what AKuz wrote, I am engaged in a delusional fantasy where I don't understand a blasted thing, and ONLY YOU truly understand the sheer horror of what is about to unfold.

Of course.

...

More seriously, I would like to strongly recommend that we all cool our jets and see how this rule change pans out in practice over a few years of game time. Instead of raising a fight over it because of hypothetical opinions about how it will or won't work. At least three or four people who are normally not-stupid have gone over this already. It may turn out to be unhelpful, but it is highly unlikely to be a disaster.

So fussing and squabbling over it is unhelpful, at least until we have experience-based grounds for saying why it is or isn't working.

I, for one, am going to stop, and... never mind, my reaction to continued attempts to bicker over this is my business.
 
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Given that there is, in fact, a third part... This would not be an unreasonable approach.

I would happily waive the bonus for the second part anyway, my reasoning being that the "bonus" came from beating up the Klingon fear of dishonor a bit, and that we already used that bonus at Khitomer. :p
 
@Simon_Jester I don't think that task force Defense is likely to fight dreadnoughts before\without task force Burgundy. I think it is likely that they'll need to intercept an incursion of a drone or two or deal with a Hishimeri raid.
 
Ukrainian Ranger said:
@Simon_Jester I don't think that task force Defense is likely to fight dreadnoughts before\without task force Burgundy. I think it is likely that they'll need to intercept an incursion of a drone or two or deal with Hishimeri raid
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We don't know for sure how fast the drones are but they're probably pretty fast; the Orions had TNG-era technology and there's no obvious reason their parasite warships wouldn't be reasonably fast at warp speed.

Basically, it would be nice to think that Task Force Burgundy will always be there whenever the dreadnoughts fight, but we can't really count on that, because Task Force Burgundy is also slower than the dreadnoughts. Plus, we only have a conveniently placed tracking beacon on one of the dreadnoughts. There's at least one more, and Hayant may yet obtain a third or fourth.
 
Simon_Jester said:
So fussing and squabbling over it is unhelpful, at least until we have experience-based grounds for saying why it is or isn't working.
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Analysis of game mechanics does not, in fact, require them to be played out to determine their likely impacts on the game. Theorycrafting is a long and time-honored tradition that has brought us numerous successes and discovered numerous ways to break games before now and will continue to do so. This is a base canard.

And I am forced to ask if you read it because you're constructing this world where Sector Fleets are not front-line event responders and Theater Fleets are not penalized (or unable to respond entirely!) which is, you know, what Akuz actually wrote. This makes Kyuden's view of minimum sectors unsustainable, and puts a significant cramp on the ideal world you were describing to us. Here, tell me about how we won't spend a lot of time fiddling with Sector Fleets again.

AKuz said:
Well, due to a new ability added to mutual support a Theater Fleet ship can attempt to respond to a missed event in any theater sector at a penalty (do not rely on Reserve ships to respond to every single missed event. A Theater Fleet ship will respond fine to some events, but will not be effective in responding to distress calls or sudden, surprising events. Rely on sector ships and regular mutual support for surprises. Filling the D requirements on a sector ensures that someone will probably at least be in range).
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Though I do want to point out that Task Force Aqua and Task Force Burgundy are essentially identical to the existing Task Forces you already voted for, except I shuffled in a couple of Rialas so we could give each of the new Task Forces an Excelsior Starfleet flagship,
 
chriswriter90 said:
This again? We already have Keplers and Generalists in the pipeline.
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Eh, the way I see it, you want 2 or 3 reserve ships per theatre at most. Now, those could be Rennies or Generalists, but the setup supports keeping your Explorers deployed to sectors and your low-D ships also deployed to sectors. So there's this in-between where you want ships with excellent D but that are smaller than explorers as your top cover, which actually makes a specially designed fast response ship make sense.

There's nothing wrong with filling it in with a few cruisers or generalists once we can spare them, but it's a niche that we could expand to in the future.
 
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