I don't own Star Trek The Next Generation, or UFO.

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The Future of Starfleet is the UFO!

The Borg Incident, or the Borg Scare, where the mysterious, but powerfully dangerous Borg Collective launched a single Cube against the United Federation of Planets which saw the loss of 900 colonists on the New Providence colony, and the loss of 10,000 people at the Battle of Wolf 359, who were either killed in the battle or assimilated and transformed into Borg drones themselves, led to a series of heated deliberations when Admiral Pertwee raised a terrifyingly important point after data records salvaged from Wolf 359 to give Starfleet information about the battle revealed how easily the Borg defeated the Starfleet Taskforce assembled to slow down or even get lucky to destroy the Borg Cube.

Pertwee had quickly come to see Starfleet's current design philosophy was not only optimistic but downright fatal. And he presented an extremely well-researched argument, using records gleaned and collected over the last three centuries of Starfleet's operation.

Conflicts with the Romulan Star Empire, skirmishes with the Klingon Empire, the Cardassian war, the Tzenkethi war, the Battle of Maxia and now Wolf 359, Pertwee forced Starfleet to accept the fact the ships they had designed and built over the years were simply not practical in protecting crews and Federation citizens from the dangers of the universe. A highly charismatic man who had spent 30 years as a Captain on a number of Starships before he had accepted his promotion to Admiral, Pertwee bluntly shoved the fact Starfleet had not bothered with looking for a practical array of defences to use against the Borg, and he made it clear the Borg could launch an attack at any time. It didn't matter when, but what was important was they shook off the stupid ostrich mentality of sticking their heads in the sand and pretending dangers like that did not exist, because they did.

Starfleet, already in the desperate state of wanting to rebuild, took the initiative to totally improve every aspect of ship design.

They called for historians and engineers to come and help pitch new ideas for the development of a new Federation Starfleet, one that could continue with the Federations goals of peace, diplomacy and exploration.

Many were inspired by the 20th-century warships, the battleship and the aircraft carrier, which were enormous armoured vessels that would carry enormous numbers of weapons, but historians made it clear these ships were vulnerable to any kind of attack.

One historian, however, was enamoured with the concept of Hunter-Killer and Ballistic missile attack submarines of the 20th century; the Hunter-Killer submarines would prowl through the oceans of Earth in a time of war, hunting down and attacking ships and other submarines in a time of war, while their larger sister ships would carry the devastating nuclear weapons which were, until the Eugenics Wars and the Third World War, a deterrent against nuclear war. The historian made notes and pitched the idea that instead of building large warships that were vulnerable, they constructed instead ships that were simpler and more functional, but were multipurpose.

Expanding on the idea were a research and development team, who looked into the pop culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, where they became interested in science-fiction and space operas. One of the group was a fan of this, and they took inspiration from various space operas and shared their views and interests with the others before they began taking notice of a series of movies about an oppressive Empire fighting off against something called the Rebel Alliance, and the prequel movies and spinoff TV shows about a past conflict called the Clone Wars. They saw this series of movies and computer-generated image episodes as a great place to begin work, and they started looking into various fields to build a fleet of ships that exhibited the best aspects of the different ships.

Heavy armour.

Compact engine design instead of having two projecting warp nacelles, vulnerable and defenceless.

Fighters.

Multiple weapon platforms.

A versatile design that was good enough for exploration and combat.

But more importantly, easy to build.

While everyone else was looking at the Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica franchises for inspiration, one of the team however felt they were making too many mistakes. Yes, he believed Starfleet's classic design philosophy was too optimistic and he felt their mistakes during the Borg crisis were many and they should rectify their mistakes fast, but he felt they were making new mistakes like designing ships which were too large, bulky and would require decades to research and develop to the point they would be produced. Again, big mistake. The best thing to do was to look elsewhere for designs.

No, the researcher felt the simpler the design of the ship, the better. He went back to the drawing board, using the space operas he had seen to give him criteria for things he wanted; one of the ships in the Star Wars franchise he liked was the Millennium Falcon. It was streamlined. It was fast and manoeuvrable, and it was small enough to avoid heavier ships' weapons. Realising that Starfleet should be focusing on smaller ship designs that were compact and powerful, the researcher began looking deeper into the sources for some extra inspiration although the Millennium Falcon was a great design, and it was one that could go hand in hand with the Defiant class design. It took the researcher time before he discovered the TV show called UFO, depicting a secret group dedicated to defending Earth from a hostile alien race who wanted to steal human body parts.

But the most interesting aspect of the series was the design of the UFOs, the flying saucers; small, compact, and powerful. And it wasn't just UFO's flying saucer design in particular, but he also found others.

Putting out design models, the researcher gained increasing amounts of support since the saucer design was a classic design for primary hulls, they could make them more compact, smaller and after adding engine designs like the Millennium Falcon and heavier weapons, the Federation could build starships that were smaller, and less vulnerable, and more manoeuvrable than ever. With the perfect base prepared, the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet started designing starships that were built along the lines of the Millennium Falcon and the flying saucers seen in the movie Forbidden Planet and the TV series, UFO.

With modern understanding of physics from warp drive, materials like ablative armour and weapons like the new Quantum torpedo and the pulse phaser cannon which retuned after each impact, the design of the ships took shape, and soon a prototype was launched, and because it wasn't slowed down by the secondary hull of an ordinary starship, it's simpler construction meant it would be faster and more agile while being easier to build.

The future was certainly shaping up to be different.

The new compact designs of the Starfleet began to be constructed on large and small scales. For the next few years, the Federation and Starfleet experimented with the designs of new ships, and thanks to looking towards pop culture, they began experimenting with other shapes like spheres. When the Bajoran wormhole was discovered and fleets of ships passed through to explore before the Dominion War began. The UFO ships met their match and exceeded the Jem'Hadar ships.

But the biggest tests were still to come, the Borg. How would the new ships added to Starfleet deal with them?

Author's Note - One thing I've begun to note is after I read a great one-shot which inspired me to write short stories and one-shots about Starfleet changing their entire design philosophy is how limited so much of it is; sure, the design of the Enterprise D is beautiful and elegant, but at the same time there are other ways of designing a starship.