Work In Progress: 1/1 Scale NX-74205 Defiant (I could use some help here)

Okay, here's the gist of it; I'm trying to make a 1/1 scale USS Defiant from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Now then, I'm trying to make this thing, as with most of my ships, atmosphere-capable (in short, it'll be able to take off from a planet and get to orbit under its own power). This will be hard enough, as I had a hard enough time getting the Ichthyos, my latest and largest atmospheric jump ship, up into orbit. Needless to say I'll have to make a few modifications to the Defiant's design to get it off the ground.

Anyway, that's actually the least problematic part of this whole thing. The most problematic part of this whole thing would be the fact that no one seems to be able to agree just how big the Defiant actually is.

The measurements that I got so far were as follows:
Length : 170.68 meters
Beam : 134.11 meters
Height : 30.1 meters
Decks : 4

The number of decks is the only consistent thing about this ship, as even the POSITION OF THE BRIDGE seems to change around between episodes of DS9.

Now, let me just say this; I like the Defiant, and I like Deep Space Nine. I've seen every Star Trek series, aside from the animated series (can't find anywhere that still shows reruns of it), and I like all of the Star Trek series that are out there (yes, even Enterprise) but to be honest, I like DS9 the best. I tried building a 1/1 scale replica of the station itself, and wound up with my computer crashing, so that's out of the question. The Defiant though, that's plenty small enough for my machine to manage.

Now then, here are the issues that I'm having and what I really need help with:

1: finding accurate dimensions of the ship (so far, I'm going with the dimensions that I listed above. Until I can get better measurements, that's what I'm going with in terms of scale for this ship

2: finding the actual location of THE BRIDGE. I can't figure out if it's located in that roughly trapazoidal nose section of the ship or if that's just the docking mechanism that attaches the Defiant to the side of DS9 when docked. I've heard of the bridge being in there, I've heard of the bridge being just above the warp core in the middle of the ship in that slightly elevated area just above the main hull near the center of the craft, but as of late I can't quite find out where the bridge is. If anyone could give to me an actual location of where the bridge OFFICIALLY is on that starship, I'm at a bit of a loss and will just have to improvise.

3: finding a way to defend my base and my ship for when any local Star Fleet captains/commanders find out about this (let me just put it this way; I'm not exactly prepped to fight the Tapping currently).

4: finding a way to get the weapons systems to work. Needless to say, I only build in vanilla, it's sort of my policy with SE, and as a result, I don't have energy weapons and am stuck with more or less just guns and missiles. I need to find a way to make analogues to the Defiant's weapons and have them work. The thing is this; I was thinking of substituting photon cannons for large ship rocket launchers and then feeding it all in through a convayor system. As goes all the torpedoes, well, I was thinking of trying to do something similar to how I did the MAC Gun on my 1/1 scale Forward Unto Dawn, but I'm worried that with the Defiant's speed and maneuverability that anything attached to a piston or rotor will just shear off with the torque.




UPDATE:

Job done: https://forum.keenswh.com/threads/1-...imate-this-time-nx-74205-uss-defiant.7381652/

 

1.) There are no accurate dimensions for the Defiant. Unfortunately the ship, just like DS9 itself, was never designed with any true size in mind; both station and ship generally fluctuated depending on the needs of the scene. Onscreen-evidence points to everything from 50 meters to up to 300; 120 and 170 are the two most often agreed-upon variants and personally i prefer 170 because the ship just gets waaaay too small otherwise. You gotta cram all that shit into the hull, after all. But that's just preference; there is no canon answer. Or rather, there're too many.

2.) Judging from Bridge Dome structures on other ships my guess is this:


3.) We got you on your sensors but don't worry, the Tapping's barely armed at all.

4.) Good luck on that one. Rotors should now be stable enough to, say, attach a small grid reasonably secure, but yeah. If you find the space (spoilers: you won't, unless you build with small blocks, i guess) i'd actually recommend Missile Launchers for Pulse Phasers and Welder/Projector-Combo for Torpedoes. My own Defiants relies mostly on Missile Launchers. The vanilla Turrets stick out waaaay too much for my taste.

