Question about the Lakota

[MetalHead]

Personally, I think the Lakota sub-type of Excelsior class starships is immense.

This stems from the fact that I think the Excelsior is extreemely cool looking, and also because the combat oriented upgrades should have made it so much better.

So my question is this: Why would Starfleet hold such an obviously unfair mock battle between the Defiant and the Lakota? Two different classes of ships. The size and speed and maneuverability of the Defiant far outcompass that of the big, bulky Lakota, not to mention the fact that (according to DITL) 'The Pulse Phaser Cannon provide more RAW FIREPOWER' than do a standard phaser system. So the Lakota isn't going to be able to out maneuver the Defiant, and is a much larger target for a new more powerful weapon. Of course the Defiant was going to win.

I would think of the Lakota as more of a heavy battleship rather than a nimble raider that can cloak, weave through enemy ranks at high impulse, and unload both pulse phasers and quantum torpedos as well as standard phasers. So after all those heavy upgrades, I would have classified the Lakota a complete success at upgrading a very commonly produced starship. Infact, it might be an excellent choice for the label 'enhanced deterence explorer' if you see what I mean.

[SolkaTruesilver]

wait - at the end, are you talking about the Lakota, or the Defiant?

[Captain Seafort]

Eh? That wasn't a mock battle. That was the Lakota trying to destroy the Defiant to prevent it getting to Earth to expose Leyton's attempted coup. The Defiant didn't win - both ships were badly damaged by the end of the battle, nd only Benton's refusal to fire QTs saved the Definat from destruction. Overall they were pretty evenly matched. The Defiant is more manoeuverable (although didn't really make use of that in the battle), has more powerful phasers, has a smaller target profile, and has ablative armour. The Lakota has more raw power available, and much better weapons coverage than the Defiant's fixed-axis weapons. The Lakota suffered heavier casualties, but out of a crew of hundreds rather than 50-ish the effect on her combat effectiveness would have been less.

[Teaos]

Trying to decide how powerful the Defiant is compared to the Lakota is impossible since we have no real idea how powerful the Defiant is.

I have always hated it is a stupidly impossible ship. I think the Lakota should have won and it more or less did.

[yetiman1985]

The ablative armor on the Defiant helped even the odds. Otherwise the Lakota would have likely destroyed her.

[MetalHead]

Eh? That wasn't a mock battle

lol. I've never seen the episode, I just sorta threw together what happened by reading and filling the gaps. Guess I got it wrong. hahahaha.
Sorry. V. Embarrassed now.

[Captain Seafort]

I have always hated it is a stupidly impossible ship.

I think the idea of the Defiant being some sort of uber-powerful battleship able to outgun anything in Starfleet is something of a brainbug, developed from Sisko's comment that it's overpowered and overgunned. In practice, yes it's extremely powerful for its size, but its still only a gunboat/heavy fighter - maneuverable and difficult to hit, but handicapped by its fixed-axis armament. Against the Borg, whose tactics (in TNG at least) generally involved grabbing a ship with their tractor beams before opening fire, that sort of ship would be very effective. It could dodge the tractor beams and launch continuous hit and run attacks on the cube. A swarm of such ships could do a lot of damage while suffering little in return. Against ships that rely little on tractor beams, but on beam weapons and torpedoes, including the FC/Voyager Borg, its less effective.

[Teaos]

I guess so but everything we have seen of this ship leads to the idea that it is powerful. Then again we havent really seen it have many one on one fights. The ones it did have were usually against Bug fighters or in fleet actions.

Still the ships bugs me.

[Graham Kennedy]

I like the Defiant as a "character"... she looks nice, and has a lot of screen presence.

But I am not a fan of the Defiant as a ship design that makes sense. It's true that we don't have a really solid comparison between her and other ships, but consider that the Odyssey went into battle with three Jem'Hadar bug ships; she transferred all her shield power to phasers, so they were as hot as Galaxy class arrays are ever likely to get. And she did hit the bugs, many times... without effect.

Defiant comes along just a few months later, and when she fires pulse phasers she absolutely obliterates a bug in under a second.

Now you can argue that maybe Defiants cannon have less power but use it more effectively, but to me that doesn't really matter. What matters is that, in terms of effect on the enemy, Defiants weapons outgun a Galaxy class.

And they really shouldn't. Look at the emitters - they are TINY compared to a Type X array segment, let alone an entire array. There's no way the Defiant should have anything like the level of firepower it has from weapons like that.

I actually designed what I consider to be a "sensible Defiant" once to fix some of my little nits about the ship. Primarily, I boosted the phaser cannon size up to match their performance. Here it is...

[Sionnach Glic]

Once again, the writers have no idea what their doing, why am I not surprised.

Then again, they probably weren't expecting people like us to come along and start analyzing it!

[Graham Kennedy]

Once again, the writers have no idea what their doing, why am I not surprised.

Then again, they probably weren't expecting people like us to come along and start analyzing it!

lol, by now you would think they would be

[Sionnach Glic]

They should...but they wont.

BTW, nice version of the defiant. I wouldn't put shuttles in it personally, but thats just me.

[Graham Kennedy]

I was thinking two shuttlepods; Type 15s, which are nice and small. You can't see it on the pic, but they are each housed in a "garage" at the aft end of the superstructure that has the bridge on it. Imagine something rather like how a modern destroyer carries a helicopter. I wanted to have some minimal shuttle capability, without wasting all the internal space of a hangar deck.

[Captain Seafort]

And they really shouldn't. Look at the emitters - they are TINY compared to a Type X array segment, let alone an entire array. There's no way the Defiant should have anything like the level of firepower it has from weapons like that.

It depends on how you look at. Sure the surface area of the emitter is smaller than that of a Type-X, but the Defiant's cannon extend deep into the wing root, while the Type-X is only 1.25m deep. This means that the "rapid nadions" from which phasers derive their destructive effect will have much greater kinetic energy.

[Graham Kennedy]

Looking at those emitters, it doesn't look to me that they would go deep into the hull at all.