Ekaternia Class Battleship
Based on a Forbin Kitbash
Inspired by Vance's adaptation of Forbin's kitbash, I finally scared up some ambition, put pencil to paper, and did something.
For anyone who bothers to care, I have never been comfortable with FJ's Federation-class starships, which seemed to super-size the TOS Enterprise with a bulky, tri-nacelled design I found to be too militaristic for the Federation of TOS. The grace and symmetry of MJ's design for Constitution-class starcruisers always screamed "Federation's finest" to me, as if the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet rendered their finest effort (and most formidable one) with the Constitution star ship class.
However, it was not lost on me that the Federation might have a "secret weapon" tucked away in the hidden drydock of some obscure asteroid outpost, not far from the Neutral Zone, a prototype waiting to spring into action in case war broke out. This ship would be a reserve vessel, seldom seeing flight, never in sight of potential adversaries.
The vessel I envisioned would have a unique history: During the Earth-Romulan Conflict of the 2150's, United Earth Starfleet began to seek new ways to deal with alien threats. A project launched by Captain Jonathan Archer and Commander Charles Tucker III under the code name "Ultimate Weapon" gave rise to a controversial prototype: a purely military starship, built for deep space pursuit and search-and-destroy combat. "Ultimate Weapon" was derived from the famous NX-class of Warp 5 starships, but it ws unlike any Earth vessel flown before. There was a sum total of one ship built in secret: the U.E.S. Dreadnought. In an interstellar war whose "combat" was mostly limited to the deadly application of atomic bombs, hidden mines and fruitless chases through deep space, Dreadnought only saw limited action in the final days of the war. But after the armistice was signed over subspace radio, Earth kept their "Ultimate Weapon" under wraps. When the Coalition of Planets gave rise to the Federation a few years later, Starfleet Command took custody of the Starship Dreadnought, and kept the vessel in a hidden asteroid dock for over 100 years.
Because her design owed much to the same design lineage that gave us the Federation Starships of the 23rd century, Starfleet found it easy to refit and rebuild the Starship Dreadnought to keep up with the times. During the Romulan sneak attack on Earth Outposts in Sector Z-6, Dreadnought was manned and ready for launch. The ship could have been destroyed, but the Romulans never approached Outpost 7 where she was docked. As a result of the loss of Outposts 2, 3, 4 and 8, Dreadnought was put through her final major refit.
The final version of the ship is seen here:
The ship never flew until the early 2270's, when the recently-promoted Commodore James T. Kirk (prior to his days at Starfleet Command) was assigned to lead a task force to confront the return of the Sphere Builders in the Delphic Expanse. As his earlier command, NCC-1701 Enterprise, entered drydock for refit, Kirk re-christened Dreadnought the U.S.S. Defiant, NX-1764-A, in memory of those lost aboard the Constitution-class vessel during the Tholian Incident.
The Defiant-A served as Kirk's flagship on this strange maiden voyage, a starship that had barely taken flight in over 100 years of service was being sent on a deep space mission using a special piece of alien technology to secure the element of surprise: a Romulan cloaking device. When asked by the personnel at Outpost 7, Kirk described the ship as "butt ugly, not as comfortable as the Enterprise, but built to take on four Enterprises in combat." The Defiant-A saw action against the Xindi, Klingons, Romulans and the Burrelyites during the Delphic Expanse mission, fending off alien attacks so effectively that the mission secured the Federation greater respect from neighboring powers. Though Kirk was successful in stopping the Sphere Builders and living to tell about it, his flagship was not so fortunate. The Defiant-A self-destructed in close proximity to a Sphere during combat. The sacrifice of this ship not only secured the Federation, but also gave Starfleet new design insights into how to improve the combat abilities of the more common Constitution-class and other related starships of the line.
Defiant's military legacy, while considered crude only a generation later, was crystal clear to Starfleet engineers and combat strategists at the time. While the Defiant's odd use of four phaser batteries per bank raised eyebrows at the time (and still do today), the more fundamental built-in technological philosophy behind weapons and shields powered directly from the warp engines has since become standard practice on Federation starships. Of course, the younger generation of starship crewmen will point out that the circumferential warp nacelles were quickly made obsolete by 2279, when exponentially faster linear warp drive made its way into starships.
Compared to the Achernar and Tikopai subclasses of the Constitution class of the day, Defiant-A was marginally more massive and housed a similar crew compliment. The vessel had a nearly identical warp speed performance curve, though it never achieved the kind of high-warp bursts seen by other individual starships. In combat, Kirk's assessment was spot-on. Loaded with phaser-banks and multiple photon torpedo tubes, and stocked with armored shuttlecraft, the retiring Admiral Westervliet declared the newly refit Defiant to be a "one-ship fleet, a highly mobile assault force." Westervliet also dismissed such an "uber-battlewagon" as "a waste of Federation resources and a betrayal of the trust of the member-planets. What business do we have, building a flying fortress like this, when we should be investing our energies in improving the broader pool of our starships?" The Federation Council agreed, opting not to replace Defiant. Instead, linear warp-driven starship classes proliferated, and within 20 years common starships-of-the-line could easily outrun and outgun the Defiant-A, effectively doing more with less.
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I recycled components from Harry Doddema's drawing of the Federation-class starship at his Titan Fleet Yards, tracing certain lines by hand and incorporating them into the Defiant-A's new design. Special thanks to Harry, to Vance and to Forbin for their inspiration.
