Carriers in Star Trek

[Formless]

Uh, dude, we don't actually know what the Peregrin class is. Fans assume that its the Federation fighters that we've seen a couple times, but even that is unclear; the one time we heard about the Peregrin class supposedly it was said to be a one man craft, but the fighters used by the Maquis were clearly two man vessels. However, even if it were the Federation fighter, we rarely see them deployed, and most instances were either stolen/used by the Maquis, seen towing starships that got their asses kicked during the war, and precisely one major battle between Starfleet and the Dominion. The Delta Flyer saw more combat than that, and that was a suped up shuttle slapped together by the crew of Voyager out in the middle of the Delta Quadrant! I'm not saying that they are useless or else the Maquis wouldn't have bothered with them, but still. They too make the Defiant class look relatively successful in terms of deployment rates. Probably because they're only slightly bigger and better armed than a runabout, and this ain't Star Wars where there are Death Stars with critical weaknesses only a starfighter can hit.

[Simon_Jester]

There's a fairly persistent pattern of maximum sustainable speed being at least .4 to .5 warp factors below emergency maximum, with cruising speed being a good deal below that.

There is also a fairly consistent pattern of Federation starships having protruded Warp nacelles.

Does this .4 to .5 difference also apply to ships with nacelles integrated into the hull?

I fail to see how it would help. If having the nacelles integrated into the hull was more efficient people would do it more often. If it's less efficient, then either all speeds are lower across the board, or (also likely) cruising speed is disproportionately low. It would almost certainly NOT result in a situation where the sustained cruising speed, the 'we can manage this for a day' speed, and the emergency top speed end up close together.

There is not a lot of evidence of Federation ships being sent around for pure 'flag-showing.' The closest they come is diplomatic missions and the like. For those, a Defiant could do about as good a job as another ship... but from the point of view of the Federation it would send entirely the wrong message to send their envoys aboard a lean, mean, fighting machine.

Why? The message would be very clear: We are peacefully negotiating with you in good faith, but note that we also can take different measures if necessary.

The Federation sometimes seems to bend over backwards not to send that message during the TNG era. They don't really go in for gunboat diplomacy.

Even a light multirole frigate is a waste of money if an even cheaper freighter can do the same job. I'm talking about optimizing efficiency by better utilizing of resources, and I don't think you can achieve much solely with multirole ships.

We have no evidence that there is a lack of freighters and passenger ships (except, perhaps, on the unexplored or unsecured frontier where using such ships would be actively unsafe). The practical side of this still circles back to warship versus multirole.

It may well be that a ship which does not require trained engineers to operate will have performance so low that it is effectively useless. There's no point in building a pirate-chaser that is too slow to catch the pirates, or too weak to beat them when it catches them.

Pirates are no uniform fraction in ST! You can have low-tech pirates in a backwater area where a few Peregrines are enough to keep them at bay. Even using cheap frigates would be a waste of resources here.

Then you have pirates who are much better equipped, so you better send some cruisers.

They have plenty of Peregrines, so that's not a problem. However, any real warship must be designed to some reasonable assessment of the kind of threat it is intended to overcome. That includes tiny feeble warships. As a rule, one only designs tiny feeble warships if one knows they will never be called upon to fight well equipped enemies. Not just that you wouldn't intentionally send them to fight such enemies, but that such enemies can't even reach them. Victorian river gunboats are a good example of this- designed with a few machine guns and light cannon, but hopelessly weak by the standards of ocean going warships. And that was okay because no oceangoing warship could ever reach them to fight them.

Space isn't like that; there are no protected zones where stronger ships physically cannot go. So there is a realistic minimum size below which you just don't build warships, because while they might somewhere out there find someone weak enough to beat up, the risk of them being overwhelmed and destroyed by a competent or prepared oppobennt is too great.

Thus, there may well be good reasons why the lightest Federation frigates are the size they are- that may be as small as the Federation can build a ship and seriously expect it to survive a reasonably broad variety of missions.

We don't actually see much evidence of Mirandas being in use except after the emergency war mobilizations of the late TNG and mid-DS9 era. In which case I see no reason to assume the Mirandas ARE in regular use- but in a war emergency they have to be brought out of storage and recrewed. Sure, a frigate design might be better in some ways, but not in others, and you'd have to build those ships, whereas the Miranda hulls are already sitting around waiting to be used.

No. From the start of the Dominion war, we immediately see Mirandas. It's clear that they are still in active use and that they have to be used for frontline service.

The Dominion War wasn't the first time the Federation mobilized in the mid-2300s. It may well be that we're seeing Mirandas that were brought out of mothballs after Wolf 359. There were at least a few of them in service prior to Wolf 359 (Sisko served on one), but that in turn may well be explained by ships being kept in service through refits and updates, and there is no reason I know of to assume that the Mirandas were a significant portion of the active-duty fleet prior to Wolf 359.

Clearly the Federation didn't have enough reserve shipbuilding capacity to get by without 23rd-century vintage ships, but that's not the same thing as saying they're using Mirandas extensively for jobs that a cheap freighter or vastly smaller and cheaper modern warship could do just as well.

Why would the Federation council give up being able to decide whether it is more important to deliver the medicine or secure the neutral zone, by removing the choice from their hands by reducing the size of their multirole fleet?

Because the Federation council should recognize that their logictics network is seriously fucked up if cruisers have to be regularily used for "emergency" missions.

So instead of using cruisers as a stopgap measure, they should establish a strategy to supply their colonies in a way that doesn't waste valuable resources.

This would require having vast numbers of freighters sitting around idle, hovering over all sorts of planets that normally do not require their services, in case of an emergency. Which is extremely wasteful.