 

Netflix instant play has it.

 

Thanks for the info.

That's where I thought the bridge was too. The thing is this; I've seen cutaway drawings of the Defiant's interior and a lot of them place the bridge at that small section that juts out from the ship's bow. From what I know, that's merely the docking port for where it connects to DS9 or other stations, and can in fact be jettisoned and used as a warhead (which is why it looks like it's shoved into an indented slot in the hull; it's because it is, and it's meant to come off and be fired away from the ship if needed).

Anyway, I'm going to take a bit of a break from building this particular ship and then come back to it later. The exterior hull is giving me enough grief for right now, let alone the ever-shifting deck layout.

 

@ZeroCore Yeah, there's onscreen-stuff up to Deck 6, i believe. As for that nose-thingy, i think it's a docking port/Deflector-combi, plus the warhead-nonsense if it exists (certainly LOOKS detachable). I think one of the reasons people place the Bridge there is that the Defiant started out as a modified Runabout, up to and including reusing the Runabout control room set. Scale the nose down and squeeze that set in there.... just a theory though.

 

Try asking the Space Battles community? Cardassian warships have been present at DS9, as has the Enterprise. The relative scales of the physical models used during filming compared to DS9 and DS9 to the Defiant should make some sort of scale apparent.

 

Unfortunately the models never were filmed with each other because they're VASTLY out of scale. They also purposefully scaled DS9 up and down to make it look bigger or smaller (especially when a Galaxy is docked the station gets magically bigger), eventually settling on a middleground of 1,5 km diameter. Scaling errors happen; it's inevitable because studio models are rarely built at the same scale, with hero ships like the Enterprise D being significantly bigger because they have to convey a lot more details on the hull whereas ships of the week get away with being less rich in visuals. Consequently they have to use special effects to marry the footage of the two (or three, or four, or whatever) models; plus, sometimes, people in charge simply don't give a shit about scaling but what "looks cool" or what "looks menacing". TNG and (surprisingly) VOY were pretty good about this where on DS9 nobody gave it a second thought (sometimes not even a first one). And as much as i like DS9 - this kind of shit pissed me the fuck off. I've got no problem forgiving an honest mistake or forgiving rushed work but when you can't even be assed to pin down the station's or hero ship's fucking size? The JJ-Prise's outrageous Galaxy-esque proportions may be idiotic and thankfully non-canon but at least the Giftzwerg cared enough to make a decision.

It's a quite interesting topic; i've got a few links for further reading:

https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/scaling.htm
https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/ship_sizes.htm
https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/defiant-problems.htm (EAS goes with a 120m Defiant, btw)

and this one doesn't have it's own article, so here's what EAS has to say about DS9's size:

 

Then I arbitrarily declare the correct scale to be that found in the pilot with the 1701-D docked.

 

Ye im sure in the ever changing titles of DS9 didnt they have a Nebula (oops) parked up making the station look massive? And then suddenly in a later series the shuttle flying past it making it look tiny. Tut tut ???

 

Nebula.

It was the U.S.S. Leeds, apparently: https://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/USS_Leeds

 

Ah apologies and what a name for a ship LOL

 

Google says Leeds is a city, probably name after it.

 

Lmao I know that's the joke see I've been to Leeds... (waiting for that one Yorkshire member I didn't notice....)

 

You'd be correct in saying that it was indeed a Nebula-class science vessel (which I have one of in Star Trek Online).

Anyway, thanks again for the details on the Defiant.

Question, BTW: what is your favorite Fed ship from Star Trek (any series)? Is it the Galaxy class, which would explain the Tapping's construction, or another one perhaps that you didn't have the computer power to build at 1/1 scale?

As goes my favorite, it's kind of a toss up at this point between the Defiant-class, the NX-class (from Enterprise), the Sovereign-class (such as the NCC-1701-E from First Contact; I liked First Contact, BTW), and the Dreadnought-class, such as the Vengeance, from the alternate universe movies.

