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Description

Ported to OBJ from the model created by Taldren Studios for the video game Starfleet Command 2: Orion Pirates (SFC2OP). Preview picture posed in XNALara XPS.

In the Trek multiverse thread of Star Fleet Battles (SFB), X-ships are prototype starships for new classes that are at the cutting edge of a given interstellar power's starship technology capability. Many of their features are new and they tend to look very different from their predecessors because of that, even though they usually still follow familiar starship design patterns preferred by said power. In a few radical cases and at the discretion of the power that develops it, these can sometimes even abandon traditional design preferences for new ones. To put it another way, an SFB X-ship or X-ship class is always your "look ahead" at what might be coming in the next starship design generation. There's never very many of them, but they always rate as among the best and most powerful starships of their time given their cutting-edge nature. I've already given you one of several X-ship types that are part of the SFC series with Don "Cleeve" Woligrowski's Kleev class heavy destroyer (see separate entry), all of which were made part of the series as an added feature of SFC2OP if I've researched this correctly. It's now time to bring you the two Feddie X-ships that Taldren came up with for SFC2OP back in the day, and the post-TMP era X-cruiser USS Excalibur (NCC-2002) is the first of those.

Per my own Federation Fleet Review (FFR), whose entry I based on the original Taldren data available to me at the time, Excalibur had just been completed and was undergoing her space trials as the TMP era ended and the post-TMP era began. She was originally meant to be a somewhat toned-down Excelsior, playing its Belknap if Excelsior were Enterprise. Like Belknap, she was slanted more towards military operations than survey and exploration, having only minimal capabilities at best regarding the latter. Starfleet also took this opportunity to use Excalibur as a technology testbed, much as had been done with Excelsior back during the mid-TMP era while she was still building and then fitting out, which is why Excalibur looks so strange when compared to other Excelsior generation cruiser classes. Excalibur herself wound up being the lone ship of her class in this time period due to a combination of factors - the signing of the Khitomer Accords and the resulting downsizing of Starfleet to name but two - but she wasn't forgotten. Per the later video game Star Trek Online (STO) Starfleet resurrected the Excalibur design in a considerably revamped form decades and two starship design generations later, as fitted with the technology of the late TNG/DS9/VOY era in order to serve as a somewhat smaller companion class for Sovereign (STFC, STI, STN), still in the same vein but for the exact opposite purpose (as a somewhat smaller jack-of-all-trades all-purpose cruiser class) as she had been intended for back at the start of the post-TMP era. However, that part of Excalibur's story falls outside the scope of this discussion and is best told elsewhere.

Trek gaming fans have had a lot of fun with KA/SFC's original Excalibur over the years and have come up with many different backstories and service life histories of their own, almost all of which up until STO came along put it (and them) squarely in the post-TMP era. All of that remains valid for those unofficial Trek multiverse threads, although I must point out that the current semi-canon Franchise take (from STO) is that it doesn't get built AS A CLASS until the late TNG/DS9/VOY era, as noted above and in a heavily revamped form but still retaining many of her original post-TMP era design lines. You still have the Excalibur prototype X-cruiser herself at the start of the post-TMP era, however, per the original KA/SFC, and AFAIK that doesn't contradict what was later developed for STO. No Excalibur class of starships, mind you, just the lone prototype ship. Make of that what you will. I'm sure you will. Trek fans always do. As for those of you who still want the post-TMP era Excalibur as the lead ship of her class in the post-TMP era, all I can say there is what I always say. Trek's a multiverse. Knock yourselves out. XD

This is about as solid as semi-canon gets, folks.

Live long and prosper.

TRIVIA - In all semi-canon versions of her backstory, the X-ship Excalibur was named for the former Constitution class cruiser of the same name, which was shot up and wrecked with all hands lost during the infamous M-5 war games in the late TOS/TAS era (TOS "The Ultimate Computer").

ASIDE - I've already gotten a private comment or two about my comparing the SFC2OP Excalibur to the much later SFO Excalibur, and everyone's right. These are not the same ship. I thought I made that clear, but apparently I didn't. This IMHO was the design springboard for the later STO Excalibur, something they went back to as a design starting point when they came up with that version because the original SFC2OP Excalibur was one of the best starship designs of its day (the start of the post-TMP era), one that had never been allowed to fully demonstrate what it might have achieved if a class of them had been built instead of the lone prototype, but was now going to get that chance way on down the Feddie timeline as a Sovereign generation starship class. That was the way it appeared to be written up on the first couple of sites I looked at on the STO Excalibur, so I went with it. I mean, just look at the two side by side when they're rescaled with regards to each other. See how you can get that? Made sense to me, not to mention that you see this design recycling happening a lot in real life with aquatic civilian and naval vessels. How many "old" types are out there that get revamped to varying degrees for current times? A lot. Now you can start picking nits when it comes to specific ship classes and even more with regards to specific ships, but it does happen folks. You take an old design and rebuild it for a later generation. There's more than a few real-life examples you can look up for yourself. So if you want to throw this design history angle of mine in whenever you're talking about the STO Excalibur, you might want to add the line, "The Excalibur design can trace its origins back to a single prototype that entered Starfleet service right after the end of the TMP era ...." or something like that and take it wherever you need to go from there. You don't have to, of course, but that way (and like me) you can convincingly link the two Excaliburs together as part of their own distinct Feddie starship design lineage. There's plenty of that going on with multiple Feddies starship designs in all eras by both the Franchise and the fans, in case you haven't noticed.

