[X] Be given NCC registries.
(It's not like we have any shortage of NCC numbers to hand out, and I'm sure that all warships in homeworld fleet service are registered
with the Federation even if they don't serve the Federation itself. I suspect there are regulations against building up your own unregistered fleet within Federation space.)
The Enterprise turns out to be magic, and we get to see the stats for the Cardassian Heavy Cruiser... as well as destroy one. That loss is going to hurt them a hell of a lot. They can't have many of those things, and it's going to take a lot of time, resources, and crew to replace.
True, although depending on what its noncombat stats look like the Cardie battlecruiser design might be relatively cheaper than our
Excelsiors. It's got a lighter hull than an
Excelsior, similar shielding, and a bit more firepower. Given that the crew uses fewer techs, it may be inferior in terms of science/defense/whatever, in which case it probably costs less special resources to build.
Hmm, with the stellar performance the Enterprise Crew had, are they now Elite (Elite+, after Nash's bonus)?
Remember, the first time they died horribly, and in-story it took them
at least twenty-seven tries, possibly more, to win the battle. I'm not sure I'd go for that.
[] Not be given NCC registries
Seems like it would lead to less confusion, and I like having the member worlds with their own flair. Plus CAS Riala just sounds better than NCC Riala to me.
Ah, but the Federation still calls all ITS ships "USS this" and "USS that." There's no reason member races can't adopt their own prefixes as part of the name, something like "Her Majesty's Vessel" or whatever.
I'm pretty sure that math's wrong. It takes 1 year to build the berth, then another 2 to finish the first Centaur, and another 2 for every Centaur afterwards
In terms of combat potential (in case of fleet battles, for examples), this puts us ahead of the Constellation refit after only 7 years, since we'd gain 9 Combat, 6 Hull and 9 Shield, compared to only 9 Combat from the refit.
The problem is that you can't model fleet battles as a cage match between all our ships and all their ships. We have other things we need ships for, and
Constellations fill THOSE roles; they do not compete directly with the escorts we send off to reinforce a battlefleet on our frontiers.
And outside of fleet battles it is completely pointless to even try to add up point values; getting 6 science by building two new ships is totally different in terms of the consequences than adding +1 science to each of six existing ships.
We'd also get 3 more ships in general with fairly solid stats that could partake in events, and due to said stats have some reasonably good chances at completing them successfully, and the Constellations also still have chances to participate in events because they're out and active rather than in dock.
Except that if we're scrapping
Constellations to crew
Centaurs, we don't get to keep the
Constellations.
If we're NOT scrapping
Constellations to crew Centaurs, then we have to scrape up crews for both ships to operate simultaneously... and once we've done that, then we might as well keep the Constellations around after we're done buiding the eight Centaurs.
Overall, after 7 years building new Centaurs would be ahead of refitting the Constellations by a small margin, and that margin would only grow the longer the game runs because we can build/refit more ships this way.
See, I'm counting the time it takes to actually replace all eight ships, because that's how long this build project would require. And at no point during that interval do we gain major advantages over the refit process, because a one-for-one replacement of Constellations with Centaurs just isn't that good compared to refitting the Constellations. We also expend a great deal of special resources in the process because Centaurs are that expensive.
