Guide:Trent/Apache/Kovaris
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| Trent / Apache / Kovaris | |
|---|---|
| Class Overview | |
| Category | light destroyer / scout |
| Operational | 2205-2250, 2287-2295 |
| Constructed | 70 total:
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| Dimensions | |
| Length |
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| Beam | 76.8 m |
| Height |
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| Mass |
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| Performance | |
| Cruise Speed |
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| Max Speed |
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| Endurance | 2 years |
| Complement | |
| Officers | 11 |
| Enlisted |
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| Tactical Systems | |
| Beam Weapons | Trent (both), Kovaris (Flts 1 & 2):
Horatio (both), NCC-418, Apache, Dace (both), NCC-823 (2214):
Kovaris Flt III:
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| Missile Weapons | Horatio (both), Dace (both):
NCC-418:
Kovaris Flt III:
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| Shields |
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| Transporters | Trent (both), Horatio (both), NCC-418, Apache, NCC-823 (2214):
Kovaris (Flts 1 & 2), Dace (both):
Kovaris Flt III:
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| Auxiliary Craft | Trent (both), Horatio (both), NCC-418, Apache, NCC-823 (2214):
Kovaris (all), Dace (both):
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| Historical | |
| Ships of Note |
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| Canonicity | |
| Design | SFB, FASA: Denial of Destiny |
| Name | Kovaris SotSF/SFB, Apache SFB, LUG |
| History | SotSF, SFB, own
|
Background
The Defense Command arsenal was, in the early 2200s, deemed adequate for present Federation defensive needs, even if insufficient were any expansion of Star Fleet’s area of responsibility to take place. While great attention was given to keeping the cruiser fleet up to the demands of the day, little in the way of advance planning and virtually nothing in terms of contingency plans existed for the destroyer force. The vaguest motion for procuring two or three dozen modern heavy destroyers to succeed the Marshall was waived on cost-effectiveness basis – such behemoths would merely directly compete with the light cruisers that were already struggling with affordability issues. As pressure gradually mounted for creating a viable defense for the outer holdings of the UFP, it thus was the lighter destroyer designs of yore that Star Fleet pondered as templates for the necessary attrition units. Yet by 2204, two rounds of requests for proposals had yielded little of consequence.
There were several inherent limits in the aerodynamic hull form, even when its warp-dynamic characteristics were well known and its manufacturing technologies perfected. Modern total conversion powerplants required considerable interior volume, which in the classic lifting body could only be provided by overall upscaling. This in turn would result in wasted volume and mass elsewhere on the ship, especially when the high output powerplant would allow the impulse engines to be run with less propellant than ever before. Supercruising warp engines would be too massive to cater for practical atmospheric operations anyway, and the optimal placement of coils should be dictated by warp field geometry concerns rather than center of gravity.
The new priorities in mind, Empress pointed out the obvious advantages of a separable space propulsion section, as employed in the Placido. All the shortcomings of the aerodynamic hull could be remedied simply by installing an all-new, volume-optimized element in its place! Once given a tentative go-ahead, Empress engineers modified the upper half of USS Neudorf to accommodate a Fairey total conversion main powerplant, and installed a single vertical pylon to sturdily mount a PB-17 warp nacelle. Its powerful coils, even if far from being state of the art, nearly doubled the field output from the Placido standard and brought cruise speed up to full warp four. Top speed would eventually be set at warp 6.0, there being potential for more but at the risk of excessive wear and tear. Impulse propulsion for the resulting bulk of nearly 100,000 tons was provided by SSMW’s C-2 engines, little modified from the previous century.
The propulsion hull was neatly plugged into a rectangular ‘socket’ segment of the new 75 m saucer hull (although in theory it could be attached to a Placido spaceframe as well, practical arguments against this were legion). The blocky structure held secondary power systems as well as supplies and support systems for detached, emergency-only operations. Twin shuttle landing bays and hangars flanked the drive section. Aft-facing rolling doors and full precision tractor beam approach control represented the most modern technology, finally in a working combination. The two shuttlepods were intended to give the type some Placido-like flexibility in replenishment and reconnaissance operations – a necessary expansion of capabilities considering the miserly procurement policies and the unlikelihood of any dedicated scouts or supply ships being fielded in the near future. Yet the ships were to feature transporter systems as the primary method of ship-to-ship or ship-to-surface transfer, and carried two twin-pad Mk I systems plus novel 22-pad, dematerialization-only evacuation units inside their primary hulls. Despite the saucer’s modest diameter, modern life support gear, sensors, command and control spaces and weapons systems could also effortlessly be accommodated there, as no propulsive or power generation machinery intruded to the mission-dedicated part of the vessels.
