What Came First...

[Bry_Sinclair]

The Jem'Hadar ship ploughed pretty deeply into the Odyssey plus hit the deflector dish. If the deflector on the Sovereign-Class is a standard design, then the Odyssey's would have been charged with anti-protons as well.

Besides the Dominion had to destroy a Galaxy-Class, to show just what level of threat they posed.

 

[Timo]

If the deflector on the Sovereign-Class is a standard design, then the Odyssey's would have been charged with anti-protons as well.

Or then no Starfleet vessel has ever had its deflector charged with antiprotons - unless it has been co-opted by the Borg.

After all,

a) if deflectors were a vulnerability in general, or even in the specific case of the Sovereign class, the enemy would no doubt concentrate their fire there, which we never see happen (indeed, the Duras sisters, ideally positioned to fire at the deflector in ST:GEN, specifically fail to hit it when trying to score decisive hits); and

b) the deflector being explosive due to being charged with antiprotons came as news to Lieutenant Hawk, who should have been well versed on the specs of the ship. Only Picard, with inside info on the Borg, appeared to know of this risk.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SchwEnt]

^^^Also, behind the deflector dish at the bottom of the secondary hull are the antimatter storage pods for the intermix shaft. The Jem'hadar was probably gunning for that area, trying to bust through or ram something into that assembly.

 

[NebulaClassGuy]

It's also the area where the forward stores of photon torpedoes are held... and each of those has an antimatter warhead.

 

[Timo]

Or at least will receive antimatter before launch, from machinery that may be a particularly vulnerable spot in the overall antimatter handling system of the ship.

The Galaxy has a torpedo launcher near the warp core. The Nebula has launchers relatively far away from the core, possibly making the transfer of antimatter a riskier process. Whether such differences were of any significance in the designing of the two classes, we don't know, but we do see Galaxies sent to particularly hot spots while Nebulas don't seem to enjoy quite that status. Of course, we're mightily biased there because we can so closely observe NCC-1701-D...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[DEWLine]

And the warp core assembly is just about directly behind the main deflector dish on a Galaxy-class ship as a rule. The deflector and the big forward sensor apparatus mounted directly behind that have direct taps into the main reactor, right?

 

[E-DUB]

Like that "Excelsior/Eureka" combo. Some yeas back I did a resin model kit of a "Mirandized" Excelsior called the "Odin" class. Here's a link to the pics of that:

http://s1217.photobucket.com/albums/dd396/EmsleyWyatt/Shiloh/

I've also made reference to a "Monarch" class as the "Sovereign" equivalent.

 

[Sumghai]

The nebula condensed into the galaxy.

I always thought it was the inverse, with the engineering hull of the Galaxy being scrunched up to bring the narcelles into the Nebula config.