GENERAL TREKKY STUFF:
I honestly got a bit of a sadface when I saw that the current plans are to name the next Excelsior Stargazer. Since in my mind that's the Constellation that Picard commands....it'd be what, another 20 years from now? At least?
*Checks Memory Alpha for quick-and-dirty dating*
Huh, 2333 when he served on the bridge, call it 2330 when he started on her?
So yeah about 20 years?
Plus, as noted, we already know the names of all the
Constellations we have, and it's vanishingly unlikely we'll ever build another given how unsatisfactory their statline is. Although I could actually get behind building
Constellation-As as a stopgap measure to handle rapidly increasing Defense requirements, given that they're very cheap ships. At least, I could if we didn't have a dangerous redshirt shortage.
Personally in our NEW AND RADICAL TIMELINE I was thinking a Connie-B could easily be the Stargazer.
I'd promoted this idea myself, and it would have been in keeping with the spirit of the episode where Kirk's old command was first introduced.
That was actually
SUPPOSED to be a Connie, by the way, but apparently they had to switch models at the last minute, and they picked "Constellation" because they could dub it in over "Constitution" in the dialogue easily.
So not much chance of a mysterious masked ship to swoop in and save the day (at least not without time travel, alternative reality travel, or acts of Q)?
The closest we've got is USS
Shield, which is as far as we can determine a duplicate copy of another
Miranda, the USS
T'Kumbra. The
T'Kumbra accidentally copy-pasted when it ran into a spatio-temporal whozit somewhere in Vulcan sector. Starfleet has since made a practice of stationing the two ships in different sectors, for fear that if they ever meet there may be some kind of explosion.
This is meant to cover up for the fact that Oneiros accidentally gave two
Mirandas the same registry number, an error which has since been changed.
HEADCANON: the Vulcans have an
Oberth because, in one of the most sensible decisions he ever made, Admiral Rogers specifically funded the construction of that
Oberth, under agreement with the Vulcan Science Council. Its primary mission:
FIND THAT ANOMALY AGAIN! So far, no luck.
Listen, I have a sure fire fix. We don't use the Canon design as seen on screen, we use the original, much better looking, Ambassador design that Probert did for Yesterday's Enterprise they did not have the time to get onscreen...
I like this idea. Especially since the
Ambassadors we build are effectively an alternate-historical design different from the canon one. They're likely to be a hundred thousand tons lighter (to fit in three-megaton berths) and they'll be started several years earlier (if we stay on schedule to start the project in 2313). So why not also have them look prettier?
Gear said:
This is, admittedly, a much better developed design. But it still suffers for being an obvious in-between design, a smaller Galaxy with design elements from the Excelsior added on. It looks like the ship that came before the Galaxy.
Your objection doesn't even make any sense anymore.
YES, it looks like a transitional phase between the
Excelsior and the
Galaxy... but you could equally well argue that the
Excelsior looks like a transitional phase between the refit
Constitution-A of the movie era and the
Ambassador!
I mean seriously, remember that the original purpose of the
Excelsior model from
Star Trek III was to look like someone took the design of the
Constitution-A and built a bigger, shinier, modern version. They're not unique super-graceful beauty ships that make their poor stupid successors look like inferior ugly ducklings. They're simply one of several designs in a continuous, evolutionary lineage from the TOS-era Connies to the
Sovereigns.
I am not a fan of the galaxy by cannon stats, for the first it has a 6 year production time, which means 9 year prototype time. That just seems like far too long a wait on any ship. Really reduce it to 4mt for 5 year production and 7.5 prototype. As for escort building, I figure any time we are in a crew crunch but still want more ships coming online we can slot in some Centaur-A. Really for any escort we design I want crew cost to be low. They won't be as good as a cruiser but they should be crew efficient ships.
At this point, canon stats for
anything new are a dead letter, unless Oneiros is too busy rewriting the ship design rules on the fly that the SDB crew can't come up with a balanced and suitable design and he says "to heck with it, let's go with canon."
Which is what happened with the
Renaissance-class, admittedly.
BORING FLEET CONSTRUCTION DETAIL ARGUMENT
I agree, we don't need a new cheap combat escort design.
Hell, we don't really need any new escorts till at least the Galaxy era, and the reason for that is the Renaissance. The Rennies are the last sub-1mt cruiser designs, and I really thing that they will be practically, maybe even officially, downgraded to 'light cruisers' by the mid 2320's.
Right now, we're using Centaur-A's as essentially light cruisers, to be general sector garrison ships essentially...
Which means that we'll start using them in place of what we're using Centaur-A's now, as general sector ships and main contributors to missions like fighting the Syndicate. At this point, the Centaur-A's have outlived their niche of being 'heavy escorts/light cruisers'. They're too expensive to be good escorts, and too under-powered to fulfill cruiser duties. So I say that we just don't make any more, as that 1mt berth and the resources can be put to better use making Rennies.
