Martin Ashkenazy was a Manticoran citizen and ship designer in the 15th and 16th Century PD.
A mining ship designer, working with civilian spacecraft under governmental radar, he was the grandson of one of the officers on the original Triumph battlecruiser in the 1440s PD. Over eighty years later, Ashkenazy still owned his grandfather's diagrams and specifications of that ship.
With some prompting from the self-proclaimed Committee for Military Sanity, he devised and approved a plan to take the Royal Manticoran Navy's mothballed Triumph-class battlecruisers apart and convert each of them into a pair of corvette-sized ships classified as "sloops". (MA1)