The U.S.S. Saturn Five

The U.S.S. Saturn Five was not a technological breakthrough. It was a pork project really, and a chance to break the speed records by any means possible. There were no new technologies at all used by the *Saturn*, merely a novel idea. The idea was that in the old days of space travel, if you wanted to get anywhere fast you had a small command module atop thousands of gallons of explosives with huge engines at the bottom. At the time, "fast" was dwarfed by even the slowest interplanetary cargo haulers. But nevertheless, some Starfleet Engineer realized that the idea could apply to warp field dynamics.

The U.S.S. Saturn Five was a creative spin on the Constitution Class cruiser design. It has a saucer section which housed the crew, bridge, and scientific instruments, a cylindrical engineering hull which housed reactors and equipment, and two cylindrical warp nacelles which actually warped space. The major difference between the *Constitution* and the *Saturn* was the proportions. The *Saturn's* saucer was little more than ten crew quarters and a bridge. The Engineering hull was a compact antimatter/matter reactor with a navigational deflector bolted on the front with no regards to shielding or structural integrity fields. The warp nacelles were massive cylinders almost twice the size of the Constitution's and four times the size of the Saturn's engineering hull.

The *Saturn* would, if calculations were done correctly, be able to reach a maximum speed of Warp 24. For about thirty five seconds. After that, the main stores of antimatter would be depleted, and the huge warp engines would be detached. It would then be a slow Warp 5 crawl back home on much smaller engines. If calculations were correct.

If they were incorrect, the warp field would be so twisted and bent by the massive warp coils and the huge amounts of energy, that the entire ship would collapse into a tiny, short-lived black hole, liberating all of its energy to Hawking Radiation, and it would explode catastrophically. If calculations were correct, but something went wrong, the matter and antimatter stores, over 500 times more massive than a normal ship's, would explode.

The opponents of the Saturn Warp Ship program threw the buzz-word "explode" around a lot. The proponents of the program threw the buzz-words "Andromeda" and "Magellanic Clouds" around a lot. If the U.S.S. Saturn Five was a success, similarly proportioned ships could for the first time explore other galaxies. The major problem was that the U.S.S. Saturn Five was not a technological breakthrough. It was inefficient, expensive, and served no obvious purpose in design lineage. It was a sort of a callback to Earth's Space Races of the 1960s and 2030s, even down to the name. The Romulans and Klingons both had plans on the drawing board--heavily publicized in their propaganda--for faster, more powerful starships.

The state-of-the-art for Warp Field Generation was the huge Deep Space Research Station WFD-1. It was a warp dynamics research lab with warp coils the size of a small asteroid (a convenient Verterium-Cortenide-rich asteroid) that would be capable of moving a Constitution Class starship at Warp 92. This was, however, a facility so massive that it was incapable of movement on its own. Its purpose was a sort of an astronomical warp-tunnel, similar to an aeronautical wind tunnel. While the station could generate a factor 92 field, it was generally only ever brought up to factor 63, any more and there is a risk of catastrophic failure and lasting subspace damage.

It was the perfect testing ground for the Saturn. The test body was able to reach a velocity of Warp Factor 24.677 before being torn apart by gravitational torques and tides. The first powered test, with power augmented by the station's own reactor, showed that the ship's warp coils could get the Saturn up to Warp 21, but had trouble breaking the Warp 22 barrier. It was at this point that the technology of the U.S.S. Saturn Five was forced to become more advanced. A new design for warp coils was built, which had a smoother power curve but an overall lower efficiency. The warp coils became hot enough at around Warp 18 that they could be modified in-flight, and so the warp coils only engaged this sort of "after-burner" mode after Warp 20. Initial tests proved that the modified warp coils were able to bring the ship up to Warp 23.3 in the warp tunnel. Real space had hydrogen, gravitational anomalies, and imperfections compared to the Warp Tunnel, but the approximation was close enough that the final phase of Saturn's development was started.

On launch day, the U.S.S. Saturn Five was powered up in real space for the first time under its own power. Initial checks were go, and the reactors were brought up to full power. With the "Go" order from Starfleet, the U.S.S. Saturn Five jumped to warp. Within five minutes it had already passed the previous maximum speed record set by the U.S.S. Enterprise, at Warp 14. The Saturn swiftly made it past Warp 18, and the coils were reshaped. But something wasn't right. The ship was being held back by something. Alarms blared on the Saturn's Bridge, but the ship pushed on. It reached the Warp 22 limit, and switched to afterburner mode. The antimatter and matter were almost halfway depleted at first, but within thirty seconds the rest of it was used up and the Saturn had broken the Warp 25 barrier.

The Saturn was now ten times further from home than it was supposed to be. The mission called for a six week return trip. The 15 crew members were now looking at a year of deep space outside of the galaxy.