Before we can take a look at the tactical configuration of the Enterprise, let's first take a look at hull classifications you will and have encountered. Most hull classifications do not have a set size, but may have a size range. An example of this is the Starfighter which we will cover first.

Starfighter: light craft typically launched from a carrier, some designs have FTL capability size typically ranges from 4-14 meters in length.

Hull Code: SF, SFI, SFX, SFB, SFH

Code Ident: SF means starfighter, and most fighters including space superiority fall into this code. SFI is for interceptors and light fighters. SFX is for prototype fighter designs it is not listed below but add an X to any primary hull code below to denote prototype status. SFB is for bombers. SFH is for heavy fighter designs.

Shuttle: Light craft used to transport people or cargo between ships and stations, some designs are lightly armed.

Hull Code: SH, SLC, SLR

Code Ident: SH is for most shuttles. SLC indicates the shuttle is armed and means light combat shuttle. SLR is for shuttles with extended range and they may carry light armaments

Combat Shuttle: Armed shuttles designed for military use, they are often equipped to carry troops and equipment, some are even outfitted with bomb bays the X-1205 is an example of this craft type.

Hull Code: CS, HBS, AS

Code Ident: CS means Combat shuttle and is for basic armed shuttles. HBS is for shuttles that carry bombs instead of troops. AS is for shuttles like the X-1205 who can carry either bombs or troops and are geared for an assault role.

Spaceship: Basic classification that indicates a ship is limited to interplanetary travel at best. Typically used by civilian ships.

Hull Code: S

Starship: Basic classification that all vessels capable of interstellar travel fit into, but is typically used for civilian ships.

Hull Code: SS

Corvette: Light craft that border the line between fighters and frigates, built for speed and maneuverability they are often used for a variety of duties from patrol to escort. Has no more than three decks and a hull length no greater than 130 meters.

Hull Code: CV, CVE, CVP

Code Ident: CV is for your standard corvette. CVE is for escort corvettes, and CVP is for patrol corvettes

Frigate: Light combat ship typically no longer than 250 meters. They usually have between 10-30 decks. They never carry torpedoes or bombs a subtype of this class is armed solely with missiles. Frigates are designed to be cheap and easily deployed, as such they are among the most numerous ships in a fleet, only the patrol cruiser is more common.

Hull Code: FR, MFR, FRE, BFR

Code Ident: FR is for the standard frigate, MFR is for missile frigates. FRE is for escort frigates. BFR is a subtype of the standard frigate geared for speed and a strong frontal attack at the expense of defense often called a Bird of Prey.

Destroyer: Medium combat vessels, typically armed with torpedoes. Destroyers typically favor speed so that they can dump their payload of torps quickly. Both subtypes listed below are used solely by nomadic races such as the Soleans. Most are no longer than 2 km in length.

Hull Code: DD, DDE, DDC

Hull Ident: DD is for most destroyers. DDE is a special subtype of destroyer geared for Escort duty and as a result carries more AA than a typical destroyer. DDC is a special subtype of destroyer geared toward stealth and ultra-heavy weaponry which is typically carried by dreadnoughts to make up for her reduced torpedo armament

Cruiser: These mid-sized vessels are the workhorses of the fleet. Designed for a variety of roles cruisers are divided into five subtypes. Because of their versatility cruisers are among the most numerous ships in a fleet, and used for almost any role imaginable. Cruisers can vary in size quite a bit with the largest cruisers being the size of small capital ships.

Hull Code: CR, CL, CH, CM, CE

Hull Ident: CR is for most cruisers. CL is for Light cruisers which are built for speed. CH is for heavy cruisers which favor strong shields and/or Armor. And feature a well-balanced array of heavy and medium weapons. CM is for missile cruisers. CE is for Carriers.

Battlecruiser: Typically larger and heavier than cruisers these powerful ships bridge the gap between cruisers and Battleships. They focus heavily on speed and firepower but have little in the way of defense making them somewhat fragile. This fragility means they are poorly suited to slugging matches. Instead, they lend themselves to hit and run attacks. These small capital ships excel at hunting smaller ships like cruisers, but fare poorly against battleships and dreadnaughts.

