Saladin

The Saladin-class formed the backbone of Starfleet's military response capability for the better part of 50 years and served admirably in that capacity. During that period of service, ships of the Saladin-class and its refits saw action against both the expansionist Klingon Empire and the newly-assertive Orion Syndicate. It should be noted that the very thing that made it distinctive also left the Saladin as somewhat controversial. Proponents and antagonists alike defined the class in terms of its combat potential, to the point of referring to it as a 'destroyer' in many (unofficial) contexts. Nevertheless, Starfleet steadfastly maintained that the USS Saladin and her refits/subclasses were never intended to be dedicated warships; indeed, these vessels were equipped with sufficient scientific equipment and onboard industry to find ample use in peacetime. This did not entirely ameliorate the concerns of Vulcan and its colonies and the Federation Council officially requested that Starfleet refrain from assigning any Vulcan names to this class out of respect for their misgivings.

History
Technological development on the class that would become the Saladin began in 2236 with the construction of a groundbreaking single-nacelle warp sled at the Yoyodyne test range in the Alpha Centauri system. The core principle relied on 'folding' the warp coils inside the nacelle cowling to create a warp bubble without needing a second set of polarized coils. This mono-nacelle layout was originally implemented on the Suvek-class aviso runabouts in 2239 before construction began on the prototype USS Saladin later that year. Early technical reports from the USS Suvek and her sister ship USS Burke led to a series of minor modifications to the design that delayed construction the Saladin by roughly three months.

Although the initial order had been placed for a mere ten vessels, an marked uptick in tension with the Klingon Empire and an overall lack of confidence in the ability of the existing Akula-class frigates to match up to modern Klingon designs quickly prompted Starfleet to order a second set of ten Saladins. This haste proved fortunate. Saladin herself fought with distinction at the Battle of Uwaar Shi in 2244, the first among many attempts by Klingon vessels (both pirate and state-sanctioned) to attack Federation merchantmen and installations across the border. Commerce raiding continued unabated over the next four years, and Saladins slotted in beside their more primitive Akula cousins to protect Federation shipping with considerable -- albeit not total -- success. In 2246, the USS Alexander joined the Akulas USS Thresher and USS Osiris in defending against the Klingon Empire's first foray where they repulsed the D7 cruisers IKS tammoH and IKS chunDab at the Battle of Epsilon Archede.

This conflict continued to escalate until it reached a state of undeclared war now known as the Taan Tal Offensive; squadrons of Klingon warships operated with impunity across the entire border zone and grew increasingly bold with their choice of targets. Eventually, this would climax with in the Battle of Donatu V, where a Federation wolfpack (composed of the Saladin-class vessels USS Ajetha, USS Zorab fop Yangor, and USS Hannibal Barca; the Ranger-class vessels USS Saratoga, USS Zhang Qian, and USS Atago; and the older Republic-class vessels USS Kir'Shara and USS Cochrane) cornered a major Klingon force and obliterated it outright, losing the Saratoga and Kir'Shara in the process, with the Zorab fop Yangor also being crippled by disruptor fire. On the whole, the Saladins were judged to have performed admirably.

It would not be long, however, before those same starships were found lacking. This came in the form of a two-pronged attack. First, peacetime service led to more Saladins handing diplomatic missions -- something they proved wholly unsuited for -- and a particularly embarrassing incident where the accidental exposure of a Medusan envoy killed ten Starfleet officers during a routine trade summit drew the ire of the FDS who demanded, in as many words, that "something must be done." Second, tactical supremacy proved fleeting. Although the alliance between Orion pirates and a rogue Klingon House was quashed before it could snowball into a true crisis at the Battle of Sur Cha in 2252, both the USS Methelian and USS Orrav were destroyed in the engagement. Subsequent analysis found that the Saladins had been insufficiently shielded to withstand the cutting-edge weapons that had been employed against them.

These factors joined with the impending retirement of the Akula class to prompt a deep reexamination of the Saladin's future, and of what form that future would take. The general consensus had been moving in the direction of a third flight of Saladins, but some among the Admiralty had never been fond of the Saladin's radical design and urged for the development of a more traditional dual-nacelle frigate design to replace the Akula. After all, the Saladin required many specialized parts (not least of all the painfully expensive nacelle) that weren't shared by any other Federation vessel. In the end, support for the Saladin proved too strong to overcome. A new flight of 12 starships was ordered under freshly-revised specifications, to which the existing 20 vessels would be refit to over the next several years.