Gear, you're missing something very important.
Cruisers have huge crew requirements.
A full-size explorer, the
Excelsior class, has 6/5/5 crew requirements; the
Ambassador would have 6/6/6 if we use the canon statline. And I doubt Oneiros is going to crank it down much below that, for balance reasons. I
hope he doesn't, anyway.
The
Constitution-B crew requirement, by contrast, is 3/4/4, and the
Renaissance uses 3/5/3. You could almost crew
three Miranda-As for the crew cost of one Rennie, and you could crew two
Centaur-As with some extra goldshirts left over in change for the price of a ConnieBee.
Even a high-performance future escort is unlikely to have crew requirements above 2/2/2, and could easily have a "3's and 4's" statline that makes it competitive with the Science 3 Presence 4 Defense 5
Renaissance-class for event response. The materials cost may be comparable, but the crew cost would be much lower, and we are limited by our ability to crew ships, not by the resources we have to build them with.
Not to say that I support making new Miranda-A's either. Escorts don't really fit in well with Starfleet's mission, which is to Explore, Contact, Research, and Defend. Escorts can defend the Federation well, but with the Combat Cap and minimum Science Floor, along with their terrible Presence scores, Escorts are just a drain on Starfleet as a whole. Now, I'm not saying to get rid of what we already have, just that Starfleet doesn't need to build any more of them, and thus use up our precious Combat Cap.
You're generalizing. The
Centaur-A has been doing a fine job of "explore, contact, research, defend." It's
BETTER for our ability to meet the science floor while keeping under the combat cap than our new cruiser classes, and for Presence checks it's as good as a ConnieBee (though it might fail to show up to a mission the Defense 5 ConnieBee can get to).
So this isn't nearly as much of a foregone conclusion as you make it out to be. Especially since it is simply not true that escorts automatically have disproportionately high combat scores. A
custom-made fighting escort design probably would, but that would be the equivalent of the
Defiant-class: a ship specially built to rapidly augment the Federation's military strength, in the event of an emergency where we needed to build up as much combat power as possible in the period of a few years.
The scheme I have is that we set minimum standards for Homeworlds and Major Worlds, then offer a few grants a year to help them meet those standards. Now this would be a long term project, but thankfully, Nearly all of the Homeworlds would already be most of the way to those standards, and even Major Worlds probably don't need a lot to get their either. And we're also going to stretch this out over a decade or two will help with costs a lot as well.
I suspect that the major species homeworlds are something like an order of magnitude more populated than a lot of the colonies. Compare Orion space (where we have at least a clue of what the populations are like), and remember that the Orions have been in space for thousands of years, which means their little colony worlds have had time to grow up big, in a way that human colonies or Tellarite colonies haven't.
What I'm thinking is that we set the minimum for Homeworlds at:
1 Starbase
2 1mt berths
4 Escorts (Miranda-A's)
2 Cruisers/Light Cruisers (Rennie's)
For these, Starfleet will pay half their cost, if they don't already have them, or equivilants...
If we're paying them resources on any significant scale to build ships for themselves, then people in the Council are going to argue that it would make more sense to reduce the member worlds' contributions to Starfleet, so that said member worlds could pay for the fleet and basing upgrades themselves and cut out the middleman.
In the long run, this just results in us getting hit with a budget cut.
Now I know that sounds like a lot, and it is, but remember that this is a long term project, and we can easily afford to dole out a couple of resource grants and spend a handful of PP a year to get started in the most critically needed areas.
Given how politics works, we will
lose resources and PP we spend on this kind of project on any ongoing basis. Look at it from the point of view of, say, Andoria. They pay their taxes (or voluntary contributions, not sure how it works) to the Federation to build up Starfleet because they know that Starfleet's ships can and will be sent to protect Andoria directly in the event of a crisis (say, hordes of angry Klingons invading). Now we're proposing to take their taxes and give them
directly to species on the other side of the Federation, to build ships and defenses that the Andorians may or may not ever see in the event of a crisis that threatens Andoria.
They'd probably be happier with Starfleet keeping the resources and using it to build more stuff for itself. At least that way, they have a say in how the resources are spent (via the Council), and they're more likely to actually get a direct benefit from the expenditure in the event that Andoria is ever directly threatened.
And speaking of Excelsiors, I don't imagine us stopping building them just because we can start building Ambassadors. At the very least, I want the two Starfleet 2.5mt berths to keep up a steady stream of an Excelsior every other year.
