Looking outside of canon for a moment: The 1701 shuttlebay had many unidentifiable shuttle type vehicles in TAS that could have been some type of fighters Kirk could scramble if he needed to. "Dreadnought" depicted rather small one and two person Arco-class and Tycho-class attack sleds. The newer video games feature the Valkyrie fighter. None of these vessels have standing room so they are likely to be about half the height of a shuttle and they lack warp drives, which eliminates the engine size of a shuttle and makes them fairly easy to store i assume. These are the kind of craft i belive a Starfleet carrier would bring.

Kind of the difference between a long range bomber and a small fighter in our current military. Bombing runs can be launched from our territory, do their business and return home. Fighters are carried to the location because they have a shorter range.

[ November 20, 2001: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]

Peregrines are autonomous spacecraft, probably originally light couriers, that when upgraded with assorted modular bits and pieces can be useful for close-quarters fleet engagements. This has been Sternbach's line and I think it makes sense. If they're 35 m long there might even be room below the cockpit for a fairly cramped sailboat style bunkroom and a common space and such. They have a use outside of combat and as shown on DS9 acted as essentially the smallest starships in the fleet, not as some kind of auxilliary secret weapon that popped out of holes here and there and everywhere.

If an Akira carries fighters, they'd have to be be tiny, shuttle-sized POSes. Trek tech, with Defiant being the acknowledged onscreen exception ("Tough little ship") has pretty much always emphasized bigger=more powerful. (I guess you can craft theories of powerplant size and weapons cabability if need them to get your head around it.) Anything shuttle-sized is going to get its ass handed to it by any kind of starship that isn't flown by a bunch of sponge-haired guys from the Delta Quadrant. Much as there may be a cool factor in having little attack shuttles zooming about blowing the hell out of big ships, there's no Trek precendent for it. There's a reason why modern sea-navies don't utilize sea-going fighters in its engagements and those hold true in the Trek context as well.

It's all about how we translate this into the Star Trek universe. The simplest explanation would be that they were built after the Defiant, but they could've also been in preparation for earlier wars. I imagine them sharing the shipyards with the Wolf 359 ships. No reason Sisko should know about them, or be authorized to tell Kira.

[ November 20, 2001: Message edited by: Phelps ]

[ November 20, 2001: Message edited by: Phelps ]

Specifically... The E-D fired a probe from the forward launcher on many occasions. The probe seemed to be a Class 1 or 2 from the VFX. It is extremely different from the photon torpedo--- there are drawings of the probes in the TNG TM... the last two Classes 8 and 9 are modified torp casings. Comparing them the all have the same overall diameter. But the Class 1 and 2 are rings, Class 8 & 9 are ellipsoids. The DS9 TM indicates that the P-torp and Q-torp have basically the same maximum dimensions. It says the Defiant is capable of depensing a mixed load out.

As for tactics, who says a carrier ought to hold back? If the fighters are simple force multipliers, and you can deploy them from a Main Battle Ship without having to build a special wimpy US-style carrier for them, why not go for it? Especially in the case of the Borg battle, little could have been won by keeping the carriers safely in the rear echelons. Ditto, really, for the mad sallies into Dominion planetary defences or blockade fleets, where the goal apparently was to fire as many shots as possible and cull the rows of the enemy as rapidly as possible.

Naval tactics in general did not favor the use of reserves back in the days when guns were the main armament. The side that brought the largest number of guns to the battle won the battle: the one with more guns has the faster *rate* of inflicting losses on the enemy, so the enemy loses his guns at a faster rate as well, and the threat against you decreases progressively. Play "Command & Conquer" with big armor formations and see what I mean.

Carriers and missiles changed that fact by giving different ships dissimilar engagement ranges. But in Trek, there are no dissimilar ranges - the difference made by the fighters is necessarily minor, due to their limited speed versus the capital ships. So naturally, a carrier has a perfect excuse to pull double duty as a gun cruiser.

