Foundry class

Inscription on Commissioning Plaque:
 "If We Can't Fix It, It Ain't Broke"

-- Slogan of late 20th century Electronic Warfare Technicians

General Specifications:
Length: 928m
Width: 780m
Height: 464m
Max. Warp: 8.0 (unladen)
Cruise: 7.2 (unladen)
Max. Impulse: 0.9935 lightspeed (unladen)
Crew: 150 officers, 405 enlisted

Armaments: Two "cutter beams", 1 fwd, 1 aft. Eight heavy tractor beam emitters, 4 fwd, 4 aft.

Type: Heavy Ship Tender

Status: One undergoing shakedown (Foundry), one under construction (Forge).

About Ship: In the wake of two invasions by the Borg, a "difference of opinion" with the Klingons, and the current war with the Dominion, Starfleet has had quite a few ships (and fragments thereof) to repair or salvage. Not all battles take place within convenient range of a static repair facility such as a starbase or shipyard. A need was determined for a vessel equipped to deliver starbase-type support for repair and salvage operations on an as-needed basis.

The Foundry class starship is equipped to repair or salvage any vessel in the fleet. Its largest feature is an internal maintenance bay that measures 744m x 404m x 280m. Five segmented doors (1 each fwd, aft, port, starboard, and below) provide ingress to the largest vessels in starfleet, with few exceptions. The Foundry possesses the repair capacity of a small starbase.

The Foundry is heavily overbuilt, with four M/ARA units feeding power to a battery of quantum flywheels. The structural integrity field is especially designed to compensate for the stresses involved with simultaneously towing up to four large vessels.

The Foundry is not a warship, but is equipped with two cutter beams fabricated from parts scavenged from Borg vessels. These cutter beams may be used for defensive purposes, but their primary purpose is to dismantle any vessel too large to fit (intact) within the internal bay. The eight tractor beams are likewise useful in a defensive role, but are intended to allow salvaged or crippled ships to be towed or maneuvered into the internal bay. They are powerful enough and possess sufficient range to enable the Foundry to remain in orbit and recover large (over 100,000 DWT) vessels from a planetary surface with not more than 3 gees of surface gravity.

The toroidal warp nacelles are an unusual design. The primary advantage of this design is that the warp field of the ship is more easily extended to envelop a large towed vessel. The Foundry may exceed warp 5 without increasing the risk of a subspace rift, but is limited by its configuration to warp 8, due to unacceptably high dynamic structural stresses incurred at high warp.