To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] SynchronizedWritersBlock
Now if only there was a Bajor push plan...
Now if only there was a Bajor push plan...
- Location
- Patriarchova
There is. Its called "build up our forces, fortify our frontier affiliates, and then dictate whatever terms we want to the Cardassians." What we're voting on is how to eventually get there.
lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
- USA
@OneirosTheWriter, IIRC wasn't one of the impetus behind MWCO that we could sell off our Connie-Bs when we could replace them better ships (way down the line)?
Will there be options to sell - or even buy - ships to interested member world fleets? It could serve as third option to the scrap vs mothball decision, but only works if a member world fleet has interest.
Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
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- He/Him/His
Okay, Big, long-term question here. What, in general terms, do we have to do to get either the Romulans or the Klingons to actually become part of the Federation? I refuse to believe such a thing to be impossible.
UbeOne
Daydreaming CPU
- Location
- Philippines
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- She/Her
Get the Iconians to invade the galaxy.
I just want to add that I don't have a massive problem with @Nix's plan. It at least buys the EC drive.
We have an opportunity this year to clean up the big projects on the docket, so I thought I'd take it; that's why my plan exists. Colonies are comparatively easy to fit in later years as a quick addition at the end of planning, compared to 40pp 8turn projects. But I understand the "claim them now" drive even if I disagree with it.
We have an opportunity this year to clean up the big projects on the docket, so I thought I'd take it; that's why my plan exists. Colonies are comparatively easy to fit in later years as a quick addition at the end of planning, compared to 40pp 8turn projects. But I understand the "claim them now" drive even if I disagree with it.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
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- He/Him
[X] [COUNCIL] Plan Industrial Expansion
- Location
- Patriarchova
We'd need to become so massive and so powerful that they come to see us as a superior rather than a peer. Even then, there would be cultural factors that make absorbing them very difficult.
For the Romulans.... reunification with Vulcan.
Check back in that in 150 years or so.
- Location
- Patriarchova
I think the Klingons would need a revolution before they could become Federation compatible. Their feudal aristocracy has to go, or at least have its power reduced to the ceremonial.
In the wake of that, their society could become something along the lines of the Amarki, who we had no trouble absorbing.
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While I'm willing to give him another shot, I'm a firm believer in giving second chances if you can, the problem, or at least my problem, was never the gamble itself. It was about his actions around the gamble.
See:
for more details.
lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
- USA
At this point, the contributions of the generic teams are minor enough that by the time they do become major a decade later, we'll likely have other tech teams to fill in gaps.
So feel free to let slip narrative decision making into the cold mechanical calculus of research.
While I'm not gungho about 2.1mt cruisers, I'm also not particular enthused about the pocket explorer idea. It sounds like it's abusing a mechanic, and I wouldn't be surprised if Oneiros changes it to something like: +5pp per latest flagship-class ship constructed.
edit: This kinda applies to all the escort vs cruiser vs explorer distinctions between techs. We shouldn't be severely disincentived from actually researching these max escort scale and max cruiser scale techs.
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- Location
- somewhere
Even if that happens costing 2 points less towards the combat limit would still be a strong reason to go for explorers rather than cruisers for a just under 2mt design.
If Scale 7 exists, and we're to be punished for using it, what's the point of Scale 7?
Crew and resource costs are still lower, significantly last time I checked. I'm not going to port everything over to the experimental crew sheet till it's final though.
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lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
- USA
Actually there might be a way around this. What if max scale per ship type did not define strict brackets, where instead we can choose to build any ship type at tonnages that the ship types can be scaled to. So for ex, even with 2.1mt cruiser researched, we could still build either 2mt cruisers or 2mt explorers.
Hmm, there a lot of formulaic differences between ship types, so I'm not sure if this would work out, but this might also provide the avenue to actually have the escort-sized "long-ranged explorers" mean what it means.
This idea isn't fully thought out and requires some experimentation in the ship design spreadsheet (and changing it so that ship type can be explicitly chosen).
Hmm, there a lot of formulaic differences between ship types, so I'm not sure if this would work out, but this might also provide the avenue to actually have the escort-sized "long-ranged explorers" mean what it means.
This idea isn't fully thought out and requires some experimentation in the ship design spreadsheet (and changing it so that ship type can be explicitly chosen).
