federation Craft Designs

            Though the Early Federation was reliant on the relatively few designs that existing Trenoc starship design concepts had established, the modern federation has a great variety of different vehicles. This has been no doubt helped by the different system design approaches that each race took in designing their first vehicle, today with over a century of star faring experience our starships are looking less like hybrids of different Federation race design architectures and more towards developing its own independent character.

            Most starships in the main Federation fleet have their design origins in one of the many different design templates, though most of these design templates code for the creation of military vessels, very few vessels are actually constructed with weapons systems, consequently although most civilian vessels do not carry an extensive arsenal, they do share the same design architecture as if they had been fitted out as military craft. The reasons for this stems from the fact that although the Federation does have a relatively small dedicated military fleet, it would simply not be possible in a time of crisis to build up a large number of dedicated military vessels quickly. Instead of massively increasing its production abilities to accommodate for surge demands like this, it instead has opted for the ability for most federation craft to be upgraded to military status by simple system swap outs which can be done on a much greater scale than wholesale de novo war fleet construction. It also means that in a time of crisis existing starship crew can be used to fly the modified military vessel and in effect the conversion of civilian craft to military purposes does not present the same logistics nightmare as trying to form suitable command crews (this also helps keep the relatively non-hierarchical Federation military command structure).

            A smaller number of craft within the federation do not conform to a design template, they are generally partly or entirely custom designed, or are salvaged craft from derelicts. In terms of numbers these craft make up a relatively small percentage of the total number of starships, circa 10%. A lot of these custom craft are design modifications of templates, though all craft have some slight variation to their design template the extent on modification on these vessels in generally in excess of 30% of the standard systems. These craft have new characteristics and usually perform specialized roles.