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Not necessarily - if the ships are assigned missions according to their spec, you'd in theory generally only be coming up against ships of a similar role, and therefore spec. Remember too that those ships are only coming up against ships of a similar technological era.

The Soyuz was a system defence craft if I remember correctly. Thus it could come up against anything from a raider to a Vor'cha.

True, but nobody expected it to go toe-to-toe with a Vor'cha and be succesful. The role it was designed for was taking on pirates, small-time raiders, etc.

Teaos wrote:I know it was ignored in DS9 but Defiants are supposed to have limited range and speed.

They can only go Warp 9, unless they turn off their phasers. This was addressed in "The Sound of Her Voice", if I recall correctly.

As for limited range, well, the ship is almost always at DS9. It's not like it is ever up and about, unless it has a major mission or a war. I relate the Defiant to be more like minivans the DS9 guys took out. The Runabouts were small two person cars. Other starships are like RVs.

It did tris to Earth and the Gamma Quadrant often enough to stretch credability about its range.

Teaos wrote:It did tris to Earth and the Gamma Quadrant often enough to stretch credability about its range.

Nothing really new though; Enterprise undoubtedly had more limited range than any of these ships yet trekked about the quadrant and to and from Earth and Q'onos. That kind of inconsistency is common.

Ah but we expect it of ENT since it is the worst show ever. DS9 is supposed to be better.

The inconsistency goes back before though. Look at how much Graham has to bend over backwards and invent all sorts of speculative things to explain away how the Enterprise-D hopped all over the Alpha Quadrant between episodes. None of the shows seem to have ever had someone "in charge" of setting up realistic travel speeds, distances, etc., and making sure the writing stayed continuous to it. In the cases where things made sense it almost seems like luck.

Well, writers do have a habit of putting plot needs before logic.

Mikey wrote:Well, writers do have a habit of putting plot needs before logic.

Exactly. Which is why I feel that since the crew has stated multiple times that the Defiant is (relatively speaking) a limited range ship (the crew of the Valiant said the same I believe) we should go with that, rather than going off seeing it hop all over the galaxy when the plot needed it to. Clearly it had much greater range than say a runabout, but probably simply couldn't do the type of long-range, long-term trips a Galaxy or Excelsior or Intrepid could.

I think that range limitation was more due to accomodation rather than any technological limitation. Obviously, it wouldn't have the deuterium reserves of a much larger ship; but I think the limitations on replicator stock, torps (magazines take space!) etc. would be more of a limiting factor.

And in the case of the Valiant, they were of course limited to about 32 mph until Nog magically fixed the engine.

Not only did it not hold much fuel but it burnt it pretty quick.

Teaos wrote:Not only did it not hold much fuel but it burnt it pretty quick.

Yeah the Defiant seems to be designed with more of the "fighter" concept in mind--- it goes out, it burns through its ordinance, it returns to port. It's not built for self-sufficient long term sustainability like the larger ships. From what we have been told it was never meant to be a full service starship at all, it was just an emergency weapon platform vs. the Borg, and nearly got scrapped.

Hell, the damn thing used to take itself apart until O'Brien rubbed the lamp.

A lot of O'Briens fixes were ones offs so I wonder howthey solved them for the rest of the Defiants.