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To put it bluntly? It was the right call and on reflection I don't think most people voting for telling everybody we know understood the full consequences of that decision. I'd bet my ass Sulu would have told us the same damn thing because he's nervy like that and we would have trusted his judgement. We wouldn't have devolved to threatening to have him sacked, and so he wouldn't have had to respond by saying it's in his remit to make that call.
Because if the charter agrees with him, it was his call to make. I'm not sure how you expected him to 'respectfully' respond to a threat to have him fired, but it's a fine tradition in Starfleet embraced by Kirk and Picard and pretty much everyone worth talking about to do what you think is right rather than to cave to authority when they threaten you. His call will probably prevent the next Cardassian plot.
When that happens, we probably want to consider how problematic the order actually was at length rather than writing off the person risking their career as a jackass. Now, was it a bit cowardly of him to try to skate by without confronting us to begin with? Maybe. But if he felt strongly enough about it to risk his career, he wanted to ensure that risk protected what he felt needed protection.
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Is Jessica Rivers still captain, or has she been promoted already?
[X][COUNCIL] Plan DS
I actually like the border zone, at least compared to a starbase that will only probably be at Vega. The border is long enough that such a position can't cover everything. I get that this isn't going to win this turn, but I don't want people scared off putting it in their plans in the future, especially if raids shift spin-ward.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
DOCTRINE AND PROCUREMENT STUFF:
We see here both Yukikaze and the Earth force Centaur-A which I am provisionally dubbing UES Bellona, a name I picked because honorable reasons but ultimately because of being a renaming of the only wooden ship ever to hold her own against ironclads in battle. Kaiser was the original name of that ship, by the way.
1) Escorts actually do possess an evasion chance; both Yukikaze and Bellona evaded enemy fire once each during the battle. This may have been fluke luck but I doubt it, suggesting that evasion is a noticeable part of the 'tankiness' of escort-class combatants in general.
2) In a very real sense, Combat is armor. The two Centaurs had inferior durability to the outpost, by (in the most favorable interpretation) a 3:4 ratio, but superior Combat by a 7:4 margin in raw score. This translated into the Feds being able to put hits on target roughly twice as fast as the Syndicate base could, which in turn meant the Syndicate's superior "health bar" got whittled down twice as quickly. The outpost lost shields on turn 10, after landing two hits, one of which was successfully evaded. Had the combat ratio been 4:4, with the same RNG results, the outpost would have only taken five hits, while landing five, and the Centaurs would have been in considerably worse shape.
Obviously we can't exploit this fact on a Federation-wide basis because we have a combat cap. But it's worth remembering that a 2:1 advantage in Combat is extremely powerful under the current engine, powerful enough that the ships with superior combat can emerge alive, and potentially unharmed, from confrontation with a considerably tougher opponent.
3) Of the six times the outpost managed to hit the Federation fleet, five of those were directed at Yukikaze. This is an outcome that COULD happen by chance (with a roughly 5/64 probability), but is unlikely (see previous).
This actually calls into question my belief that hits are assigned randomly, target prioritization might have been a thing for the Orions. But I'd like more evidence. It would be good to re-examine the log of Enterprise against the two Cardassian ambushers 2307Q4, because that was the other case on record of a simple one-on-two action.
When we get to, oh, the TNG era, I'd kind of like to be able to say that since an 'explorer' is now a ship of five million tons or whatever, a 2.4 or 3.0 million ton 'cruiser'
I'm also a bit worried about the gaminess of the "all-pocket-explorer" fleet concept because the Federation Council may start to seriously wonder whether all our 'pocket explorers' of 1.95 megatons or whatever are really, in any meaningful sense, 'explorers,' when we're using them as garrison ships and wandering around with something like the Galaxies as our frontline five year mission ships
Post-battle tactical analysis:
We see here both Yukikaze and the Earth force Centaur-A which I am provisionally dubbing UES Bellona, a name I picked because honorable reasons but ultimately because of being a renaming of the only wooden ship ever to hold her own against ironclads in battle. Kaiser was the original name of that ship, by the way.
1) Escorts actually do possess an evasion chance; both Yukikaze and Bellona evaded enemy fire once each during the battle. This may have been fluke luck but I doubt it, suggesting that evasion is a noticeable part of the 'tankiness' of escort-class combatants in general.
