The NX-08 Exeter, alongside two Daedelus Class starships Bill Penn and Determination, have found themselves and their crews stranded in a region of space which would later be explained as the result of an Omega-particle detonation--a region of hard science fiction where subspace is damaged. No artificial gravity, no transporters, no subspace comms or sensors, no impulse drive, and of course, no warp drive.
With the impulse drive crippled into a makeshift nuclear fusion rocket with almost no propellant, each ship's delta-v was limited to less than two kilometers per second. Luckily, their parabolic escape trajectory from this star (from the relative velocity that went uncorrected) would bring them to meet the sphere of influence of two gas giants in a very close binary orbit. For a fairly minimal correction they could insert into orbit at the giant planets' mutual lagrange point off to one side.
After determining from weeks of sensor logs and analysis that warp and anything subspace was impossible in this solar system, the crew of the Exeter would dismantle the ship and turn her into Exeter Station, turning walls into floors and ceilings. Oddly enough, the windows of the NX-class are already mostly on the ceiling, so viewports were not a problem. The bridge was dismantled and replaced by a command center in what used to be the navigational deflector.
Eventually a rescue mission was sent, with the ships Bill Penn and Determination finding themselves in the same situation that had befallen the Exeter. They were stranded in stellar orbit for a few months before they made contact with Exeter Station. One of the warp nacelles of the Exeter had been emptied out and turned into a propellant tank for a crude Nuclear Thermal Rocket, which was sent to the two Daedelus class ships with supplies and equipment to increase the specific impulse of their impulse engines just enough to get the two onto a flyby with the gas binary--after leaving behind some dead weight--one of each impulse engine, both nacelles and struts, the navigation deflectors, etc.
The station was eventually expanded to include the Daedelus hulls. NTR rockets built from the nacelles of the three ships and the stripped-down shuttlecraft were used to set up propellant refineries on one of the moons.
A second rescue mission would never come, because in the aftermath of the Romulan War, the neutral zone would be drawn up, putting this star system into it.
The final drawing represents a hundred years beyond that, in which the settled system--with gigantic teleportation monoliths larger than planets, and the only remaining subspace technology in the system--is colonized, and a spaceship using Orion Nuclear Pulse Propulsion inspects a starship that’s just been captured into the system.
