USS Appalachia NCC-52136

Among the first Steamrunner-class vessels completed on Copernicus Fleet Yards in 2373, its shakedown cruise on the outskirts of the Sol system coincided with the Borg incursion into Federation space, and Appalachia proved instrumental in the hours leading up to the Battle of Sector 001.

With only a skeleton crew on board, the ship shadowed the cube at maximum sensor distance and took detailed readings before the rest of the fleet was in a position to attack. This tactical information proved the basis for Vice Admiral Hayes' battle plan. After finishing repairs following the battle, Appalachia was properly commissioned and placed under the command of Captain Ahmed al-Rashid.

• This description incorporates elements written for the ebook "Star Trek: Corps of Engineers #22" and for the RPG sourcebook "Star Trek Adventures: Utopia Planitia".

USS Budapest NCC-64923

Specialized in responding to needs of engineering and logistical assistance, Budapest was under the direct purview of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Its commanding officer was Captain Sarah MacDougal, a career engineer.

Commissioned just a few years before the Dominion War, Budapest quickly gained a reputation during the war for completing reconstruction efforts faster than expected or even thought possible, moving from one war torn location to the next, helping rebuild after Dominion attacks and boosting morale along the way. At the end of the war, Budapest was among the flotilla of support ships sent to Cardassia to assist with its reconstruction.

USS Cerberus NCC-75110

The Battles against the Borg at Wolf 359 and Sector 001 both showcased several flaws in Starfleet battle readiness and threat response capabilities. One of the main concerns in the eyes of Starfleet Command was that early on in both battles, the Admiral's flagship in command of the fleets was destroyed, leaving the remaining forces uncoordinated and with a crippled chain of command.

Cerberus was built specifically to try and offer a solution to this problem. The ship was not intended to separate into three independent crafts during battle as other Prometheus-class vessels, but rather to function as a resilient flagship able to withstand heavy barrages of enemy fire and still coordinate fleet movements effectively.

The redundancy inherent of the class design, with its 4 main warp nacelles, 3 independent computer cores, 6 impulse engines, and many other redundant systems, made it a perfect candidate for this role. The ship still retained the ability to separate in an emergency, but its spaceframe was heavily modified to prioritize total hull strength when the ship was connected together.

Originally intended to enter service in 2375, delays with the spaceframe modifications pushed the commissioning of Cerberus to 2376, just enough to miss the end of the Dominion War. The vessel became the new flagship for Rear Admiral Ross, and while it didn't see the heavy fighting it was designed to withstand, still proved a successful and versatile peacetime flagship for the Admiral, showing the flag in many diplomatic missions during the post-war reconstruction of the Alpha Quadrant.

• Cerberus was mentioned as the post-war flagship for Admiral Ross in several Star Trek novels. The registry number came from the RPG sourcebook "Star Trek Adventures: Utopia Planitia".

USS Emmett Till NCC-82277

Emmett Till was among the first vessels of its class commissioned, under the command of Captain Ezri Dax, following the completion of her assignment as CO of Spector. The ship was the first to venture beyond the remnants of the fractured Romulan Empire, greatly expanding the Federation's knowledge of the far reaches of the Beta Quadrant; making first contact with 8 new warp-capable species in the process, two of which established formal diplomatic relations with the Federation not long after.

• The Emmett Till was created for the DS9 retrospective documentary 'What We Left Behind', shown in a hypothetical season 8 of the show. The exterior of the ship was designed by John Eaves, and can be seen in more detail here.
• The registry and ship class are conjectural on my part. One of Eaves' concept pieces for the ship has the registry 'NCC-2277', so I simply added an 8 in front of that number. As for the class, 'Perseverance' illustrates the long road still ahead of us to reach a future where we learn from history rather than willfully forget it. Perseverance is also the proposed name for the next Mars rover, which will be similar in design to the rover Curiosity. Hence, I think the name also works due to the similarities this starship design shares with the Curiosity-Class from 'Star Trek: Picard'.
• The ship was named after Emmett Louis Till, an African-American boy who in 1955, at only 14 years old, was brutally lynched by a white mob in Mississippi, USA. As DS9 producer Ira Steven Behr (who named the starship) put it: "It seems to me that in order to reach a complete and healthy society we need to do two things. One, the historical record is broken and needs to be fixed. There’s lots of information floating around, but very little context. The past is no longer even prologue, it’s pretty much ignored. Two, we have to own our mistakes, our failures. Again, it seems to me that unless we recognize and remember our mistakes, embrace them, we are doomed to repeat them over and over and over again. Say hello to the 21st century. So, if I’m living on Federation Earth 300 years from now it would make me feel good to know that as Starfleet sails among the stars Emmett Till is sailing along with them. He is remembered. We own his story. He is part of our journey".

