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Description
Since reminded me of Scorpio-class corvettes, I went through my old files and dug out this. Back when I was more active in NS I used DoGA for 3D art, and this was back when I still used standard parts rather than developing custom ones in Metasequoia first.

thought of Scorpios as shuttle-sized, but I always imagined them to be on the scale of runabouts (in Star Trek RPG 'canon' they were 22 meters long; the Danube-class runabout is 23 meters long according to the Deep Space Nine Technical Manual). This here is a Scorpion-class, which is a fanship upgrade of the Scorpio.

Backstory follows. Note that whenever I need an independent design firm in a universe, I plug in TME Industries 'cuz I'm shameless in stealing my own ideas like that. Also, the Constitution-refit is the Enterprise-class and the Miranda-class is the Reliant-class, putting this most firmly into the FASA Star Trek universe and completely invalidated by canon.

* - * - *

After the lackluster performance of the Scorpio-class corvette against anything but the lightest line opponents in the Triangle and the Orion sector, the top levels of Starfleet debated the need for a larger yet still-agile corvette that could threaten vessels larger than it. The Scorpio supporters, led by Admiral McNamara of Starfleet Intelligence, stated that the Scorpio was sufficient to police civilian Federation ships and the poorly-equipped pirates it was designed to combat and claimed that simulation analysis placed the Scorpio as far more effective than their opposite numbers in the Klingon and Romulan fleets such as the P-3 Caladan. Admiral Norton of Triangle Sector Operations pointed to after-action reports of efforts to use the relatively new Scorpio to police Federation interests in the Triangle and the Orion Sector, saying that the Scorpio was easily bested by the paramilitary vessels that were real threats in these sectors and that its deployment profile essentially negated the likelihood of corvette-corvette battles; any theoretical Starfleet counteroffensives under the Black Flag exercises were always spearheaded by heavy cruisers, not squadrons of Scorpios. “While the Scorpio is good at what it is designed for,” Admiral Norton argued, “that is all it is good for—policing systems not threatened by anything larger than near-negligible criminal force. The class offers no danger to any even vaguely militarized vessel larger than a destroyer, and even then that requires entire squadrons.”

Swayed by Admiral Norton’s testimony, Starfleet authorized Military Operations Command to accept offers for a “bigger and better” Scorpio. The Andorian design bureau responsible for the Scorpio offered up a torpedo heavy second mark of their vessel, while another firm, TME Industries, took MOC’s order to heart. Starting with publicly available images of the Scorpio-class, TME Industries scaled it up into something visually similar but notably larger as a Class IV ship, all built around tandem FSLB warp engines and FIC-1 impulse engines which maximized the new ship’s maneuverability. Military Operations Command, at the time it put out the order, believed that a budget-mandated production slowdown in the Enterprise-class heavy cruiser would create a surplus of advanced computers and shield generators and thus authorized the competing teams to use the newer equipment. The Scorpio Mk. II was simply too small to accept this equipment, but TME Industries snapped up the opportunity to use the M-6A control computer and the coveted FSS shield generator. The design was finished out with an FP-4 photon torpedo launcher and twin FH-11 phasers, the latter in limited-traverse forward mountings as their larger construction prevented them from having the Scorpio’s expansive firing arcs.

TME Industries needed the M-6A to operate the advanced FSS generator, but otherwise the system was ludicrously overpowered and made arrangement of the new ship’s systems difficult. The warp nacelles were moved out of the body, but still close together—true to the original Andorian concept—but the ship’s fuselage was still dominated by a computer system designed for a heavy research cruiser. Any attempts to pare down the core would defeat the purpose of using off-the-shelf surplus, and so this was solved by cutting mass and volume off of the superstructure, hoping that the powerful shields would protect the ship before it could be annihilated by a single good disruptor strike. Adapting to the problem, extensive automation was added to the ship and put under the control of the computer, limiting the crew to only ten people packed into the extreme forward section. Flight test crews complained that they hadn’t had to sleep in five-man bays since the academy, to which the engineers replied with the old adage, “There’s Klingon marines that would love to have the space we give you, you know.”

