You know what? The defiant is one hell of a bold design for the federation, I mean look at it no noticeable saucer section, no separate engineering computer core, the weapons are somewhat unconventional, I think it is safe to say that the defiant is the most brilliant design in Starfleet. A more stable structure for warp speed, a more capable weapons arsenal. But there is one major thing I don’t like about the defiant at all…the size. For one thing the size of the ship automatically deprives it of family quarters or comfortable crew quarters, secondly it should above all things be an exploration vessel not a battleship or warship. Sure it is armed to the teeth but if you look at it as being more capable of safe exploration, it qualifies as the safest ship for that particular task. Yet Starfleet built it with three decks and not something like ten or twenty, which would have been fine. Yes, it was made for war, Yes, it is overly armed, Yes, it is arguably the most controversial ship class in the fleet, but only capable of war,No.
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
Which is why in the DS9 relaunch books, the Defiant (75633) is outfitted with scientific equipment and the like for exploration of the GQ. It's been a while since I read any of the DS9 relaunch books, but I think that either some crew quarters or some weapons storage had to be sacrificed for the scientific equipment.
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
Um, I've never seen anyone argue that the Defiant shouldn't be a warship before, much less suggest a whole bunch of modifications that would turn the Defiant into an Intrepid or something. Wow. Excuse me, I'm gonna be totally awed for a while. Wow.
Posted by Ace (Member # 389) on :
Hehe...the new breed of tech fans. Before, they wanted ships with phaser canons and all sorts of super weapons. Now, they want to take these warships and turn them back into exploration vehicles. Maybe Star Trek isn't doomed after all... Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
its not designed to operate independantly for long periods of time though, so it must only be used as a short run explorer, which gives it no range unless there are lots of bases to stop at along the way, which defeats the purpose of exploring, unless you are performing a specific mission in the area before the next stop, because unexplored space wouldnt have bases to stop at.
The crew would be terribly stressed, bunking two to a room with no furniture, no rec space and hardly any medical/workout facilities. Thats why the Defiant is constantly returning to DS9.. its not designed to be taken out for long periods of time. The living conditions are designed for soldiers, people who crew the ship in a battle and dont expect to be permanently assigned there (except for Worf, but he's wierd)
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
"...Starfleet built it with three decks..."
Must be that 70m Defiant that Goffy came up w/ so long ago...
Posted by Masao (Member # 232) on :
How long should a starship be able to operate without support of any kind? If (a big if) we accept the idea that antimatter is similar to nuclear fuel, refueling would only be necessary every few years, and range is essentially unlimited in that regard. If that is the case, range might be limited by impulse fuel (which might be collected by bussards), consumables (which might be recyclable with high efficiency or replicable), maintenance (that can't be done in the field), replenishment (photon torpedoes and other nonreplicable items), and crew comfort. Cap'n Mike makes Starfleet crews sound like a bunch of whiny little babies! Good thing they're not on submarines.
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
So far, we haven't really heard of a starship "running out of oomph" - save for the one infamous moment in VOY where a severe deuterium shortage hit the ship. And when it did, boy if it didn't make a mess: the ship was, like, totally crippled and had to limp to the nearest suitable planet to refuel.
Whether we like it or not, "Demon" is canon. And it's our only real source to information about starships running out of their endurance envelope. So what can we learn from it?
The fuel shortage was apparently rather sudden and unpredicted, to be such a threat to the ship. This might actually suggest that the ships need to refuel fairly often while cruising, and Voyager simply missed two or three of these pit stops in a row. "Fairly often" would probably mean mere months between refills, then. If the shortage was long time in coming, surely Janeway would have taken preemptive action. (Or was the fuel gauge of the ship broken?)
Larger ships might have a different fuel economy, which is why we never ran into the fuel shortage issue when the E-D was stranded a long distance from home, say, by the antics of Q. They might be able to sail sufficiently long between refills that they would never be caught between two refill points - one refill interval would span dozens of such points. But if smaller size means reduced economy, then the Defiant must be especially screwed unless there's a tanker or a friendly harbor nearby.
