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The most security surrounded a single starship, USS Prometheus. What was known at the time was mostly about its appearance: a one-off cruiser-sized vessel some 415 meters in length, with sixteen decks, with a quartet of warp nacelles in an X-form layout and a modern pointed-arrowhead-shape primary hull blending into a linear secondary hull. Much of the remaining data surrounding the ship was heavily classified at the time, and still remains so, but in 2402 limited declassification filled in some gaps. Prometheus was built in 2372 as a testbed for something called "multi-vector assault": the ship was actually composed of three sections, each warp-capable on its own and able to operate independently of each other. The sections could coordinate their attacks, either manually by a minimal crew from the main bridge atop the one designated "Alpha" or by computer control. The idea was that this single ship could become a small flotilla of light, maneuverable, and heavily-armed starships to swarm and overpower an enemy. The original proposal called for a total of 25 of the ships (75 segments in all) as anti-Borg defenders; unknown circumstances killed the project after the initial prototype NX-74913. Some mission data was included in the declassification, but much of the details have been redacted. What is publicly known about the ship's wartime career is that it was involved in several clandestine missions in the latter half of the war near Romulan space and deep within Dominion-held territory.

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Originally posted by Lee:
On another note, though, I've alway wondered what happens if just the middle part of the ship gets destroyed, would the two remaining bist still fit together?

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In the interim, work proceeded on the other "off the shelf" cruiser class. Both new classes addressed the problem of a frontier so expanded that transit to and from the interior core of the Federation was becoming problematic. Speed was definitely necessary to a solution: Excelsior was now betting its farm on transwarp drive with all the hopes and dreams associated with it; the second starship had to make do with what was available, with all the attendant problems that engineers and theorists had been struggling with for years. When the project was authorized in 2277 under the name Constellation, it was already evident thatExcelsior would be receiving the lion's share of support, publicity, and research. This, too, somewhat mirrored the relationship between the Supercruiser classes after production began. Rivalry often breeds innovation, however, which certainly became the case in this situation. From the outset, Constellation design teams shunned anything even remotely useable as a possible solution by their counterparts working on Excelsior, sometime to the extreme. The final design created by the project engineers completely encapsulated this philosophy.

The problem faced by the team was the same as their rivals: creation of a larger cruiser for extended deep-space missions with increased speeds and ranges. Since traditional solutions to the problem had not been fruitful, and the limitation of using only currently available systems had been imposed, non-traditional concepts were the only avenue left to them. To increase volume, rather than describing larger hulls had previously been done, Constellation was actually made smaller than other proposals, with a 310-meter length comparable to Constitution's 305 meters (and much less than Excelsior's projected 460). Rather than the usual dual-hull arrangement, the designers used the Sentinel ships and the new Knox-class as touchstones for ways to increase hull volume without increasing size appreciably. A decision was made to keep the ship as a saucer-only configuration; volume problems were solved by thickening the saucer by two decks at its widest point and adding an outer ring section, which tapered in a truncated teardrop shape to the stern. Study of current warp theories and creation of radically modified field envelope control software allowed the designers to give Constellation a brand-new never-before-possible warp configuration. Instead of the usual twin-nacelle tandem configuration, Constellation mounted four nacelles, in a two-up/two-down arrangement. This was paired with a twin impulse system—two standard decks mounted port and starboard, on a 90-degree change of standard orientation—and an uprated linear intermix reactor system. The warp core was able to supply power to either upper or lower pairs of nacelles for standard cruising, or to both sets at once for faster speeds albeit at greatly increased consumption rates. Sensor systems, scanning equipment, and other mission-swappable instrumentation were placed within external blisters to conserve space for habitable volume within the hull. In every possible way, Constellation was the anti-Excelsior: short, stumpy, clunky, and ungainly, taking the current fleet aesthetic and pushing it to its extremes as opposed to the naturally evolved smooth, sweeping, pleasing new design lines of its brother class. Placed side by side, the two could not possibly have beenmore different.

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Cheyenne was first in 2338, the most radical in design, taking the modular corvette concept begun with Citizen to an extreme form. Easy swapping of external components such as
bridge modules had been commonplace for nearly a century, while internal mission module replacement had been a recent innovation. Cheyenne looked to simplify these processes by making the whole starship mission-swappable: not only could the bridge section be easily replaced but the entire saucer or engineering section could be exchanged, locking into place via a plug-and-play format made possible by an early form of modular docking latch system later modified for use in Galaxy-class explorers. The belief was that this system would allow an entire array of ships to be created & modified as needed for any mission—in theory, an entire ship could be swapped out for a totally new one. Saucers would be built complete and unchanging for a variety of mission types and engineering sections constructed to support long-range or short-term tasks as needed. In reality, however, this was rarely used as the costs of supplying the various types of components to such a large area of operation meant the idea soon became prohibitive, and ships often stayed in the same configuration for their whole service lives or had a module swap once or twice in emergency situations. The most common configuration became the four-nacelled version for courier, scout, and escort duties; much rarer were the ships with a twin-engine/secondary hull arrangement or extra sensor pods or weapons, many of which were eventually refit to the quad-engine standard. Drawbacks in module replacement did not otherwise prevent Cheyennes from performing their assigned missions admirably, however. The quad-nacelle configuration boosted speeds to Warp 9.12 (1588 c), making the ships well suited for deep space support missions. Some vessels using that engineering section were paired with a thicker nine-deck saucer, replacing the standard five-deck module, equipped with expanded research facilities and crew spaces for investigative missions and associated personnel. These variants were colloquially referred to as "exploratory scouts" despite being much larger than the average scout ship due to their ability to and mission orientation towards long-range deep space survey operations.

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