2) In a very real sense, Combat is armor. The two Centaurs had inferior durability to the outpost, by (in the most favorable interpretation) a 3:4 ratio, but superior Combat by a 7:4 margin in raw score. This translated into the Feds being able to put hits on target roughly twice as fast as the Syndicate base could, which in turn meant the Syndicate's superior "health bar" got whittled down twice as quickly. The outpost lost shields on turn 10, after landing two hits, one of which was successfully evaded. Had the combat ratio been 4:4, with the same RNG results, the outpost would have only taken five hits, while landing five, and the Centaurs would have been in considerably worse shape.
Obviously we can't exploit this fact on a Federation-wide basis because we have a combat cap. But it's worth remembering that a 2:1 advantage in Combat is extremely powerful under the current engine, powerful enough that the ships with superior combat can emerge alive, and potentially unharmed, from confrontation with a considerably tougher opponent.
3) Of the six times the outpost managed to hit the Federation fleet, five of those were directed at Yukikaze. This is an outcome that COULD happen by chance (with a roughly 5/64 probability), but is unlikely (see previous).
This actually calls into question my belief that hits are assigned randomly, target prioritization might have been a thing for the Orions. But I'd like more evidence. It would be good to re-examine the log of Enterprise against the two Cardassian ambushers 2307Q4, because that was the other case on record of a simple one-on-two action.
I'm a bit worried about the long term implications of this, what with it becoming impossible to 'grow' our cruisers over time. And with us being committed to really expensive explorers in place of being able to ultimately construct what I hope would be relatively cheaper heavy cruisers.
When we get to, oh, the TNG era, I'd kind of like to be able to say that since an 'explorer' is now a ship of five million tons or whatever, a 2.4 or 3.0 million ton 'cruiser'
I'm also a bit worried about the gaminess of the "all-pocket-explorer" fleet concept because the Federation Council may start to seriously wonder whether all our 'pocket explorers' of 1.95 megatons or whatever are really, in any meaningful sense, 'explorers,' when we're using them as garrison ships and wandering around with something like the Galaxies as our frontline five year mission ships
I'm going to stop you right here. You see it wasn't a vote. Now maybe I missed it somewhere but as far as I remember, and five minutes of searching through posts seems to back me up, there was no vote on revealing information on the cloak. That was all Admiral Kahurangi there.
Sulu would have told Admiral Kahurangi about the giant gaping hole in her plan (IE: depending upon information that she can not order revealed) right away rather then waiting until hours/days after the message was sent.
While I'm obviously not Admiral Kahurangi and can't say exactly what was going through her head at the time I would wager she was threatening him over being a disrespectful ass to a superior officer and countermanding one of her orders without having the decency of even telling her.
You seem to be missing my point; it's not about whether it was his call or if it was the right call. The problem is how he went about making the call and his actions following it.
I'm not sure how it wasn't clear but I was talking about the stuff before that. Specifically:
Maybe we're having a clash over differing interpretations of the events but I took that as less threatening him, because that would be wrong, and more rebuking him over his behavior.
This really sounds like you contradicting yourself here. On one hand you say it was perhaps (and it definitely was) cowardly to avoid confronting the Admiral to begin with but on the other hand you say that he felt strongly enough about the issue that he was willing to risk his career over it by going behind her back.
Again if Linderley had just done his damn job and advised Admiral Kahurangi when she first brought up sending out the message to the Klingons. They could have discussed the matter like rational human beings and people would have been happy.
Who has wanted an all Pocket Fleet? I know when I designed mine, they were to replace garrison flagship Explorers, not whole fleets.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
LINDERLEY STUFF:
Because the other, arguably even more undesirable scenario is that we cause the disruption in Intelligence, obviously already significant, to become completely disastrous by bringing in a (semi)random outsider and by doing what is in effect demoting our current head back to a subordinate position.
Linderley hasn't done well enough that we'd even want to promote him again even if that were possible, but he also hasn't done so badly that we need to shove him out the door like he was a live bomb.