Hull Code: BC, BCL, BCH

Hull Ident: BC is for your basic Battlecruiser which focuses on a balance between firepower and speed. BCL is for light battlecruisers which focus on speed over firepower. BCH is for heavy battlecruisers which focus on firepower more than speed. All three types don’t have good defense.

Battleship: These ships boast powerful shields and/or armor, and favor powerful artillery to quickly break an opponent and are among some of the most feared ships in a nation’s arsenal. Any battleship design longer than 15 Km is automatically considered a Dreadnought. Battleships have even been seen in nomad fleets protecting their valuable city ships.

Hull Code: BB, BBH

Hull Ident: BB is for battleships which balance firepower, defense, and speed. BBH is for Heavy Battleships which focus on firepower and defense at the expense of speed.

Dreadnought: The Heaviest ships in a fleets arsenal, boasting powerful long-range weapons, and sturdy defenses, these ships are typically fielded as flagships. They typically suffer from poor maneuverability. It is rare for a nomadic race to field one of these impressive ships. They typically measure between 15 to 2000 Km in length. Early dreadnaughts are significantly small, however. The sheer cost of these ships means only the wealthiest nations would field even one of these ships on the battlefield. When nomads field these ships, they are typically used to protect their main fleet.

Hull Code: DN, DNH

Hull Ident: DN is for standard dreadnoughts. DNH is for heavy dreadnoughts.

Super Dreadnought: These super behemoths are among the largest ships in the universe and typically carry enough firepower to rival a fleet. Their massive size means that they are incredibly expensive to build and maintain, few nations have the means to field more than one of these ships. The smallest of these ships measure 2000 Km in length with the largest examples being the size of a small planet. It is extremely rare but not unheard of for a nomadic race to own one of these ships, but nomad versions are typically built to serve as a central mobile base for their fleet and operate not unlike a colony, with factories, farms, markets, shipyards, and cities to service the fleet and therefore have considerably less firepower.

Hull Code: SDN

Now let's move on to Earth technology. Earth during the first Colonial war used Ion engine technology, but Laser Pulse Wave engines were developed in the interwar years that solved the maneuverability problem early earth spaceships had, during the second war Mars Colony developed the first Particle Pulse Wave engines which are superior in every category. Pulse wave engines produce thrust by using a laser or particle beam series to excite a Rydium core. The number of cores varies by design. By increasing the number of cores in a given engine size you increase thrust, but also increase fuel consumption. For military use the triple-core is considered to have the best balance between fuel use and performance, no military craft has more than 4 cores or less than two. Another important fact about pulse wave engines is they partially nullify a ship's mass around 60% of it in fact.

Let's move on to armor, Earth vessels have always been armored with titanium-based alloys, during the First Colonial War, spaceships had little to no armor, but during the Second Colonial War the advent of Grav Plating allowed shipwrights to armor every section of a ship and increase the thickness, this led to a race to develop better ship armor to counter the ever-evolving weapons technology. First came polarized plating to counter the shift towards energy weapons and later the early designs of Overlord Armor. The current titanium-based alloy used in armor construction is called Titan Alloy, for the colony that developed the alloy. The alloy is in heavy use due to its high compatibility with structural reinforcement fields. Titan Alloy despite the name is not entirely composed of metal, but is a mixture of several metals, carbon, thirteen artificial polymers and a small amount of Rydium dust. This mix is not only highly compatible with reinforcement fields but remarkably strong. With high marks for resilience, against both kinetic and energy-based impacts on its own. The biggest downside to Titan Alloy is that it is a heavy material for starship construction, which makes it unattractive to the civilian market.

