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Recommended BGM: "One Last Message" by Andrew Lockington - www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-_13Z…

1. Introduction
As with my previous submission, what you see here is not my own work. The design of this starship (what you see here is the 5th revision out of 7 total) was done by based on parts created and made available by She is a reworking of one of ’s earlier works, the U.S.S. Archer (NCC-2755), which can be seen here: fav.me/d1xa27b as well as her counterpart from the alternate reality of the J.J. Abrams-directed movie franchise, which can be seen here: fav.me/d28zfug Also, a “retro” version of the design created with TOS-era technology can be seen here: fav.me/d5ov9jj In addition, the U.S.S. Farrington (NX-2010) and her backstory is the intellectual property of model builder April “Kitbasher Girl” Welles, which I am using with written permission.

Of course, “Star Trek” itself is the creation of Gene Roddenberry and the many talented men and women who worked with him. The vast majority of my ideas are based on the board game “Star Fleet Battles” by the Amarillo Design Bureau and its computer-game incarnations, “Starfleet Command”/“Starfleet Command II: Empires at War” published by Interplay, with some mechanics borrowed from “Star Trek: Legacy” published by Bethesda Softworks. The design of the Archer-class is directly inspired by that of the Enterprise NX-01 from “Star Trek: Enterprise,” which was done by Doug Drexler and was ultimately based on the Akira-class warship designed for “Star Trek: First Contact” by Alex Jaeger of Industrial Light and Magic. Certain references I make throughout this section are inspired by the amazing website, “The Starfleet Museum” by Mr. Masao Okazaki, which can be accessed at www.starfleet-museum.org/ and some of the Resilient’s technical specifications are based on numbers from the “U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701A Deck Plans: 25th Anniversary Collector’s Edition” published in 1992 by David Schmidt.

(This is why the ship’s speed ratings, which are meant to be largely identical to those of a late-2280’s refitted Constitution-Class Heavy Cruiser, are expressed in “Transwarp Factor” units and given in numbers matching the old, pre-TNG warp factor system, before the upper limit of Faster-Than-Light travel was firmly established as Warp Factor 10 and before the word “transwarp” got its modern association with the Borg transwarp conduits and slipstream travel. The “Transwarp” referred to here, as in “Transwarp Factor 8.9,” has more to do with the pseudo-“transwarp” that Starfleet tried to achieve in the U.S.S. Excelsior (NX-2000) trials of the late 2280s as shown in the 3rd feature film.)

2. The Myth of the “Perfect Heavy Cruiser”
Though the design of the Archer-class heavy cruiser ultimately traces its roots to the revolutionary NX-class deep space exploratory cruisers operated by the United Earth Space Probe Agency (Earth Starfleet) in the 2150s, its more immediate origin can be found in a single prototype built for feasibility testing in the mid-2260s, then tucked away for nearly a decade. The Archer-class project initially came about as a consequence of the difficult birthing process of Starfleet’s most legendary vessel design, the Constitution-type Class 1 heavy cruiser. In the early 2240s, the plans for the Constitution-class proposed a revolutionary new layout unlike almost anything Starfleet had ever commissioned before and was considered highly controversial. With a powerful, charismatic champion in Starfleet captain Robert T. April, the Constitution’s supporters triumphed over their detractors and the class was approved for mass production as the new workhorse of Starfleet, poised to lead an upsurge of exploratory, economic and military activity as the Federation increased its influence throughout the Alpha Quadrant. Constitution (NX-1700) was to herald a wave of modern designs from the Federation- and Siegfried-class dreadnoughts to the humble Saladin-class destroyer, Hermes-class scout and Ptolemy-class fleet transport/tug, all of which used her as their springboard.

Though the actions of individual starships like U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701) would permanently endear the Constitution-class starship to the Federation public as the veritable symbol of Starfleet and do much to advance the Federation cause, as the 2260s dawned and the Constitution-class cruisers pressed into almost their second decade of active service, the Admiralty and ASDB staff reviewed the many reports sent back by Constitution-class crews and a consensus began to emerge among some in Starfleet that those naysayers who had opposed the widespread adoption of the type had not simply been the “obstructionist, outdated ultraconservative crackpots” that the pro-Constitution popular press had painted them out to be. Though the Constitution-class starship had indeed proven to be a strong and capable platform with a large amount of interior space, good shielding, an ample main armament of twin-turret Phaser banks and Photon Torpedo launch tubes, a configuration optimized for “massive modularity” and capacity to achieve high impulse and warp speeds, she was not quite the “perfect design” that Captain April and his camp had advertised. The Federation’s borders had rapidly increased by 2264 as the Department of Colonial Operations settled scores of newly-discovered worlds and the UFP gained new members with each passing year, but the Constitution was a product of the 2240s. While she had, in theory, been just barely capable of conducting five-year missions throughout the Federation of 2240-2245 without stopping at Starbases for replenishment or refitting (barring significant disasters), there were some in the Admiralty who now believed that her range just wasn’t enough to adequately cover the Federation of the 2260s even as she was already being pushed to the limits of her endurance by hard-driving captains like James Tiberius Kirk of Enterprise (NCC-1701).

The Constitution was also reported as not having the optimal level of maneuverability that ASDB had initially desired from a top-of-the-line heavy cruiser. In fact, mission reports suggested that the Federation design was rather sluggish compared to the Romulan Bird-of-Prey and Klingon attack cruiser types that she regularly had to deter, and was hopelessly outperformed by most Orion pirate raiders, which could run circles around her; she was also unable to fully match her Klingon rival’s ability to accelerate to high warp speed, hampering attempts by patrolling Constitutions to chase down marauding Klingon attackers. Furthermore, the Constitution’s then-revolutionary layout of a saucer-shaped primary hull separated from a cylindrical secondary hull by a long, interconnecting dorsal spar, was an evolution of designs used in the Daedalus and Asia-class cruisers that preceded her; while this design optimized the interchangeability of the ship’s components, made repair, refitting, and mass-production simpler, improved crew survivability by making saucer separation easier and was (quite rightly) heralded as the future of Federation shipbuilding, it also significantly increased her draft, made her much easier to target, provided a dangerous structural weakness should enemy ships concentrate their fire in that area and made the vessel unwieldy and difficult to maneuver using the Federation’s conventional saucer-mounted RCS quad system. Moreover, it was still a sore point within the Starfleet procurement and logistics commands that the creation of the Constitution-class heavy cruisers had necessitated the development of a whole new generation of starship technology manifesting in a completely new series of parts that had to be mass-produced from scratch to allow mass production of the new ships, an enormous and costly investment that Starfleet pursers were determined to recoup. A small, but determined cabal of Starfleet admirals, frontline officers and naval architects grew convinced that an answer to these perceived shortfalls was needed – one that could be built using the existing parts that had been developed for the Constitution program, in order to maximize ASDB’s returns on its investment in Captain April’s pet project.

3. A Prototype is Born
In 2262, a small panel of designers at the Advanced Starship Design Bureau began work on an experimental prototype frame to meet those needs. The mysterious new ship, designed, built and launched under little fanfare or scrutiny from the fleet at large and never meant to actually be a production design, looked radically different from the Constitution but was actually an intriguing mating of Constitution-class parts with the basic architecture of a ship from a generation earlier. In the period of human expansion leading up to the Earth/Romulan War of the late 2150s, the Enterprise (NX-01) and her NX-type sisters were hailed as the pinnacle of U.E.S.P.A. ship development. Her unusual catamaran layout, featuring a single saucer-shaped main hull with twin propulsion booms (each ending in an impulse engine fairing) leading to a pair of engines linked by a symmetrical warp field governor, was designed almost entirely around meeting the challenge of allowing the ship to exceed the “Warp Five Barrier” that dogged the naval architects of her day. Although such a catamaran shape had not been adopted by the U.E.S.P.A. or its Federation Starfleet successor since the last NX-class starship was finally retired from duty shortly after the founding of the United Federation of Planets in 2161, the ships’ design was still upheld among Starfleet shipbuilders as a case study in efficiency; the ASDB’s unnamed prototype would put that case study into practice, becoming the first new starship built to this layout in almost a hundred years (fav.me/d5ov9jj ).

