Antares I Class
The Antares I-class freighter is a cargo transport design that has been in service since the 22nd century across the Alpha Quadrant. While originally a Federation design, it has been widely produced by manufacturers far beyond the Federation's borders. While this class has not been produced since the 23rd century and has been retired from Starfleet Auxiliary service, they continue to be found in almost every corner of the galaxy in private hands, including contractors moving goods for the Federation.
Engineering
Compared to other Federation designs, the Antares looks quite primitive: three oversized impulse engines on the stern propel this boxy vessel forward, with a long, flat cargo section for bulk goods, each with their own dorsal loading hatch for the direct transfer of goods like dilithium or tritanium ore. The forward section is raised and contains the ship's smaller holds for cargos like equipment and medical supplies, as well as the ship's bridge and crew accommodations.
Warp propulsion aboard the Antares uses an outdated alternative to Cochrane-style warp coils: the ship uses conduits running the length of the cargo modules and its main deflector to create a subspace field, and the impulse engines are then used to push the ship into warp. This is very efficient at low speeds, but burns fuel quickly above warp four, restricting these ships to slow speeds. Newer members of this class have been tuned to speeds of warp five or six, but these are rare.
Given how old the systems are aboard these ships, their characteristics are known and predictable, but there is little in the way of automation to help the engineers. Unlike newer ships, they can't be run without at least a half-dozen engineers aboard. On a typical voyage, the ship will spend two to three months at warp, meaning that engineers must become comfortable operating around active machinery.
Tactical
Stock Antares-class starships are unarmed and protected only by limited graviton shielding. Given the realities of space travel, many privately owned vessels of this class have been retrofitted with weapons. Their maneuverability is extremely limited, due to their mass, but they are capable of quick acceleration when not full of cargo. In general, they present relatively easy targets to pirates, but they also aren't often carrying particularly valuable cargo.
Some pirate groups have been known to use these vessels as so-called Q ships, equipped with weapons beneath their cargo hatches to surprise other freighters, or curious Starfleet vessels responding to distress calls. Given all of the disadvantages this class has in ship-to-ship combat, they generally rely on the element of surprise to be successful. The possibilities for modifying a ship of this class are nearly limitless, though, as it's simply a matter of filling its internal volume with power generators, weapons, and hardened shield generators. In the right hands, an Antares-class freighter could be turned into a formidable battleship. Even in its stock configuration, there would be little stopping a fully-loaded Antares traveling at full impulse towards a target.
Shipboard Life
In their stock configuration, Antares-class freighters have individual crew cabins for all aboard, as size is not a concern compared to smaller freighters. There is a shared mess hall, as well as a recreation room. It's not luxurious, but these ships were built with the knowledge that their crews would live aboard them for years. Some also have a hydroponics garden. In civilian hands, many of these ships are family owned and operated. Privately-owned vessels have also been retrofitted with better quarters in some cases, but most remain utilitarian and antiquated. Most crews of these ships would likely have little formal training in starship operation, often learning on the job or choosing a life on a freighter either hoping for calm or to escape something, as the months-long journeys these ships take are typically not exciting.
Antares Class History
The Antares class design was developed in the mid-22nd century, as a simple bulk freighter that could be used to help expand Earth's colonial presence across the galaxy. It was created as a competing design to the Cochrane-style J-class and Y-class modular freighters then being built. The engine systems would be radically simplified, discarding the nacelle system to rely on the impulse engines to push the ship into a subspace field envelope. At the time, it was far more efficient than earlier freighter designs and was built in large numbers, but these ships could never truly surpass the warp four efficiency threshold and were quickly left in the dust by newer starships. What would be months or years on a J or Y at warp 2 was cut down dramatically by the run of an Antares, but as the Federation expanded, these journeys began to once again take months or years.
Before the prime directive was implemented, the Antares class design was given to many, many worlds as a gesture of good faith to help them expand like Earth had. This resulted in the proliferation of the design through the Alpha and Beta quadrants as a standard freighter design, with similar vessels observed as far away as the Delta Quadrant. They were operated in large numbers by the Earth Cargo Service, and later Starfleet Auxiliary into the 23rd century, but were displaced by the smaller, faster Antares II in Starfleet Auxiliary service by the 2260s. The next bulk freighter design didn't come until the 2370s with the introduction of the much faster, automated Fluyt.
As of the 25th century, there are thousands of these vessels still in service in private hands, and they remain an important part of the supply chain, particularly for moving ore and other bulk cargo. It's unlikely that the design will go away anytime soon.
The Antares Class In Play
- This is an old, almost ancient vessel type that you're likely to encounter almost anywhere there's trade or merchant activity. The design was seen all over The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and even early Voyager episodes representing a generic freighter design. If you need a freighter in your story operated by a civilian, this is a good choice.
- These ships aren't very interesting, but you could make them interesting: they'd make a great mobile pirate base with souped up engines, or a mad scientist's converted research ship. Give how common they are, they're able to move through space without drawing much attention.
- This is not to be confused with the Antares II, the cargo vessel seen in Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Animated Series.