Overlord armor functions by running an energy field through layered armor plating, a dispersion layer is integrated into the plates to disperse kinetic energy across the surface of the hull. Dispersion field generators are integrated into the hull which disperse energy weapon shots across the surface of the hull. Energy absorbers are also integrated into the hull plating. When a weapon is fired at the plating its energy is dispersed across the hull, then some if not all of its energy is absorbed by the absorbers which shunt the absorbed energy to the armor integrity field, recharging it or in some cases overcharging it, then the excess energy of the shot is absorbed by the AIF unless it has failed, in which case it is absorbed by the hull. When an Earthship monitors her hull armor she is monitoring the AIF. The AIF’s effectiveness drops as it weakens and some energy can get by it when its energy level is low enough. The effective strength of the AIF is dependent on the thickness of the hull plating, while the dispersion field and EAs are dependent on the surface area of the ship being protected. A weapon that can resist being dispersed can cause a localized failure of the AIF and breach the hull, torpedoes, and beams are often good at this, but there are exceptions. Hull breaches reduce the effectiveness of the armor, while being overcharged temporarily increases its effectiveness.

Next is shields. Earth does not have much in shield technology and only have two devices that could be considered a shield. The first is the radiation shield, These shields block radiation from interacting with the ship’s hull via a process called mitigation, and the military version can reduce the power of beam weapons, but weapons that aren’t continuous such as pulse weapons quickly overwhelm the shield, while ballistic weapons pass right through like it wasn’t even there. The second is the Energy Web, a defensive device that detonates ballistic ordnance such as missiles and torpedoes before they interact with the hull, but not with perfect effectiveness.

Finally we have weapons. During the first Colonial War, railguns and missiles were the weapons of choice, but as armor evolved the laser cannon became more popular and later the particle cannon. After the advent of overlord armor weapons development switched to torpedoes since they were the only weapon that could reliably punch through overlord armor, while beams could quickly drain it. After encountering the Cathamari Earth encountered the first true combat shields and developed the shield piercing torpedo and later the Electro Cannon to counter them. The shield piercing torpedo while powerful is not perfectly reliable at piercing shields and some shield designs can stop them. The electro cannon, on the other hand, suffers from a short effective range.

Now we can finally cover the Enterprise. The Enterprise is a Heavy Cruiser measuring 5020 meters in length, and 3800 meters at the widest point on the primary hull. Nacelle separation is 4000 meters with the secondary hull half-way between, and mounted above the primary hull while the nacelles are mounted below. The primary hull is 1000 meters thick at the thinnest point and has 194 decks with an additional 25 decks in the secondary hull. The secondary hull is a half-disk attached to a thick and sturdy angled neck. The secondary hull is 120 meters tall, 240 long and 220 meters wide. She was designed to comfortably carry 15000 troops, 1200 tanks, and 80 Scorpion Class battle platforms. Five Massive Tri-Core Particle Pulse Wave Engines provide the majority of the ship's thrust. Each main engine is directly linked to two Quad-Core sub-engines used for maneuvering. Each Nacelle is 1600 meters long and mounts 20 paired Tri-Core Sub-engines plus two Warp-Engines. Giving the Enterprise a total of 59 engines. The primary FTL motivators and spatial regulators for the Warp Engines are located in Warp Engineering which is in the secondary hull. The ship is also equipped with a pulse detonation drive which functions a lot like an afterburner increasing acceleration, speed, and maneuverability for a short time but increases fuel consumption.

The ship’s shape allows the ship to focus the majority of its fire forward, dorsal, ventral, port, or starboard, but the Aft quadrant suffers. The ship's weapons are divided into banks which are subdivided into batteries, each bank contains ten batteries which contains 20 cannons. This gives the Enterprise 3600 medium particle Cannons and 1600 heavy particle cannons. She also has 2400 triple tubed photon missile launchers and 400 Electro cannons. A beam array is a series of linked beam emitters and is considered one weapon but each beam array can target and fire on multiple targets simultaneously. After adding the torpedoes the Enterprise has a total of 8034 weapon mounts not including the mine launcher which raises it to 8035. The Enterprise also carries twenty-four fighters, with the majority of its hangar bays being devoted to auxiliary craft for her large troop complement.