But what kind of actual mission equipment should the new destroyers carry? Forced-intermix torpedo technology was not yet reliable in the early 2200s, so a conventional fusion and photonic torpedo launcher was selected as the main long range armament. Yet advances in Federation shielding technology (no doubt mirrored by similar developments in Klingon and Romulan fleets, or so Star Fleet Intelligence insisted) had made fusion and even antimatter warheads of dubious worth in combat. Cruisers like Mann, Caracal and Horizon could carry heavy and complex phase cannon for ripping apart the enemy shields and letting the torpedoes in, but the modern destroyers had no room for such dual gear. Thus it was decided to equip a certain number of the new destroyers with Type L phased particle guns only, along with the associated power loops and batteries, while others would instead carry the torpedo launcher and its magazines. Common armament would include warp-accelerated nanometer lasers for close combat. In addition to port and starboard banks with good forward hemisphere coverage, the torpedo destroyers would feature a tail ‘stinger’ to compensate for the more restrictive cone of fire of their main weapon.
The destroyer program now crawled forward with a decided lack of enthusiasm. In the next three years, twenty Trents split evenly between the subtypes were completed in what was optimistically considered the initial batch, allowing the Marshall to finally retire. The next ten units were shunted to alleviating the scout shortage; they were armed with lasers only so that tactical sensors could be fitted in place of the heavy armament. The tooling was already being mothballed for ‘potential future needs’ when the altercation at Gamma Demetrius put haste to destroyer procurement again. Rather than produce more Trents, Star Fleet opted for a preplanned upgrade wherein the I pylon was replaced by a T one, and two PB-17 engines were mounted, less for the slight increase in dash speed and maneuverability and more for redundancy in case of deep space mishaps.
Forty of the (by new standards) lightweight vessels were ordered by Star Fleet. USS Kovaris (NCC-460) at 52,210 tons of hull mass was the first of twenty to be launched with phase cannon armament in October 2210, USS Dace (NCC-462) at 59,255 tons of hull mass the first of twenty to carry the torpedo launcher in March 2211. Yet there was more to escalation than the mere construction of ships. How should the art of flotilla operations be reintroduced to Star Fleet whose last real attrition units had been retired in the 2170s? Simulations and drills would only make the crews competent in waging the last war – how had the threat environment changed in the intervening half a century?
Rather than wait for an opportunity for meaningful flotilla action, Star Fleet decided to create one: in 2211, a heavy military and diplomatic task force was sent to Beta Rigel to secure the key strategic region from ‘piracy’, the conventionally expected opening move of a hostile star empire. In claiming control of the Rigel system, Star Fleet brought about more confrontations than it could have imagined. Mere firepower could not uproot the Nausicaans, Orions and Elasi from their positions of power at Rigel. Even less feasible were attempts to challenge the anarchy of what had been the Delphic Expanse. Yet the strategic decision had been sound: beyond the veil of chaos, a mighty enemy from the past was indeed formulating its own designs on the future of the region. The Klingon Empire was finally recovering from the aimlessness and internal discord brought about by the prolonged interregnum and the Vulcanian misadventure. Examples of strong leadership had emerged, plans of conquest had been drawn, and representatives of the Empire once again approached the Rigelian despots in hopes of securing the funds that would make these plans a glorious reality.
The Orionite rulers were fully aware of the possibility of another destructive war, were the economic interests of the empires to come to an open conflict. Later studies of Rigelian archives have revealed that Rigel X in fact arranged an ingenious system of ‘alternate parking hours’ to keep the ships of the two empires from meeting each other and still allow for trade relationships with both regimes!
