Uni Design II

The Uni Design II is the first major revision to the Uni Design, changing about 20% of the specifications of the final version the the first Uni Design (not counting the Cultural traditions section). The original Uni design has proven to be remarkably stable with approximately 95% of the specifications outside the "cultural traditions section" being the same as the original version even after going through over 100 changes over the years since first implemented.

Background
In 5045, the Capital Ship Development Bureau (CSDB) was tasked by Fleet Command to outline the next generation of ships. For the first time since the Uni Design had been adopted, Fleet Command requested that instead of restricting themselves to designs that would be just have incremental changes compared to existing capital ships, to also consider the idea of building Lyrec and Karmat class ships from scratch, as well as consider new designs the size of those two ships.

After 6 months of study, the CSDB received the results of USS Dominator's first test as the carrier for a rapid reaction force. With the favorable results of that test, and the history of the USS Devastator, the CSDB proposed to Fleet Command to dedicate at least a portion of their construction resources towards implementing fleet-wide the concept of a fast ship carrying reaction forces.

While the concept was set, initially there was no decision on centering these forces around between Union built Karmat or equivalent sized new ship design. There was considerable debate at Fleet Command on both the size and what the force it carried would consist of, with proposals ranging from 200 conventional battleship sized auxiliaries and 10 USS Devastator sized ships to a force one tenth that size. A number of proposals included only conventional or Devi sized ships.

In late 5049, Fleet Command decided to standardize the rapid reaction force as one carrier ship, one Lyrec sized ship and 40 conventionally sized ships. The decision on whether to use Uni Design ships. Seenian Design or a new design for the ships in the force was left up to the CSDB.

After consulting with some of the engineers responsible for designing the refits of the Karmat, Lyrec and Marantz class ships it was decided to do a major revision to the Uni Design that was designated Uni Design II. The departure from the original Uni Design affected approximately 20% of the systems described in the latest revision of the Uni Design which was 95% identical to the original specifications. Of the changed systems, 20% had been tested on the USS Tigershark during it's first two missions, 15% were Seenian designs that had recently been fully understood, 40% came from societies that were not a part of the Union at the time the Uni Design was developed and 25% had been developed within the Union after the Uni design was put into place, and had been tested on other ships.

First Uni Design II classes
The first two classes designed according to the Uni Design II were the Tyranno Battlegroup Carrier class, which was loosely based on the refit Karmat class and the Lyrec II Class which was loosely based on the refit Lyrec Class. In both cases, the external appearance was nearly the same as the original, even though internally there were significant differences. After some issues found while building the prototypes of those designs were corrected, two classes of battleships were designed - the first with a higher top speed for short time periods (a week or so at top speed) intended for members of the Rapid Reaction Force, and the second one with top speed comparable to conventional Uni Design ships. A variation of the second battleship was developed into a HALD class explorer to accompany the Marantz II class Large HALD Explorer (loosely based on the Marantz class.)

Future plans
After 5100 all new classes of Capital Ship must conform to the new Uni Design II. New Smaller combat ships classes as well as those considered to be Auxilaries have until 5150  before they have to comply. Refits to existing ships that are expected to still be in commission after 5200 are to be made in order to better comply with Uni Design II.