Author's note:
Below is something I wrote for the fun of it: A description of the TOS Pioneer Class in the style of the Starfleet Museum website. It gets a bit treknobabble in the middle, so be warned. However, understanding the babble is not required to understand what's going on.
It's also longer than I realized.
I have no intention of writing anything else in this line but I did want to share it with someone... so... I hope y'all enjoy.
All comments are welcome.
Constructive comments preferred.
zDarby
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PIONEER CLASS
DESIGN HISTORY
Earth and Star Fleet naval design history are filled with attempts --often failed-- to take components from a successful vessel and rearrange & reconfigure them into a new vessel meant to fulfill a different role than its parent. The logic behind these attempts is that such components are proven, reliable, off-the-shelf technology that can be cheaply reused with little development cost, a quick turn around and a high rate of success. Proponents of this design methodology can point to various successes: the Heiwa, Spicio, Rememdium and Traho classes, for example.
Opponents argue that though such vessels might be cheaper to design and build, the result is a vessel whose capabilities are considerably less than one specially designed for the role. They continue that though individual components need not be designed, repurposing and integrating them into a new configuration eats up whatever time and expense is saved. And as to previous successes, critics point out that for every successful design there are dozens that were either so obviously flawed they could never get the funding, got the funding but were stillborn, or were built and launched but were greatly disappointing.
These criticisms, as correct as they are, have never stopped new proposals of this sort from continuously cropping up. And the spectacular, if belated, success of the Constitution class of starships, more than any other class in history, inspired this kind of design. Between 2242, when USS Constitution's keel was laid, to 2266, when plans for the refit of USS Enterprise were officially drawn up, no fewer than twelve classes based on Constitution's component architecture went into at least limited production.
The Miranda class, the first of these "deformed chimera", as Captain Matt Deckard once decried them, boded well for the technique as it quickly earned a reputation for reliability and competence. She was so successful, in fact, that she would later inspire several variants of her own, some of which were still used in the Dominion War 130 years later. This opened the flood gates for designs using reconfigured Constitution components. Indeed, as Vice Admiral Chernikov put it, "The success of the Miranda class has turned the reconfiguration serpent into a hydra. No sooner have you denied the funding for one such project, another rears its ugly head."
The second and third such designs to be funded, the Saladin and Hermes classes, were capable but so disappointing that their production runs were cut short and their replacements ordered just four years after their first commissioning. Most Hermes and Saladin vessels were converted to Advent pickets when that class began production.
The next Constitution derivative, the Ptolomy class tug, was a resounding success and a large number were produced. Star Fleet relied on her almost exclusively for 50 years. The only complaint leveled upon her was that she did not do well as a combat transport. Her hull simply had too little volume to mount the powerful weaponry or shielding needed for combat situations. Fortunately, this niche was well filled by the few Pyotr Velikie class vessels that had been converted to combat tugs.
The Advent, Marco Polo and Paladin classes obtained moderate success but all suffered from the same limitation as Ptolomy: Too little volume within the hull led to poor shielding and lack of firepower. Such limitations were acceptable in a tug but not in fighting ships. None the less, due to outpostings either well within the front lines or within the protective firing range of fleets, these vessels faired well in their respective roles and could be considered limited successes.
The Federation class dreadnought, launched 16 years after Constitution, was the disaster critics had been predicting from the start. It's design was a severe over reach of the technology at hand. Of the twenty originally authorized, only three were produced and none of them saw combat. This was probably fortunate as both captains and crews agreed Federations were slow, bloated, cranky and fraught with bugs. Within a decade of their launch, USS Federation was given to the Star Fleet Museum and the other two --USS Star League and USS Unification-- were scrapped.
It was at the peak of this hostile climate of mediocrity and failure that the Pioneer project was first proposed. Pioneer was meant to fulfill a specific need for deep water boarder patrol in volumes of space that were, "At the same time, far enough from the Federation's core to have moderate supply issues but close enough or with a society old enough to be dismissed as nearly self-sufficient, and therefor not needy enough to send in 'the big guns' to protect them", as Lieutenant Commander K'farar wrote in her proposal to Star Fleet.
Artemisia Hypatia K'farar grew up in just such a system: Eta Serpentis. Dubbed Shiraz by its colonists, Eta Serpentis was colonized by an extensive Persian clan in 2187 aboard a single Superbison transport bought from Star Fleet two years earlier as surplus. Due to a relatively metal poor system that had no M class planets, the colony was fortunate to be completely ignored by other civilizations for several decades after colonization. But, at just over 18 parsecs from Earth, they were also not well connected to their own civilization. The colony existed due to a small transport and trade empire owned by the clan as a whole. And the colony relied entirely on the private fleet of transports that was the backbone of this empire to trade with the Federation core for over 20 years before the Federation's influence extended out as far as Shiraz. By 2247 when Artemisia was born, the colony was mostly self sufficient and an exporter of many sought after goods. Yet rarely was it visited by Star Fleet ships and thus was subject to minor but not rare pirate raids. This goes a long way in explaining why Lieutenant Commander K'farar was passionate about the Pioneer project. And it was this passion that was the biggest reason the project succeeded as well as it did, especially considering the climate in which it battled for survival.
Pioneer's design would be guided by a philosophy of survivability and reliability rather than technical excellence. It was this philosophy that suggested Pioneer be designed around Constitution components, that by that time had nearly two decades of in-the-field use. That meant, K'farar argued, that all the major bugs had been found and documented, and work-arounds had been found and systematized. There had already been 8 classes designed and constructed around these components, she argued, so interfacing them in a ninth should be quick and painless; spare parts would be numerous, making logistics for repairs far simpler; and, finally, since all the vessel needed to be was adequate, even the admitted mediocrity of most of the previous Constitution-derived classes would be perfectly acceptable. As long as it didn't turn into the failure of the Federation class --a turn of events that K'farar claimed could easily be attributed to that class's over-reaching goals and, therefor, would not befall her project-- the class would be a success.
Her very first design decision was controversial and would dictate the path traveled by the Pioneer class from blueprints to scrapyard: four nacelles.
"The motto of the Pioneer class is survivability and reliability," K'farar answered a critical Admiral Jacobi in her final pitch to Star Fleet. "I can not stress this enough. Indeed, this motto suggested the very naming of the class, as the survival of pioneers rely on these attributes being found in their equipment. A double set of nacelles was chosen not so that the class could be faster or more maneuverable at warp, as has been the case in other proposals, but so that less subspace stress would be put on any one nacelle and, therefor, all would and justifiably could be relied upon with less maintenance and longer lifespans. Further, the geometric placement of those nacelles allows for any two to be damaged or destroyed without greatly hindering the vessels performance, giving her Captain the latitude she needs to fight on or flee as the situation dictates. Yes, they weigh her down, make her less maneuverable at impulse. Yes, they make her more expensive. But not greatly so in either case and the gains in reliability and survivability greatly outweigh these losses.
"And from this one concession to practicality all other design choices filter out onto the blueprints with the application of the projects motto. She is the right ship at the right time for a small but vitally unfilled niche in our starship ecology. She must be funded now, while the window for her rightness is still open." K'farar did not convince all her listeners, but enough to get funded under review. As such, Pioneer would become the last vessel to be commissioned using original, first generation Constitution architecture.
However, political realities required certain technological concessions to upcoming trends. Thanks to the continuing success in the refitting of USS Asia, with plans to do the same to her sisters, there were already, a decade before the project got underway, undercurrents of what was called at the time, "The Great Experiment." This is not to be confused with the transwarp project which later coopted this expression. Instead, the phrase referred to the question of whether shipbuilding techniques were advanced enough that a complete refit of a front-line vessel of the 2240s could be brought up to the technical standards expected of a front-line vessel of the 2270s. To this extent, certain technologies that were neither part of Constitutions' make-up nor part of Pioneer's original plans were included in her final design. An example of these political concessions, one that was both a boon and a bane for her design, was the warp plasma delivery system.
Warp conduit system design studies prior to 2261 focused strictly on delivery of warp plasma with as little loss of energy and charge dynamics (both electric and strong nuclear chroma charge) as possible. This was not a trivial problem in conduits with lengths of several dozen meters, which can be attested to by the fact that supercomputer simulations of starship system integration had been dominated by attempts to accurately simulate plasma containment interactions since the era of Zefram Cochrane's Pheonix 200 years earlier.
This changed significantly in August 2261 with a paper published in Warp Field Technical Journals by a previously unknown theoretician with a pen name of "The Scott", a pen name that still fosters speculation that the author was none other than Montgomery Scott, famous for, among other things, being Chief Engineer of Captain Kirk's Enterprise. (Mr. Scott vehemently denies any involvement in the paper.) The paper, entitled "Spectral Charge Coupling of Warp Systems", linked warp plasma frequency and phase to warp field distortion, the coupling of subspace layers within a warp bubble and warp field tensors --both local and global-- in a seminal work that still dominates the study today. This paper can also be said to be responsible for the excitement at the prospect of a "miraculous upgrade," as one Commander scornfully described the proposed refits of the 2270s.
By the time Star Fleet Design Bureau approved funds for Pioneer, "spectral coupling" was a catch phrase even among Federation arm-chair engineers and the Design Bureau made demonstrating the technology a stipulation for its funding. Artimesia K'farar, by then having been promoted to Commander, bowed to the inevitable and agreed to the stipulation but frequently cursed the necessity of doing so. Though she never said so on the record, in private she predicted this one concession would increase the price by 25% and extend necessary R&D by 3 years. Although her prediction was accurate, subsequent studies have indicated that were it not for this technological improvement, Pioneer would have been unable to meet its design goals.
In January of 2262, a first generation Constitution Sabre nacelle was procured and research for the Pioneer Project began in earnest. Test equipment was either purchased or built to refine the reactive properties of the Sabre nacelle to the spectral and phase transitions expected for this new regime of warp flight. Initial tests looked promising, with high correlation between theory and measurement. But when the test rig was expanded to two nacelles, the correlation became chaotic. It took the team two months to track the chaos to temporal and spacial phase differentials between the plasma injected into the two nacelles. And another two months to learn that phase differentials as small as one quarter wavelength would cause chaotic instabilities. Furthermore, it was soon suggested that the situation might become worse when all four nacelles were included in the system. However, when requests were made for the two additional nacelles to be added, Star Fleet replied that until it could be shown the Pioneer Project had figured out solutions to this hurdle, there was no reason to supply them with more equipment.
Controlling plasma streams within warp conduits to this level of accuracy was unprecedented but could theoretically be done. Commander K'farar gave her team one month to draw up engineering solutions to the 1/4 wavelength problem and four months to engineer tests to see which solution would work. With this data in hand, she was able to requisition two more nacelles for the test stand, only to discover what seemed an insurmountable problem: phase coupling chaos increased exponentially as the number of simultaneous warp coil excitations. Thus, with one nacelle, normal plasma differentials were well within tolerances. With two nacelles, tolerances needed to be within a quarter wavelength. With four nacelles, tolerances were increased to 64 parts per million. These tolerances were so high that even warp plasma interactions with the local neutrino field could push the system out of whack. This was engineering far beyond the abilities of the day.
K'farar was incensed. Not only had her project been saddled with a nonsensical requirement that now seemed impossible, but the stupidly frugal requisition standards had made them waist 5 months of hard work on a solution that would be of no use. With only five days until Pioneer's next funding evaluation, K'farar ordered work on all other aspects of the project be dropped and an all-staff brainstorming session imposed for the next five days with the sole intent of finding a solution to this new problem. By the fourth day K'farar had drafted a complete report on the problem, a scathing essay on how bureaucratic red tape had wasted months of time and effort, an official request for Star Fleet to drop the spectral coupling criteria from Pioneer funding, and a letter of resignation if the request were refused.
Fortunately, late that day, a work-around was found: multi-frequency phase inducers at each injector would shift plasma properties just prior to injection and the control logic of each individual injector would be interconnected with all other injectors as well as to specialized subspace sensors via a dedicated subspace network in order to coordinate plasma injection. This system would allow on-the-fly adjustments to all plasma properties at each injector nanoseconds before its injection. Quickly programmed simulations, allowed to run all night to the following midday, predicted tolerances up to 5 parts per million, ten times what was needed. Proof of concept engineering was weeks away but the theoretical simulations were enough to keep Pioneer funded, and everyone went back to work.
Testing and integration of this design went well for 18 months. It wasn't until a full scale test of the system was underway that yet another chaotic asymmetry arose. It was assumed this behavior was an extension of the previous troubles and could therefor be found and fixed at the new injectors. It's a testament to the faith these technicians had accrued within Star Fleet that even without any sign of solution, Pioneer funding continued for a full nine months before an ultimatum was given: they had 6 months to show progress or the project would be canceled.
Again, K'farar ordered an all-staff brainstorming session. This time a full week was required to get the various design teams up to speed on this aspect of the project. After this one week period --a length of time greatly reduced by the desire of all involve to get back to their respective fields of study-- it was the team in charge of communications that realized the trouble and the weapons engineers that resolved the solution. To fully understand either, it is necessary to delve more deeply into the design of the vessel and the requirements that dictated those designs.
As already mentioned, equipment for Pioneer was to be restricted to that from the Constitution class or her variants, or easy modifications of that equipment. Even the plasma injection modifications were relatively simple to implement. The reasoning for this and for the use of four nacelles has already been alluded to earlier within K'farar's speech: long term reliability.
Early drafts of the design tried to modify the primary saucer of the Constitution to accommodate all the ship's systems: warp core, impulse engines and fuel for both; deflector arrays, tractor beams, internal & external graviton emitters; computer, sensor and communications systems; crew quarters, mess halls, environmental systems and waste processors; shields, phases and torpedoes; Shuttles, shuttle bays, personnel transporters, cargo transporters and cargo bays; repair bays, equipment and raw materials, etc. However, the most common complaints leveled on vessels that attempted to cram all the equipment in the saucer hull --Paladin, Saladin, Hermes, Ptolomy, etc-- was the cramped quarters and shortness of onboard supplies, which made frequent stops a required logistics hassle. Therefor, an engineering hull was added to Pioneer, one that looked very much like a scaled down version of Constitution's, connected via a modified Constitution neck.
The warp core, antimatter, navigational deflector, tractor emitter system, some of the deuterium and most of the transporter arrays were transferred to this secondary, engineering hull. By necessity of volume, the core was mounted horizontally within this hull. In emergencies, both the core and antimatter, located just aft of the core, could be ejected out the aft. Without the need for the core and its ancillary equipment to be in the main saucer, Pioneer was free to use its lower and mid sections for weapons and communications volume, much as Constitution did. Indeed, much of the Constitution lay-out and equipment was adopted wholesale. It was commented more than once that a crewman familiar with Constitution would feel right at home in most of the saucer section, finding little difference in the fore, port, starboard, mid, dorsal or ventral divisions. And most of the differences would be directly related to the fewer complement aboard: 240, as opposed to 430.
The aft section of the saucer, however, was greatly modified. First draft requirements did not include a shuttlebay, as transporters and docking rings were considered adequate for the vessels mandate: defensive patrol and interception. However, when it became clear this mandate would include anti-piracy patrols and the subsequent rescue missions in highly radioactive volumes of space such patrols imply, a shuttlebay of considerable size became a requirement. Since the volume of the secondary engineering hull had already been divvied up satisfactorily, it was decided to modify the saucer to accommodate the shuttlebay. The first proposed modification was to place it atop the saucer aft of the bridge, similar to the Avenger and Predator classes. But it quickly became clear this arrangement made pathways for warp plasma to the dorsal nacelles unacceptably convoluted if routed through the saucer, or unacceptably fragile if diverted directly from the engineering hull. So, instead, the shuttlebay would be inset within the aft saucer, nestled between the port and starboard impulse engines, and the warp plasma routed around one side, through the port impulse deck.
It was this asymmetry in the plasma routing that caused the problem. A warp field that had any asymmetry port and starboard --which was not the case only while traveling in straight lines through perfectly euclidean subspace-- would cause a dorsal-ventral asymmetry in the phasing of the plasma-subspace coupling, one greater than the new injector's could handle.
This asymmetry was, again, chaotic and very difficult to compensate for mechanically. Fortunately, it was a kind of plasma instability often encountered in high power phasers and could be compensated for by a technique called Free Nucleon Laser Routing, the details of which will not be covered here. In broad strokes, it required the warp plasma stream to be split in two and routed to either side of the shuttlebay through an array of jostling magnetic fields. These fields force the plasma to emit laser pulses of a frequency, phase and polarization dependent on these same properties of the plasma. This light, emitted down the conduit, interacts with the plasma downstream, making the entire stream tend towards a uniform whole. These jostling magnetic fields continued even after plasma stream reintegration, thus allowing any port-starboard asymmetries to cancel themselves out downstream.
This was a tried and true technique within the realm of phaser weaponry and it solved the problem in simulations. Unfortunately, the solution had never been engineered in conduits longer than 5 meters. Pioneer's requirements were 40 meters. This turned into a major engineering challenge that required 13 months to adequately resolve and continuously threatened to sink the project. Fortunately, many Star Fleet engineers had both sympathy for the technical difficulties and greed for the possible applications of such technology that much pressure was put on Star Fleet to keep the project funded.
However, no sooner had the theoretical and technical issues been solved, and an engineering prototype made, than yet another difficulty arose. Since the plasma conduits to the dorsal nacelles were nearly thrice as long as those to the ventral nacelles, there was a delay in the received power by the two sets of nacelles of approximately 2 nanoseconds. This is an infinitesimal span of time for a human but a huge span of time for a warp field whose local effects travel at the speed of light.
Fortunately, there was a 20th century solution to the 23rd century problem: quantum teleportation. The lased light created in the FNLR technique could be manipulated to transfer both the power and quantum state of upstream plasma to downstream plasma at near the speed of light. Since warp plasma travels through its conduits at a tenth the speed of light, precise control of this phenomena could compensate for conduit length.
This turned out to be the last hurtle presented by the Pioneer's plasma delivery system. The warp system was mated to USS Pioneer's hull in May of 2267 and began trials in October 2267. She was officially commissioned in December and a limited production of 19 more vessels were approved. Further production of the class would be ordered if she was deemed a valuable asset.
But she was not. By the time the 20th Pioneer vessel, Chief Josef, was commissioned in 2276, the refit craze of the 2270s was in full force, having proved so successful that every Constitution class vessel and every vessel based on Constitution was scheduled for a refit. Pioneers, being last to be constructed, were last on the schedule. But after a 15 years of congested shipyards, the craze had run its course and the schedule for the remaining refits spread out over a much longer time period. The scheduled refitting of Pioneer would take 8 years, twice as long as it took to go through all the Constitutions and Miranda's combined. Some Pioneers waited so long that it was decided to retire them instead of spend the resources refitting them.
In spite of this neglect, Pioneers were universally loved by the systems they protected and universally praised by their crews. Despite frequent brawls with local trouble makers, no Pioneer ever had to be abandoned in deep space, though some were brought to port so badly mauled that they could not be repaired and had to be scrapped. Even so, no Pioneer ever became famous across the Federation and very few gained notoriety outside the systems they patrolled. Their role was not to discover new civilizations, and they did not; nor was it to discover new interstellar phenomena, though several such discoveries are credited to her class, especially the USS Red Cloud, stationed North of the Brair Patch; nor to map promising new solar systems, though, again, this did happen; they never played a pivotal role in any fleet engagement, indeed their duties rarely brought them near to such engagements. However, from 2269 when USS Pioneer began her first patrol, to 2313 --44 years and a refit later-- when USS Frank Hamilton Cushing was quietly retired, Pioneers protected small, out of the way systems that were visited only rarely by other ships of the fleet. They fulfilled the niche they were designed for with yeomanly aptitude, if not outright brilliance, without a single one lost in deep space. (USS Charles Crocker had to be abandoned in system when her life-support finally gave out. Her crew were recovered without incident and she was successfully repaired.) And in the colony worlds they protected, Star Fleet enrollment was consistently higher than was the norm. And this can be directly credited to having Pioneers and her crews as role-models.
However, the largest contribution of the class was certainly the creative solutions to problems that would be faced by technicians when they began to refit the myriad Constitutions and her derivative classes in the 2270s, starting with USS Enterprise in 2271. Many of these solutions are still employed as standard fair in todays fleet. Furthermore, her proof of concept for plasma-subspace coupling was the first paving stone of Excelsior's experiment. For though transwarp drive was not discovered, many discoveries were made in the project.
Finally, having proved her abilities on the Pioneer class, in 2280 Commodore Artemisia K'farar was asked to take command of the flagging Constellation Project. Constellation became the direct technical descendant of Pioneer and went on to become, arguably, the most successful starship of that era.
USS Looking Glass has been restored to her original hardware and is now on display at the Star Fleet Museum along side her sister ship, USS Joshua Abraham Norton, which was kept as her refitted self.
USS PIONEER.................NCC-1914
USS MERIWETHER LEWIS........NCC-1915
USS WILLIAM CLARK...........NCC-1916
USS STEPHEN FULLER AUSTIN...NCC-1917
USS WILLIAM MULHALLAND......NCC-1918
USS JAMES HENRY LANE........NCC-1919
USS CHARLES CROCKER.........NCC-1920
USS JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON...NCC-1921
USS JOSEPH LAFAYETTE MEEK...NCC-1922
USS JULIA LOUISA LOVEJOY....NCC-1923
USS SITTING BULL............NCC-1924
USS LOOKING GLASS...........NCC-1925
USS RED CLOUD...............NCC-1926
USS CRAZY HORSE.............NCC-1927
USS BLACK KETTLE............NCC-1928
USS JUAN CORTINA............NCC-1929
USS WILLIAM CODY............NCC-1930
USS FRANK HAMILTON CUSHING..NCC-1931
USS WILLIAM MULHOLLAND......NCC-1932
USS CHEIF JOSEPH............NCC-1933
Below is something I wrote for the fun of it: A description of the TOS Pioneer Class in the style of the Starfleet Museum website. It gets a bit treknobabble in the middle, so be warned. However, understanding the babble is not required to understand what's going on.
