USS Cheiron
More actions
- "And he fixed in my mind, the statutes of sacred justice."
- —Statius, The Achillead
USS Cheiron (NCC-92045) is a Centaur-II-class science vessel currently assigned to the Fourth Fleet's Fourth Fleet Operations. As part of the Skerryvore Station Division, she operates primarily in the Federation interior as a platform for Starfleet Academy’s field placement programme.
Service History
Commissioning and Early Service
Launched in 2329, only a few years prior to the end of the original Centaur-class production, her shakedown was mired in hurdles from the class's detractors. Many of whom argued she be broken down into parts to repair the larger Excelsior-class vessels, which were now entering the midpoint of their expected hull life. Seeing the benefit of an already fully functioning vessel, Starfleet Operations decided to retain the vessel’s commission despite the class’s known limitations, believing the completed vessel more useful in service than in the spares pile.
Cheiron proved her detractors wrong repeatedly over the next decade, operating throughout the Federation’s expansion region towards the galactic rim, where initial exploration missions by Starfleet’s earlier ‘Five Year Missions’ required follow-up. Over the course of 20 years, Cheiron visited over 600 planets and points of interest, providing Starfleet Science with a substantial archive of stellar mapping data in the vast region. She escaped service on the Cardassian border during the Federation-Cardassian war by virtue of her fairly remote posting, and spent much of the conflict mapping space near the Gorn and Metron borders.
Early Retirement (2370s)
In 2373, Cheiron’s peaceful journey came to an abrupt halt when a Gorn raiding party crossed the border in an attempt to claim resources from the dilithium mining colony of Syreeka IV. Nearby surveying a particularly interesting neutron star cluster, Cheiron was one of two vessels within range and, despite overwhelming odds, came to the aid of the colony alongside its bigger sister USS Bombardier. In an engagement that lasted almost 5 days, the pair of vessels fended off two dozen Gorn raiders until reinforcements arrived. Unfortunately, Cheiron’s hull was extensively damaged, and when she was recalled to the newly expanded Avalon Fleet Yards she was found to have extensive damage to her impulse arrays, which had been pushed to the brink chasing the nimble Gorn vessels. Starfleet opted to place her in mothballs, conscious that rising tensions with the Cardassian Union and the Dominion might necessitate her components for repair.
Recommissioning (2390s)
Cheiron’s dusty form remained in mothballs, largely untouched by the needs of the Dominion War for which she had been reserved, until 2385, when the Fourth Fleet acquired a number of these hulls as part of efforts to re-populate the fleet following the events of the Attack on Utopia Planitia. Cheiron was one of several hulls to receive a number of refits to the new Centaur-II model, finally departing the fleet yards in 2390 to rejoin mainline service. She has since been assigned mostly to the peripheries of the Federation’s rimward territories once again, revisiting familiar locations to pursue further scientific exploration.
Configuration
As part of her substantial refits into the more modern Centaur-II class, Cheiron received improvements to almost all of her systems. In 2403, as part of her reassignment to the Skerryvore Station, she received further overhauls to her secondary systems and redundant features to facilitate her new roles as a training vessel for cadets.
As part of her refitting for service as a field training platform for Starfleet Academy, Cheiron features a large number of communal and bunk-style cabins for cadet squads to use during deployment. All of Cheiron's labs, save the horticulture lab, which serves double duty as a small arboretum, have been converted to generic science labs to provide additional multifunction teaching spaces.
Symposia
One of Cheiron’s major overhauls was the conversion of a secondary cargo bay to a multi-function classroom and simulation space. Using stand-alone holo-generators and a small dedicated computer core, the Symposia can act as both a small seminar room and a live field simulation with real-time feedback. Modelled in a similar style to the teaching spaces at Starfleet Academy, the space is intended to bridge the gap between cadets’ theoretical learning spaces and ‘in the field’ application.
When not in use for scheduled classes, the Symposia is used by on-board science teams as a facility for theoretical project simulations and projections. The restricted computing power available to the space, coupled with the basic specification of the hologenerators, however, means the space has limited functionality beyond initial hypothesis testing.