I'm looking and the more I look the more unhappy I am. The Saber is a light crusier of 160 meters with 4 type 10s and torpedoes.
The steamrunner is a frigate of over 300 meters with.... 4 type 10 phasers of the same size as the saber and torpedos.
Starship Design Bureau
- Thread starter Sayle
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The steamrunner is a frigate of over 300 meters with.... 4 type 10 phasers of the same size as the saber and torpedos.
Theunderbolt
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Isn't that illegal? As in banned by treaty?
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- California
Oh so we're time skipping the Ambassador and Galaxy era? Well, post 359 is probably the biggest build up era of Starfleet history, so it makes sense, but still. A shame not to be able to leave our marks there. Fighting over what to stick in the Galaxy would be have been fun.
Of the choices we have, the Defiant is fine as is. It's over gunned and can't stuff enough power into its hull, but it can still smash most ships in the Quadrent and I doubt our own variant will be better.
I think I'll go with the Saber.
Of the choices we have, the Defiant is fine as is. It's over gunned and can't stuff enough power into its hull, but it can still smash most ships in the Quadrent and I doubt our own variant will be better.
I think I'll go with the Saber.
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The Defiant got a special dispensation because Ira Steven Beher wanted to play with a new toy.
Theunderbolt
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The Defiant
The Steamrunner
The Sabre
Honestly we know the Defiant gets worked out (Well the Sao Paulo works out) so I'd prefer we do the Saber or the Steamrunner.
I say steamrunner. In cannon it got the same load out as the Saber even though it's bigger.
Theunderbolt
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Starfleet made a deal with the Romulans so that the Defiant could have a cloak as long as there was a Romulan observer on the ship.
It was swept under the rug as the war advanced.
The Sabre and Steamrunner class in canon were both... probably fine. Like there is not much to say about them because there is so little to go on*. All we can say for sure both of them seem to have existed and served in Starfleet during the Dominion War. This implies some minimum level of capability and lack of issues they must have been able to meet, although considering that the Federation at one point was also refitting Miranda-class vessels into attack ships and sending them out in wings where they would suffer casualties as bad or worse than we see from Peregrine fighters, Starfleet may not have been feeling too picky about hulls which could be quickly pressed into service at that moment.
By contrast, the Defiant in canon was basically a failure when the design was first produced, sort of an example of what we might expect if we really fucked up a project beyond fixing it. The ship was so overpowered that it would essentially tear itself apart under high-stress situations, and the one prototype was mothballed after these problems came out in testing. In Deep Space 9, Miles O'Brien works out a fix to these issues by rejigging the structural integrity fields, and it turns into a highly capable escort which was able to be produced in numbers just in time for the Dominion War, where it saw notable success.
Reading between the lines, one wonders if Starfleet might have believed these problems were fixable with enough time and resources, and simply decided not to because the looming threat of further Borg incursions did not materialise as expected... but we can only speculate.
So it sort of depends on how much historical contingency we can assume. If the other design team's projects turning out the way they did in canon includes the events of Deep Space 9 playing out as they did canonically, then this means the Defiant should eventually turn out into a viable design. If it does not, then this is our one chance to fix it. @Sayle, can we assume that the "canon" timeline will run identically for the projects we don't take, including the shelved Defiant design eventually being rehabilitated, or not?
*(The Steamrunner and Sabre have much more active careers in stuff like Star Trek Online and fanon, because they're basically some of the last designs we see Starfleet produce before the TNG-era TV series ended, representing the "cutting edge" along with designs like the Prometheus and Akira. How much @Sayle will draw on these I don't know. Although I recall back from when I played that he was is a fairly prolific STO player at one point. Both of them are fairly capable vessels there from what I recall, although neither is especially revelatory, especially the Steamrunner which I believe is regarded as a bit of an ugly duckling in fanon circles.)
By contrast, the Defiant in canon was basically a failure when the design was first produced, sort of an example of what we might expect if we really fucked up a project beyond fixing it. The ship was so overpowered that it would essentially tear itself apart under high-stress situations, and the one prototype was mothballed after these problems came out in testing. In Deep Space 9, Miles O'Brien works out a fix to these issues by rejigging the structural integrity fields, and it turns into a highly capable escort which was able to be produced in numbers just in time for the Dominion War, where it saw notable success.
Reading between the lines, one wonders if Starfleet might have believed these problems were fixable with enough time and resources, and simply decided not to because the looming threat of further Borg incursions did not materialise as expected... but we can only speculate.
