Defiant cut-away
- Thread starter MiKaTrek
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I cropped the cutaway out and did a reverse image search (oh, brave new world...). A larger version was posted to all of one website, with no information on it. Backtracking though the directory, I found a non-cutaway version of the same Martin drawing. The cutaway is unsigned, though, so I don't know if he did that version, or some fan after the fact. Either way, it's the smallest depiction I've ever seen of the Defiant outside of that one shot in "First Contact". Though the bridge does fit surprisingly well into the nose...
Cutaway
Enclosed
Cutaway
Enclosed
4 decks, with the bridge being in that large circular section on the very top of the ship.
I like it. A lot of structures that didn't really make sense otherwise make perfect sense at that scale. The weird wedges in the front become escape pods/lifeboats. The center circle is a hatch for the warp core. The sets fit nicely. Of course docking nose-first is still a problem.
Also, no room for the deflector dish. Or the shuttle bay (which is canonically on the underside, in the middle of that circle.)
There do appear to be some greebles forward of the bridge as well, could they be what powers the nav-deflector in this design?
The shuttles are located to the port and starboard sections of the ship as seen in the cutaway. And if this is indeed the teeny-tiny Defiant in First Contact, we never saw it launch any shuttle, so the shuttle bay could be anywhere!
The shuttles are located to the port and starboard sections of the ship as seen in the cutaway. And if this is indeed the teeny-tiny Defiant in First Contact, we never saw it launch any shuttle, so the shuttle bay could be anywhere!
The original idea for the Defiant was to be a much smaller ship, and yes, you can clearly see the original concept. The idea of a detachable bridge, roughly like a runabout, in the nose always made more sense. The idea of putting the bridge in the center, honestly, always felt like a major mistake to me. (All of this just to give someone a "nose-in" docking scheme which, frankly, NEVER made the tiniest bit of sense anyway!)
Ideally, the "docking port" would have been on the underside... perhaps just forward of the engine core? Having it be the size shown here would have made a LOT more sense... it would have been very much in the TNG-era "fighter" scale... not the "damned nearly as big as a TOS ship" that it later transformed into...
Interestingly, this ship size DID show a pair of shuttles... just inboard from the warp engines. And the location for those makes plenty of sense.
I wonder... did the ship, at this scale, have landing capability? It should have, anyway...
Ideally, the "docking port" would have been on the underside... perhaps just forward of the engine core? Having it be the size shown here would have made a LOT more sense... it would have been very much in the TNG-era "fighter" scale... not the "damned nearly as big as a TOS ship" that it later transformed into...
Interestingly, this ship size DID show a pair of shuttles... just inboard from the warp engines. And the location for those makes plenty of sense.
I wonder... did the ship, at this scale, have landing capability? It should have, anyway...
If they could land Voyager, they could land Defiant... Unless they could find no place for landing gears. After all, the ship is jam packed with all kinds of combat goodness. There might not have been room...
I'm not sure I can really see the logic of a detachable bridge. Unless it's a last-ditch measure to save the heroes when their ship is about to fall to the enemy one way or another - in which case having a forward-firing lifeboat sounds like the worst possible choice. A bold ship should always keep the enemy in front, so an escape maneuver should be taken in some other direction...
The fancy separable nosepiece might serve some combat function. The idea of an explosive warhead has often been mentioned, harkening back to the days of the pole-mounted naval torpedo... But perhaps the nosepiece is a breaching pod for boarding maneuvers? Our TNG heroes proved that the Borg were fairly vulnerable to boarding parties; this anti-Borg ship might have been designed to fight at such close quarters that a breaching pod would be a logical addition to the arsenal.
And if the nosepiece is dedicated to the act of getting inside a (hostile) vessel, then it only makes sense that the nosepiece would also serve as the easiest way to move between the ship and the space station to which the ship is docked. Say, there could be not just one but two side-by-side boarding tubes there, hidden behind those parallel elongated panels that feature so prominently on the topside of the nosepiece. They'd swing up like the refueling tube of a modern jet fighter, ready to breach the wall of a Borg vessel, or to gently lock to a Starfleet-compatible docking collar.
