Remove ads

To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

Linked contents
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
Reader mode
[X][KADESH] Send the Stargazer and overcrew her. Add two extra units of every type of Explorer Corps crew, working to allow them to rotate living on the Pride of Kadesh. There's no replacement for casualties out in space, and it's inevitable that some crew will be lost or want to stay with the Kadesh at trip's end. This will give them the resources to make it home.
 
The crew of an Excelsior is very, VERY small relative to the actual volume of the ship. These ships weigh over two million tons. They're the size of twenty giant nuclear aircraft carriers or cruise liners. The size of fifty World War Two battleships.

By contrast, the crew size is, what, 500 people? 600? 800? Even if we pack them in a little more (say, by converting a cargo bay, or making people sleep three to a cabin instead of two), we're in no danger of running out of food, not realistically. Especially not with the Kadeshi to backstop us.

What I'm worried about is fuel and spare parts- the exotic stuff the Kadeshi can't replicate.

I'll be touching on that in an omake, as soon as I have time to write it.
 
An aircraft carrier is about 300m, so volumetrically, an Excelsior is a bit more than three times that(factor of about half again in all three dimensions). Then again, an aircraft carrier has a crew of 500 officers and almost 4000 enlisted.

Starships have a good amount of cargo capacity as seen from people wanting them to transport stuff, so the question is what is the trade between space for supplies and space for extra crew.
 
Last edited:
as an aside (and i know it's from the future) but apparently the Akira class could evacuate 4000 people, and has a crew of about 500
 
ClawClawBite said:
An aircraft carrier is about 300m, so volumetrically, an Excelsior is a bit more than three times that(factor of about half again in all three dimensions). Then again, an aircraft carrier has a crew of 500 officers and almost 4000 enlisted.

Starships have a good amount of cargo capacity as seen from people wanting them to transport stuff, so the question is what is the trade between space for supplies and space for extra crew.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This is why I want a Colony Ship auxiliary. It contains everything that's necessary for forming a colony, which is coincidentally what the Kadeshi will be doing. And if the supplies include extra Excelsior parts...
 
ClawClawBite said:
An aircraft carrier is about 300m, so volumetrically, an Excelsior is a bit more than three times that(factor of about half again in all three dimensions). Then again, an aircraft carrier has a crew of 500 officers and almost 4000 enlisted.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
If you take an aircraft carrier and make it half again as long, wide, and tall... Unless I'm hallucinating, you end up with something quite a bit skinnier than an Excelsior saucer, or for that matter an Excelsior engineering hull.

AlphaDelta said:
This is why I want a Colony Ship auxiliary. It contains everything that's necessary for forming a colony, which is coincidentally what the Kadeshi will be doing. And if the supplies include extra Excelsior parts...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The Kadeshi already have an utterly gigantic ship that is full of everything they thought they'd need to found their colony. Why on Earth would we need to send another ship along with that role?

If all you want is to send a robot freighter full of Excelsior spare parts, or for that matter plead with the Kadeshi to make room in a cargo hold for said parts, then say so.

But that is not the same thing as a "colony ship." By saying you want to send a "colony ship," what you're really communicating is that you want to found a Federation colony somewhere out there in the deeps, where we'll never be able to remain in contact with it or help it. Which makes very little sense.
 
Simon_Jester said:
If you take an aircraft carrier and make it half again as long, wide, and tall... Unless I'm hallucinating, you end up with something quite a bit skinnier than an Excelsior saucer, or for that matter an Excelsior engineering hull.

The Kadeshi already have an utterly gigantic ship that is full of everything they thought they'd need to found their colony. Why on Earth would we need to send another ship along with that role?

If all you want is to send a robot freighter full of Excelsior spare parts, or for that matter plead with the Kadeshi to make room in a cargo hold for said parts, then say so.

But that is not the same thing as a "colony ship." By saying you want to send a "colony ship," what you're really communicating is that you want to found a Federation colony somewhere out there in the deeps, where we'll never be able to remain in contact with it or help it. Which makes very little sense.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The colony ship is more of a gift.
 
AlphaDelta said:
The colony ship is more of a gift.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Why do they need another Colony Ship when they have all their Motherships, Cruisers and yes, the Pride of Kadesh, which probably has cargo bays bigger than the entire ship you've suggested sending, and they have had plenty of time to fill while hanging out in Earth Orbit for the past six months or so?

