Star Trek 4

[Dynaman]

6 hours ago, Keith said:

Legion was amazing, I don't see the concern.

I don't remember what actual role he had with Legion - I know it wasn't director.  But in TV land what he did have might be the equivalent since episode directors come and go.  But since his only move directing credit was a bomb he would not have been my first or second or third choice to direct a "blockbuster"(*).

(*) I'll grant you the Trek films and blockbuster don't really go together but that is what they are supposed to be.

[Thom]

I liked Beyond. IMOHO it was a fun movie. Sure, they went right back to the 'maniac wants to destroy Earth' scenario (which has been dipped into once too many times) but it was good despite that. ItD really sent too much of a sour aftershock though. Trying to remake TWoK was the worst decision ever!

Have the next movie be about exploration and get it as far away from Earth as possible. And give Captain Pike a series!

 

[tekering]

9 minutes ago, Thom said:

Have the next movie be about exploration and get it as far away from Earth as possible. And give Captain Pike a series!

Hell yes.

So much squandered potential from Star Trek: Discovery's second season.  

[derex3592]

Yup. Those screen shots look downright amazing. Haven't wasted my time with STD yet, but maybe I will at some point just to see the Captain Pike stuff. Everyone says that is what this dumpster fire of a show should have been. all about from the beginning. 

[TehPW]

3 hours ago, Thom said:

I liked Beyond. IMOHO it was a fun movie. Sure, they went right back to the 'maniac wants to destroy Earth' scenario (which has been dipped into once too many times) but it was good despite that. ItD really sent too much of a sour aftershock though. Trying to remake TWoK was the worst decision ever!

Have the next movie be about exploration and get it as far away from Earth as possible. And give Captain Pike a series!

 

I was thinking about this when I had like 0.3 seconds to glance at my phone... OK everyone rips how JJ screwed the pooch by reinacting WoK's Spock's death with Kirk... I wondered... what IF it was Pike who sacrificed himself in the Warp Core chamber (in effect, resulting in the same circumstances that rendered him a quadriplegic in TOS)? Would that have been a better visual (maybe it being Kirk who rages after Kahn)? 

[JB0]

Just now, TehPW said:

I was thinking about this when I had like 0.3 seconds to glance at my phone... OK everyone rips how JJ screwed the pooch by reinacting WoK's Spock's death with Kirk... I wondered... what IF it was Pike who sacrificed himself in the Warp Core chamber (in effect, resulting in the same circumstances that rendered him a quadriplegic in TOS)? Would that have been a better visual (maybe it being Kirk who rages after Kahn)? 

Yes.

 

I laughed during Into Darkness, because what else are you supposed to do when Spock is Shatner-ing it up and shouting "KAHHHHHHHHHHN!" at the top of his lungs? A Spock that doesn't even LIKE Kirk, at that.

[technoblue]

9 minutes ago, TehPW said:

I was thinking about this when I had like 0.3 seconds to glance at my phone... OK everyone rips how JJ screwed the pooch by reinacting WoK's Spock's death with Kirk... I wondered... what IF it was Pike who sacrificed himself in the Warp Core chamber (in effect, resulting in the same circumstances that rendered him a quadriplegic in TOS)? Would that have been a better visual (maybe it being Kirk who rages after Kahn)? 

Mm. That would have been a good twist for the rebooted Wrath of Kahn tale.  In the JJ-Verse, at least given how things are setup for Into Darkness, Kirk has more of an emotional connection to Pike than Spock does to Kirk (or vice versa). A missed opportunity indeed.

[Kanedas Bike]

On 11/22/2019 at 11:49 PM, JB0 said:

I came out of the 09 film thinking "Abrams wanted to do Star Wars".

 

Pity he got the chance(though I dunno how much of 7 was his fault vs Disney's).

Pretty sure I read or saw someone else make the same assertion about watching Star Trek and thinking that JJ really wanted to direct Star Wars instead.

On that note, even after reading all about it, I still don't get the hate that The Force Awakens gets, but I digress. 

1 hour ago, JB0 said:

Yes.

 

I laughed during Into Darkness, because what else are you supposed to do when Spock is Shatner-ing it up and shouting "KAHHHHHHHHHHN!" at the top of his lungs? A Spock that doesn't even LIKE Kirk, at that.

Can't lie, I laughed/cringed/sighed/silently raged when Spock yelled that nonsense, Star Trek: Into Darkness was just an outright cluster. And I hated how hard the writers went with the antagonistic relationship Spock and Kirk had going back to Star Trek, it made believing that they'd become friends really hard to believe. All the way up to and through Star Trek Beyond.