What you're missing here is long transit times. Ships cannot just jump from one side of the Federation to the other in a hurry. It is normal for there to be only one starship within a few days' flight time of a sudden emergency... and given the Federation's fleet size, changing that would require the construction of many thousands of ships. I doubt that that would be 'cheaper' than maintaining the existing multirole force.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Because the Federation council should recognize that their logictics network is seriously fucked up if cruisers have to be regularily used for "emergency" missions.

Where do you get the idea that the use of cruisers in emergency/priority missions is a sign of a faulty logistics network? I've already posted a real-life example of a military using a warship for cargo duty in a special situation (a point you largely ignored, by the way), and there are dozens of examples of naval vessels being mobilized for peacetime emergency situations. It clearly isn't as unprecedented as you seem to think, and it certainly isn't symptomatic of an organization with broken logistics.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Indeed - cruisers appear to be part of the logistics network.

[Lord Revan]

think about it if you want make sure something or someone gets delivered from point A to point B ASAP when there's hostiles about a cruiser is ideal for the task, durable enough that most hostiles will think twice about engaging but still fairly fast. I mean when Starfleet uses Galaxies (or real life navies use combat ships) to deliver something it's generally something important, I can't think of a single episode where Starfleet vessel was responsible for trivial bulk cargo.

[BabelHuber]

Uh, dude, we don't actually know what the Peregrin class is. Fans assume that its the Federation fighters that we've seen a couple times, but even that is unclear; the one time we heard about the Peregrin class supposedly it was said to be a one man craft, but the fighters used by the Maquis were clearly two man vessels. However, even if it were the Federation fighter, we rarely see them deployed, and most instances were either stolen/used by the Maquis, seen towing starships that got their asses kicked during the war, and precisely one major battle between Starfleet and the Dominion. The Delta Flyer saw more combat than that, and that was a suped up shuttle slapped together by the crew of Voyager out in the middle of the Delta Quadrant! I'm not saying that they are useless or else the Maquis wouldn't have bothered with them, but still. They too make the Defiant class look relatively successful in terms of deployment rates. Probably because they're only slightly bigger and better armed than a runabout, and this ain't Star Wars where there are Death Stars with critical weaknesses only a starfighter can hit.

Sorry, but this is not important. Important is just that the fighters we see in DS9 should be perfectly capable to protect trade and do some patrolling duty in some areas.

Of course these areas must lack an adversary who laughs about such ships. But in ST we often see species which aren't as developed (yet?) as the Federation is.

In such areas, using more expensive ships is a waste of resources. I don't understand how one can argue with this, it's obvious.

[BabelHuber]

I fail to see how it would help. If having the nacelles integrated into the hull was more efficient people would do it more often. If it's less efficient, then either all speeds are lower across the board, or (also likely) cruising speed is disproportionately low. It would almost certainly NOT result in a situation where the sustained cruising speed, the 'we can manage this for a day' speed, and the emergency top speed end up close together.

Of course integrated nacelles mean a lower Warp speed, we have found out that this is cannon. But do we know how nacelles integrated into the hull affect the delta between top spüeed and emergency speed?

I'd say no, so this is mere speculation. We don't know the "regular" top speed of the Defiant.

On top of it, the Defiant is the only known class with this design, so we have no valid comparison for estimation.

The Federation sometimes seems to bend over backwards not to send that message during the TNG era. They don't really go in for gunboat diplomacy.

Sending a Defiant is no more gunboat diplomacy than sending a Galaxy. A species which would be threatend by one of them would also be threatened by the other.

We have no evidence that there is a lack of freighters and passenger ships (except, perhaps, on the unexplored or unsecured frontier where using such ships would be actively unsafe). The practical side of this still circles back to warship versus multirole.

No, and hoestly I don't understand why you don't get this.

We see cruisers transporting cargo because there is no other viable transport available in the show.

It's multirole cruisers only vs. multirole corvettes/ frigates plus freighters plus warships plus cruisers.

They have plenty of Peregrines, so that's not a problem. However, any real warship must be designed to some reasonable assessment of the kind of threat it is intended to overcome. That includes tiny feeble warships. As a rule, one only designs tiny feeble warships if one knows they will never be called upon to fight well equipped enemies. Not just that you wouldn't intentionally send them to fight such enemies, but that such enemies can't even reach them. Victorian river gunboats are a good example of this- designed with a few machine guns and light cannon, but hopelessly weak by the standards of ocean going warships. And that was okay because no oceangoing warship could ever reach them to fight them.

I never ever have talked about "tiny warships"! What the fuck would you do with them in the first place?

Small frigates and tiny corvettes are another story, though. But these are cost-effective multirole vessels unsuited for warfare against any serious opponent.

And yes, you had ocean-going gunboats like the SMS Panther (used in the Agadir crisis). Such ships were perfectly capable of doing missions in backwater areas, thereby saving money.

When such a little gunboat is enough to do the job, only an imbecile would use a cruiser instead. Of course, when you lack such cheap gunboats, you have to use cruisers - you can only use what you have after all.

But since you can build multiple gunboats for a single cruiser, it makes sense to manufacture both types of ships, thereby allocating your resources in a more efficient way.

And this is exactly what the Federation also should do!

Space isn't like that; there are no protected zones where stronger ships physically cannot go. So there is a realistic minimum size below which you just don't build warships, because while they might somewhere out there find someone weak enough to beat up, the risk of them being overwhelmed and destroyed by a competent or prepared oppobennt is too great.

I guess this belongs to your tiny-warship-strawman.

