son of the catargorizing Starfleet ships thread

[Jason von Evil]

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=10544

In that thread, several months back, various SF vessels were catagorized. I think we should redo it for both the hell of it and the fact that some ships were left out. The ships in question are the Niagra, Springfield and Challenger.

Here was the original list by Alyeska:

Pocketbattleship:
Prometheus

While not a true class per say, it is a level of Battleship. A Pocket battleship has traditionally weaker weapons overall compared to a battlecruiser, but it has superior shielding and armor. The Prometheus seems to be less powerful then the Sovereign, but it has superior shielding and armor to it.

Battlecruiser:
Sovereign class

This ship is very powerful for its size. Infact it seems to go for Battleship size weaponry, but at the expense of shields and armor. So this makes it a Battlecruiser. Powerful, but not as heavily shielded or armored as it could be.

Heavy Cruiser:
Galaxy class
Ambassador class

Both of these ships seem to have been built as some of the most powerful Starfleet ships. They have a combination of good shields and decent weapons. They can stand up against most other enemy ships. The Ambassador though is an older ship and does not stand up as well as it once did.

Guided Missile Cruiser:
Akira class
Nebula class

Both of these ships are heavy on torpedoes, though relatively light on phasers. Their mission seems to be to destroy the enemy at long range without getting into the thick of battle. They sacrafice other systems just for their torpedoes.

Light Cruiser:
Excelsior class
Intrepid class
Steamrunner

While the Excelsior was at one point a Battlecruiser, its age has forced it to be downgraded. Both the Excelsior and Intrepid are relatively fast ships with a somewhat light weapons load-out. They can operate on independent missions or as part of larger task forces. The Steamrunner seems to be the replacement for the Excelsior in fleet actions while the Intrepid seems to be more of an independent vessel.

Heavy Destroyer:
Defiant

Heavy destroyers are not your typical ship. Infact they aren't even a real class. However the Defiant is obviously a support and escort type ship for other larger vessels, it is also very heavily armed for its size. It works best in packs, as do other good destroyers, but they happen to be very powerful.

Guided Missile destroyer:
New Orleans

An older ship class with a series of torpedo launchers strapped to the outer hull. Designed as a support ship to escort larger ships, it has a significant torpedo capacity to drive off larger ships. Probably used in combination with guided missile cruisers.

Destroyer:
Miranda
Norway
Sabre
Centaur

The Miranda, once one of the most powerful Federation ships, now relegated to destroyer work as it was outclassed. The Centaur, a ship built from Excelsior and Miranda parts to create a relatively heavily armed small ship for escort. Both the Norway and Sabre are newer escorts that seem to be designed with minimal frontal cross sections while providing good weapon arcs. Their size indicates they escort larger ships and drive off enemy ships while in packs, if not exactly destroying them.

Here's links and info on the ships I mentioned.

Springfield:
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/artic ... gfield.htm
The Springfields 325 meters in length, according to EAS.

Niagra:
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/niagara.htm
EAS says that the Niagra is 480 meters.

Challenger (why the bloody are the nacelles stacked?):
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/artic ... lenger.htm
390 meters.

How would you catagorize these ships? I originally thought that the Springfield or Niagra could be dreadnoughts, but there's no way to know what their weapon loadout is.

And I have a question about the Norway class. What is there weapon loadout exactly? According to some EAS, it was armed solely with a phaser cannon. (like the uber E-D)

[Gandalf]

Bernd Schneider's site has it Here.

[Jason von Evil]

Um...duh?

Notice the links I posted?

[The Kernel]

The problem with calling the Soverign a battleship is that it got totally owned by the Scimitar in Star Trek Nemesis, despite getting in plenty of good hits and having two allied ships. Considering that Romulan and Federation technology are roughly similar, we have to assume that the Soverign isn't a battleship at all or it would have been able to put up a much better fight.

[Gandalf]

Um...duh?

Notice the links I posted?

Sorry.

I must have missed that bit.

I think the E-E was just a Heavy Cruiser, with kick ass weapons and capabilities.

[Ender]

The problem with calling the Soverign a battleship is that it got totally owned by the Scimitar in Star Trek Nemesis, despite getting in plenty of good hits and having two allied ships. Considering that Romulan and Federation technology are roughly similar, we have to assume that the Soverign isn't a battleship at all or it would have been able to put up a much better fight.

Good thing we classified it at a battlecruiser then.

[The Kernel]

The problem with calling the Soverign a battleship is that it got totally owned by the Scimitar in Star Trek Nemesis, despite getting in plenty of good hits and having two allied ships. Considering that Romulan and Federation technology are roughly similar, we have to assume that the Soverign isn't a battleship at all or it would have been able to put up a much better fight.

