Arrakis Class

Design by Robert Heckadon

Type: Antimatter fuel refinery
First commissioned: 2082
Length: 226m
Width: 10111m
Height: 122m
Decks: 9
Displacement: 172000t
Complement: 7 officers + 43 crew
Armament: none
Defense: Kevlar lining, tri-silicate aerogel
Embarked craft: Docking shuttles, fuel tanker

“When you write a story, you create a universe that parallels our own.” - Jake Sisko, 2383

Travelling faster than light has been the dream of many story tellers and explorers, to reach the neighbouring stars within a lifetime. Then in 2063, Zephram Cochrane engaged his first warp drive, a propulsion system that uses a subspace displacement field to cause space to travel towards the ship at faster than light, rather than vice versa since space, not starships, can travel faster than light. This then lead to the virtual eradication of poverty, disease, and war from what is known as First Contact, as well as opening the new frontiers of space. But one problem, generating the incredible energies needed for the faster than light drives for the fleets of starships. In 2082, the first of the Arrakis class antimatter fuel refineries was constructed.

Antimatter Antimatter in the late 21st century was generated by accelerating electrons to the speed of light. As an object approaches the speed of light, not only time dilation occurs, but also mass increase. This is because as soon as electrons reaches the speed of light, they can no longer store kinetic energy in its velocity, so it starts storing kinetic energy in its mass. If an electron were to receive 1836 times its mass worth of energy, its mass will increase to the point where it will have the same density and mass as that of a proton with a negative charge. An antiproton.

Antimatter generation The minimum voltage to accelerate an electron to the speed of light so its mass will increase to the equivalent to a proton is 940 megavolts. This voltage is achieved with a pair of electron acceleration antimatter generators. The primary components of the antimatter generators are one gigavolt transformer, an tri-osmium based Tesla coil, an antiproton collector on the anode of the Tesla coil, and an electron restoration conduit on the cathode of the coil. The electrons comes from a fuel ship that docks at the back of the station with a hold full of atmospheric gases from Jupiter itself. The antimatter generators draws the electrons away from the gases through the electron restoration conduit, and the now ionized gases are vented out of the ship in equal directions.

This method of generating antimatter as well as using this type of antimatter is common among younger and less advanced warp capable species.

Antimatter storage Since this form of antimatter can only exist at the speed of light, the antimatter is stored in large rings and use relatively low intensity magnetic fields to keep the antimatter in the hollow rings. This allows the antimatter to maintain its massive storage of kinetic energy, while at the same time, the magnetic fields keeps the protons and other positively charged particles out. This is often seen on the Declaration class starship, including the XCV-330, the Enterprise prior to the NX-01.

Though a new type of antimatter storage bottle is used for ships that puts the antiproton in a form of suspended animation, the antimatter containment rings remain on the station.

Tether power To power the antimatter generators, Arrakis uses 16 .5km long tethers to collect energy from Jupiter’s electromagnetic field. The total length of the tethers being 80km making it 17 times longer than the total length of the main cables used on the Golden Gate Bridge. When the station is above Jupiter’s geosynchronous orbit, the planet’s electromagnetic field cuts through the stations tethers generating power. In essence, Jupiter becomes dynamo. The key for using Jupiter as a dynamo is to keep the space station above geosynchronous orbit, or else the orbit of the space station will decay rapidly.

The antimatter refinery is located between the orbits of the Jovian inner moons of Adrastea and Amaltea, located 155,000km from Jupiter. This allows the magnetic field to impact the tethers at a speed of over 16km/s. And with Jupiter’s magnetic field being 20,000 times more intense than Earth’s, a single station can refuel 8 ships with antimatter at a 15% greater rate than those the 8 ships can burn the fuel.

Large cooling towers, similar to the ones on the antimatter generators, are used not to turn the tethers into superconductors, but rather to prevent the tethers from melting from the intense electromagnetic energy from Jupiter. They are also used to provide tension on the tethers using the micro gravity from the towers being 5 km above and below stable orbit, even though the pull is virtually undetectable. The tethers were considered to generate natural gravity for the space station without centrifugal forces, but the tethers need to be at least 65000km long to even achieve 1% of Earth‘s gravity, even with a planet as massive as Jupiter. And so gravity is then generated with a centrifuge in the habitat section.

