Background

Measuring just 40-meters long, 24-meters wide, and 4-meters deep, the Peashooter-class is a unique departure from standard Starfleet technological philosophies. An advanced scout design, the planform is longer and wider than a Danube-class runabout, yet 1.4 meters shorter in height. This factor of the hull concept was the primary cause in the delay of the onset of production, as the ship was to be built primarily around the (comparatively) massive "Snoop Slab" prototype sensor suite. In its final form, "Snoop Slab" consisted of 3 separate flat-area sensor pallets (2 rectangular dorsal, 1 circular ventral) covered with highly sensitive, ultramodern passive sensing equipment augmented with emergency-use-only active arrays. Because of the usage of this system, 40% of the available internal spaceframe volume was consumed by sensor-related systems. Another hurdle remained in the fact that there was no available or foreseeable warpcore small enough to house within the remaining space; if one were to ever be built, it still would have been woefully underpowered for the tasks at hand.

Instead of utilizing the standard warpcore, the Peashooter-class has a modified gravity generator from the Galaxy-class as its power source. Since only a small fraction of the graviton energy is needed to power the gravnet, the remaining 88% of so is channeled into an EPS converter relay and used to power the warp drive, "Snoop Slab" arrays, and other primary systems. As it is a scout class, only 4 phaser strips are installed to afford low- to medium protection.

Akula was built in early 2370 at the Izar Staryards, while Aegis was constructed by Superior Fleet Hulls at their Boccuzzi's Star V yards and entered service in 2374.

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