USS Enterprise NCC-1701-C

After the disappearance of the Enterprise-B in 2329, Starfleet spent 18 months looking for the lost starship. Officially there was no mention of a new Enterprise being in consideration at that stage, quietly however the third spaceframe being built for the brand new Ambassador class at Utopia Planitia was left unnamed, in case the search for the Enterprise-B proved unsuccessful.

In 2332, the Enterprise-C was commissioned and launched from Earth Station McKinley, under the command of 33-year-old Captain Rachel Garrett, who was promoted after an impressive tour of duty as XO on Hood. One of the largest starships ever built at that time, Enterprise was designed first and foremost for deep-space exploration, and served with great distinction for 12 years.

In 2344, while on course to Archer IV, Enterprise received a distress call from the Klingon outpost on Narendra III. When the ship arrived, the outpost was under attack by 4 Romulan Warbirds, standing no chance of survival. With sensors showing the nearest Klingon ship was still hours away and wouldn't arrive in time, Captain Garrett took the decision to engage the Romulans, despite being heavily outgunned. The Enterprise-C was able to destroy one of the Warbirds before being overpowered and eventually destroyed by the three remaining Romulan ships.

By the time the nearest Klingon ship arrived at Narendra III, the Romulans had withdrawn victorious, but the picture of what had transpired was clear from the remaining debris. Enterprise's sacrifice was regarded as both honorable and glorious by the Empire, and proved in the Klingon's eyes that the Federation could be a worthy ally.

• This description incorporates elements written for the reference book "USS Enterprise Owner's Workshop Manual".
  
• The dedication plaque is based on its depiction on the 2016's release of the "Star Trek Encyclopedia", which is supposedly how the plaque looked like on the set.

USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D

The Federation flagship for over 8 years, the Enterprise-D was the third Galaxy-class starship to enter service (after the prototype Galaxy, and Yamato). It was commissioned on the 4th of October, 2364 under the command of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. It had a distinguished career of exploration and discovery, including over 40 first contacts with sentient species.

The ship's successful career was cut short in 2371. Just after receiving a major refit, the ship was attacked over Veridian III by a renegade Klingon ship under the command of the Duras sisters. While Enterprise was victorious in the end, its warp core had sustained enough damage that a breach was inevitable. The crew managed to escape to the saucer section and separate the ship, but the warp core explosion pushed the saucer into the Veridian III gravity well, where it crash landed. Casualties were low among the crew, which was eventually rescued by starships Farragut, Brattain, and Trosper.

Though the ship was deemed lost to Starfleet, the saucer section was eventually retrieved from Veridian III, as its discovery by the pre-warp Veridian IV natives would disrupt their natural course of development. By the 2390's the Starfleet Museum started restoring the Enterprise-D. The interior was returned to its pre-refit look; and the secondary hull was replaced by that of the USS Syracuse.

Fontana Station

Since before the founding of the Federation, several diplomatic conferences have been held in a small habitat dome on the surface of the otherwise uninhabited planetoid Babel, located on the Wolf 424 system. Following a series of incidents during the 23rd century involving attempts at sabotage and espionage, Federation officials came to understand how ill-equipped said habitat dome had become. Being a structure more than 100 years old at that point, it had become impossible to guarantee the safety of dignitaries at future conferences.

In 2274, the decision was made to construct a small starbase in orbit of Babel, to host all conferences going forward. This would not only mean a more defensible structure in the case of a direct attack (something which worried Starfleet in particular given the tensions with the Klingon Empire at the time), but also provide a more future-proof structure able to be updated and upgraded for generations. This new orbital station would be named after the Earth ambassador who first proposed a conference at Babel in 2154, and who was later instrumental in writing the Federation Charter.

Inaugurated in 2286, Fontana Station counted with state-of-the-art diplomatic facilities and amenities; including 32 conference rooms of varying sizes; accommodations for over 250 guests; multiple independent environmental systems to accommodate a wide range of species with their own environmental needs; large scale transporters for diplomatic parties; and several shuttlebays able to receive a large number and variety of small transport crafts.

• I came up with the idea for this station as a homage to Dorothy Fontana (1939-2019) shortly after her passing. She was a writer and story editor for The Original Series, among many other things, and was instrumental in developing the United Federation of Planets as the political entity it became, most notably through writing the episode "Journey to Babel".
  
