Olympic Class

== Class Description ==

After the Galaxy Class and Nebula Class projects had successfully completed the test phases of their respective design programs, Starfleet Medical came to the conclusion that the fleet lacked more specialized craft to respond to the large scale medical emergencies. The missions of both the Galaxy and Nebula would leave them exploring the frontier regions and unavailable for these sort of emergency situations as well. A design brief was issued for a craft that would duplicate the medical facilities of the Galaxy class vessels in a smaller, more mission specific platform, but also expand those level of facilities across the entire spaceframe. Designated the Olympic class, the ship would be able to deploy large scale medical services to respond to medical emergencies on site.

The hospital ship was intended to be produced in limited quantities given it's specialized role, but even during it's initial design phase it was discovered that the engineers had vastly underestimated the possible capabilities of the craft. As such, it was decided to incorporate starbase-level medical facilities on board the ship. This change would eliminate the need to transfer more critical patients back to starbases, and allow the ship to adequately serve as a mobile medical facilities to treat large scale planetary disease outbreaks or other disasters. This expansion of capabilities added more utility and efficiency to the design then simply having better facilities as the lost transit time between the site of medical missions and starbases would compound the effectiveness of the platform.

The USS Olympic made her maiden voyage in 2364 and was officially commissioned in 2365. Over the next five years nearly thirty more of the Olympic class vessels were commissioned; most examples were deployed to strategic locations such as outposts and starbases all over the Federation. Most of these vessels were maintained "on call" at these outposts in order to respond to emergency situations, but several were assigned to general duty throughout the Federation included often being sent on humanitarian missions. Since the classes initial deployment there have been few losses, and those craft that have been lost are quickly replaced as needed. In any corner of the Federation where large scale natural disasters or pandemic disease outbreaks can be found, so too can an Olympic class vessel.