 

You really have to ask?
As for "bigger"; there really isn't a substantially bigger ship class out there. The Sovereign is smaller overall thanks to being thinner and narrower, the Vengeance is A) canonically only slightly bigger and B) it's unknown if she's even a Starfleet design and other than that there really isn't much else out there unless we count the Galaxy-X* or space stations. I certainly would like to build a 1:1 Earth Space Dock-type station but that's way beyond the limits of the game, and it's not my favorite overall anyway.

* The Galaxy Refit (also known as Galaxy-X or Galaxy Dreadnought) WOULD be my favorite if it wasn't for the silly little stubby horns next to the Bridge. As much as i love the Galaxy - visually she's got a massive hole in the back, right above the Warp Pylons, that just looks imbalanced and top heavy. The third Nacelle fixes that very, very nicely. But those horns, dude, those horns totally ruin it. Not that fond of the Torpedo Pack, the Pylon fins or the Phaser Lance's design either.

 

It d

It did look a bit too retrofitted for my liking. If wasn't silly by a long shot but it in my opinion it was close. Soft spot for the Sovereign everytime it wasn't the explorer the Galaxy was but by god it was a good looking ship. I had one in STO all those lovely grindy addictive years ago. Cracker indeed so Zerocore 1 - 0 Rotal

 

It d

It did look a bit too retrofitted for my liking. If wasn't silly by a long shot but it in my opinion it was close. Soft spot for the Sovereign everytime it wasn't the explorer the Galaxy was but by god it was a good looking ship. I had one in STO all those lovely grindy addictive years ago. Cracker indeed so Zerocore 1 - 0 Rotal

 

@Hotshot Jimmy The Sovereign has a weak start with me by default since introducing it was the entire point of crashing the Enterprise D. Fuck you, Paramount.
But even so, i HATE elliptical Saucers that stretch forward. It looks unnatural. Even sideways ellipses are iffy but at least they give a ship a nice wide angle. The Sovereign is way to narrow. And dat lack of a neck is disturbing to look at. It's like someone took a hammer a bashed the Saucer long enough to squish it into the Secondary. Bah. BAH i say!

 

Any series? I should assume novel books count? Because Vesta Class is my favorite.


Has already built one for myself in SE but it wasn't a full 1:1 scale though. Not due to performance but small enough for the idea of keeping it to one-man crew ideal, myself.
I would show screenshot of it but I built it from large ship blocks... It didn't come out great as I wanted. Had planned to redo it in small ship block for better details but... There's a bad memories leak affecting AMD's CPU/GPU users.

 

Hi there! Another fan of Star Trek... to me DS9 was the best show to explore the nature of humanity and how gray things can be. Oh Garak, the best character aside from Data IMHO.

About the Defiant, as @Commander Rotal said, there's no definitive answer to it's size, but we can estimate given some comparison.

Take this shot from the movie First Contact... this is the WORST comparison possible... hahaha


The Sovereign Class, according to Memory Alpha, was 685m long.
Memory Beta says the Width of the ship was 250.6m.

If you took this as a reference the Defiant would be 50m long and 30m width, that's too small.

Now... this another image that displays how inconsistent the sizes were:


This is from the Episode Homefront, one of the best in the entire show.

The Excelcior Class is also a mistery, since MEmory Alpha doesn't provide the size, Memory Beta does, but makes it too big if we compare to the Sovereign Class. In Memory Beta says it is 511.25m long by 195,64m wide, making the Defiant again too small, it's always "the power of plot".

In my humble opinion, seems the better size fit would be showed in the episode Sacrifice of Angels, where the Defiant(now renamed from the USS São Paulo) was almost the same size of a Miranda Class or Klingon B'Rel. You can place it as 170m long by 130m wide(including nacelles).

As for interior design, there are some charts of reference you can use:

 

Cannot agree more about Garak. (Not as good as B5 but i'm not opening that can of worms) I have respect for both shows in different ways

 

I'll assume you talk about Babylon 5...