Secondly, if Linderley is right, and he really does have the power to override Starfleet's high command on whether information is classified... That makes it even more critical that we do not have an insubordinate obstructionist in charge of Starfleet Intelligence. See, having a subordinate who doesn't always do what you want is manageable if you have the power to directly order them to do things that you need, and they do it whether they like it or not. But having a subordinate who ignores your wishes, and whom you have no real power to order around, is disastrous. Because they will do whatever they think best from their own empire-building perspective, and they will then fail to do what you, or the organization at large, actually needs if they do not share your opinion.
It is not a good idea to give Linderley veto power over decisions of strategy and diplomacy, just because those decisions involve intelligence information. It is especially not a good idea to give him such a veto if we know he's likely to use it whenever his own preconceptions are challenged.
Thirdly, you seem to be saying Linderley's decision was "the right call" based entirely on information that Linderley did not possess- namely, that we didn't need help detecting the cloak. He couldn't know that because Sarek had not, at that time, been keeping up tracking of the Kadak-Tor for two or three weeks. Also, he presumably didn't know that the Kadak-Tor wasn't coming to ravage one of our homeworlds. If Linderley knew that and withheld THAT, then he really does deserve to be fired, as opposed to merely being under a cloud.
What would you be saying about Linderley if a rump version of the Council were staggering around in the bombed-out ruins of Paris while Starfleet Command tried to patch a command structure together again, because the Kadak-Tor broke contact and managed to nuke Earth in a decapitation attack? Would you be saying he made the wrong call as firmly as you are now saying he made the right call? Because that's the logical implication, if you're going to judge him by the consequences of his actions, rather than by the process through which he arrived at them.
Exactly how insubordinate and obstructionist would Linderley need to be, before you'd agree that his actions were a mistake?
How big an objectively verifiable mistake would he have to make, before you'd agree that his decision-making process is counterproductive? How big a risk would he have to expose us to?
While I don't favor either firing him or promoting a new leader over his head right now on the strength of this incident alone, I definitely don't want us to get into a situation of assuming that just because a subordinate ignores our orders and fails to carry out his tasks, he must somehow be a hero for "standing up for what is right."
Our last insubordinate hero who stood up for what they thought was right was that captain beaming people off the freighter during the biophage. They were directly, explicitly, saving lives from a horrible death with their beamout. I respect that, even if I don't like the consequences that resulted.
I don't think Linderley is in the same league as that. I think he did this more out of a general aversion to leaks and spreading information, than out of any genuine fear that intelligence sources would be placed in direct danger important enough to offset the dangers associated with this crisis.
But IF he learned a lesson and isn't going to be an obstructionist in the future, he deserves a second chance.
EXACTLY! I made that exact point, either in the post you quoted or elsewhere.
Because the other, arguably even more undesirable scenario is that we cause the disruption in Intelligence, obviously already significant, to become completely disastrous by bringing in a (semi)random outsider and by doing what is in effect demoting our current head back to a subordinate position.
Linderley hasn't done well enough that we'd even want to promote him again even if that were possible, but he also hasn't done so badly that we need to shove him out the door like he was a live bomb.
Firstly, the fact that Linderley says the charter gives him the power to refuse to divulge classified information in a crisis despite the direct orders of his superior doesn't necessarily mean he's supposed to have that power. There may be dodgy interpretations of the charter, and some people tend to favor dodgy interpretations of the rules that let them do what he want.
Secondly, if Linderley is right, and he really does have the power to override Starfleet's high command on whether information is classified... That makes it even more critical that we do not have an insubordinate obstructionist in charge of Starfleet Intelligence. See, having a subordinate who doesn't always do what you want is manageable if you have the power to directly order them to do things that you need, and they do it whether they like it or not. But having a subordinate who ignores your wishes, and whom you have no real power to order around, is disastrous. Because they will do whatever they think best from their own empire-building perspective, and they will then fail to do what you, or the organization at large, actually needs if they do not share your opinion.
It is not a good idea to give Linderley veto power over decisions of strategy and diplomacy, just because those decisions involve intelligence information. It is especially not a good idea to give him such a veto if we know he's likely to use it whenever his own preconceptions are challenged.
Thirdly, you seem to be saying Linderley's decision was "the right call" based entirely on information that Linderley did not possess- namely, that we didn't need help detecting the cloak. He couldn't know that because Sarek had not, at that time, been keeping up tracking of the Kadak-Tor for two or three weeks. Also, he presumably didn't know that the Kadak-Tor wasn't coming to ravage one of our homeworlds. If Linderley knew that and withheld THAT, then he really does deserve to be fired, as opposed to merely being under a cloud.
