Virtuoso

While the Sanctuary-Pattern Heavy Fleet Tenders are backwards compatible with the older Dancer-Pattern corvettes, they were designed with the Virtuoso in mind. A small 500kt ship, 225m long, the Virtuoso-class has very different design considerations than the ships of most Federation peers.

While equipped with an efficient warp drive system, the Virtuoso is not equipped with an antimatter reactor, instead it poses Sarium Krellide batteries that are designed to be recharged from a convenient base or Tender. In the event of an emergency, or long term independent operation, a Virtuoso possess a set of deployable solar sails that are also capable of trickle charging the warp drive system. In battle the Virtuoso relies upon salvo fired, box launched, antimatter micro torpedoes intended to overwhelm defensive systems. As the corvettes do not have antimatter storage containers to siphon from, all micro torpedoes are filled and live when loaded into the corvette from their tender.

Due to the small size of the Virtuoso the crew facilities are kept very austere and spartan, especially by Harmony standards, and the 70-75 crew are intended to cycle on and off of the vessels in short intervals.

In a combat situation Peacekeeper doctrine calls for multiple Virtuoso and Dancer pattern strike corvettes to launch a single mass wave of antimatter missiles from their box launchers before rapidly closing to knife fighting range and outmaneuvering larger vessels to take advantage of precision strikes in blind spots as determined by the command and control staff on their tender.