[Nate the Great]

DS9 DVD featurette discussing the development of the Defiant.


The only reasons they give for the size are "it was originally only going to be a couple times larger than a runabout" and "we wanted it to be overpowered for its size."



Yeah, still don't buy it. As I've discussed elsewhere, the Defiant wasn't designed to dock with DS9 anywhere, unless you posit an extending umbilical going from the station to the top of the saucer. You'd think the mere act of docking would be a key design factor from day one. Why having Defiant dock at the docking ring (which, may I remind you, were designed for Cardassian ships in the first place) was so important I don't know. Couldn't the Defiant be a bit larger and dock at a pylon?



A few quick figures. Wikipedia says the Defiant is 170 meters long, 134 meters wide, and 30 meters high. Ex Astris Scientia has done the math using various ships, and declared that on the whole the standard deck-to-deck distance is 3.5 meters, with corridors and rooms being 2.5 meters and the rest being conduits and such. This means that the Defiant could actually be more like 8 decks, or maybe 7 if the ablative armor is really thick. We certainly can't suggest that the ceilings on the Defiant are higher than on the Enterprise, that would be a waste of space on a warship.


The diameter of DS9 is 1450 meters, and looking at a sideview of the station we can estimate the docking port width at 5 percent of the diameter, or 70 meters. Looking at an overhead view of Defiant we can estimate the width of the forward deflector pod at 20 percent of the width of the Defiant, or 27 meters. So actually we should be able to double the size of Defiant and still fit in the docking port.



So actually, you could make the Defiant twice as big and still fit at DS9. Looking at a closeup of the deflector dish, I almost wonder if the center portion of the deflector dish could fold up and inward to make room for the telescoping docking port from the station.