I'll reserve judgement on this new Trek until the final trailer and/or I see the movie - IF - it gets made. 

-b.

[Sildani]

Star Trek Into Darkness would be “fixed” in great measure if Cumberbatch’s character had actually BEEN John Harriman, and Khan himself was still on ice. Last scene see Harriman back in his capsule, pan over a couple pods and see another pod, the faceplate mostly frosted over but a mane of silver hair is visible; and below is an obscured nameplate that reads “KHA############INGH.”
 

That would have hooked me. Plus that crap about the Vengeance. There’s no way something that big could be built by that many people and crewed by that many more, and nothing leaked or was noticed by bureaucrats. 
 

That said, it was an awesome design, and if the Federation didn’t keep its blueprints in some deeply buried file somewhere, they’re fools. 

[Dobber]

24 minutes ago, Sildani said:

Star Trek Into Darkness would be “fixed” in great measure if Cumberbatch’s character had actually BEEN John Harriman, and Khan himself was still on ice. Last scene see Harriman back in his capsule, pan over a couple pods and see another pod, the faceplate mostly frosted over but a mane of silver hair is visible; and below is an obscured nameplate that reads “KHA############INGH.”

I said the same thing years ago. Plus it would play into themes the movie was trying to portray....Harriman wanting to save his father figure Kahn and the rest of his “Family” and Kirk avenging/protecting his with Pike and crew.

Chris

[Seto Kaiba]

18 hours ago, Thom said:

And give Captain Pike a series!

IIRC, doesn't Anson Mount kind of not get on with the current crop of Star Trek showrunners?  I know he's said that he'd be open to discussing more involvement if it were someone else in charge, and he'd expressed frustration with the show's tendency to have shooting sessions run weeks over schedule.

Granted, he was easily the best thing about Star Trek: Discovery's second season.  

 

18 hours ago, tekering said:

So much squandered potential from Star Trek: Discovery's second season.  

The potential was always going to be squandered... because the inclusion of Captain Christopher Pike and the original USS Enterprise were a bait-and-switch band-aid meant to make the series appeal to Star Trek fans after season one failed to meet Netflix's expectations.  (In hindsight, the showrunners probably wish Jason Isaacs hadn't shot off his mouth about it not needing Star Trek fans to succeed after season two fell so flat Netflix almost refused to fund season three at all and did refuse to fund Star Trek: Picard.)

If anything, having the Enterprise show up and seeing what Discovery could have been just made Discovery look that much more substandard.  Next to the USS Enterprise, its much better-looking uniforms, and its actually-likable characters, the USS Discovery looked like a hot mess and its crew like a bunch of unprofessional antisocial Starfleet rejects in cheap pajamas.  The good stuff had to stay offscreen as much as possible or audiences would never be able to take Discovery's original content seriously.

(Which just highlights that the real squandered potential was that Star Trek: Discovery didn't use those vastly superior TOS-like designs from the word go.  How much easier would the Star Trek: Discovery series gone down with fans if it actually looked like classic Star Trek, albeit more cosmetically advanced?)

 

15 hours ago, derex3592 said:

Yup. Those screen shots look downright amazing. Haven't wasted my time with STD yet, but maybe I will at some point just to see the Captain Pike stuff. Everyone says that is what this dumpster fire of a show should have been. all about from the beginning. 

There are two "Short Treks" and one or two episodes right at the start of Star Trek: Discovery season two that actually feel like real, honest-to-goodness Star Trek.

Unfortunately, that doesn't last and the show quickly falls back into the stupidly grimdark nonsense of the previous season with a touch of Hideo Kojima-grade incomprehensible BS.

 

15 hours ago, TehPW said:

I was thinking about this when I had like 0.3 seconds to glance at my phone... OK everyone rips how JJ screwed the pooch by reinacting WoK's Spock's death with Kirk... I wondered... what IF it was Pike who sacrificed himself in the Warp Core chamber (in effect, resulting in the same circumstances that rendered him a quadriplegic in TOS)? Would that have been a better visual (maybe it being Kirk who rages after Kahn)? 

Among casual viewers, I think it might've gone over a little better than the hilariously narmy schtick of Spock screaming in rage over Khan indirectly killing someone he didn't even like.

Among Star Trek fans, I think the scene would still be poorly regarded because it's a very poor knockoff of one of the most iconic scenes in classic Star Trek.

This kind of lazy writing is, unfortunately, a hallmark of J.J.-Trek and properties derived from it like Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard.

