Severe Necro Post - but I think you'll like it ;-)
Imagine looking out of a windows into deep space. Beneath, over and in front of you are thousands of people, working tirelelessly to produce new ships. As you ponder, a ship gets towed past your windows, it's sleek silver hull reflecting the small sun you're orbiting.
Now rewind. This is not Utopia Planitia. There are not thousands of people working here, but only one hundred. And that ship that gets towed by most certainly has a silver hull, but it's riddled with dark specs and it's not as shiny as a new ship is supposed to be. Next to that, aside from some support ships, it's the only one in this facility.
Now imagine that you are one of the one hundred people, and that a second one is standing behind you. "This was to be prevented!" You cringe as the words form images in your mind. She is right.
You see, commander Arness is in a pretty rotten situation. The ship that gets towed by wasn't on it's way to the next step in the production cycle. It gets taken
back into the asteroid's concealed drydock, before being transported to a new location. It was his job to make sure that absolutely nobody got to know about the project that was unfolding before his eyes. But, as you guessed it, somehow, someone knew. And that someone made sure that the Romulans knew as well. Arness shivered with the thought of what happened to the commander who let the Rommies hijack Starfleet's last secret project.
Admiral V'tal took a few steps as to have the same view as Arness had. "You are in luck. I cannot afford to bring more people in to replace you; doing so would only make the chance of leaking even more likely. However..."
Another cringe.
"you will not fail again. Make sure that no one finds out, and if someone does, make sure they do NOT take Aurora away
again. Within the coming twelve months, her slipstream reactor will be operational and you can imagine that a recovery action might be a whole lot more difficult if they manage to activate it!"
As the admiral walks away without greeting, Arness sighs.
So, back to the drawing table...
The year is 2420. The major powers of the Alpha Quadrant all have access to slipstream technology. But the ships just make short leaps, significant enough by warp standards, but nowhere near the distances the fake
Dauntless could travel. And now, Starfleet holds the key in hand to make it happen... that is, if they can make sure nobody steals the technology and beat them at their own game. That was Arness' job. And as you might have noticed, he kind of failed that specific part of his job description. Only because the core was not quite finished was Task Force Aurora able to retrieve the hull. The Rommies had trouble enough infiltrating the ship itself, satisfying themselves with the hull and the partially completed core. It had no computer cores installed, no schematics lying around, nothing. That was Arness' rescue, because if the schematics would have been transfered to Romulus he'd be in a lot more trouble than the commander of the
Prometheus project was.
However, Arness is no fool. He did went back to the drawing table, and he made sure that the next time the Romulans found out where the Aurora was (they always do), he was ready for them. Because this is what the Rommies saw when they entered the asteroid:
That's right. There was no bridge. Where the bridge was supposed to be, there was a hole. The Romulans managed to enter the hull, thinking they could bypass everything that the bridge should have handled and get away with the hull anyway, as they have done so many times in the past. Guess who was wrong...
The Aurora's bridge is an entirely independent vessel, docked to the main ship during normal operations. It has it's own warp reactor, which is capable of accelerating it to warp 9.7, independent computer systems, replicators, and a transporter. On one side of the bridge is a small mess, the other side features the same room but empty, used only during emergencies. Here's the catch, though: without the bridge, the slipstream reactor won't respond to slipstream commands. While the reactor is a dual core (pardon the pun), managing both slipstream and warp speeds, the slipstream part will refuse to activate without the encrypted signal coming from the bridge module, at the same time denying every attempt to get at the slipstream schematics. This also makes every bridge in the Aurora class line unique.
If you want to steal a ship, you'll first need to find a bridge unit. If you then manage to steal it, good luck in finding the correct hull if there's more than one Aurora docked. And even if you manage that, it means that by the time you've reached the hull you'll probably have been shot down. If that happens, the hull gets taken back to a shipyard to receive a new bridge and encryption decoding squence. It's not entirely fail-proof, but so far it made sure that at least three Aurora's were recaptured from an enemy government.
So, there you have it. All this time of secrecy was to make sure I could make this bridge, which is litteraly a ship of it's own. The small warp reactor I showcased a few (or a lot of...) months ago? It's installed in here. The impulse reactor and computer core? Same story. So now you all know why it took me so goddamn long to post updates
Don't mind those strange shapes on the saucer, though. I thought it would look cool but I have decided to hide the airlock behind panels
I'll post some more updates on the ship pretty soon as well, when I have finished the bridge itself and made sure that stuff like the turbolift access is positioned correctly
