BRAD'S COMMENTS:  The Vor'cha is what the KDF-2 K'mirra should have been.  At the time that FASA's TNG Officer's Manual came out, we had not yet seen the impressive Vor'cha design, and the few glimpses of TNG-era Klingon ships that had been revealed were merely redresses of the familiar Bird Of Prey and K'tinga "D7" model.  Rightly reasoning that the Klingon Empire would come up with a larger ship class to match the Ambassador and Galaxy classes of their 'friends' the Federation, the OFFICERS MANUAL writers postulated the KDF-2.  Even after seeing the Vor'cha on screen several times, I had to look at it very closely to convince myself that it was not actually a KDF-2!  With time, though, it became obvious that the KDF-2 design had been lost to the dust bin of licensing history, but the Vor'cha class picks up where the KDF-2 leaves off, and for the sake of clarity both designs share separate and (almost) equal space on this web site
          Unlike the so-called K'mirra class, the Vor'cha is actually more in tune with the way the Klingon-Federation alliance was later developed following TNG Season One.  The alliance never was an easy one.  Tensions were always high.  The kind of technology exchange necessary to create the KDF-2, with its phaser banks and Excelsior-style engines, was never really possible.  Therefor the Vor'cha looks and feels much more Klingon, from the nacelles to the command pod to the spread 'wings' of the secondary hull.  A ship like this from the Kirk-era would almost certainly be classified as a battleship, but as of the advent of ST:TNG the Vor'cha is more of a battle cruiser.  I have seen many texts labeling it as an 'attack cruiser', so I have reluctantly placed this largish fighting ship with the other Klingon cruisers in spite of its battleship-like qualities.
          As always with designs that were seen in TNG, DS9, VOY, or other episodes and movies that come after the fall of FASA's Trek license, the stats listed below are wholly my own invention.  I've tried to stick by official canon numbers where possible, and I've resisted the urge to turn this class into an out-and-out brute.  But in the end it can't help but be a total brute!  (I admittedly bring the Vor'cha roughly up to par with the super-brutish K'mirra because I believe the Vor'cha is what the K'mirra should have been, as of the time of Picard and the NCC-1701-D.)

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*   Denotes completely hypothetical model number and stats, devised by Brad R. Torgersen.
**  The 'main gun' on the Vor'cha is seen in action many times throughout TNG and DS9.  It is capable of obliterating entire starships in a single blast!  This has got to be some kind of killer weapon!  It seems a little like the Romulan plasma weapons of TOS, in that it does not fire bursts or barrages.  Instead, it seems to unload a single green energy bolt, almost like an energy torpedo.  The KKDT-X1 weapon should be treated kind of like a mix between a torpedo and a disruptor, sans the special rules that apply to Romulan plasma weapons.  The maximum power it can be energized to is a whopping 50, but it only takes half as much power to energize this weapon as a normal bank of disruptors.  Therefor, pouring 10 points of energy into the KKTD-X1 will fire a bolt worth 20 points of damage.  Pouring in 15 points of energy yields a bolt worth 30 points of damage, and so forth.  It takes a maximum of 25 energy points to fully energize the weapon, yielding a bolt worth 50 damage points.  Such a fell blow will easily vaporize small and even medium-sized warships, shields or no shields.  Which seems proper to me given the fact that we see the Vor'cha do exactly this in several different episodes of TNG and DS9.  It also seems reasonable to me that such a super-weapon would not have equipped the Vor'cha at its inception.  Rather, this mega-weapon would only equip the latest model Vor'cha ships, perhaps as an R/D addition to combat potential Borg and especially Dominion threats.

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