USS Freedom

The USS Firebrand, which was destroyed in the famous battle at Wolf359, brought a good deal of attention to the Freedom class of Starfleet ships, particularly because of its unique single-nacelle design. Of course, anyone with even a limited idea about Star Trek warp technology would know that this design simply could not work. The fact that the craft has no deflector array whatsoever only adds to the overall problem. I've always hated the Freedom class design profile and wanted to come up with a way to use the overall shape while bringing in more accepted notions about how Star Trek's warp drive works. The following diagram shows my redesigned Freedom class (yes, another one named USS Akhenaten).





The first thing I did was to double the width of the nacelle, enough to get a second set of warp drive coils in there. Secondly, I brought the saucer section down closer to the drive nacelle. Then I added an actual engineering section along the top of the nacelle. I added a deflector array between the Buzzard collectors up front, and a square impulse set to the aft dorsal pylon. I made the above schematics from Freedom (saucer), Galaxy (nacelle), and Ambassador (engineering and saucer pylon) class hull sections.

The Freedom class has a problematic design, and the limited development that went into what is considered a canonical Star Trek class is shoddy. I can't claim to have achieved greatness in my own design but at least it's cooler than the "official" craft. Below is my Lego version.




I named this vehicle "Racinante" after Don Quixote's faithful horse and after the spaceship used to go through the black hole in Rush's classic song Cygnus X-1.