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I gotta agree on the 'heavy fighter' aspect. Wasn't the defiant originally built for fighting the borg? I'm sure I read/heard that somewhere, though could be wrong.

As far as the Lakota sub-type goes, I think its actually far more efficent for what Starfleet is most likely to encounter, combat wise, on a 'day to day' (please excuse the expression) basis.

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

Relative to the length of the ship, the Defiant's cannon are about the same length as the phaser lance on the All Good Things future-Enterprise.

No way. The lower pair are on little boxes that stick out of the hull. They are not deep at all.

Who cares how deep into the hull they go though? Seriously. Pulse Phaser Cannons cause big damage. Thats about all that matters in this case

Look at the specs in the DS9 TM. The lower cannon are missing, but they show the upper cannon extending into the nacelle - they're not just emitters.

What I don't like, with the "Heavy Fighter" theory (which I think is the most plausible), is that, with good reason, it would be damned powerful in a swarm.

Now.. how often have we seen a Defiant-class ship on screen? Not often. In DS9, we have seen 3

- Defiant
- Valiant (they gave a state of the art starship to a bunch a cadet! Grrr)
- Sao Paulo

The Federation would be seriously badass if they mass-produced them. They don't even need to keep the class running, they just mothball them, and keep them in reserve for when trouble arise.

The only "real" realist moment I have seen with the Escort-Class, is during "Message in a Bottle". 2 Defiant + 1 Akira, yhea! I can perfectly imagine the Defiant as "Heavy Escort" for the more polyvalent - bus still badass - Starfleet ship. It's a perfect fit: 1 Heavy starship, with 360 degrees firepower, a few heavy fighters around.

Think how the battle in Nemesis would have been different if the Enterprise carried a couple of those babies along them.

Do we ever see a Lakota subtype again? Obviously it was a reuse of the Enterprise-B model, and when they went to CGI we saw the old Excelsior classes again. But does a Lakota ever sneak in there?

Heavy fighter does make sense as a role for the defiant, but really, an Akira is a torpedeo platform with a rather large helping of ass-kickery in the form of exactly how you put it - 360 degree firepower.

Think of when the Odyssey (spelling, yay!) was assisted in battle by those runabouts. Runabouts, by combat standards of starships, are almost useless in a direct confrontation, but as a SUPPORT vessel, they can be effective (although the Odyssey did get uh, destroyed.) But replace those runabouts with Defiant-classes, and the battle would have been a short one.

The only way I could have accepted that they are more powerful than the phasers on other ships is if they were a whole new type of weapon. But no they make them the smae tech but just delivered in pulses.

A whole new type of weapon could very well be more powerful but not a them thing wrapped differently.

In defense of the Defiant, she's one cool ship, and none of the problems with the ship are really that noticeable until heavily overanalyzed....so, with no further ado, I now proceed to overanalyze some more!

Yeah, the Odyssey thing has always bothered me, but I'm sure there could be explanations.....just making up a theory up off the top of my head, the Dominion's shield systems could have been, like their weapon systems, at first invulnerable to Federation phasers, allowing the bug fighters to slaughter the Odyssey. Then, in their analysis of the battle, Starfleet discovered that switching the frequency on their weapons would allow them to affect Dominion shields, and so ordered all of the ships in the fleet to make the switchover immediately, thus turning the Jem'hadar fighters into the cannon fodder we all know and love....

How does that sound?

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

That's common in sci-fi. An unbeatable enemy suddenly becomes laughably weak, but wait, hordes of them show up to compensate.

Also in the Defiant's defense, we saw other ships' weapons become more effective against the Dominion. For example, we saw the Rotarran (a smaller, older ship than the Defiant) destroy a Jem'Hadar attack ship with a single burst in Favor the Bold, I believe. Perhaps Federation weapons simply became more effective against the Dominion through combat experiences.

I don't think I have to remind anyone who is putting forth the "heavy fighter" idea that fighters make no sense and would be completely useless in serious combat.

Well, I could think of a few conditions that could allow space fighters to be effective, albeit more allong the lines of "we want fighters, how do we justify them".

1) Requirement - destroy enemy sensors, communications, weapons and the like.

2) Long range fire is too inaccurate due to ECM, so a veehicle must get in close to the enemy.

3) Must be manoueverable enough to avoid being hit as weapons are significantly more damaging at short range.

4) ECM prevents an RPV from doing the job, so it must be controlled from within.

5) AI is out due to either a) not advanced enough, or b) not trusted.

Going completely off-topic, I'd thought up a little back story on the Lakota. I like to think that the Lakota is the Enterprise-B, which was decommissioned in the mid 24th Century to make way for the Enterprise-C. It was later recommissioned, refitted and renamed to Lakota during the Dominion war.

I also think the Enterprise/Lakota was the only one of that subtype. I'd say the Ent-B was a prototype refit that was later deemed unnecessary or not worth the price, and scrapped.