Posted by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) in Discussion of Possible Change to XFleet

Posted by Katy Darrah in Discussion of Possible Change to XFleet

Posted by Vice Admiral Daniel Lerner (Personnel Director, EGO) in Discussion of Possible Change to XFleet
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻
As has been brought up, and as a result of a myriad of discussions in the past, I want to see how much interest there is in amending the purpose of the XFleet to provide a documented and appropriate avenue for members to create a ship in XFleet and, providing it meets to be determined specified and rigorous standards, graduate that ship to the Main Fleet.

My opinion is that I have heard this as something desired from MANY members over my time in the club, and I personally think it would add a great amount of creativity and opportunity for our members.

This is merely a discussion of IF this is something that we as a club would want. There are no specifics, no rules being discussed. That is a later conversation. Right now, I think we should simply answer the question: Do we want the ability to do this in the club?

James Sinclair
Supervisor of Experiments

I don’t know about others but I’m going to burn out if we go re-open old command discussions every few years. We literally had an in-depth review and analysis of this topic like three years ago. Unless there’s real evidence that something has materially changed, can we avoid having to repeat the whole review project again?

Daniel

To say it simply: I’d be open for discussing this. Or, if not this, an alternative idea I had that might also work.

Katy

See this bit of BOXES here that says ( https://www.star-fleet.com/library/bookshelf/charters/charter-xfleet.html ):

Transfer
There is no specific process for transferring an X-Ship out of X-Fleet. The standard club policy for commissioning Standard Ships or Alternative RPG Areas must be followed.

We wrote that in there because we talked about this idea already when X-Fleet was created and decided that we explicitly did not want that. We’ve changed BOXES a bunch of times since then, and had a big X-Fleet review during Rob’s presidency, and we still did not want that.

I’d link to the review as Dan suggests, but since it’s not available, I’ll briefly summarize why every time this has come up, the consensus that ends up getting reached is that we don’t want it.

1. It’s not the point of X-Fleet to spin up alt-RPG ships and then transfer them to the main fleet. As I said in my post yesterday ( https://www.star-fleet.com/core/command/command/notes/73726/ ), we didn’t create X-Fleet just so we could make otherwise normal alt-RPGs “prove themselves” and reward people on them with a giant spacecrane dropping them into the main fleets. The case for having X-Fleet never rested on this idea. The transfer language was added to BOXES specifically because it is explicitly not the purpose of X-Fleet to do this, but X-Fleet’s opponents kept trotting it out during the original proposal as a backdoor way to kill X-Fleet before it’s review period made it permanent.

2. It is unnecessary to create a formal process to do this, because it is already an established power of the President and Fleet Commanders to create ships. If they want to do it, they can just do it. We don’t need to give them more power to do it. If someone has a wildly successful X-Ship that they think ought to be made more permanent and standardized, either as an Alt-RPG or as a Standard Ship, or as a rule change, or whatever, all they have to do is talk to the President to get that ball rolling. And yeah, it sucks if nobody knows what the President is going to say, but… that’s kind of true about everything that happens in the club under any President. Like, that’s a feature of how the club is organized. If you want to tackle that sort of uncertainty, you need to be talking about ending the Presidency in some way, or creating some new space where the President can’t operate. X-Fleet is kind of a space where the President can’t operate in one very narrow way, but I don’t think that space should expand to the main fleets because… well… the main fleets are kinda central to why we have a club, and we have the President specifically to support the things that are central to the club.

3. There has been no X-Ship that would actually meet any set of “determined specified and rigorous standards.” The closest one, the most successful that people really did talk seriously about moving, was the USS Albert Einstein. But… the Albert Einstein was an X-Ship that had a story of fixed length; the cadets were all stuck somewhere on the other end of the galaxy when their training cruise went awry, and the sim was about them getting back to Federation space. A few years later, they got back to Federation space, so the reason for having the Albert Einstein promptly ended. No other X-Ships got there (I think one other one got close) and that’s perfectly fine. X-Ships aren’t intended to become permanent institutions of the club, or to be promoted into being permanent institutions of the club. It’s totally OK to do an X-Ship that’s time limited or just to try something really wacky.

So, unless these “MANY” people you’re talking to have some new insight that addresses all three of these points, it’s kind of retreading old ground. And if I seem bothered by the proposal, it’s because I find it really rude to hijack someone else’s discussion about a new idea, to talk about an idea that we’ve collectively rejected for the past eight years.

Joe

So to reiterate:

Yes, I am aware that XFleet isnt set up to do that. Yes, all are aware that the president has the authority to create ships at their discretion.

But as the original intent of this discussion was to simply ask the question “Do we want the ability in the club for members to create a ship in XFleet and, if deemed successful, move that ship to the Main fleet?”, I dont see where the back and forth is really answering that question. It’s a “Stupid idea, no thanks.” or “Hey, that would rock. Yes please!” kind of answer.

James