 

27 minutes ago, Sildani said:

Star Trek Into Darkness would be “fixed” in great measure if Cumberbatch’s character had actually BEEN John Harriman, and Khan himself was still on ice. Last scene see Harriman back in his capsule, pan over a couple pods and see another pod, the faceplate mostly frosted over but a mane of silver hair is visible; and below is an obscured nameplate that reads “KHA############INGH.”

Ironically, that's kind of how they tried to advertise the film... and the studio admits that it wasn't all that successful at getting attention that way.

Khan has name recognition even outside the Star Trek fandom, thanks to Ricardo Montalban and the aforementioned iconic scenes from Star Trek II that even non-fans know from parodies and memes.  You can't shortcut right into the action the way they wanted to if your villain is an unintroduced new character nobody's ever heard of before.  You'd have to take time to actually introduce them, build them up as a threat, etc.  Outside of the jokes about his name and his involvement in The Hobbit and Marvel movies, Cumberbatch isn't really much of a draw in film.  He's just another mumbly Brit who's only entertaining when he's going full ham or engaging in Mr. Bean-esque rubber-faced buffoonery.

 

27 minutes ago, Sildani said:

Plus that crap about the Vengeance. There’s no way something that big could be built by that many people and crewed by that many more, and nothing leaked or was noticed by bureaucrats. 

That whole part of the film just wasn't thought out at all... from its connections to Section 31, to its alleged secret status despite Admiral Marcus keeping a model of it on his desk in Starfleet Headquarters, to the idea that the ship would be inconspicuous and impossible to trace back to the Federation despite being obvious at a glance it's a Federation ship that some edgelord painted black and carved a giant Starfleet delta into the saucer section of.  It's all just silly.

[Mommar]

16 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That whole part of the film just wasn't thought out at all... from its connections to Section 31, to its alleged secret status despite Admiral Marcus keeping a model of it on his desk in Starfleet Headquarters, to the idea that the ship would be inconspicuous and impossible to trace back to the Federation despite being obvious at a glance it's a Federation ship that some edgelord painted black and carved a giant Starfleet delta into the saucer section of.  It's all just silly.

As a matter of fact it would have made immensely more sense for the Vengeance to look like a Klingon ship.  They wanted an excuse to blow the hell out of the Klingons anyway.  Having a Klingon-like ship that wrecks Starfleets flagship would be a perfect way to justify a war with them.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Mommar said:

As a matter of fact it would have made immensely more sense for the Vengeance to look like a Klingon ship.  They wanted an excuse to blow the hell out of the Klingons anyway.  Having a Klingon-like ship that wrecks Starfleets flagship would be a perfect way to justify a war with them.

Really, the USS Vengeance itself shows how low the standard of writing on J.J.-Trek is... and is a pretty damned strong argument against making a fourth J.J.-Trek movie.

The USS Vengeance is an idea straight out of the very worst sh*t-tier fan fiction.  She's a massively upscaled version of Starfleet's best class of starships (the Constitution-class), she's got an all-black paintjob (for maximum edginess), she's several times faster, more agile, more heavily armed, more heavily armored, she's got new weapons the Constitution-class didn't get, she's heavily automated so one character can run the entire ship, and she was built in super-secret by the Federation's super-secret elite intelligence agency for a super-secret mission.  She's unbeatable in a one-on-one fight.  All it's missing for maximum cringe is for its executive officer to be an anthropomorphized character from My Little Pony that's in love with its commanding officer, who uses Japanese honorifics in English conversation (fedora and katana optional).

The design itself isn't bad... because it's just a 5/1 scale Connie... but everything to do with it in the story is eye-rollingly stupid.

I'd heard the original plan for J.J.-Trek 4 (AKA Star Trek XIV) was set to be a time travel plot not entirely dissimilar to Star Trek IV, though featuring Kirk going back in time to meet his own father.  Sadly, it's rather unlikely that George Kirk would give Jim a "the reason you suck" speech, so now we can only wait and see what kind of cringe awaits us.

[Thom]

Vengeance was such an ugly design, plus being super-sized even compared to the stupidly super-sized JJ-prise. I think the only reason it was so big was for that slide out scene when Kirk and Kahn snuck aboard. Thing was so big it was like a shovel taking out sky-scapers!

But I think I was okay enough with the movie until Kirk started kicking highly sensitive matter/anti-matter machinery. The Kaaaaahn! scream from Spock was just too over the top.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

15 minutes ago, Thom said:

But I think I was okay enough with the movie until Kirk started kicking highly sensitive matter/anti-matter machinery.