First Refit
Referred to as the Hyusma subclass after the lead vessel, these next-generation frigates boasted an extensive array of alterations including a modernized nacelle, recreation facilities that could be converted into a conference chamber on short notice, and a distinctive 'tail' that jutted out slightly behind the ship to accommodate an expanded shuttle bay. Certainly, they were an improvement in every regard over the Akula design they had supplanted. Still, they were a dozen ships intended to fill the shoes of 25. The typical Saladin of this era was rarely to be found at rest; while the larger and more capable Mirandas attended Federation homeworlds and major colonies, it typically fell to these smaller frigates to run the peripheral routes and border patrols.

Two ships were lost during this period. The USS Mirg vanished while on patrol out of Vega after indicating that they had received a faint distress signal in 2263. More infamously, the USS chim Coga was drawn into ambush by the Orion Syndicate in the ternary system of Mazralla in 2266, where it was disabled by exploiting a design flaw in the warp nacelle to create a feedback loop that prompted the ship's computer to initiate an emergency core shutdown. The crew were sold into slavery on Alukk while the chim Coga herself was broken down into component parts and sold on the black market. (It is believed that the warp core design in use by the Orion Syndicate was reverse-engineered from this incident).

Fallout from the Mazralla Incident was swift and terrible for the Syndicate after Starfleet Intelligence discovered what had transpired through the services of a SOPHINT asset three months later, and the FDS quickly set about locating and retrieving the enslaved officers and enlisted. It wasn't until the middle of 2267, however, that they happened upon someone who understood the specifics of what had transpired. After the chim Coga's former Chief Engineer -- now some 15 kilos lighter, post-captivity -- explained the precise vulnerability in warp field harmonics that the Orions had exploited in front of an aghast Admiralty, the Saladins in service were immediately withdrawn from border duty and relegated to secondary roles within core Federation territory while a crack team of engineers began emergency work on a refit.

The news proved to be a bitter pill to swallow. Far from being a simple nacelle replacement as had been hoped, the flaw was endemic to every mono-nacelle design using the horseshoe-coil paradigm. That is to say: every mono-nacelle ship in Starfleet, as no other coil patterns were considered to be viable using present technology. Saladin and her sisters would either have to lose their iconic solo nacelle profile or exit service altogether. That choice was a simple one, though: as the old Earth saying goes, "in for a penny, in for a pound." The hulls were in good shape, and there were no forthcoming frigate designs that could be rushed into service in greater number sin order to replace them. While the next phase of refits would be horrifically invasive and costly, there was no real way forward aside from rolling up one's sleeves and setting to work.

Second Refit
Out of adversity, the Apollo.

The typical nomenclature would be the 'Saladin-B', but both the scale of the alteration and the fact that Starfleet decided to make the further investment worth their while by ordering an unprecedented fourth flight of Saladins led to the new refit being called the Apollo-class, even in most official documentation. Most obviously, the Apollos were given a second dorsal nacelle to complement their existing ventral one. These nacelles were of the same pattern in use with the Constitution and Miranda, among others, making them (relatively) cheap to procure. Further, the torpedo launchers were removed from the underside of the saucer and relocated to a brand new tactical pod located roughly a third of the way down the ventral nacelle spar. (For unclear reasons, the yard that produced the Tlaloc and Inanna implemented a minor design variation that placed the tactical pod on the dorsal nacelle strut instead, which would prove very fortunate for the Inanna.) Naturally, the full extent of the changes ran much deeper. With the space saved by the relocation of the torpedo launchers and magazine, designers were able to add a dedicated diplomatic suite as well as a further-enlarged shuttle bay. Sensors also received a total rework, but advances in miniaturization actually led to an increase in available hull space that was mostly given towards increased material stores.

Aside from these class-wide features, the 18 newly-built Apollos were designed with an additional deck in the middle of the saucer. This gave them a very distinctive 'fat' look, almost more reminiscent of forthcoming Constellation-class that would follow five years later than of their fellow Saladin hulls. Variances in internal layout allowed these ships to mount a proper deflector dish on the prow of the vessel (albeit typically protected behind a retractable panel). These ships also had a second sickbay, alongside a shuttle bay expanded yet further in order to accommodate up to two liaison runabouts at once. Moving away from the somewhat charged naming scheme of great military conquerors applied to previous Saladins, the Apollos were instead named after historical deities. (Vulcan, yet again, requested exception.)