The ASDB prototype, still unnamed and unregistered, was finally completed at Starfleet’s Aldebaran construction yards in late April of 2264. At this time, the continued service of the Constitution-class heavy cruisers on the front lines of the fleet and the attitude of most in the Admiralty and procurement boards that Starfleet needed to fully recoup its investment in the Constitution, Saladin/Hermes, Federation and all other classes derived from her design meant that there was little perceived need for rapid development and production of new ship classes; rather, Starfleet Command focused most of its resources on maintaining and refitting the considerable number of vessels it had already developed and constructed, including the new Kongo and Bonhomme Richard subtypes based on the Constitution hull. The Admiralty in particular held stubbornly to this philosophy despite heavy losses of Constitution-class ships to deep-space accidents and enemy attack, a newly resurgent Romulan Star Empire deploying long-ranging, cloaking Birds-of-Prey equipped with deadly plasma torpedoes and concerns over growing Klingon expansionism, making it seem like the prototype being put through its paces at the proving grounds near the Aldebaran shipyard would never see active service, nor would any of her kind be built.

However, to the cabal of admirals and designers who ordered her into existence and marshaled the resources to make her possible, the unnamed ship was already proving her worth. The new vessel had been built along the general lines of the NX-class starships, but 23rd century advancements made for some major differences that enabled Starfleet designers to both channel the strengths of the original design while also providing small but important innovations that promised to solve the problems that her Constitution-class cousin had been accused of having. In the 2150s, the Enterprise NX-01 had been lauded for incorporating a then-revolutionary plasma supercharger as an intermediate stage in the warp drive initiation process. The device further energized the electro-plasma stream directed from the ship’s main engineering deck to the warp coils in her nacelles, and was credited as the most critical breakthrough making it possible for Enterprise to reach speeds of up to (and, in one extreme, in excess of) warp factor five. This supercharger device was now a standard piece of equipment already built into the plasma distribution systems of 23rd century starships, but the engineers of the NX-based ASDB prototype borrowed the concept of an extra stage, building a new device reminiscent of the old supercharger into the catamaran booms of their new vessel, dubbed a “plasma recirculator.”

Though not truly a “new” invention, the recirculation device provided an innovative way to boost the efficiency of the ship’s warp propulsion system beyond anything that could be achieved just by modifying a starship’s existing engineering setup. However, because the ASDB prototype featured a large secondary hull with a fully-sized M/AM reactor core and electro-plasma facilities in the position where the original NX-class starship merely had a symmetrical warp field governor, the new system was routed somewhat differently from the old, forcing electro-plasma fresh from the ship’s engineering assembly through one pathway straight up the nacelle braces into the nacelle pods to power warp flight. But then, spent plasma from the nacelles was fed back through the nacelle braces farthest from the central hull into the catamaran arms, where it would be shunted through a loop in the opposite direction of the nacelles and forced through a turbocharger stage reminiscent of the NX-class’ original supercharger in order to re-energize it. This “recycled” plasma was then fed back to the nacelles, continuing to power the warp coils within, before finally being processed as spent plasma in a Constitution-class design would be. This innovation increased the amount of charged electro-plasma available to the warp nacelles, boosting M/AM fuel economy and increasing the range of the prototype significantly beyond that of the Constitution-class while negating the need to design a completely new warp propulsion system.

Reverting to the sleeker, more planar and more compact layout of the NX-class starship also benefited the prototype ship’s maneuvering characteristics. The additional space for impulse engines provided by the catamaran hull booms allowed the new ship to mount two extra deuterium-fusion rocket propulsion units in addition to the main impulse engines already built into the rear of her primary hull, thereby making her significantly faster than the Constitution at sublight speeds (though at the cost of proportionally increased fuel consumption from the additional engines). Without the clumsy and vulnerable dorsal interconnecting section and with the warp nacelles mated to braces extending straight from the catamaran-bound main hull, the starship’s mass was redistributed in a way that made her more responsive to RCS thruster fire, better balanced and easier to steer while also reducing her cross-section, making her slightly but appreciably more difficult to target and also allowing her to fit into smaller drydocks held over from earlier time periods that would not have been able to service a starship with the great draft (height) of a Constitution-, Federation- or Siegfried-class design. The only significant issue that came about due to the prototype’s modified NX-class layout lay in the arrangement of its armament. While the ASDB prototype faithfully reused much of the primary hull design created for the Constitution-class, an issue quickly arose when her designers discovered that the placement of her plasma turbocharger system, main computer core, central cargo hatch and bow-mounted auxiliary deflector systems meant that the space normally used for forward-firing Photon Torpedo launchers in the Constitution-class design were no longer available. Instead, the ASDB designers were forced to institute the rather awkward compromise of mounting two pairs of twin-tube torpedo launchers in the sides of the saucer section’s outer rim, one pair to each side. Although all of the project’s staff could see that this layout would be a hindrance in combat given the narrow forward firing arc of the standard photon torpedo launcher (the starship would essentially only be able to fire torpedoes in broadsides), the fact that the design was only a proof-of-concept and seemingly would never see mass production or combat conditions made this a secondary concern.

The ASDB prototype continued running tests and recording flight data well through the end of the 2260s as her Constitution-class stablemates came and went from their five-year missions. As she remained something of an under-the-table “skunk works” project run by a small group of stubborn Starfleet personnel, her existence was still not well known, exhibited in her continued lack of a formal name, registry, or commission. Some of the officers involved in the project had already taken to calling her the “U.S.S. Nameless” (after the famous pseudonym used by King Odysseus when confronting Polyphemos the Cyclops in The Odyssey) while others, who felt the ship deserved some more respect, preferred to dub her the “Archer,” after the legendary captain of the first of her NX-class forebears who would rise to become a Starfleet admiral and the 2nd president of the United Federation of Planets. The latter nickname was ultimately deemed more “appropriate” for the prototype vessel and, though she was still not formally named or commissioned, all involved with the prototype would eventually come to call her the “Archer” and the name was simultaneously (and quietly) held back from the list of names for “official” vessels currently launching from Starfleet’s shipyards.

4. Enter the Archer-Class
The tumultuous events marking the transition from the 2260s to the 2270s would ultimately change the Archer’s fate. In 2269, the Constitution-class heavy cruiser U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701) completed a historic, but very dangerous five-year mission of exploration, diplomacy and deterrence under Captain James Tiberius Kirk. When she returned to drydock in Earth orbit, Kirk and crew were informed that a special fate awaited the vessel. In the time between 2265 and 2270, Starfleet had pioneered yet another new wave of technology in its neverending effort to push the limits of Federation engineering and capabilities while also maintaining parity with all neighboring powers, rendering all ships of Enterprise’s 2264-era layout obsolete. Although the Enterprise was already 25 years old by 2270, her enduring popularity as Starfleet’s “flagship” vessel made many in both Starfleet and the Federation public reluctant to see her scrapped and the procurement and logistics boards, after approving yet another bout of expensive innovation and shipbuilding, were eager to see if it was possible to retrofit older ships to a new standard rather than building new vessels outright. In a difficult process that took almost a year, the Enterprise went through a transformation nearly as radical as the conversion of the British large light cruiser H.M.S. Glorious into an aircraft carrier in the 20th century and emerged as a nearly totally new ship. Technologically, the refit was a success – the refit program had been proven feasible and the Enterprise, once more at the cutting edge of Starfleet technology, had been granted a new lease on life – but the cost in time and resources was nearly the same as it would have cost to just build a whole new ship from scratch. The Constitution-class design was deemed important enough that nearly all surviving Constitutions and Constitution variants were scheduled for the refit, but Starfleet ultimately decided against similarly refitting the remainder of the more antiquated ship designs.