This was probably the worst moment of "did not do research" in all of J.J.-Trek, IMO.

James T. Kirk goes crawling around inside the (stupidly massive) matter/antimatter reaction chamber of the Enterprise's warp core.  Never mind that the dilithium crystals that moderate the reaction are MIA, or that matter and antimatter injectors have tolerances measured in microns, warp cores get hot.  Like, unreasonably hot.  2.5 million Kelvin hot during cold starts, and 2 TRILLION Kelvin at the reaction site.  You're not gonna have time to worry about dying from radiation exposure, because just opening the reaction chamber hatch of a core that's not properly shut down will vaporize you and everything around you.  Kirk is two feet from the plasma stream when he kicks the injectors back into alignment.  The only way to recover Kirk's body from THAT would be with a vacuum pump... but fortunately for our hero, convection is so utterly out to lunch that he manages to not even get burned.

[Sildani]

As for the scale model on Adm. Marcus’ desk, Abrams said its presence was a filming mistake and it was never supposed to be there, so at least Marcus wasn’t THAT dumb. 
 

And I honestly like the Vengeance design and its rationale for existing - whenever Starfleet thinks they don’t need warships, they get slapped by some Big Bad and find that yes, they do - but it was the wrong movie and method for her to exist. 

[Dynaman]

I always took the thing Kirk was kicking was not DIRECTLY attached to antimatter or anything but something out of alignment in the plumbing along the way and JUST enough something or other was leaking to cause radiation death.  The thing that bugged me was the direction he was kicking the thing would not move it back into place, more likely the opposite if anything.

[Thom]

Just kick it or hit i with something! The simple solution for all broken equipment in the universe.

[peter]

On 11/23/2019 at 9:02 PM, derex3592 said:

Yup. Those screen shots look downright amazing. Haven't wasted my time with STD yet, but maybe I will at some point just to see the Captain Pike stuff. Everyone says that is what this dumpster fire of a show should have been. all about from the beginning. 

STD is the first Star Trek series I haven't bothered to watch.  I didn't even put in the effort to stream, torrent or ask friends to d/l for me.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Sildani said:

As for the scale model on Adm. Marcus’ desk, Abrams said its presence was a filming mistake and it was never supposed to be there, so at least Marcus wasn’t THAT dumb. 

To be fair, the biggest shooting mistake is Abrams's presence (and involvement).  Into Darkness's writers left Admiral Marcus holding onto the idiot ball with both hands, both feet, his teeth, and a rope made from his own intestines.  He literally found the greatest, most destructive despot of the Eugenics Wars and decided "So what if he's smarter, stronger, faster, more durable, and a master manipulator?  I'll defrost his *ss and force him to work for us developing weapons and espionage technology for our secret plan to start an interstellar war.  After all, giving an unstable genius with a messiah complex and near-unlimited access to our resources reason to hold a massive grudge against me and the Federation can't possibly cause problems, right?"

So yeah, Marcus WAS that dumb... and he'd somehow made it all the way to Admiral.  We can only assume Starfleet gave him a really excellent nanny who kept him from running with scissors and eating too many crayons.  That kind of insane writing is all over the J.J.-verse Star Trek stuff... like the Jellyfish (Spock's ship with the red matter) being "their fastest ship"... capable of a whopping Warp 8.  Did they f*cking forget that practically every Starfleet ship to appear since 1987 could go faster than Warp 9?

 

4 hours ago, Sildani said:

And I honestly like the Vengeance design and its rationale for existing - whenever Starfleet thinks they don’t need warships, they get slapped by some Big Bad and find that yes, they do - but it was the wrong movie and method for her to exist. 

When has that ever happened, though?  

 

16 minutes ago, Thom said:

Just kick it or hit i with something! The simple solution for all broken equipment in the universe.

Today: "Hello IT have you tried turning it off and on again?"

Star Trek: "Hello Engineering have you tried reconfiguring the primary power coupling?"

[Mommar]

2 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 When has that ever happened, though?  

Needing Warships?  The Borg and the Dominion.

[Sildani]

Especially the Borg, but I could see an argument made for the Four Years’ War and the Romulan War (forget the canon name.) 

[Seto Kaiba]

35 minutes ago, Mommar said:

Needing Warships?  The Borg and the Dominion.

Needing "more ships" isn't the same thing as needing "warships".

It's seldom directly acknowledged, but one thing Star Trek has been pretty consistent about since its earliest days is that most of the ships Starfleet uses for missions of peaceful space exploration and diplomacy are so heavily armed and armored that they're equal or superior to the dedicated warships of the Federation's enemies in a stand-up fight. 

