Star Trek: The Quadratic War

[Cynical Cat]

1) The Akira is larger than the micro Sovereign but clearly not three times larger. The forward to mid part of the Sovy's engineering section is clearly larger than the than the equivalent parts of the Akira (which is all struts at that point)and that's 1/3 the length of the ships. The Akira's weapon pod is also high, not broad, making it look larger in a side view comparison to a Sovy's engine section. I might go as high as the Akira outmassing the micro Sovy by two to one (I lean from 1.5 to 2) but not 3.

Now for Mirandas

1) Making definitive statements how much Connies outgun Mirandas is impossible. Connies are larger ships, but the Miranda is clearly well armed with phasers and a photon torpedo weapon pod. Since at no point in the Wrath of Khan does any ship actually fire on another ship with active shields, let alone slug it out at full power, the best we can do is say the Miranda has respectable fire power and shields (it is stated that the few shots the Enterprise could manage on auxiliary power wouldn't be enough against her shields) and the Constitution is a larger and presumably more powerful ship.

[Lys]

In the first engagement Enterprise gave back to Reliant nearly as good as she got. Both ships got hit unshielded with full phaser barrages on their engineering sections, and neither fired torpedoes. Reliant did get the better of the exchange, being less damaged afterwards because the Enterprise return barrage was shorter in duration than Reliant's opening strike. The greater damage to Enterprise is why Kirk went into the Mutara Nebula, because his shields were weaker than Khan's and they needed to nullify that advantage, which made the odds even. In the nebula itself each ship once again gave as good as she got in the one successful pass they made at each other. Then the Enterprise ambushed Reliant from behind and got her with a torpedo barrage. Every exchange of fire the final ambush was on an equal footing, with both sides lacking shields and hitting each other in vital areas. So to me they always looked like very evenly matched ships.

I might go as high as the Akira outmassing the micro Sovy by two to one (I lean from 1.5 to 2) but not 3.

Unfortunately the only way to settle this definitely would involve sticking meshes of the ships into a 3D program to measure the volume, and neither of us is going to do that. Our actual difference of opinion isn't really that large anyway. If i read you correctly you're willing to say the Akira's 2/5 a Sovereign's mass at the upper end, whereas i'm willing to say it's 1/2 at the lower end (by rounding down instead of up). So we're looking at like 10% of a Sovie's mass in actual disagreement here, which isn't room enough to have an argument. You see it smaller, i see it bigger, and there's little else to say.

[Cynical Cat]

No, we should fight to the death over a couple of percentage points. Now, choose your weapons. Comfy pillow or duster?

[Lys]

Good God man, don't you know using dusters in battle is a warcrime? Comfy pillows are fine, but dusters, why they might cause a sneezing fit! That's is outside the conduct of civilized warfare, sir!

[Cynical Cat]

What can I say? I roll Klingon style and that means uncivilized warfare. If you don't have the stomach for it, retire to your sitting room and sip some Chateau Picard while watching Masterpiece Theater.

[Lys]

Bah, Klingons, such a brutish people. Clearly the benefits of civilization are wasted on those who can't even manage the basic etiquette of wiping their backstabbing knives before handing them off.

[General Havoc]

Ship classes are relative to the era in which the ships were produced. The Defiant, small though it is, is more than capable of flaying a Constitution-class Cruiser to death. Does this make the Defiant a Battlecruiser? Or a Battleship? To take another example from our real history, a Chicago-class Heavy Cruiser from WWII does not magically transform into a rowboat simply because an Oliver Hazard Perry-class Guided Missile Frigate would reduce it to scrap iron in ten seconds. The question of how large the Akira is, to me, not yet resolved, and I will decide how to interpret it whenever it becomes important. But while size does matter insofar as it determines, relative to other ships of its time, what the ship was designed for, it is not the be-all and end-all of these matters. A Miranda is the size of several Light Cruisers I could mention, but is nevertheless a Frigate, by intention and design. Frigates are small ships designed to operate independently but unable to take line duties in the event of cruiserweight throwdowns. While Light Cruisers also cannot really take on line duties either, but are not designed for screening or independent work, but instead for support duties as science vessels, carriers, or missile cruisers of some sort. The Medium Cruiser is indeed something of a legacy designation, but also serves as a catchall for cruiserweight ships that do not reliably fit into the Heavy/Light Cruiser dichotomy.

As to Constitutions and Mirandas, I'm sorry, I do not agree with the basic premise here. The Miranda is a significantly smaller vessel than the Constitution, both in terms of size and in terms of firepower capacities. Despite having ambushed the Enterprise and more or less disabled it, a few shots to its unshielded hull is enough to render it hors-de-combat. Mirandas, like heavy frigates, were plainly capable of inflicting damage upon a larger opponent, and perhaps even defeating it, but it does not follow that it was a larger ship. One has only to look at the exploits of Thomas Cochrane, whose sloop Speedy defeated and captured the Spanish Frigate Gamo, despite the Gamo outmassing and outgunning (and outcrewing) the Speedy by factors of something like 6 to 1, thanks to a timely ambush.