The ship's weapons array is divided into 6 groups and each tactical station on the bridge controls one group, with the Primary tactical officer responsible for directing each group. The beam arrays are typically controlled directly by the Primary tactical officer. Each weapon battery also has its own secondary one man aux control room, and there are over a dozen aux control rooms for the whole array which ensures the ship can keep firing even if the ship is largely inoperable. The ship has multiple engineering substations on the bridge for monitoring different subsystems groupings the ship's armor is monitored by the three different stations, Primary tactical, Operations, and Structural Engineering. The main engineering station provides a general overview of the ship’s status. The bridge’s screen layout gives the captain a full field of view on any object in visual range. The captain can easily change what is shown from his station. A tactical display in the center of the bridge displays a top-down tactical view on all ships in sensor range.

The Enterprise is uniformly armored with 12 meters of Mark III Overlord armor in a type IV configuration giving her an average armor absorption rating of 4520 GJ per second, and an AIF that can absorb up to 4130 TJ before failing. The armor type configuration differs based on the role and size of the ship in order to maximize protection. Type IV is for heavy cruisers, battleships, and dreadnoughts. Type I is for corvettes, shuttles, and fighters. Type II is for frigates and destroyers, while type three is for cruisers and light cruisers. The ship’s nacelle mounting struts are structurally reinforced and almost completely solid each one being nearly 70 meters thick with only narrow maintenance corridors and necessary fuel and power lines inside. The entire ship is built from the Titan Alloy and each deck is structurally reinforced. Furthermore each hull plate is coated with a special material for thermal resistance and specially polished to help reflect lasers. The inner hull and internal hallways are all lined with a special lining to provide protection against cosmic radiation, this lining has limits and the shields are used to provide extra protection when needed. The ship, as a result, can enter the Earth’s atmosphere from any angle without fear of burning up assuming the ship had a reasonable speed under .23c and has excellent impact resistance. Each of the ship’s viewports and access hatches are linked to retractable armor plates. The ship also has a number of exhaust ports which are typically closed, they only open when the ship is venting her engines to protect them from overheating, when open they present the only weakness in the ship's armor.

Additional protection for the ship comes from the ships Energy Web generators which surround the ship in an energy grid, while projecting dispersed particle blasts around the ship. This web is the replacement to traditional point defense and is highly effective at intercepting and destroying incoming ordinance. Missiles, torpedoes, mass driver rounds and even fighters if they get close enough can be destroyed by the web. The web has deployment radius of two hundred fifty meters (meaning there are two hundred fifty meters of space between the hull and the web’s barrier). The ship also carries two linked class two radiation shield generators, which project a low-level energy shield around the ship with a radius of three hundred meters. This field can be focused on any direction to provide increased protection in that quadrant at the expense of the others. The shield has a decent mitigation rate, but nothing impressive. This rate can be increased by disabling the overload safeties, but this risks permanently damaging the generators. This shield lacks an absorption layer and as a result, any energy it fails to mitigate will strike the ship, the shield is prone to overloading if massive amounts of energy is thrown at it in too short a period.

The ship armor is considered a critical system when traveling at warp, since translight dust impacts are common during warp. A series of specialized kinetic energy absorber and the normal general ones combined with the AIF and the hull dispersion layers, disperse the energy of these impacts and protect the ship. While a special warp field configuration is used to divert these impacts away from the ship. The warp field configuration, however, loses effectiveness as ship speed increases according to theory this field configuration becomes completely ineffective once a ship exceeds warp 6. However, this field does allow the Enterprise to limp away from a battle at low warp even with multiple hull breaches.

The ship’s alert statuses are as follows

Blue: Condition normal. Weapons are offline and armor is charged to 15%, reactors are kept at minimal power output.

Red: also known as tactical alert or battlestations, indicates vessel is under attack or preparing for battle. All weapons and defenses are bought online and reactors are brought to full output.

Green: Docking/ landing stations

Orange: Biohazard warning