Every now and then, a new alien species of the week will note that the Starfleet ship visiting them is suspiciously well-armed for a ship on a mission of peaceful exploration.  TNG made a lot of it implicitly, with almost every belligerent confrontation with a major hostile power (Romulans, Cardassians, etc.) involving the Enterprise up against two or more of the latest, best warships the hostile power in question has.  Voyager hung a lampshade on it several times early on, with the Kazon considering the lightly armed (by Federation standards) science ship to be almost stupidly overpowered.  Deep Space Nine had a moment during the Dominion War where the USS Defiant was stopped in its tracks by an almost century-old Excelsior-class ship (USS Lakota) that'd been upgraded with the latest Starfleet weapons updates... a purpose-built anti-Borg warship stonewalled by a eighty-year-old multi-mission explorer that had just come from the refitters that was nevertheless able to fight it on an even footing (and was actually winning until the Lakota's captain stood down).

The only time Starfleet main line ships have ever been depicted as unequal to the task of handling enemy warships was Star Trek: Enterprise, before the NX-01 Enterprise was upgraded with phase cannons and photon(ic) torpedoes.

 

[Sildani]

...and the Federation’s first belligerent encounter with the Dominion, which led to the destruction of the USS Odyssey with the loss of all hands. We’ll also note that in “Sacrifice of Angels” the Federation Combined Fleet was having a very hard time of it at the hands of the combined Dominion/Cardassian flotilla until the Klingon fleet arrived. I grant you the Feds were outnumbered two to one there, but the sequence showed many more Starfleet and Cardassian vessels damaged or destroyed than Dominion classes. 

Finally, I suppose the best evidence the Federation realized the need for warships was the fact that they produced more Defiant-class ships. Valiant, São Paulo, and a couple more unnamed vessels we see in the combined Fleet that goes after the Dominion in “What You Leave Behind.” It might have been more efficient from a production point of view to simply build more, upgunned Intrepid-class or Centaur-class vessels, but Starfleet did not. 
 

Although I broadly agree that Starfleet’s normal ships were powerful, well-protected, and more than a match for most of the crap the galaxy could throw at them, it has to be said that there were enemies that made the extra size and power requirements necessitated by “multi-role” ship design a disadvantage in combat, especially by those races who were naturally more belligerent and designed their ships in kind. 

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Sildani said:

...and the Federation’s first belligerent encounter with the Dominion, which led to the destruction of the USS Odyssey with the loss of all hands.

Later incidents in the Dominion War proved that the Galaxy-class was more than the equal of practically any hostile warship.  The USS Odyssey still massively outgunned the Jem'Hadar ships attacking it despite being outnumbered three to one, and would very likely have won that engagement without breaking a sweat if it'd had shields able to deflect phased polaron beam fire at the time.

Starfleet's engineers plugged that hole in their defenses in short order... it's not a representative sample.

 

3 hours ago, Sildani said:

We’ll also note that in “Sacrifice of Angels” the Federation Combined Fleet was having a very hard time of it at the hands of the combined Dominion/Cardassian flotilla until the Klingon fleet arrived. I grant you the Feds were outnumbered two to one there, but the sequence showed many more Starfleet and Cardassian vessels damaged or destroyed than Dominion classes.

Because the objective wasn't to defeat the Dominion fleet, it was to break through it and recapture Deep Space Nine.  Sisko slowly fed his forces into the grinder trying to provoke the Cardassians into opening a hole in the Dominion formation he could fly through.

 

3 hours ago, Sildani said:

Finally, I suppose the best evidence the Federation realized the need for warships was the fact that they produced more Defiant-class ships. Valiant, São Paulo, and a couple more unnamed vessels we see in the combined Fleet that goes after the Dominion in “What You Leave Behind.” It might have been more efficient from a production point of view to simply build more, upgunned Intrepid-class or Centaur-class vessels, but Starfleet did not. 

Did they, though?  Or are those other Defiant-class ships prototypes that Starfleet dug out of mothballs like the USS Defiant herself?

Speaking as a design engineer, you usually don't build just one prototype if you can help it because every breakdown means losing test time and you're SOL if that one prototype breaks down.  Something the scope of a Galaxy-class is so big and expensive that a single prototype is the only practical method, but the Defiant-class is pretty small and would be a lot easier to build multiples of to test (esp. if the ship were to be tested in live fire testing given its role as a warship).

