The Defiant class was initiated in 2365 as a crash programme to develop a starship capable of fighting and defeating the Borg. The design incorporated several new weapons concepts, including the Quantum torpedo and phaser pulse cannon. The design and construction teams were briefed to produce a small, tough, simple to build vessel packing the maximum possible level of firepower. A secondary aim of the project was to develop new technologies for implementation in the Sovereign project and possibly into existing starship designs. The vessel which emerged from the design office was unlike anything ever contemplated by the Federation before. In place of the usual graceful structures, Defiant was a compact, boxy, almost ugly design. The central body is a three-deck block with the a single deck bridge mounted on the top for four decks in all. The upper deck contains the bridge, engineering support spaces and some crew quarters. Deck two features main engineering, a simple medical bay, more crew quarters and the ships communal mess hall. The third deck includes the transporter room and ships storage and cargo bays and the deuterium fuel tanks. Deck four houses the ships replication storage tanks and systems, the antimatter fuel pods and the small shuttle bay. The single computer core is split between decks two and three. The navigational deflector is located in a prominent housing on the ships bow, which also contains a probe launcher. Flanking the deflector housing are a pair of torpedo tubes capable of firing both Quantum and photon torpedoes. Aft of this the nacelles are fitted directly to the main hull, flanking the bridge. Each nacelle housing includes four warp coils and two of the ships pulse phaser cannon. The nacelles supporting equipment are contained within a fifth deck which hangs below the normal four; this deck is divided into three levels of crawl-way spaces. Aft of the nacelles are the aft torpedo tubes, and the ships armament is completed by a turret type phaser array aft of the bridge. Serious faults in the design surfaced. Overpowered and over gunned for a ship of its size, Defiant experienced serious problems with her structural integrity during warp flight and weapons operation. With the Borg threat now less urgent, the President ordered the Defiant project shelved in favour of the new Sovereign class which was then under construction.
