Was the Ambassador Class phased out?

[blssdwlf]

Did the Sovereign-class participate in any DS9 battles?

[t_smitts]

blssdwlf wrote:

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Did the Sovereign-class participate in any DS9 battles?

No. The only Sovereign ever seen was the big "E" and that was only seen in the three movies.

Real world reason is probably that a "hero" ship like that (which is larger than most other Starfleet ships) would stand out in fleets, rather than blending in, the way that Excelsiors, Mirandas, Nebulae, and even Galaxies do. You can't have some guest ship upstaging the Defiant!

[King Daniel Into Darkness]

IIRC, the Sovereign-class' absence in DS9 was due to TPTB wanting it kept "special" (i.e. only for the TNG movies)

[Mark_Nguyen]

Yes. I believe the DS9 people wanted to have one in the background or even on special occasions, but the execs wanted to keep her for the movie outings. Frankly I think it would've been just fine to see the Big-E in a shot or two, sorta like seeing the USS Galaxy in action at Chin'toka. It WOULD seem a little wierd to have Picard in a fleet commanded by Sisko, but it's not as though the hierarchy of the big fleet battles made that much sense to begin with IMO, beyond cool-lookingness.

I agree that there probably weren't that many Ambassadors built to begin with, being supposedly akin to the Galaxy's initial rareness as Starfleet's premier explorer. However, where the Galaxy may have seen increased production beyond the six that were initially planned (per Sternbach et. al.), the Ambassador may have been kept to small production runs and also to their intended duty of being deep space explorers.

I like to imagine maybe two dozen of the class being constructed in two batches (NCC-10xxx and NCC-26XXX ish, going by known registries) and spending the vast majority of their times on the periphery of Federation space and beyond. When the war rolled around, Starfleet may have recalled those Explorers within a year's travel time of the conflict, but otherwise left the guys further out on their own, perhaps at best telling them not to go out further on their planned courses into deeper space just in case they needed to be brought back. We know that Starfleet had ships up to thirty years travel time beyond Federation space (VOY "Lifeline"), and one or more of them may have been an Ambassador-class ship, tooling along and waving the flag to anyone who may want to come conquering. :P

Mark

[EmperorTiberius]

^I agree

T'Girl wrote:

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Maybe they just never built very many to start with. Therefor you don't see them for the same reason you don't see the newly created Sovereign Class, at the time of the Dominion War there are only two or three of them.

This is what I mentioned on another topic. If only 6-12 were ever built (like Galaxies and Constitution), and few like Enterprise and Horatio destroyed, you woudn't have many around. When Dominion War came, they would have tried to complete Galaxies that already had frameworks built and in storage rather than go with building Amabassadors from scratch.

[EmperorTiberius]

t_smitts wrote:

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No. The only Sovereign ever seen was the big "E" and that was only seen in the three movies.

Real world reason is probably that a "hero" ship like that (which is larger than most other Starfleet ships) would stand out in fleets, rather than blending in, the way that Excelsiors, Mirandas, Nebulae, and even Galaxies do. You can't have some guest ship upstaging the Defiant!

I think a Sovereign class ship would blend in just fine, being that it's slightly bigger than Excelsior, but much smaller than Galaxy and Nebula.

It would have been nice to see USS Sovereign swoop past those Galors when the Galaxies did.