D'Hatham Warbird
RSE Vas'D'Latta (Deathbird)
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Last Revision: 04/12/05
D'Hatham Warbird:
"Despite our past misgivings about the Warbird project, we cannot deny the one singular truth about the outcome that the Katar produced: these new vessels are devistatingly effective!" -Senator T'Sal
Although Praetor K'Shiak had intended to change the course of the Romulan Star Empire with his incursion into Federation space with the Katar, he did so in ways that he could not foresee. In the aftermath of the Katar Incident, there was an uproar within the major governments: how could one ship almost single-handedly cut a swath of destruction through a neighbouring powers' territory? The realization soon came about that the escalating arms race that had been ensuing between the major powers had long since gotten out of hand. With the Khitomer Accord freshly signed the majority of the other governments agreed that there would have to be limits placed on future warships so that a single renegade could not recreate the debacle that K'Shiak had created. Amongst them was the Romulan Senate, at least at first.
The associated envoys from each government hammered out what would become known as the K'saio Accord. This would place constraints on various aspects of a warships’ destructiveness, limiting size, firepower, support vessels carried, etc, in an effort to prohibit any one ship from becoming too powerful. Needless to say, the Federation welcomed this wholeheartedly, as did many of the other governments. Surprisingly, the Klingons didn’t seem to have issues with these rules: they prefer smaller, more agile vessels, so most of their warships were already within the boundaries set out in the Accord to begin with. And as Delegate Mor’Tagh stated: “Despite what many may think, a warrior’s mettle is not determined by the strength of his steel!”
Given the current political climate, and the fact that they were still making amends for allowing their Praetor to go so far on a personal vendetta, the Romulans also signed the Accord. They did so reluctantly however. They had invested a great deal of time and resources into redesigning their fleet, reforming it into larger, albeit fewer warships, each of which were to replace many smaller craft. The Katar and her sister ships were the first in this new generation of warship classification, now designated as Deridex (Warbird). The WB’s broke many of the rules laid out in the Accord, of which forced the Romulans to scale back the capabilities of these new ships. The resulting design was the D'Hatham (Great Preadator) class WB, and would become the backbone of the Romulan Fleet for nearly half a century.
Placing their fleet’s strength into fewer but larger vessels was intended to relieve the depletion of their region’s scant dilithium supply: basically one larger ship with the firepower of seven ships would only use one-seventh of the dilithium that seven smaller ships would. Now that they were being forced to push back toward the more traditional smaller vessels they were caught in a tight situation: they would no longer have enough dilithium to expand into more lucrative territory. The D'Hatham’s were continually under a major amount of criticism from the other governments, since despite being scaled back from the Katar’s original design capabilities they still were in contravention of the Accord in many respects. Numerous demands were made to have the Warbirds dismantled from all the major powers, of which only served to generate a great deal more tension between the Romulans and their neighbours. This, amongst other issues, would eventually lead to the Romulans breaking their ties with the other governments, marked by the bloody Tomed Incident of 2311.
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