As the 2270s passed, the refitted Constitution-class heavy cruisers were pressed back into hard frontline service with Enterprise (NCC-1701), leading the charge once more, on a second five-year mission under now-Rear Admiral James T. Kirk and his reassembled crew. Though the heavily rebuilt starship continued to hold her own against all challenges she faced, the refits did not really change the flaws that the cabal behind the ASDB “Archer” prototype had cited in her inherent design. The vast increase in speed provided by her new engines had increased her range, but the size of the Federation and its territories had increased as well, leaving even more space for the Constitution-class to patrol and all but negating the effects of the new engines. And though the Enterprise Refit of 2270-2271 had been successfully advertised to the public as a grand demonstration of the Constitution’s modularity at its best, the flaws the layout engendered in the ship’s handling, maneuverability and size as a target were unchanged. In fact, the need to incorporate larger twin-tube torpedo launchers in a refitted hull that didn’t have enough space wound up being resolved by mounting the launchers in a dedicated housing located where the dorsal interconnector section mated to the stardrive section, creating a “deckhouse”-like protrusion that made the launchers extremely vulnerable to attack as the U.S.S. Ballista discovered the hard way during a confrontation with one of the Klingon Empire’s new C-7 battlecruisers; the Klingons were able to identify the Ballista’s torpedo launchers just by visual examination and focused their firepower there, punching through the cruiser’s shields and destroying the entire torpedo launcher assembly before she could retaliate.

By 2273, tensions were beginning to rise throughout the Federation’s borders with all of its neighboring powers as, unbeknownst to Starfleet, Terran Empire operatives from the Beta-Universe had already begun to replace Starfleet ships and officers with their Terran counterparts in a bid to engender a quadrant-wide war that would weaken the Federation, committing war crimes for which the Federation would be held accountable. The Constitution-class starships were still Starfleet’s primary long-ranging cruiser units, but their flaws were still present. And despite their refits, their internal frames were still holdovers from the 2240s and 30+ years of hard service were finally beginning to take their toll. It was time, many admirals felt, for new production – and one particular admiral, an Andorian who had been part of the “Archer” prototype’s development program, believed she had just the thing. On May 1st, 2273, the prototype starship was finally fully unveiled to Starfleet as her crew received orders to take her to Earth Spacedock to undergo a similar redesign and refit as the one Enterprise had been through three years prior, in order to bring her “up to spec” with the rest of the fleet and also fix a number of her own idiosyncratic design issues – in particular, the location of her photon torpedo tubes. Upon completion of said refit on May 9th, 2274 the vessel fitted out and embarked on a rigorous series of shakedown cruises to test her new systems and ensure that the advantages of her original NX-based hull form were still relevant.

When her trials were complete, the ship was approved as the blueprint for a new class of heavy cruisers to be mass-produced as a longer-ranging supplement for the Constitution-class in Starfleet’s cruiser squadrons and in the process, finally given her official name and registry: U.S.S. Archer (NCC-2755). In this finalized launch configuration, the Archer measured three-quarters of the length of the refit Constitution (226.5 meters), had 70% of the draft or height (49.9 meters) and the same beam or width (141.7 meters) due to using a nearly identical design for the primary hull, the widest part of the ship. Due to her lack of a dorsal interconnector or “neck” structure, she was four decks shorter (17 decks), but many of her decks were laid out in a similar way to her Constitution-class cousin with her main bridge on Deck 1, the captain’s ready room on Deck 2, a central galley on Deck 3, many scientific/medical laboratories and accomodations for VIP’s and senior officers (including the captain’s stateroom) on Deck 4, a cavernous main shuttlecraft bay occupying the aft ends of decks 12 and 13 and an enormous M/ARA reactor core running the entire height of her secondary hull from Decks 10 through 17 with the primary reactor control rooms on Decks 15 and 16. Due to her smaller size and increased automation, she carried a significantly smaller crew than the Refit Constitution-class with a standard complement of 350 officers and enlisted rates but was also capable of accommodating up to one and a half times as many passengers in an emergency, albeit in cramped conditions. She could hold enough provisions for a standard five-year mission; this coincided with Starfleet’s prescribed five-year refit cycle for most ship classes.

The Archer ( fav.me/d1xa27b ) would ultimately be a unique ship as she herself was a refitted prototype dating from the 2260s, but the vessels built from her model would be among the first completely new vessels built by Starfleet in the 2270s. The Flight 1 Archer class vessels, based on a modification of the platform of the original Archer (NCC-2755) (see the image at fav.me/d5ops9n ) were all built to the same basic Class-1 heavy cruiser (F-CA) standards that their Constitution-class stablemates had been held to. With very similar power plants and identical warp engine assemblies, the ships could achieve the same speed ratings as the Constitution-class, with a standard cruising speed of Transwarp Factor 8.9 on the 22nd-23rd century warp scales, a flank speed of Transwarp Factor 12.3 and an emergency top speed of Transwarp Factor 18.6; at this emergency speed, her engines were designed to automatically shut down after 12 hours to prevent burnout. However, their innovations (including the plasma recirculator preserved from the ASDB Archer prototype) meant that they could accelerate to cruising or maximum warp speed significantly faster than the Constitution and that the ships were able to maintain high warp speeds for much longer periods of time, appreciably increasing their maximum cruising range. The Flight 1 variant also kept the prototype's two auxiliary impulse thrusters, one on either side of the aft saucer section; a design trick that would be repeated when Starfleet upgraded the Excelsior class starships nearly a decade later. The original Archer and her Flight 1 descendants nominally maintained the same armament mounts and shielding as the Constitution-class with six twin-turret Phaser-1 (long range/offensive) batteries arrayed on the dorsal and ventral primary hull and two twin-turret photon torpedo launch tubes firing forward, but the model of the photon torpedo launchers and their optimal location on the ship continued to dog the Archer-class’ designers.

The refit of the Archer prototype and the design’s refinement for mass production came on the heels of the U.S.S. Ballista’s disastrous loss of her entire torpedo launcher housing, leaving the Archer-class designers under much heavier pressure from their Admiralty backers to use their ship’s promise of increased structural integrity and decreased target cross-section as a selling point to push the design. The Archer-class team had originally wanted full parity of armament between the Constitution and the Archer and insisted on installing torpedo launchers capable of firing warheads of the exact same caliber as the type used on the refit Constitution-class while also trying to avoid the massive “deck house” launcher that caused the Ballista so much trouble. The Archer wound up with a compromise measure; instead of fitting both tubes together in each individual launcher, necessitating a large space to house all of the launcher assemblies, two tubes were moved up to the lower saucer section, straddling the auxiliary navigational deflector while the other two were kept in a much smaller “deck house” assembly. The lower two tubes were still in an exposed structure, but they were still harder to target and much less exposed than the ones on the Constitution and even if they were destroyed, the saucer tubes would remain unscathed. However, this design would not prove satisfactory as the Archer prototype was refined into the Flight 1 Archer-class.

During the refinement stages, the starship design was slated to use a brand new main navigational deflector that would be powerful enough to render her auxiliary saucer deflector unnecessary, but its removal created the issue of what to do to fill in the space left behind. Because the ultimate selling point of any Federation cruiser design would be its multipurpose nature, the most popular proposal was to use the space to house additional laboratories and machine shops that the original design didn’t have the room for (but that the Constitution featured prominently). Furthermore, additional pressure on the Archer-class design team to continue reducing the vulnerability of her torpedo launchers to enemy fire combined with the proposed rearrangement to cause a conundrum as to what to do with the new Archer configuration’s torpedo armament. With a procurement deadline fast approaching, the problem was temporarily solved in the Flight 1 ships by updating a design from the 2230s featuring individual launch tubes housed in small turrets in the saucer section that could fold flush with the hull or extend for combat. The antiquated design was noted for giving the torpedo turrets a somewhat better field of fire than the fixed, forward-mounted assembly used on the Constitution-class, but it came with a serious drawback in that the design of the turret’s expansion/retracting mechanism could not accommodate a full-sized 2270s era torpedo launcher, necessitating the installation of a scaled down, weaker version on the Flight 1 Archers though they compensated for it by also offering a slightly increased rate of fire. The less potent, downsized torpedo launchers and the extra complexity that the plasma recirculator added to her electro-plasma transfer conduits would remain the two greatest weaknesses of the Flight 1 Archer design (and, for the latter, of the class as a whole).