With the design finalized, the first ship of the new Scorpion-class, NX-73102, slipped her moorings and immediately suffered a power brownout as the M-6A overtaxed the engine power trying to calculate all of the newly-visible navigation beacons and stars once Scorpion cleared Spacedock. The crew jury-rigged a solution by writing some new code on the fly slowing down the M-6A’s clock speed on anything except deflector shield control. She then continued on her shakedown cruise, destroying a few small asteroids with live weapons fire. Momentary trouble with the FP-4’s automatic loading mechanism—leading to the uncomfortable situation of having a live but unprimed photon torpedo warhead jammed into the breech—was solved by again reprogramming the computer to slow down the fire rate, reducing it to levels approximately identical to the more common partial automation used on larger vessels. TME Industries engineers never gave a solid answer why, exactly, a ship with a fifteen torpedo complement needed a rapid-fire launcher, although one was heard to murmur something that sounded like “dakka.” Despite these false starts, the Scorpion eventually had her kinks worked out of her and bested Scorpio-class corvettes in a five-on-one duel; after this, Admiral McNamara also ended up as a supporter, arguing that the result of the Scorpio/Scorpion duels justified the Scorpio’s cost.

Limited production began of the Scorpion-class, with the first ships being assigned to replace entire Scorpio squadrons suffering heavy losses from paramilitary privateers from the Independent Klingon States and Orion pirate cartels. Single-vessel engagements between Orion Wanderer-class blockade runners and the new Scorpion often quickly ended in the Scorpion’s favor as the corvette outflew and outfought the pirate ships. Hearing about the new ship and mistaking it for an ultrapowerful Scorpio, the pirates and militias backed off during the critical transition where the Federation was weakest, thus allowing Starfleet to bolster its strength with the new Scorpions. With the surprising success of the new vessel, Starfleet planned to expand production orders.

Unfortunately, the Enterprise-class budget was re-expanded by the Federation Council in a desire for more research cruisers with more expansive facilities than the Reliant-class. This meant that the projected parts surplus was nothing as large as predicted and that new Scorpions suddenly found themselves lacking their computer cores and shield generators, which couldn’t yet be produced at the greater rates that the heavy corvettes demanded. Still, the Scorpion-class filled in a gap in Starfleet between the low-threat police ship Scorpio and the line combatant destroyers and frigates, and so Military Operations Command immediately tasked TME Industries to design a simpler model, either to be the new standard production model or as a temporary bridge until the production lines of the M-6A and the FSS could be increased. In response, they fitted the second mark of the Scorpion with an FSI shield generator and an M-3 computer to control it, replacing part of the freed volume and mass with additional crew to deal with reduced automation and additional support structure to make the ship more structurally sound. This also reduced the cost by almost twenty percent, which lead to the remaining Scorpion order being increased by about ten percent as the funds were already allocated.

It remains to be seen if the advanced system lines will be expanded enough to allow for Scorpion Mk.I production to continue, although a limited production run is ensured due to an incident in the Triangle. A Klingon privateer force consisting of two battlecruisers—two D-7 war cruisers, one A and one M model—entered the Al Sadieri system to raid the Federation mercantile colony there. Four Scorpion-class heavy corvettes were scrambled to intercept them and, after the Klingons refused all challenges to leave, engaged and destroyed the two cruisers in short order. Data captured by Starfleet Intelligence indicates that threat forces in the Triangle list the Scorpion-class as a ‘pocket destroyer,’ and as it is half the cost of the line-combatant Baker Mk.IV, it suggests new avenues for development and deployment. Simulations put the two on a nearly equal footing, with the Baker-class being only slightly superior. Continued combat trials will quantitatively measure the Scorpion’s effectiveness one-on-one against a ship more than twice its size.

