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More Lost era Romulan ships
corerunner
Member Posts: 147 Arc User
Could we get more 2290's to before the TNG reintroduction era ships like A Romulan D7 refits, winged defender and Z1 Nova? Would be interesting to see more older ships to match the Klingons and federation.
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Sadly, I suspect that STO is not allowed to use the FASA designs directly since many of them have been requested, like the Orion Wanderer-class, one of which has actually appeared in four episodes of TNG as a cruiser in use by Starfleet (USS Constellation, NCC-55817) though never shown as anything but wireframe, but none have ever appeared except for Paramount adaptations such as those listed above. There was some bad blood between FASA and Paramount after Paramount withdrew the license, so it is probable that STO would not be able to use anything from FASA any time soon.
I too would love to see a Z-1 Nova class enter the game, the Romulans could really use a torpedo-oriented fast pocket battleship like that. I used to have a plastic model of the Scharnhorst, which was said to be the inspiration for FASA's Nova class. The realworld Scharnhorst-class fell between a battlecruiser and a full battleship, was equipped with fast-firing 11-inch guns and torpedoes (it was supposed to be refit with 15 inch later on, and would probably have dropped the torpedo launchers) and was armored enough to be ideal for hammering cruisers to scrap in brutal close-range slugfests (though few of those kind of battles ever really happened) and fast enough that the cruisers could not just run away, or to use its speed in quick darting attacks when it faced larger, full battleships.
The Nova would be a good candidate for an enhanced battlecloak (or maybe a Scimitar style cloak) in its role as a heavy torpedo-based ship (as it mostly was in the FASA version anyway, in practice the realworld Scharnhorst and its sister ship Gneisenau rarely ever fired their torpedo tubes) despite its large size (it is about the size of an Excelsior though a bit chunkier). Both the Nova-class and the realworld Scharnhorst had an odd forward orientation to their main armament that would translate to a 5/3 or 6/2 hardpoint layout (in fact Scharnhorst had three turrets of three guns each, two forward and only one aft) which could make a good novelty arrangement though I am not sure how practical it would be in STO for a ship of that size. The durability of a ship that size would definitely help to make the enhanced battlecloak actually useful in the current TFO style where so many ships have lock you at once that cloaking usually means getting zerged to death before it fully kicks in on the few ships (escorts and heavy escorts so far) that have them.
Another FASA Romulan ship I would like to see in STO would be the T-10 Bright One class destroyer. Three of my STO characters are from a Last Unicorn Star Trek campaign I ran a long time ago where I mixed in some FASA elements. In the original campaign they were NPCs from a FASA timeline flotilla who escaped a hopeless situation by diving into a rift and eventually found their way out of the timeless void via what turned out to be the Bajoran wormhole. Four critically damaged ships went in, three made it all the way through, a Winged Defender (I am using a Flambard in STO for it, though it is not a great match), a T-10 (which unfortunately there is nothing even vaguely similar to in STO), and a custom class made in the FASA ship builder which was a scout/"electronic" warfare ship very similar to the Faeht class, which is what I am using for it in STO. The player characters in that campaign often 'hired' the scout for stealthy mission transport, btw.
Anyway, on top of that possible licensing issue, the devs seem even more reluctant to add any new Romulan ships to the game than they used to.
That D-27 is a Chris Reyes design, I remember seeing a bunch of stuff rendered from his designs over at the Scifi Meshes site back about a decade or two ago (he's the one that designed the vertically oriented Chariot class for instance). It would be a nice one to have available, but STO got burned rather badly the last time they used a fan design and have avoided them ever since. Fasa had two swept-wing D-7 like ships though, the D-4 Predator class and the D-16 Swiftwind class, though being FASA designs they are probably unlikely to be in STO due to the FASA/Paramount feud.
The Windged Defender's swing wings and swing-down weapons pods are indeed a nice effect, probably one of the best in Trek albeit non-canon nowadays (the FASA game was considered almost quasi-canon at the time though and they could not publish anything Trek at all without running it past Paramount for canon compliance first).
The video below has the best rendering of it in action, though the spoken information is a mix of accurate information from the FASA Romulan Ship Recognition Manual and fanciful speculations (for one, FASA never identified which ships used which power source, the artificial quantum singularity power source was still only fanon at that point and appeared in only a few novels (and of course fanzines), Paramount didn't canonize it until the D'Deridex appeared in TNG years later).
https://youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=wLNGSz1Gir4
The switchable torpedo types from the same launchers the narrator mentions were actually a thing early on in the combat simulator, but FASA backed away from putting them in the later editions since they were annoyingly complex to use and way too easy to abuse (yes, tabletop games had exploit problems too).
An interesting bit of trivia is that the Romulans tended to use a "caseless" photon torpedo based on their own plasma torpedo technology. The theatrical cut of The Search for Spock, had a slightly longer view of the first time the BoP fired its photon torpedo which showed the matter and antimatter swirling in from the edges of the dish, presumably being kept from actually touching by the complex force field bubble(s) before shooting off towards its target, a holdover from earlier when the villains were supposed to be the Romulans.
It is a four-engine fast-battlecruiser with staggered nacelles similar to the way the Federation Nimitz class nacelles are set up. There is a common fan theory that the staggered pair arrangement is modal, one pair is for fast cruising and the other pair for better maneuvering (or alternatively that all four run all the time but relative power or phase or whatever is varied between the pairs for field-shape tuning), but as far as I know of there is nothing in the shows that actually supports the idea (though it is an interesting one).
*There is a possible caveat though, Klingon Academy was apparently based on the Star Fleet Battles game, and that game was done under the Franz Joseph Designs version of the Star Trek license, but KA also used situations and a few ship designs from the Paramount version of the license, so it may be unclear which authority has precedence for the content of that game.