- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'll just use some high school stuff.
What are the odds of the ship NOT having a major failure in a given
The flip side of that is, there is a roughly 1/4 chance of ONE of the ships breaking down, and a (somewhat smaller) chance of two or more breakdowns in the same
Now roll that four-sided die, every
Common sense suggests we will expect to see at least one ship experiencing a failure about every three or four
Okay, if breakdown chance is truly only rolled once a year, things are less bad- but still problematic.
Remember what happened when the Soyuz-class started experiencing mechanical failures once every few quarters? NPCs started calling for the class to be scrapped.
Now imagine what would happen if a brand-spanking-new ship class we'd just spent political will getting built were doing the same thing?
Let's not build anything with a reliability below 95%. Preferably not below 98%.
I mean heck, automobiles get recalled for mechanical defects that have only a 0.001% chance of actually happening... because if they happen, someone dies, and a one in a hundred thousand chance of a lethal accident multiplied by all the cars of that make and model on the road can add up to a lot of dead people.
Nix, we're going to be designing at least two classes of cruisers, two classes of explorers, and probably two classes of explorers, between now and 2370. Who says we have to design only one class of science vessels?
The basic point of the Keplers would be to get those poor plucky little Oberths off the street and have a somewhat more survivable, flexible ship to do things like gather signals intelligence deep in Cardassian space. That's a science vessel we can feel good about constructing, one that won't be a complete waste of a berth in the 2310s or 2320s.
Will we be able to do better by, say, 2340 or '50? I certainly hope so. And between now and then we should be able to find time to design a better one.
But...
Basically, we have four roles in our fleet: explorer, cruiser, science vessel, and escort. We've already decided our next new design (the Renaissance) is going to be a cruiser. After that, the only question is, do we design an explorer, a science vessel, or an escort? Whichever answer we pick, we're getting a ship designed with 2310s technology.
So if you don't favor bothering to design any new science vessels in the next ten years, on the grounds that anything we do now will be too weak compared to the ideal image of the Intrepids we can build sixty years from now... What do you think we should do next?
Honestly, even the Galaxies, who are kind of the poster children for low reliability, only failed rarely, like less than once per twenty episodes. You only get high failure rates if you count active sabotage. Stuff like alien commandos busting out of the brig, Iconian polymorphic computer viruses attacking the operating system, or Wesley's science fair project eating key control systems.
95% reliability is creeping up into "dumb things will happen so often that if they based a Star Trek series on this class, it would become a meme that the ship is a piece of junk about to fall apart."
Come to think of it, those shiny shiny high stats for the Galaxy and Intrepid should be interpreted with that in mind... In some important ways they were low-reliability ships.
You have my vote. Remind me of that if I vote for anyone else.
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