I agree, and in my mind, many of them did indeed exist. I could easily see the Triumph as an attempt to take the Federation-class Dreadnought and downsize it in size, costs, and materials, for instance (albeit a failed attempt).
Yeah, everybody at Oakland Shipyards, where it was designed, also think it was "just plain ugly." (Excerpt quoted from the Oakland Yards tech manual )
It wasn't just the fact that it was "just plain ugly", mind you! That wouldn't have mattered if the Triumph had been able to outmatch other ships of her size (namely the Constitution class), but in addition to still lacking agility, even though the third nacelle added power to the weapons, but as the other starship classes were upgraded, there was less and less of a difference in weapons power, and the Constitution class was better rounded overall. In the end "it just wasn't worth building any more examples of the Triumph class", and "the much later Ascension class, herself a sub-class of the Belknap-class Strike Cruiser, was more heavily armed and agile than the Triumph class could ever hope to be" (I believe these quotes comes from the Triumph's Starfleet Museum Exhibit). And yet, somehow, the idea of mating both hulls directly would become more and more successful much later on, which was good for the Sovereign class. In many ways, the Intimidator class could be considered what the Triumph class was supposed to be.
I didn't feel like doing a front view on this sucker, so I just did enough to make a decent tech manual page. The point of the Arminius class was to whack together some partially built components to get some warships into the Dominion War as fast as possible. So the primary hull is from some passenger ships that didn't get finished before the war started, scabbed onto a Maquis raider (Peregrine class?) engineering hull, and a couple of subscale warp nacelles. The model itself was made from two stands from the Ertl Excelsior kit, a Monogram Maquis raider (the old Voyager 3-pack), and 1/2500 1701-D nacelles, with a 1/1400 1701-D bridge stuck on.
I could do that more often if you like. If you like come of what I come up with, you could even add it to the information behind the class. For example: "The Arminius-class Light Corvette/Combat Starship was a starship class originally on the drawing boards as the latest descendent of the venerable Renner-class Corvette/Destroyer Escort, and was slated for her final design process and construction in the early 2380s to supplement and eventually replace the current Corvette incarnation of the time, as the Arminius's Naval Contract Code (NCC-82455) shows." I could probably go on for a while: how she was rushed into production in the aftermath of the Breen incursion of Earth to help out the approximately 20 year old corvettes currently in service at the time, and how she was eventually replaced my a much more advanced class of corvette in 2383, due to not being able to incorporate a number of the latest technologies (namely quantum slipstream). I could easily see the Arminius as a descendent of the Renner class.
Damn , your right - I'm sure I'd seen the Renner before, but I don't recall it. My "official" history goes like this:
Nice! One small nit at the end of the second to last paragraph: "CAMBATANTS" - should be "COMBATANTS".
Nice write-up. Always loved that little Frankenstein. And while we're doing proofreading, in the first image description you missed a space between "a" and "Klingon" and in the second it should read "Chin'toka"
Believe it or not, there IS a space there. I saw that too and went to fix it, and found a space! Maybe I should add another .
Is that a real thing from the show? Seems too specific. Combat Command is more of an overall agency. The USAF used to be divided into Strategic Air Command and Tactical Air Command (among other commands). A while ago they consolidated the force structure and combined those two into Air Combat Command.
Elizabeth Shelby was working out of Starfleet Tactical for that anti-Borg program per "Best of Both Worlds", and the office kept getting name-checked on all those dedication plaques of Starfleet ships from TNG to VOY, too.