Defiant Re-Reimagined

[Graham Kennedy]

A while back I posted a model of my version of the USS Defiant. Basically the same concept as the original, but making more sense to me in terms of the weapons. It always bugged me that Defiant's weapons were tiny, given that they were supposed to be so powerful. So I scaled them up... and added more. And then some more.

Lately I've had a go at reworking the design. Very much a work in progress, but here's a look.



Change 1 - it's a bigger ship. Never did like a tiny Defiant killing ships 100x the size. This one is 236 metres long. Still shorter than a Connie, but a much more substantial ship.



Change 2 - Defiant's phaser cannon are miniscule. There are more like the All Good Things phaser lance. Though actually I have half a thought that they should be disruptor cannon. The Defiant was built to fight the Borg, so IMO it should not only have the most powerful weapons possible, but as many different types of weapon as possible. So when the Borg adapt to your phasers, switch to disruptor cannon. When those fail, quantum torpedoes. When those fail... well I had in mid that the deflector was designed to be able to do that deflector cannon thing the E-D did in Best of Both Worlds, too.



Change 3 - phaser arrays, and lots of them. And those are the secondary armament.



Change 4 - Quantum torpedo tubes. Six facing forward, two facing aft.



Change 5 - I wanted a much more armoured look to the ship. Notice that both the big cannon and the nacelles have huge layers of extra armour over them. That armour is three and a half feet thick.

Also the shuttle hangar bay is in a much more sensible place. Never did like the 'drop bay' shuttle design.



Still lots of detail to do, but I'm liking how it's turning out.

[Bryan Moore]

I like this a lot. Somehow this rough animation along with your added weaponry gives this a Last Starfighter feel to it.

[Graham Kennedy]

Added some gratings over the bussard collectors, put some texturing on the phaser arrays to give them that segmented look, and added a sprinkling of phaser ball turrets around the hull just because... well, you can never have enough firepower! And most obviously, began to add hull markings and colouring.

There's also a guy in a space suit standing on the hull. Can you spot him?

[Graham Kennedy]

So I rebuilt the nacelles, which has improved the texturing some. And I made the hull markings a little more detailed, which looks pretty good.



I wanted to put a shuttle in the bay, but the TOS shuttle just didn't look right. I tried building the Chaffee from DS9, but that really didn't work out too well. Then I found a Runabout online; courtesy of ChrisKuhn at BlendSwap.com

And bloody hell, Runabouts are HUGE! I had no idea they were so big, but I had to widen the Hangar doors by like six metres each to get the thing to fit through them, and even then it only clears the doors with about 18 inches on each side. You could, just barely, fit four of them into the bay. You wouldn't have room to turn them around, though, So more likely two in the hangar.

Also put a better colour/design on the impulse engines.

[Graham Kennedy]

Can't think of anything more to do to this, so for now this is the finished version.



As you can see, BIG cannon. But not that big, really. Think of the phaser lance in All Good Things, or even those huge cannon on the Negh'Var.

Also, an array of forward facing tubes, rather than just a couple, and the tubes much more prominent. I never much liked that quantum torpedoes seemed to be basically photon torpedoes of a different colour. I wanted mine to be bigger, obviously more powerful.



The aft end. Much bigger impulse engines, and twin aft facing quantum tubes. Also I relocated the shuttle bay. I never much liked 'drop type' shuttle bays. Either you park your shuttle on the doors, which seems like really bad engineering ("Sorry Captain, the door lock broke and the shuttle fell out."), or you have to have this expanse of floor space that you can't use. Either way, not good. So I put mine in what seemed like the most obvious place. Originally these were much smaller, but I resized them so that they could, just, take a Danube class Runabout. Runabouts turned out to be a good deal larger than I'd expected them to be!



