@HearthBorn, your table of vote comparisons... I can't find where it says
which plan is which.
Also, I am really, really unsure that declining the resignation is a good idea. As I pointed out last night, declining the resignation means that we consider keeping Rear Admiral zh'Rhashaan to be as important as getting a starbase and a mining colony. Or an upgrade program for an obsolete set of ships, or
coordinating our anti-Syndicate operations.
All of those are areas where we'd have to expend roughly thirty political will to get our goal.
If this is about pragmatism,
pragmatically it is very unlikely that zh'Rhashaan will be so much better than her potential replacements that it's worth sacrificing 30pp to keep her.
If it's about principles, "command takes responsibility" is an important principle. It is very much normal for senior commanding officers whose organization has just made a major mistake to resign. Otherwise there is virtually no accountability at all for when these organizations make mistakes.
...
Remember what someone else pointed out about looking at this issue from the point of view of Federation politicians. Starfleet Intelligence just gambled with the lives of several hundred Federation spacers and one of our finest starships, on the basis of inadequate information. They lost. If the head of Starfleet Intelligence gets away with only a slap on the wrist from the admiral-in-chief...
Where is the accountability? What is to discourage future admiralties from doing much the same, on a larger scale and more often, with greater risk of provoking a major war?
From the point of view of someone watching the Federation evolve from outside, that kind of decision is exactly how you get the rise of something like Section 31. This is how you get an unaccountable, irresponsible, reckless, violent rogue agency that "does what it has to" in order to do what it
thinks protects the Federation. Without oversight, or at least without oversight that means anything, because the people who are really in charge can cause major disasters without personal consequence.
It's not even "hard men making hard decisions," because the 'hard decisions' in question
are not hard, because the decision-makers aren't being held accountable if things go wrong!
...
So basically, if we think the highest principle of Starfleet command structure is "my admirals, whether they're right or wrong," then by all means decline the resignation. But then the Council is right to lose some faith in us, because we're
supposed to think the highest principle is "take responsibility for your actions and accept civilian control of the military."
Yes, that was one of the main reasons I said that such a reform would be more likely after unification.
Possibly, but there's a relatively narrow timeframe between the point at which planetary unification of Earth makes a standardized spelling of International English
possible, and the point at which the advances in translator technology make it
unnecessary. The relevant time window would be, oh... 2075 to 2125, roughly, because by the time of
Enterprise universal translation appeared to be very much in effect.
Ooh nice drawings (I'll excuse the Excelsior). It consistently amazes me that the Constitution is so small, shorter than the Centaur even it weights 25% more, yet packs such an amazing punch. The Renaissance also isn't going to be much longer than the Centaur and still weighs the same as a Constitution.
Three-dimensional objects can be funny like that. For instance, decreasing the length of a ship by 10%, BUT increasing the width and thickness of the components (height and depth) by 30%, will increase total volume by 0.9*1.3*1.3 = 1.52... In other words, a 50% increase.
Another issue is the density of internal machinery spaces. If the
Centaur, for example, contains large amount of empty space for hangar or cargo bays (quite possible in the Federation), that would explain it being 'puffy' and less powerful than it might be. We know that afflicted the
Galaxy-class design, for instance.
Every single thing except the Renaissance, the Lone Ranger techs and Cardassian research. A lot of changes because the previous project finished, some to move teams to a new higher priority, some to accommodate other teams being moved. Would you prefer less efficient research, e. g. by not switching the two warp tech teams to take advantage of a chance to finish a tech, just so it's easier to audit? Or maybe list the previously researched project along with the new? Highlighting the majority of teams wouldn't make much sense.
[Closes eyes]
This is
exactly what I was afraid would happen regarding our research turns...
As I've said, I do not want a situation where the research decisions are so inaccessible and complex that only a small minority of the people following and participating in the quest can participate meaningfully. If we're going to do that, we might as well just drop the whole "allocate research teams" system entirely because it's become a useless gameplay feature.
