Star Trek: Delta Fleet - Technical Manual

"To boldly go where no one has gone before..."

Length -1,798.6 meters
Beam - 700 meters
Height - 216.25 meters
Decks - 54
Mass - 42,000,000 metric tons
Crew Complement - 2,800

	Officers - 300
	Enlisted - 1700
	Civilians - 800

The Discovery-Class marks a watershed in starship design, demonstrating both Starfleet's bold return to long-term exploration and an unprecedented degree of incorporation of non-Federation expertise into the design process, resulting in the first class of vessel built specifically to travel trans-galactic distances and back via the revolutionary quantum slipstream propulsion system.

Prior to the First Borg Incursion, starship design reflected a committment to peaceful exploration and a downplaying of offensive systems, as epitomized by the Galaxy-Class explorers. After encountering both the Borg and then later, the Dominion, Stafleet was forced to develop ships more optimally designed for combat, such as the Defiant, Sovereign, and Prometheus classes. This more militant philosophy reached its high-water mark after the Fourth Borg Incursion, when most of the pre-2364 ship designs took heavy losses compared to their later, better armed sister ships.

The Discovery-Class represents a more balanced approach, a waning of the pure military mindset of the past quarter-century. Created to support a fully equipped expedition to the Delta Quadrant and back, these ships have the largest crew complements and diversity of support craft of any vessel built by the governments of the Alpha and Beta Quadrant powers, supporting whole families and a civilian support community in addition to the operating crew. Discovery-Class starships carry around eight hundred civilians under normal circumstances, and as many as 45,000 under extraordinary ones. In normal situations, they serve important roles aboard the ship, but in a battle, they are are evacuated via the EEVs.

Despite their primary mission of exploration, the Discovery-Class was also built to be combat equivalent to a Borg Cube. Combining the latest breakthroughs in Generated Ablative Armor, transphasic torpedoes, multi-spatial shielding, and the largest phaser arrays of any mobile vessel, the ship has an overall strength index some twenty times that of a Sovereign or Prometheus-Class ship.

Much controversy has been raised regarding the decision to equip the Discovery-Class with a Dual Mode Phase Cloak, giving the vessel every maximum tactical advantage in a conflict with the Borg.

Normal Warp Cruising Speed - Warp 9.8
Normal Slipstream Cruising Speed - Warp 13.3
Maximum Slipstream Cruising Speed - Warp 14 for 20 days
Maximum Rated Slipstream Speed - Warp 16 for 45 minutes

Standard 6 Person Transporters - 10
Emergency 22 Person Transporters - 8
Cargo Transporters - 10

In order to power the quantum slipstream drive, the tactical systems, and eliminate the strategic weaknesses of the standard M/AM warp core, the Discovery-Class is powered by a Zero-Point Inflationary "bubble core." While taking up a greater volume that the standard cylindrical core, the power output is both steadier and nearly fifty times greater per cubic meter, not to mention being statistically impossible to breach.

Multi-Spatial Shield Output - 29.3 x 10~5 kw
Directed Energy Weapons - 18 Type XIII phaser arrays
Total Phaser Power Output - 920,700 terawatts
Maximum Phaser Range - 300,000 kilometers
Torpedo Launchers - 2 fore 2 aft, 2 lateral,
Torpedo Explosive Yield - 110 isotons
Torpedo Spread - 4 per launcher
Maximum Torpedo Range - 4.05 million kilometers

Torpedo Load -	800 Type III quantum torpedo warheads
	400 transphasic torpedo warheads
	30 Tri-Cobalt devices
	Antimatter spread emitter

The Discovery-Class is armed with multiple Type XIII phaser banks capable of firing at many targets simultaneously. These phaser banks, located on the upper and lower saucer, and on the secondary hull, feature the latest improvements in phasers technology in the last 10 years. The new Type XIII phasers has a shorter recharge time and can fire a longer sustained burst, giving each bank a greater combat effectiveness than ever before. The new phasers are housed within Starfleet's new Multifunctional Phased Arrays (MPA).

This new multi-spatial shielding system builds a back-buffer shield in addition to the primary shield. When sufficient damage is taken to the primary shield, the back buffer is phased through to replace the primary while it regenerates within the protection of the new primary shield. This new system consumes a good deal of energy, which is supplied by half a dozen power arrays near the shield emitters supplied directly by the engine core. The new shields also incorporate auto modulation and regenerative features to adapt to new Borg attack strategies, and can be switched to a metaphasic mode with minimal disruption to its standard defense capabilities

The original specifications for the Discovery-Class starships called for saucer separation and a high-warp- or slipstream-capable engine core for the saucer. Unfortunately, further work on slipstream hull geometry revealed too many flaws in this design to allow the required velocities in docked mode. The idea of putting the saucer into battle alone was quickly eliminated, as that would mean leaving the ship's most powerful engines, power plant and deflectors behind.

The realization of the need for a bubble core was the nail in saucer separation's coffin--the size of the bubble core meant that many critical systems, such as the third computer core, had to be pushed forward into the saucer section; other systems, like a planned secondary deflector array, had to be eliminated entirely. With the new placement or lack of these systems, adding saucer separation was virtually impossible.

At this point, the Advanced Starship Design Bureau decided that the best approach would be for the Discovery-Class to carry six specialized auxiliary ships designed to bring the civilians to safety. The Emergency Evacuation Vessels (EEVs) are designed to break away from the exterior hull during a crisis, and then proceed at high-warp to a predetermined rendezvous point.

USS Enterprise -- NCC-1701-F
USS Victorious -- NCC-40967-B
USS Odyssey -- NCC-615336
USS Klothos -- NCC-76321
USS Majestic -- NCC-78640
USS Prosperity -- NCC-76901
USS Atlantis -- NCC-87292
USS Avenger -- NCC-87453
USS Republic -- NCC-90103
USS Europa -- NCC-87125
USS Kumerian -- NCC-88860
USS Tenacious -- NCC-87004
USS Columbia -- NCC-2013-D
USS Phoenix -- NCC-15420-B