What would you be saying about Linderley if a rump version of the Council were staggering around in the bombed-out ruins of Paris while Starfleet Command tried to patch a command structure together again, because the Kadak-Tor broke contact and managed to nuke Earth in a decapitation attack? Would you be saying he made the wrong call as firmly as you are now saying he made the right call? Because that's the logical implication, if you're going to judge him by the consequences of his actions, rather than by the process through which he arrived at them.
Maybe, or maybe not; we had this argument at the time.
Exactly how insubordinate and obstructionist would Linderley need to be, before you'd agree that his actions were a mistake?
How big an objectively verifiable mistake would he have to make, before you'd agree that his decision-making process is counterproductive? How big a risk would he have to expose us to?
While I don't favor either firing him or promoting a new leader over his head right now on the strength of this incident alone, I definitely don't want us to get into a situation of assuming that just because a subordinate ignores our orders and fails to carry out his tasks, he must somehow be a hero for "standing up for what is right."
Our last insubordinate hero who stood up for what they thought was right was that captain beaming people off the freighter during the biophage. They were directly, explicitly, saving lives from a horrible death with their beamout. I respect that, even if I don't like the consequences that resulted.
I don't think Linderley is in the same league as that. I think he did this more out of a general aversion to leaks and spreading information, than out of any genuine fear that intelligence sources would be placed in direct danger important enough to offset the dangers associated with this crisis.
But IF he learned a lesson and isn't going to be an obstructionist in the future, he deserves a second chance.
- Location
- somewhere
I'm not saying to never research 2.1mt cruisers, just that it doesn't make sense to do so soon, before we had the chance to design an explorer in that weight range.
Also, when we have a 0.7mt and two 1mt classes in one group and a 2.3mt and a 3mt class in the other group arguing that a 2mt design properly belongs to the second group shouldn't be a very hard sell. The Lone Ranger bonuses aren't about Explorer Corps ships, they are about large ships, otherwise they wouldn't be giving (lesser) boni to cruisers. The very point of Lone Ranger as a Fleet Design Doctrine is to use larger ships for sector fleets, not just for exploring. Making sure one of our larger ship classes, much closer to the top end than to the middle, receives the full benefit intended for large ships shouldn't be particularly gamey. It's a different thing when we are starting to build Galaxies of course, a new 2mt design (or even a 2.5mt design) shouldn't count as a large ship, and it very likely won't because we will have researched larger crusiser sizes by then. That doesn't mean we should be in any great hurry to do that soon though.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The idea of a fleet that consists of (basically) all pocket explorers plus full-sized explorers was raised when I was debating the merits of Lone Ranger, Combined Arms, and Swarm doctrines.
Basically, the mechanical bonuses for Lone Ranger are really good if we (ab?)use them to allow us to build huge swarms of Combat 6 explorers that count as Combat 3 or 4 for cap purposes. This would in effect allow us to have a fleet whose actual total combat capacity 50% to 100% greater than the combat cap.
There are no correspondingly good bonuses for Combined Arms or Swarm... but it seems very unlikely to me that if we actually tried to minmax that hard, we'd get away with it. And that is on top of the question of how we'd crew or pay for that many pocket explorers.
Now, I think a lot of people are promoting pocket explorers for other, less... extreme reasons. My point is simply that I don't want us to get locked up in, or committed to, the idea of "gaming" the Lone Ranger mechanical bonuses for explorers so hard that Oneiros is tempted to take them away. If we never research Scale 7 or higher cruisers on the grounds that calling a 2.1 megaton ship an 'explorer' is advantageous to us in an era when we're contemplating 4-5 megaton explorers for five year missions...
We're going to shoot ourselves in the foot.
@Nix :
If we want to defer researching Scale 7 cruisers for a while I respect that. It'd be nice to look at what a pocket explorer designed with the Ambassador's tech would look like. Maybe someone from SDB can post some representative designs after we settle what the Ambassador itself looks like.
Although an Ambassador-era pocket explorer would arguably be competing with an Excelsior-A refit option; the latter might prove more economical.
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