Description

Ported to OBJ from the model created by Taldren Studios for the video game Starfleet Command 2: Orion Pirates (SFC2OP). Preview picture posed in XNALara XPS.

In the Trek multiverse thread of Star Fleet Battles (SFB), X-ships are prototype starships for new classes that are at the cutting edge of a given interstellar power's starship technology capability. Many of their features are new and they tend to look very different from their predecessors because of that, even though they usually still follow familiar starship design patterns preferred by said power. In a few radical cases and at the discretion of the power that develops it, these can sometimes even abandon traditional design preferences for new ones. To put it another way, an SFB X-ship or X-ship class is always your "look ahead" at what might be coming in the next starship design generation. There's never very many of them, but they always rate as among the best and most powerful starships of their time given their cutting-edge nature. I've already given you one of several X-ship types that are part of the SFC series with Don "Cleeve" Woligrowski's Kleev class heavy destroyer (see separate entry), all of which were made part of the series as an added feature of SFC2OP if I've researched this correctly. It's now time to bring you the two Feddie X-ships that Taldren came up with for SFC2OP back in the day, and the post-TMP era X-cruiser USS Excalibur (NCC-2002) is the first of those.

Per my own Federation Fleet Review (FFR), whose entry I based on the original Taldren data available to me at the time, Excalibur had just been completed and was undergoing her space trials as the TMP era ended and the post-TMP era began. She was originally meant to be a somewhat toned-down Excelsior, playing its Belknap if Excelsior were Enterprise. Like Belknap, she was slanted more towards military operations than survey and exploration, having only minimal capabilities at best regarding the latter. Starfleet also took this opportunity to use Excalibur as a technology testbed, much as had been done with Excelsior back during the mid-TMP era while she was still building and then fitting out, which is why Excalibur looks so strange when compared to other Excelsior generation cruiser classes. Excalibur herself wound up being the lone ship of her class in this time period due to a combination of factors - the signing of the Khitomer Accords and the resulting downsizing of Starfleet to name but two - but she wasn't forgotten. Per the later video game Star Trek Online (STO) Starfleet resurrected the Excalibur design in a considerably revamped form decades and two starship design generations later, as fitted with the technology of the late TNG/DS9/VOY era in order to serve as a somewhat smaller companion class for Sovereign (STFC, STI, STN), still in the same vein but for the exact opposite purpose (as a somewhat smaller jack-of-all-trades all-purpose cruiser class) as she had been intended for back at the start of the post-TMP era. However, that part of Excalibur's story falls outside the scope of this discussion and is best told elsewhere.

Trek gaming fans have had a lot of fun with KA/SFC's original Excalibur over the years and have come up with many different backstories and service life histories of their own, almost all of which up until STO came along put it (and them) squarely in the post-TMP era. All of that remains valid for those unofficial Trek multiverse threads, although I must point out that the current semi-canon Franchise take (from STO) is that it doesn't get built AS A CLASS until the late TNG/DS9/VOY era, as noted above and in a heavily revamped form but still retaining many of her original post-TMP era design lines. You still have the Excalibur prototype X-cruiser herself at the start of the post-TMP era, however, per the original KA/SFC, and AFAIK that doesn't contradict what was later developed for STO. No Excalibur class of starships, mind you, just the lone prototype ship. Make of that what you will. I'm sure you will. Trek fans always do. As for those of you who still want the post-TMP era Excalibur as the lead ship of her class in the post-TMP era, all I can say there is what I always say. Trek's a multiverse. Knock yourselves out. XD

This is about as solid as semi-canon gets, folks.

Live long and prosper.

TRIVIA - In all semi-canon versions of her backstory, the X-ship Excalibur was named for the former Constitution class cruiser of the same name, which was shot up and wrecked with all hands lost during the infamous M-5 war games in the late TOS/TAS era (TOS "The Ultimate Computer").

ASIDE - I've already gotten a private comment or two about my comparing the SFC2OP Excalibur to the much later SFO Excalibur, and everyone's right. These are not the same ship. I thought I made that clear, but apparently I didn't. This IMHO was the design springboard for the later STO Excalibur, something they went back to as a design starting point when they came up with that version because the original SFC2OP Excalibur was one of the best starship designs of its day (the start of the post-TMP era), one that had never been allowed to fully demonstrate what it might have achieved if a class of them had been built instead of the lone prototype, but was now going to get that chance way on down the Feddie timeline as a Sovereign generation starship class. That was the way it appeared to be written up on the first couple of sites I looked at on the STO Excalibur, so I went with it. I mean, just look at the two side by side when they're rescaled with regards to each other. See how you can get that? Made sense to me, not to mention that you see this design recycling happening a lot in real life with aquatic civilian and naval vessels. How many "old" types are out there that get revamped to varying degrees for current times? A lot. Now you can start picking nits when it comes to specific ship classes and even more with regards to specific ships, but it does happen folks. You take an old design and rebuild it for a later generation. There's more than a few real-life examples you can look up for yourself. So if you want to throw this design history angle of mine in whenever you're talking about the STO Excalibur, you might want to add the line, "The Excalibur design can trace its origins back to a single prototype that entered Starfleet service right after the end of the TMP era ...." or something like that and take it wherever you need to go from there. You don't have to, of course, but that way (and like me) you can convincingly link the two Excaliburs together as part of their own distinct Feddie starship design lineage. There's plenty of that going on with multiple Feddies starship designs in all eras by both the Franchise and the fans, in case you haven't noticed.