Defiant's dedication plaque quote
- Thread starter Rÿcher
- Start date
Kirk quoted it in an episode of TOS, if I recall. I think it's from a Walt Whitman poem or something.
It doesn't seem out of place for an exploratory starship, but it does seem out of place for a small, efficient battleship like the Defiant, built specifically to battle the Borg.
Perhaps more fitting would be this quote from Amelia Earheart:
"Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace." Or perhaps Pierre Cornielle's "To win without risk is to triumph without glory."
It doesn't seem out of place for an exploratory starship, but it does seem out of place for a small, efficient battleship like the Defiant, built specifically to battle the Borg.
Perhaps more fitting would be this quote from Amelia Earheart:
"Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace." Or perhaps Pierre Cornielle's "To win without risk is to triumph without glory."
A good quote, but not so good for the Defiant. Defiant was a warship, a more 'warlike' quote would have made more sense.
The odds are, this quote comes from the first starship Defiant, which for all we know was an exploratory vessel of some sort in the 22nd century.
After all, we know that the various Enterprises all have the same motto on their plaques (from the -A onwards, at least). It might be Starfleet practice to associate a motto with a name in general.
Too bad that a motto wasn't in fashion during the mid-23rd century, so neither Kirk's old ship nor the TOS-era Defiant have one visible, and we thus can't tell if the latter would have had the "All I ask" thing there, too.
OTOH, it seems that both NX-01 and NX-02 carried a motto on their plaques - and the motto of Archer's ship is the one that the later Enterprises used, too. So we might argue that the motto of Sisko's ship comes from some old United Earth Starfleet vessel, too...
Timo Saloniemi
Rÿcher
Fleet Captain
whoa. You just blew my mind.
pass the kleenex.
I guess my problem with the original quote is that it's not a tall ship. It's a rather diminutive ship. If it were a grand, massive ship, something on par with the Enterprise-D then yeah, I could see that quote being fitting and the quote seems to me something that would be reserved for the explorers.
I remember reading that when they couldn't use the name Valiant as Sisko's ship because the studio didn't want two ships starting with a V name, they chose U.S.S. Defiant because it was used in the original series and the mistaken belief that the Royal Navy had a sailing ship named HMS Defiant during the Napoleonic wars. In fact, the name HMS Defiant comes from the 1962 film H.M.S. Defiant (released as Damn the Defiant! in the United States) starring Alec Guinness and Dick Bogarde. Perhaps the John Masefield quote is used because of this mistaken belief and they were trying to create a relationship between the starship Defiant and the sailing HMS Defiant?
Hey, not bad! But what specific relationship would Masefield's poem have with a fictional HMS Defiant? Just a generic reference to sailing ships, or something more?
One might also suspect that the motto was simply the first thing that popped in the mind of the prop designer, and was never intended to be seen and read...
Timo Saloniemi
One might also suspect that the motto was simply the first thing that popped in the mind of the prop designer, and was never intended to be seen and read...
Timo Saloniemi
Well the Defiant is a ship of war so how would this fit.
"Cry havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War"
"Cry havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War"
