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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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Simon_Jester said:
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...
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After 10 seconds in the sheet, @OneirosTheWriter is just going to have to say if keeping Explorers at scale 7 is a ok path. Given a bonus to internal event finding(like Thirst for Answers), it could be interesting have internal "5YM" going with weaker explorers.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
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.
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We've known that for a couple days:
OneirosTheWriter said:
Enterprise against the Lorgot and Karnack got a 10% Evasion chance for crew rating.

The current mechanic for evasion is that there is a base percentage for evasion that is reduced for each point of scale on the ship, rounded up. At the moment, regular escorts have a 20% evasion chance.
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There's definitely more to the formula than simply "23-ceil(scale)" since it doesn't take into account defense and crew rating (and that formula generates 12% for an Excelsior which is already higher than the Enterprise's evasion chance), but it does give us a ballpark figure.

Nix said:
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 indented for large ships shouldn't be particularly gamey.
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The problem wouldn't be so acute if there was a gradual gradient to the bonuses. That 5pp per explorer could be replaced with: 5pp per EC ship + 3pp per other explorer + 2pp per cruiser. Then the difference between cruiser and explorer wouldn't be a huge problem in this particular case.

edit: (Above numbers would actually make the bonus overpowered, but it's just an example.)
 
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Leila Hann said:
He's actually toned them down from show canon. In the shows, the Orion Syndicate is an outright cult, and its members will commit suicide before betraying it.
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I don't think you can accurately call it 'in canon' a cult. Religious overtones, to be sure, but the Witnessing ceremony isn't too different from how the American Mafia inducted new members. It's just ramped up by making it clear if your new underling squeaks, you die and anyone you love might well be on the chopping block as well.

That's why Bilby commits suicide by Klingon -- if he were to call off the op, he'd have to expose a leak, which would threaten his life and the life of his family. It's a decision rooted in cost-benefit, not religious fanaticism.
 
Simon_Jester said:
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.
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Technically this isn't fully true. Swarm plus Forward Defense, if you can get the fleet's average combat below 2, would allow a very large fleet of ships. Given that the ships would probably be very small, they'd also have a high evasion chance.

However, given any sort of targeting priority and the ability of combat to act as armor that you noted above, I think we both hesitate to build that sort of fleet. On the other hand, I'm not inherently opposed to this sort of fleet. It would mean that most sector events are handled by roll-bar-less Miranda and similar crafts, wars are fought primarily with cruisers, and we'd have a small core of Explorers just for five year missions. This is defensibly close to canon.

Stuff like the above is why I've come to the conclusion that we should decide our defense doctrine before we start implementing our own designs.
 
lbmaian said:
We've known that for a couple days...
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Yes, but it's good to have empirical confirmation. I'm trying to draw conclusions purely from actual, specific experience with our ships coming under fire here, where I can point to what happened and talk about what would have happened had things gone differently.

The problem wouldn't be so acute if there was a gradual gradient to the bonuses. That 5pp per explorer could be replaced with: 5pp per EC ship + 3pp per other explorer + 2pp per cruiser. Then the difference between cruiser and explorer wouldn't be a huge problem in this particular case.

edit: (Above numbers would actually make the bonus overpowered, but it's just an example.)
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Yeah, or Oneiros could scale the bonus as he saw fit, depending on his own assessment. I mean, suppose hypothetically we have four classes of explorer available- Galaxy, Ambassador, Excelsior, and a pocket explorer of 2.1 megatons that I'm going to provisionally call the Pioneer-class.

If we're already building Galaxies then Ambassadors are no longer impressive, and Excelsiors and Pioneers would seem very ho-hum. The bonuses associated with the ship classes might be +5, +3, and +1. But then the rules might have changed from when there were no Galaxies, and before they were commissioned, the bonuses for the other three classes might have been +5, +3, and +2, respectively.

sebsmith said:
Technically this isn't fully true. Swarm plus Forward Defense, if you can get the fleet's average combat below 2, would allow a very large fleet of ships. Given that the ships would probably be very small, they'd also have a high evasion chance.

However, given any sort of targeting priority and the ability of combat to act as armor that you noted above, I think we both hesitate to build that sort of fleet. On the other hand, I'm not inherently opposed to this sort of fleet. It would mean that most sector events are handled by roll-bar-less Miranda and similar crafts, wars are fought primarily with cruisers, and we'd have a small core of Explorers just for five year missions. This is defensibly close to canon.

Stuff like the above is why I've come to the conclusion that we should decide our defense doctrine before we start implementing our own designs.
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Yeah, I pretty much agree with that for all future designs EXCEPT the Ambassador-class, because we know we'll want something recognizably like the Ambassador no matter what we do. Doctrine may affect how many we build, but not whether we want them.

We should certainly do that before we design the next-generation escort.
 
We currently have six starbases, seven once the Caitians join. The Rigellians and Apiata are both close to joining and have Starbases as well. No matter how I look at it, there's no way Starbase 9 will be at Bajor. This makes me sad.
 
Nervos Belli said:
We currently have six starbases, seven once the Caitians join. The Rigellians and Apiata are both close to joining and have Starbases as well. No matter how I look at it, there's no way Starbase 9 will be at Bajor. This makes me sad.
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It won't be the 9th starbase, but if we finish the project before then and build 8 others it could be the 9th Deep Space starbase.
 
Nervos Belli said:
Compare the number of DS9 episodes dealing with the malfunction of the week to TNG. Cardassians, perhaps because they are so disciplined and rule-abiding, seem to build their bases solidly.
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That's cause TNG is set on the flagship. While the Enterprise gets the shiniest tech, it usually hasn't gone through its final teething stages just yet. Plus weird shit just seems to happen to Enterprise.
 
Nervos Belli said:
We currently have six starbases, seven once the Caitians join. The Rigellians and Apiata are both close to joining and have Starbases as well. No matter how I look at it, there's no way Starbase 9 will be at Bajor. This makes me sad.
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We didn't build those starbases, and I'm pretty sure we won't own them, so I'm not sure they count in our numbering system.

I'm sure we can find an excuse to make things what they ought to be. :)
 
Derek58 said:
Since it's way at the end of the current starbase construction tree, I'm guessing an incredibly nasty version of a starbase :cool:
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I don't think so. My guess about what said space stations entail can be found in the name. A "Deep Space" station is unlikely to be able to rely upon regular supply shipments making it to them seeing as even if it is part of the route, it is most likely to be at the end of said route so would only get the scraps. Therefore, it makes sense to assume that a Deep Space type station is one capable of being near entirely self sufficient, with hydroponics systems sufficient to provide both food and a breathable atmosphere for the station as well as able to reprocess the water to be used multiple times without requiring a new shipment. At least, that is how I see them.
 
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Derek58 said:
Since it's way at the end of the current starbase construction tree, I'm guessing an incredibly nasty version of a starbase :cool:
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Current starbase tree is only three tiers, and Deep Space I is slightly earlier than Outposts II and Starbases II (same depth, but cheaper unlock tech).
 
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