Utopia Planitia Shipyards

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Revision as of 19:28, 13 April 2006

Utopia Planitia has always been one of Starfleet's premier ship yards, many of the ships developed in the last 200 years started out as projects at Utopia Planitia. Even if the projects were later completed at other ship yards within the Federation.

With the Borg incursions Starfleet soon realised it would need to marshal its ship building facilities within Sol, in a few short months Utopia Planitia moved to a war footing. Many theoretical projects were placed on the back burner as Utopia’s extensive facilities were used to aid the war effort, the ship yards skilled workers began retooling to build large numbers of small to medium Starfleet Vessels with a handful of capital ships to serve as replacements for battle damage.

Throughout the 2380’s and early 2390’s Utopia managed this quite well, a full third of new star ships came from Utopia Planitia including the Ronald Reagan – A, a ship that later went on to serve as the Earth Defence Force Flagship and later as the Starfleet CnC’s flagship.

In 2395 disaster struck the ship yards, the Federation had been plagued for many years by attacks by dooms day cults who wanted to damage Starfleet’s defence attempts to bring the day of reckoning closer. Foolishly, Starfleet believed Utopia Planitia too well protected to suffer any form of attack, they were wrong to think that. Exactly how wrong was brought home with a bang when three Starfleet ships staged an attack on the ship yards, destroying many facilities and half complete hulls before attempting to ram the facilities main structure on Mars.

For several years Utopia Planitia worked slowly, devoting much of it’s time to rebuilding the damage caused by that attack. Secretly in 2399 Starfleet began a project to rebuild vast parts of Utopia Planitia under cloak, their aim was to return the ship yards to full capacity and do so without attracting unwanted attention. Late in 2303 this project was unveiled to the Galaxy along with a new string of defences for Utopia, the whole area is now tightly controlled and unauthorised ships are shot on sight.

The most notable ships to launch from the facility in recent years have been the USS Stargazer and USS Excalibur. The Stargazer was the lastof its class to be built by the Federation, while the Excalibur Class Prototype was an older ship idea taken from mothballs and updated by Doctor Jacob Thatcher.

Utopia Planitia still retains a few prototype vessels left over from work before and during the war. As time and resources permit they occasionnaly attempt to complete these ships for use by the EDF. Two current projects are the USS Columbia NCC 2011 - E construction which is proceding slowly and The Venture Star Class warp propulsion systems test which is nearing completion aboard the Uss Freedom testbed ship.The complete warp assembly and nacels are due to be shipped to san fran shipyards within the next 4 months..

Overall command of the base is overseen by Captain Gregory Fernandez.