User:CrimsonTacit/Sandbox/Damar Class

The Damar-class battleship is the premiere warship of the Cardassian Union, launched after a decade of extremely secretive construction and design to put the Union back on an even footing with its neighbors. Built as a direct counter to the Federation's Odyssey-class heavy explorer and the Klingon Empire's Bortasqu'-class dreadnought, the Damar incorporates technological innovations derived from the Dominion along with captured and reverse-engineered equipment from Alpha and Beta Quadrant powers. While not as fast or as large as the Odyssey, or as heavily armed as the Bortasqu', the Damar incorporates passive stealth technology into its hull design, which allows it to evade most long-range sensors to execute surgical strikes and other force projection missions.

Science and Exploration

While built primarily with a military application in mind, the Damar has powerful sensor arrays and extensive laboratories. The Cardassians are nothing if not thorough, and they have designed the Damar to be able to understand everything it possibly can about both the Union's enemies and potential areas for resource exploitation. As such, a Damar-class warship embarks a core scientific crew that spans biology, geology, astrophysics, and cultural studies so that every resource can be brought to bear against whatever the ship encounters in deep space. Compared to earlier Cardassian warships, the Damar's engines and life support equipment are much more efficient, which allows it to explore independently, but, given their rarity and importance for the Union's program of saber-rattling and intimidation, it isn't anticipated that many of these ships will be assigned to such missions.

Diplomacy

Damar-class starships are a key component of the Cardassian Union's diplomatic agenda, both as a deterrent and as an emissary. They are equipped with impressive conference facilities and quarters to woo potential allies and to scare potential supplicants into submission. The purpose of sending a Damar to a negotiation is so that this revolutionary and well-armed starship can be seen up close by those who have become used to thinking of the Cardassian Union as feckless and impotent.

Engineering

Retaining the ankh-shaped hull common to most Cardassian designs, the Damar is significantly larger than the Galor-class destroyers and Keldon-class cruisers that still make up the bulk of the fleet. As with smaller designs, the ship's reactor is located in the stern and uses massive heat exchangers located in prong-like protrusions to obviate the need for liquid coolant. The ship's warp coils are located in the "wings" flanking the main body, which also contain two of the main impulse engines, supplemented by a third amidships. The engines aboard the Damar are tuned for as low emissions as possible to make targeting her difficult. Power generation systems and computers are a hybrid of native Cardassian technologies and components developed by the Dominion, which makes maintaining her systems a challenge.

The lower hull of the Damar contains extensive cargo and hanger facilities, which allow it to support a fleet of Hideki-class vessels which serve in both tactical and logistics roles. The intent is to allow the Damar to subjugate entire planets on its own, and these facilities are also more than capable of supporting humanitarian activities.

Tactical

First and foremost, the Damar is a warship. It sports the newest and most impressive weapons developed by the Cardassian Union: hybrid polaron-phaser arrays which combine the shield-piercing power of Dominion warships with the reliability and ease of maintenance of Cardassian phasers. They are a compromise between these two design types that exceed the power of the Federation's latest Type-XV arrays and match Klingon heavy disruptors. The ship's main armaments are three heavy polaron-phaser arrays that are routed through the ship's forward deflector array. An additional three heavy arrays fire directly aft from the aft sensor platform. This arrangement maximizes the efficiency of the ship's power grid, at the expense of being a significant vulnerability if struck directly. A further dozen pyramid-shaped energy beam emitters are spread around the ship to provide all-around coverage. Apart from energy weapons, the Damar has two forward and two aft torpedo launchers capable of launching all standard torpedo types.

Shields aboard the Damar are very impressive, developed from combining the massive shield generators developed for the Hutet with metaphasic technology acquired through the Ferengi. While not as powerful as those aboard the Odyssey, they give the Damar the ability to shrug off most assaults long enough to put enemies in the sights of her weapons. For her size, the Damar is fast and maneuverable at sublight. Indeed, an issue still being resolved is that she is faster than the Galor and Keldon-class ships that would often be escorting her. Thanks to her passive stealth systems, Damar-class ships utilize a first-strike approach. They will cripple potential threats before announcing their presence if any hint of hostility is detected.

Shipboard Life

Damar-class vessels are comfortable assignments, even with a relatively large crew. They carry modern creature comforts such as holosuites and personal replicators in each set of crew quarters that were lacking on older vessels. The atmosphere aboard these ships is one of well-deserved pride, because the Damar is the new flagship of a renewed Cardassian Union. All of the officers and crew have been hand-picked and have met the strictest requirements for excellence and loyalty. Serving on one of these ships is the highest honor available to a member of the Cardassian military—other than commanding one!

