We have three (yes, three) different Defiant write-ups. The first was done by Maldal. Who's Maldal? Beats me. The second was mostly done by MIB, and cleaned up by Epoch. The third was done by Matrix. Enjoy.
And may whatever Defiant length you believe in have mercy on your soul...
Maldal's Version
The Defiant Class has become the premiere short-range point defense vessel in the United Federation of Planets Starfleet Arsenal. Small, quick, and can produce as much firepower as a vessel nearly three times its size, the Defiant Class was born out of necessity and has quickly become an indispensable, if somewhat limited, vessel in the Starfleet.
Project Defiant was headed up by Admiral Batelle Toh, Advanced Starship Design Bureau representative, with the Antares Fleet Yards. Selection for the new Defiant Project was narrowed down to those vessels that had already entered the initial spaceframe and system stress testing. The study hull that was chosen was originally designated NXP � 2365WP/T / Project: Pathfinder and was designed as a high-speed warp interceptor that would penetrate enemy space, attack a target with overwhelming amount of Torpedoes and then quickly withdraw.
However, when the threat of a Borg incursion was finally realized fully, the Project Pathfinder hull was abandoned in favor of a complete redesign. The Pathfinder Project Hull would later be used in the successful Nova Class. The Defiant Design team went back to the drawing boards. Built on lessons learned at the Battle of Wolf 359, the new Defiant hull was compact, the Nacelles imbedded in the hull and pulled much closer to the engineering spaces than any other deep space vessel had before. This minimized the Defiant�s ambient warp signature and limited its threat profile while also protecting the vulnerable nacelles from enemy fire. However, this compact space frame did present certain unique problems as far as Structural Integrity and Inertial Dampening were concerned.
The new hull design went into production in 2364 as the hull was gamma welded together at construction arm 2 of the Antares Fleet Yard Facility. In 2365, Impulse Engines based on the KY 8000 New Orleans Class impulse engines by Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems Ltd completed field testing and were integrated into the new hull. To expedite completion of the Sublight propulsion systems, the Defiant Team utilized Galaxy Class thrusters (themselves, based on the Ambassador Class RCS packs), and the 8 thruster packs were integrated simultaneously with the Impulse engine systems. The hull, now designated NX 74205, began impulse engine testing near Antares IV by the end of 2366.
As the new Defiant Project was taking shape, development of the major systems of the new Escort type vessel were bogging down. Most notable of these problems was the development of a Warp Core and M/ARA system for the compact vessel. Serious questions as to the viability and functionality of a warp core on a 4 deck warship came into question as simulations showed that a traditional, single M/ARA reactor would be too large to integrate into such a small craft. The decision was made in 2365 to create a quad-core Warp Core, to save space and to provide the necessary power outputs for the Defiant Class systems. Testing of the Warp Core began in 2366, just as the test hull began its first Impulse engine trials near Antares.
Further, the use of Ablative Armor, an experimental type of starship protection developed at the Utopia Planetia Armory, was deemed a necessity for the Defiant Class. Due to the vessels small size, and despite the fact that the oversized Impulse engines could accelerate the space frame to high Impulse speeds and the RCS thrusters imported from the Galaxy Class gave the vessel unprecedented maneuverability at high impulse speeds, the Defiant class could take very little punishment against her shields in combat. The armor, when struck with a phaser / disrupter beam or torpedo, would burn off and the resulting debris cloud would give an additional layer of defense. However, the Armor had not entered full production, and quantities were limited. Production began at the Utopia Planetia Foundries, and enough of the armor passed quality testing to completely outfit the final production hull in 2370.
