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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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Picard finds the Sword?
And then has to deal with both Klingon and Romulan assassins trying to make sure that only their Sword is the real one ....
 
Lets have a Tally
Adhoc vote count started by Thors_Alumni on Apr 13, 2018 at 2:59 AM, finished with 209 posts and 65 votes.
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Alastor Mobius Toth said:
You can't just jump over actual centuries of institutionalized xenophobia in handful of years, a
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Not IRL, but FDS has worked miracles before.
Alastor Mobius Toth said:
but it bears reminding that Romulans engineered Biophage in the first place.
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They did not. They found it, and, being an empire quest, tried to weaponize it. Needless to say, they failed.

OneirosTheWriter said:
To answer your next questions point by point to avoid spaghetti posting:
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Thanks, but this really should have been in the post.

Changing my vote. Same as SWBs incidently.

[X][PREZ] Alliance-Building Diplomacy Response to gain more participants in response
[X][PREZ] Romulan-Klingon Border Peacekeeping Response
[X][PREZ] Conciliatory Diplomatic Response to Breen

I am very worried that this vote/crisis will end in a cluster****.

UberJJK said:
Giving the Romulans infrastructure aid does go against both of these. However there is a simple solution to that; when the Klingon conciliation round comes around vote to give them industrial support as well. It keeps the current balance, shows the Federation has an even hand in dealing with both powers, and can probably be sold to the public as helping our neighbors recover from a devastating war in something equvilant to the Marshall Plan.
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Problem is, both Romulans and Klingons are assholes. What do you think they will use those ships we helped them build for?

charysa said:
Just want to note, if we're going for the Romulan-Klingon border permanent peacekeeping task force, we're going to probably have to forgo sending a TF to the Gorn anytime soon.
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Permanent? Its only until the Breen get lost. Also, we really should get discounts and/or free member ships to work with due to the crisis, unless the council wants us to shrink our other duties.
 
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Godwinson said:
Clearly the only solution is for one of our explorers to find the real sword in an archaeological dig.
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Sounds like a job for Zolani Volanan!


Given the mixed emphasis nature of this vote, is the split between lend-lease and border patrols a good thing, or do we need to be all-in on the patrols for them to be meaningful?
 
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Something that'd be basically impossible to organize for a quest this large, but would be really funny, is if all the vote options got the same number of votes.
 
Godwinson said:
Something that'd be basically impossible to organize for a quest this large, but would be really funny, is if all the vote options got the same number of votes.
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Shey gets tired of dealing with walking on eggshells with the council and just facerolls the PADD until everything is all caps, highlighted, and underlined.
 
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I know some people are frustrated by the vaguer options, but you do need to keep in mind there is no practicable way to deliver all the information necessary for in-the-weeds voting without stopping all progress for a week. And then there would be no votes because it would be absolutely bewildering for voters.

At a certain point I need folks to keep in mind that your protagonist character has subordinates consisting of an Admiral, over a dozen Vice Admirals, and some five times that in Rear Admirals, plus about one hundred million ton of line starship, and an operational area that hits nearly 7,000 lightyears square when viewed top-down.

There must be a layer of abstraction, or we'll all lose our minds. You do not sit there coming up with individual line-items on the invoice, you mark out the general theme and then let specialists handle the details. In this event, you have us QMs, who can take into account all the things that we would have taken into account when judging your ideas.
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
I know some people are frustrated by the vaguer options, but you do need to keep in mind there is no practicable way to deliver all the information necessary for in-the-weeds voting without stopping all progress for a week. And then there would be no votes because it would be absolutely bewildering for voters.

At a certain point I need folks to keep in mind that your protagonist character has subordinates consisting of an Admiral, over a dozen Vice Admirals, and some five times that in Rear Admirals, plus about one hundred million ton of line starship, and an operational area that hits nearly 7,000 lightyears square when viewed top-down.

There must be a layer of abstraction, or we'll all lose our minds. You do not sit there coming up with individual line-items on the invoice, you mark out the general theme and then let specialists handle the details. In this event, you have us QMs, who can take into account all the things that we would have taken into account when judging your ideas.
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Good idea in theory, but poor execution here I would say. We needed far more information then a single line to even pick a direction if we want to do it competently and have some idea of the consequences, much less in a vote this important. A great deal of info available or even obvious IC is not so to us, and unless all the options offered are equal (why would they be?), we are going to make some really stupid choices like this.

I want my competent Starfleet damn it. This isnt competent. Give us a decent description and the opinions of our closest advisers for each choice please.

Edit: To put it yet another way, you are letting us pick a direction, but we dont know the terrain. One way has a road, another a cliff, and we have a rough map IC. Show us the highlights of this map.
 
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Iron Wolf said:
Lend-Lease would likely mostly be infrastructure income, which could be used for resource expansion, shipyard construction, more crew etc. Depends what the President authorizes. As for leverage I'm not sure what you mean. It's going right into Romulan hands. You/the Prez can try to mandate some restrictions but it's to help them out in a war.
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Lend-Lease implies this is a loan/where getting something in response.
What are the romulans offering in return?
providing shipping/engineering teams post war?
parts of the neutral zone becoming federation territory?
Not contesting the federation turning the Sotaw in an affiliate?
Opening their worlds to trade/cultural exchanges?

If the klingons see us getting something in return for providing shipping they might accept it more then when it is a free gift.
 