Thus, there may well be good reasons why the lightest Federation frigates are the size they are- that may be as small as the Federation can build a ship and seriously expect it to survive a reasonably broad variety of missions.

A frigate does not need to survive " a reasonably broad variety of missions" because you only send it to missions it can handle. And when a frigate can handle a specific mission, it is crazy to use a cruiser instead. If it can't handle the mission, it would be crazy to deploy it.

Any sane military planner would try to use expensive ships only for missions which warrant such an expensive ship.

Are you seriously suggesting that a preferable approach is to make missions more costly than necessary? This is retarded, sorry.

There were at least a few of them in service prior to Wolf 359 (Sisko served on one),

Bingo! They weren't all mothballed, at least the more up-to-date ones were still in service at Wolf359.

Ans this is consistent with the fact that we see them in fucking frontline service.

You can ignore this point, and I'll bring it back up: You would not send previously mothballed ships as cannon fodder to the front lines, you would use them for second-line duties!

It's like the light cruisers of WW1-vintage in WW2: GB used these to escort convoys in the North Sea, but GB did not use these outdated vessels to hunt down German surface raiders.

By allocating these outdated cruisers to convoy duty, GB could use their newer and better cruisers for other things, like helping hunting down the Scharnhorst

What you're missing here is long transit times. Ships cannot just jump from one side of the Federation to the other in a hurry. It is normal for there to be only one starship within a few days' flight time of a sudden emergency... and given the Federation's fleet size, changing that would require the construction of many thousands of ships. I doubt that that would be 'cheaper' than maintaining the existing multirole force.

Dear lord! You don't have to send cheap freighters around from one end of the Federation to the other! You station them where needed, because you have plenty of them and hence can do so!

The alternative is to use a much smaller number of cruisers as stopgaps, which does not make much sense at all.

Let's just say the Federation has 7,000 cruisers. Let's also say, with the same amount of resources, the Federation could also have 3,000 cruisers, 500 Defiants, 5,000 cheap frigates and an additional 8,000 freighters.

The latter seems a more appropriate use of resources for me...

[Prometheus Unbound]

Of course integrated nacelles mean a lower Warp speed, we have found out that this is cannon.

No we didn't. No such mention has been made.

[Scottish Ninja]

Because the Federation council should recognize that their logictics network is seriously fucked up if cruisers have to be regularily used for "emergency" missions.

Where do you get the idea that the use of cruisers in emergency/priority missions is a sign of a faulty logistics network? I've already posted a real-life example of a military using a warship for cargo duty in a special situation (a point you largely ignored, by the way), and there are dozens of examples of naval vessels being mobilized for peacetime emergency situations. It clearly isn't as unprecedented as you seem to think, and it certainly isn't symptomatic of an organization with broken logistics.

Here's an example from just the other day, actually - a Norwegian F-16 flew an emergency mission to deliver medical equipment from Trondheim to Bodø. Obviously Norway has reasonably well-developed transportation infrastructure - if there wasn't an emergency it would've been trivial to put the machine in a van and drive it, or put it on a train. But in this case the chance to fly it up on a fighter jet came in very useful.

[Crazedwraith]

Of course integrated nacelles mean a lower Warp speed, we have found out that this is cannon.

No we didn't. No such mention has been made.

Also it's more likely a function of size or even just design. The Nova Class is similar size the Defiant has Sovereign style nacelles... and a top speed of Warp 8. Even less than the Defiant.

[Simon_Jester]

I fail to see how it would help. If having the nacelles integrated into the hull was more efficient people would do it more often. If it's less efficient, then either all speeds are lower across the board, or (also likely) cruising speed is disproportionately low. It would almost certainly NOT result in a situation where the sustained cruising speed, the 'we can manage this for a day' speed, and the emergency top speed end up close together.

Of course integrated nacelles mean a lower Warp speed, we have found out that this is cannon. But do we know how nacelles integrated into the hull affect the delta between top spüeed and emergency speed?

I'd say no, so this is mere speculation. We don't know the "regular" top speed of the Defiant.

On top of it, the Defiant is the only known class with this design, so we have no valid comparison for estimation.

So in short, you're arguing that for all we know the Defiant can keep up its maximum sprint speed indefinitely because of its integrated nacelles, because we cannot use precedent. This is a very convenient way to argue from ignorance in the face of a dozen or more seasons of examples of Starfleet ships having a medium cruising speed, a substantially higher "three day run" speed, and a still higher "sprint" speed, across the board.

The Federation sometimes seems to bend over backwards not to send that message during the TNG era. They don't really go in for gunboat diplomacy.

Sending a Defiant is no more gunboat diplomacy than sending a Galaxy. A species which would be threatend by one of them would also be threatened by the other.

On the Galaxies, at least during the TNG era, Starfleet routinely had crews keeping their children aboard the ship. While there are a lot of good reasons not to do this, it's pretty "nonthreatening." As a strategy for encouraging people to think that the Federation doesn't desire conflict, I have to say it'd work rather well. Only the most defenseless, suspicious, or ignorant people seriously believe that Picard's very presence is a threat in early TNG.

Now, they abandon this approach as far as we can tell after the Dominion War (if not after Wolf 359). Because, yes, it's not safe for the civilians and children aboard the ship. But seriously. Sending a small, slimmed down, lethally optimized warship is not sending the same diplomatic message as sending a massive ship with luxurious accomodations and civilians aboard and extensive supplies of humanitarian equipment and large, elaborate scientific apparatus.

We have no evidence that there is a lack of freighters and passenger ships (except, perhaps, on the unexplored or unsecured frontier where using such ships would be actively unsafe). The practical side of this still circles back to warship versus multirole.

No, and hoestly I don't understand why you don't get this.

