Milky Way Galaxy
Alpha Quadrant
Sol System
Earth
Okinawa, Japan
Daystrom Institute

Daystrom Log, Stardate 7621.8

I had that dream again. The dream where I find myself aboard the USS Excalibur, sitting in the captain's chair. Everything is calm and peaceful until suddenly the ship shakes violently. I turn the chair, confronted by the First Officer, her face a look of shock makes my stomach turn.

I try to turn away, to look at something else, anything else. I watch as someone screams that life support has failed and the lights give out…And I come face to face with Excalibur's captain, his face also burning and melting in a horrible mélange of flesh and blood, crying out over the screams:

'You, Daystrom! You did this!'

It's at that point, I wake up with the words echoing my mind. I hear their voices in the back of my mind, I see their faces when I close my eyes, crying out to me.

'Why did you do this? Why are you killing us?'

I can never fully atone for what I have done but I must try. I must find a way to quiet the screams of the dead and restore faith in my legacy. It is with my greatest hope that if I somehow succeed, the dead will allow me one night of uninterrupted sleep.

That is all I can ever ask of them.

Just one night…

But how? How can I make up for the damage that I've done?

End Log

Following the meeting with Ambassador Sarek, Daystrom and April returned to Earth and parted ways, with Daystrom returning to the Institute. What the Ambassador had said had given Daystrom a lot to think about. Sarek's statement that the Vulcan High Command had begun recycling older decommissioned ships had Daystrom's mind wandering, and he decided to check the number of ships that had been mothballed.

The number…

Well, let's just say there were a lot.

Since the founding of the United Federation of Planets, over two hundred Daedalus class ships had been built. From the first day of the war, it was obvious that a new class of warships was needed, ships that where larger, faster and more powerful than any which had preceded them. Work began at a feverish pace early in 2156, and by mid-2158 the first of the new Daedalus class was launched. The designers were urged to be daring, and they certainly took this advice to heart.

Instead of the integrated hull form which most previous ships had possessed, the Daedalus class featured a multi-hulled configuration. The engineering section was a cylinder six decks tall which housed the ships' heavy engineering equipment, the warp core, structural integrity and inertial damper field generator systems, shield generators, hangar bays, impulse drive, etc. This hull was connected by a two-deck neck to a spherical primary hull which housed the ship's main weapons, control areas and provision for the crew. Designed to be easily constructed and maintained, the ships lacked many creature comforts found on other vessels of the period.

However, they were known for their rugged durability.

They proved their worth during the Romulan war, and then as deep-space exploration and defensive units for the newborn United Federation of Planets. The ships served extensively during the Romulan war, rapidly acquiring a fearsome reputation on the front lines. By 2159 the rapidly growing Daedalus fleet had been an important factor in turning the tide in the war, and by the end of that year they were routinely striking deep into Romulan home territory. The Romulans, faced with a war now fought almost wholly on their own territory, sued for peace in 2160.

When the United Federation of Planets was formed in 2161, the constitution called on members to supply the newly formed Starfleet with ships until purpose-built vessels could be constructed. The pacifist Vulcan's where reluctant to devote resources to what they considered a military force, but the Humans had no such qualms; of the fleet of seventy Daedalus class vessels in service in 2161, they turned over no less than sixty of these to Starfleet. With Starfleet assigned a major scientific and exploratory role in addition to its secondary military mission, this bold move bought the Humans a huge stake in the future of the Federation. Virtually every exploratory mission, every first contact, every new scientific discovery made in the first eighty years of the UFP was made by Daedalus class starships under Human command and carrying wholly Human crews.

Several ships were lost, including the USS Essex under the command of Bryce Shumar. The USS Archon was lost when its crew was absorbed by the entity known as Landru on the planet Beta III in the system C-111. The Daedalus class USS Horizon visited Sigma Iotia II in 2167, resulting in massive cultural contamination of that planet. The huge number of such first contacts, together with the planting of colonies and exploratory work, resulted in a heavy pro Human bias in the evolving structure of the Federation itself, and most especially within Starfleet.

This bias endures even to the present day.

The first of the Daedalus class vessels reached the end of its hull life in 2188. Initially it was planned to conduct a major overhaul on the hulls of the ships to extend their lives a further twenty years, but with a lessening in tensions during this period it was decided that Starfleet needed fewer heavily armed ships in service. The number of Daedalus class ships was allowed to gradually fall as ships reached the end of their hull life and retired. Initially it was planned to retire the cruiser-type altogether in favor of large numbers of smaller, more maneuverable vessels.

But in the end, it was decided to put most of the Daedalus fleet into mothballs against possible future need. The last one hundred ships were placed in storage in 2196. As the Daedalus ships fell behind the state of the art and became gradually less useful even as a reserve force, Starfleet began to find other uses for them. One was retained for the Fleet Museum, where it remains to this day. Some thought was given to refitting the remaining ships and using them as cargo carriers, but this plan was abandoned.

Another plan to sell the Daedalus fleet to alien governments was also abandoned when the Prime Directive was established in 2225. Thirty of the ships were used in live fire exercises - one achieving a degree of fame as the first vessel destroyed by a phaser bank during the development of that weapon in the 2250's. Most of the remaining ships were scrapped between 2250 and 2260, though a few continued to serve in civilian hands for some years afterwards. Still, some remained in the mothball yards and Daystrom found himself looking over the designs and the initial plans that had been made to refit them.

