The chap who came up with these ideas and Gene Roddenberry had a falling out, so you only learn of this stuff when you go looking for it, as Gene decided to write it out, and make Starfleet (not Star Fleet) much more peaceful, and a dreadnought is more of an arms-race intensifier than a pacifying agent. For more on this saga, check out this site. Suffice to say that for my games of ACTA: SF I want some of these more obscure vessels, hence the hacking and carving and slashing and scoring of kits I'd long since put together. It was a pest to assemble this vessel, and if I had any sense, I should have rigged up a jig so I could just have put the warp nacelles in place, glued them and gone away. I didn't, and there was a fair amount of profanity uttered when I finally finished them off later. It may strike you that the GS applied at various points is copious. There's a reason for that: it has diminished subsequent swearing. I've modelled this vessel with a single cargo pod, which is approximately to scale. Here are a few pics, and look forward to seeing USS Ptolemy at some future date with an escort of destroyers, as she delivers vital Mumbleonium to the Federation colony of Plotdeviceium VII!