We see cruisers transporting cargo because there is no other viable transport available in the show.

It's multirole cruisers only vs. multirole corvettes/ frigates plus freighters plus warships plus cruisers.

Nope!

But since you're basically ignoring, repeatedly, the reasons others present why cruisers might be used to move high priority cargoes on the frontier, there's not really any point in engaging you on this. Reread the posts made above this point.

They have plenty of Peregrines, so that's not a problem. However, any real warship must be designed to some reasonable assessment of the kind of threat it is intended to overcome. That includes tiny feeble warships. As a rule, one only designs tiny feeble warships if one knows they will never be called upon to fight well equipped enemies. Not just that you wouldn't intentionally send them to fight such enemies, but that such enemies can't even reach them. Victorian river gunboats are a good example of this- designed with a few machine guns and light cannon, but hopelessly weak by the standards of ocean going warships. And that was okay because no oceangoing warship could ever reach them to fight them.

I never ever have talked about "tiny warships"! What the fuck would you do with them in the first place?

Small frigates and tiny corvettes are another story, though. But these are cost-effective multirole vessels unsuited for warfare against any serious opponent.

And yes, you had ocean-going gunboats like the SMS Panther (used in the Agadir crisis). Such ships were perfectly capable of doing missions in backwater areas, thereby saving money.

The ships of that category were in many cases scrapped as useless white elephants after 1910 or so, because they were incapable of performing any significant role during wartime. Jackie Fisher had some rather exclamation-point-heavy remarks on the stupidity of building ships that were too slow to run and too lightly armed to fight.

Given that your entire argument hinges on the notion that the Federation should increase its preparation for war by building dedicated warships, it seems foolish for you to propose to build weak ships that will be easily snapped up by the enemy in the opening phase of any conflict, including a small one.

The smallest reasonable size for a warship is the size necessary to fight effectively. To carry adequate propulsion systems for their theater of operations, and adequate weapons to have a good chance of bringing harm to the enemy. Ships smaller than this size are useless, unless they operate in some protected 'basin' where no stronger enemy force can reach them (e.g. gunboats on lakes and rivers).

But since you can build multiple gunboats for a single cruiser, it makes sense to manufacture both types of ships, thereby allocating your resources in a more efficient way.

And this is exactly what the Federation also should do!

The gunboats would be too weak to be entrusted with missions of any consequence, because all sorts of random events could easily destroy them. While there is no doubt room for a 'frigate' size of ship somewhere below that of the Galaxy and its derivatives, and probably even below that of, say, the Akira..., there is a practical lower limit below which it is stupid to build vessels that are inadequate to dealing with competent opposition. And there is no evidence that this 'minimum size' in the TNG era is much smaller than, oh, a Miranda.

Thus, there may well be good reasons why the lightest Federation frigates are the size they are- that may be as small as the Federation can build a ship and seriously expect it to survive a reasonably broad variety of missions.

A frigate does not need to survive " a reasonably broad variety of missions" because you only send it to missions it can handle.

Reality does not work that way. You do not always get to choose what threats will emerge during a ship's mission.

If there is no danger to the ship, then there is no reason to send a warship at all. If there is danger to the ship, then the ship must be strong enough to confront a reasonable selection of probable dangers. You can't just say "oh, we'll send our weak ships on missions that are only a little bit dangerous" and expect that to work reliably. Because nature, circumstance, and enemy action will not always be so kind as to give you a predictable rundown of which missions are least dangerous at any one time.

You can ignore this point, and I'll bring it back up: You would not send previously mothballed ships as cannon fodder to the front lines, you would use them for second-line duties!

And if the number of such ships exceeds what is actually required for second-line duties, then you start sending them to the front- because an old warship is better than no ship at all, and there may be many times when two modern ships backed by an old ship can accomplish considerably more than two modern ships alone.

What you're missing here is long transit times. Ships cannot just jump from one side of the Federation to the other in a hurry. It is normal for there to be only one starship within a few days' flight time of a sudden emergency... and given the Federation's fleet size, changing that would require the construction of many thousands of ships. I doubt that that would be 'cheaper' than maintaining the existing multirole force.

Dear lord! You don't have to send cheap freighters around from one end of the Federation to the other! You station them where needed, because you have plenty of them and hence can do so!

I wasn't talking about the freighters and don't understand why you did.

The alternative is to use a much smaller number of cruisers as stopgaps, which does not make much sense at all.

Let's just say the Federation has 7,000 cruisers. Let's also say, with the same amount of resources, the Federation could also have 3,000 cruisers, 500 Defiants, 5,000 cheap frigates and an additional 8,000 freighters.

The latter seems a more appropriate use of resources for me...

The frigate role is currently held by the Federation's large number of lightly armed and generally small 'science vessels,' which are not as large as frontline cruisers of the same generation, though they are closer than you seem to imagine the 'cheap frigates' being. There is literally zero evidence that there are 'no freighters.' So the only part of your scheme the Federation is unable to duplicate with its existing deployment is the Defiants, and I've already addressed repeatedly why it's debateable whether you want a large force of those.

To summarize the reason, if you deploy your Defiants or other similar warships centrally, it takes them too long to respond to a crisis. If you scatter them out in penny packets on the frontier, they can respond to a crisis... but in smaller numbers, and you're forced to maintain a large number of ships out on the frontier which have very little to do except in wartime.

[Formless]

Sorry, but this is not important. Important is just that the fighters we see in DS9 should be perfectly capable to protect trade and do some patrolling duty in some areas.

Of course these areas must lack an adversary who laughs about such ships. But in ST we often see species which aren't as developed (yet?) as the Federation is.

