A Constitution Class vessel.
The Constitution Class of starships were a very successful line of warp starships designed for space exploration and defence.
History[]
Designed in the 2230s by the Lunar Construction Facilities engineer Jeresh Threll, the craft was desgned during a period of significant expansion in the Federation, and the older types of starship built by private firms were often of poor quality, making the need for a multi-purpose vessel paramount within the expanding government.
Threll had designed the craft in the fashion of his home planet, Parrandian, and the layout was fairly spartan with only a few relaxation areas around the ship. These, however, proved ample enough in practice.
The ship was originally designed to be equipped a single, far more powerful engine. In theory, the single engine nacelle could have produced a warp speed of over factor 6 (extremely fast by the standards of the 2230s), but these were still in a fairly experimental state and would often fail during the pre-examination tests. After several nearly catastrophic engine failures, these single engined variants were only produced in very small numbers after the flight examination, although for a few decades the rare ships enjoyed a position as the fastest in the United Federation of Planets. One such example is the USS Kelvin, featured in the 2009 Star Trek Movie, although the exact specifications of the Kelvin and the single engine Constitution Class Staships are not exactly the same, and the Kelvin did not engage in any combat in the Unlogic Universe. Meanwhile, the double-nacelled versions proved, in the end, to be faster than the single engined variants, eventually reaching speeds of warp 8 in the 2260s.
In Service[]
Whilst many hundreds of Constitution Class starships (single and double engined varients) remain in service in the 2280s, there are far greater numbers of the more modern Constellation Class starships, numbering in the thousands. During their heyday of the 2240s-60s, they became an icon of humanity's ideals: Exploration and peace.