But you can trust me, take my word for it.
Defiant For The Borg? Makes No Sense
- Thread starter All Seeing Eye
- Start date
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
But you can trust me, take my word for it.
You expect me to take your word for it? I don't know you from Adam.
Nor do I know you from adam, yet you say the exact same thing.But you can trust me, take my word for it.
You expect me to take your word for it? I don't know you from Adam.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Nor do I know you from adam, yet you say the exact same thing.But you can trust me, take my word for it.
You expect me to take your word for it? I don't know you from Adam.
That's different. I'm Tachyon Shield.
I have to at least give you credit, your posts are entertaining. I may not agree with most of them, but thats half the fun right?
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Nothing much left to say though is there? The "Actual discussion" has already taken place, everyone has made their position on the matter clear.
Threads start of as they should, we have discussion about the topic at hand and we debate about it and then eventually there's pretty much nothing left to be said.
As far as I can see there's nothing left to be said now about this particular subject. So ya know, whatever. Once the thread is finished I don't see any harm in throwing in a bit of humour towards the end.
And as for me? I'm just a sarcastic bastard. I love to discuss topics, and have debates. Then once it's over I like to have a battle of wits.
Sisko said as much.
Not necessarily; prototypes don't see much fighting, and the designs that emerge from prototypes don't necessarily much resemble the prototypes.
Sisko never said this. While it may make sense, other interpretations also make sense, and the one about swarms has never been supported by the characters, or by the actions of the Defiant.
One should also remember that how Starfleet expected the Defiant, or the future anti-Borg fleet derived from the Defiant, to work need not be what would really have worked against the Borg. When the Defiant was designed, the Feds didn't yet have reliable intelligence on the Borg. Sisko said the development began five years before SD 48200, while "Best of the Both Worlds" takes place around SD 43900; all that Starfleet would have to go by would have been "Q Who?", and we now know our heroes got basically everything wrong about the Borg in that early encounter.
Perhaps the Defiant was conceptually deeply flawed and would never have stood a chance. If the concept was swarms, perhaps the best way to go would have been a big battleship with adaptive weapons. If the concept was heavily armored battlewagons (and the prototype just happened to be small and nimble for budgetary reasons), perhaps swarm tactics would indeed have worked better. Starfleet did abandon the project, soon after "BoBW", and instead of Sisko's hollow-sounding "the threat lessened" excuse, the reason could have been that they found out the Defiant had been the exact wrong way to tackle the Borg issue.
We can perhaps work out what the Defiant was built to do, but we should not do it from the point of view of knowing everything we know of the Borg NOW, and then ourselves devising an efficient Borg-fighter. Starfleet didn't do it that way; they trusted Riker's flawed report from J-25.
Timo Saloniemi
That, if I am not mistaken, is exactly what Icheb's parents did when they infected the Borg with a particularly nasty bioweapon. So the proof of concept is sound; the Borg are suckers for tasty bait.
They would have -594?
well it might be because star fleet thought that they had created something to defeat the borg but the were so wrong
What special materials other than pulse phasers? Everything else is the same. The hull would be stronger and ablative armor would be installed as well so more is needed for this area. I can definitely see 30 Defiants being built for the same amount of material as a Sovereign. Weapons systems are smaller and since there are already other small ships, this wouldn't be an issue. Constructing a Defiant would take considerably less time than constructing a Sovereign so mass producing them would be easy.
The Defiant was a test bed for new technology, so we can't say 'Everything else is the same'. A lot of the systems would be brand new, revolutionary, so would have to be manufactured specially. Until such time as dedicated manufacturing systems can be set up, this would be a small scale operation, and comparatively slow.
Ablative armour has shown itself to be very useful on occasions, yet isn't standard across the fleet. This suggests (though does not prove) that it is in limited supply for some reason. The most likely explanation, though others exist, is that such armour requires uncommon materials to manufacture.