Based upon early perpetual energy experiments on Earth, it was considered to increase the power output of the antimatter station by giving it a retrograde orbit around Jupiter. So instead of orbiting from west to east, the station would orbit from east to west, and increase the speed of the magnetic field impact on the tethers to nearly 64km/s. But that idea was abandoned due to numerous navigational hazards and the difficulties of reaching and docking with the station safely.

With this power source, it has been estimated that even with hundreds of stations providing fuel to thousands of starships, Jupiter has enough kinetic energy to last millions of years.

Critics Critics have asked as to why Arrakis wasn’t powered by solar energy? The complex series of solar collectors and structure that would be needed to power the antimatter generators at a required rate would have thrown the entire Arrakis project horrendously over budget. Though an enormous solar sail had been considered to reflect solar energy onto a smaller array, and was deemed cheaper and easier to maintain than conventional solar collectors and within a reasonable budget, tether power was in the end cheaper and easier to maintain.

Critics have also asked as to why not simply power the antimatter station with matter/antimatter reactions and dilithium? Despite conventional belief, starships using this type of antimatter do not harness its energy from reacting it with matter, but rather energy is released when the antiprotons enter a dilithium crystal causing them to instantly decelerate, releasing their massive storage of kinetic energy in the form of intense X-rays. These X-rays then powers the ship’s warp drive. Even though this type of antimatter can react with normal matter in an annihilation reaction, because they can only exist at light speed, they often are unable to react with them cause of their speed, being unable to alter course in time to intercept a proton. With at best 1 in 10000 antiprotons being able to react with protons, annihilation reaction was deemed highly inefficient and too dangerous for starship use.

An extremist group known as Terra Prime claims that the reason why the antimatter refinery is orbiting Jupiter is so that Starfleet can force humanity away from Earth, and that the antimatter refinery can easily be powered by the Sun’s electromagnetic energy even more efficiently than Jupiter, and can be kept relatively close to the Earth, since at that distance the sun‘s magnetic field would impact the station‘s tethers at 405km/s. In fact Starfleet tested this idea with Arrakis 1’s tethers in the final testing stage, and for reasons unknown, no power was being generated.

The extremist group also claims that Earth can also power the space station and it in turn can power Earth itself. However with a geosynchronous orbit of 35000 km, and requiring at least 45000km about the surface, the Earth’s magnetic field is deemed too weak to power anything larger than a medium size city.

Habitat The habitat section is designed with an internal rotating section, a centrifuge, to generate gravity for the station’s living quarters, medical bays, exercise bays and oxygen garden with a force of only 0.3G. Every other part of the habitat section, or the rest of the station as a matter of fact, is in zero gravity. 100% of Jupiter’s energy is dedicated for the antimatter generators, and with the weak solar energy at that distance, the habitat section is powered by nuclear fusion.

The refinery’s resources are replenished with a series of docking ports and cargo shuttles from Europe and Io.

Refit The first major redesign of the Arrakis class began with Arrakis 8 in 2140 with the installation of verteron field generators attached to the antimatter generators. These generators converts the kinetic energy of the antiprotons into an interstitial spin within the antiproton while retaining the antiproton’s mass and density. This allows the antimatter to be stored in magnetic bottles instead of rings, as well as being relatively safe to react with matter in an annihilation reaction using dilithium as a reaction controller. The verteron generators requires significant amounts of power and causes antimatter production to drop 29%.

Another major redesign includes 500 metre long electron collectors at the end of the tether cooling towers to capture valence electrons trapped in Jupiter’s magnetic field. Therefore a fuel shuttle is no longer required. The refit also included a redesigned habitat section which includes artificial gravity plates and generators. This upgrade is considered a blessing for the crew who were tired of floating off the deck when they jogged as fast as the centrifuge in the opposite direction and cancelling out its gravitational effects.