In space, there's no such limitation, which is why I believe that the big battleships theory has come back into play in Trek. Thus, a carrier's traditional role to stay out of the fighting and simply stick to fighter ops is a whole lot less valid. I submit that a carrier's role in Trek would depend on the op; what that is is up to debate, as we've simply not seen that happen yet in any capacity.

I really don't think the Federation would use carriers against the Borg. Capital ships are already pretty vulnerable against Borgs, the fighters wouldn't even last a second. At least the capital ships can pack enough weaponary to make a difference.

Of course, leaving the Harriers ashore, or swapping them for ASW or assault or SAR choppers, would not diminish the destroyer in a major way. So depending on the availability of the planes, and on the mission, the destroyer could launch fighters prior to entering the fray, or then not. Loss of the carrier-combatant would be no big deal, since there would be plenty of other, empty carrier-combatants available to recover the fighters.

This is how I'd see the Akira, and most other starship classes as well. They are all carriers AND cruisers to some degree - Akira and Steamrunner simply have a different balance of "carrierhood-vs-cruiserhood" from that of Intrepid (which, as we all know, is a pure carrier with a nominal 120-shuttle capacity) or Defiant. Starfleet is not all that interested in going to the extremes of all-carrier or all-cruiser vessels, however.

The one thing that remains is that Akira and Steamrunner are the only known canonical "through-deck" vessels in Starfleet, as long as we accept the bow doors as doors and not just fancy deflectors or reverse impulse engines or something. That should tell us something about the balance of equipment aboard them. And we should be thankful that at least these two ships *have* a balance of equipment, instead of the dull homogeneity of most starships.

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Originally posted by Timo:
Carriers can't be risked? That's just because some idiots build expensive carriers. If they built destroyers with two Harriers and plenty of SSMs apiece, things would be vastly different...

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Carriers are expensive for a reason. You can't build destroyers with enough room for two or even one Harrier at reasonable operating cost or even for them to remain destroyer-sized. It'd be stupid to put support personnel, spares, munition, fuel, etc for the aircraft on every destroyer. That's not what destroyers are for. You'd just be wasting resources by spreading assets so thinly in the name of redundancy, and cutting into the space avaliable on a destroyer at the same time. More SSM? Try less. Plus, Harriers weren't build for carrier warfare anyways, they can't protect the CVBG like the Tomcats or have the legs of a A-6 (I hesistate to use F/A-18 as an example of good range). Using them in a purely VTOL capacity (no ramp for STOL) is going to cut into their payload and loiter time. Also, full size carriers are faster, more stable platforms which can conduct air operations in sea states which would make VTOL on and off something like a destroyer impossible. Carriers can also stay on station much long due to their spare, fuel and munition stores, and their superior ability to maintain and repair aircraft. Not to mention operate a whole collection of support aircraft, like AWACs and tankers.

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Originally posted by Timo:

Of course, leaving the Harriers ashore, or swapping them for ASW or assault or SAR choppers, would not diminish the destroyer in a major way.

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Right, because destroyers were designed to work with rotary aircraft which supports the destroyer's role of supporting larger ships.

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Originally posted by Timo:

So depending on the availability of the planes, and on the mission, the destroyer could launch fighters prior to entering the fray, or then not. Loss of the carrier-combatant would be no big deal, since there would be plenty of other, empty carrier-combatants available to recover the fighters.

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If you try your penny-carrier strategy against a full-sized carrier and co, you're going to be partially right. You won't be short on hanger space because you will not have any aircraft left. Even if some were to return, they would have nothing but patches of oil and floating debri and bodies to return to. Redundancy is no match for sheer superiority in every other catagory.

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Originally posted by Timo:
And we should be thankful that at least these two ships *have* a balance of equipment, instead of the dull homogeneity of most starships.

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the 15 launchers can be seen on screen, most on the weapons pod.