The USS Scorpion was named after two twentieth century submarines- a name, some would say, had more fate in it than starfleet realised, since both of those ships disappeared at sea, never to be heard from again.
About thirty years ago, the covert operations branch of starfleet was testing some interesting drive variants- including one that would eventually lead to the creation of the phase-cloak - but not until long after it had caused the loss of the test ship (the USS Scorpion) and the death of her crew. After the failure of the experiment (the ship could not be brought back into phase, and the crew had already died, because the designers had failed to grasp the unique dangers of being partially out of phase with the rest of the universe, the ship was abandoned, and all records of it destroyed, completely. The only memory of the ship lies in the tales of the poor souls who wee there, most of whom have been "excused" from starleet, left to wander the spacelanes, seeking odd jobs, and drowning their misery in the bars and cantinas around the galaxy, whispering tales of the ship that floats free like a ghost throughout space.