Description
Since reminded me of Scorpio-class corvettes, I went through my old files and dug out this. Back when I was more active in NS I used DoGA for 3D art, and this was back when I still used standard parts rather than developing custom ones in Metasequoia first.

thought of Scorpios as shuttle-sized, but I always imagined them to be on the scale of runabouts (in Star Trek RPG 'canon' they were 22 meters long; the Danube-class runabout is 23 meters long according to the Deep Space Nine Technical Manual). This here is a Scorpion-class, which is a fanship upgrade of the Scorpio.

Backstory follows. Note that whenever I need an independent design firm in a universe, I plug in TME Industries 'cuz I'm shameless in stealing my own ideas like that. Also, the Constitution-refit is the Enterprise-class and the Miranda-class is the Reliant-class, putting this most firmly into the FASA Star Trek universe and completely invalidated by canon.

* - * - *

After the lackluster performance of the Scorpio-class corvette against anything but the lightest line opponents in the Triangle and the Orion sector, the top levels of Starfleet debated the need for a larger yet still-agile corvette that could threaten vessels larger than it. The Scorpio supporters, led by Admiral McNamara of Starfleet Intelligence, stated that the Scorpio was sufficient to police civilian Federation ships and the poorly-equipped pirates it was designed to combat and claimed that simulation analysis placed the Scorpio as far more effective than their opposite numbers in the Klingon and Romulan fleets such as the P-3 Caladan. Admiral Norton of Triangle Sector Operations pointed to after-action reports of efforts to use the relatively new Scorpio to police Federation interests in the Triangle and the Orion Sector, saying that the Scorpio was easily bested by the paramilitary vessels that were real threats in these sectors and that its deployment profile essentially negated the likelihood of corvette-corvette battles; any theoretical Starfleet counteroffensives under the Black Flag exercises were always spearheaded by heavy cruisers, not squadrons of Scorpios. “While the Scorpio is good at what it is designed for,” Admiral Norton argued, “that is all it is good for—policing systems not threatened by anything larger than near-negligible criminal force. The class offers no danger to any even vaguely militarized vessel larger than a destroyer, and even then that requires entire squadrons.”

Swayed by Admiral Norton’s testimony, Starfleet authorized Military Operations Command to accept offers for a “bigger and better” Scorpio. The Andorian design bureau responsible for the Scorpio offered up a torpedo heavy second mark of their vessel, while another firm, TME Industries, took MOC’s order to heart. Starting with publicly available images of the Scorpio-class, TME Industries scaled it up into something visually similar but notably larger as a Class IV ship, all built around tandem FSLB warp engines and FIC-1 impulse engines which maximized the new ship’s maneuverability. Military Operations Command, at the time it put out the order, believed that a budget-mandated production slowdown in the Enterprise-class heavy cruiser would create a surplus of advanced computers and shield generators and thus authorized the competing teams to use the newer equipment. The Scorpio Mk. II was simply too small to accept this equipment, but TME Industries snapped up the opportunity to use the M-6A control computer and the coveted FSS shield generator. The design was finished out with an FP-4 photon torpedo launcher and twin FH-11 phasers, the latter in limited-traverse forward mountings as their larger construction prevented them from having the Scorpio’s expansive firing arcs.

TME Industries needed the M-6A to operate the advanced FSS generator, but otherwise the system was ludicrously overpowered and made arrangement of the new ship’s systems difficult. The warp nacelles were moved out of the body, but still close together—true to the original Andorian concept—but the ship’s fuselage was still dominated by a computer system designed for a heavy research cruiser. Any attempts to pare down the core would defeat the purpose of using off-the-shelf surplus, and so this was solved by cutting mass and volume off of the superstructure, hoping that the powerful shields would protect the ship before it could be annihilated by a single good disruptor strike. Adapting to the problem, extensive automation was added to the ship and put under the control of the computer, limiting the crew to only ten people packed into the extreme forward section. Flight test crews complained that they hadn’t had to sleep in five-man bays since the academy, to which the engineers replied with the old adage, “There’s Klingon marines that would love to have the space we give you, you know.”

