So in one of my moments of semi-boredom this week, I went crawling through the bowels of the Memory Beta wiki, which is the wiki for the Star Trek Expanded Universe for those in the audience who've never heard of it. And while there, I found out that the good folks over at Arc Games apparently did up a series of "Legendary" variants of famous Trek ships to dig a little deeper into players pockets. And that the version of the Defiant they did had this:

Which is one of five different variants:

I sort of like to imagine when looking at this that by the "current year" of STO (2411), the Admiralty just quietly gave up trying to maintain the myth of Starfleet being anything other than a military organization that dabbles in scientific exploration.

>I sort of like to imagine when looking at this that by the "current
>year" of STO (2411), the Admiralty just quietly gave up trying to
>maintain the myth of Starfleet being anything other than a military
>organization that dabbles in scientific exploration.

The Defiant class has always been kind of an outlier to that philosophy anyway, since it was expressly developed as a weapon to counter the Borg. I'm pretty sure the Flying Tigers shark-teeth deco appears in the DS9 Tech Manual, along with the Defiant project's original mission patch, which features the motto "Assimilate THIS!"

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>The Defiant class has always been kind of an outlier to that
>philosophy anyway, since it was expressly developed as a weapon to
>counter the Borg. I'm pretty sure the Flying Tigers shark-teeth deco
>appears in the DS9 Tech Manual, along with the Defiant
>project's original mission patch, which features the motto "Assimilate
>THIS!"

Nah, where it gets funny is how Wolf 359 became a catch-all excuse for the plethora of new ships that cropped up, first in First Contact and then later during the Dominion War arc over on DS9. Starfleet suddenly fielding lots of combat-focused ships despite all the Roddenberry-era "humanity has evolved" BS on TNG? Just say they were designed in a panic to fight the Borg and then quietly shelved. All advanced, one-off prototypes that suddenly got rammed into mass production in time to fight the Dominion.

But yeah, the class development patch for Defiant is indeed in the manual and does have the shark-toothed grin. I think what motivated me to bring this here was remembering that picture of Valiant that I saw on the SoS pictures page ages ago and thinking "This would be so awesome to post over at UF."

Not only advanced prototypes, but just cobbled together bullshit, just to get guns into the fight. From warp nacelles stapled to Constitution class saucers, to mothballed Excelsiors, anything that could still fly, or could be made to fly, flew,

I liked the look of some of those.

LAST EDITED ON Sep-05-21 AT 05:22 AM (EDT)
 
>I liked the look of some of those.

I love the Big Trouble In Little China reference best of all.

That said, STO's story has a lot of war in it, and that fact is used as in-game explanation for a number of facts about how the game works. The martial nature of the Fed ships is one of them. It also explains why your usually young character can make their way to Admiral, and how there are so many ships, and new types of ship, in general.

Edit: It also explains the better ground weapons and armor your team carries around, and I would assume it explains why no one complains when you can bring a Boolean Cannon to a social event or diplomatic function.

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Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge