Guide:Cavalry
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| Cavalry | |
|---|---|
| Class Overview | |
| Category | light destroyer |
| Operational | 2151-2193 |
| Constructed | 33 total |
| Dimensions | |
| Length | 190.0 m |
| Beam | 37.8 m |
| Height | 50.0 m (sensor dish retracted) 55.1 m (sensor dish extended) |
| Mass |
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| Performance | |
| Cruise Speed | w 2 |
| Max Speed | w 3.1 |
| Endurance | 2 years |
| Complement | |
| Officers | 9 |
| Enlisted |
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| Tactical Systems | |
| Beam Weapons | Cavalry
Strachan
Mars
Turing
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| Missile Weapons | Strachan
Mars
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| Shields |
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| Transporters | Cavalry, Strachan (original)
Cavalry (refit), Strachan (refit), Mars, Turing
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| Auxiliary Craft | 2 atmospheric shuttlepods |
| Historical | |
| Ships of Note |
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| Canonicity | |
| Design | FASA |
| Name | FASA, SFC, Timo |
| History | FASA, SFC, Timo |
| Delta Dynamics | SRM #299 |
Background
Hobbyist's Guide
The UESF military doctrines of the 2140s were still based on the experiences of the rather lopsided battles against unorganized feline Xindi forces in what were actually just peacetime police operations. The blind faith in "heavily" armed and armored cruisers was badly misplaced in the actual conflicts of the era, as was the idea of operating without major front line supply and repair bases. Yet the UESF was still very much limited to operating in or near the Sol system and the major Human settlements elsewhere, in terms of technology, politics, and tradition alike. Even when these triple barriers began to crumble, a fatal conservatism prevailed in strategic thinking. When Earth in 2151 fielded a series of new destroyers, they were not propelled by the revolutionary deep space engine of the Enterprise class, but by the much humbler fusion-powered S66-D, capable only of warp 3.1 at very best. In face of the recent experiences of the exploratory cruiser Enterprise (NX-01) with deep space threats, the UESF should have immediately discontinued the light destroyer program and diverted the funds to longer-ranging combatants. Instead, the Admiralty deemed the design ideal for system defense and proceeded with full production.
Tactical scenarios were based on unrealistic extrapolations of a limited dataset: it was predicted that invaders would utilize large starships conceptually similar to the Vulcan voidships and such an adversary would best be fought with short-ranged strike vessels possessing great offensive firepower. The anti-fighter defense role, factually more important against the continuing pirate threat, would be left to the already existing, heavily-armored cruisers bristling with defensive plasma cannon. Thus, the Cavalry (DD-600) class of destroyers featured only four 6 GW plasma turrets and dedicated significant room to twin missile tubes or a single hypermodern phased particle cannon. Also, heavy armor was concentrated on the bow of the hull and frontal profile was minimized by reducing beam, for once overriding the doctrinal call for aerodynamic performance.
The narrow hull gave unwelcome commonality with the preceding Djartanna destroyers: internal volume was at a premium. The utilitarian hull featured just four decks, of which the lowermost was essentially divided in two by the ventral radiator assemblies of the heavily armored compression fusion reactor amidships. The forward part of the bifurcated deck housed ventral plasma cannon banks, while the aft one held power transfer systems. The two middle decks housed the missile launchers or the alternately carried Type A phase cannon forward, engineering spaces abaft, and crew berthing amidships. Deepest within, just forward of the reactor core, were the sickbay on upper and the mainframes of the Yoshimitsu combat management system on lower middeck. The top deck was actually numbered Deck 2, as atop its fire control spaces and bow plasma cannon banks lay a series of crew-accessible superstructures, including the navigation bridge, a retractable sensor dish, the top of the reactor core and a lifepod station. The upper level of a stern shuttlebay also extended above Deck 2, giving enough internal volume for carrying of two Monarch or Skeet atmospheric shuttlepods. Two airlocks/docking ports on Deck 3 rim facilitated intership access and a single GP transporter was added in a series of refits between 2156 and 2159.
The multiple means of disembarkation were quite necessary as, despite the hull itself having rudimentary atmospheric maneuverability, the Cavalry as a whole possessed no operational landing and takeoff capability. The single, 120,000-ton set of fourteen-spool warp coils was packed into an open-frame standoff nacelle well below the stern, on a sturdy twin-pylon mounting. Since the coils were somewhat less modern than the powerplant, much of the reactor output was left unused by the warp drive system. This benefited the high performance impulse engines, whose twin nozzles in the aft corners of the hull could fire past the nacelle for violent maneuvering. Linear acceleration was also commendable, surpassing that of both the lighter Gangess and the heavier cruisers. An emergency nacelle separation maneuver would provide even greater agility, yet leave the ship hopelessly crippled afterwards.
Operating a single-engined combat vessel was a novel experience for the UESF and many civilian specialists more familiar with the configuration were employed in training the crews. Two Dnestr class commercial transports were purchased for training duty and modified internally to provide a more destroyer-like service environment. In return, it was customary for a while to paint the destroyers with false viewports and cargo pod seams to reinforce the illusion of a freighter-like silhouette, although few adversaries could be fooled by this. It was not the intended job of the destroyers to protect convoys or lure in pirates in any case. The standard mode of system defense operations was reactive rather than proactive: to pounce at approaching enemy fleets from several directions with slashing attacks, then retreat as a single formation towards an ambush set up by a heavy contingent of cruisers. The fatefully misguided Xindi bombardment of the Caribbean in 2153 and its follow-up actions involving Klingon and further Xindi penetrations seemed to justify the doctrine, in which intrusions by a low number of heavily-shielded point targets would be deterred by decisive counteroffensives of similarly few UESF units.
Other operational experiences showed that the concept required some fine-tuning, however. UESS Carronade (NDD-601) was lucky to survive a Romulan raid on Defense Outpost 4 on January 1st, 2152—the first attack truly verifiable as the doings of the Rihannsu, although the evidence was initially mistranslated just as badly as in the earlier Intrepid and Enterprise encounters, thanks to extreme Romulan prowess in information warfare. The plasma cannon armament was found to be singularly ineffective against the Romulan shields and later destroyers received an updated secondary armament—but not of the phase cannon type, which had also performed poorly in the engagement. Instead, advanced warp-accelerated lasers, developed and tested using the Cavalry testbed UESS Mars, were soon substituted for the obsolete plasma cannon mounts. Torpedo tubes were installed on the last two units of the original production run (twin tubes replacing the main phase cannon), as well as on seventeen second-batch vessels (single tube supplementing the particle beam armament). The armor grid was reconfigured no less than seven times to produce optimal shielding to match the latest Romulan firing patterns. Throughout the Romulan conflict, the Cavalries still remained much more vulnerable to enemy retaliation than the Messier, Triton, Enterprise cruiser modernizations, Achilles, or Christopher newbuilds, or the almost equally massive modern Marshall heavy destroyers, all of which now mounted Andorian shield generators.
Still, the Cavalries proved to be formidable warcraft and matched in the elegant balance of martial skills what they could not achieve through simple strength in shielding, weaponry, or numbers. The last of the original 29 ships were completed in 2156. The Marshall class had recently been introduced to meet the new tactical requirements, combining deep space range and endurance with heavy armament—the latter concentrated in a fighting section derived from the Cavalry hull. The early first loss of this new class made it possible for the older destroyer type to extend continuity in another fashion as well: the penultimate Cavalry, DD-627, would perpetuate the name Patton in the upcoming years of conflict. UESS Cavalier (DD-628) in turn was the last Cavalry loss in the Romulan War, shot to pieces well after the official declaration of ceasefire and limping to a crash landing onto an unexplored, barely M-class world on May 24th, 2161. Seven months later, on January 21st, 2162, rescuers found all the survivors of the crash, led by LT Lawrence D. Baker, alive and in good health. Their recovery was a long-awaited positive media event in the middle of the postwar atmosphere of disillusionment, ambiguity, and anxiety.
Four unfinished late-standard Cavalry (aka Mars subclass) hulls were completed in 2160 with shield generators and two single 80 MW warp lasers and equipped with advanced sensors for long range armed reconnaissance, to serve the UFP Star Fleet as the Turing subclass. Their sorties in the Tarn conflict of 2162-64 were success stories that overshadowed the early UFP defeats and helped secure the Star Fleet reputation, even when yet another military conflict ended in an apparent draw. These vessels proved useful in later exploration duty as well, whereas most of the 21 surviving original Cavalries and Marses were sold forward to other UFP navies (chiefly Earth Fleet) in 2161-68, pending the formation of an operational common fleet.
Delta Dynamics
Cavalry class light phase gun destroyer
The durable maxim that generals are always prepared to fight the last war holds true with the proposal, design, and production of the Cavalry light phase gun destroyers. This is not to be read as an admonishment of that decision, though the vessels could barely operate even as chaff against the later Romulan threat of the 2150s. Instead, it is an acknowledgment of the defensive concerns of the United Earth Starfleet in the 2140s.
In that period, the most urgent requirement for Earth and her then-major colonies were ships to serve in what were essentially police operations to quell the irksome raids of the Kzinti, a blustering feline race with origins to the (then-unknown) Xindi civilization of the Delphic Expanse. The UESF had developed and placed a great deal of faith in cruisers armed and armored with the most cutting-edge technology currently available to Humans, in order to protect ships of the Earth Cargo Authority and United Earth Space Probe Agency. This demand on the heavier vessels meant that system defenses either relied on patrol cutters—often without the capacity to bring heavier weapons to bear—or cruisers that happened to be system-adjacent, not a scenario any planetary administration would accept.
Tactical scenarios also envisioned a potential alien invasion to be predicated upon a large starship—such as made familiar with the Vulcan voidships—which would best be countered by multiple interceptors armed with forward-facing heavy weaponry conducting constant and coordinated strikes. As these vessels would not need to be focused on interstellar missions, they would have no distance nor FTL requirements of the deep-space explorers and cruisers, nor anti-fighter weaponry often required for the counter-piracy roles of convoy duty.
Hence, the Cavalry class light phase gun destroyer was designed to carry four 6-gigawatt plasma cannons on the bow, with a heavy Type A phased particle cannon in the 500-gigawatt range centered on the bow as well. Heavy polarizable armor was embedded on the dorsal fore to allow lined-up strike approaches and, on the ventral side, as protection during the violent banking maneuvers away from the attack run. The warships had one S65 ventral nacelle powered by the S66-D fusion reactor via two sturdy pylons, with a maximum capacity of warp 3.1, more than enough to allow system patrollers to form up for interception runs. The subspace matrix normalizer was deemed a necessary addition to the nacelle itself, as a formation of closely-maneuvering starships would cause localized tetryons to behave chaotically, impacting the stabilization of warp fields on the trailing ships. The waste delta radiation from the normalizer dictated a position as far as possible from inhabited interiors; the open frame just forward of the device helped to reduce unnecessary mass.
The crew of 84 “enjoyed” an intimate operational environment, as the narrow hull had to hold all departments’ equipment in a fore-to-aft configuration necessary to restrict the beam perspective. There was enough room on the dorsal stern to support a two-pod shuttlebay with aft entry, a much more tolerant design than the ventral bay of the Enterprise class explorer that debuted the same year. The two dual-use airlock/docking ports located on opposing sides of Deck 3 and the lifepod station on the dorsal midsection comprised the entirety of embarkation points, until the first inclusion of a single-person transporter in 2156. Though equipped and supplied for an endurance of two years, the “mission range” reflected more upon the lack of capacity of some colonies to support their defenders.
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Strachan subclass light torpedo destroyer
The most dominant feature of the Cavalry class light destroyers—to those who crewed them—was the cramped interior space. That was all fine and good for a vessel tasked with staying within the relative confines of a system’s neighborhood where a patrol might last, at the most, up to 5 or 6 weeks. Since the defensive mission was to protect the colony planet (or Earth and its system outposts, for a few select ships), the confined internal spaces were tolerable, as going groundside was a common evolution. Starfleet did not deem the mission as dependent upon a higher-warp nacelle nor the latest in innovative reactor designs, such as with the dilithium-regulated total annihilation reactor of the concurrent Enterprise design.
However, that did not mean the Cavalry class was underpowered. The fusion S66-D warp reactor was more than capable of fully energizing the plasma necessary for the S65 nacelle, a recent design utilizing 14 well-established coils, with plenty of power remaining to also fully charge the two high performance impulse engines. This allowed the ship to make drastic sublight maneuvers that would bring her onto target and then off on an unanticipated bearing before too much counterfire could be drilled into her armored hull. That energized plasma was also more than enough to allow all four plasma cannons and the main phased particle weapon to engage in rapid-succession chain fire or all-out alpha strikes.
Unfortunately, that proved to be underwhelming when the ships met the Romulans in the 2150s. Though the enemy went unidentified at the time, his shielding proved extremely effective against the UESS Carronade’s plasma and phase cannons in the raid upon Defense Outpost 4 in January 2152. Early analysis suggested that a torpedo weapon might be the necessary factor to hammer those shields to the point that energy weapons fire could then penetrate and strike the protected hulls. Since the Cavalry’s electroplasma system for the plasma cannons could not be easily swapped out for ones with the capacity to support the higher-output phase cannon, and because they had a higher rate of fire, it was instead decided to swap out the main weapon. Two vessels already under construction, UESS Strachan (ND-610) and UESS Procope (ND-611), had two torpedo tubes installed alongside the centerline. The majority of the complement of 24 torpedoes were stored openly in the passageways aft of the tubes, along overhead rails that ran into the bay; taller crewmembers either had to bend down to traverse the passageway or take an alternate route.
The Strachan subclass light torpedo destroyer also saw the addition of additional polarizable armor at three points on the forward section and both pylons. This was the second of eight evolving armor locations the entire class would undertake in order to counter the latest in Romulan firing patterns.
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Mars subclass light torpedo destroyer
The second full production run of the Cavalry light destroyers (the Strachan subclass being an alteration to the first) was fully influenced by the growing tensions (and associated conflicts) with the unknown Rihannsu. Not only was additional polarized armor installed to cover larger areas exposed to known enemy aim points, but the four plasma cannons of the Cavalry and Strachan ships were substituted by advanced warp-accelerated lasers. Though down by one tube in comparison to the second subclass, a dedicated magazine enabled 12 torpedoes to be effectively stored and efficiently primed for combat. The dedicated facility did reduce the overall complement by 50%, but the firing rate increased by almost that same amount, a critical factor in combat that was often timed in mere minutes.
Seventeen Mars subclass light torpedo destroyers were completed between 2153 and 2156, with four additional hulls suspended when it became clear the conflict was rapidly transitioning into open warfare in areas too far-flung for the light destroyers. The last Mars to be built, UESS Cavalier (ND-628), was also the last Cavalry lost to Romulans, heavily damaged well after the September 2060 ceasefire was proposed. The United Earth Starfleet ship crash-landed on a borderline Minshara-class planet in May 2161; the crew was rescued in January 2162, unaware of the founding of the United Federation of Planets but soon lauded as heroes in the postwar period of collaborative rebuilding.
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Turing subclass light destroyer (United Earth)
Four Mars light torpedo destroyers, previously mothballed in an incomplete state in 2156, were commissioned in 2160 with advanced sensors and graviton shielding, in order to fulfill a long-range armed reconnaissance role. Because of their extremely low cruise speed (warp 2), they were not rolled up into active task forces, but instead sent on solo missions to seek out Romulan activity in low-threat areas. Due to the large amount of internal space required to support the sensors’ computing and added defensive systems, the ships were armed with only two 800 MW laser emitters and one central 500 GW phased particle cannon, a throwback to the first Cavalry. It was understood these were peashooters when compared to the Romulan warcraft, but it was a reminder to these commanding officers—generally alumni from other ships in the series—that they were there to find, report, and get the hell out of Dodge. It could be presumed that this message sunk in, but in reality the ships were barely activated before the ceasefire proposals started winging their way through subspace.
The armor placement depicted on the Turing image here represents the last one presented on all ships of the Cavalry class; Romulans had discovered that the Deck 3 personnel hatches had inherent structural weaknesses associated within the bulkheads supporting the atmospheric pumps for the airlocks. The Turings left drydock with an armor configuration intended to rectify that vulnerability.
One other way these ships stood out from their predecessors was in their incorporation into the UFP Star Fleet, an honor not afforded to any other Cavalry, Strachan, nor Mars. While the Turing light destroyers served admirably in the next conflict to also end in a draw—against the Tarn in 2162 through 2164—the first three subclasses in the Cavalry series were partially sold to other local UFP navies. As within the newly re-titled Earth Fleet, the small warships served as gapfillers until more advanced defensive craft were produced, though no later than 2168. The Turings, however, filled an early exploration role for that respective command, until being decommissioned in 2193.
As aficionados of early Star Fleet well know, the five founding members of the Federation each took responsibility for developing one major division of the newly unified force. The Exploration Command, as represented by the Human’s United Earth Space Probe Agency (UESPA), was overseen by the senior officer of the (now former) United Earth Starfleet, Admiral Samuel Gardner. It was his decision to incorporate a blocky variation of the UESPA warp delta into the command insignia, as utilized in the Turing class patch.
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United Earth Starfleet (later Earth Fleet) livery -
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United Federation of Planets Star Fleet livery -
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Gallery
Other Images
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Starboard
Star Fleet Registry
Turing subclass
- USS Poisson (NCC-02)
- USS Turing (NCC-244)
- USS Lantz (NCC-282)
- USS Nicomedes (NCC-326)
Supporting Documents
External Sources
- Vintage Starships: "2141 – Cavalry": includes 3D viewer
Notes
- Though not identified as a subclass within the Timo text, the last two vessels of the Cavalry class were modified for torpedo weapons. As part of the Delta Dynamics' commissioning award program, TheRochellaProject suggested "Lt Harcus Strachan, a Canadian cavalry officer who served in WW1 and was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions in the Battle of Cambrai". The first of the two ships (the other being the Procope) will be named after the cavalry officer, with the subclass also taking the name.
- The prefix "USS" has been changed to "UESS" for ships of the United Earth Starfleet.
- The registry for the Phalanx was changed from DD-612 to ND-613, and Patton from DD-627 to ND-627.
- The reference of Poisson as a testbed for advanced weaponry was changed to Mars, which came early enough for that role. That removes "USS Poisson" from the "Timo" text, but I recommend it be retained for the Delta Dynamics-verse.
- The platform that extends aft of the two pylons has been removed in the DD-verse images, as it was not identified by Timo and served no noticeable function.
- The prefix "USS" has been changed to "UESS" for ships of the United Earth Starfleet.
- Of the Cavalry-types produced, only the four of the late Turing subclass were transferred to the UFP Star Fleet. The others were operated by Earth Fleet.
- Task: as the registries project is about to change the hull numbers of the Turings, issue #299 will need to be updated.
References