5. The Flight 2 Archer Class
When launched in August 2277, U.S.S. Resilient (NCC-2931) was an Archer-class heavy cruiser built to Flight 2 specifications, based on a redrawn design introduced in 2276. Among other significant improvements and alterations, the vessel now featured a more “patriotic” paint scheme with bright blue highlights to her hull, her reaction control thruster system was greatly improved with miniature attitude-control thrusters placed throughout the dorsal and ventral surfaces of her saucer section in addition to her main thruster quads to give her maneuvering systems more redundancy and to increase her responsiveness to helm control, and her warp nacelles were replaced with newly introduced models that were downsized and more efficient, further boosting her range and fuel economy while also making her a slightly smaller target. The most drastic change between the Flight 1 and Flight 2 ships, however, lay in the Flight 1 design’s most glaring weakness: the issue with the ship’s torpedo launcher mounts. This was solved once and for all with an inventive compromise; the Archer-class designers managed to rearrange enough interior space in the secondary hull to build four single-tube torpedo launchers of an intermediate caliber between the 2230s-style miniaturized, rapid-firing torpedo tubes of the Flight 1 Archers and the full-size Constitution-type torpedo tubes used on the original Archer (NCC-2755) into the “blister”-like structures surrounding her navigational deflector. While the individual torpedoes the ship could fire were still smaller than those delivered by a Constitution- or Miranda-class starship and were only capable of approximately 70% the yield, the ship’s smaller launchers, based on a refinement of the 2230s-era turret design, also kept an increased firing rate of up to 1.5 times the rate of fire delivered by a Constitution’s launchers. The Archer ultimately would make up for explosive power with quantity.

(On the actual image of the Archer-class provided by , only three of the four torpedo tubes can be made out. This is not meant to represent a flaw in the starship itself but a flaw in the visual rendering of the design. creates his works in image editing programs by taking pre-fabricated “parts” supplied on a “sheet,” then rearranging and reworking them to “build” the ship. Although I can’t speak for the artist, I think he might be somewhat limited by what parts he has available and – as each “part” is actually an image in and of itself – what his program can really do to stretch the part. If he’s working in something like Microsoft Paint, for example, parts can be stretched easily while rotating them would be next to impossible. Therefore, I humbly ask that the viewer imagine that the lower nacelle struts of the Archer-class starship depicted here are longer and at a sharper angle than they are depicted, that the secondary hull, therefore, actually completely clears the lower navigational sensor dome of the primary hull instead of looking like the deflector beam would be firing straight into the lower sensor dome, and that, finally, all four torpedo tubes would be visible and clear to fire without the threat of damaging the firing starship.)

6. Fire Support Cruiser, F-CFS(R)
By 2280, with interstellar war raging across the quadrant, it was becoming clear that the “standard ordnance” of a F-CA was becoming insufficient to meet the increased threats that Starfleet squadrons were facing. A certain number of Federation cruiser designs with enough room and power to spare for additional armaments, including many Constitutions and several Flight 2 Archers, were called back to port for a risky experimental refit designed to improve their protective Phaser coverage and reinforce their armament of heavy weapons, including the Resilient, which reported to Starbase McKinley for reconstruction on the 15th of March. The vessel that emerged was redesignated a “Federation Heavy Cruiser, Class-1b Variant, Fire Support w/ Rear Phaser Refit” or F-CFS (R). In her original F-CA specifications, the Resilient, like all standard Federation heavy cruisers, suffered from very poor weapon arcs firing aft as her rear was only protected by her four “wing” Phaser banks on the port and starboard sides – weapons that were often required to fire forward or to the sides at more pressing targets. The “R” or “Rear Phaser” refit added two small Phaser-3 (close-range/defensive) banks in single-emitter housings fixed to the aft of her secondary hull above the main shuttlebay and to port and starboard. Meanwhile, her conversion to a Fire Support Cruiser added an additional package of heavy weapons to allow her to provide a heavier punch when engaging enemy ships either one-on-one or in larger fleet actions while simultaneously further improving her aft defenses. Four additional rear-firing photon torpedo launch tubes were installed in two twin-tube launchers (identical to the forward-firing models used on Constitution-class ships) built into a recessed space at the bottom rear of her secondary hull, sacrificing approximately 15% of her cargo storage space to accommodate the weaponry, making her as dangerous from the rear as she already was up front.

Four drone launchers – launch racks capable of firing relatively slow-moving ship-guided missiles based on the spatial torpedo technology used in the Romulan war – were installed as additional armament, firing from turret-mounted launchers built in similar fashion to the “pop-out” torpedo turrets of the Flight 1 Archers and 2230s Federation starships and concealed in a similar manner, retracting into the dorsal side of the primary hull when not in use. Though the drones were nowhere near as effective against shields as modern Photon Torpedoes, they had other uses. They still posed a credible threat but were easy to destroy with gunfire, so they could be launched against an enemy ship as distractions to decoy Phaser or Disruptor fire that would otherwise be targeted toward the firing ship. If by chance they were able to hit an enemy ship, they could still cause considerable damage; a typical F-CFS could launch up to four drones at a time and if all four hit, their damage equaled an appreciable fraction of the punch from a single torpedo strike; if drones were fired against an unshielded target, even this amount of damage could easily prove a fatal blow. Finally, the ship’s torpedo launchers were all fitted in the secondary hull, so in the event of an emergency saucer separation, the drone racks would allow the saucer section to at least have some heavy weapons capability.

7. Resilient’s Last Refit
The Resilient (NCC-2931) would nominally remain a F-CFS(R) for the rest of her career, but she would be rebuilt again in 2298 – this time, as a one-off, unique modification. Shortly before Fleet Captain Sun took her out into the Badlands for the second time in his quest to secure foreign aid for the Starfleet Resistance, one of the Resilient Cell’s other starships - a Miranda-class new light cruiser (F-NCL) - had been damaged beyond repair. But although the ship herself was no longer usable as a fighting unit, many of her components could still be salvaged and fitted to other craft. Miranda-class new light cruisers were well-known for their heavy weapons batteries; the standard configuration mounted a “roll bar” with four standard Photon Torpedo launch tubes of the same caliber as those used on the Constitution-class (two fore, two aft) and a pair of Mega-Phaser cannons. The “roll bar” of this particular Miranda-class vessel was undamaged, and believing that the Resilient needed more firepower for her long campaign ahead, Fleet Captain Sun ordered the bar stripped from the stricken new light cruiser and grafted onto the Resilient’s catamaran hull booms. These new weapons meant that the ship now had to carry two different models of Photon Torpedo, negatively affected her handling characteristics and proved to be such a significantly increased drain on her energy reserves that Resilient’s engineers often had to drain her batteries during combat to keep them fully powered. But the massive boost to her already considerable firepower made the upgraded U.S.S. Resilient (NCC-2931) much more of a match for her Terran opponents. The starship would keep this heavily armed, “pocket battleship”-like form until the final defeat of the Terran Empire in 2299.

