A CL article suggestion:
Roderick’s Tales.
Background: It is after the general war, and Roderick, who spent the war in the no man’s land between the Federation – Klingon – Romulan – Tholian space, spins his tales of fantastic ships and combat.
Roderick served with Macpherson’s Yard, a space ship scrap yard, that played both sides of the fence before the war and had contracts for ship maintenance on Star Fleet vessels, as well as a couple of hidden maintenance yards that repaired and refitted Orion Pirates, and other Privateers who could not be serviced at regular yards. Also working at Macpherson’s was an improvational engineering genius, who was amazing at cobbling together bits and pieces to make a working whole. He was also into designing off the wall weapons and cross connecting technologies.
Before the war Macpherson’s collected many old hulls, those that could be made space worthy were stored in a nearby asteroid field and sold when repaired either above board if possible or otherwise if necessary. When the Federation started to get involved in the war Macpherson’s evacuated all his heavy equipment to the hidden facilities, and when the Klingons invaded, they dropped below the radar, and continued their clandestine work. They also accumulated more hulls due to all the combat, and used radical and new modifications on them to make them space worthy. Alas at the end of the war a major catastrophe destroyed the hidden facilities and all the unique ships, only Roderick survived. He now lives on a quiet agricultural world and spends his nights spinning tales of the wild ships and adventures of Macpherson’s yard at the local pub. These articles would be based on Roderick’s stories, and the more drinks you buy him the bigger the stories get. So they will not affect the SFU time line, or official ship lists, but allow tech slosh galore.
Specifically:
Each article would contain a quick write up of some uniquely modified ship or two with the SSDs and a scenario to fly them in, the key would be that they are unique ships, that are only spun up out of Roderick tales, not real, never can be real, never used as justification for anything else. But they would allow a splash of tech slosh, say a Klingon F5 with plasma F torpedoes. Or even new weapons that are not used anywhere else, a chance to publish some of the millions of suggestions for new systems received by ADB. For fun and excitement, they could also eb limited in some way no tractor beam, or transporter, Labs, to add some unique difficulty as well.
Perhaps a modified Fed old CL with external bays for Hydran Stinger fighters, and having the photons and drone replace with a short range Blaster (new weapon) in a scenario having the safe guard a civilian convoy for a short distance on the way to earth. While Klingon ships attack.

By Glenn Hoepfner (Ikabar) on Sunday, June 03, 2007 - 09:56 pm: Edit

Sounds like a perfect spot for the WYN Scrap Cruiser to show its ugly head again. Dubbed Frankenstein, it composes of a gorn bubble,Klingon neck (not the full boom), a lyran battle pod with welded-on romulan module engines, part of a hyran hull and on the end a rear portion of a heavy freighter. It wields 3 plasma-Fs, 4 disruptors, a smattering of ph-1/2/3/G and cannot perform a HET due to its 0-6 breakdown rating. The original SSD can be seen in SFTs.