BRAD'S COMMENTS: The United Federation Of Planets and its Starfleet possess the most high-tech and powerful ships among all of the three major 'superpowers' in the old FASA Star Trek game universe.  Strangely, I don't think the Federation recognition manual is as well written as the Klingon manual, and I also don't think the ship designs are quite as good.  Mostly because the scaling is all cattywompus!  Very often it seems the illustrators for the Federation manual just photocopied the saucer section and warp nacelles from a motion picture era Constitution class (Enterprise class in the old FASA books) and then slapped a bunch of other hardware around that saucer and those nacelles, and called it a ship; regardless of size or mission.
        For example: take the destroyer designs Lenthal and Baker which, if the identical saucer and nacelles are supposed to be to scale, ought to mass more than the Enterprise cruisers.  But too often the saucer and nacelles are not to scale, and I think it was dumb on the part of the FASA ship designers to slap an Enterprise saucer and nacelles on a scout or an escort or a destroyer when these ships are clearly much smaller than the heavy cruiser that is the USS Enterprise.
        Another beef of mine is that the written text describes a Federation space navy that is horribly small compared to, say, that fielded by the Klingons.  Yes, the UFP does have better technology, and yes Starfleet's primary mission is still one of exploration, but the Klingon forces of the motion picture era number into the tens of thousands of ships, while if you added up the entire Federation manual you'd get a Starfleet that amasses only a few thousand ships, at the most.  This to me is not very believable, especially since we eventually see Starfleet ship registry numbers that run into the tens of thousands.  Where are all the rest of the ships?
        Like all the old FASA manuals, this one was made thoroughly outdated by the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine television series, as well as movies like Star Trek VI and Star Trek Generations.  There was a late effort to bring the UFP fleet up to date with the introduction of the FASA-produced Next Generation Officer's Manual, but as with the older UFP recognition manual, just about every design in the TNG Officer's Manual is apocryphal, having little or no basis in the actual television program.
        Unless otherwise noted, all of the ships listed here can be found in the FASA Federation Ship Recognition Manual 2nd Edition.  Those ships which originate from other sources, such as the FASA TNG Officer's Manual, or Stardate Magazine's Jaynz files, have been designated accordingly.  See the legend.

NOTE: where possible, I tried to scan each ship at as high a resolution as I reasonably could.  But the original format of the drawings in the FASA manuals typically makes this very difficult.  The designers at FASA used an old black and white layout trick where the "gray" color that shades the ships is not gray at all, but instead composed of thousands of tiny black dots on a field of white.  (click here for an example!)  The net effect viewed from afar by the human eye is that of 'grayness' but the scanner picks up every last dot and it takes a lot of softening/blurring and reduction via Paintshop Pro to get the ships to look halfway decent.  Even then, the images sometimes don't come out nearly as crisp as I'd like.  So if things seem a teeny bit fuzzy around the edges, or if the graphics don't look exactly as they did on paper, please understand that I did what I could with what I've got.  In some lucky cases I have been able to find large-scale graphics from other sources for well-known canon ships (like the Constitution Refit/Enterprise & Reliant/Miranda).  These graphics produce superior scans when compared to the Ship Recognition Manuals, and I have necessarily replaced the poor FASA graphics with crisp, better looking images that have been cropped, resized, and shaded manually.

Design: Forest G. Brown
Writing: Forest G. Brown
Historical Consultant: Hikaru Sulu
Editor-in-Chief: L. Ross Babcock III
Editing & Additional Writing: Wm. John Wheeler
Proofreading: Donna Ippolito
Illustration & Cover Art: Dana Knutson
Typesetting: Karen Vander May
Layout & Pasteup:
                        Dana Knutson
                        Todd F. Marsh
                        Jane Bigos
                              

FEDERATION SHIPS: CLASS TYPE

BATTLESHIPS
Excelsior
Excelsior (refit) ⁿ
Federation ¤
Federation (refit) ª
Indomitable ∆
Royal Sovereign *
Sovereign ⁿ

CRUISERS
Akira ⁿ
Ambassador ⁿ
Andor
Anton
Archer ª
Brenton
Constellation *
Constitution
Durrett
Enterprise (Constitution Refit)
Envoy *
Galaxy *
Intrepid ⁿ
Nebula ⁿ
Protector ª
Reliant (Miranda/Soyuz)
Saber ⁿ
Ticonderoga ∆
Triton ª
Wellington *
 
DESTROYERS
Baker
Charger ∆
Decker *
Defiant ⁿ
Lenthal
Larson
Firestorm ª
Saladin ¤
Tangent ∆
Thufir
Wilkerson

ESCORTS
Genser
Griffon
Remora

FRIGATES
Babcock
Chandley
Cygnus ª
Kiev
Loknar
Mackenzie ∆
Northampton
Paine *
Steamrunner ⁿ

CUTTERS AND CORVETTES
Danube ⁿ
Epsilon
Scorpio
Solar

SCOUTS
Clark ª
Bader
Gagarin (Oberth/Sagan)
Karekh
Keith
K'kmarak ∆
Moscow *
Nelson
Nova ⁿ
Ranger
Scylla ∆
 

SPACE STATIONS
Alamo Defense Outpost
R-1 Orbital Station
Spacedock
Starfleet Headquarters ¤

SHUTTLES
Greyhound
Pulsar
S-Series Travel Pod
SC-22 Sphinx Shuttle
SW-21 Shuttle *
S-20 Shuttle *

MISCELLANEOUS
Aakenn freighter
Cle Dan tender
Cochrane transport
Cosmos Royale liner
Derf tender
Fenlon monitor
Illustrious carrier ª
Kethkin transport
Laweya freighter
Liberty freighter
M'Benga medical ship *
Mo'Kal transport
Overfield
Pearl mobile repair facility
Samson tug / tender

FEDERATION SHIPS: ALPHABETICAL

ⁿ Denotes ship class from the Next Generation era that is officially part of Star Trek canon, but which was not included in any of the FASA manuals.  May include canon designs from Deep Space Nine And Voyager television series, as well as Next Generation era Star Trek feature films.

ª Denotes ship class of purely fan origin; also known as a "fanship".  Not part of official Star Trek canon and never appeared in any FASA material.

∆ Denotes ship class that appeared as a Jaynz entry in Stardate magazine.  Considered somewhat official by FASA standards, but not necessarily canon by contemporary Star Trek standards.

¤ Denotes ship class that originally appeared in the Franz Joseph-authored Starfleet Technical Manual.  Not official by FASA standards and not canon by contemporary Star Trek standards.