Hi.

Currently, the only power shown to have advanced technology survey ships are the Feds, with their Galactic Survey Cruisers and so forth.

However, with an off-map Distant Zone as vast as it is, as well as a solid SR design to build on, I'd argue that the Concordium Navy would have had reason to build, or convert, at least one X-tech Survey Cruiser.

Whether it would scour the Void, make trips of exploration to the post-Unity Cloud, or try to survey areas of the Trusteeship Territory ravaged by the Andromedans, there would be as much use for such a ship for the ISC Navy as there is for the GSX in Star Fleet.

(Plus, if any of the known SRs survived the first wave of Andromedan invasion, an X-tech upgrade could provide the ISC with a more flexible impromptu heavy scout and/or RTN hunter.)

By Terence Sean Terry O'Carroll (Terryoc) on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 08:28 pm: Edit

I always got the impression that the Federation's ships had as many labs and so on as they did because of the Vulcan influence, which is huge. It's their knowledge-for-its-own-sake drive that created the incredible GSCs, and then the GSX/GVX. I'm sure there are organisations in the ISC that are curious about the Void or the Magellanic Cloud, but getting the political clout to make the ISC fleet spend the money on such a task is not easy. If the ISC navy decided they needed a heavy X-scout, then they'd probably build a heavy X-scout. They might put it on survey duty during peacetime, but it would be built first and foremost as a scout, not a survey cruiser.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 08:38 pm: Edit

The Q'naabians, for one, are noted as being pretty keen on the knowledge-for-its-own-sake thing - even if they didn't have special sensors on their Early Years ships.

(But then, who is to say it wasn't on Q'naabia where such sensors were perfected, when it came to use with the unified Navy?)


And the point about the X-scout was more to point towards the many conversions which the ISC made to its ships in the panicked first years of the Andro assault - when the home systems themselves were at risk from Andromedan attack.

With at least 8 SRs in service (at least according to preview OOBs in C2 and CL25) the notion I was trying to get at was that one of them might have been in the yards when the invasion hit, and that applying X-tech to it could have been an act of necessity.

(At least one class of ship in X1R was noted as being borne of such desperation.)


Still, I would argue that even if one example was upgraded in a panic, there would still be cause for the ISC to want to build X-tech SRs for their own purposes.