Thanks to the Apollo refit, Saladins continued to serve as a reliable wing of Starfleet's frigate force for the next twenty years. Apart from an unfortunate meeting with an unfriendly cosmozoan of uncertain species that forced the crew of the USS Narremala Ka to evacuate the ship before it could be consumed in late 2276, the only blemish has been the loss of the USS Inanna in the second quarter of 2291. Her plasma manifold had been improperly maintained by the engineering crew and failed at an inopportune time: namely, while the ship was performing a very low orbit survey of one of the gas giant Lirocca Bc's eight rocky moons. Having lost all impulse control, the helmsman of the Inanna successfully used RCS thrusters to guide the starship down to a controlled but dangerous landing inside the hollow of a large crater. Had theInanna's tactical pod been located in the standard ventral configuration, the lower nacelle strut would not have been able to buckle as it did without risking a possible detonation of her photon torpedo magazine. Miraculously, there were no fatalities recorded. The USS Excalibur successfully raised the Inanna via tractor beam, but a full analysis at Starbase 3 judged the hull a total loss. (The heretofore-unnamed moon was subsequently dubbed Inanna.)

In the end, the Saladin's long service was brought to an end not by age or obsolescence but by internal politics and the far-reaching repercussions of both the Khitomer Accords and the Cartwright conspiracy. With Starfleet due to be radically reduced in terms of personnel and equipment, the Federation Council was eager to see what they had long viewed as its most militarized class on the chopping block. And chop they did. The reduction took place steadily between the years of 2294 and 2297, with the final ship -- USS Kutaisi, also the last to be commissioned -- being retired in a ceremony above Alpha Centauri in January of 2297.

Although its service life may be over, many of the hulls continue to exist in operable condition. Twelve hulls (predominantly fourth-flight Apollos) remain in mothballs scattered across Starfleet's three major reserve depots, where they were most recently readied as a reserve fleet during the height of the Biophage Crisis. Four more survive as warp tugs, using their powerful tractor beams to haul orbital infrastructure across the Federation in cases where runabout-sized warp tugs prove insufficient. A final set of surviving Saladins can be found in various museums operated by the four founding members. The hulls at Andor, Tellar Prime, and Vega are dormant museum pieces, but Starfleet Museum's El Cid and Al-Mansur are maintained as active vessels and often used to perform reenactments.

The "51st Saladin"
The final vessel of the Saladin class is perhaps the least conventional of them all: the USS Serapis is a full-size mock-up of the Saladin-class internals located in San Francisco as a training annex of Starfleet Academy. Constructed in 2275, the Serapis allows cadets to experience the rigors of shipboard service without having to leave the gravity well of Earth. Indeed, participation in this training program is considered mandatory before one is deemed eligible to participate in a proper spaceborne tour aboard one of the Academy's small fleet of aviso runabouts. Despite its status as a 'fake' ship, the Serapis nevertheless has a small crew of officers assigned to serve aboard as guidance and teaching staff. Overall command of the vessel is usually vested upon a promising young Lieutenant Commander and is seen as one of the most prestigious posts in the fleet; it's not atypical for the Captain of the Serapis to be personally groomed by the Commandant of the Academy.

In Member Fleet Service
In addition to the Saladins in Starfleet, the class also saw an uncommonly prolific adoption by member states. Part of that could be ascribed to the aging state of their respective frigates, but there was also an undeniable level of paranoia regarding the potential abilities of Klingon raiders and Orion pirates to strike vulnerable targets deep within the Federation sphere. While this might seem somewhat deluded to the modern ear, this concern was very much genuine during the height of Klingon aggression in the 2240s. Starfleet seemed to be buckling; would it break?

The answer, of course, proved to be a resounding "no," but at that point the governments of Earth, Tellar Prime, and Andor had already accumulated a significant number of Saladins and were working on building even more. Vulcan High Command, predictably, wanted no part in this. Their faith in Starfleet's ability to defend the border against deep incursions seems never to have wavered. Although the ships were virtually never faced with combat duty, these member fleet Saladins served as reliable workhorses for decades to come.

In the wake of the Mazralla incident, however, member fleets faced a rather stark choice. Unlike Starfleet, it was very difficult to justify the expense it would take to refit their entire Saladin fleets to the new Apollo standard. At the end of the day, there were simply too few missions that couldn't be handled just as well -- or better! -- by a Miranda or Soyuz. UESPA and the Andorian Guard chose to refit only half of their inventory, while the Tellarite State Force wound up retaining all four. (Having just retired their last two remaining Rangers, the call was made that they couldn't afford to lose any more hulls.)

Without the political pressure leveraged against Starfleet during the 2290s, member fleets were in no rush to phase out their relatively modern frigates and kept them in operation well into the first decade of the 24th century. Their last notable period of activity proved to be the Biophage Crisis of 2305, when the remaining Saladins were pressed into Federation service as patrol & response ships to fill the gaps that had been left by the massive mobilization against the Inflictor -- perhaps ironically, the very role they had been created to perform. The final vessel was retired in 2309, as the member fleets began to place more trust in a reinvigorated Starfleet to handle the basic needs of the Federation.