Constitution Class Cruiser

The Constitution class cruiser was a design from the mid-23rd century that serve in Starfleet for over a century in various roles. It was drawn up in the 2230s, and sped up during the Four Years War to compete with existing and potential Klingon designs fielded during that conflict, and to speed its development, utilized the 20-year-old saucer proven in several older ship designs such as the Zarex, Rowsdower, and Hayes class ships. Its development proved quicker and it was available for a quick end to the Four Years War with the launch of the USS Constitution two months before the USS Enterprise. 
Once the war concluded, relatively quickly after the introduction of the Constitution, Starfleet resumed a peacetime role. Captain April took command of the Enterprise, and made numerous first contacts and scientific discoveries just as the Constitution and the other sister ships.
To bolster the numbers of the fleet, which had taken a number of casualties during the war, Starfleet's original order of 13 ships was sped up by refit of several existing ships into Constitution Class ships. This explains the lower registry numbers on the following ships: USS Constellation, USS Republic, USS Intrepid, USS Farragut, USS Excalibur, and USS Exeter. All six ships were brought up to specification by 2248, at which time the other ships of the class were commissioned: USS Potemkin, USS Hood, USS Lexington, USS Yorktown, and USS Defiant. Until roughly 2259, construction contracts were assigned out of order, in blocks of numbers, and in incomplete runs, so that ships 1601 through 1610 would be assigned to one class, while 1611 to 1620 to another class, then 1621 to 1630 to the first ship class on the second series. Later on, reserving registries was halted, such that the next ship took the next available registry number, rather than reserving numbers ahead of time.
The armaments of the ship were upgraded to cover all arcs, bringing three dual phaser banks on the dorsal and ventral saucer surface, four single phaser turrets on the underside of the engineering hull, and two above the shuttle bay covering the upper aft approach.
The first upgrade to the ships, starting with the Potemkin, was the introduction of a dual turbolift bridge, which would've delayed the introduction of the class to refit the first thirteen to include this safety feature. Later bridge modules for some ships, notably Enterprise and the Republic, would shift the turbolift from directly aft of the captain to his left, necessitating the bridge forward to be a few degrees left of center of the actual ship direction (another reason the dual turbolifts were introduced to avoid this oddity). 
==List of Ships==
 Sortable table
Ship 	Registry	Commissioned	First Captain
Constitution 	NCC-1700	2245 	Captain George Winter
Enterprise 	NCC-1701	2245 	Captain Robert April
Constellation	NCC-1017	2248 	Captain Matthew Williams
Republic 	NCC-1373	2247 	Captain Jessica Kingham
Intrepid 	NCC-1631	2248 	Captain Skon
Farragut 	NCC-1647	2248 	Captain Jamie Dougherty
Excalibur 	NCC-1664	2248 	Captain Rodger Limbach
Potemkin 	NCC-1702	2247 	Captain Dmitri Gurov
Hood 	NCC-1703	2247 	Captain Jeffrey Wheeler
Lexington 	NCC-1709	2247 	Captain Louis Labrouche
Yorktown 	NCC-1717	2247 	Captain Charles Janoušek
Exeter 	NCC-1672	2247 	Captain Mark Dorsett
Defiant 	NCC-1764	2247 	Captain Robert Coon
Category:Starfleet Starship
Category:Constitution Class
Category:Starfleet Cruiser