In the Dominion War and immediate aftermath what class of starship would be the “workhorse” so to speak of Starfleet? By workhorse I mean dependable, solid, and versatile. Not necessarily a high end like a Defiant, Intrepid, Sovreign or Galaxy, but one that’s the all purpose starship.
I would say the Excelsior and Miranda classes. They've already been the workhorse of Starfleet for about 80 years.
I guess one convenient metric would be "a tad smaller and thus presumably more affordable than the top-line design of a given design generation". And starships from the Plastic Age definitely come in such generations, even if CGI has resulted in greater variation and perhaps a bit less kitbashing. For the Galaxy, there are a couple of generation siblings we might consider. The Nebula is big, though, and doesn't meet the above criterion, even if she appears in quite some numbers in TNG, DS9 and VOY. And the kitbashes from "Best of Both Worlds" are really obscure. But there's one family member that's just perfect - the Akira shares the saucer contours and the like, and is both smaller and (thanks to CGI) quite numerous. All-purpose? Dunno about that. But she's everywhere, and might just as well do everything. The presumed next generation, with the lengthwise stretched primary hulls, terracing, triangulish-cross-section nacelles and all, has the Sovereign and (as per Lower Decks) Luna as the higher-end ships, but apart from them, there's only the rare Prometheus and the midget Nova so far. Plus, perhaps, eventually, Parilament (again thanks too LDS). Hard to pick from there. Unless we postulate that this generation will also come to feature a "top dog", a ship as big as or bigger than Galaxy, leaving the middling Sovereign as the workhorse. A bit like how the Excelsior originally appeared to be big and impressive, but then there came the Ambassador with the same saucer contours and shuttlebay shapes and whatnot, and the Excelsior was demoted to a jack-of-all-trades... Timo Saloniemi
I think Stargazer Hathaway and other Constellation types had a long life. Four nacelles put it even with Klingon B-10s Stargazer might have been a better choice for Janeway and her crew than even a Galaxy what with redundancy. That or an Ambassador. Biggest secondary hull of all canon designs…stout. It was the first with a structural integrity field but probably didn’t need it. You want something of a slab.
I was thinking Akira, too. I always loved that design. But I think it fits more specific missions than all purpose ones like Miranda and Excelsior.
Horses? We get no goddamn horses. Horses are for officers. We work on foot, knee deep in this mud, with our bare hands. And, okay, with this California class ship. I guess it's better than nothing. But a horse? Never saw a horse in my twenty years out there. (Ate half a one once. 'Least I think it used to be one. Was pretty ripe at that point.) I think there's room in Starfleet for a proper workhorse class and the California side by side. Or, more like, one atop the other. Timo Saloniemi
Given how rarely they appear in the franchise I would infer that the Ambassador-class had a very small production run relative to the Excelsiors or even the Galaxys.
Or maybe the Ambassador's where on a deep space assignments, and the Enterprise was close to Earth. But I see your point
I nominate the runabouts. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/s...est/scale-to-width-down/636?cb=20070719192541
agreed. And those long nacelle struts make it look almost like an older Ptolemy class, useful for towing cargo underneath. It wouldn't suprise me if they show that, at some point.
We don't really know much about the first half of the 24th Century, canonically....as if that really matters The Ambassador class may be the workhorse during the 25th Century.
Judging from the Dominion War scenes, I'd have to say: Akira Excelsior Galaxy Miranda Defiant I don't know why we never saw the Ambassador on DS9. Fairly sure it's not a rights issue (since there is one in "Emissary"). Did something happen to the model? (It's like why we never see the Norway class outside of ST:FC; the CGI model was corrupted and unusable.)
No doubt they could, but what would be the motivation? Back then, it would have cost money, and they already had ships galore. (They already broke the model once and put it together somewhat differently for its later appearances. The second time it purportedly broke, it might have been a bit too broken to fix even for "scanning into CGI" or however the process went back then.) Timo Saloniemi
What Timo said. It would cost to much time and money to bring the beautiful Ambassador in CGI on screen
Especially if they use the Ambassador as it was SUPPOSED to look (i.e. Probert's original vision; the one that was depicted on the briefing room wall in TNG), not the hastily-thrown-together-at-the-last-minute version we actually saw onscreen.