Federation Commander

The Klingon D-hulls are generally in sequence by design date. The D-5, however, is not. Is there an in-universe reason why the sequence skipped from D-4 to D-6? And why the D-5 was designated later. I know in the real world the D-5 was designed long before the D-4, but I'm also curious why the game designers went back to the D-5 for the war cruiser instead of the D-8.

The second question relates to the Klingon F-racks. The rules state that these racks were more or less an add-on to ship classes that did not originally have drones. But looking at the D-3 and D-4, these ships also have F-racks. I would have thought if these classes had F-racks, the D-6 (or at least the D-7) would have been designed with A-racks right from the get-go. Is this mention of the D-6 and D-7 not originally having drones an old piece of background flavour that has been rendered obsolete? Have the D hulls without the drone racks ever been released?

Cheers


Bruce

Don't recall if any SSDs were released for the D-6 without racks,
but the story is they were an add-on,
which initially were placed in shuttle bays and fired through the doors ---

Once they were built with racks, they were separated by walls, and each rack could fire instead of just one ---

Why D-hulls carry less shuttles ---

It's not in FC, so my memory on this is hazy and I could very-likely be wrong.

With that said... IIRC, there was a Klingon light cruiser that was designed but never built (other than maybe as a prototype) that used the designation first. The Klingons decided to just keep building D-6s. Much later, when the impending General War forced the need for a smaller/cheaper cruiser on them, they applied the "unused" D-5 designation.

That would be the LD5 (R3.134), from SFB Module R8; they built six or seven of them, but they were considered a failure and not put into regular production.