Excalibur Class

From FEInfobase

History

When Starfleet decided to create a next generation vessel two designs fought for supremacy – The Sovereign design and the Excalibur Design. After months of deliberation Starfleet decided to go ahead and build the Sovereign class Starship, this left the Excalibur design unused.

Although Starfleet went ahead with the Sovereign design the Excalibur’s design was not without merit. They instructed Utopia Planitia to set up a small design team tasked with keeping the design up to date and ready for implementation if necessary.

In 2383 the order came down to begin production of the Excalibur prototype, Starfleet’s instruction indicated that the first Excalibur Class needed to be space worthy within 5 years. The engineers at Utopia Planitia had to cram 8 to 10 years work in to 4 years just to have a hope of meeting the deadline.

From the start the entire project should have been scrapped, Excalibur became a mishmash of systems both old and new as its development team changed. As casualties rose within the fleet engineers were re-tasked to higher priority roles, some were sent to other tasks others to take on engineering roles aboard ships within the fleet.

After 3 short years the first hull was completed with a second well under way. The original plans called for Excalibur to have a saucer separation system. This was dropped early on in the development process, as estimates showed that creating a saucer separation system for the Excalibur would add 2 years to the development time. As work began on the internals the first real faults began to show with the design, in an effort to get the ship in to space with in the time limit set the engineers had systems developed independently. Some systems used bio neural gel packs as a conductor others relied on older iso-linier chips to function.

9 Months later the ship launched from Utopia Planitia’s Dock 8, the ship moved a few hundred thousand meters from its birthplace before suffering massive systems failure. Within moments every light on the ship blinked out of existence and the ship ground to a halt. Tests on the ship suggested that the warp core didn’t generate enough power for the ships myriad of systems.

The Excalibur seemed doomed, Starfleet’s best core could not hope to provide enough power to run the ship and installing a second core was unfeasible given the space available on the ship. Doctor Jacob Thatcher provided an answer; he gave Starfleet a working model for a quantum slipstream drive. The drive its self would allow a Starship to open an a slipstream conduit and travel along it, while providing roughly one and a half times the power a standard warp core provides. At first Starfleet was sceptical about the drive working; however Doctor Thatcher’s theoretical model seemed to prove that the investment would be worth it.

When the Excalibur returned to space dock its standard warp drive was removed and over the course of the next year it was replaced with a quantum slip stream drive/standard warp drive hybrid that would both be compatible, separately and together, with the Starfleet standard warp core. As work on the internals of the second hull had not started Starfleet decided to re-design its internal systems to use bio neural gel packs and to install a quantum slip stream drive in it from the start.

In 2388 the Excalibur left dock 8 for a second time, this time without any system failures. At this point hull 2 sat roughly 3 years behind hull one with work on installing its internal systems only just beginning. Initial tests of the quantum slipstream drive proved successful with the ship being able to maintain slipstream for an hour without any issues.

One problem the ship did seem to have was with power management, under combat or slipstream modes the ship failed to deliver the power to the systems that required it. This often led to the ship shaking violently as it fought to dispose of its excess energy.

Disaster struck on the Excalibur’s maiden voyage, 10 hours in to its first major slipstream test the ship vanished from Starfleet’s sensors. The first fear was that the Borg had found the ship and assimilated it; however tests undertaken on the debris found later that year confirmed a core breach had caused the ship to fail.

Work on hull 2 slowed to a crawl as Starfleet tried to decide whether or not to continue with the slipstream experiment. While they deliberated Utopia Planitia continued work on the second hull slowly bringing it towards operational status. For the next 10 years the ship was to sit in dock 8, almost untouched beyond a skeleton crew tasked with maintaining the ships systems.

In 2400 with the formation of the EDF Starfleet again gave the order to bring the ship to full operational status. Work began in earnest to finish the job started over 15 years ago. Although Starfleet gave orders for the ship to be readied for commissioning it took the destruction of USS Voyager for a second time to prompt the admiralty to commission the ship.

On the 14th of June 2403 the second hull was commissioned as USS Excalibur NX 100001 in honour of the first Excalibur.

Specifications

 
Designation: Explorer/Battleship
 
Hull Life Expectancy: 
Expected Duration: 120 Years 
Time Between Re-Supply: 10 Years
Time Between Refit: 15 Years
 
Personnel: 
230 Officers
705 Enlisted
2 sabre squads
30-100 Civilians and Non-Starfleet Personnel
Maximum Rescue Capacity: 4500
 
Armament: 
10 Type XII Phaser Arrays
4 Type XV Phaser Arrays
4 Fixed Fire Tubes (2 Forward, 2 Aft) and 1 Rapid Fire Torpedo Turret
350 Quantum Torpedoes
380 Photon Torpedoes
 
Defensive Systems: 
Ablative Armour Type I
Ablative Armour Type II
High Intensity Structural Integrity Field
Multi-Layer Shielding System
 
Warp Speeds: 
Normal Cruise: Warp 8.2
Maximum Cruise: Warp 9.6
Maximum Rated: Warp 9.89 for 24 hours
 
Dimensions: 
Length 819 Meters
Width 349 meters
Height 134 Meters
Decks 36
 
Auxiliary-Craft Compliment: 
Shuttle Bays: 2
6 Type-9 Personal Shuttles
4 Type-11 Personal Shuttles
2 Type-10 Cargo Shuttles
2 Danube Class Runabouts;
1 Delta Flyer Class Runabout;
 
Ships of the Class: 
Currently there is 1 in service with 1 building per year.

* USS Excalibur NX-100001
Assigned to 4th Fleets Starfleet Re-Exploration Initiative Task Force

* USS Saratoga NCC-100398
Under Construction