The Defiant-class is actually the sort of ship you want. It's really good at doing what a warship needs to do, is very efficient at it, and is small (and thus cheaper) than the bigger, multipurpose ships that are often expensive as fuck for their combat capability.
Watsonian: Yeah, agreed, as long as you actually build enough of them to make its
insanely long and deeply troubled development worth the time and expense; otherwise you end up with...well...the F-22, basically.
Doylist: This is not possible with current cost mechanics; modules are free and the tonnage and shielding to house them are
relatively affordable enough (in comparison to the cost of engines, warp cores, nacelles, and weapons) that light pure-combat ships don't make sense.
For the record, I think this is an entirely natural outcome of a sudden, massive quantum leap in sublight drive power; it basically just deleted one of the major balancing factors that normally favor smaller ships- agility- because we have the sheer thrust to make anything
or at least anything we can afford to build at all highly maneuverable at an affordable price.
It also feels realistic (plausible? truthy?) to me that warp cores and nacelles are a humongous fixed cost and that large ships be generally more cost-effective in consequence.
So in short I don't see the current lack of sensible frigate options as a
problem; I just want it to be
recognized that we can now effectively make, power, and propel much, much larger ships.
Like, the answer (imo) isn't to rework the mechanics so a
Selachii-replacement makes sense; that takes all the value out of risking and winning our massive gamble on the theoretical Type 3 thrusters. The answer is to realize it's now practical to build
way bigger ships and if we go light shields they'll still be acceptably tough (because yuge) and won't be insanely expensive, either. Postwar, after the Darwin? Reclassify the Darwin and Newton to "frigate" and everything else in inventory to "light cruiser", give me a 275-300kt Warp 8 "medium cruiser" for internal duties (and maybe stick the Kea-II saucer on a new engineering hull and build couple dozen more of 'em [and a handful more Excaliburs]), and when the Type 4 nacelle comes out give me a 400kt
demigod for our first dedicated flagship explorer, even if we only get six or eight or ten of 'em.
Edit: This is assuming the Federation's membership is sufficiently traumatized by the Four Years' War to bump Starfleet's funding up from 0.2% to 0.5 or even 1% of their budgets.
I am making a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek assumption about the actual numbers involved and they are definitely wrong and probably way wrong- although I do damn well hope we get some significant funding increase out of this and the general idea of "clearly you guys have been cutting it way too close, come on, when you stop quivering in terror could you please loosen the purse strings" still applies