It's also longer than I realized.
I have no intention of writing anything else in this line but I did want to share it with someone... so... I hope y'all enjoy.
All comments are welcome.
Constructive comments preferred.
zDarby
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PIONEER CLASS
DESIGN HISTORY
Earth and Star Fleet naval design history are filled with attempts --often failed-- to take components from a successful vessel and rearrange & reconfigure them into a new vessel meant to fulfill a different role than its parent. The logic behind these attempts is that such components are proven, reliable, off-the-shelf technology that can be cheaply reused with little development cost, a quick turn around and a high rate of success. Proponents of this design methodology can point to various successes: the Heiwa, Spicio, Rememdium and Traho classes, for example.
Opponents argue that though such vessels might be cheaper to design and build, the result is a vessel whose capabilities are considerably less than one specially designed for the role. They continue that though individual components need not be designed, repurposing and integrating them into a new configuration eats up whatever time and expense is saved. And as to previous successes, critics point out that for every successful design there are dozens that were either so obviously flawed they could never get the funding, got the funding but were stillborn, or were built and launched but were greatly disappointing.
These criticisms, as correct as they are, have never stopped new proposals of this sort from continuously cropping up. And the spectacular, if belated, success of the Constitution class of starships, more than any other class in history, inspired this kind of design. Between 2242, when USS Constitution's keel was laid, to 2266, when plans for the refit of USS Enterprise were officially drawn up, no fewer than twelve classes based on Constitution's component architecture went into at least limited production.
The Miranda class, the first of these "deformed chimera", as Captain Matt Deckard once decried them, boded well for the technique as it quickly earned a reputation for reliability and competence. She was so successful, in fact, that she would later inspire several variants of her own, some of which were still used in the Dominion War 130 years later. This opened the flood gates for designs using reconfigured Constitution components. Indeed, as Vice Admiral Chernikov put it, "The success of the Miranda class has turned the reconfiguration serpent into a hydra. No sooner have you denied the funding for one such project, another rears its ugly head."
The second and third such designs to be funded, the Saladin and Hermes classes, were capable but so disappointing that their production runs were cut short and their replacements ordered just four years after their first commissioning. Most Hermes and Saladin vessels were converted to Advent pickets when that class began production.
The next Constitution derivative, the Ptolomy class tug, was a resounding success and a large number were produced. Star Fleet relied on her almost exclusively for 50 years. The only complaint leveled upon her was that she did not do well as a combat transport. Her hull simply had too little volume to mount the powerful weaponry or shielding needed for combat situations. Fortunately, this niche was well filled by the few Pyotr Velikie class vessels that had been converted to combat tugs.
The Advent, Marco Polo and Paladin classes obtained moderate success but all suffered from the same limitation as Ptolomy: Too little volume within the hull led to poor shielding and lack of firepower. Such limitations were acceptable in a tug but not in fighting ships. None the less, due to outpostings either well within the front lines or within the protective firing range of fleets, these vessels faired well in their respective roles and could be considered limited successes.
The Federation class dreadnought, launched 16 years after Constitution, was the disaster critics had been predicting from the start. It's design was a severe over reach of the technology at hand. Of the twenty originally authorized, only three were produced and none of them saw combat. This was probably fortunate as both captains and crews agreed Federations were slow, bloated, cranky and fraught with bugs. Within a decade of their launch, USS Federation was given to the Star Fleet Museum and the other two --USS Star League and USS Unification-- were scrapped.
It was at the peak of this hostile climate of mediocrity and failure that the Pioneer project was first proposed. Pioneer was meant to fulfill a specific need for deep water boarder patrol in volumes of space that were, "At the same time, far enough from the Federation's core to have moderate supply issues but close enough or with a society old enough to be dismissed as nearly self-sufficient, and therefor not needy enough to send in 'the big guns' to protect them", as Lieutenant Commander K'farar wrote in her proposal to Star Fleet.
Artemisia Hypatia K'farar grew up in just such a system: Eta Serpentis. Dubbed Shiraz by its colonists, Eta Serpentis was colonized by an extensive Persian clan in 2187 aboard a single Superbison transport bought from Star Fleet two years earlier as surplus. Due to a relatively metal poor system that had no M class planets, the colony was fortunate to be completely ignored by other civilizations for several decades after colonization. But, at just over 18 parsecs from Earth, they were also not well connected to their own civilization. The colony existed due to a small transport and trade empire owned by the clan as a whole. And the colony relied entirely on the private fleet of transports that was the backbone of this empire to trade with the Federation core for over 20 years before the Federation's influence extended out as far as Shiraz. By 2247 when Artemisia was born, the colony was mostly self sufficient and an exporter of many sought after goods. Yet rarely was it visited by Star Fleet ships and thus was subject to minor but not rare pirate raids. This goes a long way in explaining why Lieutenant Commander K'farar was passionate about the Pioneer project. And it was this passion that was the biggest reason the project succeeded as well as it did, especially considering the climate in which it battled for survival.
Pioneer's design would be guided by a philosophy of survivability and reliability rather than technical excellence. It was this philosophy that suggested Pioneer be designed around Constitution components, that by that time had nearly two decades of in-the-field use. That meant, K'farar argued, that all the major bugs had been found and documented, and work-arounds had been found and systematized. There had already been 8 classes designed and constructed around these components, she argued, so interfacing them in a ninth should be quick and painless; spare parts would be numerous, making logistics for repairs far simpler; and, finally, since all the vessel needed to be was adequate, even the admitted mediocrity of most of the previous Constitution-derived classes would be perfectly acceptable. As long as it didn't turn into the failure of the Federation class --a turn of events that K'farar claimed could easily be attributed to that class's over-reaching goals and, therefor, would not befall her project-- the class would be a success.
