Lexington-class

The Lexington-class was a type of Federation starship in limited use in the 23rd century, classified as a command cruiser. An offshoot of the Excelsior class, the Lexington-class was designed to be a smaller, more lightly armed ship to command fleets that did not need heavy firepower but did need a dedicated command ship. The Lexington-class ships featured advanced sensors and were used in deep space exploration.

Refit
After the events of 2286 and the attack of the Whale Probe, much of the Lexington-class was damaged. Due to its unique speed advantage and use in rapid response, it was the Lexington-class that quite often intercepted the probe on it's way to Earth and thus was disabled. A number of crews were lost because of this incident and as such, it was decided to phase out much of the Lexington-class ships that remained. This was until it was discovered that the 7 ships of the second run of the class had the unique feature that would make it possible to modify with more advanced transwarp warp cores, which at the time were only in use on the USS Excelsior and a planned line of Excelsior-class ships.

The 7 ships of that run were recalled and dry-docked to begin the process of completely refitting and in some cases all but rebuilding them. The new ships were to be a standard bearer for the new fleet. There were innumerable delays, incident after incident required the process to be slow, and for several years the process was abandoned because the focus shifted to the Excelsior-class line of ships.

It was not until 2293 and the peace accords between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire that work truly began in earnest on the project to refit the Lexington-class ships, by then of the 7 only 4 had not been scraped for material, The USS Augustus, the USS Julius, the USS Aurelius, and the USS Arcadius.

With a need for the more advanced and much faster ships produced and with the push to begin long-term exploration missions, the Lexington-class refit project was viewed as the perfect test-bed for a number of new technologies, ranging from an onboard prototype holographic activities room to a new form of matter synthesizer using the already existing transporter technology to call up specific molecular patterns and create food based on that pattern. All of these new systems powered by the newly designed transwarp engine, capable of exceeding speeds of even the original USS Excelsior.

The project would take another 18 months to get the first ship ready to launch, the USS Augustus and after a further 6 months of testing the ships new systems, she was ready to begin active service as part of the fleet.