The Ares Class is the hero ship seen in Prelude to Axanar, a 20 minute "documentary" describing the lead in to Axanar.
For anyone who hasn't come across this, look it up. For everyone else...
"The first goal was to create a class of ship that could spring Starfleet back into action, back into battle. We had to leapfrog Klingon technology."
"It was called the Ares class. It was exactly what we needed."
"We had over a dozen member worlds working on it. It was the first pure warship that Starfleet had ever built."
Credit to the Axanar team for their hard work in creating some original Star Trek and designing us some new ships to play with. Meshes by KJC, textures originally by WileyCoyote and Rick Knox (P81) and edited by Jetfreak.