Then there was the famous NX class, the first Human-built vessel capable of reaching warp factor 5. Under the command of Captain Archer, it conducted many exploratory missions in star systems near to Sol. The enhanced NX class was fielded as a result of the lessons learned with the NX-01 in her first year of operation. The ship experienced a much higher threat level than expected, so most of the modifications which were being included in the NX-02 involved more firepower and more damage resistance. When the Xindi weapon attacked Earth in 2153, the NX-01 was recalled and refitted with the same weapon load which had been planned for the NX-02.

Improvements included enhanced polarizing systems for the armor and replacing the spatial torpedo tubes with photonic torpedoes with fifty times the range and much higher yield. Additional phase cannons were also added to both increase overall firepower and to give coverage on the dorsal hemisphere, something which had been lacking on the original NX design.

Then there was the Earth-Romulan War.

That led to the NX class being modified with an additional hull, the cylindrical section that would serve as the engineering section for the generations that followed, historically known as the NX Class Refit, much like what the new Constitution class is known as. While over a hundred years old, Daystrom noted something different.

The NX class used an unusual, reinforced hull material known at the time as victrium. By combining durotanium and victrium at the molecular level, it not only increased the hull's durability but made it as strong as a hull made of tritanium. At the time, Starfleet had used this technique to allow the hull to better handle the stresses of the class's duel warp core system, especially during the Earth-Romulan war. When the Federation was formed and began combining technologies, it appeared that this specific development had been forgotten as no other class ships had used this method.

But this had Dr. Daystrom's mind racing, considering the possibilities.

Perhaps Ambassador Sarek and the Vulcan High Command were on to something with this recycling method.

Daystrom immediately tapped a switch on his desk. "This is Dr. Daystrom, I want all division heads to meet me in the briefing room."

Skyriver Galaxy
Mid-Rim
Chommell Sector
Naboo System
Naboo
USS Enterprise

Personal Log, Spock Recording:

In the time we have spent in this galaxy, I made the personal mission to study the remains of the droid armies the Trade Federation used to invade the planet Naboo. Given their high use of these autonomous machines and the fact that no one in our galaxy has created or used androids to such a level, I thought it would be best to learn what I can. My personal studies have been…interesting.

We will start with the B1 Battle Droid:

Despite the vast resources that have been used to create entire armies of this one model, the B1 Battle Droid is primitive in several areas to note. The first being its level of intelligence, being highly basic compared to the Enterprise computer. The AI is simply programmed to follow orders sent to it by a transceiver from a Droid Control Ship which we had encountered. Beyond that, the droid would defer to a commanding officer or unit to carry out its tasks.

As soldiers, I have to admit they are heavily flawed in design. The most notable flaw would be the power supplies and the weight ratio. I understand that the droid armies were a build up from a simple force of security droids to ward off pirate attacks in the Outer Rim of this galaxy. It is understandable why it would most serve as cannon fodder and yet, this type of machine is perhaps the most expendable design I have ever seen.

From our scans taken of deactivated B1 battle droids, they are made with a material known as Durasteel, a low-quality kind of steel, that does not stop blaster bolts and is extremely heavy. I am given to understand that Durasteel, despite being used in the construction of starships in this galaxy is weaker than titanium. In addition to this, the servos and joints are underpowered, making these droids awkward, slow and unbalanced. If a lighter but stronger metal was used, they would be more formidable. Their design is meant to be bipedal so that they are able to operate machinery much like how an organic would.

I find myself puzzled by this choice of design.

Given my own qualifications in computer science, having even programmed the Enterprise computer to play chess, I would say the bipedal design only makes the battle droids more awkward. Trying to replicate the movements of humans in a machine is very difficult, even for the best and brightest in Starfleet. In the early twenty first century on Earth, human militaries begun exploring the use of robots to aid their human soldiers. The complex nature of replicating a bipedal design would have been too much, hence why any machines were designed with four legs or on treads.

The higher center of gravity for a bipedal machine like the B1 makes the platform less stable, especially given the likely terrains it is likely to encounter. In addition, the limbs are long and fragile, making them heavily vulnerable. In addition, the computer core is located in the head module of the droid, rather than the chest which adds even more vulnerability, given the extremely thin neck strut. Speaking of the computer core, I analyzed it as well to understand how these machines were programmed.

As I said before, the AI programming is primitive to the likes of R2-D2 and barely worth comparing to a machine as advanced as V'Ger. It seems the Trade Federation, or who ever created these droids for them used a form of motion capture technology of elite organic soldiers so that the battle droids could replicate these movements, however that is yet another design flaw. Organic soldiers move the way they move because of how their bodies are built and organics are naturally limited, only usually possessing four limbs, a limited dexterity and have organs that need to be in certain positions in order for tasks to be carried out. The fact that these droids are modeled after organic soldiers in such detail, makes them heavily vulnerable, given that their computer brains have no scanners beyond basic targeting computers and Friend/Foe identifying software programmed into them by the control systems they connected to.

Their network system is another flaw and is actually primitive to the military networking of late twentieth century Earth. By that time, soldiers had been given a form of networking technology consisting of wireless radio transmitters and Global Positioning Software chips that allowed all of them to know exactly where their fellow soldiers were on the battlefield, acting as a second pair of eyes and allowed them to move the correct material and personnel to the right places on the battlefield, especially when the terrain or field is covered in dust, smoke and other forms of visual inhibiting circumstances. Logically, this kind of system would be perfect for the B1 battle droids and it seemed the Trade Federation had a system like this in place but the weakness was that they were completely dependent on the central command center on the Droid Control Ship.

"Bridge to Commander Spock."

Spock turned away from his analysis of a B1 battle droid that had been given to Starfleet by the Naboo. "Spock, here."

"We have new orders to return through the gateway and head for Starbase 11." Uhura stated. "One Samuel Cogley."

Spock raised an eyebrow. "I am on my way."