Headless Galaxy Classes?

[Unicron]

Indeed. And even if the Feds hadn't suffered a lot of damage to their shipyards during the war, it's always possible that they'd have to be modified to adequately produce a design like the Defiant. It's hard to judge, but plausible. We know also that the Valiant suffered from similar design bugs which hampered its early mission until Jake and Nog came along.

 

[Deks]

It was stated in DS9 to my recollection that SF is barely able to keep up with Dominion's capabilities in replacing ships.
Meaning that SF was successful in keeping up, but it was difficult.

At the same time, by the time the Dominion War began, the Defiant was already in service for approximately 2 years (and most of it's bugs were taken cared of in their entirety by O'Brien in the next few weeks up to a month ... he WAS able to patch things up in a VERY short time frame for the mission to search the Founders).
It's also quite possible that SF would have been able to standardize numerous parts used in Defiant's construction within the mentioned 2 years, making it easier to create in comparison to when it was first made as a prototype.

SF also heavily modified DS9 (a Cardassian station which was also quite old) to make it as combat ready as possible.
And they did so in just 12 months time (right after becoming aware of the Dominion and the possibility they might attack).

 

[Unicron]

Good points.

 

[publiusr]

You could argue that Defiant was the silver bullet, and that the early Defiant concept sketches were the mass produced versions with only a few Valiant Defiants made at first.

 

[SoM]

[Indeed, that's the whole point of the Defiant-class - a cheap, mass-producable, small crew, single-purpose ship,

Is there any evidence for this? I always thought, based on the admittedly non-canonical DS9 Tech Manual, that the Defiant was a very resource intensive craft for it's size. Furthermore many of the components were slow to manufacture. The original planned fleet was to be just six ships.

I'll admit in turn that I haven't read the DS9TM. My main thought in saying that was that, well, if it WASN'T cheap, then what was it for? A Defiant can't do any better than any of the larger ship classes in a fight - all the advantage, even in concept, must be in the ship design being relatively small (even at the longest end of the length spectrum it was shown with, the only vessels in the same sort of size class are the science-specialist vessels like the Obereth and Nova-classes), relatively cheap, involving a relatively small crew and, ultimately, being relatively "disposable".

Or to rephrase, if a Defiant in construction and use was resource-hungry once it was past the prototype stage, and the same resources could beget a larger ship which would perform just as well within the Defiant's core purpose (i.e., fighting) while exceeding it in other areas, where's the point of the Defiant-class?

Agreed on that. People tend to point out that the Defiant was supposed to be the start of a new warfleet - but "The Search" doesn't exactly say that this fleet would consist of Defiant class ships. Instead, said design is consistently considered a prototype if not a testbed (and a failed one at that). And Starfleet employs her in a silver-bullet fashion in the end...

Why invest these new technologies in such a radical departure from the standard Starfleet saucer/secondary/nacelle ship paradigm, though, if it wasn't even a prototype, but a testbed? [Surely testbedding would have meant bunging the bits on an existing ship to see how they performed?]

What I always took from "The Search" was that Starfleet had given up on the Defiant-class as too unreliable and not worth the further investment to turn it into a workable design (i.e., taking the time to fix it was seen as throwing good money after bad). A couple of transfers later, Sisko, when looking for a ship to take to the Gamma Quadrant after the Founders, happened on his old pet project, still lying in mothballs, and specifically requested it ("That's why I asked for the Defiant"), convinced it was still viable. And O'Brien managed to turn it into a usable ship, albeit not without compromises - the top speed, in particular, had to be artificially limited to well below the potential top speed (Warp 9 vs. at least 9.5) it could achieve for fear of the ship ripping itself apart.

I'm not convinced they would ever have given him, say, a(nother) Galaxy-class to head off on his low-odds mission, but I don't think the Defiant was the ONLY option he had for his search.

I'd be inclined to agree; I think they'd have wanted as many Defiants as they could get, but that issues with its more specialized systems compared to conventional designs would reduce the total number they could build during the war.

Well, besides Deks' very valid points about any specialised components becoming standardised,...

As was pointed out, it was overpowered and imbalanced. The thought occurs that one way that could have come about would have if they'd plugged in some already-standard components from significantly larger ships as part of trying to make it more quickly and cheaply, rather than designing all-new systems which were far too big for the ship design.

 

[The Badger]

I'll admit in turn that I haven't read the DS9TM. My main thought in saying that was that, well, if it WASN'T cheap, then what was it for?

What was it for? Well, this is purely my subjective impression, but I always thought it's purpose was to both test and use the new technology. Now you can ask why that tech was not applied to more conventional ship designs. Obviously some of it was. We've seen quantum torpedoes on other ships, and it's quite likely other innovations have also been added to the fleet.

But some of the new tech might not scale up to larger ships. Consider the ablative armour. (Again I must stress that I know the DS9 TM is non canonical. You're free to disregard this if you so wish, but this is the basis for my reasoning). Ablative armour is slow and expensive to manufacture. If this is the case, it would be inefficient to attempt to apply it to larger vessels. Given a choice of protecting six ships or one (or whatever the ratio is) what would you choose?

And then there are the rapid fire pulse phasers. Now we have seen pulse phasers before, most noticeably on the Reliant, but the Defiant's seem much more advanced. It is not merely that they are more powerful (though they are), but they are also considerably more efficient and have significantly greater shield penetration.

Now in principle there seems no reason why such weapons should not simply be put onto a larger multipurpose ship. However, unlike most phaser weapons Star Fleet employs these ones seem to be unable to fire in any direction except directly ahead. The ship itself has to turn to bring it's weapons to bear. A lot more convenient in a small maneuverable craft than in a big slow one. One could speculate that the ship was designed around the weapon, rather like the A-10 Warthog, though there's no evidence of that.

It's also a smaller target in combat, and it's shields only have to protect a much smaller area.

 

[Timo]

One might indeed argue that the ship tested both the concept of the pulse phaser, and the closely related concept of a small, low-profile ship required for closing in on the enemy so that the new very short-ranged weapon could be utilized at all. The small size would then be unrelated to production costs (except that perhaps the testbed would have been built slightly smaller than the intended production versions to reduce costs - or alternately slightly larger, to save on miniaturization expenses).

The pulse phasers sound exactly like a dedicated anti-Borg weapon: they fire less phaser energy (because there are gaps in between) but they do so in a Borg-damanging fashion because the pulses can be varied and customized. They might offer no advantage against more conventional enemies - but by sheer chance, they would result in Sisko having access to a small and agile and expendable ship that still packs uncharacteristic firepower, so Sisko would take this ship and not some other design intended for 40 suicide candidates.

Starfleet really might not have anything else to offer in that size and capacity range. Othe ships of such small size might not be warships, and it would be less optimal to send Sisko there in even a slightly larger ship where up to 200 lives might be lost. But it would still be sheer happenstance that the Defiant met the specs for this "armed recce" mission, as it wouldn't have been designed for it, or for anything remotely resembling it.

...A bit like how the Mosquito completely randomly happened to emerge as the perfect designator plane for WWII bomber formations, even though originally designed as a superfast twin-engine light bomber, a job it never really performed.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unicron]

SFC3's take on the pulse phasers seemed to imply they might actually be a little more powerful per burst than a traditional beam, because of the layering effect of the pulse, and thus could do more damage. The key drawback compared to beams was that the layers would dissipate more quickly and thus the pulse phaser had a more limited range.

 

[The Badger]

^ Yeah. I think the implication was, even if you only put the same amount of power in, pulse phasers are more damaging than regular phasers. And they could take more power than the normal sort could.

There may have been drawbacks. I've suggested that the ship itself has to be aimed. Unicron raises the possibility of shorter range. Perhaps also pulse phasers are less versatile than the more conventional sort. Only useful as weapons, whereas beams can be rigged for operations as diverse as energy transfer to performing a ceasarian on a pregnant space creature.

As an aside, there is an interesting fan design, the Harrier class tactical scout, that was specifically designed with rapid mass production in mind. Most of the components are off the shelf, the bridge for example is a modified runabout cockpit module. It can be seen here:http://www.subspace-comms.net/index.php?topic=3304.0