Also, "Demon" proves that the famous ramscoops cannot refuel the ship in all conditions, not even for impulse flight purposes. Whether the conditions in "Demon" were exceptional or commonplace is not known. Perhaps the ramscoops are only useful across a narrow range of operating parameters. And perhaps the range is different for ships built to perform different missions?
In light of "Demon", it seems possible that the seeming independence and endurance of TOS, TNG and DS9 ships is just an illusion. The ships from those shows probably refuel whenever the camera is turned away. In DS9, such refueling probably involves starbases (during the regular, "peace" episodes) and tankers (during the "war" episodes"), but the exploratory voyages of TOS and TNG cannot rely on starbases alone.
Perhaps Kirk and Picard rendezvoused with tankers fairly often. Or then there are "sweet spots" in space for ramscoop refueling, and the ship sought out those (but left a safety margin, unlike the Voyager). Certainly they couldn't refuel from the surfaces of Demon-style planets, since only the Voyager met the hardware requirements for that.
Possibly the Defiant would meet those requirements as well, given how she has demonstrated semi-controlled planetary landing ("Children of Time"), tractoring of large objects to orbit ("The Ship"), and maneuvering in atmospheres ("Starship Down" et al). But overall, she looks like a ship that would rely heavily on tankers and tenders and other external support if forced to take on a long-range, long-duration mission.
We have to remember, though, that the Valiant operated for a long time without any external support... Perhaps that's the best benchmark we have for Defiant-class exploration potential.
(Uh, and I just remembered that "Night" ought to set the standard for Intrepid class endurance. Two years without any chance at refueling beyond ramscoops didn't seem to worry Janeway there.)
Timo Saloniemi
[ April 10, 2002, 02:00: Message edited by: Timo ]
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
Well, my biggest disagreement with the original post is the idea that the ship should have been built for exploration. Says who? "The Search" establishes that the ship was built for pretty much one reason: to fight the Borg. At the time it was constructed, that was its only purpose. Now, when the Borg threat became less pressing, the project was redeveloped a little, but it still retained its original design.
The Defiant was built as a Borg Killer...not an explorer.
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
Amen. And if we want to give our DS9 heroes some exploration duties (which they never really had during the run of the TV show) for the book series, why not give them a new and better-suited ship? This Commander Vaughn character could fly the Defiant in a defensive/offensive role, while the rest could go gallivanting across the Gamma quadrant aboard a Nova class ship or something.
A stupid concept in the first place, really. DS9 was not about our heroes exploring Gamma, for a good reason - they had better things to do, like actually running the station and minding the wormhole. The Defiant was mainly there for "armed recce", and seems largely unsuited for Sisko's heirs now that the war is over.
So, what do you think - what sort of auxiliary ships SHOULD the DS9 heroes have in the post-show environment? Defiants? Runabouts? Big honking "full starships" from Voyager size up?
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
sorry to make starfleet crews seem like "whiny babies"... but how long is a submarine designed to operate without letting its crew out hmm? five years? ten?
no? thats because the realities of a long range space exploration is a little different that submarine patrol.
thanx
Posted by Woodside Kid (Member # 699) on :
The ramscoop is probably only operable within a narrow range of conditions. An old book I have called "The Science In Science Fiction" has a couple of pages on a ramscoop as a starship propulsion system. It points out that at the density of interstellar space (one to two atoms of hydrogen per cubic centimeter) a 100,000 ton vessel would need a collecting field with a funnel radius of 34,100 kilometers. (How the author determined these figures I do not know.) Moreover, since fusion engines use deuterium, only one atom in 6,700 of what would be collected would be useful as fuel.
It seems likely that the ramscoops would be useful only in a fairly dense cloud of hydrogen gas; out in normal interstellar space there would be very little to work with.
