Soyuz

[Wingsley]

Regarding the U.S.S. Bozeman, a Soyuz-class Federation starship seen in the TNG ep "Cause and Effect":

After Googling the Soyuz-class, I found this intriguing fan-made LCARS schematic today. It got me to thinking...

What was the mysterious Soyuz-class starship? What purpose did it have? It is obviously somewhat larger (in terms of either overall mass or bulk) than a Miranda-class vessel like the Reliant or Saratoga.

As of "Cause and Effect" (2368 A.D.), Geordi exclaimed that the Soyuz-class had been discontinued for at least 80 years. (2288) So apparently, newer classes of ships had been put into service that replaced the Soyuz, or otherwise did a better job, or some of the ship's uses were superseded.

But that LCARS graphic, along with other forum discussions I've participated in lately, made me wonder: What if the Soyuz had a strange, hybrid function similar to that of the Antares seen in "Charlie X"? During the course of that ep, the Antares had been called a survey vessel, a cargo vessel and a science-probe vessel. What if the Soyuz played a similar role?

 

[Unicron]

For my part, I've always liked the Jackill take on the design - that the Soyuz was a limited build designed to provide heavy phaser power and assault capabilities. This happens to coincide with some of Mastercom's work in SotSF, where the frigates were often assumed to have similar roles. It's possible that the build was low because there were already a number of tactical ships in service at the time, and Jackill's third volume suggests that the Excelsior design family was being used to replace older versions of the FJ ships (something I like to think would have occurred around the turn of the century, after the Excelsior was a proven workhorse). So perhaps the Soyuz would have been considered overgunned and obsolete at the same time.

 

[SicOne]

I think Timo, in his Hobbyist's Guide, envisioned the Soyuz as an enhanced sensor platform patrolling the areas adjacent to the Romulan Neutral Zone, looking for cloaked ships. I'd have to dig out the printouts of his Guide, but he might want to chime in here.

 

[Dukhat]

Not to stray away from the subject, but the original intent for "Cause and Effect" was that the Enterprise-D would collide with a TOS Connie. However, since it would have been cost-prohibitive to build an all-new TOS Connie model just for this one episode (as it wouldn't have been able to be used as a guest ship in other eps), they modified the Reliant model instead. My question is, if they originally wanted to use a Constitution class ship, why didn't they just use the Enterprise-A model for the Bozeman?

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Very likely they would have had a moratorium on using the model. ILM would have only recent finished using the model for Star Trek VI, and they would have bruised it significantly for that movie. Someone may have thought about it, but then realized that they would have to pay to restore the model, which may have been prohibitive. Also with STVI being fresh in the collective audience mind, they may have wanted to stay away from using the model right away, much like how we never saw a Sovereign-class ship in any DS9 episode (granted they had moved to mostly CGI by that point on DS9 and ST:FC used mostly their physical model, so there may not have been a model available to use anyway).

In any case, the HD screencaps show that the Bozeman bridge model did indeed have the modified Reliant model shown in displays, meaning that any thought of using a TOS model or other existing model was relatively brief and likely in the scripting phase and not during actual production. Okuda, Sternbach and the VFX team would have needed weeks to plan and prep the Bozeman model, then shoot the fairly complex shots needed for the episode (I dunno how they would have modeled the collision if they had used the Connie), so IMO any thought of Bozeman being some other ship would have been brief and early.

I know a lot of fanon stuff has the TMP-era of Starfleet being fairly militarized (and why not - most of it was created in the 80s and then early 90s when the Cold War was still freaking everyone out and various governments were arming rather than shrinking), so there would be a lot of people at the time thinking that the Soyuz class was some awesome phaser cannon platform with weaponized pods replacing the rollbar of the Reliant. Fair supposition - but still clashing with the overall vision of Starfleet per Roddenberry.

I used to think ti would be okay as a weapons platform, but I now mostly believe that it was a low-production class meant to mount extra-awesome sensors. As with all tech, it would be ultimately supplanted by better stuff that was smaller and didn't need dedicated directional turrets. The raison-d'etre of the class therefore evaporated, and as such the remaining ships were scrapped or modified to existing Miranda-class specs of the day, assuming that were possible.

Mark

 

[137th Gebirg]

Ah, the Soyuz - one of my favorite canonical designs. Like the Akira in some ways, it's one of the "Boba Fett's" of starship design. Unfortunately, we all get so wrapped around the axle about what the turrets are, be they weapons or sensors or both, we miss something else of arguably equal, if not greater significance.

The Soyuz class has an additional unparalleled capability that nobody ever really mentions - a massive third landing bay complete with an aft landing platform (also containing slightly-oversized impulse engines) that has never been seen, before or since, on any other Starfleet vessel that I can recall. Why the third long bay? Shuttles don't need that kind of distance to take off and land. Where does that leave us? This, IMO, pushes Soyuz's mission back to one that is purely tactical. I get the impression that this extra-long assembly was used for quick launch and landing of fighter attack craft, akin to an aircraft carrier. I mean, look how long that thing is - it stretches back almost to the tail-end of the nacelles!