• The design of the station itself is from a painting by Rick Sternbach, seen in Picard's quarters during TNG. The book 'Star Trek Maps' states that Babel is a planetoid with 3 moons, which matches the painting, so in my head the painting is supposed to depict this very station. Perhaps it was Picard's first posting, or perhaps being a diplomat himself he saw the station as an icon of the diplomatic corps.

USS Lalo NCC-43837

After 17 uneventful years transporting cargo through the Federation, Lalo was lost with all hands on stardate 43994.8. While on a freight run from Zeta Alpha II to Sentinel Minor IV, it became the first Federation starship to encounter the Borg incursion of 2366. The crew was able to send a partial distress call before being presumably destroyed.

• While Lalo was only mentioned by name in TNG, the class name comes from an internal production memo. The exterior shape of the ship is a fan-made design by Bernd Schneider, which was eventually used in official novels and comics to represent the ship.
  

USS Potemkin NCC-18253

A ship of the line when first commissioned in 2308, by the late 2360's Potemkin was an old but reliable workhorse mostly assigned missions inside Federation space, such as outpost resupply runs, VIP transport, or low-level diplomatic assignments. The ship is currently under the command of Captain Marcus Bertrand, its 11th commanding officer.

USS Ross NX-76710

The first ship of its class, Ross was launched in 2381 under the command of Captain Azeri Sull, and was assigned to explore the Shackleton Expanse out of Narendra Station, as part of Starfleet’s 20th Fleet.

The ship incorporated the first holographic first officer in Starfleet, Commander EXEO, who ran on a dedicated computer core with its own holographic matrix. Other inclusions are a large diplomatic promenade on deck 8 for receptions; and a Cetacean Ops department on deck 13 crewed by 22 Odanian officers.

• The Ross class was designed by Thomas Marrone for "Star Trek Online" in early 2020, in collaboration with The Streampunks RPG group for their "Star Trek Adventures" campaign, "Clear Skies". I was approached to design the Ross bridge for the campaign shortly afterwards. The USS Ross (now NCC-76710) was made canon when it appeared in the background of several episodes in seasons 2 and 3 of "Star Trek: Picard".

USS Thunderchild NCC-63549

Thunderchild was one of the early testbeds for the Akira-class design. Under the command of Captain Evelyn Hoffman, its first few years of service were spent patrolling the edges of Federation space, mapping two worlds inhabited by pre-warp civilizations and surveying 6 new star systems during this period.

3 years after the ship was launched, a Borg cube was intercepted by Starfleet on its way to Earth, in what would become known as the Battle of Sector 001. Thunderchild's heavy ablative armor resisted several direct impacts of Borg energy weapons, and even managed to dissipate a tractor beam attempting to lock onto the ship. Thunderchild survived the battle, and was the starship to score the most direct hits on the Borg cube during the encounter, thanks in no small part to the Akira class having an unprecedented number of torpedo launchers.

USS Victory NCC-9754

Victory was nearly 80% complete when the Khitomer Accords were signed. Starfleet Command evaluated scrapping the vessel before completion, however Admiral Gihlan from the Copernicus Ship Yards, who oversaw the development of the Constellation class, convinced Command to carry on with construction, modifying Victory to instead fill a standard heavy cruiser role.

Following an initial period of uneventful patrols of the Tholian border, Victory quickly proved its usefulness when a plague struck Epsilon Canaris III on stardate 13408.7. Despite not being assigned to the relief efforts, Victory's powerful warp engines allowed the ship to reach the afflicted planet faster than any other vessel, where its vast shuttlebays were quickly converted into quarantine areas for the sick population, helping to quickly isolate the virus and develop a cure. By the time the medical ship Houssay reached the planet, Victory already had the situation under control, impressing both the Epsilon Canarians and Starfleet Command.

Initially thought of as an obsolete ship before even leaving drydock, thanks to the ingenuity of its crew Victory became an example of how cold-war era ship designs could excel at peace-time roles.

USS Yeager NCC-61947

One of the first Saber-class starships to enter service, Yeager was commissioned under the command of Captain Melissa Binde and assigned to patrol shipping routes in the Typhoon Sector, a known hot spot of Nausicaan raiders. During its first 15 months of deployment, Yeager disabled 6 Nausicaan ships before eventually driving the raiders off the area altogether.

On stardate 50893.5, the Borg began a new incursion into Federation space. Yeager was part of an assembled response fleet, and assigned to the third combat wave alongside starships Anchorage, Hiroshima, Tannu Tuva, Galatea, and Pearson. By the time the fleet managed to engage the Borg, they had already entered Sector 001. Yeager performed admirably during the battle, but received extensive damage to its ablative armor and power systems in the engagement.