[X][PREZ] Alliance-Building Diplomacy Response to gain more participants in response
[X][PREZ] Direct Action Response against Breen assets
[X][PREZ] Recon & Intel Support
 
MTB said:
On 2d6? The cheaters!
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Actually, it was just a 1d10. The die just kept on rolling tens and rolls of 10 exploded. Rolls of 1 also exploded the other way, but they only rolled a 1 after rolling ten 10s.

[X][PREZ] Aggressive Diplomatic Response to isolate Breen
[X][PREZ] Subterfuge & Sabotage Response
[X][PREZ] Direct Action Response against Breen assets
 
[X][PREZ] Alliance-Building Diplomacy Response to gain more participants in response
[X][PREZ] Conciliatory Diplomatic Response to Breen
[X][PREZ] Recon & Intel Support
 
[X][PREZ] Industrial Support/Lend-Lease Response
[X][PREZ] Alliance-Building Diplomacy Response to gain more participants in response
[X][PREZ] Recon & Intel Support

Have to agree that the additional info (and other QM clarifications) should have been in the update itself. :|
 
Briefvoice said:
People keep pounding this as the obvious "everybody wins" simple solution, but that would be... rather bad gameplay. Choices shouldn't be meaningless. If you piss off the Klingons, it shouldn't be possible to turn around and immediately placate them that way.

So I hope there's not such option, because that would be terrible, because it would leach out all the consequences for our choice.
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No, it would not have remotely that effect.

It would simply move some of those consequences. Foreign policy consequences would be exchanged for domestic policy consequences. Say, something like "this is monstrously expensive and cuts into your shipbuilding and other construction resources, imposes a tax on your political will, or both."

I mean, you seem to be modeling this as "first piss off the Klingons, then bribe them." No. That is not the plan. That would not work very well, knowing how Klingons are. What is proposed is to start out the entire arrangement in a way that clearly provides benefits to both empires.

See, while there is clearly a choice to be made here, that doesn't automatically mean the choice in question is "offend the Klingons by helping the Romulans, or alienate the Romulans by withdrawing their help and letting them get mugged by Breen." Policy issues are complex. There is a lot of room for multi-sided tradeoffs.

Enerael said:
Good idea in theory, but poor execution here I would say. We needed far more information then a single line to even pick a direction if we want to do it competently and have some idea of the consequences, much less in a vote this important. A great deal of info available or even obvious IC is not so to us, and unless all the options offered are equal (why would they be?), we are going to make some really stupid choices like this.

I want my competent Starfleet damn it. This isnt competent. Give us a decent description and the opinions of our closest advisers for each choice please.

Edit: To put it yet another way, you are letting us pick a direction, but we dont know the terrain. One way has a road, another a cliff, and we have a rough map IC. Show us the highlights of this map.
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@OneirosTheWriter , to translate this into something a bit less confrontational...

Suffice to say that in general, when it comes to major decisions with far-reaching implications (like "semi-permanently align the Federation with the Romulans and against the Klingons or vice-versa"), then either the implications of our choices should be obvious, or they should be explained.

An example of 'obvious implications' would be if a second war broke out, if there were provocations on both sides, and if (purely hypothetically) we were being asked whether we should intervene militarily on the Klingons' side, the Romulans' side, or remain militarily neutral. Nobody would need to think very hard about what those choices could do in the opinion of Starfleet Command, so it would be pretty easy to decide based on the situation and on what the thread wants. The choices are clearly connected to the goals. The same is true of the Snakepit; we know what our Snakepit options do, so it's easy to make informed choices about whether or not it's worth spending political will on them.

Here, the implications are not so obvious. Will proposing to patrol the Klingon-Romulan border offend the Klingons more, or less, than material aid to the Romulans? How could we possibly have even the slightest idea, without some degree of formal advice from in-game experts who understand both nations' politics? The implications of the decision are, again, not obvious. That creates tension and fear. Because even knowing you don't deliberately craft trap options, you might well think it was 'obvious' that a certain vote choice would lead to a certain outcome, and that we must have known what would happen and wanted it... When in fact, we didn't know, and didn't want it. Then it happens and we're unpleasantly surprised.

So personally, I recommend that any update where we get a novel situation and new choices, but where Starfleet should be able to make some educated guesses as to the consequences... That we get something like a short paragraph describing some of the most basic consequences of each action.

That text can appear as exposition in the update (Shey musing on what some of his advisors have suggested). Or it can appear mixed into the vote options as captions or blurbs or something. But it really ought to be there, because otherwise we're being told "cut the red wire, the blue wire, or the green wire" without having a circuit diagram to tell us which wire does what.
 
[X][PREZ] Recon & Intel Support

[X][PREZ] Alliance-Building Diplomacy Response to gain more participants in response

[X][PREZ] Aggressive Diplomatic Response to isolate Breen
 
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There was concern about a Lizard-Bug war breaking out rimwards of the Federation. The patrol the Klingon Romulan border should result in the Klingons sending ships to reinforce their rimward border whch in turn will reduce the chance of a Lizard-Bug war breaking out there. So if the cost of commiting a dozen starships for a decade to patrol that border is acceptable compared to the possible costs of sorting out a freefor all that will likely breakout if the Breen are sucessfull and the Klingons get involved making them a tempting target for the Gorn then Klingon Romulan border duty might end up the best option.
 
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