Why uber ships fail

[Lazar]

They are holding station next to Romulan Warbirds, though. A properly sized Klingon BoP would have been a speck of dust next to one of those behemoths!

And I'm the curmudgeon shaking my fist and yelling, "They shoulda been K'T'Ingas!"

I know there will never be any canon justification for my idea, so I'm not trying to have a debate... but it's clear that the plot of TNG required a solid old cruiser design for the Klingons, and it would have made so much more sense to use the preexisting design that was already in the cruiser range, and actually looked like a cruiser, rather than scaling up a small scout / interceptor ship. So you could have had a nice, balanced fleet with BOPs (scouts), K'T'Ingas (light cruisers), Vor'chas (heavy cruisers) and Negh'vars (battleships), with the K'T'Inga being sort of like the Miranda of the Klingon Empire. As it was, K'T'Ingas were seen rather rarely in the TNG era, and they didn't seem to have a well-defined niche.

[m52nickerson]

K'T'ingas could have worked. Even a larger number of correctly sized BOP would have been better.

[Graham Kennedy]

The giant BoP is something Ian and I went around the houses on - we literally spent twelve hours straight one Saturday doing nothing but shoving DVDs into the machine and looking at clips and talking through what the best interpretation of the evidence was.

I was very, very tempted to write off all the different sizes we see in the FX as "not the way it was intended"; had there been contradictory dialogue then I would certainly have done so. But there isn't. I almost wrote it off anyway, because the idea of making ships of different sizes that are externally identical is a rather stupid one. But one thing I've always disliked about Trek is that the main aliens get so few ship designs and Starfleet gets so many, so I jumped on the chance to pad the Klingon fleet out a bit.

The left rear BoP in that image above is behind the D'Deridex, meaning it is further from the camera. The D'Deridex itself has no canon length, but is typically shown being significantly larger than the E-D; the DS9 tech manual puts them over a kilometre long, which makes them 800 or so metres wide. Which makes the BoP shown there feckin big.

If you want to blink hard and pretend those three BoPs are really normal sized BoPs (not that there is a "normal" size), then feel free. I can definitely understand why you would, and it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

[Granitehewer]

this is just my view and probably not a very well informed one, but i just thought that the BoPs in 'The Defector' were same class and size as the 300m BoPs seen in 'Yesterdays Enterprise' described as 'klingon battlecruisers', rather than the smaller vessel described as a 'bird of prey' seen earlier in 'Yesterdays Enterprise'.

[m52nickerson]

[rant]If only the paramount would have had the intelligence to put someone in charge of keeping some types of order as far as ship sizes, story lines, basic science, common sense.....ect. perhaps canon would not be a jumbled clusterfuck that it is. Instead we get writers that have never seen a star trek episode, FX people who have no idea what the approximate size of ships they are using, and directors who could careless.[/rant]

[Granitehewer]

alot is artistic license to entertain the great unwashed rather than us select elite reified few lol :-p

[Graham Kennedy]

They do have such people. But it would slow them down a lot if everybody had to run everything they do past their tech guys all the time. Plus, these are creative type people; they don't like being straightjacketed too much.

[Lazar]

While we're on it, the D'Deridex does fascinate me. Why did the Romulans feel the need for such a big, hollow design?

[m52nickerson]

Intimidation?

[Granitehewer]

my friend puts it down to the romulan tech level being so poor that they need a ship that big to compete with other capital ships in the two quadrants, personally i don't subscribe to that as numerous dialogues prove that romulan tech is comparable too and in some cases on a par with federation tech eg 'redemption pt 2'.
I like to think that its size is either related to its quantum singularity and other uniquely romulan technologies, that its built to intimidate and muscle flex or perhaps it can convey a large number of troops or cargo.

[Granitehewer]

only thing is that a much smaller vessel like a vor'cha or galaxy refit may not be intimidated once the superficial ''aargh'' effect on the viewscreen/sensors has passed, as the warbirds' weapons and shields don't seem leagues ahead of the forementioned ships

[Tsukiyumi]

While we're on it, the D'Deridex does fascinate me. Why did the Romulans feel the need for such a big, hollow design?

It reflects their own personal feelings of emptiness?

[Reliant121]

In my opinion, the D'Deridex was as much a weapon of fear and terror as it was a battleship. And, as an auxiliary purpose, it was also somewhat a symbol of Romulan power and prowess. The D'Deridex was the pinnacle of the Romulan empire's might, a huge and powerful warship designed to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy. I mean come on, if i'm sitting at the helm of a border patrol Miranda, and i See a Big D decloak, i'm gonna shit myself. Unfortunately, the D'Deridex is actually not a good ship as a tactical propesition. Average firepower, stupidly thin shields and armour and a wallowy, massive shape that kinda lollup (i like that word, i decided to use it for the fun of it ) around the battlefield.

[Granitehewer]

i could use freudian psychoanalysis and come up with something a little more crass and explicit than tsuks' refined remark lol

[Graham Kennedy]

I think they were trying to follow Gene's starship rules; one states that there must be a clear line of sight between warp nacelles.