The fears of the Rigelian despots soon turned into grim reality. Even though the Rigel region was not to be the focus of the conflict launched in 2218, it would be touched by the war nevertheless. The battle of Arquin Pillar in 2223 was typical of the border skirmishes fought between expeditionary fleets of the empires, in which both sides tried to inflict damage on the enemy forces without endangering their precious cruisers. It was also something of a swan song for the Trent destroyers, which had become grossly outdated by the new threat. The battle serves as an excellent example of the radical changes in space warfare that took place during the lifetime of the Trent class.
The very fact that there were Trent and Kovaris vessels present at all is attributable to an engine refit effected in 2214-15. The Pleshun PB-25, a lighter counterpart (104,000 mt) to the Mann PB-20 propulsion system that had opened the warp four cruising era, was a supercruising engine destined for future greatness. Alas, the feeble powerplants of the refitted destroyers did not allow the engine to demonstrate its full potential. Despite the greater safety margins of PB-25, two out of nine Trents sent to Arquin had to perform an emergency venting en route, falling behind and missing the action.
The primary Star Fleet offensive weapon in the battle was the spatial torpedo, capable of use in warp engagements. First adopted by the United Earth Stellar Navy in 2111, with antimatter warheads developed in 2148, the weapon had behaved erratically since adoption. For the Trent, though, it was nothing short of a raison d’être. Far less dependent on a ship’s power output level than lasers or particle cannon, a torpedo launcher could keep an aged ship apace with an escalating threat simply by introducing newer and deadlier types of warhead. While the Trent retained some of the directed energy weaponry of the original design, this was of little use against modern Klingon shields. Thus, everything in the design was in practice dedicated to bringing the torpedoes to bear: the spectrum of sensors installed in the refit, the allocation of power and computing resources, the scope of the impulse drive and reaction control system upgrades. In other words, every tactical choice from engagement range to approach vector was already built into the ship.
Klingons taught Star Fleet the hard way that inflexibility and dissimilar combat equal disaster. The preferred weapon of the Klingon forces, the disruptor bolt, had shorter range than the Star Fleet torpedo, but engagement range was not for Star Fleet alone to decide. It also had a higher rate of fire; it cost a fraction of the torpedo per shot or per target destroyed; and while it could be evaded at long ranges, it could not be shot down by lasers or particle beams, knocked off course by jamming, or blocked by destroyer-level shields. The disruptor bolt could only be defeated by an ‘all-round’ warship, not one relying on a single superior weapon system.
Another milestone in the battle was the first massed use of sublight fightercraft by a Star Fleet task force. The first of Star Fleet’s gambles with unconventional fighting techniques was a dismal showing indeed. Mainly deployed from the brand-new carrier Queen Christina (NCC-446, Valkyr class), the various fighters were unable to inflict any damage on Klingon vessels, or even mount an effective defense. Using their traditional strafing attack technique, the Klingon forces simply warped in, fired disruptors and warped out before the fighters could react and gather for a strike. The captains of the destroyers Kwajalein (NCC-406) and Jacoubet (NCC-479) received posthumous Medals of Honor for their valiant protection of the cruisers of the task force when the fighter cover failed, having mounted daring ambushes for the Klingons and forced them to perform complex sublight maneuvers to get a clear shot at the Federation cruisers. By exploiting these moments of sublight movement, the Federation fighter force finally managed to cripple a Klingon cruiser of D4 type and, with the help of the Star Fleet cruisers, to kill two Klingon destroyers. The prolonged and ultimately indecisive battle left a bitter taste in the mouths of the fighter doctrine proponents, yet was not enough to condemn the concept altogether.
A third important turning point in the Arquin Pillar battle was the realtime communication with Fleet headquarters made possible by the improved subspace radio. The Trent class was fitted with the device and its adjoining relay buoy layer in conjunction with the engine refit, enabling the ships to contact starbases as far as 50 lightyears away with minimal delay. Smaller ships were still unable to carry the bulky and energy-hungry device, having to resort to subspace radio types that did not appreciably exceed 2150s performance. Still, the expanding relay network was gradually bringing realtime communications capacity to all UFP space.