Posted by Cpt. Kyle Amasov (Member # 742) on :
Hey, I just finished the comic dealing with the Trill and that one guy who wants to destroy every Worm on the planet, Verad? I think that was his name (he appeared on DS9 once). And I noticed something at the beginning; when Defiant arrives at Trill to meet with the terrorists, they are ambushed, and they are not able to beam them back. Commander Vaughn launches two shuttles (not the pods, the real shuttles from 'The Sound of her Voice'), Chaffee and Sagan. That made me think about the capabilities of the ship; the MSD doesn't show anything shuttlebay-related behind the bay, but the schematic from the DS9TM ( this one's from maximumdefiant.com ) shows a door behind the main hangar. And the game 'The Fallen' included the complete ship, with an accessable repair bay behind that door. So a possible storage room for another shuttle. And what did they say about the pods? 2 or 4? If every secondary bay holds one ship, then it's 2, but could there be a similar storage?
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
eh.. Drexler has them swap out new shuttlebays every six months or so.. keeps it fresh
I was really disappointed the comic didnt show the correct 75633 reg for the Defiant III
Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
I'm almost scared to ask....but "Defiant III"?
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
> U.S.S. Defiant NCC-1764, 1st app. "The Tholian Web" > U.S.S. Defiant NX-74205, second ship, 1st app. "The Search" > U.S.S. Defiant NCC-75633, the third ship, formerly named U.S.S. Sao Paulo (unfortunately misregistered during "What You Leave Behind" because of stock footage)
[ April 10, 2002, 23:10: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]
Posted by CaptAlabin (Member # 733) on :
you mean Defiant NX-74205 for Defiant II and Defiant NX-74205 for Defiant III.
The D3 was cheated out of having the 75633
Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
No, no! They're still testing the Defiant, you can see it by the NX.
Posted by akb1979 (Member # 557) on :
I thought that when they renamed the Sao Paulo the registry number was also changed to fit with the name. I thought that that was the general "theory" behind it all - like they renamed the USS Yorktown in Star Trek IV to become Enterprise-A. Posted by First of Two (Member # 16) on :
quote:gallivanting across the Gamma quadrant aboard a Nova class ship or something
Admittedly, the GC is less threatening with the Dominion seemingly out of the picture, but still, I wouldn't want to go across it in an itty-bitty Nova. You need something a little more defense-capable.
And what if Odo's entreaties don't quite manage to sway the Founders? Then what?
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
grr, though... the point of a registry is to distinguish a ship. Thats why they added an '-A' to 1701 in the case of the Yorktown.. the Defiant, I think, should receive its proper registry, and the (brief) episode where it was shown should be disregarded in the name of common sense. Besides, the Sao Paulo was a regular series construction, so i dont see any reason to bounce it over to 'NX' again, unless theyre testing an Omega-13 down in the fifth shuttlebay (Tardis technology)
Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
No, they're tsting the ship still! Thats why they have a NX-74205! See the Sao Paulo was not testing but, the Defiant was so naturally they had to transfer the experiments on the new Defiant. Therefor they had to repaint the Defiant NX-74205!
Just kidding.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
The likeliest post DS9 DS9, in my opinion, is surrounded by new stations, weapons platforms, and so on, and is the headquarters for the task force of starships permenently stationed there. Bajor = West Germany, in other words.
I doubt the Federation is going to decide to stop considering the Dominion a threat, regardless of how friendly one member of its governing body may be.
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
Does this mean theyre going to build a wall on Cardassia Prime separating the sides liberated by the Federation and the Romulans?
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
Don't forget the side liberated by the Klingons. Although that wall will probably have some shrubbery on the Federation side to symbolize its friendship with the Klingons.
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
and who will prepare the shrubbery? perhap someone can be coerced to obtain it by The Klingon Warriors Who Say nIH'...
[ April 10, 2002, 23:24: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
I said Bajor was like West Germany, not Cardassia. I suppose Cardassia may very well end up like Berlin, but that wasn't exactly what I was getting at with that post.
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
There's something to be said for the possibility that Starfleet actually gets kicked out of Bajor, too. Apparently, the Prophets had an objection to Bajor joining the UFP, and now the Emissary is gone and cannot reverse that decision. So Bajor probably won't be a member world in the foreseeable future. And it's *their* station that still keeps guard over the wormhole mouth at the end of the series, *their* officer in command, and *their* dibs to the phenomenon in the first place. Plus they've got the remaining Orbs, ergo, the only working hotline to the Prophets. (Or can the Feds go pillage some from the ruins of Cardassia?)