If this ship were simply a mobile sensor platform to detect border incursions and cloaked ships, why the higher shuttle/fighter capacity? Just for cargo? No, I think Jackill was right - this thing is a floating death machine that was commissioned during a time when the Federation may have been at the brink of war on multiple fronts. These monsters were put on the front lines as a show of force. Assuming the turrets are weapons, THIS is the beast I would take on a Kobayashi Maru test any day of the week!

 

[Dukhat]

No offense, but that diagram is a bit inaccurate. Here's an actual side view of the model:

http://employees.csbsju.edu/rsorensen/modelcitizen/trekships/miranda/bozeman2.jpg

The extra shuttlebay doesn't stick out as far as the one in your diagram, and the ramp is a lot smaller as well. However, I do think the existence of the shuttlebay itself is a good indicator that the Bozeman is some sort of heavy carrier for shuttles or other auxiliary ships. Or perhaps it's a cargo bay, and the Bozeman is a cargo ship. But then, why the huge sensor pallets? Is it a cargo/space probe vessel like the TOS Antares?

 

[SicOne]

^ Equipment storage, testing bays and manufacturing facilities so Soyuz can stay out by the Neutral Zone and fabricate and test new materials and antennas and such without having to go to a Starbase or SpaceDock for minor refurbishment. I am thinking that Soyuz was intended to patrol the Neutral Zone on an extended basis rather than just several weeks or a few months.

It is also possible that some of the antennas and pods house equipment meant to be able to probe very deeply within the Neutral Zone, much farther than "ordinary" starship sensors. Not just for cloaked ships, but for general survey.

 

[Tomalak]

For what it's worth, I never took the pods to be phasers, mainly because they look nothing like any other Starfleet phasers. I think they are sensors, probably designed for intensive planetary surveys, with the expanded cargo/shuttlebay being used for deploying vehicles to explore the planet in closer detail. They were presumably retired because these sensor platforms became outdated, with more powerful equipment available in a smaller frame on the new Excelsior class ships.

Perhaps the successor is the Miranda variant seen in Sisko's Saratoga - also with large, unidentified outboard pods. There's some debate about whether those are phasers or sensors too, but again I think they are sensors.

 

[Timo]

I think Timo, in his Hobbyist's Guide, envisioned the Soyuz as an enhanced sensor platform patrolling the areas adjacent to the Romulan Neutral Zone, looking for cloaked ships. I'd have to dig out the printouts of his Guide, but he might want to chime in here.

Mike Okuda is (allegedly) on record saying that those were supposed to be sensor pods on the ship. Alone, such intent would mean little, but there's a good chance it was translated into onscreen fact: there are Okudagrams of the ship visible on the bridge, including ones with labels for the various parts (just as with the Hathaway). Sure, these are illegible even in HD (just as with the Hathaway), but I took them to count for something nevertheless.

Whether these are sensors for scientific surveys or for military spying, these could be boosted by reconnaissance craft deployed from the three bays. We have seldom seen shuttles used for pure recce, but this sounds like a natural function for them anyway.

OTOH, with the bulky add-ons, the ship isn't going to be an agile combatant, so Starfleet might have decided to add random bells and whistles and never mind the mass penalties since all is lost anyway.

I like to think that the ship was retired because of her sensors: not only did these massive raison d'etre things become outdated soon, but their bulk and torque also fatigued the spaceframe to the point of retirement, so that there was no chance of substituting more modern, possibly more compact sensors.

Or then these ships were refitted back to "standard". Either way, the distinct silhouette was lost from the Starfleet inventory, which is what counts plotwise.

FWIW, there's a comic depicting a Soyuz class vessel in TOS era adventures, titled Spock: Reflections 3. The art for the 2265 version of the ship (USS Collins) shows the familiar hull but with nacelles halfway between TOS and TFS: LN-64 style bow and PB-31 style stern, to use the fan terminology. Check out Memory Beta... (I also use that story in the Guide, giving it a little twist fitting of my sigint ship interpretation.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

In the movies, Reliant and Saratoga, equipped with the weaponized "roll bars", seemed to be Starfleet's gunships. (Capt. Alexander's Saratoga was patrolling the Neutral Zone area when the Whalesong Probe appeared.)

Given this, it seemed unlikely to me that the Soyuz-class Bozeman was a dedicated defensive Federation starship, or even that defense would be a primary or secondary use. If Bozeman and her Soyuz-class ships had a military function, it could be to launch probes and other intelligence-related craft, as well as to conduct intensive eavesdropping and other intelligence research. Since those funny projections along the periphery of the ship are not in traditionally useful places for standard Federation weapons, it seems far more likely these would be intel devices/facilities. Note that the upper and lower aft pods mounted on wings are kept a discreet distance from the rest of the ship, possibly to help screen out interference from the main body of the ship.

It is also possible that Soyuz-class vessels could have a very similar, non-military function. Starfleet's primary mission is "to seek out new life and new civilizations", after all. What better way to conduct deep-space research than to customize a small class of Miranda-class-derived ships to distribute probes, "listening post" satellites, and special beacons to seek out alien communications?

