Specifications - USS Churchill
Summary
Formally the USS Paris an Excelsior class star ship commissioned in 2310. The vessel was later retired in 2373 after her involvement in the Dominion War.
Starfleet became concerned that the decommissioning yards where becoming more of a waste ground and that older class vessels were not recycled fast enough and that the Yaridian Yards were far too insecure for newer ships to be decommissioned there.
In 2383 Starfleet Engineering began working on a refit program of older class vessels that had at least a 90% hull intact. The USS Paris had been the third vessel to undergo an extensive refit. The Vessel would later be renamed the Churchill.
The history of the Excelsior Class tends to consist of extremes. The Excelsior Class was the testbed for many new techologies and ideas in Starfleet thinking including a captains ready room, failed transwarp drive, and a new style of living arrangements for Starfleet officers. Initially fitted with a transwarp drive and proclaimed 'The Great Experiment', the ship had an ignoble start when its engines failed when it was called into action to prevent the theft of the USS Enterprise. Although this was due to deliberate sabotage, it transpired that the Excelsior had been saved from a major disaster. Engineers working to correct the damage discovered a series of flaws in the transwarp drive which, had it been used, would have caused a nacelle implosion which would have destroyed the ship. The USS Excelsior spent nearly a full year in spacedock while engineering specialists struggled to repair the problem. Re-launched early in 2286, the ship met with little more success.
Although the fatal flaw of the transwarp drive was repaired, the system was subject to major problems and over the next year it never completed a successful test, much to the embarrassment of Captain Styles and his crew. Finally, Starfleet cancelled the transwarp project altogether, and for a short time the Excelsior faced decommissioning. There was nothing wrong with the basic engineering of the space frame however, and in all other areas the Excelsior Class was still the most advanced ship in Starfleet, and indeed the entire quadrant, by a considerable margin. In light of this Starfleet rapidly decided to fit the Excelsior Class with a more conventional propulsion system. She returned to spacedock for the third time in 2287 to have her hull converted to run with a standard warp drive. This process went remarkably smoothly, and by the end of the year the Excelsior was in space again. From here the history of the ship leapt from one extreme to the other. From being a costly and embarrassing failure, the Excelsior rapidly built a reputation for outstanding performance and a solid reliability few other designs have matched. Series production commenced at once, and continued unbroken for the next thirty nine years, a record for Federation shipbuilding. The Excelsior herself was assigned to Captain Hikaru Sulu in 2290 and conducted extensive scientific, exploratory and diplomatic missions under his distinguished command.
Since then the Excelsior has been a mainstay of the Federation fleet for nearly one hundred years, although production was eventually cut and the last Excelsior rolled out of dry dock in 2351. After refitting the class for decades to conform with updates and upgrades in technology, the class has massively outlived it's original twenty year life expectancy. The Excelsior Class also played a pivotal role in the fight against both the Borg Collective and Dominion. Many have now been retired, given other, non-Starfleet issued duties or scrapped for other, newer classes of ship. However just as many still remain in service and are expected to continue until finally breaking down, or are replaced. Overall, the class is supposed to have been replaced by the Explorer Class, but the phasing out of the Excelsior class is not expected until 2405 at the earliest, more than 120 years after the first was built.
General
| Class |
|
Excelsior |
| Role |
|
Cruiser |
| Duration |
|
60 Years |
| Time Between Refits |
|
5 |
| Time Between Resupply |
|
3 |
Dimensions
| Length |
|
467 meters |
| Width |
|
180.3 meters |
| Height |
|
77.1 meters |
| Decks |
|
22 |
Personnel
| Officers |
|
115 |
| Enlisted Crew |
|
450 |
| Civilians |
|
35 |
| Emergency Capacity |
|
800 |
Speed
| Cruise Speed |
|
Warp 6 |
| Maximum Speed |
|
Warp 8 |
| Emergency Speed |
|
Warp 9.5 for 8 hours |
Weapons & Defensive Systems
| Shields |
|
Regenerative Shielding System |
| Weapon Systems |
|
10 Type Type-IX - Refit power design |
| Armament |
|
120 Photon Torpedoes
4 Tricobalt Devices
|
Auxiliary Craft
| Shuttlebays |
|
2 |
| Shuttles |
|
8 |
| Runabouts |
|
2 |