(This concludes my report on the design and voyages of the United Space Ship Resilient (NCC-2931), the captains who led her to greatness and the times in which she was built and operated. Many thanks to all my watchers and everyone interested for sticking through this long essay. I’ve never written this much material about a single ship, nor have I put this much effort into a single “Star Trek” collaboration since my former college roommate and I undertook the monumental task of completely revamping the “Dark Reflection” storyline when I was a college undergrad. Live long and prosper – and Anchors Aweigh! )

Description
Recommended BGM: "One Last Message" by Andrew Lockington - www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-_13Z…

1. Introduction
As with my previous submission, what you see here is not my own work. The design of this starship (what you see here is the 5th revision out of 7 total) was done by based on parts created and made available by She is a reworking of one of ’s earlier works, the U.S.S. Archer (NCC-2755), which can be seen here: fav.me/d1xa27b as well as her counterpart from the alternate reality of the J.J. Abrams-directed movie franchise, which can be seen here: fav.me/d28zfug Also, a “retro” version of the design created with TOS-era technology can be seen here: fav.me/d5ov9jj In addition, the U.S.S. Farrington (NX-2010) and her backstory is the intellectual property of model builder April “Kitbasher Girl” Welles, which I am using with written permission.

Of course, “Star Trek” itself is the creation of Gene Roddenberry and the many talented men and women who worked with him. The vast majority of my ideas are based on the board game “Star Fleet Battles” by the Amarillo Design Bureau and its computer-game incarnations, “Starfleet Command”/“Starfleet Command II: Empires at War” published by Interplay, with some mechanics borrowed from “Star Trek: Legacy” published by Bethesda Softworks. The design of the Archer-class is directly inspired by that of the Enterprise NX-01 from “Star Trek: Enterprise,” which was done by Doug Drexler and was ultimately based on the Akira-class warship designed for “Star Trek: First Contact” by Alex Jaeger of Industrial Light and Magic. Certain references I make throughout this section are inspired by the amazing website, “The Starfleet Museum” by Mr. Masao Okazaki, which can be accessed at www.starfleet-museum.org/ and some of the Resilient’s technical specifications are based on numbers from the “U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701A Deck Plans: 25th Anniversary Collector’s Edition” published in 1992 by David Schmidt.

(This is why the ship’s speed ratings, which are meant to be largely identical to those of a late-2280’s refitted Constitution-Class Heavy Cruiser, are expressed in “Transwarp Factor” units and given in numbers matching the old, pre-TNG warp factor system, before the upper limit of Faster-Than-Light travel was firmly established as Warp Factor 10 and before the word “transwarp” got its modern association with the Borg transwarp conduits and slipstream travel. The “Transwarp” referred to here, as in “Transwarp Factor 8.9,” has more to do with the pseudo-“transwarp” that Starfleet tried to achieve in the U.S.S. Excelsior (NX-2000) trials of the late 2280s as shown in the 3rd feature film.)

2. The Myth of the “Perfect Heavy Cruiser”
Though the design of the Archer-class heavy cruiser ultimately traces its roots to the revolutionary NX-class deep space exploratory cruisers operated by the United Earth Space Probe Agency (Earth Starfleet) in the 2150s, its more immediate origin can be found in a single prototype built for feasibility testing in the mid-2260s, then tucked away for nearly a decade. The Archer-class project initially came about as a consequence of the difficult birthing process of Starfleet’s most legendary vessel design, the Constitution-type Class 1 heavy cruiser. In the early 2240s, the plans for the Constitution-class proposed a revolutionary new layout unlike almost anything Starfleet had ever commissioned before and was considered highly controversial. With a powerful, charismatic champion in Starfleet captain Robert T. April, the Constitution’s supporters triumphed over their detractors and the class was approved for mass production as the new workhorse of Starfleet, poised to lead an upsurge of exploratory, economic and military activity as the Federation increased its influence throughout the Alpha Quadrant. Constitution (NX-1700) was to herald a wave of modern designs from the Federation- and Siegfried-class dreadnoughts to the humble Saladin-class destroyer, Hermes-class scout and Ptolemy-class fleet transport/tug, all of which used her as their springboard.

Though the actions of individual starships like U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701) would permanently endear the Constitution-class starship to the Federation public as the veritable symbol of Starfleet and do much to advance the Federation cause, as the 2260s dawned and the Constitution-class cruisers pressed into almost their second decade of active service, the Admiralty and ASDB staff reviewed the many reports sent back by Constitution-class crews and a consensus began to emerge among some in Starfleet that those naysayers who had opposed the widespread adoption of the type had not simply been the “obstructionist, outdated ultraconservative crackpots” that the pro-Constitution popular press had painted them out to be. Though the Constitution-class starship had indeed proven to be a strong and capable platform with a large amount of interior space, good shielding, an ample main armament of twin-turret Phaser banks and Photon Torpedo launch tubes, a configuration optimized for “massive modularity” and capacity to achieve high impulse and warp speeds, she was not quite the “perfect design” that Captain April and his camp had advertised. The Federation’s borders had rapidly increased by 2264 as the Department of Colonial Operations settled scores of newly-discovered worlds and the UFP gained new members with each passing year, but the Constitution was a product of the 2240s. While she had, in theory, been just barely capable of conducting five-year missions throughout the Federation of 2240-2245 without stopping at Starbases for replenishment or refitting (barring significant disasters), there were some in the Admiralty who now believed that her range just wasn’t enough to adequately cover the Federation of the 2260s even as she was already being pushed to the limits of her endurance by hard-driving captains like James Tiberius Kirk of Enterprise (NCC-1701).

The Constitution was also reported as not having the optimal level of maneuverability that ASDB had initially desired from a top-of-the-line heavy cruiser. In fact, mission reports suggested that the Federation design was rather sluggish compared to the Romulan Bird-of-Prey and Klingon attack cruiser types that she regularly had to deter, and was hopelessly outperformed by most Orion pirate raiders, which could run circles around her; she was also unable to fully match her Klingon rival’s ability to accelerate to high warp speed, hampering attempts by patrolling Constitutions to chase down marauding Klingon attackers. Furthermore, the Constitution’s then-revolutionary layout of a saucer-shaped primary hull separated from a cylindrical secondary hull by a long, interconnecting dorsal spar, was an evolution of designs used in the Daedalus and Asia-class cruisers that preceded her; while this design optimized the interchangeability of the ship’s components, made repair, refitting, and mass-production simpler, improved crew survivability by making saucer separation easier and was (quite rightly) heralded as the future of Federation shipbuilding, it also significantly increased her draft, made her much easier to target, provided a dangerous structural weakness should enemy ships concentrate their fire in that area and made the vessel unwieldy and difficult to maneuver using the Federation’s conventional saucer-mounted RCS quad system. Moreover, it was still a sore point within the Starfleet procurement and logistics commands that the creation of the Constitution-class heavy cruisers had necessitated the development of a whole new generation of starship technology manifesting in a completely new series of parts that had to be mass-produced from scratch to allow mass production of the new ships, an enormous and costly investment that Starfleet pursers were determined to recoup. A small, but determined cabal of Starfleet admirals, frontline officers and naval architects grew convinced that an answer to these perceived shortfalls was needed – one that could be built using the existing parts that had been developed for the Constitution program, in order to maximize ASDB’s returns on its investment in Captain April’s pet project.

3. A Prototype is Born
In 2262, a small panel of designers at the Advanced Starship Design Bureau began work on an experimental prototype frame to meet those needs. The mysterious new ship, designed, built and launched under little fanfare or scrutiny from the fleet at large and never meant to actually be a production design, looked radically different from the Constitution but was actually an intriguing mating of Constitution-class parts with the basic architecture of a ship from a generation earlier. In the period of human expansion leading up to the Earth/Romulan War of the late 2150s, the Enterprise (NX-01) and her NX-type sisters were hailed as the pinnacle of U.E.S.P.A. ship development. Her unusual catamaran layout, featuring a single saucer-shaped main hull with twin propulsion booms (each ending in an impulse engine fairing) leading to a pair of engines linked by a symmetrical warp field governor, was designed almost entirely around meeting the challenge of allowing the ship to exceed the “Warp Five Barrier” that dogged the naval architects of her day. Although such a catamaran shape had not been adopted by the U.E.S.P.A. or its Federation Starfleet successor since the last NX-class starship was finally retired from duty shortly after the founding of the United Federation of Planets in 2161, the ships’ design was still upheld among Starfleet shipbuilders as a case study in efficiency; the ASDB’s unnamed prototype would put that case study into practice, becoming the first new starship built to this layout in almost a hundred years (fav.me/d5ov9jj ).