There's a general absence of windows on my version of Defiant, because windows are weak spots. The only place you find them are in the hull sections containing the crew quarters. These are behind the phaser cannon, so difficult for an enemy to hit. And those sections are non-essential anyway, and would be empty during battle. The armour scheme is such that these sections are lightly armoured, but there is a big slab of armour behind them. So a hit there would blast the empty quarters before being hopefully stopped by the armour behind.

Note also phaser arrays dotted around the ship. These are 4 metres wide, as wide as a Type X, though shorter than the main arrays on a Galaxy class.



A close up of the Quantum tubes and a phaser array. Note there are also phaser ball-type turrets as tertiary weapons, because sometimes you don't want overkill. Like having 30mm cannon on a modern Destroyer because sometimes the target doesn't rate a 127mm main gun round.

Also, I figured that since the design was based on fighting the Borg, the thing to do would be to have as many different types of weapon as possible. As the Borg adapt to one, you switch to another - so you get as much time to strike as possible before your weapons become useless. To that end, I considered having the main cannon be disruptors rather than phasers. Perhaps Klingon weapons engineers assisted in the design of them? I also thought that the ship would probably be designed to allow the deflector weapon the Enterprise-D tried to be a standard feature of the deflector design. That would give the ship photon torpedoes from the nose probe launcher, quantum torpedoes, disruptor cannon, phaser arrays, and phaser ball turrets. Quite the loadout!



A close up of the cannon. The darker patches of the hull are thick slabs of armour - over the cannon, that armour is about thirty inches thick. Over the nacelles it's double that. There are other protective features, too - the bussard collectors have armoured grills over them, which means gas can still flow into them along the Y-axis of the ship but they're shielded if you go more than a few degrees off axis. The bridge is buried with hull structure all around it; the bridge dome is thick armour, and the glass ceiling dome is replaced by a big thick lump of extra armour.

So, some stats :

Length overall : 235.7 m (773 feet)
Breadth overall : 214.3 m (703 feet)
Height Overall : 71.5 m (234 feet)

Weapons : 4 Pulse Disruptor Cannon (4 fwd); 8 Quantum torpedo tubes (4 fwd 2 aft); 10 Type X phaser arrays (1 fwd, 4 stbd, 4 port); 1 probe launcher, capable of launching photon torpedoes (1 fwd); 10 Phaser turrets (6 drsl, 6 vntrl).

Crew : 135, facilities to carry 100 tactical crew with equipment.


So that's my take on the Defiant. Hope you like her!

[Bryan Moore]

This is your best, in my opinion, of your Starfleet designs. All are good to very good, but the logic behind this design is pretty bulletproof. I absolutely love the rear shuttle bay and the massive torpedo launchers. This looks like a gunboat, not a funky escort like on the series. Really well done.

[Graham Kennedy]

This is your best, in my opinion, of your Starfleet designs. All are good to very good, but the logic behind this design is pretty bulletproof. I absolutely love the rear shuttle bay and the massive torpedo launchers. This looks like a gunboat, not a funky escort like on the series. Really well done.

Thanks, really appreciate it!

I really liked how this one turned out, too. As you say, it looks like a gunboat - I was going for "mucking great guns with just enough ship to move them around", and the kind of ship that would make people of nefarious character go "Oh shit, the Defiant is here! We're SO screwed!" I think this does that pretty well!

[McAvoy]

As far as the armor in concerned, armor is a dense material and would take up very little space beyond the structure to hold it in place. However with that being said, what take up space is compartments meant to take an explosion or blast without getting into the interior of the ship.

I think your ship could easily have a two layered design. The outer hull dispurses as much of the energy of the weapon while being pierced but the second layer is the main armor where it will withstand the remaining energy.

The area between the two hulls would uninhabitable. Or hell, some sort of energy absorbing material like gel or liquid.

[Tinadrin Chelnor]

I really like this, much better than the original Defiant. Looks awesome.

[Graham Kennedy]

I really like this, much better than the original Defiant. Looks awesome.

Thanks!