Let's not pretend that losing an Explorer isn't going to hurt-you're suggesting making it hurt MORE by taking away one of the colony ships we haven't built any new examples of since the start of the game from our already overstretched logistical command. I get you want to give till it hurts, but understand that sending an Excelsior *is* 'giving til it hurts'.
 
Last edited:
On the other hand, the robotug with Excelsior parts @Simon_Jester suggested does make sense, and I'm somewhat tempted to vote to include it. It's not like it'll be easy to say, build a new nacelle enroute if they get one blown off or something, and if they ended up getting stranded behind it could easily take years for a fellow EC ship to show up and tug them back to Fed space.
 
Yeah, but the Federation isn't stupid. We can reasonably assume that any plan to send out an explorer will include sufficient spares and material to enable the Stargazer to have every chance of making it home, barring misfortune extreme even by the standards of the Explorer Corps.

We don't need to specify an exhaustive list.

If people are worried about it, well... let's omake it up. I'm planning to push along those lines as soon as I have some time to kill.
 
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
Sending the Odyssey seems somewhat more viable than sending the Stargazer, if not from a mechanical perspective than from a narrative one.

- It can catch up to one year's travel in less than a quarter.
- That means the fitting out period will be suited to the 23y mission rather than regular EC duties, which is important.
- Since we just started crewing it, we have time to filter its crew to volunteers only. Which is, in my opinion, absolutely necessary for a 20y mission.
- We don't delay a year in replacing the Miracht in regular EC missions.
- The fucking name. It's perfect.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

This idea has a lot of good merits, though I also think Briefvoice has a point that Starfleet has likely been quietly preparing for this for months already.

What particularly attracts me is the name AND the possibility of starting off with a blooded crew. But if we're worried about the name or the crewing...

@OneirosTheWriter, I don't suppose we could vote to swap the names and crew of the Stargazer and Odyssey, could we? Pretty please?? :cry:


pheonix89 said:
Speaking of academy expansions we really ought to grab the Science Academy. 20 pp for +1 techs is a better deal than 40 for +.5 each type. Yeah, techs are no longer as cripplingly short as they used to be, but they're still short, it's cheaper, and if we do run an excess that's 20 pp for 1 crew output we can shift elsewhere.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

If we could shift that tech crew income into other officer or enlisted crew income more rapidly than our apparent max of 1 income conversion every 4 years, then I'd support this. But as it stands, we'll be very hard pressed making tech crew our bottleneck again unless we start building a shitload of Oberths or science ships.

AlphaDelta said:
T_t

The bandwagon has spoken.

Ah well. It's acceptable.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I sympathize and there likely is a bandwagon effect, but I still prefer the simpler overcrewing plan.

Mr Tebbs said:
There was an earlier omake about the power of the Connie. It is The icon of Star Fleet. The andiorians who'd never seen space asked to draw a space ship drew a Connie. Connies are on many a Star Fleet unit patch. The chance to go face the unknown in an alley and make it run from us again and not use The Last Constitution would make Enterprise A roll in her moorings.

In another earlier omake where we got the ConnieBs, people were asking why we couldnt dust off the old As and dress them up for one more dance. Well this time we can, and a whole new section of the galaxy will think of the Constitution when they think of Star Fleet for a damn good reason, just like our people do.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I believe @Gear made a very convincing argument that in the actual world of Star Trek, and not through our outside lens of TV and movies, it would be the Excelsior that best captures the imagination of the Federation and its neighbors. It's not the Constitutions that helped expand the Federation or was a first contact's first view of a Starfleet vessel - it was the Excelsiors. Someone else could expand on this far more eloquently that I can.

Simon_Jester said:
By saying you want to send a "colony ship," what you're really communicating is that you want to found a Federation colony somewhere out there in the deeps, where we'll never be able to remain in contact with it or help it. Which makes very little sense.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

To be pedantic, such a colony would remain in contact with the Federation, since the update did say we would remain in contact with the ship we sent. So we should also be able to remain in contact with the Kadeshi, although it would be more like email snail mail rather than telephone.

edit: fixes
 
Last edited:
Simon_Jester said:
Yeah, but the Federation isn't stupid. We can reasonably assume that any plan to send out an explorer will include sufficient spares and material to enable the Stargazer to have every chance of making it home, barring misfortune extreme even by the standards of the Explorer Corps.

We don't need to specify an exhaustive list.