The ASDB prototype, still unnamed and unregistered, was finally completed at Starfleet’s Aldebaran construction yards in late April of 2264. At this time, the continued service of the Constitution-class heavy cruisers on the front lines of the fleet and the attitude of most in the Admiralty and procurement boards that Starfleet needed to fully recoup its investment in the Constitution, Saladin/Hermes, Federation and all other classes derived from her design meant that there was little perceived need for rapid development and production of new ship classes; rather, Starfleet Command focused most of its resources on maintaining and refitting the considerable number of vessels it had already developed and constructed, including the new Kongo and Bonhomme Richard subtypes based on the Constitution hull. The Admiralty in particular held stubbornly to this philosophy despite heavy losses of Constitution-class ships to deep-space accidents and enemy attack, a newly resurgent Romulan Star Empire deploying long-ranging, cloaking Birds-of-Prey equipped with deadly plasma torpedoes and concerns over growing Klingon expansionism, making it seem like the prototype being put through its paces at the proving grounds near the Aldebaran shipyard would never see active service, nor would any of her kind be built.

However, to the cabal of admirals and designers who ordered her into existence and marshaled the resources to make her possible, the unnamed ship was already proving her worth. The new vessel had been built along the general lines of the NX-class starships, but 23rd century advancements made for some major differences that enabled Starfleet designers to both channel the strengths of the original design while also providing small but important innovations that promised to solve the problems that her Constitution-class cousin had been accused of having. In the 2150s, the Enterprise NX-01 had been lauded for incorporating a then-revolutionary plasma supercharger as an intermediate stage in the warp drive initiation process. The device further energized the electro-plasma stream directed from the ship’s main engineering deck to the warp coils in her nacelles, and was credited as the most critical breakthrough making it possible for Enterprise to reach speeds of up to (and, in one extreme, in excess of) warp factor five. This supercharger device was now a standard piece of equipment already built into the plasma distribution systems of 23rd century starships, but the engineers of the NX-based ASDB prototype borrowed the concept of an extra stage, building a new device reminiscent of the old supercharger into the catamaran booms of their new vessel, dubbed a “plasma recirculator.”

Though not truly a “new” invention, the recirculation device provided an innovative way to boost the efficiency of the ship’s warp propulsion system beyond anything that could be achieved just by modifying a starship’s existing engineering setup. However, because the ASDB prototype featured a large secondary hull with a fully-sized M/AM reactor core and electro-plasma facilities in the position where the original NX-class starship merely had a symmetrical warp field governor, the new system was routed somewhat differently from the old, forcing electro-plasma fresh from the ship’s engineering assembly through one pathway straight up the nacelle braces into the nacelle pods to power warp flight. But then, spent plasma from the nacelles was fed back through the nacelle braces farthest from the central hull into the catamaran arms, where it would be shunted through a loop in the opposite direction of the nacelles and forced through a turbocharger stage reminiscent of the NX-class’ original supercharger in order to re-energize it. This “recycled” plasma was then fed back to the nacelles, continuing to power the warp coils within, before finally being processed as spent plasma in a Constitution-class design would be. This innovation increased the amount of charged electro-plasma available to the warp nacelles, boosting M/AM fuel economy and increasing the range of the prototype significantly beyond that of the Constitution-class while negating the need to design a completely new warp propulsion system.

Reverting to the sleeker, more planar and more compact layout of the NX-class starship also benefited the prototype ship’s maneuvering characteristics. The additional space for impulse engines provided by the catamaran hull booms allowed the new ship to mount two extra deuterium-fusion rocket propulsion units in addition to the main impulse engines already built into the rear of her primary hull, thereby making her significantly faster than the Constitution at sublight speeds (though at the cost of proportionally increased fuel consumption from the additional engines). Without the clumsy and vulnerable dorsal interconnecting section and with the warp nacelles mated to braces extending straight from the catamaran-bound main hull, the starship’s mass was redistributed in a way that made her more responsive to RCS thruster fire, better balanced and easier to steer while also reducing her cross-section, making her slightly but appreciably more difficult to target and also allowing her to fit into smaller drydocks held over from earlier time periods that would not have been able to service a starship with the great draft (height) of a Constitution-, Federation- or Siegfried-class design. The only significant issue that came about due to the prototype’s modified NX-class layout lay in the arrangement of its armament. While the ASDB prototype faithfully reused much of the primary hull design created for the Constitution-class, an issue quickly arose when her designers discovered that the placement of her plasma turbocharger system, main computer core, central cargo hatch and bow-mounted auxiliary deflector systems meant that the space normally used for forward-firing Photon Torpedo launchers in the Constitution-class design were no longer available. Instead, the ASDB designers were forced to institute the rather awkward compromise of mounting two pairs of twin-tube torpedo launchers in the sides of the saucer section’s outer rim, one pair to each side. Although all of the project’s staff could see that this layout would be a hindrance in combat given the narrow forward firing arc of the standard photon torpedo launcher (the starship would essentially only be able to fire torpedoes in broadsides), the fact that the design was only a proof-of-concept and seemingly would never see mass production or combat conditions made this a secondary concern.

The ASDB prototype continued running tests and recording flight data well through the end of the 2260s as her Constitution-class stablemates came and went from their five-year missions. As she remained something of an under-the-table “skunk works” project run by a small group of stubborn Starfleet personnel, her existence was still not well known, exhibited in her continued lack of a formal name, registry, or commission. Some of the officers involved in the project had already taken to calling her the “U.S.S. Nameless” (after the famous pseudonym used by King Odysseus when confronting Polyphemos the Cyclops in The Odyssey) while others, who felt the ship deserved some more respect, preferred to dub her the “Archer,” after the legendary captain of the first of her NX-class forebears who would rise to become a Starfleet admiral and the 2nd president of the United Federation of Planets. The latter nickname was ultimately deemed more “appropriate” for the prototype vessel and, though she was still not formally named or commissioned, all involved with the prototype would eventually come to call her the “Archer” and the name was simultaneously (and quietly) held back from the list of names for “official” vessels currently launching from Starfleet’s shipyards.

4. Enter the Archer-Class
The tumultuous events marking the transition from the 2260s to the 2270s would ultimately change the Archer’s fate. In 2269, the Constitution-class heavy cruiser U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701) completed a historic, but very dangerous five-year mission of exploration, diplomacy and deterrence under Captain James Tiberius Kirk. When she returned to drydock in Earth orbit, Kirk and crew were informed that a special fate awaited the vessel. In the time between 2265 and 2270, Starfleet had pioneered yet another new wave of technology in its neverending effort to push the limits of Federation engineering and capabilities while also maintaining parity with all neighboring powers, rendering all ships of Enterprise’s 2264-era layout obsolete. Although the Enterprise was already 25 years old by 2270, her enduring popularity as Starfleet’s “flagship” vessel made many in both Starfleet and the Federation public reluctant to see her scrapped and the procurement and logistics boards, after approving yet another bout of expensive innovation and shipbuilding, were eager to see if it was possible to retrofit older ships to a new standard rather than building new vessels outright. In a difficult process that took almost a year, the Enterprise went through a transformation nearly as radical as the conversion of the British large light cruiser H.M.S. Glorious into an aircraft carrier in the 20th century and emerged as a nearly totally new ship. Technologically, the refit was a success – the refit program had been proven feasible and the Enterprise, once more at the cutting edge of Starfleet technology, had been granted a new lease on life – but the cost in time and resources was nearly the same as it would have cost to just build a whole new ship from scratch. The Constitution-class design was deemed important enough that nearly all surviving Constitutions and Constitution variants were scheduled for the refit, but Starfleet ultimately decided against similarly refitting the remainder of the more antiquated ship designs.

