Quote:I've always thought of the Nova as being essentially a successor to the Oberth class - ie, intended to deal with the question of fights by seeing them coming, then running away. The two potential competitors that I'd put up against the Prommies for the roving security job would be the Saber or Defiant classes.
Furthur, being a guardian of sailors, livestock, and the young should bode well for a class whose greatest utility outside of pitched battle is probably commerce protection - a small ship that can do the job of three, and has the speed and striking power of a capital ship to lay the smack down on raiders without tying up as much manpower or material as a Soveriegn or even a trio of Novas.
The Saber, just to make a WAG, looks to me to be about 2/3-3/4 the size of an assembled Prometheus, and being that it was probably designed well before the Dominion War et al, is almost certainly going to be better at, well, just about anything that doesn't involve straight up combat. It'll also be half the cost or less, just because of how much -simpler- a machine it is.
Against pirates, who wouldn't have 1st line equipment or good supply lines or even very capable ships - because, face it, clobbering freighters doesn't take much - the fact that it's less than half as dangerous wouldn't matter in the face of all the other neat things you can use it for.
All that, given that a peacetime fleet'd probably be heavily downsized, -I'd- mothball the Prommies and keep the Sabers in service.
Comparing to the Defiant is, I think, likely to be even less favorable - I think that the price-per-unit ratio is likely to be something like 3:1, which given that they're both combat-focused ships, basically means it's a choice between paying for a hundred and twenty pounds of mean, a hundred-pound sack, and three forty-pound doggie bags, -or- a hundred and fifty pounds of mean in three thirty-pound sacks.
I can barely see a point to the MVAM - the three sub-units only really need to carry -one- full-up example of a given system between the three of them, which means that they'll have more room for guns and such than three smaller independant ships... but if you're going to go to all that trouble, -I- say, fuck it and build a fighter.
You take a small ship, say, half to two-thirds the size of your smaller BoP. Chop its endurance down to -nothing-, like, twenty-four hours or so, tops. Give it a reasonable top speed, on the order of Warp 8 or 9 or so. Add a bare-bones framework of other systems. Then turn the guns, shields, and agility up to 11.
Once you've done that, you take a larger, more conventional ship - say, a Steamrunner. Uprate the engines a bit, both for speed and to let it tow additional mass, double or triple its expendables, and add some extra crew quarters. Then bolt a half-a-dozen docking hardpoints to its outer hull.
Your parasites are going to be cheap for the amount of ship you're getting - they're specialists, and stone-axe-simple besides, and for peacetime work they can be replaced with other types - scientific specialists, cargo or passenger specialists, increased-endurance models capable of limited independant operations, etc. Your mothership will cost a little more than a normal ship of its mass, but the overall cost of carrier+parasites is still going to be less than an equivalent tonnage of Prometheus-class ships, and most of the cost in in the carrier, the overall -system- will be both better specialized and, in the long run, more flexible.
There are other advantages, too - for one thing, you're going to have a lot easier time building a swarm of parasites if you need them in a hurry than you would expediting the construction of a few larger ships, and for another, you don't -have- to base them off of mobile starships - extant starbases or planetside colonies will work just as well.
So, overall, I think that the Prometheus makes an interesting technology demonstrator, and will be valuable for the lessons learned by building and operating it, but overall, building more than one or two of the things would be a total waste.
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."