In addition to Kwajalein and Jacoubet of Arquin Pillar fame, two other Trents made it to the history books. USS Targa (NCC-467) managed in 2222 to disperse a magnetic storm threatening Balaka III by using her experimental pulse wave warheads – a Vulcan technology briefly toyed with by Star Fleet, as the efforts to perfect the antimatter torpedo stumbled. On a grimmer side, USS Enderbury (NCC-480) became Star Fleet’s first pulse wave torpedo ‘kill’ when a defective warhead detonated right after leaving the launcher. The explosion ripped open the pressure hull of the destroyer and killed most of the test crew immediately; radiation took a further death toll, as hyronalyn treatment was still unknown to Federation science in early 2219.
After some five years during which the Trent and Kovaris flotillas desperately fought back the Klingon battle cruisers where they could, Star Fleet was finally able to field destroyers properly armed with forced-intermix antimatter torpedoes. The large Detroyat and Saladin classes quickly replaced the older types in all frontline operations; the lighter destroyers were relegated to Activation Class Two and sent to the now blessedly silent Romulan border. The nimble yet hardy combatants never saw action against Klingon forces again, to the great disappointment of their commanders and crews. Official retirement for the last Star Fleet Kovarises came in the ‘big sweep’ of 2250.
In the era of paranoia and over-escalation after the Organian disappearance, a handful of Kovaris destroyers were in 2287-88 reactivated and equipped with phaser V emitters. A single Common Claw torpedo tube similar to the Larson refit units was installed on each ship, to make better use of the effort put into developing these weapons. The hull modifications needed were minimal, since the Mk 8 assembly took only 35% of the space needed by the old Saladin-era launchers. Propulsion systems were refurbished and uprated for warp 5 cruising and warp 8.8 dash speed, the former achieved by respooling the coils with modern materials, the latter simply by reprogramming the limiters.
The reactivated if not revigorated Kovaris ships served in light destroyer duty during the height of the Klingon crisis, protecting the similarly anachronistic fusion-powered Titan carriers in one simulated planetary assault mission after another but luckily never seeing true action. The ships were mercifully decommissioned and scrapped in 2295.
Gallery
Trent light phase gun destroyer
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Horatio light torpedo destroyer
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Apache scout
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Kovaris light phase gun destroyer
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Dace light torpedo destroyer
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Trent Flight II light phase gun destroyer
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Horatio Flight II light torpedo destroyer
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Kovaris Flight II light phase gun destroyer
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Dace Flight II torpedo light destroyer
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Kovaris Flight III light destroyer
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Other images
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USS Trent -
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USS Dace -
USS Stenersen, a 2287 refit of the Kovaris subclass -
USS Apache
Supporting Documents
Notes
- The original article made the significant variants to be between the one-nacelle Trents and two-nacelle Kovaris subclass, with the Apaches a minor offshoot. However, I decided to further expand upon the difference between the phase cannon and torpedo platforms, essentially "adding" two additional subclasses with the Horatios and Daces.
- The Apache sub-class had a different series of hull numbers, due to the classification as a scout.
- To be clear, the Trent (and Apache) sub-class were not upgraded to the T-pylon double-nacelle configuration; this was left to the Kovaris sub-class new-builds.
- The reference to the battles of 2218 and 2222 appear intended to be a part of the Four Years War, but game-canon has this put off until the early 2240s.
- The paragraph detailing the use of torpedoes in the class has been changed (in description) to better align with the Spacedock construction rules. No dates were changed, but proper nouns for the technology were adapted.
- In response to the Flying Fortress ransacking, Star Fleet assigned Kovaris sub-class ships to escorting supercruising convoys.[1]
- USS Stenersen is, of course, my tribute to Marty.
- I've named the torpedo variant of the original series (Trent) the Horatio subclass. The first three ships of the Trents lineage will be of the phase gun variant, but thereafter, the two will swap out, with the Horatios odd-numbered, until the tenth phase gun variant is completed.
- I decided the mass of the individual PB-25 nacelle to be 104,400 mt, almost 25% lighter than its parent PB-20.
- I've removed the reference to navigational deflectors on the propulsion hull ventral bows, deciding the (formerly) auxiliary navigational deflector emitters on the saucer hull bow acted as the primaries.
- I've made Adrasil's torpedo destroyer prototype game-canon, with USS Ascot (NCC-418). The idea was that it was a 2209 predecessor to the Dace subclass two-nacellers, rejected as unreliable.
References