IKS Qo’noS bortaS

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What it is: The IKS Qo'noS bortaS is a first-generation Klingon warp-capable vessel constructed during their war with the original, first, Hur'q.^{(Citation needed)}

This ship does not have:

generated artificial gravity

Inertial dampening

shields.

a Navigation Deflector

capability of greater than warp 1

Disruptors

Photon Torpedoes.

It is instead armed with thermonuclear tipped ballistic missiles.

The Qo'noS bortaS is primitive. The main power supply is a fission reactor, the structure is made up of titanium-steel and titanium aluminide alloys, the computers are roughly early 1970s technology, the radar system is relatively primitive, many of the systems aboard still use transistors or vacuum tubes. She predates the Klingons reverse engineering integrated circuitry.

It's an interstellar warship as if it were built in the 1960s.

The Reason

The first Contact with an interstellar species for the Klingon people, began in their equivalent to the late 1950s/early 1960s, when Qo'noS was divided between two empires in a cold war with early atomic age weaponry. One of those empires, built a large radiotelescope and sent out probes seeking alien life in the hope of finding peaceful contact. What they got, was a slow-boat colonizer race (sublight transit) who answered their signal for peace with incoming kinetic bombardments before landing that killed, burned and maimed half the Klingon race.

Their first contact, was a war of annihilation. The more aggressive, martial and paranoid Empire survived this first contact, and fought a nuclear war to drive the invaders out, then had to fight successive actions to deal with the follow-ups, in this mess, the Klingon people were traumatized and forged, pouring everything into developing some way to hit back, to make the successive slowboat invasions stop.

In the process of losing all but a few hundred million of their people, they discovered by chance the theory of Warp Travel, and with an existential threat over their heads, they gripped it with both hands, a means to deter the invaders before they landed.

They Built their first fleet, and even while that first fleet was journeying from design to deployment, the work was already under way on the second.

The First Fleet failed, though they did reduce the invaders somewhat and this bought time. Time to develop understanding of Deflectors, force-fields, artificial gravity...but not in time for the first battle, a battle that destroyed six out of seven ships launched into the path of the invaders.

The seventh, was Qo'noS BortaS.

The Recovery

In 2411 (Imperial year 3579-reckoned from the ending of the 1st Dynasty) General K'Ragh, son of D'Ward, led a salvage and recovery that retrieved the mostly-complete vessel, including the bodies of the fallen crew and what data could be recovered from the simplistic computers aboard, and brought it back to Qo'noS. The matter was then put under Chancellor's Seal and classified.

The reason for this, is the officially adopted story in the Empire, is one of 'Swords and Sandals to the Stars', and the existence of a primitive Klingon vessel, one that was not 'captured' from an invader in a glorious rebellion, was heretical in most circles and calls into question the legitimacy of many of the Great Houses, never mind the rest of the Empire's beloved historical legends.

However the Empire could not fully sweep this under the rug, not with outside witnesses. Diplomatic pressure was employed to limit distribution of the after-action reports among 'outside interests' including the UFP.

The compromise was that the wreck of the ancient ship would be stored at a secure location for 'Historical examination and verification'-an indefinite status, as clearances to access the site were placed on a high-level restricted list.

Source Stories

"Looking into Enemy Eyes"

"History is not legendary"

Notes:

There were aside-references in "Myrmidons" from Kanril Eleya's perspective, but...y'know, kinda hard to dig out and segregate, and an indirect foreshadow in "The Most Foolish Klingon" but that story was posted in first-draft form, and didn't get proper editing or alignment with the rest of the "War of the Masters" canon as it finally evolved once Starswordc and Knightraider6 were part of the writing group. (a lot of the early stories have this problem.) The base underlying concept I (and later 'we') were working on, was de-Kzintifying the Klingons, because the whole conceit doesn't fit with what we've seen OF the Klingons (or demonstrated with sentients in real life). Basically, if you give a modern computer to a primitive tribesman without spending years teaching him, he'll electrocute fish with it. For the "Swords and Sandals to the Stars" story the Klingons tell themselves, they'd have to be the most brilliant engineering geniuses that ever were in order to pull it off. OTOH, if they're a very OLD culture, (relatively) they could have gone through cycles of rise-and-fall-and-rise-again, much like China did. To put this into perspective for you, China had a petroleum industry when Rome was still building with mud bricks, the Qing Empress wasn't impressed by English technology in the 1850s, because she was aware of times when China had equivalent, or even superior technologies in the past. (Thus, making the insult that led to the Opium Wars.)

China, in particular, has gone through cycles to the point that they'd forgotten wonders they themselves had built. Six thousand years of continuous civilization does that sometimes.

So I borrowed THAT idea for the "War of the Masters" setting, and applied it to the Klingons-their legends have a 'basis' in fact, and represent their cultural Truth, but those legends themselves are Legends and not Facts. The fact is, in this fanfiction setting, the Klingons had to do it for themselves-while fighting an invader that was not that far ahead of them. (wow, this explanation's going long). They did it, got lucky a few times, and had a head-start off salvage, but they had the base concepts to USE that head start...and then, they went through cultural turmoils and chaos and horrors, then tried like hell to forget them, while clinging to the lessons. The result, being that history got altered, erased, or forgotten, but the essence of the stories remained and mutated to give us the Klingons we all know (and some of us in the fan community) love.

I put a lot of work into making the IKS QonoS BortaS something believably hard science fiction, while giving it anachronistic traits to show that they really WERE pretty primitive, just not bronze-age and sandals primitive. That idea, in the fiction, came LATER, as their numbers filled out and they fought among themselves, successive Emperors and Chancellors and Warlords 'editing' the past until it was nearly unrecognizable from what actually happened.