posted
Speaking of the Warbird, am I alone in thinking the design is strangely reminiscent of the Concorde planes?
It doesn't seem that unreasonable that the "mouth" of the Warbird could be both the nav deflector and a weapon array. The Galor cruisers seem to be the same. I also think it's feasible that the torp launcher area of the Klingon BoP and battlecruisers are nav deflectors too (where else could the deflectors be on those ships?).
We also know that the Ent-D dish could be modified into a super powerful weapon. And we've seen the Defiant dish converted into a phaser emitter. The difference is that with these Federation ships the dishes were burnt out after firing.
posted
Re: the deflector dish on the Ferengi Maruder it could be theoretically be anything - part of the 'head' section... the 'pincers'... at the peak of the 'buffalo hump'.
And as for possibilities for new areas for a deflector system on the Warbird - I would assume those grill looking 'talons' underneath. They face forward.
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quote:Originally posted by AndrewR: There is a phaser emitter in the area of the Defiant's deflector dish... it wasn't converted into an emitter.
There are 4 phaser bank and 1 phaser array on the Defiant that we've seen, none of which are anywhere near the main deflector dish. There isn't any reason for a phaser emitter to be there; the forward arc is covered by the 4 pulse phasers.
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"Starship Down": the deflector is modified to act as a phaser emitter and burns out in the process.
"Paradise Lost": beam phasers are fired from the deflector and the bridge areas.
"Shattered Mirror": a beam phaser is fired from the bridge area.
"Message in the Bottle" (VOY): a beam phaser is fired from somewhere on the underside when one of the Defiant-class ships joins in for the final salvo on the Warbird.
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posted
I don't think that's a phaser strip. I've got a model of the Defiant, and it's got little weird circle projections at both ends of the strip. Plus, the corners aren't rounded like all other phaser arrays we've seen.
So, it COULD be a phaser array, but it looks totally unlike every other array I've seen.
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posted
I'm sure nobody in the world has any idea what most of the Defiant's details are supposed to represent. That's why I say, bring in Rick Sternbach to do the blueprints after Martin's done with his sketches. They could've tried to assign meaning to all of the random features we see, but maybe not everything worked visually. Also, most of the widgets are on the underside of the model, in the cavity surrounded by Deck 4. Kinda difficult to have a phaser emitter or a torpedo launcher there.
Most of the Defiant's weaponry is probably hidden under hull plates. Ever noticed how all of these random phasers or torpedoes were always shown from a distance in order to conceal the lack of features on the model? Of course, once they started using CGI more, we would see the hull plates pull aside, revealing the escape pods or shuttlebays underneath. All of this would've been rather difficult to do using motion control alone, which is what DS9 was using 80% of the time.
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posted
We also saw the mirror Defiant fire beam phasers from its bridge in "The Emperor's New Cloak" but it might have been stock footage from "Shattered Mirror".
Another Defiant oddity, in "Shattered Mirror" there is a scene where the Defiant is attacking the BoPs (before facing the giant Negh'var) and it fires a fwd photorp that appears to come from the main shuttlebay area. When the torpedo hits they finish the Bird off with the pulse phasers.
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posted
A shuttlebay-launched torpedo doesn't help at all! Although it did seem to me that the aft torpedo from "Paradise Lost" was launched from about the same area (just note how the glow grows big enough to fully envelop the starboard quantum launcher, so this photon launcher must be closer to the front of the ship than to the back).
Maybe that's where a foward photon launcher was installed or should've been installed according to the stolen Defiant specs -- after all, the DS9TM says the shuttlebay area was originally reserved for future weapons systems. It could be a plug-and-play slot, just like the shoulder modules that housed quantum launchers most of the time.
My theory is that the Defiant had been originally outfitted with two forward launchers in the nose and two aft launchers on either side of Deck 4, as shown on the original MSD. They would've fired both photon and quantum torpedoes. However, they just couldn't get them to work as well as the newly developed weapons that could be fitted into the plug-and-play slots, so for the time being, they filled the plug-and-play slots in the shoulders with quantum torpedo launchers, and the one in the shuttlebay-area with a forward and an aft photon torpedo launcher. The MSD weapons would've hence stayed offline most of the time.
Once the series ended (note that the DS9TM blueprints and MSD have stardates in the 53xxx range), somebody finally figured out how to get the deflector launchers and the Deck 4 aft launchers working right -- they moved the forward tubes together (as seen in the deck plans) and fixed some other things. That opened up the forward shoulder slots for targeting sensors. The shuttlebay-area weapons had been replaced with a shuttlebay long before that, since that was deemed more necessary than a photon torpedo launcher, rarely used in the series.
I also forgot to mention that for a period of time in 2374, during which no torpedoes were fired onscreen, O'Brien would have another try at liberating the shoulder-slots by putting the quantum launchers on the nacelles (as mentioned in the text of the DS9TM). However, that didn't work either, so back they go into the shoulder modules, just in time for us to see them in "Tears of the Prophets".
In the meantime, newer starships of the Defiant class would be outfitted with only a single forward and a single aft torpedo launcher (as seen in the ship section at the end of the DS9TM), located in the shuttlebay slot. Starfleet saw that installing deflector and Deck 4 aft launchers just didn't make any sense until their problems were fixed. Quantum torpedoes in the shoulder slots would be classified as too expensive until warranted by a mission -- after all, how many ships have we seen using them?
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posted
thats odd because, even though the pod looks oversized in that pic of the Miranda.. the Encyclopedia pic weve been seeing for years has the pod a little on the small side. The Ships of the Star Fleet version looks best, oddly enough.
What worries me more is how the nacelles on all Mirandas and Miranda variants are drwan wrong in current Fact files/ST:The Mag issues.. the forward side grill assemblies are misshapen..
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