As the 2270s passed, the refitted Constitution-class heavy cruisers were pressed back into hard frontline service with Enterprise (NCC-1701), leading the charge once more, on a second five-year mission under now-Rear Admiral James T. Kirk and his reassembled crew. Though the heavily rebuilt starship continued to hold her own against all challenges she faced, the refits did not really change the flaws that the cabal behind the ASDB “Archer” prototype had cited in her inherent design. The vast increase in speed provided by her new engines had increased her range, but the size of the Federation and its territories had increased as well, leaving even more space for the Constitution-class to patrol and all but negating the effects of the new engines. And though the Enterprise Refit of 2270-2271 had been successfully advertised to the public as a grand demonstration of the Constitution’s modularity at its best, the flaws the layout engendered in the ship’s handling, maneuverability and size as a target were unchanged. In fact, the need to incorporate larger twin-tube torpedo launchers in a refitted hull that didn’t have enough space wound up being resolved by mounting the launchers in a dedicated housing located where the dorsal interconnector section mated to the stardrive section, creating a “deckhouse”-like protrusion that made the launchers extremely vulnerable to attack as the U.S.S. Ballista discovered the hard way during a confrontation with one of the Klingon Empire’s new C-7 battlecruisers; the Klingons were able to identify the Ballista’s torpedo launchers just by visual examination and focused their firepower there, punching through the cruiser’s shields and destroying the entire torpedo launcher assembly before she could retaliate.

By 2273, tensions were beginning to rise throughout the Federation’s borders with all of its neighboring powers as, unbeknownst to Starfleet, Terran Empire operatives from the Beta-Universe had already begun to replace Starfleet ships and officers with their Terran counterparts in a bid to engender a quadrant-wide war that would weaken the Federation, committing war crimes for which the Federation would be held accountable. The Constitution-class starships were still Starfleet’s primary long-ranging cruiser units, but their flaws were still present. And despite their refits, their internal frames were still holdovers from the 2240s and 30+ years of hard service were finally beginning to take their toll. It was time, many admirals felt, for new production – and one particular admiral, an Andorian who had been part of the “Archer” prototype’s development program, believed she had just the thing. On May 1st, 2273, the prototype starship was finally fully unveiled to Starfleet as her crew received orders to take her to Earth Spacedock to undergo a similar redesign and refit as the one Enterprise had been through three years prior, in order to bring her “up to spec” with the rest of the fleet and also fix a number of her own idiosyncratic design issues – in particular, the location of her photon torpedo tubes. Upon completion of said refit on May 9th, 2274 the vessel fitted out and embarked on a rigorous series of shakedown cruises to test her new systems and ensure that the advantages of her original NX-based hull form were still relevant.

When her trials were complete, the ship was approved as the blueprint for a new class of heavy cruisers to be mass-produced as a longer-ranging supplement for the Constitution-class in Starfleet’s cruiser squadrons and in the process, finally given her official name and registry: U.S.S. Archer (NCC-2755). In this finalized launch configuration, the Archer measured three-quarters of the length of the refit Constitution (226.5 meters), had 70% of the draft or height (49.9 meters) and the same beam or width (141.7 meters) due to using a nearly identical design for the primary hull, the widest part of the ship. Due to her lack of a dorsal interconnector or “neck” structure, she was four decks shorter (17 decks), but many of her decks were laid out in a similar way to her Constitution-class cousin with her main bridge on Deck 1, the captain’s ready room on Deck 2, a central galley on Deck 3, many scientific/medical laboratories and accomodations for VIP’s and senior officers (including the captain’s stateroom) on Deck 4, a cavernous main shuttlecraft bay occupying the aft ends of decks 12 and 13 and an enormous M/ARA reactor core running the entire height of her secondary hull from Decks 10 through 17 with the primary reactor control rooms on Decks 15 and 16. Due to her smaller size and increased automation, she carried a significantly smaller crew than the Refit Constitution-class with a standard complement of 350 officers and enlisted rates but was also capable of accommodating up to one and a half times as many passengers in an emergency, albeit in cramped conditions. She could hold enough provisions for a standard five-year mission; this coincided with Starfleet’s prescribed five-year refit cycle for most ship classes.

The Archer ( fav.me/d1xa27b ) would ultimately be a unique ship as she herself was a refitted prototype dating from the 2260s, but the vessels built from her model would be among the first completely new vessels built by Starfleet in the 2270s. The Flight 1 Archer class vessels, based on a modification of the platform of the original Archer (NCC-2755) (see the image at fav.me/d5ops9n ) were all built to the same basic Class-1 heavy cruiser (F-CA) standards that their Constitution-class stablemates had been held to. With very similar power plants and identical warp engine assemblies, the ships could achieve the same speed ratings as the Constitution-class, with a standard cruising speed of Transwarp Factor 8.9 on the 22nd-23rd century warp scales, a flank speed of Transwarp Factor 12.3 and an emergency top speed of Transwarp Factor 18.6; at this emergency speed, her engines were designed to automatically shut down after 12 hours to prevent burnout. However, their innovations (including the plasma recirculator preserved from the ASDB Archer prototype) meant that they could accelerate to cruising or maximum warp speed significantly faster than the Constitution and that the ships were able to maintain high warp speeds for much longer periods of time, appreciably increasing their maximum cruising range. The Flight 1 variant also kept the prototype's two auxiliary impulse thrusters, one on either side of the aft saucer section; a design trick that would be repeated when Starfleet upgraded the Excelsior class starships nearly a decade later. The original Archer and her Flight 1 descendants nominally maintained the same armament mounts and shielding as the Constitution-class with six twin-turret Phaser-1 (long range/offensive) batteries arrayed on the dorsal and ventral primary hull and two twin-turret photon torpedo launch tubes firing forward, but the model of the photon torpedo launchers and their optimal location on the ship continued to dog the Archer-class’ designers.

The refit of the Archer prototype and the design’s refinement for mass production came on the heels of the U.S.S. Ballista’s disastrous loss of her entire torpedo launcher housing, leaving the Archer-class designers under much heavier pressure from their Admiralty backers to use their ship’s promise of increased structural integrity and decreased target cross-section as a selling point to push the design. The Archer-class team had originally wanted full parity of armament between the Constitution and the Archer and insisted on installing torpedo launchers capable of firing warheads of the exact same caliber as the type used on the refit Constitution-class while also trying to avoid the massive “deck house” launcher that caused the Ballista so much trouble. The Archer wound up with a compromise measure; instead of fitting both tubes together in each individual launcher, necessitating a large space to house all of the launcher assemblies, two tubes were moved up to the lower saucer section, straddling the auxiliary navigational deflector while the other two were kept in a much smaller “deck house” assembly. The lower two tubes were still in an exposed structure, but they were still harder to target and much less exposed than the ones on the Constitution and even if they were destroyed, the saucer tubes would remain unscathed. However, this design would not prove satisfactory as the Archer prototype was refined into the Flight 1 Archer-class.

During the refinement stages, the starship design was slated to use a brand new main navigational deflector that would be powerful enough to render her auxiliary saucer deflector unnecessary, but its removal created the issue of what to do to fill in the space left behind. Because the ultimate selling point of any Federation cruiser design would be its multipurpose nature, the most popular proposal was to use the space to house additional laboratories and machine shops that the original design didn’t have the room for (but that the Constitution featured prominently). Furthermore, additional pressure on the Archer-class design team to continue reducing the vulnerability of her torpedo launchers to enemy fire combined with the proposed rearrangement to cause a conundrum as to what to do with the new Archer configuration’s torpedo armament. With a procurement deadline fast approaching, the problem was temporarily solved in the Flight 1 ships by updating a design from the 2230s featuring individual launch tubes housed in small turrets in the saucer section that could fold flush with the hull or extend for combat. The antiquated design was noted for giving the torpedo turrets a somewhat better field of fire than the fixed, forward-mounted assembly used on the Constitution-class, but it came with a serious drawback in that the design of the turret’s expansion/retracting mechanism could not accommodate a full-sized 2270s era torpedo launcher, necessitating the installation of a scaled down, weaker version on the Flight 1 Archers though they compensated for it by also offering a slightly increased rate of fire. The less potent, downsized torpedo launchers and the extra complexity that the plasma recirculator added to her electro-plasma transfer conduits would remain the two greatest weaknesses of the Flight 1 Archer design (and, for the latter, of the class as a whole).