Damar-class History

Following the Dominion War, the Cardassian military was in tatters and the Union itself was reliant on Federation aid to feed its people and to help with rebuilding. Eager to turn a corner, nearly all of the debris and other reminders of the war were quickly expunged from their worlds. The restored Obsidian Order seized every bit of Dominion debris left in Cardassian space, primarily to aid in their ostensible primary mission of prosecuting collaborators and war criminals, but also out of a desire to retain the one thing they had that might one day give the Cardassian Union an edge. Operation Akleen, named for the founder of the Cardassian Union, was initiated to reverse engineer this technology from a secret base in concert with their extensive sensor records from the war. Working slowly and methodically, the Obsidian Order's scientists were able to create new hybrid sensor, computer, engine, and weapons systems from the scraps of Dominion technology they salvaged, despite not having fully functional components to any one system. Utilizing this technology was not considered to be a high priority because of the need to rebuild more pressing infrastructure and because utilizing it would likely lead to souring of relations with the Federation—and potentially a violation of the Treaty of Bajor—so the Detapa Council kept it in reserve.

When aid was rescinded in 2385, the Detapa Council reconsidered its position and authorized the secret design and construction of a new flagship. They barely had the resources to feed their military let alone field a fleet like the one they had pre-war, so they knew they needed a technological advantage to make up for it. Thus the Damar-class battleship was born, alongside the smaller Ghemor-class cruiser and the Detapa-class escort. Unlike the previous Cardassian military doctrine which used phalanxes of many ships of the same class, these new vessels would operate in mixed-class battlegroups using tactics learned from both the Dominion and the Federation.

While Starfleet Intelligence had suspicions that the Cardassians were embarking on a new shipbuilding program, the existence of Operation Akleen remained a secret throughout the prototype's construction. Slowly but surely, non-tactical upgrades to sensors, engine systems, and shield systems derived from this program were rolled out across the existing Galor and Keldon fleets, both to provide badly-needed modernization and to throw rival powers off the scent of the even more sophisticated set of ships that would come next. As the design matured in the 2390s, the Detapa Council was confident enough to authorize a full fleet of the new classes to form a reconstituted Eleventh Order, rebuilt with Dominion technology after the Dominion sacrificed the 500,000 soldiers of that Order during the Dominion War.

The Damar itself was launched in mid-2401 under the command of Gul Rayel. Starfleet's first encounter with the Damar took place in the Former Demilitarized Zone later that year, when the battleship responded to a distress call from the mostly-Cardassian colonists of Pullock IV. The Damar was intercepted by the Starfleet vessel Arcturus, providing the class with its first opportunity to square off against its primary rival: the Federation's massive Odyssey class. During this incident, the New Maquis revealed themselves and the Damar's baptism of fire came not from striking the Starfleet vessel but through eliminating a squadron of New Maquis ships. Cooperating with Arcturus, the Damar was crucial in exposing the renewed existence of both the True Way and the New Maquis to the wider galaxy, a move on the Central Command's part to provide plausible deniability that they were in fact funding and equipping True Way insurgents in the former DMZ. A side effect of this high-profile encounter was also providing a partial demonstration of the Damar's capabilities to Starfleet, which has led to the Detapa Council pushing for faster completion of the other units of this class.

Starfleet is currently unaware of how many Damar-class vessels may already be in service alongside the prototype, but based on Starfleet Intelligence's estimates of current the Cardassian economy and their industrial capabilities, they anticipate that several could be built each year. For the near term, they are considerably outnumbered by peer classes such as the Odyssey and the Klingons' Bortasqu'-class dreadnoughts, but the Cardassians have a much smaller border to defend and the Damar is now a powerful deterrent to those who may wish to test the Cardassian Union.

The Damar-class In Play

• As emphasized in the article, the Damar is the Cardassian Union's answer to the massive super-capital ships already in service with Starfleet and the Klingon Empire. Unlike the even larger Hutet, the Damar is fast and mobile, not stuck guarding core systems. While their weapons are inferior to those found on large Klingon ships and their shields are weaker than those on the Odyssey class, they are more or less a 1:1 counter to these vessels.
• So far, Starfleet is only aware of the Damar, which is the flagship of the new Eleventh Order, but other units surely exist thanks to the Cardassians ordering additional units while the prototype was still under construction. By 2405, there will likely be at least a dozen of these ships in service. You're unlikely to encounter one unless you do something that catches the attention of the Central Command.
• The Damar is intended to operate in a battlegroup with two Ghemor-class cruisers and three Detapa-class escorts, alongside an embarked defense screen of Hideki-class patrol ships carried aboard the flagship and the two cruisers. As before, Starfleet has only observed one of these formations, but Cardassian ships are almost never alone, so you shouldn't expect the Damar to be an exception to that.