 

3 hours ago, Sildani said:

Although I broadly agree that Starfleet’s normal ships were powerful, well-protected, and more than a match for most of the crap the galaxy could throw at them, it has to be said that there were enemies that made the extra size and power requirements necessitated by “multi-role” ship design a disadvantage in combat, especially by those races who were naturally more belligerent and designed their ships in kind. 

So far, the only enemy that's ever been acknowleged as prompting the Federation to consider a dedicated warship design was the Borg... and Starfleet backed away from that in favor of improving its tactics.  As noted by First Contact's creators, Starfleet's main problem at Wolf 359 was trying to fight the Borg in orderly battle formations and standard maneuvers, allowing the Borg to make use of Picard's knowledge to turn the engagement into a shooting gallery.  Starfleet had all but deadlocked the Borg by using the chaotic battle plan they used in First Contact until the Enterprise showed up and finished the job.  Even century-old ships can still kick ass and take names if updated properly by Starfleet.

Even in the noticeably more militant, xenophobic J.J.-Trek Federation, Starfleet's multi-mission explorers seem to be the shootiest things they've got, by dint of being able to redirect all that extra power from things like science labs and elaborate sensor arrays to weapons and shields, likely giving them an advantage over ships built without that kind of excess output in mind.

The stupidly fanfic-y USS Vengeance wasn't a warship per se, she was an instrument of genocide... meant to launch a preemptive decapitation strike against the Klingon Empire using advanced weapons that could engage from beyond the range of any Klingon retaliation.  It's basically Admiral Marcus's My First Death Star.

[JB0]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Did they, though?  Or are those other Defiant-class ships prototypes that Starfleet dug out of mothballs like the USS Defiant herself?

Yes, actually.

"After several upgrades by Deep Space 9 Operations Chief Miles O'Brien, the ship was deemed worthy of use and more ships of the class were constructed. (DS9: "The Search, Part I", "Call to Arms"; VOY: "Message in a Bottle") "

Aapparently O'Brien was COMPLETELY wasted on Ent-D's transporter and Deep Space 9. He's better than all Starfleet's best shipwrights put together.

 

(All credit to Memory Alpha)

[Sildani]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Later incidents in the Dominion War proved that the Galaxy-class was more than the equal of practically any hostile warship.  The USS Odyssey still massively outgunned the Jem'Hadar ships attacking it despite being outnumbered three to one, and would very likely have won that engagement without breaking a sweat if it'd had shields able to deflect phased polaron beam fire at the time.

Starfleet's engineers plugged that hole in their defenses in short order... it's not a representative sample.

 

Because the objective wasn't to defeat the Dominion fleet, it was to break through it and recapture Deep Space Nine.  Sisko slowly fed his forces into the grinder trying to provoke the Cardassians into opening a hole in the Dominion formation he could fly through.

 

Did they, though?  Or are those other Defiant-class ships prototypes that Starfleet dug out of mothballs like the USS Defiant herself?

Speaking as a design engineer, you usually don't build just one prototype if you can help it because every breakdown means losing test time and you're SOL if that one prototype breaks down.  Something the scope of a Galaxy-class is so big and expensive that a single prototype is the only practical method, but the Defiant-class is pretty small and would be a lot easier to build multiples of to test (esp. if the ship were to be tested in live fire testing given its role as a warship).

 

So far, the only enemy that's ever been acknowleged as prompting the Federation to consider a dedicated warship design was the Borg... and Starfleet backed away from that in favor of improving its tactics.  As noted by First Contact's creators, Starfleet's main problem at Wolf 359 was trying to fight the Borg in orderly battle formations and standard maneuvers, allowing the Borg to make use of Picard's knowledge to turn the engagement into a shooting gallery.  Starfleet had all but deadlocked the Borg by using the chaotic battle plan they used in First Contact until the Enterprise showed up and finished the job.  Even century-old ships can still kick ass and take names if updated properly by Starfleet.

Even in the noticeably more militant, xenophobic J.J.-Trek Federation, Starfleet's multi-mission explorers seem to be the shootiest things they've got, by dint of being able to redirect all that extra power from things like science labs and elaborate sensor arrays to weapons and shields, likely giving them an advantage over ships built without that kind of excess output in mind.

The stupidly fanfic-y USS Vengeance wasn't a warship per se, she was an instrument of genocide... meant to launch a preemptive decapitation strike against the Klingon Empire using advanced weapons that could engage from beyond the range of any Klingon retaliation.  It's basically Admiral Marcus's My First Death Star.

As for the Odyssey, very well. I will point out that, even with power diverted, the fire from her and a runabout didn’t seem to injure a Jem’Hadar fighter too much. 
 

