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Unknown. The fact that they seemed to have fallen out of favour by the time of DS9 suggests that they were not a success. Perhaps they were intended to replace the K't'inga in the cruiser bracket, but problems were encoutered with the design in long-term service, and they were retired as the Negh'vars were introduced and Vor'chas became more commonplace.

I always kind of assumed this was a rushed design to fill a gap in their fleet. It never seemed to me to be a "proper" class.

They are useless in all but pack attacks

Its interesting what is Star Fleet able to do with the ship of the same size.

Teaos wrote:I always kind of assumed this was a rushed design to fill a gap in their fleet. It never seemed to me to be a "proper" class.

There were too many of them for it simply to be a rush job, and the fact that the head of the most powerful House in the Empire used it as his personal ship suggests that it was at least initially considered a good ship. I suspect that some bureaucrat got carried away with the effectiveness of the BoP design, and pushed through the enlarged design hoping to get an equally effective to get a cruiser on the cheap. The Klingons proved to be good enough engineers to get it to work in the short-term, but the hulls aged very quickly thanks to the problems inherent in scaling up the design. Result: by late-TNG the Klingons were foisting them off on to every two-bit pirate in the quadrant (the Ferengi in "Rascals"), and by the time of DS9 they were gone from the KDF.

Hmm I suppose. It just seems wrong to scale up a ship and call it a new design.

I don't think anybody ever claimed that it was anything but a scaled-up BoP. Seafort's analysis makes sense: they have what's been a successful design, so they scale it up to fill an empty niche - it works well enough for a limited time, and then becomes obsolete.

I compare the BOP to the Miranda class. They were good and effective ships in their time, because they were at the height of the technology level of that era. However, when technology advances they are little more than expensive torpedo magnets. I imagine that the same will happen to the Defiant class in time, as well.

Question about the Bird-of-prey "cruiser" bracket.... (is it properly referrable as K'Vort? I know Graham has rather large discussions on the topic of various BoP sizes and classes.) So far as we know, was it ever "intended" to exist? Or was it a size/scaling problem in TNG? I was always rather torn between the two conclusions, since a Bird of Prey, if properly scaled, appears dwarfed by the Ent-D and there were several episodes that tried to make Klingon BoP's a credible threat, so brand new "huge BoP's" suddenly appear.

I'd say we can infer that it's an actual ship class. If it was just an SFX goof, then they wouldn't be thought of as a threat.

AFAIK, it (or they) are best-bet type of in-universe rationalizations of scaling/SFX problems.

The 300-350m BoP is too common to be a VFX error - it turns up in "Reunion", "Yesterday's Enterprise", "Redemption" and "Rascals" just off the top of my head. The idea seems to have been to have roughly the same relative sizes between them and the E-D as between the original BoP and the E-nil.

The correct designation is B'rel-class - the K'vort only turned up in YE, and when the same footage was reused for "Rascals" the B'rel designation was used.

Captain Seafort wrote:The 300-350m BoP is too common to be a VFX error - it turns up in "Reunion", "Yesterday's Enterprise", "Redemption" and "Rascals" just off the top of my head. The idea seems to have been to have roughly the same relative sizes between them and the E-D as between the original BoP and the E-nil.

The correct designation is B'rel-class - the K'vort only turned up in YE, and when the same footage was reused for "Rascals" the B'rel designation was used.

What are the small "normal" Birds of Prey called then? I always got all the names confused because the game Star Trek Birth of the Federation called the basic BOP the B'rel, though of course a game isn't canon.

I think they're just called 'Birds of Prey'.

I don't think we've ever heard an official designation other than "Bird of Prey" in ST3 and "D-12" in Generations. The latter was considered an obsolete heap of junk, so it's clearly a different class from the Rotarran-type.

Captain Seafort wrote:I don't think we've ever heard an official designation other than "Bird of Prey" in ST3 and "D-12" in Generations. The latter was considered an obsolete heap of junk, so it's clearly a different class from the Rotarran-type.

D-13's then, presumably? Loose canon I guess.

Maybe. Though we don't really have anything to go on. For all we know there could be a load of different types built between them. Or they may not follow a strict '1, 2, 3' line of numbering.