lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
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Replies to older discussion:
Not really. During combat, hull and shield stats are translated into hull and shield hit points, which are initialized to 10x the stat value, and then receive combat stat-based damage. All integers during combat. At end of combat, hit points are translated back to integral stats via rounding.
But that's not the important part anyway. It's the damage being proportional to the combat stat that makes the biggest difference, not anything about decimal vs integral health.
Yes, that's the thing that needs tweaking. Either there needs to be a base damage to bump up smaller combat (e.g. base damage of 2 resulting in C3 => (2+3)/2 avg dmg, C6 => (2+6)/2 avg dmg), or the scaling needs to be less than linear (e.g. 0.75 exponent resulting in C3 => 3^0.75/2 avg dmg, C6 => 6^0.75/2 avg dmg). Something to ensure that (avg dmg of C<2x>)/(avg dmg of C<x>) is less than 2.
Are you sure you understand Oneiros's proposal? Because with the hull and shield stats having this 10x hit point factor AND the average damage per hit being combat/2, damage per turn would actually average lower than before when normalized. I called this out as something I'm worried about, because it: a) requires rebalancing combat mechanics related to "# turns", and b) indirectly buffs less durable ships due to lower relative damage variance and thus lower risk of randomly getting knocked out earlier (although this does very slightly balances against the typically higher damage of more durable ships).
Remember that my issue with large ship combat inefficiency is that we need some explanation for why other nations, which are more militaristic, still build combat-oriented explorer-sized heavy cruisers. Like the Cardassian's Lorgot and the Romulan's Heavy Warbird. I'm mostly fine with Starfleet being thematically restricted to generalist explorers, but something has to explain why these other nations keep building these ships that are supposedly inefficient in combat. Lone Ranger combat-related doctrine bonuses are also insufficient to compensate for this.
I was actually thinking of overlapping times between research and prototyping. Research does start first to come up with the design to start prototyping, then while the prototype is being built, further research is done to help smooth out any problems encountered during prototyping. And I expect a large part of the extra prototyping cost and time to be the fact that no matter how much effort you spent designing, something won't work as expected, requiring revisiting and researching the problem and ironing out manufacturing quirks. Cost overruns and delays are a thing, and the longer prototyping times serve as an abstraction to cover them.
The new tooling for the new ship design may be a factor, but it can't be that large because then you'd need such tooling in every berth, and the extra prototype cost is independent of number of berths (that all would need retooling).
But that's all unnecessary complication for this research vs prototyping abstraction. The current system of seperate research and prototyping phases works well enough.
Ah yeah, that would make sense. And now that I check the TBG ship database, USS Centaur is listed there as lost at stardate of the Battle of Kadesh Orbit. Poor ship - lasted less than 3 years.
There is an interesting dynamic where the higher the event DC, the statistically better it is to have a smaller quantities of higher stat ships. But because event DCs vary a lot, this isn't an argument for building Renaissances over Centaur-As. It's better to build both.
Thinking about this some more, I think we're conflating two separate aspects of @Gear's proposal, and we should judge them on their own merits separately rather than reject the whole thing outright.
First is the idea of subsidizing the fleets and infrastructure of our smaller member nations.
Second is the actual implementation of that and the intended goal of having a reserve military fleet.
I am sympathetic to the idea of subsidies to our smaller or less advanced member nations. Individual member nations might not care so much about their "poorer" neighbor members, but the Federation as a whole does care about the well-being of all the members. The Amarki might grumble about having their contributions to the Federation going toward say Betazed instead of something that's more directly beneficial to the Amarki like Starfleet ships, but it's a justifiable price of Federation membership. (Kinda reminds me of all the complaints of ungrateful West Virginia draining resources from other states via the US federal government.)
Now, I don't think this should be a Starfleet-only thing (or else we get into the Starfleet budget issue), and it has to respect the wishes of the member nation that needs help. It must be a multi-division Federal effort to provide that help in whatever form it takes, whether its modernization or quality of live improvements or things that Starfleet can provide like ships and space-borne infrastructure. More details need to be worked out on a case by case basis, but this type of subsidization is something I'd support. It's also something that can be done through the MWCO, at least for the Starfleet part of the aid.
However, I'm much more skeptical about the goal of having our member nations maintaining an emergency war fleet. That feels like gaming the combat cap that the Council is mandating. The combat cap is an abstraction of the Council's estimation of the maximum Starfleet strength needed for covering Federation-wide defense needs, and if we're trying to work around that limit by effectively offloading combat to our member fleets, the Council is in all likelihood not going to be fooled. The Council may reevaluate the defensive needs of the Federation and actually reduce Starfleet's combat cap in response to stronger member fleets.
And that's ignoring the fact that not all member nations may want to build such combat-focused vessels if not for the proposed grants/subsidies. I already mentioned my reservations about the specific implementation so I won't rehash them here.
edit: wording
Not really. During combat, hull and shield stats are translated into hull and shield hit points, which are initialized to 10x the stat value, and then receive combat stat-based damage. All integers during combat. At end of combat, hit points are translated back to integral stats via rounding.
