Montreal-class heavy cruiser
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Production information
Manufacturer:	Jafer-Nocsky Shipbuilders
Model:	Montreal
Class:	Cruiser
Operator(s):	Systems Coalition Navy
Preceded by:	Richmond-class
Succeeded by:	Auckland-class
Generation:	Fifth
Technical information
Length:	635m
Width:	70m
Height/depth:	84m
Max acceleration:	20 kilometers per second
Engine unit(s):	Element Zero Drive Core
Power plant:	2 Element Zero drive cores
Shielding:	Energy Shielding
Hull:	481cm of Silaris-D Modular/Ablative Super Armor
Sensor systems:	LIDAR Radar Spectroscope
Targetting system:	Shipwide AI
Countermeasure(s):	"Aleph" blinker device
Armament:	5 Generation II GARDIANs 100 plasma torpedoes 50 port side 50 starboard side 30 defense guns 15 port side 15 starboard side 376 Pilum-C anti-ship cluster missiles 188 port side 188 starboard side 50 Vulcan CIWS 25 port side 25 starboard side 2 thanix cannons
Crew:	3,000
Skeleton crew:	50
Usage
Commissioned:	5 August 2242 CE
Decommissioned:	13 October 2380 CE
Role(s):	Attacking enemy ships/orbital fire support
Era:	Human Cycle Dominion Era Post-Cycle Pax Aeterna Era
Affiliation:	Systems Coalition

The Montreal-class heavy cruiser was a classification of cruiser that served in the Systems Coalition Navy from 2242 CE to 2380 CE. Built as a successor to the Richmond-class, a cruiser that had been serving in humanity's navy since the Reaper War, the Montreal-class was a post-PA war vessel that incorporated many then-new technological innovations in weaponry, shielding, countermeasures and cyberwarfare to create what the Coalition saw as a "300 year heavy cruiser" and to become part of their powerful ultramodern fleet of warships. A fifth generation warship, the Montreal-class came fitted with state-of-the-art directed energy and particle armaments, two thanix batteries, heat-resistant heavy-composite armor, dual-layered energy shielding, an AI-directed cyberwarfare suite and an array of chaff and flares for combatting anti-ship weapons and missiles. While much of these components were becoming commonplace amongst all of the Dominion navies by this time, and were considered necessity for fifth generation ships, one unique innovation that the Montreal-class served as a testbed for was a translocation device known as the "Aleph" blinker device. Colloquially known as a "blinker", the "Aleph" device allowed the Montreal-class to perform unconventional maneveurs in combat in the form of limited teleportation, utilizing a seperate element zero core to manipulate mass effect fields and allow a transition of the ship from one location to another in a way similar to the biotic ability Biotic Jump that biotics utilize to traverse a battlefield quickly. The ability to apply this to a several thousand ton vessel in space proved less daunting than originally thought, as space proved to be much easier to traverse than a terrestrial body, and therefore only the preciseness of such jumps became an obstacle. After a dozen years of research, the CSV Montreal was fitted with the first blinker device, and in its shakedown run it successfully utilized the device in combat against three Richmond-class heavy cruisers in a war game test. The advantage of this device was that it became a much harder target for enemy ships to hit, and it also allowed the vessel unparalleled maneveuring across the battlefield, an ability that no Covenant vessel possessed, giving the Dominion a distinct advantage. The knowledge of this device was heavily classified to keep it from falling into enemy hands, and it was not public knowledge that the device even existed, and it wouldn't be declassified until after the Dominion Civil War, well after the existence of the device was observed by the Dominion Dissident Front in its usage across the war.

While its most notable feature by far, the blinker device was not the sole advantage of the Montreal-class, and its impressive arsenal, defenses and capabilities made it a formidable opponent in naval combat, which it proved during the Terra-Rannochian War and Dominion Civil War. Such was the performance of the vessel that Covenant forces had orders to capture any Montreal-class vessels when they could for research, but due to the difficulties in doing so, and the ship's ability to simply jump out of precarious scenarios (making entrapment of such ships nearly impossible), the Covenant was never successful in these endeavours. The DDF was much more successful, with the DDF coming into possession of sixty Montreal-class vessels by the end of the war, largely owing to either the defections of the crews who manned them, the capture of the ships while docked or under repair, or in very rare cases, the military defeat, boarding and hijacking of the heavy cruisers. One such ship, the Antwerp, would even briefly serve as the flagship of Marcus L. Shepard in the early stages of the civil war, prior to his transfer of command to the getho-quarian RNS Revengeance. The Montreal-class would continue to serve in the Coalition Navy after the war, becoming an integral part of the UGR's naval forces for the next hundred years before it was finally succeeded and replaced by the Auckland-class, which included a third generation blinker device far more sophisticated than the Montreal's by-then obsolete variant.

The class was named after the city of Montreal in the former United North American States on Earth.