Canon Facts Backstage Info  Speculation

Notes : The Defiant class was initiated in 2365 as a crash programme to develop a starship capable of fighting and defeating the Borg. The design incorporated several new weapons concepts, including the Quantum torpedo and phaser pulse cannon. The design and construction teams were briefed to produce a small, tough, simple to build vessel packing the maximum possible level of firepower. A secondary aim of the project was to develop new technologies for implementation in the Sovereign project and possibly into existing starship designs.

The vessel which emerged from the design office was unlike anything ever contemplated by the Federation before. In place of the usual graceful structures, Defiant was a compact, boxy, almost ugly design. The central body is a three deck block with the a single deck bridge mounted on the top for four decks in all. The upper deck contains the bridge, engineering support spaces and some crew quarters. Deck two features main engineering, a simple medical bay, more crew quarters and the ships communal mess hall. The third deck includes the transporter room and ships storage and cargo bays and the deuterium fuel tanks. Deck four houses the ships replication storage tanks and systems, the antimatter fuel pods and the small shuttle bay. The single computer core is split between decks two and three.

The navigational deflector is located in a prominent housing on the ships bow, which also contains a probe launcher. Flanking the deflector housing are a pair of torpedo tubes capable of firing both Quantum and photon torpedoes. Aft of this the nacelles are fitted directly to the main hull, flanking the bridge. Each nacelle housing includes four warp coils and two of the ships pulse phaser cannon. The nacelles supporting equipment are contained within a fifth deck which hangs below the normal four; this deck is divided into three levels of crawl way spaces. Aft of the nacelles is the aft torpedo tube, and the ships armament is completed by a turret type phaser array aft of the bridge.

In mid 2367 a Borg attack was launched on the Federation. The Defiant was still many months away from completion, but her crew nevertheless prepared to launch the ship in a desperate attempt to inflict some kind of damage on the attacking vessel. In the event the Borg vessel was destroyed in Earth orbit by the USS Enterprise-D shortly after the Defiant left Spacedock to face it.

The Defiant continued to outfit in Spacedock for several months, but serious faults in the design surfaced. Overpowered and over gunned for a ship of its size, Defiant experienced serious problems with her structural integrity during warp flight and weapons operation. With the Borg threat now less urgent, the President ordered the Defiant project shelved in favour of the new Sovereign class which was then under construction.

In 2370 the USS Odyssey was destroyed in a disastrous encounter with the Dominion. The first of the Sovereign class was still months away from completion, so Commander Benjamin Sisko of Deep Space Nine requested that the Defiant be assigned to a mission to contact the Dominion leaders. The ship was equipped with a cloaking device by the Romulans in order to facilitate this mission, in return for Starfleet sharing any intelligence it gained. Despite a disappointing performance on her first mission, when she was quickly overpowered and captured, Defiant proved her worth as a combat vessel over the next few months. The field engineering team under Chief Petty Officer Miles O'Brien have overcome her initial difficulties by re-calibrating and reinforcing the Structural Integrity Field system. Although not an especially fast ship by Starfleet standards, Defiant is far more manoeuvrable than any vessel of comparable size at both Warp and Impulse speeds. This, combined with her inherent toughness and high level of firepower, makes the ship a formidable fighting force. Despite this, Starfleet has had a difficult time getting approval to put the ship into series production, due in part to the designs perception as having failed originally, but also because of political trepidation within the government over fielding a dedicated warship. Fortunately these problems have now been overcome and the Defiant class is finally in full production.

The Defiant herself continued to serve at Deep Space Nine for some time, before being destroyed in late 2375 during the Dominions recapture of the Chin'Toka system. Fortunately most of the crew were able to escape the ship.