Have you forgotten that in the near future we will be getting the opportunity to upgrade the
Excelsiors? If we just keep building
Excelsiors as fast as we can from now until the
Ambassador becomes available for mass production, then if we rely only on that pair of 2.5-megaton berths to do refits, it would take roughly
twenty-five years to finish them all. Even if all the
Excelsiors laid down after, say, 2314, are prebuilt to the refit standard, we'll still be looking at something like a decade worth of work just for two berths to refit the 11 explorers we have
right now.
So there's no question of using those berths for continued production of new
Excelsiors. If anything, we're going to have to slow down explorer production for a good long while just to refit the ships we already have.
And I want this because there is quite the price jump between the Excelsior and the Ambassador, the Excelsior is still a very useful design, and because with the buildsheet still being adjusted, the previously listed build time of 4 years may turn out to be 4.5 - 5 years. It is a 3 million ton ship, after all.
The
Ambassador will also be based on technology thirty years newer than the
Excelsior, and the extra tonnage means higher performance. And we won't be building
Ambassadors in quantity until at least the year 2320 at the earliest (start in 2313, then some amount of time to research them, then some time to build the prototype). By that time, we'll have researched technologies that boost mineral productivity, and founded quite a number of new mining colonies.
Unless the
Ambassadors have huge crew requirements that make it prohibitive for Starfleet to operate them in quantity, we'd be very unwise to keep turning out
Excelsiors.
I still feel that the Excelsior should get at least some sort of +1 Presence inside Federation space just from it's iconic-ness and nostalgia factor, and maybe even with the other Empires that were in frequent contact with the Federation during it's heydey. What do you say
@OneirosTheWriter?
The Connies don't have that bonus now, forty or fifty years after their heyday why would the
Excelsiors have it in 2330 or 2340, forty years after
their heyday?
The
Excelsiors are perfectly satisfactory ships as-is; fishing for bonuses isn't necessary to make them effective.
Because we haven't decided not to use the canon ship designs for them. And you know that the time between the Ambassador and Galaxy will decades less than the time between the Excelsior and the Ambassador. Combined with the price difference, we're just not going to build nearly as many Ambassadors, or Galaxies, as we will Excelsiors.
I don't think you've even tried to sit down and do the math on how the growth of the Federation economy is working. If you have, please show your work. If you haven't, please stop making claims about future construction plans until you know what the numbers are likely to look like.
I really don't understand this. We have like 15-16 escorts in Starfleet right now, along with half a dozen Constellations, which aren't much better than Centaurs-A's. We're using doctrines that favor cruisers and explorers. The same berths that can build escorts can build our brand new cruiser, which is far more valuable to us all around than escorts. So we make a cruiser heavy force, leaving Escorts to be only a quarter to a third of the fleet, like it is now, with Member World fleets being Escort heavy for emergencies.
Once we get to regular Rennie production, we can use some spare berths to build the odd Escort to round out the numbers, resources and design permitting. But I just don't see any big push towards Starfleet escorts till at least the Galaxy era.
The elephant in the room is crew numbers. A next-generation escort might very well provide (for example) Defense 4 and decent event response statistics in exchange for a 2/2/2 crew. That would be looking awfully attractive in the late 2310s when we're in serious danger of running out of people to operate all the
Excelsiors and Rennies we're building.
I disagree entirely. Inter-agency budget deals are a sign of good government, where both parties get something they want, that they couldn't otherwise get. Just because the Navy covers some of the cost of a Coast Guard base that the Navy can use as a backup repair facility, or helping them buy some more modern frigates doesn't mean that the Navy needs less budget, what it means is that both agencies are cooperating to stretch their budgets so they can both get something that they couldn't get alone.
The problem here is that if we go with the US analogy, this is more like the federal government spending money on the state National Guards.
In the United States that works, because the federal government has what is
de facto an unquestioned right to tax its citizens, and in fact taxes them more heavily than the states do. It therefore has a huge revenue stream that the states are happy to get back. Some states profit from this significantly, getting more money in federal aid than they pay in taxes. Others... don't.
But the Federation as portrayed in TBG is, ironically, something of a
confederation, an alliance of individually sovereign member species who consent to donate a portion of their resources to organizations that pursue the common good. There is not a lot of evidence that the Federation as a whole, or Starfleet specifically, has the power to directly tax the Federation member worlds.
So taking money from the member worlds, only to pay it back TO the member worlds, isn't going to be as popular and isn't going to be a simple case of two agencies that work for the same government (Navy and Coast Guard) agreeing to share a facility. Starfleet is competing directly with UESPA and the Andorian Orbit Guard and the Amarki Navy and so on for resources and crew. While the member worlds clearly agree that it's in their interests to fund Starfleet's existence, if we start using our large budget as a tool for redistribution of resources from one member world directly to another, we're changing the rules on the member worlds, and some of them are likely to object.
I don't want to see a revival of Earth First-ism, or its equivalent on other planets.
