To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

[Simon_Jester]

This will be a dynamic, and one we'll have to monitor, but an (also unknown magnitude) counter-factor is the upcoming Independent Captains tech that can finish this year, which effectively seems to 'push' events from core zones to borders.

Click to shrink...

We really don't want to err on the side of heavy borders, though. Because if it turns out that we needed eight or ten ships in a sector to properly cover the fact that we federalized its entire local defense force, and we only have four or so... we are FUCKED, diplomatically speaking.

Remember how mad the Tellarites got a few years ago? Imagine several times worse. We've been explicitly warned of how ugly things can get if we casually send away all the federalized ships and don't leave enough behind for event coverage, and we have no idea how much of the existing federalized fleets was actually needed to cover events.

 

[Night]

It's too late, in that case. We've already done it and three of them are committed. The time to discussion this issue was during the deployment vote.

 

[Brogatar]

I think this is just a odd roll amount for Sol sector but I can see the GM's not warning us about coverage as a Cavet Emptor warning.

Edit Actually wouldn't we also see a rise in Vulcan Tellar and Andor sectors if that was the case?

 

[ilbgar123]

We should probably assign at least one more ship to these 'problem' sectors next deployment, just in case.

 

[Iron Wolf]

I will say at this point in Federalization it's not so much the total number of possible events going up as it is your chances of generating events rising, because UESPA/VSA/TSF/AIG has set up automatic forwarding for places they don't have capacity to patrol.

 

[Brogatar]

Well we do have our answer.

 

[MTB]

I will say at this point in Federalization it's not so much the total number of possible events going up as it is your chances of generating events rising, because UESPA/VSA/TSF/AIG has set up automatic forwarding for places they don't have capacity to patrol.

Click to shrink...

In-game there should be statistics of number of incidents/year for Federation members, counted a lot of different ways.

 

[Simon_Jester]

I think this is just a odd roll amount for Sol sector but I can see the GM's not warning us about coverage as a Cavet Emptor warning.

Edit Actually wouldn't we also see a rise in Vulcan Tellar and Andor sectors if that was the case?

Click to shrink...

We've only seen one month out of three, and we've already had events in Tellar Sector (one), Vulcan Sector (one), and Sol Sector (two). Two or three of these events pulled in two ships apiece, one for the primary and one for the assist. That was just in January. February and March are still coming up.

If this isn't ALL the events that take place in the Core Four sectors, or nearly all, we have a problem on our hands.

I will say at this point in Federalization it's not so much the total number of possible events going up as it is your chances of generating events rising, because UESPA/VSA/TSF/AIG has set up automatic forwarding for places they don't have capacity to patrol.

Click to shrink...

This is informative. On the other hand, the probability of an event rolling is rolled per major world, isn't it? In effect, any increase in the probability per major world translates into a higher probability of 'double stacking' or even triple stacking events.

If you have four major worlds in a sector and each has a 10% chance of triggering an event, there is a 66% chance of no events, a 29% chance of one event, and a mere 5% chance of two or more events. Double-stacking of events in the sector in a single quarter will be rare, though not unheard of when you add up the odds over multiple sectors. MIght happen once every, oh, five or six quarters on average.

If you have four major worlds in a sector and each has a 20% chance of triggering an event, there is a 41% chance of no events, a 41% chance of one event, and an 18% chance of two or more events. Integrate that over several core sectors and you'll see one or more sectors doublestacking in most quarter.

 

[Brogatar]

From Discord

Iron Wolf - Today at 2:07 PM
I think we were going to and just forgot
Brogatar - Today at 2:12 PM
?
Iron Wolf - Today at 2:15 PM
To mention probabilities increasing

 

[charysa]

Forgot to... or "forgot" to? >.>

 

[Brogatar]

Forgot to this is Iron wolf speaking.

 

[Steven Kodaly]

We were reasonably certain that Starfleet was going to be picking up the slack going into the federalization process, even without the game masters giving us hard numbers to play with. This first year will probably be pretty rough, but it won't spell certain doom for Starfleet or the Federation.

That's scheduled for next year.

 

[Erandil]

Isn't an "increased" event rate a pretty obvious and logical result of of something like the federalization? I mean I fail to see how you could come to any other conclusion considering we are talking about Starfleet suddenly having to shoulder the burden of four(?) national fleets in one of the busiest and densest regions of the federation. Or are we really going to assume that the majority of those national fleets did nothing and were only there to look good?

And honestly I would argue that the increased attention from the political and public sphere on this process, which is obvious even for a far from involved reader like me, would lower the treshold to what is a "noteworthy" enough event to get noticed by people significantly during this period resulting in a overall higher than normal event rate (+the increased event ate due to no national fleets being available anyhow). This is the time when both supporters and critics of this idea will look especially closely at Starfleet to see if they were right and thus a delayed reaction etc. that might normally be simply be viewed as business as usual could in this situation easily be interpreted as a real failure.

 

[Enerael]

Isn't an "increased" event rate a pretty obvious and logical result of of something like the federalization? I mean I fail to see how you could come to any other conclusion considering we are talking about Starfleet suddenly having to shoulder the burden of four(?) national fleets in one of the busiest and densest regions of the federation. Or are we really going to assume that the majority of those national fleets did nothing and were only there to look good?