Regarding Operation Return, the hole wasn’t being created until Dukat gave him one. Sisko knew it was a trap and took it anyway. When the Dominion jammed Starfleet comms, their battle formation pretty much disintegrated into ship-to-ship fighting... which wasn’t going well until the Klingons interceded. 
 

Even with them, only the Defiant broke through initially to get to DS9... and only 200 friendly vessels eventually followed her. Considering that probably more than a few of those were Klingon, out of an initial fleet of 600+ ships, having only some 200 survive is a loss rate of more than 60%... that’s thousands and thousands of officers and men. Yes, they were outnumbered, but if the Starfleet ships were as powerful as all that, they should have had fewer losses, damaged the Dominion fleet to a greater degree without the Klingons’ aid, or both. 
 

The Battle of Sector 001: multiple Starfleet vessels had been destroyed, whereas the single Borg cube had sustained “heavy” damage to its outer hull and had cheerfully proceeded all the way to Earth. Hardly “deadlocked.” Losses were comparable to those sustained during the Battle of Wolf 359, despite the Federation having years to advance its technology and tactics. It’s interesting to note that the larger vessels were destroyed, whereas the Defiant was beat to crap but salvageable. 
 

As for large multi-mission vessels having more power to divert: take that same power output, put it into a smaller spaceframe for a smaller target and better maneuverability, overbuild the structure itself, and you have a warship. The Defiant-class, in fact. That’s why she almost shook herself apart during tests. 
 

And thanks, JB0. 

Edited November 26, 2019 by Sildani

[Dynaman]

6 minutes ago, Sildani said:

As for the Odyssey, very well. I will point out that, even with power diverted, the fire from her and a runabout didn’t seem to injure a Jem’Hadar fighter too much. 
 

 

Plot armor giveth and plot armor taketh away.

[Sildani]

3 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Plot armor giveth and plot armor taketh away.

Too true! But that’s what we have to work with: what we see on screen. I don’t know what all is “canon” or not... with Macross, it all mostly comes from Kawamori, and he doesn’t like to be held down by it too much. And there’s stuff like the Master Files books which kinda are and aren’t all at the same time. Mostly aren’t. 
 

Star Trek though... there’s a lot of producers, actors, and so on running around having their say. Is Memory Alpha canon? Memory Beta? The Eaglemoss magazines packed with their models? What the Trekyards guests say?

So yeah, plot armor. It’s fun to think about though!

 

[Mommar]

21 minutes ago, Sildani said:

As for the Odyssey, very well. I will point out that, even with power diverted, the fire from her and a runabout didn’t seem to injure a Jem’Hadar fighter too much. 
 

Regarding Operation Return, the hole wasn’t being created until Dukat gave him one. Sisko knew it was a trap and took it anyway. When the Dominion jammed Starfleet comms, their battle formation pretty much disintegrated into ship-to-ship fighting... which wasn’t going well until the Klingons interceded. 
 

Even with them, only the Defiant broke through initially to get to DS9... and only 200 friendly vessels eventually followed her. Considering that probably more than a few of those were Klingon, out of an initial fleet of 600+ ships, having only some 200 survive is a loss rate of more than 60%... that’s thousands and thousands of officers and men. Yes, they were outnumbered, but if the Starfleet ships were as powerful as all that, they should have had fewer losses, damaged the Dominion fleet to a greater degree without the Klingons’ aid, or both. 
 

The Battle of Sector 001: multiple Starfleet vessels had been destroyed, whereas the single Borg cube had sustained “heavy” damage to its outer hull and had cheerfully proceeded all the way to Earth. Hardly “deadlocked.” Losses were comparable to those sustained during the Battle of Wolf 359, despite the Federation having years to advance its technology and tactics. It’s interesting to note that the larger vessels were destroyed, whereas the Defiant was beat to crap but salvageable. 
 

As for large multi-mission vessels having more power to divert: take that same power output, put it into a smaller spaceframe for a smaller target and better maneuverability, overbuild the structure itself, and you have a warship. The Defiant-class, in fact. That’s why she almost shook herself apart during tests. 
 

And thanks, JB0. 

Don't forget, at the battle of Sector 001 every single one of those ships was redesigned to specifically be Borg killers and it still took the arrival of the Enterprise E, and Picards magical knowledge where to specifically shoot, that actually stopped the Cube (and even still that was a Borg ruse.)  They WOULD have lost otherwise, even with the upgraded weapons on all ships.

