Glorious Heritage

Created by Rear Admiral Lucas Thorton on Sun Aug 21st, 2022 @ 12:44am

During the Dominion War, it became increasingly evident to the Starfleet that they needed desperately to find a way to avoid the Jem'Hadar ships that plagued the Space Lanes. To this end, Starfleet employed the efforts of their Special Projects Division.

Admiral Richard Brannigan immediately set his people to exploring all the new ways of accomplishing this as well as some old, long-forgotten ones. From his considerable files of "failed" Starfleet projects, he pulled the TransWarp Project.

It was his belief that if this piece of genius were reworked, it could be just the ticket. He handed it off to one of his trusted lower Admirals, one Daniel Brogan. Brogan set a team of the best Engineering minds in the Federation to work on modifying the old TransWarp Project and came up with a possible advance.

That advance was this. According to scans taken by the USS Enterprise as the Borg entered one of their SlipStream Points, said device opened up an entirely new level of Space. A level of space riddled with currents which moved at extremely high speeds. And TransWarp opened up a Point into a Conduit.

The trick was to merge the two in such a way that the resulting Engine would open up a SlipStream Point and then find the Current that was moving in the direction they desired to go. This, theoretically, would not only effectively hide them from the Warping Jem'Hadar ships but would also effectively decrease their travel times from one point to another. And so it was tested.

Testing lasted for the next ten months, during which time several things became clear. The first was that it did indeed increase the speed of travel, cutting travel times by great amounts. With this technology, a journey that would take a standard Warp ship weeks to make would take the thus-equipped vessel only hours. Thus, a trip that would have taken years would only take weeks, maybe months on the outside.

The next thing to be noted was that the ship could not fly these Currents on its own. Several test ships were lost due to the fact that the computer, it seemed, could not make the necessary judgment calls to account for the sudden changes in the directions of the Currents. Therefore, manned ships had to be used.

The third thing that was noticed was that Telepaths should not fly the Currents. It seemed that the nature of the SlipStream Space distorted their impressions, making it difficult for them to focus on the Current. Most of these test pilots came back to Headquarters rambling about impossible things. Planets and big, black porcupines with funny noses. Incoherent. Therefore, it was decided never to put another Telepath in the driver's seat.

However, the rest of the test pilots found it the experience of a lifetime! And through these test flights, Starfleet began to map the SlipStream Currents, also known by Starfleet as TransWarp Lanes. This knowledge was then passed back to Starfleet who gave their final nod of approval for the construction of the first two ships to use this as one of their standard means of travel. These two ships were the USS Millennium and the USS Glorious Heritage.

The Millennium was scrapped after an accident involving one of its new, terribly experimental systems. The Heritage (as she was called by most); however, was snapped up from the Regular Fleet by Intelligence... who then lost hold of it to a section dubbed ShadowWynds by its controlling Admiral. Its missions are classified, and only the highest of Fleet Admirals even know of her existence now.

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