Bear in mind that with the push for construction of new
Renaissance and
Constitution-B cruisers by many of the member worlds, they may not want our used
Constellations either. The crew requirements are lower, but so is the performance.
I can see someone like the Betazoids or the Risans wanting to buy a ship like that, because they lack the native industry to build better ships for themselves even if they work from Federation designs. But that's not a very big market.
We'll want to hold onto the Cheron no matter what, too, and she would benefit from a refit...
By
Cheron do you mean
Challorn?
@Simon_Jester given that a refit eats a year of berth time either way, and crews deduct a year before the build is complete, we would be down a hull for the same amount of time whether we were mothballing a Constie to crew a Rennie or upgrading a Constie.
Thing is, the "down a hull for a year" cost of replacing a
Constellation with a Rennie is
in addition to the berth cost... mm, you may actually be right, if I'm doing the accounting that way.
Given that the MWCO allows us to "sell" mothballed ships apparently, we might be able to sell of our excess Consties instead of holding them in reserve, too. Given how hard it is to acquire crew...
That's a fair point, but I would say that holding them in reserve is
good enough.
The most likely scenario for us getting to activate reserve ships is if a war starts some time AFTER we've built up to our Combat cap. Once we hit the cap we won't be adding new ships to the fleet, so our crew and resource stockpiles will start to become large.
Then the Threat level skyrockets, and the Combat cap rises with it. That leaves us free to add new ships- but building ships takes time.
That is when it's helpful to have new ships ready to go as soon as you can commit crews to them. Which we'll be able to do, because we'll be stockpiling crews again.
In other words, if we mothball
Constellations, we're not doing it in case we need them in 2318, we're doing it in case we need them in 2328. By that time, realistically we'll have built up to our Combat cap, Patricia Chen will no longer be running Shipyard Operations so building ships will be taking longer, and we're more likely to have a reserve of crews ready to go to operate new ships if only we were allowed to use them.
I don't think there's going to be a sudden surge that would let us recrew anything in reserve unless something like a serious war unlocks mechanics that allows us to draft personnel or something. Even so, we're still better off building Miranda-As in that circumstance rather than reactivating Consties (since I doubt such a surge would be fast enough that we would save time reactivating ships as compared to new construction).
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if there was the possibility of, say, taking a 1/2/1 Starfleet crew from our crew pool, filling them out with a 1/2/1 force of new volunteers, and putting them on a
Constellation-A from mothballs. This would almost certainly be faster than building a whole new
Miranda-A.
Real reserve fleet activation often works like this, with a ship having a "nucleus crew" that knows how to operate it and can help bring fresh recruits up to speed quickly.
