This would be an Early Years proposal, for the period between year 70 and perhaps as late as year 100.

The pretext is that during that period, most fleets are building (or have built) early years ships, up graded sublight ships to the Y or W (refitted) standard.

This means that any National Guard units would either have to be taken from the first line ships (since there wouldn't have been any older designs assigned to the mothball fleets or in some sort of reserve status.) (ships in service, in the Federation for example, would be the WCL, WCM, WSR and the WDD of the time.)

Note also, that the Years were talking about long predate the advent of Q ships (middle years) armed freighters, and both skids and duck tails.

For a real history example, these would be the kinds of ships the Englands Royal Navy assigned to various "Stations" around the world during the victorian era (mid 19th century thru the first few years of the 20th century).

these included old monitors (HMS cerbus) or a seemingly endless collection of gun boats, torpedo boats, revenue vesels and "support vessels".

The closest approximate SFBs design might be the Monitor (Mon) and Light Monitor (LMN) designs.

Since those ships didnt actually go into service until year 140 (and year 130 for the LMN), the Colonial Cruisers (or perhaps they should be called colonial monitors) would be needed to guard the early colonies so that the few (and over worked) ships of the Star Fleet (and other races) would be available for normal duties.

Actual proposal to follow.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - 11:28 pm: Edit

Colonial Cruiser, An Early Years proposal.
by Jeff Wile, USS Minnesota.

A generic design in use by several major and minor races during the early years period. intended as an "very light" monitor design, the ship would have no more than 2 heavy weapons (and oddly, not set together for overlapping fields of fire...) and a number of phasers similar in type of the race building the colonial cruiser. (for heavy weapons, Klingons would use disrupters, the Federation would have photons).

the Colonial cruisers were characterized as very slow (perhaps no more than 6 SFBs tactical hexes per turn) and a GURPS strategic speed of warp 2.5 (very slow...).

It was the Colonial cruisers other functions that actually justified the construction of these ships... for the construction of various colonies, the colonial cruisers acted as the force flag ship for the star fleet corps of engineers units assigned to setting up the various ground bases of the new colonies.

another function of the colonial cruisers was to act as the "law and order" in the region in the absense of regular fleet units. these units provided some of the support later provided by the FLGs (Fed YIS year 134).

Between the years 70 and 100 (a period that saw the development of most of the alpha octents national borders, it was the location of these colonial cruisers that actually denoted the location of the empires borders. In general, most of these ships were built in a given races capital world ship yards, and spent years moving from one prospective colony site to a newer colny site (invariably farther from the home world capital hex).

For the 30+ years that these ships were in service, they almost always engaged in single combat with pirates, monsters or (depending on the political situation) with enemy warship raiders.

after year 100 (or so) the various fleets of the empires eventually had built up their fleets to the point where they began assigning W and Y era ships to the National Guard forces. At that point the Colonial Cruisers were no longer needed, and (in most cases) were sold for scrap where ever they happened to be (the costs of actually towing or disassembling the components of the ships for transport far out weighed the ships scrap value.

Some were simply docked to little used or abandoned bases, others were landed on asteroids, or a few were actually landed on planets and used for shelter or other commercial purposes (one was actually used as a warehouse while another became a rather posh restaurant near the star port.)

None were still in commission, or in salvagable condition by the time of the General War.

By Mike Strain (Evilmike) on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 - 12:42 am: Edit

Since 'sublight' ships and W-era ships have the same F&E speed (3 hexes/turn), essentially what you are proposing are sublight ships that have phasers, et al, but not tactical warp drive.

Example: The Klingons, trying to get some use out of their vast sublight D3 fleet while in the process of refitting said fleet to Tac Warp, began a program of sending sublight D3's (hereafter called SD3's...) with modern weapons to garrison backwater worlds while the W-D3's (warp-refit) served to protect the borders. By Y79, all D3's/F3's had been refitted, and any remaining sublight ships were scrapped.

Don't see this happening for the Feds, their economy is robust enough so that they were slapping guns and engines on their sublight ships As Fast As Possible.

Definitely not happening in Hydran space...their sublight ships apparently couldn't handle tacwarp tech.

Given Lyran/Kzinti/Carnivon politics, nope.

Gorn....have been covered extensively. As have the Paravians.

We all know about the Roms.

Ditto the ISC.

Same vis a vis the Orions (see Feds).

Tholians, of course, never used sublight ships in the Alpha Quad.....

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Thursday, December 27, 2012 - 04:19 pm: Edit

Basically an Early Years Monitor. Standard problem, if the colony is important enough to have a monitor, then it is important enough to attack. Such monitors would rarely engage in single ship duels, their existence, just as modern SFB Monitors, precludes any but the most desperate from attacking. In most cases the attacker will arrive with sufficient force to defeat the monitor, or he will not attack.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, December 28, 2012 - 10:58 am: Edit

I changed the title to include Early Years so it can be considered for a future Y-module. This is, sort of, an "obvious variant" as we made early years versions of just about everything other than this already.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, July 15, 2019 - 03:11 pm: Edit

I would think that any converted civilian ship might do for the mission, such as the corvette versions of the FT and APT. If those are blocked by YIS dates then an easy fix becomes obvious, or perhaps a slightly modified Early Trader or Early Transport.

I can see an early monitor but calling it a colonial cruiser confuses the issue.