With the refit of Enterprise in the early 2270's, Star Fleet began to re-evaluate the designs of ship components, looking towards ways to make ships that can be configured (and re-confugured) to specific missions or specifications more quickly rather than going through an extensive design and construction process for every ship. Features previously unique to specific hull designs were broken down to core components that could be installed onto ships in a much quicker and simpler manner. By pre-building a set of standardized components, adding capabilities to an existing hull now took only a few days to a week rather than several months of design and ground-up construction.

The Dreadnaught hulls of old provided the perfect opportunity to test this new design and configuration concept. Rather than integrating the old Through-Deck Shuttlebay into the hull profile, it was redesigned as a set of components that attached to the top of the hull. The superstructure needed to hold the top mounted TDS had the added benefit of increasing the usable interior volume of the hull. Some ships benefitted from just this slight increase in hull volume. Other ships needed additional decks rather than shuttle space, so a set of straight decks were were designed as well.