The Enterprise – D The Federation Flagship

While I've been doing biographies on the cast for a while, I've been thinking that the ship deserves one as well. If it wasn't for the ship then the show wouldn't exist and this crew would never have ended up together. Admittedly there would have probably just been another ship, but would it have had the atmosphere or the intrigue of this great Galaxy Class ship.

The idea for the Galaxy Class began in 2343 and designing began that same year. The ships were designed to be multi-purpose; they would be able to carry the crew and their families. Also it could spend great lengths of time without docking to a Starbase or space station, this would give it the ability to conduct deep-space exploration or to be able to stay on the front-line (in times or war) for longer than many other ships. Construction began in 2350 at the Utopia Planitia construction yard orbiting Mars. Construction finishes in 2357 and the ship spends the next 3 years testing the various systems such as the warp coils, shields, torpedo launchers etc. The ships is officially commissioned the "USS Enterprise - D" on the 4th of October 2363. 3 years after the first Galaxy class starship (the USS Galaxy) it is the third of the Galaxy class starships to be built.

The ship consisted of a new feature, which allowed it to separate it to separate into 2 portions, a Saucer section and a Battle section. This would normally be done in battle situations. Since the ship has many families living aboard they would be moved into the saucer section, and most of the crew would move to the battle section, which contained most of the ship's armaments and the warp drive. The bridge crew would be transferred from the Main Bridge (Deck 1) to the battle bridge (Deck 8). This was first put into practise against the Q in the first episode ("Encounter and Farpoint"), later on it saves the crew from certain death when their ship is attacked by Lursor and B'Etor (I apologise for the spelling) in the movie Generations. The idea was further adapted to the Battleship Prometheus, which could split into 3 sections.

The ship and a maximum "safe" warp speed of Warp 9.2, however if pushed it could reach higher speeds. The ship also has 6 main personnel transporters with ranges of 400000km. There are also 6 emergency "one-way" transporters, which can be used for emergency evacuation of the ship. There are many more features of the Enterprise -D that haven't even been touched upon in this article, yet to go into them would in fact be quite monotonous and so I will spare you that.

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