This starship can be inserted into your campaign either as the characters’ ship, one that they all just transferred onto or as a visiting guest ship that an episode could take place on. Players may also wish to use this starship as a background piece for their characters, perhaps serving aboard her. Maybe a family member was assigned to the starship at some point in the past. A long-serving starship such as this has had many personnel move across her decks and the player’s characters could easily be one of them—Contributed by Aaron Pollyea.
Overview: Eranos Eaoth was the first Constellation-class starship constructed and launched from the Imperial Navy Shipyards in orbit of Andoria in 2298. The name translates as “Eran’s Breath” and is a millennia-old myth of an Andorian goddess whose warm breath brought life to the stars in the sky and represented the Milky Way. Eranos Eaoth was initially assigned to the rimward reaches of the Federation, a fast response vessel as many Constellation-class vessels were. After her first six months of deployment to the Ciat Sector, the Admiralty changed her mission to one of exploration in the more distant reaches of the rimward near the Tholian Assembly, staying outside of their carefully patrolled borders.
During the next eight standard years, the Eranos Eaoth’s Captain Banath sh’Onal and the vessel’s primarily Andorian crew would go on to make sixteen first contacts (the most of any vessel at the time in the region) and participated in two engagements with the Tholian Assembly during incursions into Federation claimed space. At the retirement of Captain sh’Onal, a tradition was begun that has lasted until the present where a shuttle was renamed after a former commander. By the beginning of the Dominion War these shuttles would be Banath sh’Onal, Melat zh’Tri, Onoton Perelis, Matthew Huntsman, and the most recent retired commander Cophier Tanaly.
With each retiring Captain, Eranos Eaoth would return to Cait and perform repairs. tHEY also cycled crew from promotions and transfers. After such a renowned service under Captain sh’Onal, many Andorians would specifically request to be transferred or to serve on Eranos Eaoth. The starship would continue to have a majority of its crew from that species with many Caitians serving due to the starship being based at that world and a more typical mix of other Federation species filling the rest of the roster. Because of this, Eranos Eaoth has a different feel than many Starfleet vessels with the temperature of its interior colder by five degrees than usual and the interior illumination simulating Andoria’s sun rather than a more typical G2 class star.
At the outbreak of the Dominion War, Eranos Eaoth was reassigned to Starbase 129 to be used as a rapid response interceptor for any incursions by the Dominion or its Cardassian allies across the rimward border of the Union into Federation space. Its current patrols take it near the Argus Array as it moves between Starbase 129 and Starbase 47.
Capabilities: As with all Constellation-class starships, the Eranos Eaoth is incredibly fast at warp and has excellent sub-light acceleration, making it an ideal interceptor and patrol vessel. Following the retirement of Captain sh’Onal in 2306, Eranos Eaoth returned to Cait to undergo an extensive refit that focused solely on its engines. An attempt was made to begin the construction on a subclass of the Constellation with the first model being Eranos Eaoth. The refit lengthened the warp nacelles by ten percent to allow more advanced warp coils developed for the Excelsior-class to be installed. This improved the vessel’s top warp speed by six percent and the addition of subspace stabilizers along the nacelle pylons gave the vessel an ability to stay at emergency speeds longer, increasing by twenty percent.
With the vast majority of its service life being more than two light-months from the core worlds of the Federation, the many crews of Eranos Eaoth have only slowly allowed newer technologies to be installed on the vessel, relying on more proven and easy to maintain equipment whenever possible. This has given the vessel a well-known reputation for being able to repair heavy damage from engagements or accidents without the need to return to Starbase. It has become common practice for the crew to find an asteroid belt where the vessel may find a protected area to moor to. There the crew launches the vessels multiple shuttles to perform asteroid mining for any needed materials to feed the vessels replicators to manufacture any replacement equipment needed.
Only two significant exceptions to this reliance on older technology have occurred for Eranos Eaoth, the replacement of the ships original duotronic computer core with an isolinear system during a refit in 2335, and a massive overhaul to the impulse systems in 2350. Smaller modern multi-stage fusion reactors replaced the reactors inside the two separate impulse drives, but freeing up enough volume to install an additional reactor core in each, improving secondary power output by nearly a quarter. During emergency situations engineers can shunt power directly from the fusion reactors into the ships main power for warp propulsion. This allows Eranos Eaoth to maintain warp velocity for approximately an hour at cruising velocities before power levels are unable to keep up with demands, though tests have shown that the fusion reactors are capable of keeping the vessel at warp 1.5 for days at a time in gravitationally stable space-time.
Current plans for a final refit to the spaceframe in 2385 are underway. There are two competing proposals, the first is to improve the vessels’ phaser banks to arrays in response to the Dominion War, and the second involves reinforcing the structural members of the outer saucer to better withstand damage to the less protected shuttle bays.
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