When I was first assigned to the Enterprise I had thought Commander Riker was frustrating to deal with and stuck in his ways. Compared to what I’ve been dealing with at R&D, he practically rolled out the red carpet and offered me champagne on the transporter pad.

When I joined Admiral Hanson at Starfleet Tactical, he threw his weight around to get things done. When the Columbia was destroyed at 359, I had to come back without his support while dealing with a lot of expectant admirals expecting 40 or more ships to be rebuilt and operational before the year was out. It would have been no mean feat to accomplish even surrounded by a leadership team of yes men, which I definitely didn’t have.

Even though we had broken ground after J25 on designs like Defiant and Akira, there were still a number of shall we say ‘the old guard’ that needed to be more forcefully persuaded to up their game. Aside from the 359 survivors who had decided to join the effort to rebuild the fleet, the entire R&D mindset seemed firmly stuck in the last decade.

Here we were putting pen to paper to build ‘Starfleets first warship’ so we might stand a chance when the Borg come back, while they were patting themselves on the back about their colony ship that could serve as a forward operating base for planetary combat.

The Borg aren’t going to engage in trench warfare. We had a peace treaty with the Cardassians. What problem was this ship going to solve exactly?

That’s the question I ended up repeatedly asking the leaders of all the starship development projects. Forcing them to clearly lay out what current problem their design would solve. Some, like Benjamin Sisko, were almost too passionate when making their presentation.

Like I did with Picard, I question Starfleet’s willingness to so quickly put those who were traumatized by Wolf 359 back to work so quickly.. I’m happy to hear that he’s now solved the Defiant’s structural integrity field issues though.

But Intrepid and more specifically, Jack Tracy were a constant thorn in my side. I’d be lying if I told you that it hadn’t impacted my feelings on the class. Or if I claimed I was surprised when the entire project was canned. I had to fight him every step of the way to make Intrepid fit to solve a problem the Federation was currently facing.

Eventually though, he fell to the same trick that seems to work on all officers of a certain generation.

Mention Kirk. I mean, I admire the man. Who doesn’t? But it seems that those of a certain age are almost irrationally fanatical about him. All I had to do was dress up what I wanted Intrepid to be, a multi-role exploration vessel, by pointing out that we had a ‘Constitution class sized hole’ in the fleet line up.

We agreed that Intrepid would be larger than was currently planned, with a few more weapons. But also that as long as he could make it work, that the ship would retain landing capability. If it was already built into the design, it couldn’t hurt to keep it right? Besides, If these Intrepid classes ended up in half the hijinks that Kirk’s Enterprise did they might need to set down before returning to a starbase.

In the end though, I thought the class was a bit of a lemon. Despite our collaborative efforts to make it the latest and greatest by giving it torpedo launchers capable of firing the new quantum torpedoes and implementing bio-neural circuitry, something we developed using scans of the borg cube debris. It seemed to run into problem after problem. Constantly being reworked and redesigned. There are some good bones there, but they need to be built into a new ship from the start. Rather than added and stuck on ad hoc when there are already space frames under construction in drydock.

I won’t say much, but you might see a familiar ship profile in the fleet in a few years. Watch this space.