Her very first design decision was controversial and would dictate the path traveled by the Pioneer class from blueprints to scrapyard: four nacelles.
"The motto of the Pioneer class is survivability and reliability," K'farar answered a critical Admiral Jacobi in her final pitch to Star Fleet. "I can not stress this enough. Indeed, this motto suggested the very naming of the class, as the survival of pioneers rely on these attributes being found in their equipment. A double set of nacelles was chosen not so that the class could be faster or more maneuverable at warp, as has been the case in other proposals, but so that less subspace stress would be put on any one nacelle and, therefor, all would and justifiably could be relied upon with less maintenance and longer lifespans. Further, the geometric placement of those nacelles allows for any two to be damaged or destroyed without greatly hindering the vessels performance, giving her Captain the latitude she needs to fight on or flee as the situation dictates. Yes, they weigh her down, make her less maneuverable at impulse. Yes, they make her more expensive. But not greatly so in either case and the gains in reliability and survivability greatly outweigh these losses.
"And from this one concession to practicality all other design choices filter out onto the blueprints with the application of the projects motto. She is the right ship at the right time for a small but vitally unfilled niche in our starship ecology. She must be funded now, while the window for her rightness is still open." K'farar did not convince all her listeners, but enough to get funded under review. As such, Pioneer would become the last vessel to be commissioned using original, first generation Constitution architecture.
However, political realities required certain technological concessions to upcoming trends. Thanks to the continuing success in the refitting of USS Asia, with plans to do the same to her sisters, there were already, a decade before the project got underway, undercurrents of what was called at the time, "The Great Experiment." This is not to be confused with the transwarp project which later coopted this expression. Instead, the phrase referred to the question of whether shipbuilding techniques were advanced enough that a complete refit of a front-line vessel of the 2240s could be brought up to the technical standards expected of a front-line vessel of the 2270s. To this extent, certain technologies that were neither part of Constitutions' make-up nor part of Pioneer's original plans were included in her final design. An example of these political concessions, one that was both a boon and a bane for her design, was the warp plasma delivery system.
Warp conduit system design studies prior to 2261 focused strictly on delivery of warp plasma with as little loss of energy and charge dynamics (both electric and strong nuclear chroma charge) as possible. This was not a trivial problem in conduits with lengths of several dozen meters, which can be attested to by the fact that supercomputer simulations of starship system integration had been dominated by attempts to accurately simulate plasma containment interactions since the era of Zefram Cochrane's Pheonix 200 years earlier.
This changed significantly in August 2261 with a paper published in Warp Field Technical Journals by a previously unknown theoretician with a pen name of "The Scott", a pen name that still fosters speculation that the author was none other than Montgomery Scott, famous for, among other things, being Chief Engineer of Captain Kirk's Enterprise. (Mr. Scott vehemently denies any involvement in the paper.) The paper, entitled "Spectral Charge Coupling of Warp Systems", linked warp plasma frequency and phase to warp field distortion, the coupling of subspace layers within a warp bubble and warp field tensors --both local and global-- in a seminal work that still dominates the study today. This paper can also be said to be responsible for the excitement at the prospect of a "miraculous upgrade," as one Commander scornfully described the proposed refits of the 2270s.
By the time Star Fleet Design Bureau approved funds for Pioneer, "spectral coupling" was a catch phrase even among Federation arm-chair engineers and the Design Bureau made demonstrating the technology a stipulation for its funding. Artimesia K'farar, by then having been promoted to Commander, bowed to the inevitable and agreed to the stipulation but frequently cursed the necessity of doing so. Though she never said so on the record, in private she predicted this one concession would increase the price by 25% and extend necessary R&D by 3 years. Although her prediction was accurate, subsequent studies have indicated that were it not for this technological improvement, Pioneer would have been unable to meet its design goals.
In January of 2262, a first generation Constitution Sabre nacelle was procured and research for the Pioneer Project began in earnest. Test equipment was either purchased or built to refine the reactive properties of the Sabre nacelle to the spectral and phase transitions expected for this new regime of warp flight. Initial tests looked promising, with high correlation between theory and measurement. But when the test rig was expanded to two nacelles, the correlation became chaotic. It took the team two months to track the chaos to temporal and spacial phase differentials between the plasma injected into the two nacelles. And another two months to learn that phase differentials as small as one quarter wavelength would cause chaotic instabilities. Furthermore, it was soon suggested that the situation might become worse when all four nacelles were included in the system. However, when requests were made for the two additional nacelles to be added, Star Fleet replied that until it could be shown the Pioneer Project had figured out solutions to this hurdle, there was no reason to supply them with more equipment.
Controlling plasma streams within warp conduits to this level of accuracy was unprecedented but could theoretically be done. Commander K'farar gave her team one month to draw up engineering solutions to the 1/4 wavelength problem and four months to engineer tests to see which solution would work. With this data in hand, she was able to requisition two more nacelles for the test stand, only to discover what seemed an insurmountable problem: phase coupling chaos increased exponentially as the number of simultaneous warp coil excitations. Thus, with one nacelle, normal plasma differentials were well within tolerances. With two nacelles, tolerances needed to be within a quarter wavelength. With four nacelles, tolerances were increased to 64 parts per million. These tolerances were so high that even warp plasma interactions with the local neutrino field could push the system out of whack. This was engineering far beyond the abilities of the day.
