In TNG's "Conspiracy" when Picard meets the other three captains, it is specially mentioned that two of the ships are "frigates" while the third is a "heavy cruiser". The U.S.S. Horatio IIRC commanded by one of Picards best friends. In DS9s "The Search", Sisko says the Defiant is "officially an Escort" though he seems to explain that is a politically correct term and in reality the Defiant is a "pure warship". The only other ship type I can think of that might've been mentioned onscreen was a "Scout ship" though I can't remember when. It is worth mentioning that if the Defiant is actually a battleship, then she is a battleship built on what amounts to a scout ships hull. Someone once suggested a proper definition for the Defiant would be a "Pocket Battleship" (from the Nazi Germany designation). Which amounts to battleship guns mounted on a cruiser hull but with full thickness armor. Anyone have any more on the ship types operated by Starfleet?
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Federation_starship_classes Best that I can tell, all of those are backed up by on-screen appearances or references. The Defiant isn't any sort of "battleship" as far as I'm concerned. Just a heavily armed escort/gunboat type of vessel.
That kind of description would really not be adequate for the Defiant as it is described more than once as "one of the heaviest armed ships in the quadrant". Another thing is that site and several sources like the DS9 Technical Manual (beautiful but seriously flawed) suggests that Starfleet deployed a bunch of literally "kit bashed" starships in the Dominion War which to me is patently ridiculous. Plus the list is flawed as it does not mention the Thomas Paine and Renegade from "Conspiracy" specifically said by Worf to be "frigates". By the way, historically "frigates" were "pure warships". The first ships ever built for the U.S. Navy such as the U.S.S. Constitution being technically "frigates" IIRC.
Certainly, but just as certainly the Defiant isn't any sort of capital ship like a battleship/dreadnought. I agree, but there's plenty of onscreen evidence for all the Franken-fleet types mentioned on the site and in the technical manual. I never claimed that it was a flawless list. Just something I found with a quick Google search. Once again, Dayton asks others for information that he could easily find for himself then bitches about it.
I've looked at a number of online sources before posting this thread. The one you linked to I did not see. But that said, why complain about it? After 11 years you should be pretty familiar with how I post.
Interpreting Google search results requires an ability to analyze the results given, and to analytically decipher which ones are most relevant. If you bitch about what others are doing for you, then perhaps it's best for others to leave it up to you.
That being said, there is a website that has every Trek ship seen on screen, large and small where you can directly compare their sizes.
I've seen a couple of websites like that. Interesting. But I'm not that interested in ship sizes but in ship categories.
It seems a little silly to call the list "flawed" for that reason, seeing as how it doesn't mention any individual ships. It's a list of ship classes. However, Memory Alpha does list both the Thomas Paine and the Renegade as New Orleans-class, and that list describes New Orleans-class ships as frigates. It's probably impossible to map every ship ever mentioned on-screen to a modern-day category, since some of them aren't even seen, and also since Trek writers could get pretty fast-and-loose with military terminology anyway. "Frigate" probably doesn't mean "a mixed-armament warship bigger than a destroyer and smaller than a cruiser," but rather "the first naval-sounding word that popped into the writer's head." (And since the definition of a frigate has changed a lot in the last 300-odd years -- technically, the U.S. Navy doesn't consider itself to have any frigates at all -- who knows what the word would mean in 24th-century Starfleet?)
For that matter, the last Frigate class the USN had (Perry class) was approximately half the size of the contemporary destroyer class (Spruance).
We've got a bunch of new frigates. The US Navy recently decided to ditch the LCS (Littoral Combat Ship) designation and redesignate them all as frigates. ETA: Well, not that recently. This January. DefenseNews.com story
I think they still might be using both because the whole program was LCS, but I guess the ships will carry an FF number.
I miss the term "dreadnought" and how Franz Joseph used it as the designation for the three engined starship. The "All Good Things" Enterprise being much along those lines.
I take that to mean that the show's writers were idiots at least in regard to naval terminology. There is absolutely no way that ship was one of the most heavily armed Federation vessel. The very fact that it had cloaking technology is testament to it being lightly armed, lightly shielded, and dependent on stealth and maneuverability. It would most accurately be considered a corvette.
Sorry, what's the evidence that a cloak mandates a fragile or lightly-armed ship? They stuck cloaks on the Klingon flagship and Shinzon's mobile fortress, and both are armed to the frigging teeth. Standard Rom Warbirds and Klingon Vor'Chas were no slouches either. It would be more accurate to say that the Defiant was the most heavily-armed ship of its size... Packing phasers that have as much punch (if not a little more thanks to the pulse-fire) as those on a Galaxy or Sovereign into a spaceframe a lot smaller, and backing them up with the new quantum torps.
It was modeled after the Daedalus, which many an idiot wanted as the ship model for Enterprise. That show had flaws, but the ship model wasn't one of them.
IIRC, the Pasteur wasn't even built by the TNG model makers. It was built by a professional model maker who was a big Star Trek fan and did indeed model it on the hypothetical look of the Daedalus. The TNG effects team (fighting budget problems with "All Good Things") became aware that there was a filmable model out there and got the maker to allow them to use it for the finale.
I've looked at the problem of using a "Daedalus type" design for a series ship. It is doable. You have to take the top two or three decks and the bottom two or three decks off the spherical primary hull and give it an overall leaner look and you can end up with favorable viewing angles.
For what its worth, in "All Good Things" they nearly had to use the earlier version of the Klingon Attack Cruiser instead of the later, huge version because customs agents broke the filmable model in half looking for cocaine when it was being brought back into the U.S. from Europe