The few bright spots in the development of Project: Defiant, include the development of and implementation of the new ships Tactical Systems. The most famous of these items include the Pulse Phaser Cannon, developed by Starfleet Research and Development � Tokyo. These cannon were completed after the vessels first shakedown cruise in 2370 and were integrated at Utopia Planetia. By using ultra-pure phaser crystals in the Emitter assembly, in combination with rapid-discharge EPS coils and highspeed focusing coil assemblies, the Cannon is able to store the emerging pulse and add charges to the single shot. In the span of 2.3 nanoseconds, the resulting blast from the Phaser Cannon would be layered several times over by multiple frequency phaser charges. The resulting blasts, therefore, were harder to disperse over a threat vessels shields like a standard phaser beam. Four of these cannon were mounted in the USS Defiant, and thoroughly tested at the Jupiter Base Weapons Range before being certified at the end of 2371.
The USS Defiant, NX 74205, first sailed from Antares Fleet Yards in 2370 for its first shakedown cruise to Sol System and Utopia Planetia. The Defiant mustered a maximum warp speed of 9.5 with an extremely short endurance range. The endurance of the Defiant class was considered disappointing to Starfleet Command; as the Defiant had to take on Antideuterium aboard from the escort vessel USS Hamilton during the voyage to Sol. During final system integration, ablative armor mounting, and testing at Jupiter Range, the mission profile for the Defiant Class changed drastically with the realization of the possibility of increased hostility with the Gamma Quadrant empire known as The Dominion. Starfleet Intelligence indicated that the primary vessel utilized by the Dominion was a small, over-gunned, vessel not much larger than a Defiant Class. In 2372, the Defiant was transferred for final testing to Deep Space 9, and to also provide point-defense for DS9, protect the Bajroan Wormhole, and also provide vital reconnaissance and intelligence gathering by travelling to the Gamma quadrant through the Wormhole.....
MIB and Epoch's Version
Defiant-class history.
When the Enterprise-D first encountered the Borg in the year 2365, the Federation found that the Borg were a major threat. Fearful that an invasion was on the way, early in the year 2366, Starfleet ordered the Advanced Starship Design Bureau (ASDB) to design and build a warship specifically designed to take on the Borg as well as new weapon systems. One of the designs the ASDB came up with was the Defiant-class starship. The design was for a compact heavily armored and armed yet highly maneuverable ship. The Defiant prototype was developed at both the Antares and the Utopia Planitia fleet yards. Along with its unique design the Defiant was to incorporate several new weapons platforms. However, the Borg arrived before the prototype was space worthy. Though the Borg invasion was stopped without the help of the Defiant project, Starfleet was concerned about a second invasion that they decided to continue. After the shakedown cruise, major design flaws with the ship�s power, weapon, and safety systems arose. This along with the diminished Borg threat convinced Starfleet to shelve the Defiant project indefinitely. It was not until 2371 that the project would be revived to deal with the increasing threat from the Dominion.
The Defiant-class was the very first class of ships that were designed purely as battleships. Armor was added to all areas of the ship instead of to the more vital areas as was done on other ships. This makes a Defiant class ship more resistant to enemy fire when the shields are down. The prototype was outfitted with ablative armor which was found to be far more effective then the standard armor. It is armed with four pulse phaser cannons which were designed to fire each shot at a different energy frequency to keep the Borg from adapting to the weapon. There are three torpedo launchers (one forward firing, two aft firing) capable of firing both photon and quantum torpedoes. Lastly, the Defiant comes equipped with one standard phaser bank located at the dorsal end of the ship.
The Defiant was designed with the warp nacelles directly attached to the hull without the use of any pylons or support beams. This makes the Defiant-class smaller and harder to target. The Defiant class is also one of the few classes of ships to have one hull instead of two like most Federation ships. It is also very fast and maneuverable under impulse power, however it was not designed to be very fast at warp speeds despite its powerful class 7 engines. Its maximum safe cruising speed is warp 7 with a maximum speed of warp 9. Although it looks like the Defiant�s have only one impulse engine, they actually have 3 separate impulse units lined up in a row. The standard crew compliment for a Defiant class ship is approximately 40 people. In emergencies, they can accommodate up to 192 people. The computer core is composed of powerful twin isolinear processing cores. Over half of a Defiant�s main computer processing power (55%) is used solely for the task of processing tactical and intelligence data. This makes the Defiant a focal point for coordinating attacks and movements of friendly fleets. Defiant class ships usually carry at least two auxiliary craft, usually 2 shuttle pods. It can, however, support 1 larger auxiliary craft in place of the 2 small shuttle pods. According to computer simulations, it is also capable of atmospheric landings and take-offs. This function, however, has never been tested with a real ship. Although the prototype of the Defiant class was fitted with a cloaking device, it is not standard equipment for a typical Defiant class ship. No other Defiant class starships were fitted with a cloaking device after the prototype was destroyed during the Dominion War.