But that's not the important part anyway. It's the damage being proportional to the combat stat that makes the biggest difference, not anything about decimal vs integral health.
Yes, that's the thing that needs tweaking. Either there needs to be a base damage to bump up smaller combat (e.g. base damage of 2 resulting in C3 => (2+3)/2 avg dmg, C6 => (2+6)/2 avg dmg), or the scaling needs to be less than linear (e.g. 0.75 exponent resulting in C3 => 3^0.75/2 avg dmg, C6 => 6^0.75/2 avg dmg). Something to ensure that (avg dmg of C<2x>)/(avg dmg of C<x>) is less than 2.
Are you sure you understand Oneiros's proposal? Because with the hull and shield stats having this 10x hit point factor AND the average damage per hit being combat/2, damage per turn would actually average lower than before when normalized. I called this out as something I'm worried about, because it: a) requires rebalancing combat mechanics related to "# turns", and b) indirectly buffs less durable ships due to lower relative damage variance and thus lower risk of randomly getting knocked out earlier (although this does very slightly balances against the typically higher damage of more durable ships).
Remember that my issue with large ship combat inefficiency is that we need some explanation for why other nations, which are more militaristic, still build combat-oriented explorer-sized heavy cruisers. Like the Cardassian's Lorgot and the Romulan's Heavy Warbird. I'm mostly fine with Starfleet being thematically restricted to generalist explorers, but something has to explain why these other nations keep building these ships that are supposedly inefficient in combat. Lone Ranger combat-related doctrine bonuses are also insufficient to compensate for this.
I was actually thinking of overlapping times between research and prototyping. Research does start first to come up with the design to start prototyping, then while the prototype is being built, further research is done to help smooth out any problems encountered during prototyping. And I expect a large part of the extra prototyping cost and time to be the fact that no matter how much effort you spent designing, something won't work as expected, requiring revisiting and researching the problem and ironing out manufacturing quirks. Cost overruns and delays are a thing, and the longer prototyping times serve as an abstraction to cover them.
The new tooling for the new ship design may be a factor, but it can't be that large because then you'd need such tooling in every berth, and the extra prototype cost is independent of number of berths (that all would need retooling).
But that's all unnecessary complication for this research vs prototyping abstraction. The current system of seperate research and prototyping phases works well enough.
I strongly suspect the ship's name was Centaur.
I mean, honestly... the ONLY ship we have at the moment whose name indicates that she's the lead ship of her class is Excelsior.
You can handwave that the USS Constellation and USS Miranda and USS Oberth were all lost some time before 2300, staggeringly unlucky as that may be- I've got headcanon for what happened to the Constellation. But I think we should at least TRY to make sure that all our ship classes in future actually contain a ship with the name of the class.
Ah yeah, that would make sense. And now that I check the TBG ship database, USS Centaur is listed there as lost at stardate of the Battle of Kadesh Orbit. Poor ship - lasted less than 3 years.
There is an interesting dynamic where the higher the event DC, the statistically better it is to have a smaller quantities of higher stat ships. But because event DCs vary a lot, this isn't an argument for building Renaissances over Centaur-As. It's better to build both.
Thinking about this some more, I think we're conflating two separate aspects of @Gear's proposal, and we should judge them on their own merits separately rather than reject the whole thing outright.
First is the idea of subsidizing the fleets and infrastructure of our smaller member nations.
Second is the actual implementation of that and the intended goal of having a reserve military fleet.
I am sympathetic to the idea of subsidies to our smaller or less advanced member nations. Individual member nations might not care so much about their "poorer" neighbor members, but the Federation as a whole does care about the well-being of all the members. The Amarki might grumble about having their contributions to the Federation going toward say Betazed instead of something that's more directly beneficial to the Amarki like Starfleet ships, but it's a justifiable price of Federation membership. (Kinda reminds me of all the complaints of ungrateful West Virginia draining resources from other states via the US federal government.)
Now, I don't think this should be a Starfleet-only thing (or else we get into the Starfleet budget issue), and it has to respect the wishes of the member nation that needs help. It must be a multi-division Federal effort to provide that help in whatever form it takes, whether its modernization or quality of live improvements or things that Starfleet can provide like ships and space-borne infrastructure. More details need to be worked out on a case by case basis, but this type of subsidization is something I'd support. It's also something that can be done through the MWCO, at least for the Starfleet part of the aid.
However, I'm much more skeptical about the goal of having our member nations maintaining an emergency war fleet. That feels like gaming the combat cap that the Council is mandating. The combat cap is an abstraction of the Council's estimation of the maximum Starfleet strength needed for covering Federation-wide defense needs, and if we're trying to work around that limit by effectively offloading combat to our member fleets, the Council is in all likelihood not going to be fooled. The Council may reevaluate the defensive needs of the Federation and actually reduce Starfleet's combat cap in response to stronger member fleets.
And that's ignoring the fact that not all member nations may want to build such combat-focused vessels if not for the proposed grants/subsidies. I already mentioned my reservations about the specific implementation so I won't rehash them here.
edit: wording
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