in defense of USS Valiant

[kkt]

(It mentions Defiant being the one and only prototype for what would have been a new class of starship, with one single purpose (fighting borg), until "Valient" shows up for zero reason except to confuse the audience as a cheap gag, since there's been no borg there or anywhere near there or anywhere zillions of solar systems away from there. So it's more headcanon time, maybe they added more bolts to the chassis so it wouldn't rip apart at top warp and now built more to allow cadets to command it when all the adults died or whatever, but this is getting way too far off (read "scope creep") so I'll reel back...)

The existence of the Valiant wasn't a problem for me. Sitting in Starfleet Command right after a Galaxy class was blown up pretty easily by a few small Jem Hadar ships in episode "The Jem Hadar", they're thinking "Uh-oh. We're gonna need a better warship." So they look at what they've got: USS Defiant in mothballs. It had the potential to be a fantastic warship, if they could get the bugs worked out. Well, who was in charge of the Defiant project? Commander Benjamin Sisko? Oh, he's at DS9 now. He's got a pretty good engineer there too, O'Brien... yes he's enlisted, but he just turned down a commission, he's up to a challenge. We'll send Sisko the Defiant and let him and his engineer work out the bugs. Sisko would love a chance to finish the Defiant project. So they send the Defiant to DS9 and at the same time start producing more Defiant class ships as quickly as they can. That was the end of DS9 season 2. The Valiant with Red Squad was found near the end of season 6, and she was out of touch with Starfleet for a year. So Starfleet had three years making Defiants before one of them was made a cadet training ship. There's even some logic to training cadets on a new type of warship so some officers aboard new Defiant-class ships are familiar with them.

However the big problem is that the cadets didn't make contact with Starfleet as soon as possible when all their real officers had been killed. They were busy carrying out orders made a year before! And they've got one of the best warships in the fleet. It should be obvious that Starfleet priorities might have changed depending on how the war was going. And that possibility of all the commissioned officers being killed should have been covered in their orders as well.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

There was maybe one that I agreed with Donald Rumsfeld on: you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. The intention in making the Defiant isn't particularly relevant as much as the ability to improve when the nature of conflict changes.

 

[Detached Nacelle]

2 unnamed Defiant class vessels appeared in Voyager in Message in a Bottle before we saw the Valiant so it's clear the class entered full scale rollout.

But the whole concept of Red Squad was a disaster waiting to happen and it did.

 

[The Wormhole]

2 unnamed Defiant class vessels appeared in Voyager in Message in a Bottle before we saw the Valiant so it's clear the class entered full scale rollout.

Though they both had USS Defiant NX-74205 stamped on their hulls. I always liked the joke that one of them was the Defiant and the other was the Sao Paulo.

At the very least, it is legitimately probable one of them really was the Defiant, given the two security officers who beam onto the Prometheus bridge at the end were played by background extras who usually appeared on DS9 as Defiant crew.

 

[Detached Nacelle]

Though they both had USS Defiant NX-74205 stamped on their hulls. I always liked the joke that one of them was the Defiant and the other was the Sao Paulo.

Did they? I've obviously never noticed in all these years of watching what is my favourite VOY episode. I thought they were blank cgi models with no name at all.

 

[somebuddyX]

I love the idea of the Defiant and Sao Paulo having been on a mission together.

I don't have any problem with more Defiant-class ships being around. We saw multiple at the end of "Call to Arms." We know the ISS Defiant exists too and it took those cats like a month to build it at DS9.

 

[Tosk]

the two security officers who beam onto the Defiant Prometheus bridge at the end were played by background extras who usually appeared on DS9 as Defiant crew.

Only one of them, Angus McClellan. The other one, Todd Leatherbury did not appear on DS9.
It's also not clear if the two officers beamed aboard from the Akira class ship or either of the two Defiant class ships.

 

[mithril]

Given the threat of the Borg and the fact the Defiant was meant to operate in packs, it's possible the Valiant was actually built alongside the Defiant, perhaps starting a few months later, and put in mothballs alongside the Defiant. With starfleet pulling it out of mothballs after O'Brien and Sisko manage to find solutions to the worst of the power distribution problems, and other issues the class had. Heck, the 2 unnamed ships in VOY might have been also started at the same time. It could well be that the Sao Paulo was one of the first actual new builds for the war.

(I've never put much stock in the "I freeze framed this 1/10th of a second shot and zoomed in on the registry" stuff because whether physical model or CGI, they're generally not going to go through the trouble of changing the model's name and registry if they aren't planning to have it easily visible in the scenes. This sometimes backfires in this time of HDTVs but it saves a lot of budget)

 

[Riley]

I always wanted to see more Defiant-class ships using -ant names: Gallant, Constant, Vigilant, and, of course, Reliant.

 

[Mage]

2 unnamed Defiant class vessels appeared in Voyager in Message in a Bottle before we saw the Valiant so it's clear the class entered full scale rollout.

But the whole concept of Red Squad was a disaster waiting to happen and it did.

If you closely, the fleet shot at the end of the season 5 finale also had two other Defiant class starships in it. Top left, right above the Excelsior and if you take the Miranda class at the (almost) front and go up, there's another one as well. And of course the Defiant herself at the bottom turning around. So that's three Defiant class starships in total active during late 2373.

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