If the new Kai decides to forbid Starfleet presence in the system, would the Feds send in their gunboats to change the Kai's mind? Are they that interested in going to Gamma anyway, now that they know who's on the other side? If Bajor decided to allow traffic to go through but not to allow Starfleet to regulate it, would the Feds comply?
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
My whole take on the issue with Bajor joining the Federation is this: Sisko warned them not to join the UFP before the war, because if they had, they would have been destroyed as a member of the Dominion's enemy. However, now that the war is over, the Prophets may very well see the benefits of Bajor joining up.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Yup, I think Aban is correct... the Prophs didn't want Bajor to join the Feds because of the up-coming war... once that was out of the way - I think it was ok for them to join.
Oh, and how do we know there weren't OTHER Defiants between "The Tholian Web" and "The Search"!?!
ALSO - the renaming of the Sao-Paulo to the old Defiant with the exact same registry - allows ships like the NCC-1017 Constellation to fit into chronological order of Connies... it's just that the Constellation was probably another registry in the 17's and possibly even another name.
The only ship to get the EXTRA SPECIAL designation of a suffix was the Enterprise ships.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
And the Yamato. And the Relativity.
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
.. and the Excalibur.. and the Bozeman.. and the Stargazer.. and the Tubman..
Posted by Cpt. Kyle Amasov (Member # 742) on :
Excalibur? Bozeman? Stargazer?
Ahhh, we're entering the non-canon area!
Allthough I think Peter David it the best Trek author, his first NF-novels were by far superior to the crap he produces at the moment. In other words: no, I don't believe the NCC-26biteme-A.
Bozeman? Aww, come one, you didn't even know if the ship was Norway or not.
Stargazer? Which novel was that?
. . . . . .
And what the hell is a Tubman? Posted by akb1979 (Member # 557) on :
quote:Originally posted by AndrewR: The only ship to get the EXTRA SPECIAL designation of a suffix was the Enterprise ships.
Yeah but even the Star Trek Mag listed it as the Defiant-A. Surely they'd have checked this first in order to avoid a slagging by their readers . . . looks around dubiously. Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
I don't get you people. What's the difference here?
"I served aboard the Enterprise, NCC-1701."
"Which one?"
"The refit."
"I served aboard the Defiant, NX-74205."
"Which one?"
"The new one."
The only difference is that the Defiant was 100% destroyed during its "refit" into the new Defiant, whereas the TOS Enterprise was only 90% destroyed. The 10% won't make a difference in the analogy; in practice, it probably makes a lot more difference whether you served on the refit or the original Enterprise, whereas it really doesn't matter if you served on the old or the new Defiant.
The Sao Paulo was commissioned only a few months before it was renamed; it probably didn't even have a crew. It's not like anybody would miss it. If you want, you can imagine that Sisko salvaged a piece of bulkhead from the old Defiant and had it installed into the new one, to give it *something* of the old Defiant.
Sure, this isn't what we see too often, but it's a war, you want to keep the morale high with the symbolic gesture, and why not if it doesn't make a difference in practice? Starfleet has other ways of identifying the hulls (such as Rick Sternbach's IC-103 for Voyager, vs. IC-101 for Intrepid and IC-102 for Bellerophon).
What you're basically doing is taking Okuda's line/agreed tradition over onscreen evidence. Let's keep the canon order.
Boris
[ April 11, 2002, 13:28: Message edited by: Boris ]
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
please... people take things that make sense over screen info anyway
Yamato: clear aired dialogue establishes 1305-E, fans prefer to abide by illegible background info.
and as for the registry, weve already had to disregard the Defiant's registry before, like when it was NCC-74210, or when many Defiants in one episode will be all labeled Defiant.
Just like no one believes all the Constitutions in The Ultimate Computer had the registry NCC-1701
Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
I tend to agree with you, though I try my best to explain why its like that. But sometimes like having a half dozen E-nils gets hard.