Force mulitpliers were in play in that engagement, and the rate at which Mirandas were annihilated in the Dominion War, coupled with their general size (they're shown as being on par with a Defiant), and my inferences as to their intended role, all indicates to me that the Miranda was a considerably smaller and less powerful ship than a Constitution, designed as such for duties that amounted to the Age-of-Sail definition of a Frigate. That a Miranda could cripple a Constitution via ambuscade or clever tricks does not change this, as I mentioned in my writeup that Frigates are indeed capable of such things if well-piloted and led, being capital ships in their own right. I do not see them as on parity with one another in raw size, durability, and firepower, and consequently I do not rate them as ships of the same classification.

[LadyTevar]

Lys:

Thank you very much for trying to argue a point for me, but I never asked nor wished that point to be made. My Akira, my Spector is a Carrier FIRST, and a Torpedo Boat Second. She is not, and will never be the match for a Sovereign, because the Sovereign class is front-line warships, while the Akira is a bakcline support vessel. Yes, she can bring the rain, but she was not built to be the Tank like the Sovereign was, nor is she the Striker like the Defiant. She is the DoT and the summoner of Minion swarm. Let me play my role in the party.

[Lys]

It... distresses me when my arguments are misunderstood. To make it clear, the argument was not, at any point, that an Akira is a match for a Sovereign. The argument was not that the Akira is a front-line ship either. i explicitly, repeatedly, called it an long-range fire support ship, which provides said fire support with torpedoes and fighters. i also explicitly said its phasers were entirely for self-defence use in case it finds itself facing enemies inside its ideal engagement envelope. An Akira forced to use its phasers is an Akira having a bad day. It's not a match for a Sovereign, it doesn't have the mass, power, shielding, or armour to do anything but run away or get cut to pieces when facing one.

Now for the part where you want to emphasize the carrier part over the torpedo part with Spector specifically, that's okay and i understand. There's no way i'm going to purposely tell you how to play your ship. Mostly i was thinking and talking about Akira's in general and the abstract, not the Spectre in particular (what is the correct spelling anyway? Everyone uses both). To the extent it referred to your ship, it was perhaps my confusion in its emphasis in an armament that you had crippled, and its lack of emphasis on an armament that you had not (like playing a beam boat that's had half its phasers removed).

Truth is though, it doesn't actually matter, if that's how you want to play that's how you want to play. Whatever you're doing, you're not doing it wrong, you clearly enjoy your ship, heck i enjoy your ship! She's cool, your character's cool, you're cool too! It was wrong of me to say or imply that you should play it differently, and it was not my intention to do so. Still, i must recognize that i did do it, and that it's probably distressing to you. So i'm sorry, it was not my intention. (And sorry if i'm kind of clumsy and longwinded about it. Just, trying to explain that i understand how i screwed up.)

As to Constitutions and Mirandas, I'm sorry, I do not agree with the basic premise here. The Miranda is a significantly smaller vessel than the Constitution, both in terms of size and in terms of firepower capacities.

Up until a couple of weeks ago i would have agreed with you, then this thread convinced me otherwise.

[White Haven]

*Scylla tickles Lys with one of her hopelessly-obsolescent phaser arrays.*

Bring it!

[Cynical Cat]

It's easy to forget the built up section at the rear of the Miranda gives it considerable additional volume and think "It's a Connie minus the engineering section" when the reality is that the ships are not that far apart in terms of mass and volume.

[Josh]

I always loved the look of the Mirandas. The TOS-movie era ships were the best looking of the series, especially the engine nacelles. Way better than TNG-onward.

(Especially the Galaxy class, which I still say is one ugly duckling.)

[Comrade Tortoise]

In the first engagement Enterprise gave back to Reliant nearly as good as she got. Both ships got hit unshielded with full phaser barrages on their engineering sections, and neither fired torpedoes.

Oh the Reliant most certainly did use torpedoes.

[General Havoc]

I go back and forth on the Galaxy, as it looks wonderfully stately and massive from certain angles and hopelessly crunched and ugly from others. There is a reason beyond not wanting to overshadow the players that I put my primary NPCs in an Ambassador.

And I always spelled it as Spectre, but have been switching to Spector in deference to Tev's spelling of the ship's name. For all I know it's named after a person, and not the ghost.