And honestly I would argue that the increased attention from the political and public sphere on this process, which is obvious even for a far from involved reader like me, would lower the treshold to what is a "noteworthy" enough event to get noticed by people significantly during this period resulting in a overall higher than normal event rate (+the increased event ate due to no national fleets being available anyhow). This is the time when both supporters and critics of this idea will look especially closely at Starfleet to see if they were right and thus a delayed reaction etc. that might normally be simply be viewed as business as usual could in this situation easily be interpreted as a real failure.

Click to shrink...

We knew that events would increase in those sectors, the problem we have is estimating by how much.

As for the latter, I doubt that the GMs would bother to adjust their event tables to reflect this, event if that was the case IC.

 

[Alliterate]

At the time BV and Swb were crafting their deployment plans, we did ask (on Discord) about the event-rate effects of Federalisation (as well as the new former-HBZ sector layouts) so it's not like there was no awareness that this might be an issue or no attempts to cater for it. There wasn't a public-channel reply that I saw.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Well, we have four or five ships in each of those sectors, and we haven't federalized all the member world fleet ships yet, just all the good ones.

Hopefully this year won't be too too terrible, and if we need to allocate more ships next year we can.

From Discord

Iron Wolf - Today at 2:07 PM
I think we were going to and just forgot
Brogatar - Today at 2:12 PM
?
Iron Wolf - Today at 2:15 PM
To mention probabilities increasing

Click to shrink...

Well, I mean we WERE told that Starfleet would have more duties in those sectors. Repeatedly. Common sense indicated that this was going to mean that we'd need more ships to provide event/defense coverage. The specific detail that it means increased event occurrence rates and ships being busier is totally unsurprising.

 

[sunrise]

and we got the border fleets that can help:

Sydraxian Border Zone – Requires D11 (Supports Apinae, Amarkia, Tellar, Sol, and Rigel sectors)

• Homeworlds/Major Worlds in sector: 2 major worlds (Vega, Klivvar Proxima)
• 2324.Q1 - 2 Renaissance (10) [Suffrage, Concord], 2 Centaur-B (5) [Winterwind (B), Achlanacht],1 Oberth [Hawking (B)]

Licori Border Zone – Requires D11 (Supports Sol and Rigel sectors)

• Homeworlds/Major Worlds in sector: 2 = 1 homeworld (Laian (H), Lattad)
• 2324.Q3 – 1 Excelsior-A (6) [Miracht Agrad],1 Renaissance [Emancipation (B)] (5), 1 Centaur-B [Gale (B)], 2 Miranda-A (4) [Bon Vivant, Agile (B)]

 

[SynchronizedWritersBlock]

Actually, what we were told at the time was that the takeover of responsibilities would be a gradual thing.

 

[Derpmind]

Actually, what we were told at the time was that the takeover of responsibilities would be a gradual thing.

Click to shrink...

Exactly this. Even with random variance, if in just the first year we end up overstrained then we'll seriously need to beef up the core four for next year. I think we only have one event that stated it was ours due to federalization, but there may be more that weren't hinted at. Even just around +1 event per quarter this year would means next year we'll need to use many more ships than we'd hoped for.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Actually, what we were told at the time was that the takeover of responsibilities would be a gradual thing.

Click to shrink...

I'm not saying we weren't told it would take time, or that we were told it'd happen instantaneously.

But we were told it would happen, and it would hardly be a surprise if it started happening to some extent in the first quarter of the first year of federalization.

I mean, we just took all the Core Four's Renaissances and Centaurs, which were probably the backbone of their event response. Of course that drops some of their duties directly in our laps right away.

Exactly this. Even with random variance, if in just the first year we end up overstrained then we'll seriously need to beef up the core four for next year. I think we only have one event that stated it was ours due to federalization, but there may be more that weren't hinted at. Even just around +1 event per quarter this year would means next year we'll need to use many more ships than we'd hoped for.

Click to shrink...

I for one never hoped to get more than half the federalized ships for use elsewhere in the Federation. I figured the other half would have to stay at home, or be exchanged on a one-for-one basis with other ships that would do so.

 

[Derpmind]

....no, I don't really agree. We weren't given any benchmark for how much this is going to increase the number of events or the event chance. We didn't uave any way of estimating it besides the fact that it would be a gradual year-by-year increase. Otherwise, it's all gut feelings.

We knew that most of the to-be-federalized fleets were oversized for the task of local event response, but by how much was never even hinted at. IC we'd have known some of this but OOC we can't really figure it out except with hindsight.

 

[sunrise]

and at least part of the ships we where federalizing where called up for TF duty in the last few years and we used none of them this year so the reduction of response fleets was not that big.

 

[Bonvivant]

and at least part of the ships we where federalizing where called up for TF duty in the last few years and we used none of them this year so the reduction of response fleets was not that big.

Click to shrink...

This is a very important point. The founding 4 + 1 had a substancial number of ships assigned to tadk forces and the Federalisation process ths year claimed the bulk if not all of them so their simply should not have been that much of a drop in local patrol ships.

 

[Briefvoice]

Do people actually have a specific complaint about how many ships are in the four federalizing sectors?

My take is that the "assist" mechanic is often working against us. It eats two ships per Event.

 

[Steven Kodaly]

My take is that the "assist" mechanic is often working against us. It eats two ships per Event.

Click to shrink...

The obvious solution is to build more ships.

Comet finishes her prototype phase late next year, right? With Starfleet having acquired additional shipyards through federalization, how many new Comets are we expecting to lay down for construction?