Editing Sovereign Class (section)

==NAVIGATION DEFLECTOR==

Another advancement developed for the Sovereign class was a new breed of navigational deflectors. Unique, at this point, to the Sovereign class, the navigational array has a much higher stress tolerance to High-Warp and High-Energy discharges than any navigational array before it. This is, in part, to the increased number of graviton polarity generators, but also due to the amount of power provided to the assembly itself.

Without some sort of deflector system, space travel at high velocities, let alone warp speeds, would be impossible due to collisions with objects ranging from stray hydrogen atoms to large planetary fragments. Vessels of the Sovereign class make use of a single, large, main navigation deflector is located at the forward-most part of the engineering hull and spreads across Decks 15-18, with quad subspace field distortion amplifiers located on Decks 16 and 17.  Composed of molybdenum/duranium mesh panels over a duranium framework, the dish can be manually moved 8.5 degrees in any direction off the ship's Z-axis. The main deflector dish's subspace field and sensor power comes from six high-generating graviton polarity generators located on Decks 16 and 17, each capable of generating two hundred megawatts which feed into the four 650 millicochrane subspace field distortion amplifiers.

A backup deflector is located on the ventral side of the primary hull, on deck 12, and in addition to its role as a backup, the secondary deflector serves to reinforce the ship's warp field at speeds exceeding Warp 8.5. Originally seen as a means to augment the warp field due to technological limitations in graviton field generation during the development of the pathfinder vehicle, the saucer deflector is actually identical to the primary deflector of the Defiant class and is more or less a carry-over in the design process.