I am sorry if I misinterpreted your focus on this subject Lys, but as the GM, you must understand that I have to look at the matter from the perspective of "if I make ruling X, even casually, what effect might it have on the game in the future." I thus go into these things sort of assuming players are either looking to derive advantages out of them, or may in the future look to do so, and while there's nothing wrong with them doing that, it does mean I have to be somewhat careful about reclassifying things. There's also the fact that Star Trek canon is an unceremonious mess, and to make the game work, one eventually has to draw the line somewhere and say "It is thus." Otherwise the entire thread becomes nothing but acrimonious debates about arcane matters of contradictory canon. Please don't think I'm attacking you when I defend my classifications based on the premises and thoughtlines I used to construct them. I recognize they are neither perfect nor particularly scientific, but they represent my best analysis of the canon, and my belief as to what will cause the game to run smoothly.

Up until a couple of weeks ago i would have agreed with you, then this thread convinced me otherwise.

*Sigh* I'm afraid, Lys, and I am trying to put this delicately, that I really can't be bothered to give a damn what SD.net in general has to say on the subject of the relative sizes and scales of the ships of Star Trek, or for that matter about basically any other subject whatsoever.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure everyone there has put a lot of work into their conclusions, but as I sit, this is a website that often seeks to prove mathematically that people are wrong for liking certain media more than others, and that imaginative interpretations of any form of canon whatsoever are crimes which should be responded to with public shaming, insult, flaming, and general fucktardery. It is a den of assholes who are gleefully committed to acting in the most uncivil and depraved manner to one another possible, and prepared to go to any length of "proof" to show that they are right, independent of whether or not they actually are. My own view of Star Trek based on my extensive viewing of the shows and movies has given me the impression that a Miranda, while a capital ship in its own right, is significantly smaller than a Constitution, and I have therefore enshrined this in the game. I admit, that notion is based on an eye-test and guesswork, but then all claims to the contrary, eye-tests and guesswork are basically all we have to go on, as every other source of Star Trek information is either based on the same thing, or goes off of wildly inaccurate (and fluctuating) "figures" established by semi-canon sources, models, or whatnot.

Now if that notion of mine were grossly at variance with the experience of the majority of the players in the game, I would consider changing it. Maybe. If there was a good reason to. I would never, however, do so in response simply to SDnet's general opinion, particularly given that the very thread you cited devolves into a screaming match halfway through the first page complete with the usual epithets and charming accusations of people being "fucking twats" for having had the gall to suggest various interpretations. The entire exercise as I see it is self-serving and based on suspect data culled solely for the purpose of being able to better insult one another. Much like damn near everything on SD.net. Given this, I cannot take their research seriously, and even if I could, my objective in this game is not to present absolute fidelity to some theoretical benchmark of Platonic Star Trek, but to present a scenario that retains the look and feel of the show in all its myriad forms and senses of scale while still being playable in a rules-light environment. This is why I simply declared that "combat works thusly" and left it at that. It may be possible to sit down and reconcile all of the diverse and wildly contradictory elements of various shows' combat into one master work. SDnet, given its founding history, may even have done so. But given that such an exercise will by necessity be based on conjecture, opinion, and the selective rejection of one bit of evidence in favor of another (they can't even agree what Warp 9 means), and given that SDnet will do so not to produce a master setting wherein one can run a freeform game, but so as to produce another tool to facilitate calling people shitheads, I really can't be bothered to drum up much interest in the project, at least insofar as it concerns us here.

And yes, I know a whole pack of you are regulars on SDnet. But then nobody's perfect .

Anyway, we have no Mirandas or Constitutions in the fleet at present, so I suppose the issue of relative scale is somewhat academic. Even if we accept the dimensions cited in the SDnet thread though (which I do not, as they are unsourced citation-free examples culled from nowhere by people with an axe to grind), I would still classify the Miranda as a Frigate, albeit a heavy one, just purely based on my guesswork. If you believe that this analysis is in error, that is fine, and if many people believe it is in error (and it matters) I might switch around the Miranda's (or perhaps the Constitution's) classification (might). But should a similar debate arise about a ship that is involved in the game, please forgive me if I discount wholesale everything that SD.net has to say about the subject. I would sooner close the thread than run my game based on what that pack of trolls thinks of my narrative judgment .

Assuming you can stomach it, please, you should all feel free to draw from SDnet's admittedly exhaustive research on the subject should you wish to come up with inspiration or some clever idea for a bind you're in, or just otherwise improve the quality of your detailwork insofar as your ships go. But as I cannot stomach such things, I will be leaving SD.net's conclusions safely on their side of the internet, where I do not have to interact with them, and run the game, as ever, the best I can without their help.

[Cynical Cat]

FASA classified the Miranda as a cruiser and the Constitution as a Heavy Cruiser in their Star Trek games and that's always seemed right to me. Of course that was set during the TOS time, not the time of the TNG behemoths.

