New Ship Classes

It’s less than a week since the end of Picard season 3 – we made it, folks! We’ve come out the other end with our nerves intact and, excitingly, with the largest release of new, canonical starship classes since First Contact (or more? Or more!). Allow me to introduce to you:

• The Alita-class, a modern successor to the Akira
• The Constitution III-class, an explorer made famous on-screen by the USS Titan
• The Duderstadt-class, a multi-role light cruiser – seen on-screen with the USS Intrepid
• The Echelon-class, a modern utility light cruiser, and smaller sister ship to the Sagan
• The Edison-class, a generalist heavy frigate
• The Phoenix-class, a corvette for small teams and crews
• The Sagan-class, an explorer made famous on-screen by the USS Stargazer

In addition, the Sovereign and Odyssey articles have both received substantial updates to take into account what we now know about their role in the 25th century. The Aquarius has also been revised to fit in better as an independent ship, to help adjust for some of the things I’ll mention in just a bit.

All of these classes can be seen on the wiki (in a fully new way of navigating specifications visually), with full write-ups detailing how you can use them in your stories! Massive thanks to the Tech Team for labouring on these new drafts, especially David, who did the lion’s share of the work while I said I don’t care how many torpedo launchers a ship model has and he reminds me it’s very important!

But all good things must come to an end, and the more Trek canon ships we have, the more the Intel Office is eager to move away from fanon classes. As such, we will be retiring two of the last non-canon ship classes on our roster: the Century-class and the Diligent-class. The Century has already been rolled into the Constitution III, with names moving over as many are already those of classic Constitution-class ships. The unused Diligents have been retired, while those in use will be updated to canon classes of comparable strength in due time.

This has also prompted us to revise some of our classifications for ship unlocks by rank and by squadron strength. Rather than detail all of the changes here, I will direct you to our Command Policy to check out the changes. None of these should dramatically affect anyone at present. The keen-eyed among you may spot there is also an adjustment to the way attached ships work with starbases – now a starbase may have any Strength 1 ship attached for ‘free’, to reflect the limitations upon a starbase command and so any member with a starbase may easily be involved in fleet-wide storytelling.

Finally, we recognise that we have made massive changes to the roster of ship classes available – probably the biggest we’ll ever make. Many of you will be eager to get your hands on these brand-new canon ships, I’m absolutely sure. As such, I will be on this occasion waiving the policy requirement that members not change ships more than once every three months. Also, we are offering just this once some leeway in how we operate our registry, allowing members to change the classes of ships they already hold – within reason. If you have a ship and you’d like to keep the name but make it, for instance, an Echelon-class, you may make the request of the Intelligence Office so long as:

• You have held the ship name for at least a year;
• The change keeps you within your squadron strength (ie, no upgrading your Sovereign to an Odyssey if you’re not a Fleet Captain);
• The change is reasonable within the eyes of the Intel Office.

Members get one change each, excluding an IO-enforced change from retiring or altering a ship class. This is also your only shot; while we might offer changes like this in the future, outside of extenuating circumstances we don’t want members bouncing around in their ship class changes.

Some of you may have questions about the future after seeing Picard, but don’t worry. We do not anticipate, despite the high-octane scenes depicted in the show, anyone to be forced into any more major changes by screen canon. Frontier Day will be addressed by Bravo Fleet once our timeline reaches that point, but that’s not until July 2023.

In the meantime, the Fleet Action awaits, and the Lost Fleet is eager to confront your redoubtable starships…