On the other hand maybe we shouldn;t explain every single thing in the Trek universe??
Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :
It is because they did the time warp again.......
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
quote:Originally posted by Matrix: On the other hand maybe we shouldn;t explain every single thing in the Trek universe??
We can't anyways. Even if we solve one problem, the next episode of Enterprise could create 5 new ones.
Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
I wanted to say something, but I changed my mind, since I realize that arguing about this is pointless. I thought we agreed on what's canon and what can be changed, but now I see how that depends entirely on personal impressions (i.e. the DS9TM can go because it doesn't look right, but the TNGTM can't because it does). That's not how I'm doing this.
[ April 12, 2002, 21:17: Message edited by: Boris ]
Posted by Dax (Member # 191) on :
I'd personally like to see the new Defiant in a movie or something, sporting the NCC-75633 rego. Fact is, we all know that it only retained the old rego because the producers were lazy/idiots.
Boris, are we supposed to believe that the USS Majestic was destroyed in "SoA" and again in "WYLB"? There's more to canon than the show itself. It's called common sense.
Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
But the thing is, you can prove that the Majestic wasn't destroyed twice because that's exactly the same footage, and the chance of the situation recurring with another ship that has the same name and registry from exactly the same camera angles is impossible. Same goes for shots of the Defiant docked at DS9, a lot of which are stock footage. You can actually prove that this is stock footage, by examining the shots frame by frame. Hence, the reality need not be exactly the same, although the stock footage still remains our best evidence.
On the other hand, the new shots of the Defiant model in WYLB aren't stock footage; there's no evidence for it -- hence, had they decided to change the registry, I would've drawn the intended conclusion (just as it can be shown that the Defiant didn't morph from stock footage into Fisher Model 1 during the shuttlebay scenes of the Sound of Her Voice).
It's not impossible that the new Defiant received the same name and registry, and I've given a reason why. It is possible to derive a registry system that is slightly more complicated but fits the show. I don't think it's that far-fetched to argue that the registry numbers are not 100% precise, and that other, more precise designations exist (such as Rick Sternbach's IC-103 etc. for the Intrepid class hulls in the Magazine). I've just read an article about U.S. Navy ship designations -- supposedly, you weren't supposed to name ships after living people, but the tradition has disappeared. Ships of the same class used to have related names, now they don't. Rules have changed for no real reason: politics, relaxed tradition, etc.
[ April 12, 2002, 22:00: Message edited by: Boris ]
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
IIRC, the new shots of the USS Defiant w/Purple Carpet in WYLB (there were what, 2? 3?) never have a viewable registry, while stock footage of the USS Defiant w/Grey Carpet (which we're supposed to believe is the Defiant w/Purple Carpet, too), most notably the banking-over-the-Galor-shot, have it.
[ April 12, 2002, 22:41: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Nyerrrope. There's one very clear spot in the new footage where the registry clearly reads the old number. That's one of the big fusses about the whole argument.
Mark
Posted by Dax (Member # 191) on :
Since "WYLB" VFX had more stock footage than anything else, it hardly matters that the rego wasn't fixed for the new shots.
Side note: Voyager may be the lesser series (IMO), but at least "Endgame" had no blatant stock footage.
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
quote:It's not impossible that the new Defiant received the same name and registry, and I've given a reason why.
And let me go one record as saying, that reason sucks. New ships should have new registries, DS9 producers overlooked it and so should we, just like we overlooked the other mistakes i referred to.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
To be fair, they were kinda busy doing the half a million other things that needed to be done for the final episode of a seven year series.
"Yamato: clear aired dialogue establishes 1305-E, fans prefer to abide by illegible background info."
I flip-flop on this issue, but I will say that it's wasn't really "illegible background info". We're not talking an abscure okudagram seen over Brent Spiner's shoulder. It was shown on the viewscreen in rather large writing. It's hard to miss.
Posted by CaptainMike (Member # 709) on :
I missed it up until last year, so i dont think its prominnet enough for all the fuss
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