Metal City in Outer Space

The Federation may build outstanding and awe-inspiring starships, but without the proper back-up, they are useless. Its fleet needs top-notch, well-designed facilities for support, maintenance, and for rest and relaxation of its crew. Construction of some starships is also done in space, requiring a facility where large amounts of manpower and machines for construction and testing can be gathered. There are many such facilities (called spacedocks) orbiting Starfleet’s home planet of Earth, and the most impressive of them all is the Earth Spacedock.

It was featured in four Star Trek movies: Star Trek III, The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. In the movies, the Earth Spacedock was shown as a place for docking the USS Enterprise-A when not in use, and where it was repaired when some design flaws were noticed after its maiden voyage. Based on the films, ships were also formally decommissioned at the Earth Spacedock. Shots of the Earth Spacedock were also seen in multiple episodes of the TV Series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The mushroom-shaped space dock was built some time after the year 2274. Before its construction, Starfleet only had a single-ship orbital platform, ill-suited and inadequate for the needs of its growing fleet of starships. Earth Spacedock was designed and built to fill this technological need. It is designed rather like a small city, with all the facilities needed to process, refine, manufacture, and assemble structures needed to repair, maintain, and construct starships under one roof. Although no doubt expensive, the spacedock proved its worth by taking only a decade to recover its costs. This was attributed to eliminating the inefficiencies of transporting goods to outer space that plagued Starfleet before its construction. The Federation was so impressed with the Spacedock and its efficiency that they ordered 16 more spacedocks (although none as massive as the Earth Spacedock).

The space dock is 3,810 m wide. Its main structure has a height of 4,648m, but has an overall 5,795 m. As it is primarily geared towards servicing ships, it has 1,200 decks and can accommodate 15,000 Starfleet personnel. Civilians who work and maintain the Spacedock number from 20,000 to 30,000. A cavernous internal hangar can accommodate up to thirty starships, depending on their exact size. In addition to this, it boasts of fifteen large hangar bays that are capable of holding a whopping three hundred smaller shuttlecraft. The Earth Spacedock is not a defenseless structure by any means- it would be too prone to enemy attack if it had no built in weapons or shields. It boasts 370 Type XII phase arrays with a total output of 2,240,000 Terawatts, as well as 24 Type 2 burst fire torpedo photon tubes. The spacedock’s designers and engineers also outfitted it with a high capacity shield system with a 2,240,000 TeraJoule total capacity, as well as ad light duranium/tritanium single hull and and low level structural integrity field.

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