Starship Defiant ,what was it's size ?

[DumbDumb2007]

What was the size of the Starship Defiant ?

 

[C.E. Evans]

It depends. It's varied between 170 meters and 120 meters in length according to various sources. These days, many people are accepting the 120 meter figure as being the more accurate one.

120 meters long; 90 meters wide; 26 meters tall
4 decks
About 355,000 metric tons

I'm sure there are others with different opinions and figures, though.

 

[Mike Have-Not]

Well, if the size of the station is known, it should be relatively easy to infer the size of the Defiant, shouldn't it. There are PLENTY of shots (included in the opening credits!) of the ship docked at the station, flying over the station, etc...

 

[Sisu]

It was very little in the My Little Starship episode.


whoops, that was a runabout, not the Defiant. My bad!

 

[Gepard]

Mike Have-Not said:
Well, if the size of the station is known, it should be relatively easy to infer the size of the Defiant, shouldn't it. There are PLENTY of shots (included in the opening credits!) of the ship docked at the station, flying over the station, etc...

You would think so, but you'd be wrong...

 

[Mike Have-Not]

^ I stand corrected!

It seems even the size of the station isn't all that clear...

Oh, well.

A related question:

Are the sizes of other starships in the Trek universe relatively settled upon?

 

[shatastrophic]

I always thought it was kinda weird myself. If you look at the Defiant next to another ship like the Galaxy or Excelsior, hell the Enterprise-E in First Contact, you see it is very small. However in the opening credits of DS9 it looks alot larger in size when undocking. We get many shots of a Galaxy docked at DS9 which to me would make the Defiant real small when docked at the station, or smaller than it looks. I posted a thread a while back asking how tall a docking pylon is and i got some great responses but the one i liked the best was that they were about as tall as the Empire State building. If thats the case, taking into account the size of a Galaxy class, the Defiant should be alot smaller sitting out there on the docking ring IMO. However it's all up to visual perception, and the size of the Defiant has been questioned for years.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, about the only Trek space-things for which we can give a good, solid size estimate are the shuttlecraft which are seen next to live people. And even that isn't necessarily sufficient, since the TOS shuttle has differently sized interior and exterior...

Even the most central hero ships, NCC-1701 and NCC-1701-D, are never truly nailed down. The "official figures" for the former would mean an impracticably thin saucer; those for the latter create problems with deck count. It's sobering to realize that in all of Star Trek, the only Starfleet vessel for which an unambiguous length figure is given in dialogue is the TOS shuttle, which Kirk calls a 24-footer in "The Galileo Seven".

I'd tend to have my Defiant at 170 meters, the size that best matches the docking scenes and the interior layout, and then interpret the much smaller appearances (such as in "Defiant") as artifacts or malfunctionings of the cloaking device. The same excuse works just fine for the Klingon BoPs and their cloaks!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Delta1]

Replying to OP:

Long story short, the art department eventually settled on 560 feet (about 170.7 m). Hit up Google Groups and search rec.arts.startrek.tech for "David Stipes Defiant size" for some interesting threads (with a few posts by familiar names).

 

[Unicron]

The Defiant's really constructed out of silly putty, so it can change scale on a whim to confuse attackers.