In such areas, using more expensive ships is a waste of resources. I don't understand how one can argue with this, it's obvious.

You are delusional. There is NO indication that these ships are any more capable of patrol duties than a fucking runabout. Why? Because they are flat out compared to glorified shuttlecraft by the series' characters. They may be more combat oriented than is normal for shuttles and runabouts, but clearly they are 1) considered appropriate for civilian use and the Maquis are specifically stated to have upgraded theirs with type 8 phasers to bring them up to the same specs as the military version, and 2) they seemed to serve in the role of a short range escort, similar to a Defiant only the goal is to scare off pirates from attacking freighters rather than blowing holes in Borg cubes, Romulan Warbirds, and Dominion battlecruisers. Yes, there is of course a use for such ships considering that for all the Federation says about being a paradise they certainly aren't free of crime (see for instance the thief and collector from "The Most Toys" who kidnapped Data and also had a collection of eight unique and illegal disruptors). They may also be used for intercepting targets similarly to the Mars perimeter defense, but the fact is we have no evidence for that because they don't show up onscreen often enough to know a whole lot about them. You are making a ton of assumptions about them that common sense suggests are bullocks, and they are sadly consistent with your ideas about the fleet in general and the superiority of the Defiant design (even as I think it was successful, just not in the context you think it is). There is no reason to think a 22 meter long ship can perform the same patrol duties as a ship that is over 300 meters long like an Intrepid class (which can stay in the Delta Quadrant for over 20 years, according to "Endgame"!) or 600 meters like a GCS. The boarders of the Federation have to be measured in light years, and the territory is large enough that a ship can't cross from one side of the Federation to another in even a year. There is simply no way of patrolling such a huge border without using ships capable of staying out there for months or years at a time. And you aren't going bother doing lots of patrol duty inside Federation space-- that makes no sense, because that's where the majority of the fleet seems to be deployed most of the time anyway as they do their thing. What duties do you think they are assigning to all those Miranda class and Excelsior class ships they still have in service? And why else would they arm science vessels like the Nova class so heavily if combat isn't their specialty? By the time Voyager got home, Sector 001 was positively crawling with capital ships just in case of a Borg attack, what use would fighters be in that context? A Federation fighter probably can't stay out more than a few days, because we never saw runabouts or the Delta Flyer sent out for much longer than that at any time. It makes no sense to expect that kind of duration from them when they have no room for even token crew quarters. They too, like the Defiant, are just a set of guns strapped to an engine. Only smaller.

You have no clue how logistics and resource allocation works, do you? Nor do you understand the vastness of space or this notion of "endurance" at all. I'll give you a tip: endurance refers to both the ship's endurance and the crew's. The smaller the ship, the less fuel it has, and the less it can support its crew for long periods of time. Humans don't like being confined in small spaces.

[FaxModem1]

Let's try and use some hypothetical examples for this, substituting the Defiant for missions where the Enterprise was present patrolling and sent on another task because they were in the area:

How about a nice covert mission to make first contact with an alien ship? Such as in "Tin Man" Enterprise rendezvoused with the USS Hood to pick up their telepathic specialist, taxed their engines to the breaking point racing the Romulans to the ship, and made it there, while the Romulans, also racing there, taxed their engines so hard that they blew up. The Defiant, being slower than either, will never make it in time, the Romulan warbird won't have to hurt her engines as bad, will make it first and be able to establish contact, and Tin Man will be in the hands of the Romulans. Defiant clearly isn't meant for this mission.

For instance, a colony being poisoned, such as in "The Most Toys", well, the Defiant isn't as fast as the Enterprise, so they lose the colony due to not being able to deliver the chemical in time. The Defiant isn't as big as the Enterprise, so they'd either have to make multiple trips to haul all the chemical needed to fix the colony, or call in more ships to deliver the chemical to save the colony. That one goes to the multirole cruiser instead of the dedicated combat Escort.

Let's go with the episode "Legacy". The Enterprise, being the only ship in range, races to Turkana IV to rescue a Federation freighter. But, it gets there by taxing her engines. Too late for the Enterprise, the ship blows up and the escape pod falls to the planet. Only though the sensor suite of the Enterprise and arriving early enough to find their ion trail, do they discover where the freighter crew landed. If they had gotten there later, the trail would have disappeared, leaving the freighter crew at the mercy of rape gangs. Again, the Defiant would not be suitable for this mission.

That's four examples, and just part of the regular missions the Enterprise gets sent on a weekly basis. The Federation is big, and having enough ships everywhere that can do every job can be a problem, so Starfleet makes their ships swiss army knives for that very reason. Whether its tranporting dignitaries, rescuing ships, dealing with foreign powers, or dealing with a crisis on a colony somewhere.

The only way this could be better is if the Defiant is faster than the old Excelsior class USS Hood, and delivers the Betazoid specialist to the Enterprise faster, giving them more time to meet Tin Man.Which Starfleet seems to be doing anyway over the course of TNG and DS9, replacing their older ships with newer ones. After all, the Battle of Wolf 359 saw Mirandas and Excelsiors, the Battle of Sector 001 didn't see either but saw their present generation equivalents such as Nebulas, Defiants, Steamrunners, and Norways.

[Formless]

For instance, a colony being poisoned, such as in "The Most Toys", well, the Defiant isn't as fast as the Enterprise, so they lose the colony due to not being able to deliver the chemical in time. The Defiant isn't as big as the Enterprise, so they'd either have to make multiple trips to haul all the chemical needed to fix the colony, or call in more ships to deliver the chemical to save the colony. That one goes to the multirole cruiser instead of the dedicated combat Escort.