It requires nothing of the sort.
Ablative armor is another of those REAL TECHNOLOGY concepts which were adopted into "Treknology."
Ablative armor, simply put, is armor which is designed to dissipate energy by being burned off, rather than allowing that energy to penetrate.
We use ablative armor today, in many different applications.
The problem with this sort of armor is that (1) it has to be replaced after use, and (2) it adds a lot of weight to the object it's attached to.
(This is similar in concept to, but not identical to, something we also use currently called "reactive armor"... but while ablative armor simply burns off, reactive armor is typically made from an actual explosive compound, to "decentralize" the energy from any weapon impact.)
In other words... the reason that most ships don't carry ablative armor is because of the mass penalty associated with the technology, not the complexity of the technology.
The Defiant, on the other hand, has "oversized engines" and so forth... with tiny little "closet-like" cabins, no science facilities, and a medical bay smaller than my kitchen. Those "oversized engines" provide propulsion for the weapons and defensive systems, with very little in the way of accommodation for crew.
One of those defensive systems is "ablative armor." Presumably, the Defiant has a "resource replenishment" bay someplace, where they can draw material from in order to use a replication scheme to repair burned-away armor plating in between engagements.
The mass of such armor is not inconsiderable, even for a ship like Defiant... but it would totally undermine the mission profile of a ship like a Galaxy.
Again... the technology isn't expensive, or hard to implement... it's just very, very heavy.
For modern-day equivalents... think of the reentry heat shields from the Apollo-program space capsules.
Well, I know the DS9 Tech Manual isn't canon, but in the absence of a more definitive source...
"The ablative armor hull plating has been in development for a number of years, though various factors related to materials availability, instabilities, phaser and torpedo resistance and long fabrication times have prevented it's use on frontline starships." p.132.
(emphasis mine)
Until some thing from a canon source contradicts that, I'm going to work under the assumption that ablative armour (and maybe other components for the Defiant) require special materials and take a long time to produce.
It's also stated (p.121) that it was originally planned to build as few as six, custom built, copies. So initially there were no plans to mass produce them. Perhaps things changed during the Dominion War, perhaps not. I don't think there has been any indication either way.
"The ablative armor hull plating has been in development for a number of years, though various factors related to materials availability, instabilities, phaser and torpedo resistance and long fabrication times have prevented it's use on frontline starships." p.132.
(emphasis mine)
Until some thing from a canon source contradicts that, I'm going to work under the assumption that ablative armour (and maybe other components for the Defiant) require special materials and take a long time to produce.
It's also stated (p.121) that it was originally planned to build as few as six, custom built, copies. So initially there were no plans to mass produce them. Perhaps things changed during the Dominion War, perhaps not. I don't think there has been any indication either way.
Yeah, in like... 2366 or 67 whenever the Defiant got built. The Sovereign is shinier and newer. The Nova is shot off of the same development project and could use many common design elements. Starfleet of the 2370s would have no problem building Defiants en masse.
^ OK, that's plausible. I'm not convinced that the Fleet would be churning them out by the bucket load (the TM quote suggests that it is the availability of raw materials and the long manufacturing time that are the important factors here) but I'll certainly accept a much higher figure than the initial six proposed.
Availability of raw materials being the problem is the biggest load of garbage I've heard.
The Federation spans through 8000 Ly's.
Do you have any idea how much space and raw materials that is?
Simply speaking: VAST ... especially for a civilization with replicators that can convert energy into matter and is incredibly efficient in terms of recycling (essentially nothing goes into waste) ... and despite some materials being problematic to replicate, I doubt the time frame would have been huge by comparison.
It's just a 'convenient way' to prevent the technology from being used on a large scale and increase the drama ... as if fleets comprised out of Defiants wouldn't have suffered losses at all.
Problem is ... the writers made SF in such a capacity that they don't follow rational/logical way of thinking when it comes to fleets/upgrades and whatnot.
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