[Dynaman]

1 hour ago, Mommar said:

Don't forget, at the battle of Sector 001 every single one of those ships was redesigned to specifically be Borg killers and it still took the arrival of the Enterprise E, and Picards magical knowledge where to specifically shoot, that actually stopped the Cube (and even still that was a Borg ruse.)  They WOULD have lost otherwise, even with the upgraded weapons on all ships.

That wasn't a ruse - that was a last ditch escape for the Borg but one has to ask "If you have time travel why not do that to begin with?"

[Mommar]

7 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

That wasn't a ruse - that was a last ditch escape for the Borg but one has to ask "If you have time travel why not do that to begin with?"

No, that was a ruse.  The explosion from the Cube almost masked their escape except for the Ent-E.

[Sildani]

Where was it explained whether it was a ruse or not?

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, JB0 said:

"After several upgrades by Deep Space 9 Operations Chief Miles O'Brien, the ship was deemed worthy of use and more ships of the class were constructed. (DS9: "The Search, Part I", "Call to Arms"; VOY: "Message in a Bottle") "

So, I did some checking into this, and that statement seems to be based on the fan assumption that the Defiant was the only prototype built and not anything in the episodes cited.

The only source I could actually find alleging the Defiant-class was actually put into production was an AOL Chat with Ron Moore from 1997, and I'm not sure how official that'd be considered given that it wasn't an official interview or anything.  (Granted, Starfleet absolutely IS stupid enough to engage in No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup, but they have had moments of Reality Ensues where multiple prototypes of ships were acknowledged to be present and actively tested on, like the Vesta and Luna classes, the Yellowstone-class runabouts, the NX warp 5 testbeds, etc.)

 

8 hours ago, JB0 said:

Aapparently O'Brien was COMPLETELY wasted on Ent-D's transporter and Deep Space 9. He's better than all Starfleet's best shipwrights put together.

Was that ever in any doubt?  The man himself complains to Worf about how wasted he was on the Enterprise-D just standing around in a transporter room waiting for something to break down, and he does things that'd make even Scotty's eyes cross... like turning an unviable prototype into one of the meanest ships in the fleet, and making a Cardassian space station's systems play nice with grafted-in Federation and Bajoran technology.

(One has to wonder how Sisko, and not O'Brien, ended up posted to the Utopia Planitia yards on Mars.)

 

 

1 hour ago, Sildani said:

The Battle of Sector 001: multiple Starfleet vessels had been destroyed, whereas the single Borg cube had sustained “heavy” damage to its outer hull and had cheerfully proceeded all the way to Earth. Hardly “deadlocked.” Losses were comparable to those sustained during the Battle of Wolf 359, despite the Federation having years to advance its technology and tactics. It’s interesting to note that the larger vessels were destroyed, whereas the Defiant was beat to crap but salvageable. 

Starfleet had the Borg cube essentially swinging wild for the entire time it took the Enterprise to warp all the way from the Romulan Neutral Zone.  Depending on the writer, that's either most of a day or several days.

 

 

1 hour ago, Mommar said:

Don't forget, at the battle of Sector 001 every single one of those ships was redesigned to specifically be Borg killers and it still took the arrival of the Enterprise E, and Picards magical knowledge where to specifically shoot, that actually stopped the Cube (and even still that was a Borg ruse.)  They WOULD have lost otherwise, even with the upgraded weapons on all ships.

So, I did some checking into this as well and while I distinctly remember hearing the Akira-class was designed to fight the Borg, I'd never heard it of any of the other original designs used in the film (e.g. the Sovereign-class, Steamrunner-class, Saber-class, and Norway-class).  I wasn't able to turn up any statements to the effect that any of them had been built to be "Borg killers" in official material.  Most of them lack any kind of official development history, but the ones that do have one mentioned in expanded universe material are weirdly consistent in being said to have been on the drawing board before Wolf 359, several (e.g. the Steamrunner, Saber, Akira) are implied or outright stated to have been developed as a response to the Federation's border conflict with the Cardassian Union as upgunned patrol and utility ships to police the Cardassian border.  The closest I was able to find to a ship designed to fight the Borg (besides the Defiant) was a mention that the Sovereign-class was reworked while still on the drawing board to increase its combat performance after the Battle of Wolf 359 (but not specifically to make it an anti-Borg warship).

 

 

TL;DR, the Defiant is basically the one and only time Starfleet set out to build a dedicated warship... their fleet is made up almost exclusively of (well-armed) exploration, patrol, and utility ships.

[Sanity is Optional]

3 hours ago, Dynaman said:

Plot armor giveth and plot armor taketh away.

Pretty much, don't look for consistency when it involves flagships or any other plot-relevant ship.