These upgrades became mandatory with the development of the NX program in its final stages, including the prototype NX-01. The refitted Arrakis class became known as the Arrakis MK2.

Variants A variant of the Arrakis class MK2 was constructed around Venus in 2145. This space station instead of having 5 km long tethers for power, they were replaced with 1km long photoelectric panels. The antimatter generators were replace with 100 megavolt transformers to generate highly energetic electrons to fuel the ion drives of civilian impulse drives.

Decommission In 2220, the quantum charge reversal device had been successfully introduced to the Federation. Though about the same size as their light speed antimatter counterparts, they only used 15% of the power. It was initially proposed to develop the Arrakis class MK3, which removes the 5km long tethers with 2km wide solar arrays, but it was then decided to design an entirely new class of antimatter fuel refinery, especially with the development of the new Constitution class starships.

In 2262, the last of the Arrakis class antimatter fuel refineries, along with the civilian ion fuel refineries, had been deactivated and decommissioned.

Red Dawn Class

Design by Nixon's Head

Affiliation: ECON, Eastern Coalition of Nations (Earth)
Type: Fighter
First commissioned: 2041
Length: 12.04m
Width: 6.34m
Height: 6.34m
Displacement: 10t
Complement: 1 officer
Speed: Sublight
Armament: 6 space torpedoes, IR laser, MASER, 30mm cannon

Based on the successful Soyuz and Shenzhou spacecraft, the IS-5 RED DAWN was a manned space fighter capable of extended operations in near-Earth and cis-lunar space. Several units saw action for the Eastern Coalition during WW III. A Shenzhou-style re-entry vehicle supported a single pilot. A modified orbital module held sensor and weapons systems. The service module contained a fission reactor power source and provisions for missions of up to one month’s duration. An additional Upper Stage module was added for operations beyond Low Earth Orbit, housing a high-performance ion drive which drew power from the SM fission reactor.

Red Dawn was designed primarily to attack Western Alliance geosynchronous and high Earth orbit military assets such as comsats, spysats and strategic defence platforms, as well as low orbit targets like bombardment platforms. The Eastern Coalition opted for a manned system due to the continuing superiority of the Western Alliance in electronic and cyber warfare technology, which rendered unmanned Coalition systems vulnerable to Western interference.

Primary weapons were an IR laser rated at 1.5 terawatts peak output, with a sustained beam strength of around 25kW. This was used mainly for sensor disruption of enemy spacecraft, or to damage solar arrays and other sensitive systems at ranges of 70-100km. Also mounted was a combined UHF radar/MASER with a rated power output of up to 75kW. This was capable of delivering a focused beam of microwave energy which was capable of disrupting unshielded electronics at ranges approaching 200km, or hardened military electronics from around 20km. In its radar mode, the MASER was capable of tracking stealthed nanosats from several thousand kilometres range.

Further offensive capability was provided by six small chemical-explosive "space torpedoes", codenamed the OO-15 STARBUCK by Western intelligence. These small missiles had a maximum delta-v of around 5km/s and were normally guided remotely via encrypted link by the Red Dawn's fire control system tied into the MASER/radar, but also had some limited independent targeting capability based on a visible-spectrum CCD camera. The explosive shrapnel warhead had a rated kill-radius (defined as the outer range giving a 50% change of a lethal kinetic impact) of 200m.

The final weapons option was given by a single GSh-1001 projectile cannon modified from that used on the Coalition's Sukhoi Su-52 fighter aircraft. Using a duel hypergolic reactant to propel 30mm depleted uranium projectiles, this was a short-range (1-5km) low-accuracy weapon intended to be used when a close, low-speed intercept was possible, or as a last resort if there was a danger of the fighter being boarded. The Red Dawn generally carried no more than 1000 rounds for the gun, giving a maximum of less than 15 seconds of continuous firing at the maximum rate. Normal operation would be short bursts of 10 rounds.