Good thing we classified it at a battlecruiser then.

I'll chalk that up to my poor reading comprehension

[Stravo]

Hijack averted and given its own thread, and for the record on my part, the Sovereign is most likely a Federation battleship, we haven't seen any starship more powerful than her and she was obviously the culmination of the anti-Borg starship classes we have seen starting with the Defiant.

[Lord Pounder]

By Siskos own words the Defiant Class is a Escort Cruiser. Starfleet being Starfleet don't believe in having warship-type designations.

[Ender]

By Siskos own words the Defiant Class is a Escort Cruiser. Starfleet being Starfleet don't believe in having warship-type designations.

Did he specify that it was a cruiser? I remember that it was an escort, but not beyond that.

[phongn]

The problem with calling the Soverign a battleship is that it got totally owned by the Scimitar in Star Trek Nemesis, despite getting in plenty of good hits and having two allied ships. Considering that Romulan and Federation technology are roughly similar, we have to assume that the Soverign isn't a battleship at all or it would have been able to put up a much better fight.

Good thing we classified it at a battlecruiser then.

I'll chalk that up to my poor reading comprehension

Even still, we called USS Nevada a battleship in the 1940s - and it most certainly would get totally owned by HIJMS Yamato.

[phongn]

By Siskos own words the Defiant Class is a Escort Cruiser. Starfleet being Starfleet don't believe in having warship-type designations.

A cruiser? By any reasonable Earth-descended form of naval nomenclature, Defiant should not be one: she certainly doesn't have the endurance for it.

[Publius]

One hesitates to classify the Sovereign-class as a battlecruiser merely because of its relatively poor performance against the Scimitar. Ships are usually classified by tonnage, arms and armour, and function, by which standards the Sovereign-class seems by all accounts to be a battleship. Being a battlecruiser would imply having relatively weak shields and armour, which is not supported by USS Enterprise's performance against the Borg cube in First Contact.

Incidentally, in keeping with the Federation's aversion to bellicose nomenclature, the terms "armoured cruiser" and "large cruiser" might be preferable in place of "battleship" and "battlecruiser", respectively; both terms have been used in terrestrial navies. USS Maine, of Havana fame, was originally designated "Armored Cruiser #1" (she was subsequently designated a "second-class armoured battleship"). When the battlecruiser concept fell into disrepute, the United States Navy avoided the name by designating USS Alaska (CB 1) and USS Guam (CB 2) as "large cruisers".

Furthermore, the designation "pocket battleship", originally applied to the Kriegsmarine's Panzerschiffe of the Deutschland-class, is misleading. It does not really refer to a type of battleship at all -- the actual classification was "armoured ship" -- but rather to a type of battlecruiser; she had a standard displacement of 12,100 tons, a 3.1 inch armour belt, a main battery of six 11-inch/54 guns, and could make about 19 knots (cf. Tirpitz's 42,900-ton standard displacement, 12.5-inch to 10.5-inch armour belt, main battery of eight 15-inch/47 guns, and 16 knots). With heavy guns, relatively light armour, and high speed, the "pocket battleship" is the very model of the modern battlecruiser, as envisioned by Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher, RN, later the first Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, as a sort of cruiser-killer, commerce-raider, and scout.

PUBLIUS

[Frank Hipper]

The Deutschlands could be best described as slow, over gunned heavy cruisers more than anything else.

[BenRG]

By Siskos own words the Defiant Class is a Escort Cruiser. Starfleet being Starfleet don't believe in having warship-type designations.

I can't say that I remember Sisco describing his brainchild as a cruiser. I've always seen the Defiant-class as a heavy destroyer, designed to deliver large amounts of firepower close to some support base but lacking the endurance for the sort of patrol cruises that cruisers typically engage in.

I think that Sisco defined the Defiant as being a corvette, but I'm not sure.

[Lord Pounder]

I definatly remember Sisko calling the Defiant an Escourt Cruiser. This may have been in the novel where the Defiant was introduced and as such no official, however his reasoning was that the Federation have never built warships before and it would hurt their image to be producing dedicated war ships like the Defiant. Unfortunatley i don't collect DS9 books or i'd provide a direct quote.

[phongn]

I always thought of the Defiant as an overgrown FAC, personally. Certainly not a cruiser or even a destroyer.

[Rubberanvil]

FAC is a corvette, right?? Imvho the Defiant class is seems more like a monitor or gunboat.

Isn't the Excelsior class a little big to be a Light Cruiser but maybe instead is a Middle Cruiser?

I like to know what catagory is the Frying Pan/Freedom class is in?

