Hello and welcome to another episode of Truth OR Myth Beta Canon, a Star Trek web series that dives into the history of any given topic using Beta Canon sources and my own imagination to fill in the gaps. In today’s episode, we’re looking at the Malachowski Class, to better understand its place in Star Trek History.
As always, because this IS a Beta Canon video, all information re-laid should pretty much be taken with a grain of stardust, and only considered a little bit of Star Trek Fun! And so, with all that out of the way, let’s begin…
With the United Federation of Planets expanding by leaps and bounds, and Starfleet Command’s own technologies developing at a similar rate, the 2 organizations would decide to create a new wave of larger starship designs to supplant the old guard of Starfleet’s ageing Starships. In addition, one of these new classes would be the Malachowski Class, but what do we know about this important vessel class in Starfleet History?
Starfleet’s starship designs for the latter half of the 22nd Century had been a complete success.
The integration of federation Member world technologies had been a long and daunting process. The sheer difficulty of making all these disparate systems work together to a starship’s advantage had taken decades of development and redevelopment before becoming viable technologies that Starfleet could design entire classes around.
So, for the 2170s to the early 23rd Century, Most Starfleet Starship designs had been older classes like the NX Intrepid Class and the NX Class refit, which were used as testbeds for these brand-new technologies.
But Starfleet had much bigger plans for its fleet. Even by the early 2190s, Starfleet had set its design engineers the task of creating starship designs that would utilize all the proven tech from the ground up.
Plus, by 2205, the first new starship design plans crossed Starfleet’s Board of Admirals for a class that was known as the Malachowski Class.
At a length of approximately 277 meters, the Malachowski Class was designed to hold and be operated by a crew of 200 officers and crew members. A simple design, the Class would essentially be a saucer section with 2 warp nacelles attached to it.
The Malachowski Class would be the first Starfleet Starship Class to take advantage of the newer boxy style warp nacelles.
With a standard cruising speed of Warp Factor 5 and an emergency speed of Warp Factor 6.5, the Malachowski Class, for a time, would be the fastest starship class that Starfleet had to offer. The Class would also be heavily armed. 10 state of the art Phase Cannon Turrets would be the primary weaponry of the Class. With additional forward and aft torpedo launching systems.
Starfleet’s latest development in shield technology was also included in this class. Based on the technology given to Starfleet by the Andorians, these new shield emitters had almost double the output of those of previous Starfleet Vessels.
The Deflector dish of this class would be moved to the underside of the saucer, and be much smaller, relatively speaking, to other classes already in service in the fleet. Though this deflector dish would share most of the design characteristics with that of the original NX Class itself.
A single large shuttlebay would adorn the backside of the Saucer. This shuttlebay would also see a new force-field technology utilized in its design. The Shuttlebay force-field system would allow the bay doors to be open while a shuttle entered or exited, with no loss of atmosphere. And although an interesting development technological-wise, this force-field system was a huge drain on the ships available power, and thus was only used in rare instances.
Starfleet’s latest and best-designed shuttlecraft would also be included in this design. Unlike most other Starfleet Vessels, the Impulse Engines in this design would be split and on either side on the shuttle bay.
The latest lateral vector Transporter Systems were also included in this class. Though developments with Transporter Technology had been ongoing since it was originally invented, these Newer Transporter Systems required a great deal of power to operate. As a result, these Transporter systems often operated directly off of the warp core itself, since most times, Starfleet Transporters were not used while at warp, due to the inherent dangers involved.
Construction on the USS Malachowski would be complete in early 2206, and subsequently, she would be sent out for her shakedown cruise. Her initial systems tests went well, with each system performing within the specified guidelines of Starfleet’s best and brightest. But when the ship was put into more stressful and intensive scenarios, suddenly her systems began to freeze up, or fail completely.
Back in Dry Dock, it was discovered that the problem lied within the new computer core. Several faulty processors had been installed and had failed during the shakedown. Normally, these processors would simply be replaced, and the starship would be sent out again to complete its shakedown. But because of the failures, Starfleet Command had begun to lose faith in the ability of the Computer Core to handle all the new ships systems.
So, they made the unprecedented decision to remove Malikowski’s Computer Core and replace it with an experimental core they had been testing.
Relaunching in late 2206, this time the Malikowski’s shakedown cruise would go off without a hitch, in fact, the ship performed way above the expectations of its designers. Even the new warp drive was a beauty to behold, with the starship safely travelling at warp factor 6, with very little effort or damage to any starship components.
Feeling this to be a good omen, the starship proceeded to increase its velocity and was able to hit warp 6.5, though at this speed the cores components began to overheat at a rapid rate. So, Starfleet Command would stick with the original specifications for the warp drive of the class.
On the last leg of its shakedown cruise, the Malachowski was sent on its first real mission, the exploration and mapping of System D012. This star system was just outside of Federation Space, and although long-range scans had been completed over 30 years beforehand, no Starfleet Vessel had catalogued the area, once there, however, the Malachowski discovered an old Kumari Class Andorian Starship adrift in the system with no life-signs aboard.
Beaming over to the starship, the away team discovered that the Andorian Starship had attempted to make contact with the 4th Planet, a class M world in the System, and had brought back a disease that had killed the entire crew quite quickly.
Not allowing the away team to return to the Malachowski, the ships Doctor, which had been a part of the away team, and the Malikowski’s own medical staff attempted to find a cure for the disease and were successful, but too late for the away team, and all team members, including the captain, died as a result.
After reporting the incident to Starfleet Command, the Malachowski was recalled to Earth for final systems review and shortly thereafter the Class went into full production.
The Malachowski Class would continue to prove itself time and time again as the backbone of Starfleet’s new Star Fleet, receiving periodic redesigns and extensive system refits for the 4 decades, but with the launch of the Constitution Class in 2245, Starfleet once again made the decision to take a good long look at its fleet and begin to decommission classes over the next 20 years and replace them with more advanced starship designs.
Construction was immediately halted on the class, and any starships of the class that were badly damaged were also immediately decommissioned.
The remaining vessels would be slowly phased out over the next 2 decades, with the last vessel of the class, the USS Cooper, being decommissioned in early 2265.
Although a virtually forgotten class by the end of its lifetime, the Malachowski Class was a very important part of Starfleet’s history, nevertheless. The first-class designed from the ground up with donated Federation member World technologies, this class proved to one all that Starfleet could really accomplish. Earning this class, its distinguished place, in Starfleet History…
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