After the Defiant project was revived, the prototype was assigned to Deep Space 9 under the command of Capt. Sisko. It was at DS 9 when most of the major design flaws were corrected. After the prototype proved itself to be a capable ship to Starfleet, they started rapid production of Defiant class ships. By the year 2373 there were a large number of Defiant class starships serving in Starfleet.
Notable ships of the class
U.S.S. Defiant NX-74205: Destroyed during the Dominion War. U.S.S. Valiant NCC-74210: Destroyed during the Dominion War. U.S.S. Sao Paulo NCC-75633: Renamed to the U.S.S. Defiant after the original was destroyed. U.S.S. Pendleton NCC-74207: Active--One of the two Defiant classes ships that took part in the recapturing of the U.S.S. Prometheus. U.S.S. Calcutta NCC-75232: Active U.S.S. Ra NCC-75278: Active�Second Defiant class ship that helped with the recovery of the U.S.S. Prometheus. U.S.S. Croatia NCC-75615: Lost (Presumed destroyed.) U.S.S. Maya NCC-75622: Active
Matrix's Version
Defiant class Conjecture
Throughout Starfleet�s history, every single class that was designed could defend themselves as well as perform scientific duties as efficiently as possible. It was in fact against everything Starfleet stood for to have a dedicated warship in the fleet that does note at least possess some capability to explore. Of course there have been situations where some Admirals felt there should be a fleet of warships to defend Federation territory, but they were never seriously considered until when the Enterprise-D made first contact with the Borg. In this first encounter, the Enterprise, one of the most powerful ships in Starfleet did not stand a chance against a single Borg vessel. In the next year, many projects were started to give Starfleet some sort of weapon to fight the Borg on even grounds. One of these projects was the Defiant Development Project being developed at ASDB under the supervision of Admiral Batelle Toh.
The project first began when they selected an existing design to base off of their own designs. At first the project called for a small maneuverable fast ship capable of delivering a devastating blow to the enemy ship. The study vehicle NXP-2365 WP/T, also designated as the Defiant Pathfinder was 226 meters long, armed with six forward mounted torpedo tubes, ten Type VIII phaser arrays, and a maximum emergency warp speed of 9.8 for ten minutes. It was thought that even though the Borg might adapt to any torpedoes being developed or used at that time, a massive volley of them might in fact overload their shields through sheer brute power. A young Benjamin Sisko proposed to mount the newly developed pulse phaser cannons that was capable of firing rapid phaser �bolts� of high power at a single target that not even a Type X+ phaser array was capable of in the same amount of time. This single addition to the mission profile, changed the entire design of the Defiant Development Project. The Defiant Pathfinder design was shelved to be used later as the basis of the Nova class. A new design was submitted showing a smaller yet far more powerful ship that was designed entirely around the pulse phaser cannons. For the first time in Starfleet history, the ship was a single hull with the nacelles themselves imbedded into the hull to minimize any vulnerable appendages being destroyed during combat. Retaining the imbedded bridge design from the Defiant Pathfinder, also provided some protection for the bridge crew in case it was being fire upon. The single most difficult part of the project was designing a warp propulsion system that was powerful enough to handle the stress of the pulse phaser cannons, as well as being fast in such a small ship. Eventually, a warp core was designed for this class based on the larger but somehow equally as powerful Galaxy class� warp core. The last addition to the class was the ablative armor, which has never been used fully on a ship before. Six ships were initially authorized to be built and thoroughly tested before more would be built.
