Pegasus Fleet Forums

I still see the Ambassador as the precursor to the Galaxy. The reason the Nebula was added to Ship-of-the-Line was because the pod makes it much more adaptable. Then again, ships like the Constitution, Galaxy, and Sovereign are really more designed to take on any task it may face. The modular pod on the Nebula would need be something that is more mission specific and have to be changed in a drydock, or something that would need to be decided at construction.

My first instinct is that the Ambassador should remain as a Ship-of-the-Line, and all fighters and marines removed. The Nebula should go back to Cruiser. Another thought is that we have different flavors of Nebulas (Nebulae?), with different load-outs determined at construction. Personally, I'm fine with just leaving it as is and kept a cruiser, but I wanted to throw the option out there to see if anyone has any thoughts.

Take Marines and Fighters off Ambassador, move Nebula back to Cruiser - that's my opinion at least.

If we're going to be so finicky that a Ship-of-the-Line is absolutely under all circumstances disallowed from having marines, then the Nebula needs to come out of it. The changeable pod (which should remain a dry-dock-changeable facility) would more than likely have a marine configuration possible, amongst its other configurations.

The Nebula class has been moved. I still need to work on updating the Ambassador class. If I make no changes other than removing the marines, do I need to create a new thread or will this discussion suffice?

I may be late here on posting, but I am newly in command of an Ambassador Class ship (the USS Amsterdam). I would advocate that some ambassador ships have marines and others don't. My reasoning for this is primarily that the Ambassador classed ships that are currently in the fleet are all refit ships done over a span of time, thus I would doubt that any two are 100 percent alike. I would propose that either the Commanding officer be given a couple either or choices (one of them being presence of marines) that would take away from some other area. IE marines on board takes away cargo space or something. The second way to do this, would simply be to configure any Ambassador ships, and if the CO wants one with marines on board, then he picks that one.

I get the Cannon arguments, but moving forward, while Cannon is certainly our history, we can not be guided by it forever, or we would never progress. To clarify, I simply mean while it is our past, we have to set the future. One other argument I would make for the marine presence is the Dominion War. Some of the larger ships that have room for Marines may have gotten them AFTER TNG Cannon, we can not say for sure. I would not want to contradict cannon, but where cannon does not cover conclusively, can we dictate what we think it should mean?

Honestly, we already decided that ships with existing PC marines would have THOSE marines grandfathered. That is meaning that there would be no new marines allowed to join, if any of the existing marines leave, they can't be replaced, but the marines that are already there would continue to be there.

In light of Insurrection and First Contact and who knows what else, Star Fleet has shifted towards being somewhat politically correct, they want to put a kinder, gentler face out on the military arm of the Federation. Explorers and ships of the line won't have marines... There are other ships that are out there that will.