True but that part is total speculation (don't get me wrong, I LOVE the backstory Graham has given everything, it really fleshes out the world) to the best of my knowledge, unless he got that from a Trek magazine or something I'm unaware of. My take on it was that the Excelsiors have been, at least every 20 years or so, refitted to keep them "current" during their long life in space. My guess is that all Excelsiors in service and not being retired in the next couple of years would eventually be brought up to Lakota specs. We really don't know what things "cost" in the Trek universe, especially when it comes to the UFP which doesn't use any specific money or value system that we know of. I'm guessing some things cost more than others-- for instance, resource wise, (this is just a guess based on "our terms" since we have nothing else to base it on) it's possible that replacing a warp core with a newer, uprated version "costs" as much in resources as upgrading weapons systems on any 10 ships. Upgrading a ship's speed, shields, weapons and computers/sensors probably REQUIRES upgrading the warp core as well, in order to generate the extra needed power, but you probably see where I am going. It's probably possible to considerably increase the utility of older ships by upgrading them with better (but not necessarily the very very best possible) weapons systems or shields without needing whole-ship overhauls to every system like the Lakota apparently received.mwhittington wrote:I agree with what you're saying, Duskofdead, except the Defiant is a superior ship compared to the Lakota (Excelsior variant) in combat capability. Granted, the Lakota is an awesome ship, but my take on its upgrades -and this is just speculation- is that the engineers probably just hollowed it out and put new guts in it, like some people do with their computer, and tuned it purely for combat. I may be wrong, but it's the simplest explanation, IMO. Also, according to Graham Kennedy, the Lakota project was scrapped because it was easier to build a Defiant than to upgrade an Excelsior and also because of the superiority of the Defiant over it in that little skirmish they had.
On the topic of military preparedness/dedicated warships; pretty much everyone concedes that the Federation has continued to enjoy at least some degree of "edge" over its enemies (save the Borg) due to technological sophistication. What I would submit (hopefully one of my final points on the topic, I feel it's been pretty dead horse-beaten throughout several different threads) is that even if you have a significant number of ships dedicated purely to a combat role, that matters very little if you run up against an enemy who exceeds you technologically. (Imagine a fully combat-designed Galaxy class or Defiant or Prometheus attacking an equally sized ship from a race who had ablative armor generators and transphasic torpedoes equipped as basic defensive systems on all of their ships, as an example.) That is where the continued insistence upon such a strong degree of emphasis on science & research continues to be important, I've always thought of that as essential to Starfleet having enjoyed a technological edge over its rivals for such a long period of time.
I keep getting you two mixed up, even though I'm not sure how. 