[Frank Hipper]

The Defiant has always struck me as being more a monitor than anything else. It even vaguely resembles one.
It's too fast, of course, but it has very heavy firepower, it's armored, and has a narrow profile that invites the analogy.
"Monitor" doesn't have an especially warlike ring to it, either. A Federation friendly classification.

[phongn]

FAC is generally a relatively small ship packing lots of antiship firepower at the expensive of everything else, like decent sensors, crew quarters or whatnot.

[Jason von Evil]

Even though they aren't canon, how would you catagorize the the Venture, Iwo Jima, Aegian and Achilles class?

Venture - Small ship, crew of five. Normally used as a scout since it's sensor array can detect cloaked ships. It's only armed with one phaser.

Iwo Jima - Troop transport.

Aegian - The Armada 2 manual says that the Aegian is a frigate, but you have to build it with the same shipyard as the Nebula, Galaxy and Sovereign classes. It also has a shield enhancing ability.

Achilles - This thing has to be a dreadnought or atleast a moniter. Here's it's armament more or less:

Six Type-XII Collimated phaser arrays
Four photon/quantum torpedo launchers
Eight microtorpedo launchers
Eight pulse phaser cannons

By the way, what would the Springfield, Niagra and Challenger classes be?

[Chris OFarrell]

In order to understand the Defiant, you must understand what it was designed to do. It was designed to be the first ship in a new Federation battlefleet designed for one purpose. To fight and defeat the Borg.

The Defiants design is bassed on a wolfpack style to combating Cubes. A very small profile on attack vector combined with high manouverability means as we saw in FC, the Borg are hard pressed to tractor her. The weapons arrays primary weapons are fixed forawrd, a Cube being a rather hard target to miss. It has one shuttle bay, which realy is just a tiny docking space for one shuttle pod. It has an absurdly oversized warp core built into it which gives it power levels on part with ships of far larger sizes. A maximum upgraded Excelessor equiped with the most modern weapons and defences isn't able to defeat the Defiant, a ship less then a third her size. Against other races, the Defiant can easily smack down ships her size (BOP, Attack fighters e.t.c.) and has a good chance of defeating far larger targets (the Dominion BC in SOA, Keldon class Warships) and can take a pounding from far larger ships such as the Prototype Dominion BB, Vor'Cha class warships, Cardasian OWP's e.t.c. Which isn't realy surprising given that she was designed to tangle with Borg Cubes which arguably mount the most powerful weapons the Federation has come into conflict with on a regular basis.

So we have a ship slightly smaller then a Miranda class that can smackdown ships several times its size and take a large pounding from ships several times THAT size. For a pack fleet, it makes sense. Collectivly each ship can take a pounding from a Cube and the pack together can put out an awesome amount of weapons fire while being quite hard to take out in return.

Thats the way I read it anyway. The reason it went into production against the Dominion is that the advanced phasers and shields designed to defeat and protect against Borg shields and weapons, which have that annoying ability to become inpenetrable and penetrating. So the phased poloron beams come up against a shield system designed to protect against Borg shield penetrating weapons. And the pulse phasers rip right through the Jem'Hadar shielding.

And last, this is Siskos speach on the Defiant.

SISKO
(re: monitor)
Officially she's classified as an
escort vessel... unofficially the
Defiant's a warship. Nothing more,
nothing less.

KIRA
I thought Starfleet didn't believe
in warships.

SISKO
Desperate times breed desperate
measures. Five years ago, Starfleet
began exploring the possibility of
building a new class of starship.
This ship would have no families, no
science labs, no luxuries of any
kind... it was designed for one
purpose only -- to fight and defeat
the Borg.
(beat)
The Defiant was the prototype... the
first ship in what would've been a
new Federation battle fleet.

DAX
So what happened?

SISKO
The Borg threat became less urgent.
Also, some design flaws cropped up
during the ship's shakedown cruise,
so Starfleet decided to abandon the
project.

O'BRIEN
What sort of... design flaws?

SISKO
You'll have complete access to the
ship evaluation reports, but to put
it simply... it's overgunned and
overpowered for a ship its size.
During battle drills, it nearly tore
itself apart when the engines were
tested at full capacity.

[Howedar]

FAC is generally a relatively small ship packing lots of antiship firepower at the expensive of everything else, like decent sensors, crew quarters or whatnot.

And endurance. Especially endurance.

[Uraniun235]

The bridge on the Defiant always seemed very prone to exploding in fireworks.

[Rubberanvil]

FAC is generally a relatively small ship packing lots of antiship firepower at the expensive of everything else, like decent sensors, crew quarters or whatnot.

I ment what does the acronym FAC stand for?