5. The Flight 2 Archer Class
When launched in August 2277, U.S.S. Resilient (NCC-2931) was an Archer-class heavy cruiser built to Flight 2 specifications, based on a redrawn design introduced in 2276. Among other significant improvements and alterations, the vessel now featured a more “patriotic” paint scheme with bright blue highlights to her hull, her reaction control thruster system was greatly improved with miniature attitude-control thrusters placed throughout the dorsal and ventral surfaces of her saucer section in addition to her main thruster quads to give her maneuvering systems more redundancy and to increase her responsiveness to helm control, and her warp nacelles were replaced with newly introduced models that were downsized and more efficient, further boosting her range and fuel economy while also making her a slightly smaller target. The most drastic change between the Flight 1 and Flight 2 ships, however, lay in the Flight 1 design’s most glaring weakness: the issue with the ship’s torpedo launcher mounts. This was solved once and for all with an inventive compromise; the Archer-class designers managed to rearrange enough interior space in the secondary hull to build four single-tube torpedo launchers of an intermediate caliber between the 2230s-style miniaturized, rapid-firing torpedo tubes of the Flight 1 Archers and the full-size Constitution-type torpedo tubes used on the original Archer (NCC-2755) into the “blister”-like structures surrounding her navigational deflector. While the individual torpedoes the ship could fire were still smaller than those delivered by a Constitution- or Miranda-class starship and were only capable of approximately 70% the yield, the ship’s smaller launchers, based on a refinement of the 2230s-era turret design, also kept an increased firing rate of up to 1.5 times the rate of fire delivered by a Constitution’s launchers. The Archer ultimately would make up for explosive power with quantity.

(On the actual image of the Archer-class provided by , only three of the four torpedo tubes can be made out. This is not meant to represent a flaw in the starship itself but a flaw in the visual rendering of the design. creates his works in image editing programs by taking pre-fabricated “parts” supplied on a “sheet,” then rearranging and reworking them to “build” the ship. Although I can’t speak for the artist, I think he might be somewhat limited by what parts he has available and – as each “part” is actually an image in and of itself – what his program can really do to stretch the part. If he’s working in something like Microsoft Paint, for example, parts can be stretched easily while rotating them would be next to impossible. Therefore, I humbly ask that the viewer imagine that the lower nacelle struts of the Archer-class starship depicted here are longer and at a sharper angle than they are depicted, that the secondary hull, therefore, actually completely clears the lower navigational sensor dome of the primary hull instead of looking like the deflector beam would be firing straight into the lower sensor dome, and that, finally, all four torpedo tubes would be visible and clear to fire without the threat of damaging the firing starship.)

6. Fire Support Cruiser, F-CFS(R)
By 2280, with interstellar war raging across the quadrant, it was becoming clear that the “standard ordnance” of a F-CA was becoming insufficient to meet the increased threats that Starfleet squadrons were facing. A certain number of Federation cruiser designs with enough room and power to spare for additional armaments, including many Constitutions and several Flight 2 Archers, were called back to port for a risky experimental refit designed to improve their protective Phaser coverage and reinforce their armament of heavy weapons, including the Resilient, which reported to Starbase McKinley for reconstruction on the 15th of March. The vessel that emerged was redesignated a “Federation Heavy Cruiser, Class-1b Variant, Fire Support w/ Rear Phaser Refit” or F-CFS (R). In her original F-CA specifications, the Resilient, like all standard Federation heavy cruisers, suffered from very poor weapon arcs firing aft as her rear was only protected by her four “wing” Phaser banks on the port and starboard sides – weapons that were often required to fire forward or to the sides at more pressing targets. The “R” or “Rear Phaser” refit added two small Phaser-3 (close-range/defensive) banks in single-emitter housings fixed to the aft of her secondary hull above the main shuttlebay and to port and starboard. Meanwhile, her conversion to a Fire Support Cruiser added an additional package of heavy weapons to allow her to provide a heavier punch when engaging enemy ships either one-on-one or in larger fleet actions while simultaneously further improving her aft defenses. Four additional rear-firing photon torpedo launch tubes were installed in two twin-tube launchers (identical to the forward-firing models used on Constitution-class ships) built into a recessed space at the bottom rear of her secondary hull, sacrificing approximately 15% of her cargo storage space to accommodate the weaponry, making her as dangerous from the rear as she already was up front.

Four drone launchers – launch racks capable of firing relatively slow-moving ship-guided missiles based on the spatial torpedo technology used in the Romulan war – were installed as additional armament, firing from turret-mounted launchers built in similar fashion to the “pop-out” torpedo turrets of the Flight 1 Archers and 2230s Federation starships and concealed in a similar manner, retracting into the dorsal side of the primary hull when not in use. Though the drones were nowhere near as effective against shields as modern Photon Torpedoes, they had other uses. They still posed a credible threat but were easy to destroy with gunfire, so they could be launched against an enemy ship as distractions to decoy Phaser or Disruptor fire that would otherwise be targeted toward the firing ship. If by chance they were able to hit an enemy ship, they could still cause considerable damage; a typical F-CFS could launch up to four drones at a time and if all four hit, their damage equaled an appreciable fraction of the punch from a single torpedo strike; if drones were fired against an unshielded target, even this amount of damage could easily prove a fatal blow. Finally, the ship’s torpedo launchers were all fitted in the secondary hull, so in the event of an emergency saucer separation, the drone racks would allow the saucer section to at least have some heavy weapons capability.

7. Resilient’s Last Refit
The Resilient (NCC-2931) would nominally remain a F-CFS(R) for the rest of her career, but she would be rebuilt again in 2298 – this time, as a one-off, unique modification. Shortly before Fleet Captain Sun took her out into the Badlands for the second time in his quest to secure foreign aid for the Starfleet Resistance, one of the Resilient Cell’s other starships - a Miranda-class new light cruiser (F-NCL) - had been damaged beyond repair. But although the ship herself was no longer usable as a fighting unit, many of her components could still be salvaged and fitted to other craft. Miranda-class new light cruisers were well-known for their heavy weapons batteries; the standard configuration mounted a “roll bar” with four standard Photon Torpedo launch tubes of the same caliber as those used on the Constitution-class (two fore, two aft) and a pair of Mega-Phaser cannons. The “roll bar” of this particular Miranda-class vessel was undamaged, and believing that the Resilient needed more firepower for her long campaign ahead, Fleet Captain Sun ordered the bar stripped from the stricken new light cruiser and grafted onto the Resilient’s catamaran hull booms. These new weapons meant that the ship now had to carry two different models of Photon Torpedo, negatively affected her handling characteristics and proved to be such a significantly increased drain on her energy reserves that Resilient’s engineers often had to drain her batteries during combat to keep them fully powered. But the massive boost to her already considerable firepower made the upgraded U.S.S. Resilient (NCC-2931) much more of a match for her Terran opponents. The starship would keep this heavily armed, “pocket battleship”-like form until the final defeat of the Terran Empire in 2299.

(This concludes my report on the design and voyages of the United Space Ship Resilient (NCC-2931), the captains who led her to greatness and the times in which she was built and operated. Many thanks to all my watchers and everyone interested for sticking through this long essay. I’ve never written this much material about a single ship, nor have I put this much effort into a single “Star Trek” collaboration since my former college roommate and I undertook the monumental task of completely revamping the “Dark Reflection” storyline when I was a college undergrad. Live long and prosper – and Anchors Aweigh! )