In 2367, when a Borg ship invaded Federation space, only the USS Defiant herself was completed. She wasn�t even tested yet when she was ordered to join the fleet at Wolf 359. Everything went fine until when she was prepared to go to warp when suddenly every single power relay, and computer station blew up. The Borg ship decimated the 39 out of the 40 ship fleet at Wolf 359, later to be destroyed right above Earth orbit by the Enterprise after sending a command to the Borg ship, which destroyed herself from an overload. Afterwards the project still continued and with the Defiant completed, she was ready to be tested again. During the testing of the pulse phasers, there was major stress to the structural supports on the warp nacelles, as well as some buckling surrounding the mounting points of phaser cannons themselves. In short, she was heavily overpowered on a small ship that was threatening to tear herself apart. Firing the phasers would do more as much damage to herself as she would do to her enemy. With the Borg threat settled down, it was decided that Starfleet did not need such a class, so the Defiant and her uncompleted sisters were shelved.
With the destruction of the USS Odyssey by the Dominion in 2370, Starfleet was started recommissioning old ships and stop the decommissioning of scheduled ships to boost the size of the fleet for a suspected Dominion invasion. With Deep Space 9 as the first target in the Dominion invasion, Commander Sisko retrieved the USS Defiant from the mothball fleet to be used as a mobile defense platform to defend DS9 from the Dominion. In her first mission, she was given a Romulan cloaking device in agreement that Romulans get any intelligence from the Gamma Quadrant, so that the Defiant could go through Dominion territory without being noticed. The mission was a failure, after being ambushed by Dominion ships, and boarded. However the first time she fired her phasers in anger, she destroyed a couple of ships easily. Prior to the Dominion War, Chief Engineer Miles O�Brian who eliminated most of the Defiant�s problems by strengthening the SIF field. Maybe because of the work done on the Defiant as well as well she performs outstandingly well under combat conditions that the other five ships were brought out of mothballs and were fully completed.
With the Cardassians allying herself with the Dominion, Starfleet started to build more Defiant class ships in the suspected war that was coming. At Starfleet Command, many wanted to build a whole fleet of Defiants instead of building other ships like the Akira, Sabre, Steamrunner, Norway, Galaxy, Nebula, and even Sovereign class. They proposed that building such a fleet, within a few months, over a hundred could be ready to fight the Dominion, and during the war more could be built. Such a fleet they thought would be very powerful, to defend and defeat the Dominion. Their reasoning behind this was for the resources and time to build a single Galaxy class ship, four or even five Defiant class ships could be built in the same amount of time, and since each ship was about equal to the Galaxy class in power, the fleet would be four to five times more powerful. While their reasoning had much merit, if the war ended with so many Defiants, what was Starfleet going to do with them? Even so, Starfleet wanted to build as many ships as possible, so Galaxy class ships were completed with 65% of the interior incomplete, and new builds were going to have to wait until after the war in favor of the smaller less costly ships. The war everyone was hoping that wouldn�t happen happened.
In the war, the service record of each of these ships proved to be quite amazing. With the exception of the USS Valiant and the USS Defiant herself, no other Defiant class ship was destroyed. They proved to be a very formidable opponent that could not be matched in size and power. With only a few dozen in the fleet, a reported number of kills for this class was over 250 ships in the two years, nearly 10 to 1 kill ratio per ship. After the war, as many have suspected, many of these Defiant class ships could not do much beside patrol enemy borders in peacetime. With the Romulans stirring up trouble three years after the war, only time will tell when the Defiant is called back into action.
Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
I wonder how in hell did I come up with 226 meters for the Defiant Pathfinder...
Only if UP3 was still up, I'd do some modifications to the conjecture. Oh well.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Mabye the length of the Nova was in doubt back then?