That's a bit of an unfair example, though, since the poisoning was a deliberate sabotage engineered to lure in Enterprise and more specifically Commander Data. If Data had been serving on a different class of ship, then the saboteur would have engineered the disaster to be within the means of that ship to solve, because the purpose was to steal Data and not to harm the colonists. In fact, as it was Mr. Fajio engineered it far too perfectly, causing Worf of all people to see through the ruse and turn Enterprise right back around for his arrest. If it had been an Intrepid class, he wouldn't have used so much poison because the cargo holds are smaller on an Intrepid. If it had been a Defiant, it would probably be the same story, except that when Worf turns the ship around suddenly Mr Fajio would have been staring down a bunch of guns and The Sisko's boot.

Look, the Defiant class wasn't designed to do patrol duties because the original enemy it was meant to fight was the Borg. The Borg aren't like the Cardassians and the Romulans. Borg territory is in the Delta quadrant, and even that is using the term loosely because cubes and spheres can be encountered practically anywhere in the quadrant. With the Romulans and the Cardassians, wars were fought over borders, as evidenced by the very existence of the Neutral Zone and the Demilitarized Zone. Those are buffer zones negotiated between the Federation and her enemies to end territorial disputes. But the Borg have transwarp, so when they show up there is no chance of you intercepting them at the boarder unless you are astronomically lucky. And even if you do, they'll just blow up any one craft that intercepts an incursion. You have to pull as many ships together as possible and meet them in force somewhere inside Federation space. That's where Defiants would normally be found had the original not been plagued with problems that seemingly only got resolved when Sisko resolved his personal grief. Attached to space stations and planets, doing escort duties for other ships EXCEPT on the occasion that the Borg arrive and it turns into a pitched battle. Hell, the Federation amassed at least as many ships at Earth to fight just one sphere as they amassed at Wolf 359-- that's how much firepower it takes to fight them. And that same event shows just how randomly the Borg can show up without the border patrol being able to do a damn thing about it. So why should a ship specifically meant to kill Borg preform a duty that is completely useless at stopping the Borg?

[Tribble]

Erm, why do people assume that the Defiant was slow? During STFC the Borg Cube made a bee-line to Earth in excess of warp 9, and the Defiant was able to abandon whatever mission it was on, rendezvous with the fleet, engage the Cube and keep up with it all the way to Earth. That's better than what the E-D was able to do in BOBW; remember that part of their reason for beaming onto the Cube and trying their deflector dish attack was because the E-D couldn't keep up with it for more than a few hours. In "Call to Arms" and "Endgame" we see Defiants as part of the fleet, and in "Message in a Bottle" two were sent with an Akira to intercept the Prometheus, which was considered to be the fastest ship in the fleet at launch. At the very least Defiants are comparable in speed to other ships of their era.

The Defiant's original objective was "attack invading Borg ship until either the Borg ship blows up of the Defiant does". Later on that role was expanded to recon, blowing shit up while on recon, blowing shit up as part of a mission, joining a task force to blow shit up, and deploying other things like mines so that they can blow shit up. With a little science on the side. Given the role that it was designed for and the missions it was assigned, IMO it performed well.

Should it be the only ship built? No, and that's not it's intended role anyways; IMO the "escort" label seems to indicate that aside from killing Borg it's job is to provide heavy fire support for larger generalist ships when needed, or be part of a larger task force for fleet engagements.

[Darmalus]

I wonder if the Defiant being slow was one of those things that got fixed as the bugs were worked out. It's been forever, but wasn't it in danger of blowing itself up if it ran it's engines at full power when it was first introduced? Almost like a reverse version of the bus from Speed.

[Tribble]

I wonder if the Defiant being slow was one of those things that got fixed as the bugs were worked out. It's been forever, but wasn't it in danger of blowing itself up if it ran it's engines at full power when it was first introduced? Almost like a reverse version of the bus from Speed.

When introduced, yes it had problems. By the time of STFC onwards those problems had been worked out and it was able to keep up with a Cube travelling at warp 9+ throughout the entire battle, keep up with fleets as seen in various battles in DS9, and two of them were dispatched to help chase down the Prometheus in "Message in a Bottle".

[FaxModem1]

For instance, a colony being poisoned, such as in "The Most Toys", well, the Defiant isn't as fast as the Enterprise, so they lose the colony due to not being able to deliver the chemical in time. The Defiant isn't as big as the Enterprise, so they'd either have to make multiple trips to haul all the chemical needed to fix the colony, or call in more ships to deliver the chemical to save the colony. That one goes to the multirole cruiser instead of the dedicated combat Escort.

That's a bit of an unfair example, though, since the poisoning was a deliberate sabotage engineered to lure in Enterprise and more specifically Commander Data. If Data had been serving on a different class of ship, then the saboteur would have engineered the disaster to be within the means of that ship to solve, because the purpose was to steal Data and not to harm the colonists. In fact, as it was Mr. Fajio engineered it far too perfectly, causing Worf of all people to see through the ruse and turn Enterprise right back around for his arrest. If it had been an Intrepid class, he wouldn't have used so much poison because the cargo holds are smaller on an Intrepid. If it had been a Defiant, it would probably be the same story, except that when Worf turns the ship around suddenly Mr Fajio would have been staring down a bunch of guns and The Sisko's boot.

Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on what trick Fajo plays on the Defiant to acquire Data, Odo, a houseplant, whatever. Fajo didn't really seem to care who he hurt, just that he had a quantity of the chemical needed to get the Enterprise to come to him, as he was the only one who could offer it. For a better example, let's say the events of "Night Terrors", in which the Enterprise would have eventually had the crew all kill each other if they didn't have significant supplies of Hydrogen on their ship to disperse at the right moment. Even without the telepathic aliens, the Enterprise didn't have the proper ingredients for an explosion, so it's doubtful the Defiant would have been able to either.

