posted
The extension on the Larson has much more volume tham the neck of the Saladin, even before the nacelle supports are taken into account. And as this is TOS we may assume that the M/AM reaction takes place in the nacelle itself (as supported by TAS where antimatter is beamed into the nacelle). This agrees with both FASA and the Saladin blueprints I'm using. And of course the arrangement of the nacelle supports makes a movie style warp system unlikely (where would the intermix shafts go and how would they be jettisoned in an emergency?).
Rear phasers, as the Ptolemy and Coventry both have single banks mounted to cover the rear arcs I don't see why the Larson can't as well. The nacelle structure creates quite a large dead zone for saucer mounted phasers. Indeed a case could be made for inverting the saucer arrangement - placing the port/starboard pairs on the ventral surface and the forward pair on the dorsal surface. That way the port/staboard pairs give much better coverage. Still need some aft mounts though.
Loknar/Larson Frigate/Destroyer. FASA and 70s/80s fandom agreed on very little but destroyers being smaller and/or less powerful than frigates was one of them. Yes this is historically less common but wasn't the USN in the 1960s one of the exceptions?
Actually I have a theory....
Looking at the whole body of Trek ships deigns there are more or less no pre-TOS frigate designs and there are more or less no post-2300 destroyer designs.
So when starfleet was founded it used the term cruiser for large, multi-purpose ships and destroyer for smaller, primarily military ships.
As the fleet grows, more classes are introduced and the range of ship sizes and missions expands a new category was introduced that fell between the two. These were medium sized, fairly well armed but not primarily warships. These were called Frigates. This was in the decades immediately before TOS and helps explain the relative lack of Heavy Destroyer and Light Cruisers in TOS era designs - the new frigates were replacing them except in specialist cases.
Then early in the 24th century Starfleet gets all PC and drops military sounding names like Dreadnought and Destroyer. What's left of the old destroyer role is now split between frigates and escorts. This is the situation we see in TNG/DS9.
Hmm, gone off on a bit of a tangent.
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posted
Possibly the reason they would have a similar ship for a different purpose would be some difference in the internal configuration we dont know about
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