If people are worried about it, well... let's omake it up. I'm planning to push along those lines as soon as I have some time to kill.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I really shouldn't have dived back into the debate.

Well, if you can't beat the bandwagon...

[X][KADESH] Send the Stargazer and overcrew her.

Let's give Picard his clunker!
 
I don't think any one approach is going to win majority. What it mostly comes down to is precisely how to supply the Stargazer, and that is a... fractally complicated... issue. We can make it arbitrarily detailed, with no limit on how much we can overanalyze the exact sort of resources we want to send.

The "overcrew" idea is innovative and seems widely popular, though.
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
There still seems to be debate on exact approaches, so I'll leave the vote open for the moment.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Vote Tally : Sci-Fi - To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) | Page 917 | Sufficient Velocity
##### NetTally 1.7.6

Task: KADESH

[x][KADESH] Pick a ship to send along with the Kadesh: USS Stargazer
No. of Votes: 17
Shard
10ebbor10
Aeondrac
Chronic
ClawClawBite
Derek58
Generic_Generica
Glassware
Gnarker
Interested Party
Muramasa
Nix
nocarename
Raron
Torgamous
UberJJK
Vehrec

[X][KADESH] Send the Stargazer and overcrew her. Add two extra units of every type of Explorer Corps crew, working to allow them to rotate living on the Pride of Kadesh. There's no replacement for casualties out in space, and it's inevitable that some crew will be lost or want to stay with the Kadesh at trip's end. This will give them the resources to make it home.
No. of Votes: 16
Briefvoice
aeqnai
aledeth
Artemis1992
DarknessSmiles
Finagle007
JesseJ
KnightDisciple
lbmaian
Muer'ci
Night_stalker
pheonix89
Simon_Jester
Thebigpieman
tryrar
UbeOne

[X][KADESH] Send the Stargazer and overcrew her.
No. of Votes: 7
Gingganz
AlphaDelta
drake_azathoth
HearthBorn
Nervos Belli
NHO
Tylonius

[X][KADESH] Plan Extra Light-Year
-[X] Send the Stargazer and overcrew her.
-[X] Send a colony ship (as a write off if necessary) with industrial equipment, etc.
-[X] Request volunteer Betazoid counselors, etc
-[X] Request volunteers from the FBS
-[X] Request volunteer drive
-[X] Ask for a volunteer Admiral/commodore to lead the Starfleet mini-fleet
No. of Votes: 6
Plan: ◈Extra Light-Year
fitzgerald
Jello_Raptor
Jrin
kellanved
Leila Hann
Night

[X][KADESH] Plan Extra Light-Year (Cheron flavored)
-[X] Send the Cheron and overcrew her.
-[X] Send a colony ship (as a write off if necessary) with industrial equipment, etc.
-[X] Request volunteer Betazoid counselors, etc
-[X] Request volunteers from the FBS
-[X] Request volunteer drive
-[X] Ask for a volunteer Admiral/commodore to lead the Starfleet mini-fleet
No. of Votes: 2
Plan: ◈Extra Light-Year (Cheron flavored)
fasquardon
Mr Tebbs

[X][KADESH] Send the Stargazer and overcrew her. Add two extra units of every type of Explorer Corps crew, working to allow them to rotate living on the Pride of Kadesh. There's no replacement for casualties out in space, and it's inevitable that some crew will be lost or want to stay with the Kadesh at trip's end. This will give them the resources to make it hom
No. of Votes: 1
Void Stalker

[x][KADESH] Pick a ship to send along with the Kadesh: USS Odyssey
No. of Votes: 1
SynchronizedWritersBlock

[X][KADESH] USS Stargazer
No. of Votes: 1
Crazy Tom

[X][KADESH] Tell the Council it can't be done
No. of Votes: 1
Random Member

[X][KADESH] Send the Odyssey and overcrew her.
No. of Votes: 1
Ato

Total No. of Voters: 53

Only on how to send the Stargazer. Is the overcrewing write-in for sending it viable?
 
Well I'm not hearing a "no", so...

[X][KADESH] Pick a ship to send along with the Kadesh: Send the Stargazer BUT swap her name with that of the Odyssey and overcrew her with volunteers from the Miracht's former crew.

:V
 
Really all we need to know in order to finalize things is "what preparations is Starfleet doing to prepare Stargazer regardless of the vote, and what aren't they doing unless we ask them to?"
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top