Senator Panopticon paced in front of his desk, reflecting on class and ship names. The discussion earlier annoyed him but did drive home the fact that he needed to exercise more control over his ministry. And also on the long term form the navy would eventually take. He shouted for his secretary: "Tom! Get in here." The door to the office opened and his personal secretary Tom walked in. "You know sir we do have an intercom, you don't always have to shout. Some of the staff are growing quite nervous." He chided the elderly senator.
"Hah! Young folk can't even take a good shouting these days. How they are going to act when aliens from Alpha Centauri or whatever are trying to eat their brains I don't know. Anyway, I called you in 'cause I need you to take dictation for me."
"Err, you know we do have computers for that, some of them are quite good."
The senator knew this of course, growing up in the west during the tech boom of the early and mid 21st century had given him a perfectly firm grounding in modern technology. However when the plague crash hit he had gotten used to doing with less and now rather enjoyed being curmudgeonly about it.
"Quiet you, I'm old and if I want to do it this way then there is nothing you can do about it, anyway we need to get a policy out about how we are naming our ships, apparently some folks seem to think that if I don't say something about it now then it will give the competition some sort of foot in the door for control. Also I guess we should figure out some sort of longish range idea of the navy in general while we are at it, so take this down."
He cleared his throat: "Class names can be left to the designing corporations for now, we can always change it if we don't like it, those image conscious bastards will give them neat names anyway simply for the PR boost. For individual ships though we need separate rules, I'd like to leave it to the naval officers themselves but it seems I won't be given that luxury. I will not be locked into a naming convention before the classes are even designed though, we will pick those as we go. Currently the Crossbow is our lead class and will be named accordingly for military leaders. The names for the lead two ships will be Marcus Agrippa and Fabius Maximus. later ships will be named accordingly as well [ooc]Basically in line with the theme, I went ancient rome for the lead two but we don't have to stay there[/ooc]
"I envision the military to be a cohesive force with its main combatants able to operate for reasonably long periods without need to overhaul. The main killing power in the early fleets will be the missile combatants, with support from other ship types as follows:
A fast, well armored ship with a decent energy armament for jump point defense or close range combat
A Gunboat sized vessel to serve as a picket, as well as a low emissions variant to sucker punch opposing fleets.
A Gunboat tender (carrier) to maintain such.
A Jump ship of some variety to allow freedom of movement
An antimissile vessel to cover the main combatants. This can be energy armed or using AMMs
Support vessels include Tankers, Colliers and maintenance vessels
At this time I cannot support a small craft strategy based on fighters as our production is already going to be strained. Though depending on what is found in this and other systems any of the above could be subject to change."
Tom looked dubiously at the senator. "This isn't exactly press release quality material you know." Panopticon shrugged, "Well, pretty it up then and send it out, it will keep the vultures off our backs for a while anyway."
Tom sighed, he had a long night ahead of him. And he was so hoping to be home for dinner for once.
[ooc]Assume the other ministries are exposed to the "prettied up" version of the above. I don't hate you I promise, and neither does the good senator, he is simply cranky.[/ooc]