Look, the Defiant class wasn't designed to do patrol duties because the original enemy it was meant to fight was the Borg. The Borg aren't like the Cardassians and the Romulans. Borg territory is in the Delta quadrant, and even that is using the term loosely because cubes and spheres can be encountered practically anywhere in the quadrant. With the Romulans and the Cardassians, wars were fought over borders, as evidenced by the very existence of the Neutral Zone and the Demilitarized Zone. Those are buffer zones negotiated between the Federation and her enemies to end territorial disputes. But the Borg have transwarp, so when they show up there is no chance of you intercepting them at the boarder unless you are astronomically lucky. And even if you do, they'll just blow up any one craft that intercepts an incursion. You have to pull as many ships together as possible and meet them in force somewhere inside Federation space. That's where Defiants would normally be found had the original not been plagued with problems that seemingly only got resolved when Sisko resolved his personal grief. Attached to space stations and planets, doing escort duties for other ships EXCEPT on the occasion that the Borg arrive and it turns into a pitched battle. Hell, the Federation amassed at least as many ships at Earth to fight just one sphere as they amassed at Wolf 359-- that's how much firepower it takes to fight them. And that same event shows just how randomly the Borg can show up without the border patrol being able to do a damn thing about it. So why should a ship specifically meant to kill Borg preform a duty that is completely useless at stopping the Borg?

Yes, that's the point. BabelHunter is arguing that it would be better to have Defiants everywhere instead of spending resources on multipurpose vessels. The Federation could use their resources on building multipurpose vessels instead of a pure-warship like the Defiant, and would be better off with ships like the Nebula, Nova, Steamrunner, Prometheus, etc. We didn't see any Defiants in Endgame guarding Earth, now did we? So, it was essentially a military project that went on because of inertia, and they built more, because it's great in wartime. Not so much as a vessel what Starfleet vessels are needed to do, otherwise the Defiant's sister-ship crew will have to shrug their shoulders, and say that they'll try, but they aren't equipped for it.

As others in this thread have noted. You build, say, ten defiants instead of what, 3 to 5 Sovereigns, and that's great for defense of a world or space station. But means that they're underequipped if they need to deal with a space amoeba, transporting cargo or people, dealing with something other than the Borg appearing out of nowhere, the Defiant isn't in place to do so. Which, if you want to have local defences, you might as well just spend the resources on more heavily armed defense platforms and space stations.

[Formless]

We didn't see any Defiants in Endgame guarding Earth, now did we?

Of course we did. They even closed the show with the image of Voyager being escorted to Earth by what are clearly a Nebula, Galaxy, Excelsior, Prometheus, and yes and Defiant class starship. I don't know why you keep insisting there were no Defiants at that battle. Well, unless you just blocked Voyager from your mind, of course. No judgement there . But I mean, come on, they were designed to kill Borg and every Borg vessel that attacks Federation space inevitably comes to Earth, so if there is any part of Federation space that ought to have Defiants patrolling the area there you go.

[FaxModem1]

We didn't see any Defiants in Endgame guarding Earth, now did we?

Of course we did. They even closed the show with the image of Voyager being escorted to Earth by what are clearly a Nebula, Galaxy, Excelsior, Prometheus, and yes and Defiant class starship. I don't know why you keep insisting there were no Defiants at that battle. Well, unless you just blocked Voyager from your mind, of course. No judgement there . But I mean, come on, they were designed to kill Borg and every Borg vessel that attacks Federation space inevitably comes to Earth, so if there is any part of Federation space that ought to have Defiants patrolling the area there you go.

Well I'll be darned. This is what I get for deciding not to rewatch any of Endgame for this thread. Though, I think I'm safer off not having re-watched it. And that's coming from somewhat of a Voyager fan.

[Prometheus Unbound]

the Battle of Sector 001 didn't see either but saw their present generation equivalents such as Nebulas, Defiants, Steamrunners, and Norways.

We definitely see a Miranda do a hard turn in the battle and the USS Boseman is 80 years old and was in the fight...

[Simon_Jester]

Erm, why do people assume that the Defiant was slow? During STFC the Borg Cube made a bee-line to Earth in excess of warp 9, and the Defiant was able to abandon whatever mission it was on, rendezvous with the fleet, engage the Cube and keep up with it all the way to Earth.

1) Small ships tend to be slower rather than faster in Star Trek; this is not an ironclad law but it's common. Also, to summarize points others have cited:

2) Defiant's top speed as measured in warp factors during actual episodes appears to cap out below the comparable top speed of the Enterprise-D.
3) Defiant or her sisters of the same class moving relatively slowly, having engine problems, or having difficulty reaching the top speed of modern Starfleet vessels is a plot point.

It's easier to assume that Defiant just happened to be somewhere in the neighborhood of Earth (which did happen a few times in Deep Space Nine) than to assume that this instance inverts everything else we know about the Defiant-class's performance.

That's better than what the E-D was able to do in BOBW; remember that part of their reason for beaming onto the Cube and trying their deflector dish attack was because the E-D couldn't keep up with it for more than a few hours. In "Call to Arms" and "Endgame" we see Defiants as part of the fleet, and in "Message in a Bottle" two were sent with an Akira to intercept the Prometheus, which was considered to be the fastest ship in the fleet at launch. At the very least Defiants are comparable in speed to other ships of their era.

