Treating the sunk cost fallacy as "always wrong" is a serious oversimplification. Especially when you apply it to realistic decision-making processes. The problem is that in every project, there are always opportunities to 'abort' the project and jettison the sunk cost because the perceived future price is too high.
Doing this in any one instance may appear logical, but when it becomes a pattern the result is a constant stream of resources wasted on half-finished projects, and a 'flaky' overall policy.
It's true that it's an oversimplification in the real world, where it's rational to take into account psychological reactions, i.e. don't count on completely rationale behavior of everyone else.
But in strategy games, where the rules are well known and you know for a fact wasting resources on a sunk cost has no benefit, and that you're in control of your future decisions, sunk cost fallacies are indeed "always wrong".
This quest is kinda of a strategy game, so that's why I was bringing this up.
You do have a good point though - the key parts about strategy games where this whole sunk cost fallacy determination makes sense are those two aforementioned points, which are NOT satisfied in this quest:
a) The rules have to be well-known. Nope, QM is hiding a lot of rules, and for all we know, there could be pp costs for "wasting" options like this Connie-B refit.
b) That we're in full control of future actions. Also nope, we're voting by committee, and so psychology and sociological factors now come into play, and it would be irrational to ignore them.
In this case, we committed to the Constitution-Bs as an 'intermediate' cruiser that is a lot better than anything available to us at game start, while being slightly inferior to the Renaissance-class that will become available starting in 2317 or so. There are good reasons for us to stick to that plan.
No argument there - I think that mass producing as many Connie-Bs as possible in this construction wave is the best plan. Absent a good reason for substituting one for an Oberth.
While I favor having plenty of Excelsiors, by the time we draw near the TNG era we're probably going to have to reclassify the Excelsiors as cruisers to continue getting mileage out of them, because they will be dangerously small and limited ships compared to a 'real' explorer of the ~2350 era. By that time we shouldn't just be comparing them to Ambassadors, but to refitted Ambassador-As and prototype Galaxies. Sending even an Excelsior-A on a five year mission would be... unwise.
I hope by "reclassify" here, you mean an unofficial reclassification of its effective role in the fleet.
The explorer/cruiser/escort split has different definitions for the following 3 areas:
1) ship design/building - won't matter, since we aren't going to be building Excelsiors by this point
2) bonuses from doctrines and other techs - still matters, we want those sweet Lone Ranger (and other doctrines) explorer bonuses
3) how we're utilizing the ship in the fleet, the ship's effective role - sure, treat Excelsiors as cruisers here
There kind of sort of is. The explorer corp recruitment drive increases total crew available, which means that taking it yearly would allow more ships to be crewed. I drew up a maximum Explorer plan that took advantage of this a while back, but I wouldn't say it's actually a good idea. I just felt I should note that it exists as a possibility.
Well that only helps with EC crew and actually decreases standard crew. Now, it might make sense to divert more standard crew Excelsiors to EC Excelsiors this way, and we've done it occasionally, but it's still quite expensive.
