HOODOO

The starship Hoodoo was constructed illegally, by criminals, with illegally appropriated funds and absolutely not in accordance to Starfleet design protocol. This ship was designed and built to win the Dominion War. The story of the secret war fought by the Hoodoo and it's sister ships is one that the Federation would have preferred to see remain secret, but now the story can be told...

The Hoodoo is a battleship, designed to destroy the enemy and survive.
Starfleet has little use for vessels of this sort, because this ship is of no use in peacetime. It carries an array of weaponry unlike any seen on any Starfleet vessels, and is equipped with many systems which are strictly forbidden by the regulations. However, this is not exactly a Federation or Starfleet vessel, and those who built it are no longer affiliated with Starfleet. Indeed, they are criminals wanted by the Federation and by the Dominion.

The ship is roughly one-and-one-half times the size of an Intrepid class cruiser, and superficially resembles one in many ways. However, the differences are starkly evident to even the most casual observer. To begin with, there are three warp nacelles, the third mounted dorsally. The lateral nacelles are quite large, being about three times the length of the Intrepid's. The dorsally mounted one is only about half the length of these. All three are shrouded by the body of the ship, rather like those found on the Defiant class vessels. All three are transwarp capable, the configurations being stored permanently in memory for rapid conversion. The bow of the ship is notched deeply, but narrowly. The entire vessel is painted with an especially dark, light absorbing black paint. There are few windows, so under blackout conditions the ship is rather difficult to see.

The aforementioned notch is part of the weapons system. The four main phaserbanks converge at the collator coil inside the notch. The four beams are then collated and combined into one very powerful one which can punch through just about anything. Should that prove insufficient, each beam can be set to a differing resonance frequency simultaneously, a tactic which usually proves devastating to regenerative shielding. The Hoodoo has many other phaser arrays as well, and twelve total torpedo launchers fore and aft. Each weapon battery is controlled by a separate fire control center, allowing the easy targeting of of up to four targets at once. The ship carries a heavy complement of quantum, photon, and antimatter torpedoes, and has an assembly station aboard to make more if needed!

Fortunately, the odds are slim that the Hoodoo would ever run out of torpedoes. As it happens, the Hoodoo has quite a few items in it's bag of tricks which make torpedo use not quite so necessary. One of these is the subspace transporter array. Controlled by the bridge, this system has the ability to beam objects through shields with ease. While it is unsafe for human travel, it does work very well for beaming away small portions of the enemy target or planting explosives inside a target.

The ship is also equipped with the Phoenix of Algeron, the Federation cloaking device. The plans were supposedly destroyed along with the unit tested on the USS Pegasus and later recovered by the USS Enterprise, but copies were kept in a secret intelligence facility. These schematics were later stolen by Elias Nilsen, the scientist responsible for many of the Hoodoo's unique abilities. Besides making a ship invisible to sight and sensors, the Phoenix also allows a ship to pass through solid objects and even fire it's weapons while cloaked! The mere possession of the device is a very serious crime, for it's use could conceivably ignite a war with the Romulan Star Empire. Redundancy is a repeating theme throughout the Hoodoo's systems. As a battleship, it has to be able to function even if damaged in combat. To this end, the Hoodoo is equipped not only with phaser-ablative armor and regenerative shielding, it is also equipped with a metaphasic shield system which also allows the ship to pass through objects or even stars. Should the cloaking device fail, the ability to be immune to enemy fire will be preserved. There is one drawback, however, in that the ship's weapons are completly ineffective when this shield system is active, since the weapons would pass harmlessly through the target.

Should the Hoodoo actually take damage, it has the unique ability to repair itself. Every section of the ship is stored in transporter memory permanently. Should a section be destroyed, it is simply beamed away and replaced in one smooth operation. How? The replicator and transporter systems, as well as the holosuites, are linked together. Starfleet regulations expressly forbid this due to the inherent dangers involved. ( Starfleet would also like very much to capture Elias Nilsen and find out how he did it! )

This of course requires a tremendous amount of power and computer capacity. The Hoodoo has an abundance of both. The ship was built with enough power generation capacity to run six entire ships. Almost 35% of the ship's total mass and volume is taken up by many computer systems. Each can operate the entire ship, and are all linked together. There are also many slave systems which operate individual sections or systems.

This, of course, takes up a lot of space. It can be truly said that the Hoodoo is little more than a computer, power station, and weapons platform that flies. That does not leave much room for a crew. The Hoodoo's crew number only 40, although 60 can comfortably occupy the ship.

40-60? How can a ship like this have such a small crew? The answer is automation. The computer system has a great deal of control over all of the ship's systems. As such, things can be monitored, controlled, and adjusted with much more speed and efficiency than a solely live crew could perform the same tasks.This level of automation is absolutely forbidden by the Starfleet Regulations, in light of the M-5 fiasco so many decades earlier. However, that was many decades earlier, and computer technologies have increased exponentially since then. Indeed, the ship itself interacts with the crew as a crew member, via a holoprogram known as Mister Hoodoo. "He" has his own station on the bridge, afforded him by a holo-emitter, and has ready access to several other key ares of the ship as well. All the crew needs to do is tell Mister Hoodoo what needs to be done, assuming he hasn't already figured it out by himself, and he does it instantly. This makes him extremely useful, if admittedly extremely dangerous. Although he could probably run the ship all by himself, he is programmed to never try it unless in certain dire situations. He is probably the Emergency Medical Hologram's only "friend," although he really has no time for a social life.

The other vessels of this class include: Wraith, Zombie, Samedi, Barghest, Bastellus, Wendigo, Geist, Revenant, Voodoo, Juju, Duppy, Hellhound, Nightmare, Spectre, and Banshee.

Overall, the Hoodoo is one of the most awesome war machines ever built.