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Well, I debated a while before deciding to do this one. Some people's sensibilities will be offended by such high performance in such a small TOS-era vessel, but what the heck! If the Orion raider in "Journey to Babel" can be designed to go like hell for a short time, then blow up, I suppose Starfleet could design a small vessel that can go like heck for a few hours, and be ready to do it again after some maintenance.
Look at it this way: the earliest jet engines were almost disposable. They'd use them for (typically) 10 hours, then change 'em out and send the used-up engine back to depot for a rebuild. This ship is built using much the same design philosophy -- "Make it work for as long as it needs to, then fix it when it breaks!"
------------------ I bet when Neanderthal kids would make a snowman, someone would always end up saying "Don't forget the big heavy eyebrows." Then they would all get embarrassed because they remembered they had the big hunky eyebrows too, and then they would get mad and eat the snowman.
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