Mei'konda

Time for the red carpet, everyone! Show off your avatars here! I always go with silly and simple.

The Prometheus is kind of an odd ship in a few different ways, IMO, and having a roughly Voyager-sized ship that can do that would require Starfleet to be able to miniaturize a whoooole lot of things aside from the hull sections. Every essential system, for example, needs to be duplicated in all three sections. Warp core and associated systems, impulse engines, shield generators, weapons, logistics, and so on. If I was designing the ship, I'd probably write it as being very Defiant-like on the inside, just on a larger scale - absolutely no room for large and comfortable quarters, holodecks, science capabilities, or anything of the sort. Like @Ayiana wrote, having a minimal crew complement and a very small amount of crew quarters would free up a lot of space. It'd be interesting to see what sort of things people could come up with for the Prometheus' drawbacks to compensate for its strengths. And that's exactly the sort of thing we talk about in the ASDB, @Pholin Duyzer

Use of 'Tag!' at the end of a sim tends to vary player by player. Personally, I've never used it because I very rarely send out sims without tags, but if I was writing more of what Mei'konda was doing on his own without tagging other characters, it could be a good thing to have in there. Still, if people could just scroll to the bottom of a sim and see whether or not there's a 'Tag!' written there, they might skip reading it at all, at which point, why write it? Oddas explained the reason above why we don't use location tags on the Montreal, either. It was an experiment that Rich and I decided to try on the Veritas some time ago, because some players would miss important details to the overall plot that was going on because they didn't read something that lacked a subject line tag for them. So far it seems to be working out well, but if you need any help at all getting used to it, just let us know!

That is all.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Federation_credit I'll leave that there. It's a short, but interesting little blurb. On one hand, we have Gene Roddenbery who said that no type of money or credit existed, but the article cites several examples of money being used. And I do think that some sort of Federation credit -must- exist, if for no other reason than the economics of trade with other races who do happen to use money. Here's a quote from the above: "Almost a century later, the Federation would have paid 1.5 million Federation credits as a lump sum and then 100,000 credits every Barzanian year for the rights to the Barzan wormhole. (TNG: "The Price") So let's assume for the moment that these credits do exist. What are they worth, then, and what are they used for? My assumption would be that, unlike our current real-life currencies, they're backed up by something real and tangible, and that they aren't meant to be hoarded like money is. The Federation wants for very little in the way of basic life requirements. If you're an alien race that isn't a Federation member but still does trade with them, your planet really needs food, and you have X number of Federation credits that you earned by sending art and luxuries that the Federation's interested in, perhaps you can then exchange those credits for vast amounts of replicated basic foods to help you get through a famine. It seems unlikely to me that individual citizens would have access to more or less of these credits than, say, a Starfleet officer, whom one could argue is a more productive member of society than someone who just chooses to live life traveling Earth in the 24th century equivalent of a RV. If that were the case, then you'd start getting a little too close to that acquisition of wealth problem, and a capitalist society. I would assume that Federation citizens (Starfleet included) have access to credits not in the form of a regular paycheck, but from a collective pool, perhaps set up to be accessible from an individual starship or colony, that citizens could draw from in order to trade them for alien goods and services. Either way, it doesn't seem like a good idea for Starfleet to let its officers have no way of paying for goods from a culture like, say, the Ferengi, where if you're not making monetary transactions, you're basically not dealing with them at all.

Cameron pretty much said it all. Thanks so much, everyone.

Welcome aboard, Remy. Happy to have you!

Welcome aboard, Sakur! Speaking of stuffy Vulcan physicians, when you meet Saveron, don't let him influence you too much.

Hi Kate! Can't wait to see you on board one of our fine ships.

Welcome aboard, Ensign Han! We're happy to have you.

Welcome aboard, V'Rall! Happy to have you with us.

Like Evan said above, I think that Starships are more than just personal conveyance. They're mobile platforms to deal with all sorts of situations. If you're planning on exploring an area that's not particularly hospitable, then you really need your starship to support your crew. We also don't know just how transwarp beaming would work for actually retrieving someone or something from a location. How easy would it to be to scan for and find the signal of a person tens of lightyears away? There's also the potential for exponential increases in energy costs for utilizing this technology. It could be that it's really only practical and safe to send or retrieve someone from two very defined locations, sort of like the quantum entanglement communications between two set locations in the Mass Effect games. It was, after all, a big risk to send JJKirk and JJScott to the Enterprise in the 2009 Star Trek. Starships allow for a degree of flexibility and immediate response to a situation that transwarp beaming never would.

Welcome aboard, Sebastien! I think you'll enjoy the much greater freedom you have here versus roleplaying on STO. I hope you have fun in the fleet!

Welcome aboard, Rameses. Thrilled to have you.

It sure is nice when we have the luxury to choose to do things a certain way and don't have to do it the old fashioned way. We do it because we want to.