Another similar mission profile would be to use Soyuz-class ships to distribute Federation telecommunications beacons for secure, tight-beam transmissions. Using ships like this to expand (or repair) an existing internal telecommunications network would make a great deal of sense.

STAR TREK never really elaborated on what the Federation is doing in the 22nd through 24th centuries for "Big Bang" research, either. Are they still trying to use lightspeed and subspace radio astronomy to understand the Big Bang? If you consider that Soyuz could be outfitted like the LCARS diagram shared in O.P., the ships would be ideal for that kind of work.

Finally, Soyuz could also be useful in mining remote airless asteroids for rare substances that may be of scientific or industrial use to the Federation. A ship with extended shuttle-bay services and possibly extra cargo facilities would be ideal to work with automated warptugs and/or science vessels that would be part of a limited-production mining operation.

These are just a few non-defensive uses I could think of for the Soyuz.

 

[Timo]

The thing is, the one known ship was sent to the Typhon Expanse. Or at least that's where she ended up after traversing that wormholey thingamabob, but let's assume she set sail for Typhon specifically, three weeks before that mishap.

Would going there help spy on UFP enemies, or fight those? Probably not - even in the TNG era, the region was unexplored, so the Feds wouldn't even know if there were enemies there. Would going there be necessary for doing "pure science" comparable to Big Bang research? Probably not - Big Bang is everywhere and nowhere, and going to Typhon would just disrupt such observations. So exploration of Typhon itself sounds like a probable assignment.

Of course, it might be that Starfleet had a cloak-detecting special sensor ship to spare at some point, and the eggheads figured out that anti-cloak sensors were ideally suited for studying the Typhon phenomenon. Or Starfleet built an exotic weapons platform but had no chance to test her in realistic conditions, so it chose Typhon as a sparring partner or as a curtain to hide the testing from Klingons. Or then those spires were specifically built to exploit Typhon, to siphon off its zizigammatic particles for their exotic telepathy-enhancing abilities. Etc. Possibilities abound, but IMHO these should revolve around the fact that the ship was suited for Typhon and selected for that mission over other designs. If Starfleet builds something that special and then has no better use for it than sending it to Typhon, then there simply must be some connection there.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

I prefer to consider the possibility that Bozeman started out nowhere near the Typhon Expanse. For all we know, she could've been planting "listening post" bouys near the Tholians.

 

[SicOne]

I'd have to dig out the Star Charts book for a look-see, but do we know where the Typhon Expanse in relation to the Tholians or the Tzenkethi, both being polities that might have been due for a super-duper long-range scan by Bozeman? If you drew a straight line between Earth and the Typhon Expanse and continued it past the TE, where would one pass through or by?

 

[Ithekro]

The Star Charts place the Typhon Expanse just coreward of Deep Space Four, which is near the Romulan Neutral Zone. Not much more than a sector away from Nimbus. USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-A) would have gone past there in TFF about ten years or so after USS Bozeman vanished.

 

[Wingsley]

I remember Vonda McIntyre, in her novelization of THE WRATH OF KHAN, wrote that Reliant had a crew of about 300. I don't think that number was ever discussed, let alone verified, anywhere else. If we accept that Reliant and other Mirandas typically had a crew of about 300 (why not?), what would you think about Soyuz-class ships having similarly-sized crews?

McIntyre's statement of crew size, while obviously not canon, always made sense to me because a significant part of the primary hull (and no secondary hull) would have to house warp drive engineering and two shuttlecraft hangars, so that would diminish saucer volume for crew habitat.

 

[SicOne]

The Star Charts place the Typhon Expanse just coreward of Deep Space Four, which is near the Romulan Neutral Zone. Not much more than a sector away from Nimbus. USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-A) would have gone past there in TFF about ten years or so after USS Bozeman vanished.

(digs out Star Charts)

OK, I see it now. Hmmm. Whole lot of nothin' past the TE in that direction. Unless perhaps they were preparing to curve to the "northeast" to get into a position for a look-see of what's going on in the Romulan Star Empire backwaters. Otherwise, there's not much of a reason for a Federation ship to be in that general area.

For some reason I was thinking the TE was down "southwest" or "west" of the Federation, between Earth and Tzenkethi or Tholian space, and Bozeman was passing through the Expanse to get into a position to deep sensor probe one of the two aforementioned polities.

Thanks for pointing out the location, Itherko.

 

[QuinnTV]

In any case, the HD screencaps show that the Bozeman bridge model did indeed have the modified Reliant model shown in displays, meaning that any thought of using a TOS model or other existing model was relatively brief and likely in the scripting phase and not during actual production.

This is a good point. Nice observation.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Upon closer inspection, it actually looks like that MSD is missing the third extended hangar. Almost like it was added on to the model after the MSD was made, but it definitely shows the turrets.

 

[Wingsley]

Do screen caps clearly show three hangars? I can see two. Isn't there an impulse engine on the hull extension?