Notomys class mobile starbase

Notomys class mobile starbase

OVERVIEW

Recent developments in coaxial jump drive have developed an energy intensive system that is able to produce a spherical field and translocate an object from one point to another. Unlike teleporters which break matter down and beam it as energy and reassemble it at the destination the Jump Drive alters space/time at the quantum level effectively causing the space within the field to become the space at the projected destination.

Generating the field safely is a time intensive process taking approximately 15-20 minutes and take more energy than can be generated in a conventional MA/RA reactor. The Notomys clas starbase is thus equipped with a SM/AC (small matter/antimatter collider) reactor. The 'Smack,' as its crew has taken to calling it, are several miles of tubes wrapped around the 'waist' of the starbase and surrounded in magnetic and warp fields used to accelerate deuterium and antideuterium atoms to superluminal velocity before colliding them together for a massive energy release.

The maximum stable size for the coaxial jump field is limited to a diameter of approximately a kilometer which in turn governed the maximum size possible for a ship or starbase using the technology. The prototype starbase also has twelve massive docking arms or "masts" that extend even further when in the starbase is real space for normal operations but can be retracted when jumping. Extending and retracting the masts takes just under 10 minutes once personnel are removed to safety.

Because the jump is 'blind' and bears a risk of interpenetrating any object in the arrival zone several protocols exist for jumping. Ideally, a federation starship will survey the arrival point in detail and use its navigational deflector to remove any matter from the area before signaling the all-clear to the starbase before the starbase jumps.

Kamal class transwarp tug (transport vessel)

The initial production run of this class is limited to six prototype vessels: the Kamal, Astrolabe, Octant, Sextant, Blackstaff, and Compass. Additional vessels added to the class will typically be named after pre-warp instruments of navigation of the various Federation member worlds.

The transwarp tug is ugly, powerful, and incredibly fast.  The transwarp tug is not a tug in the traditional sense but more of an Icebreaker. Transwarp drives are currently expensive, dangerous and requires specialized training to maintain and operate. But the benefit of travelling at warp 9.995 (approximately 20 times faster than modern starships are capable of) and the findings that other starships can, for a short time, also utilize the transwarp corridor opened by a transwarp vessel caused starfleet to agree to prototype this vessel.

The mission of the transwarp tug is to fly back and forth on an established long distance route and on an established schedule. Other starships can join the tug at the beginning of the route and use the transwarp corridor generated by the tug on its passage to follow it, shaving months or even years off their voyages without needing transwarp drives of their own.

These convoys of ships gather at one end of the transwarp tugs regular route then closely follow the tug as it creats a transwarp corridor to the destination point where they then drop out of transwarp and dispurse to travel under normal warp drive for the remainder of their journey. Meanwhile at the end of the transwarp route another group of ships will have gathered to follow the tug as it returns to back to its beginning point. 

The life of a transwarp tug isn't very glamorous, shuffling back and forth and back and forth between two points in space but it the pilot program is successful will prove to be a tremendous economic boon to the Federation.