With the design finalized, the first ship of the new Scorpion-class, NX-73102, slipped her moorings and immediately suffered a power brownout as the M-6A overtaxed the engine power trying to calculate all of the newly-visible navigation beacons and stars once Scorpion cleared Spacedock. The crew jury-rigged a solution by writing some new code on the fly slowing down the M-6A’s clock speed on anything except deflector shield control. She then continued on her shakedown cruise, destroying a few small asteroids with live weapons fire. Momentary trouble with the FP-4’s automatic loading mechanism—leading to the uncomfortable situation of having a live but unprimed photon torpedo warhead jammed into the breech—was solved by again reprogramming the computer to slow down the fire rate, reducing it to levels approximately identical to the more common partial automation used on larger vessels. TME Industries engineers never gave a solid answer why, exactly, a ship with a fifteen torpedo complement needed a rapid-fire launcher, although one was heard to murmur something that sounded like “dakka.” Despite these false starts, the Scorpion eventually had her kinks worked out of her and bested Scorpio-class corvettes in a five-on-one duel; after this, Admiral McNamara also ended up as a supporter, arguing that the result of the Scorpio/Scorpion duels justified the Scorpio’s cost.

Limited production began of the Scorpion-class, with the first ships being assigned to replace entire Scorpio squadrons suffering heavy losses from paramilitary privateers from the Independent Klingon States and Orion pirate cartels. Single-vessel engagements between Orion Wanderer-class blockade runners and the new Scorpion often quickly ended in the Scorpion’s favor as the corvette outflew and outfought the pirate ships. Hearing about the new ship and mistaking it for an ultrapowerful Scorpio, the pirates and militias backed off during the critical transition where the Federation was weakest, thus allowing Starfleet to bolster its strength with the new Scorpions. With the surprising success of the new vessel, Starfleet planned to expand production orders.

Unfortunately, the Enterprise-class budget was re-expanded by the Federation Council in a desire for more research cruisers with more expansive facilities than the Reliant-class. This meant that the projected parts surplus was nothing as large as predicted and that new Scorpions suddenly found themselves lacking their computer cores and shield generators, which couldn’t yet be produced at the greater rates that the heavy corvettes demanded. Still, the Scorpion-class filled in a gap in Starfleet between the low-threat police ship Scorpio and the line combatant destroyers and frigates, and so Military Operations Command immediately tasked TME Industries to design a simpler model, either to be the new standard production model or as a temporary bridge until the production lines of the M-6A and the FSS could be increased. In response, they fitted the second mark of the Scorpion with an FSI shield generator and an M-3 computer to control it, replacing part of the freed volume and mass with additional crew to deal with reduced automation and additional support structure to make the ship more structurally sound. This also reduced the cost by almost twenty percent, which lead to the remaining Scorpion order being increased by about ten percent as the funds were already allocated.

It remains to be seen if the advanced system lines will be expanded enough to allow for Scorpion Mk.I production to continue, although a limited production run is ensured due to an incident in the Triangle. A Klingon privateer force consisting of two battlecruisers—two D-7 war cruisers, one A and one M model—entered the Al Sadieri system to raid the Federation mercantile colony there. Four Scorpion-class heavy corvettes were scrambled to intercept them and, after the Klingons refused all challenges to leave, engaged and destroyed the two cruisers in short order. Data captured by Starfleet Intelligence indicates that threat forces in the Triangle list the Scorpion-class as a ‘pocket destroyer,’ and as it is half the cost of the line-combatant Baker Mk.IV, it suggests new avenues for development and deployment. Simulations put the two on a nearly equal footing, with the Baker-class being only slightly superior. Continued combat trials will quantitatively measure the Scorpion’s effectiveness one-on-one against a ship more than twice its size.