The Red Dawn's primary power system was a Topaz-10 nuclear fission reactor, fuelled by enriched uranium dioxide fuel pins moderated by ZrH with a beryllium neutron reflector. The system used a liquid metal NaK coolant and had a maximum rated output of 150kW. Four radiator fins mounted on the external surface of the Service Module dissipated the excess heat of the reactor. The use of nuclear power on the Red Star was what made it possible to mount the high-energy MASER and laser weapons, as well as giving the fighter impressive delta-v and endurance capabilities when combined with the high-thrust plasma drive in the Upper Stage. However, it also enormously increased the unit cost of the fighter, leading to the development of a more limited but cheaper solar powered fighter, the RED MOON.

In the two weeks before the start of the war, six Red Dawn fighters were launched and began shadowing Western targets in cis-lunar space. Within two hours of the first missile launch, all launch sites of both sides had been destroyed, but the Red Dawn's mostly continued their missions on their own initiative, causing considerable disruption to the surviving Western space assets in high orbit. In one of the most notorious incidents of the war in space, Red Dawn 32 commanded by Major Lu Xinhua intercepted and destroyed a Western DY-245 transport that had been en-route to Earth carrying civilian evacuees from Copernicus Base. RD-32 went on to take out much of the Western industrial infrastructure in Lunar orbit, before Lu deliberately crashed his vessel into the Moon, his weapons having been exhausted and his homeland long since turned to ashes.

Sol Class

Design by Flagg, 3D by Nixon's Head

Launched: 2092
Length: 229m
Width: 66m
Height: 55m
Crew complement: 28
Shuttlecraft: 1
Max. Speed: Warp 2.9
Impulse engines: 4 (8 reactors)
Weapons: 2 plasma cannons, 2 probe launch bays capable of deploying nuclear mines (8 onboard)

In the last decades of the 21st century the newly formed United Earth Space Probe Agency embarked upon a new endeavor; constructing the first dedicated exploration ship capable of achieving warp speed and being deployed for long term Intra, and Inter Solar mapping and exploration. The finished design was the Sol Class prototype UESPAS-Sol was launched in 2092. It was able to reach a maximum of warp 1.9 at launch, with a desired peak capability of warp 2.5. The initial attempt at breaching the warp 2 barrier resulted in disaster as the nacelles ruptured and exploded, causing a cascade effect which resulted in a warp core breach, the first such event in Human history. It was discovered upon investigation of sensor logs that the initial 2 nacelle design was overpowered, there was simply too much energy being put into the nacelles for them to cope past Warp 1.9. Rather than completely sacrifice the concept, as the Vulcan High Command advised, the UESPA hit upon an ingenious solution, refine the efficiency of the warp coils, and add another pair of nacelles. The downside of course was that the warp core efficiency would be drastically lowered, but with a new core design at the turn of the century, this problem was mitigated. The second ship of the class, UESPAS-Mercury, was launched in 2103, 11 years to the day after the UESPAS-Sol disaster. It went on to achieve a maximum speed of Warp 2.9, far beyond the initial expectations. A total of 11 Sol-class vessels (including the ill fated UESPAS Sol, Sol-01) were completed and put into service.

UESPAS - Sol, Sol - 01 2092-2092 (destroyed)
UESPAS - Mercury, Sol - 02 2103-2128 (missing)
UESPAS - Venus, Sol - 03 2105-2113 (heavily damaged, scrapped)
UESPAS - Mars, Sol - 04 2106-2148 (decommissioned) 2156-2161 (recomissioned during Romulan War) 
UESPAS - Jupiter, Sol - 05 2106-2148 (decommissioned) 2156-2161 (recomissioned during Romulan War)
UESPAS - Saturn, Sol - 06 2107-2148 (decommissioned) 2156-2159 (destroyed during Romulan War)
UESPAS - Uranus, Sol - 07 2108-2152 (scrapped)
UESPAS - Neptune, Sol - 08 2108-2134 (destroyed)
UESPAS - Pluto, Sol - 09 2109-2152 (scrapped)
UESPAS - Sol, Sol - 10 2110-2210 (placed In Smithsonian Orbital Exhibit) 
UESPAS - Luna, Sol - 11 2111-2119 (missing)