K'farar was incensed. Not only had her project been saddled with a nonsensical requirement that now seemed impossible, but the stupidly frugal requisition standards had made them waist 5 months of hard work on a solution that would be of no use. With only five days until Pioneer's next funding evaluation, K'farar ordered work on all other aspects of the project be dropped and an all-staff brainstorming session imposed for the next five days with the sole intent of finding a solution to this new problem. By the fourth day K'farar had drafted a complete report on the problem, a scathing essay on how bureaucratic red tape had wasted months of time and effort, an official request for Star Fleet to drop the spectral coupling criteria from Pioneer funding, and a letter of resignation if the request were refused.
Fortunately, late that day, a work-around was found: multi-frequency phase inducers at each injector would shift plasma properties just prior to injection and the control logic of each individual injector would be interconnected with all other injectors as well as to specialized subspace sensors via a dedicated subspace network in order to coordinate plasma injection. This system would allow on-the-fly adjustments to all plasma properties at each injector nanoseconds before its injection. Quickly programmed simulations, allowed to run all night to the following midday, predicted tolerances up to 5 parts per million, ten times what was needed. Proof of concept engineering was weeks away but the theoretical simulations were enough to keep Pioneer funded, and everyone went back to work.
Testing and integration of this design went well for 18 months. It wasn't until a full scale test of the system was underway that yet another chaotic asymmetry arose. It was assumed this behavior was an extension of the previous troubles and could therefor be found and fixed at the new injectors. It's a testament to the faith these technicians had accrued within Star Fleet that even without any sign of solution, Pioneer funding continued for a full nine months before an ultimatum was given: they had 6 months to show progress or the project would be canceled.
Again, K'farar ordered an all-staff brainstorming session. This time a full week was required to get the various design teams up to speed on this aspect of the project. After this one week period --a length of time greatly reduced by the desire of all involve to get back to their respective fields of study-- it was the team in charge of communications that realized the trouble and the weapons engineers that resolved the solution. To fully understand either, it is necessary to delve more deeply into the design of the vessel and the requirements that dictated those designs.
As already mentioned, equipment for Pioneer was to be restricted to that from the Constitution class or her variants, or easy modifications of that equipment. Even the plasma injection modifications were relatively simple to implement. The reasoning for this and for the use of four nacelles has already been alluded to earlier within K'farar's speech: long term reliability.
Early drafts of the design tried to modify the primary saucer of the Constitution to accommodate all the ship's systems: warp core, impulse engines and fuel for both; deflector arrays, tractor beams, internal & external graviton emitters; computer, sensor and communications systems; crew quarters, mess halls, environmental systems and waste processors; shields, phases and torpedoes; Shuttles, shuttle bays, personnel transporters, cargo transporters and cargo bays; repair bays, equipment and raw materials, etc. However, the most common complaints leveled on vessels that attempted to cram all the equipment in the saucer hull --Paladin, Saladin, Hermes, Ptolomy, etc-- was the cramped quarters and shortness of onboard supplies, which made frequent stops a required logistics hassle. Therefor, an engineering hull was added to Pioneer, one that looked very much like a scaled down version of Constitution's, connected via a modified Constitution neck.
The warp core, antimatter, navigational deflector, tractor emitter system, some of the deuterium and most of the transporter arrays were transferred to this secondary, engineering hull. By necessity of volume, the core was mounted horizontally within this hull. In emergencies, both the core and antimatter, located just aft of the core, could be ejected out the aft. Without the need for the core and its ancillary equipment to be in the main saucer, Pioneer was free to use its lower and mid sections for weapons and communications volume, much as Constitution did. Indeed, much of the Constitution lay-out and equipment was adopted wholesale. It was commented more than once that a crewman familiar with Constitution would feel right at home in most of the saucer section, finding little difference in the fore, port, starboard, mid, dorsal or ventral divisions. And most of the differences would be directly related to the fewer complement aboard: 240, as opposed to 430.
The aft section of the saucer, however, was greatly modified. First draft requirements did not include a shuttlebay, as transporters and docking rings were considered adequate for the vessels mandate: defensive patrol and interception. However, when it became clear this mandate would include anti-piracy patrols and the subsequent rescue missions in highly radioactive volumes of space such patrols imply, a shuttlebay of considerable size became a requirement. Since the volume of the secondary engineering hull had already been divvied up satisfactorily, it was decided to modify the saucer to accommodate the shuttlebay. The first proposed modification was to place it atop the saucer aft of the bridge, similar to the Avenger and Predator classes. But it quickly became clear this arrangement made pathways for warp plasma to the dorsal nacelles unacceptably convoluted if routed through the saucer, or unacceptably fragile if diverted directly from the engineering hull. So, instead, the shuttlebay would be inset within the aft saucer, nestled between the port and starboard impulse engines, and the warp plasma routed around one side, through the port impulse deck.
It was this asymmetry in the plasma routing that caused the problem. A warp field that had any asymmetry port and starboard --which was not the case only while traveling in straight lines through perfectly euclidean subspace-- would cause a dorsal-ventral asymmetry in the phasing of the plasma-subspace coupling, one greater than the new injector's could handle.
This asymmetry was, again, chaotic and very difficult to compensate for mechanically. Fortunately, it was a kind of plasma instability often encountered in high power phasers and could be compensated for by a technique called Free Nucleon Laser Routing, the details of which will not be covered here. In broad strokes, it required the warp plasma stream to be split in two and routed to either side of the shuttlebay through an array of jostling magnetic fields. These fields force the plasma to emit laser pulses of a frequency, phase and polarization dependent on these same properties of the plasma. This light, emitted down the conduit, interacts with the plasma downstream, making the entire stream tend towards a uniform whole. These jostling magnetic fields continued even after plasma stream reintegration, thus allowing any port-starboard asymmetries to cancel themselves out downstream.