Timo Saloniemi
The fancy separable nosepiece might serve some combat function. The idea of an explosive warhead has often been mentioned, harkening back to the days of the pole-mounted naval torpedo... But perhaps the nosepiece is a breaching pod for boarding maneuvers? Our TNG heroes proved that the Borg were fairly vulnerable to boarding parties; this anti-Borg ship might have been designed to fight at such close quarters that a breaching pod would be a logical addition to the arsenal.
And if the nosepiece is dedicated to the act of getting inside a (hostile) vessel, then it only makes sense that the nosepiece would also serve as the easiest way to move between the ship and the space station to which the ship is docked. Say, there could be not just one but two side-by-side boarding tubes there, hidden behind those parallel elongated panels that feature so prominently on the topside of the nosepiece. They'd swing up like the refueling tube of a modern jet fighter, ready to breach the wall of a Borg vessel, or to gently lock to a Starfleet-compatible docking collar.
Timo Saloniemi
You're not thinking, Timo.
Think of a jet aircraft's ejector seat, as a parallel. The pilot can keep his aircraft operational, or try to, until the very last moment. So... suppose Defiant is in combat, takes a hit to the engine compartment, and is facing an imminent breach. The ship can continue to operate until almost the moment that the breach occurs, with a full crew operating the ship from the bridge. You have two other escape pods, and two shuttles (useful for shepherding the pods).
So, you evacuate the ship... twin shuttles and twin escape pods... while the ship is still engaging the enemy at near full capacity. And eject the bridge module only once there's no other option.
Let's consider a parallel... ST'09, and the Kelvin. Had the Kelvin had an ejectable bridge module, George Kirk could have survived... and the ship may have even been more effective, since there would have been a full bridge crew.
The bridge module on the original-concept Defiant certainly had its own engines, its own head, its own replicator... almost like a large shuttle.
As far as a "forward firing lifeboat being the worst possible choice"... oh, c'mon. I know that the SFX sequences made it seem that all this combat was occuring at distances of mere meters, but the dialog made it quite clear that the REAL distances were in millions of kilometers... the odds of "accidentally running into the opposition" is pretty slim. And let's also be clear... pretty much every time that a (non-Klingon) ship got the crap kicked out of it, we saw it turn tail and flee combat, didn't we?
Let's be clear. The original concept for the Defiant had this as the bridge module. But obviously, the "head honchos" at PPC at the time made arbitrary, ill-conceived choices to change things, and we got a ship that's, frankly, a MESS. (And c'mon... can anyone seriously say that the "docking nose-first" thing makes ANY DAMN SENSE???)
You're basically repeating what I envision Berman and Braga arguing, years ago. I think it was a mistake then, and I still think it's a mistake.
Not if the module ejected forward!
Which is why the bow bridge as such may make sense, but an ejectable bow bridge doesn't, not really.
Well, not really. The original concept for this ship already had the separable-looking nosepiece back when she used to be a nondescript Bajoran freighter, and long before she became the Defiant. Once Jim Martin was told to turn the Bajoran freighter into a hero starship, that's when the bridge may have gone to various places, starting with the nosepiece. But before that order was given, there might have been no specific place for a bridge, just like there was no specific location for it in the Wadi ship of "Move Along Home", a ship designed along the very same lines as the ship that became the Defiant (the top and bottom rings, the wedge nose) and probably also originally conceived as a Bajoran vessel (and indeed used as one later on).
There aren't really any other options, because you have to stick the narrow part of the ship into the narrow hole in the station.
Okay, so certain other Starfleet ships tried to do the naval anachronism and have a "gangway hatch" on the port side of their saucer. If the Defiant had that, she could theoretically edge in vertically, port side first... But that wouldn't make any better sense, considering the sides of the Defiant consist of her engines. Similarly, it would be a bit silly to slide a Miranda into that slot portside edge first, considering the placement of her engine nacelles. Although the horizontal nose-first approach of a few Mirandas makes much less sense than either edge-on or rotated-nose-first, or the Defiant horizontal nose-first.
Timo Saloniemi
Yes, Voyager has a standard docking port right on her prow.
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