Funny thing... I watched Babylon 5 waaay after I watched DS9 and TNG. Character development when we talk about the "dark aspect" of our existence, Babylon 5 explores it a lot better than any Star Trek.

TNG was the inspiration, the goal in which we want humanity to evolve to, DS( was a hard look on the sacrifices we need to make to reach that, also how the other civilizations of the galaxy viewed The Federation.

EDIT:
I'll just leave this here:

 

I cannot disagree with this

Garak was for DS9 what G'Kar was to B5

 

I know its not entirely canonical.. but have you all considered comparing the size of the Defiant class in STO?

 

Considered? No, but since there is no canonical size they probably just went with something that felt right to them. Considering how inaccurate some of the models are (just look at the old Galaxy models) i wouldn't use them as a source either way but i also wouldn't be surprised if they just went with 150 or 200 meters.

 

As a player of STO, I can tell you this right now; the ships in that game are not entirely to scale.

And yes, the Defiant-class of escort is, once again, not to any accurate scale (even though, since this is a game, the size is consistent throughout the game). I think Rotal is right, and that Perfect World, when adding in various attributes of ships, just went with the estimated 150 meters.

What I'm going with for my build is still the original measurements that I found. Now, I tend to round up whenever building things 1/1 scale in SE for the sake of having added room to work with for the ship's interior and systems, so here's what I've got so far for this build:

Length: 171 meters, rounded up from approximately 170.7 meters.
Beam/Width: 134 meters, rounded down from 134.11 meters.
Height: 30 meters, rounded down from 30.10 meters.

This all translates to the following:

1 SE large block measures 2.5 x 2.5 meters to a side, so I divided all measurements by 2.5 to find the dimensions, in SE large blocks.

171 / 2.5 == 68.4, rounded up to 69 blocks in length.
134 / 2.5 == 53.6, rounded up to 54 blocks ind width,
30 / 2.5 == 12 blocks even in height.

So the dimensions for my Defiant build are as follows:

69 blocks in length,

54 blocks in width,

12 blocks in height.

That's what I'm going to use for a 1/1 scale NX-74205 USS Defiant from Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

Also, you know what I just noticed about my own ships, namely their color schemes, like for instance the one on the Rhodes (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=639613785)?

The Z-Tech color scheme is generally lines made of dark gray, light gray, and yellow. Does that or does that not remind you of the paint schemes used by the Terran Empire from the Mirror Universe?

I just noticed that I was doing that...

Sheesh, now I can't look at my own ships without thinking that I've been making jump shuttles for the Terran Empire...

Whilst I'm on the subject: Star Trek Mirror Universe Terran Empire VS UNSC / ONI from the Halo Universe. That'd be an interesting fight.

 

Seems to be 120-150 by ingame estimates. Here's a good list of comparisons. Not sure how many are canon but its a rough guide on how to make it believable at least:

 

Well, at least in STO the scales are almost correct from one ship to each other.

I remember how much bigger of a Sovereign Class my Scimitar was... well, been a while since I played.

Cryptic tend to go wild with "alien" ships, like Tholian ships, new Borg designs, etc. But the Federation ships are on point, also because their deal with CBS seems to demand a set of rules.

One ship that was smaller than in the show is the Romulan D'deridex, the producers of TNG said that the entire saucer section of the Enterprise D could fit inside the hollow part on that class Warbird, in STO they are almost the same size(D'deridex and Galaxy class).

Hey awesome chart!

Problem is, considering each big block on SE is like 3,5m, either he uses small blocks what would be a nightmare or upscale on X3.5 in-game.

 

Hm, roughly, yeah, but i don't buy the 120 meters for the Oberth either. Never have, never will.

Honestly the show never properly conveyed the intended design size of the Warbird.

2,5 meter.[/quote][/quote]

 

Ye I'm pretty sure in TNG the first time you see the warbird it dwarfs the Galaxy for that real shock and awe shot and then later on in that episode with the time bubbles and aliens living in singularities it seems a tad smaller. Could be the perception of the shot but like anything in Sci-Fi scales/sizes are fluidic in nature (STO Pun) I'm on a freaking roll today