I won't say they'd be slow in the sense of "a quarter the speed," but they might well be, say, 10% or 20% slower at maximum warp, and/or have poor sustained cruising potential. The latter would be particularly natural given that the Defiant is a relatively small, cramped ship.

[BabelHuber]

You have no clue how logistics and resource allocation works, do you? Nor do you understand the vastness of space or this notion of "endurance" at all.

No, you don't have a fucking clue about how logistic networks work, otherwise you wouldn't even start talking about distance.

But I try to give you a clue: Distance means jack shit, the important factor is the transport duration!

Modern pharmacy corporations e.g. have a sophisticated logistic network consisting of manufacturing plants, regional distribution centers and local hubs (we ignore the supply chain feeding the manufacturing plants here, we focus on the actual delivery of products to the customers)

Example: You have your plants spread out over the world, you have 2 regional distribution centers and 20 local hubs in North America. These hubs supply the local pharmacies/ hospitals/ resellers.

The whole network is laid out so that you can deliver your products on-time by utilizing cheap means of transports (ships and trucks in the 21st century earth).

You do so by forecasting demand with algorithms based on past demands with seasonal patterns and whatnot. In addition, you can apply more sophisticated forecasting by e.g. analyzing the weather forecast - if it is dry and hot, people need different products compared to times when it's cold and humid and so on (the latter is actually very important in the area of crop science).

Only in rare exceptions you use more expensive transports, like airplanes. And with "rare exception" I don't mean twice a day, but perhaps once per month.

This should be the way the Federation should handle its logisctic train, not by regularily using cruisers as stopgaps.

[Simon_Jester]

You have no clue how logistics and resource allocation works, do you? Nor do you understand the vastness of space or this notion of "endurance" at all.

No, you don't have a fucking clue about how logistic networks work, otherwise you wouldn't even start talking about distance.

But I try to give you a clue: Distance means jack shit, the important factor is the transport duration

Even if you are correct, it doesn't help your case. You show no greater ability to understand the impact of transport duration than you do of distance.

You're committing the classic "sophomoric econ student" blunder here. You're taking assumptions informed by 20th and 21st century experience. And you're generalizing them to times and places where the basic rules of how technology operates, how goods move, how value is counted, are not the same. You're assuming that something which is a good decision in the context of 2000-era economics fits a time in the future, or the past, or an alternate world where society functions differently. And you're dismissing any argument others advance about how the rules have changed.

And so you are neglecting the consequences of having fleets deployed on remote frontiers months away from reinforcements, and of having ships deployed days away from the nearest friendly ship. Namely, the need for versatility and flexibility, and the uselessness of ships that can do only one thing, which they are seldom called upon to do. Or which cannot survive the unknowns and dangers of operating under frontier conditions.

Moreover, you don't even know or grasp the kinds of missions where we've seen Starfleet's multirole ships used as transports, which suggests you haven't even watched a minimal sample of the show, in which case why are you even arguing about this?

[BabelHuber]

This is a very convenient way to argue from ignorance in the face of a dozen or more seasons of examples of Starfleet ships having a medium cruising speed, a substantially higher "three day run" speed, and a still higher "sprint" speed, across the board.

I just say "we don't know, because the ship has a different design than the one we could use as comparison". We just know the long-term top speed is smaller than Warp 9.5.

Now, they abandon this approach as far as we can tell after the Dominion War (if not after Wolf 359). Because, yes, it's not safe for the civilians and children aboard the ship. But seriously. Sending a small, slimmed down, lethally optimized warship is not sending the same diplomatic message as sending a massive ship with luxurious accomodations and civilians aboard and extensive supplies of humanitarian equipment and large, elaborate scientific apparatus.

And the fact that the Galaxy also is heaviliy armed doesn't play a role? "We feel much less threatened by a huge, heaviliy armed multirole vessel then by a smal, heavily armed warship" sounds made-up.

The military of the visiting planet surely would say "don't fall for this science crew and these civilians on board. This is a very heavily armed ship which on top could transport a few thousand ground troops, if necessary"

But since you're basically ignoring, repeatedly, the reasons others present why cruisers might be used to move high priority cargoes on the frontier, there's not really any point in engaging you on this. Reread the posts made above this point.

You seem to think that this is a virtue. I don't. I think this should be the absolute exception, not the rule. Ever heard of a convoy protected by escorts?

there is a practical lower limit below which it is stupid to build vessels that are inadequate to dealing with competent opposition. And there is no evidence that this 'minimum size' in the TNG era is much smaller than, oh, a Miranda.

OK, let's go with this:

Not "much smaller" than a Miranda, the minimum size would be "not much less capable than a Miranda regarding speed, firepower, shields and endurance".

Even in this case, it is a waste of money to keep ships in service which are more than 100 years old and are a mere cannon fodder in wartime, but require the same crew than a modern cruiser.

Instead, you would mass-produce new ships which are cheaper to maintain, meaning smaller, with less crew, as cheap as possible to build and maintain and more numerous. These ships would then keep on doing their second line duty in wartimes instead of being wasted at the front lines, like the Federation does with its outdated Mirandas.

To summarize the reason, if you deploy your Defiants or other similar warships centrally, it takes them too long to respond to a crisis. If you scatter them out in penny packets on the frontier, they can respond to a crisis... but in smaller numbers, and you're forced to maintain a large number of ships out on the frontier which have very little to do except in wartime.

Except of showing the flag, patrolling areas like the neutral zone, forming a reserve to keep a fleet near Earth/ Vulkan and protecting trade.

Doing all of this while there are less tasks for regular cruisers to perform, because we have deployed an an actual logistic network which doesn't rely on cruisers as permanenet stopgaps, instead utilizing cheaper ships wherever possible.