So it sort of depends on how much historical contingency we can assume. If the other design team's projects turning out the way they did in canon includes the events of Deep Space 9 playing out as they did canonically, then this means the Defiant should eventually turn out into a viable design. If it does not, then this is our one chance to fix it. @Sayle, can we assume that the "canon" timeline will run identically for the projects we don't take, including the shelved Defiant design eventually being rehabilitated, or not?
*(The Steamrunner and Sabre have much more active careers in stuff like Star Trek Online and fanon, because they're basically some of the last designs we see Starfleet produce before the TNG-era TV series ended, representing the "cutting edge" along with designs like the Prometheus and Akira. How much @Sayle will draw on these I don't know. Although I recall back from when I played that he was is a fairly prolific STO player at one point. Both of them are fairly capable vessels there from what I recall, although neither is especially revelatory, especially the Steamrunner which I believe is regarded as a bit of an ugly duckling in fanon circles.)
Enthusiast#117
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How far down the line is that canon defiant retrofit though?
Starfleet won't have a modern escort ship for all of that time.
Starfleet won't have a modern escort ship for all of that time.
Saber class is also listed as an escort.
Theunderbolt
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The Peregines are still a weird SF decision. Those things had no business going against the Jem Hadar.
Or at the very least they should have been drone troepdo bombers rather then piloted ww2 fighters in space.
[X] A Heavy Frigate - Project Steamrunner
Defiant is fine without us going there. In contrast the Sabre and Steamrunner are steaming piles of shxx. The ships have the exact Same weaponry. So by everything that is holy lets improve the light Cruiser to be better than the freaking frigate please?:
[ ] A Light Cruiser - Project Saber
[ ] A Light Cruiser - Project Saber
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Well, they often are described as fast courier ships. I think the retrofit of them to become fighters only happened after the Maquis had shown that you could manage to deal damage with them. Besides that, it falls under the sci-fi needs to have fighters rule - I think we can ignore it mostly. As they aren't often shown besides the Dominion War where they make sense. Starfleet is basically desperate to get anything that can fly to the frontlines and has integrated the surviving Maquis.
You have a cheap way to skirmish and harras enemies as well as people who know how to do it. In the grant schemes of things, two or three people per fighter can be lost if you manage to damage or destroy a larger asset.
Theunderbolt
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Torpedo frigates would work too.
Enthusiast#117
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QM is calling it a Light Cruiser though? I'm confused.
Okay, so what exactly is the difference between these three options:
Escort implies that it accompanies other ships, but does that make it the smallest ship here?
Heavy Frigates are apparently bigger than Light Cruisers? So what makes something a Cruiser vs a Frigate? Some kind of doctrinal role?
If the Light Cruiser is also an Escort, what's the difference between the two design specifications?
Make the steam runner the troepdo frigate to give it a warload different from the saber?
That's definitely an additional issue to consider, although potentially one we can live with.
One factor on taking on the Defiant project is we have to to either solve the issues with the ship being over-powered that Starfleet designers could not canonically (until Miles O'Brien came along), or produce a less powerful design. Now I think we're pretty smart cookies, so we may well be able to do it, and was players we can assume a degree of narrative agency which may make it possible for us to surpass the "default" performance. But all that being said, it may still be a difficult needle to thread.
So this may be a bit of a hot take, and apologies for disagreeing with you, but I would actually personally say the exact opposite?
Far more so than the Defiant, which still ultimately replicates most of the canonical "starship" features like extremely high endurance and reliability, science labs, and shuttle bay, and so on, the Peregrine class really does seem to be a "pure warship" designed to trade effectively with other ships. With a crew of exactly one, very limited amenities and endurance, and at a size not much greater than a runabout, it was still able to fit phasers and a rack of full-sized photon torpedoes, with runabouts for comparison only carrying miniature ones. Yes, they suffer high casualties, but World War II torpedo and dive bombers also suffered pretty eye-watering casualties. If a Peregrine wing can destroy or cripple warships a hundred times their size and cost, then the calculus is worthwhile, and in their on-screen depictions they are shown doing so a few times.
There's actually an analysis of the Peregrine class and how it plausibly fitted into wider Starfleet doctrine on the Daystrom Institute subreddit which I really like. It also goes into some interesting speculation based on how different doctrinal choices regarding the design of their bigger ships, it seems plausible that only the Federation might be well-placed to operate smaller fighters of this type, because only the Starfleet invests in large multirole vessels with a lot of shuttle capacity. (This implies that the Reliant class may also have a very successful second lease of life as escort carriers during the Dominion War).
Memory beta lists the Saber as a light cruser and escrot. In addtion it's 10 meters shorter them then the defiant.