This was a tried and true technique within the realm of phaser weaponry and it solved the problem in simulations. Unfortunately, the solution had never been engineered in conduits longer than 5 meters. Pioneer's requirements were 40 meters. This turned into a major engineering challenge that required 13 months to adequately resolve and continuously threatened to sink the project. Fortunately, many Star Fleet engineers had both sympathy for the technical difficulties and greed for the possible applications of such technology that much pressure was put on Star Fleet to keep the project funded.
However, no sooner had the theoretical and technical issues been solved, and an engineering prototype made, than yet another difficulty arose. Since the plasma conduits to the dorsal nacelles were nearly thrice as long as those to the ventral nacelles, there was a delay in the received power by the two sets of nacelles of approximately 2 nanoseconds. This is an infinitesimal span of time for a human but a huge span of time for a warp field whose local effects travel at the speed of light.
Fortunately, there was a 20th century solution to the 23rd century problem: quantum teleportation. The lased light created in the FNLR technique could be manipulated to transfer both the power and quantum state of upstream plasma to downstream plasma at near the speed of light. Since warp plasma travels through its conduits at a tenth the speed of light, precise control of this phenomena could compensate for conduit length.
This turned out to be the last hurtle presented by the Pioneer's plasma delivery system. The warp system was mated to USS Pioneer's hull in May of 2267 and began trials in October 2267. She was officially commissioned in December and a limited production of 19 more vessels were approved. Further production of the class would be ordered if she was deemed a valuable asset.
But she was not. By the time the 20th Pioneer vessel, Chief Josef, was commissioned in 2276, the refit craze of the 2270s was in full force, having proved so successful that every Constitution class vessel and every vessel based on Constitution was scheduled for a refit. Pioneers, being last to be constructed, were last on the schedule. But after a 15 years of congested shipyards, the craze had run its course and the schedule for the remaining refits spread out over a much longer time period. The scheduled refitting of Pioneer would take 8 years, twice as long as it took to go through all the Constitutions and Miranda's combined. Some Pioneers waited so long that it was decided to retire them instead of spend the resources refitting them.
In spite of this neglect, Pioneers were universally loved by the systems they protected and universally praised by their crews. Despite frequent brawls with local trouble makers, no Pioneer ever had to be abandoned in deep space, though some were brought to port so badly mauled that they could not be repaired and had to be scrapped. Even so, no Pioneer ever became famous across the Federation and very few gained notoriety outside the systems they patrolled. Their role was not to discover new civilizations, and they did not; nor was it to discover new interstellar phenomena, though several such discoveries are credited to her class, especially the USS Red Cloud, stationed North of the Brair Patch; nor to map promising new solar systems, though, again, this did happen; they never played a pivotal role in any fleet engagement, indeed their duties rarely brought them near to such engagements. However, from 2269 when USS Pioneer began her first patrol, to 2313 --44 years and a refit later-- when USS Frank Hamilton Cushing was quietly retired, Pioneers protected small, out of the way systems that were visited only rarely by other ships of the fleet. They fulfilled the niche they were designed for with yeomanly aptitude, if not outright brilliance, without a single one lost in deep space. (USS Charles Crocker had to be abandoned in system when her life-support finally gave out. Her crew were recovered without incident and she was successfully repaired.) And in the colony worlds they protected, Star Fleet enrollment was consistently higher than was the norm. And this can be directly credited to having Pioneers and her crews as role-models.
However, the largest contribution of the class was certainly the creative solutions to problems that would be faced by technicians when they began to refit the myriad Constitutions and her derivative classes in the 2270s, starting with USS Enterprise in 2271. Many of these solutions are still employed as standard fair in todays fleet. Furthermore, her proof of concept for plasma-subspace coupling was the first paving stone of Excelsior's experiment. For though transwarp drive was not discovered, many discoveries were made in the project.
Finally, having proved her abilities on the Pioneer class, in 2280 Commodore Artemisia K'farar was asked to take command of the flagging Constellation Project. Constellation became the direct technical descendant of Pioneer and went on to become, arguably, the most successful starship of that era.
USS Looking Glass has been restored to her original hardware and is now on display at the Star Fleet Museum along side her sister ship, USS Joshua Abraham Norton, which was kept as her refitted self.
USS PIONEER.................NCC-1914
USS MERIWETHER LEWIS........NCC-1915
USS WILLIAM CLARK...........NCC-1916
USS STEPHEN FULLER AUSTIN...NCC-1917
USS WILLIAM MULHALLAND......NCC-1918
USS JAMES HENRY LANE........NCC-1919
USS CHARLES CROCKER.........NCC-1920
USS JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON...NCC-1921
USS JOSEPH LAFAYETTE MEEK...NCC-1922
USS JULIA LOUISA LOVEJOY....NCC-1923
USS SITTING BULL............NCC-1924
USS LOOKING GLASS...........NCC-1925
USS RED CLOUD...............NCC-1926
USS CRAZY HORSE.............NCC-1927
USS BLACK KETTLE............NCC-1928
USS JUAN CORTINA............NCC-1929
USS WILLIAM CODY............NCC-1930
USS FRANK HAMILTON CUSHING..NCC-1931
USS WILLIAM MULHOLLAND......NCC-1932
USS CHEIF JOSEPH............NCC-1933
and the link with the rest of the shots shows the secondary hull and the shuttlebay, exactly where they're described (although your write-up described a full-circumference secondary but shortened). It reminds me of the Nakota in the Dominion Wars mod for Starfleet Command 3. I like this, the TOS version better.