[Lys]

Havoc, had i known you would go off on an tedious rant about it, i would have just posted the pictures from the thread comparing the ships and left the rest out of it. No offence man, most your rants are magnificent, but that one makes my eyes glaze over. Really don't care if anyone loves or hates SDN; i don't even post there.

Please don't think I'm attacking you when I defend my classifications based on the premises and thoughtlines I used to construct them. I recognize they are neither perfect nor particularly scientific, but they represent my best analysis of the canon, and my belief as to what will cause the game to run smoothly.

For your part, please don't think i'm attacking you or your handling on the game by grabbing random tangents with both hands and running with them past the end zone. You're a good GM and run the game well, else i would not have been inspired to join it, or to devote immense amounts of time and effort on the character sheet.

Also, for the record, i do like the way you strung Starfleet's classification schema across a century and a half of evolving military technology, i just didn't get it at first. You made it coherent enough to be sensible, but not so coherent as to be unrealistic. And yes it can't be too coherent, because Starfleet does, after all, inherit its naval tradition from the country where this happened. Also the same country that subsequently renamed its newest destroyer leaders to cruisers because it made Congress happier about the price tag.

[General Havoc]

Well not to sound cantankerous, but if my rants are tedious, then perhaps the solution is not to argue arcane points of ship classification with me for three pages. I don't mind the debate at all, but I tend to respond at great length to most questions concerning what my position is. And I've never really cared overmuch if my lengthy replies outlast someone's attention span.

And no, I don't much care for StarDestroyer.net, nor for the sorts of analysis that goes on there. Browse it, by all means if you wish. But while the denizens of that site are certainly... passionate about their subject, I have very little use for their conclusions, as I'm sure they have little use for mine. For all manner of reasons, their material, while interesting, is more or less irrelevant to this thread.

And I am glad you like the classification (whatever the finer points of Mirandas), as it's something I put quite a bit of thought into. My vision of Starfleet isn't necessarily everyone else's, but I try to hold it consistent to the history of the institution.

[rhoenix]

You used the word "cantankerous" in a sentence, so that makes me happy.

Also, I will post soon, I just have to figure out all the means by which I'm going to evict Borg.

[Lys]

Well not to sound cantankerous, but if my rants are tedious, then perhaps the solution is not to argue arcane points of ship classification with me for three pages. I don't mind the debate at all, but I tend to respond at great length to most questions concerning what my position is. And I've never really cared overmuch if my lengthy replies outlast someone's attention span.

No, no, your rants only tedious when you decide to pour the haterade on a subject i don't care about (like SDN). They're good otherwise. Clearly the solution is for you to only talk about things relevant to my interests. ^_^

Also, I will post soon, I just have to figure out all the means by which I'm going to evict Borg.

Cynical Cat posts, Riskdah follows Khanjar in chasing after Track Beta, hundreds of his Klingons beam aboard your clown car destroyer.

[rhoenix]

Cynical Cat posts, Riskdah follows Khanjar in chasing after Track Beta, hundreds of his Klingons beam aboard your clown car destroyer.

The more room the Klingons have to beam over, the less they'll be needed.

And haven't you learned from DS9 that it's never good luck to mock a Defiant?

[General Havoc]

No, no, your rants only tedious when you decide to pour the haterade on a subject i don't care about. They're great otherwise.

Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the first chapter of my eighteen-part denunciation of Eastern Nepalese Yak-herding techniques...

[Cynical Cat]

Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the first chapter of my eighteen-part denunciation of Eastern Nepalese Yak-herding techniques...

Get those fuckers. Southern Uzbekistan yak herding techniques are clearly superior.

[Lys]

What? Hell no CyniCat, the Uzbekis are part-time amateurs at the whole yak herding thing at best. They don't have anywhere near the yak numbers, institutional knowledge, and cultural experience with yaks that people further East have. They're barely even in the yak range as it is! Tajik herding techniques are clearly the superior example.

Also, why don't you reply to my game thread post? Don't you like me? After all i've done for you!? ;.;

[Josh]

No, no, your rants only tedious when you decide to pour the haterade on a subject i don't care about. They're great otherwise.

Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the first chapter of my eighteen-part denunciation of Eastern Nepalese Yak-herding techniques...

Okay look I don't give a fuck about the earlier nerdgasms y'all were having, but this is fucking bullshit right here. The Eastern Nepalese have a tradition of Yak-herding going back over five thousand years. The mastery of the specific Yak calls takes a lifetime and enables them to effortlessly master the largest and most cantankerous yak herds with a few sounds, thus transforming chaotic masses into graceful, coordinated ballets.

As this series of diagrams clearly demonstrate, there is no comparable technique. Anyone claiming otherwise is clearly a motherfucking communist.

ETA: Soooooo tempted to pick up the yakherder.net domain now, but I have zero frickin' use for it.

[Josh]

This angry bird sums up my feelings on any further slander of the noble yak herders of Nepal.