They've actually done that, in at least one episode of Voyager that comes to mind right off the top of my head, and I feel like at least on one other occasion in one of the shows or movies or something like that.

As for the ground troops, I've wondered that as long as I can remember. I've rewatched (so far) The Motion Picture and Wrath of Khan, and in both of those movies, nods were given to Security personnel having some kind of body armor and helmets. And then I think of the DS 9 episode, "The Siege of AR-558," where regular Starfleet personnel are acting as ground troops with light weapons, no body armor or shielding of any kind, and no heavy weapon support of any kind. I have a hard time buying that Starfleet, after preparing for and being at war with the Dominion for several years, wouldn't have better options.

The Scimitar was a one of a kind ship and it represented the pinnacle of Reman technology thus it was able to easily defeat the Romulan warbirds.

Voyager got pretty good at dealing with the Borg. They did do the land Shark candygram trick with the torpedo once or twice.

I wonder if the Defiant would've given the Scimitar a run for its money?
Both are designed from the ground up as warships.

The Defiant is a small ship and nowhere near as powerful as a Sovereign class which is what Picard had in Nemesis.

Nyah-ah! *Raises finger*

It has:

Reinforced Shielding
Ablative Armour
Sensor arrays you can retract
Phased pulse er, phasers in a fixed forward arc, along with
Quad Torpedo launchers in a coaxial arrangement.
Along with your typical beam phasers.
A super douper 6x photon torpedo warhead (One use only).
And the Warp Nacelles are better protected, (at the cost of efficiency) so have half a chance of running away after a quick 1-2 salvo exchange.

But its biggest advantage is, it has manoeuvrability , it is not a drunken space cow that is the Sovereign class.

According to the DS-9 fluff book, the defiant class was specifically designed as an anti-borg (First contact not with standing.) warship vessel, not a typical, "ship of the line" that is everything else federation.

So it has I dunno, half the hitpoints of the Sovereign?
But 4x times the manoeuvrability.

As usual this is all subject to plot.


Edit:
The point I'm trying to make is the Defiant Class is an out and out warship/escort.
Whereas Galaxy, Sovereign, Excelsior etc etc etc are all "Ships of the line"
Primarily self propelled space stations, exploration, science vessels with a self defence capability bolted on as an after thought.
Not the Defiant, that class is designed to take the fight to the enemy, some in Starfleet high command thought its weapons fit was excessive.

Uh, Hello? Warship?
What part of "War" do you not understand?

And security, pfft.
Don't get me started.
WW1 Doughboys had better survival equipment.

It had to be maneuverable, it was mainly directional weapons. A cruiser or battleship doesn't need to be directional since it can fire in almost all directions without turning. The Defiant wasn't more maneuverable than just angling the phasers a bit.
I wonder how Voyager would do? They got upgraded many times with new tech on their trip, becoming pretty formidable.

Frankly I'd sooner buy a half-junk freighter with a single phaser taped to the side of it before I'd set foot on any Starfleet ship. Their motto should be "Incompetence for the sake of plot twists"

I recall reading in several Star Trek technical guides that the Sovereign class was made in direct response to the Borg threat. Is that no part of ST canon then?

Yes, but it's the difference between a destroyer and battleship. The Defiant class were "overpowered" for their day-to-day tasks, the engines and weapons being appropriate for a much larger ship.

I've never seen direct comparisons of power, but you can estimate the Defiant should've had the phaser/engine power (torps are torps and irrelevant) of a Galaxy-class ship in a hull a fraction of the size. Due to be being smaller and more nimble, it was more survivable than a big Galaxy in a Borg fight.
The Sovereign came just after the Defiant, and was yet another upgrade to the Galaxy, but it wasn't meant to evade hits like a Defiant but absorb them.

It's not mentioned in the 3 films that showed it, but the Sovereign class had a smaller complement than the Galaxy. About the same sized crew, but no more of the "suburb in space" that the Galaxy was designed around. Instead of 1000, it was down a few hundred. I'm not sure how much of the crews' families were allowed to be on board anymore. I think it was a case of "only if both parents are stationed on board" for children.



The Jedi Master

Bunch of space hippies can't even get a ship crewed without grandma and the kids coming along.

If a faction came along that wasn't 100% evil or 100% goody-two-shoes... but could have a fleet without spandex clad families onboard and didn't send bridge crews down to do the job of marines... dammit they might actually win!

I seem to remember the whole, "bring your family to work day" thing went away when the U.S.S. Odyssey offloaded all the families at DS9 before their disastrous encounter with the Jem'Hadar. Because after that, the Federation was pretty much on a war footing from then on out.

As far as the Sovereign class, if Star Trek: Bridge Commander is canon (and I believe it is), the Sovereign was another anti-Borg prototype, yes, but was exceedingly expensive, and some of the more exotic systems didn't play together nicely, which is why she was mothballed, and the Enterprise-E had slightly downgraded shields, weapons, and engines. I think that Defiant would have held her own against say, a Borg Sphere, but from what I remember reading, the original appeal of the Defiant was that the type would be able to be produced rapidly in massive numbers. Imagine what a squadron of the things would've done to a tactical sphere, where the challenge would be bringing any weapons to bear, in any firing arcs, on that many ships attack from independent axes of fire, simultaneously.

It (Defiant) had cloaking ability, so good for recon etc too. What was the difference between the prototype Defiant and the later one?
I wonder how it compares to that prototype ship the Doctor ended up on for that Voyager episode? It had 3 sections to seperate into. The Prometheus or something?

Yeah, or Nova.
It was a concurrent project to the Defiant class.

The original Defiant had a Romulan Cloaking Device "on loan"
That ship was destroyed "Due to plot" something about being hit by an EMP weapon.
Knocked all the power out = no emergency force fields = "Lets get the F**k outta here"

A big item that defines the Defiant class is the nacelles are pulled in tight to the hull which reduces the "Shield Bubble" cross section.
Which if you think about it makes sense.

Those big long nacellles of the Sovereign, Galaxy et all need protecting.
and the other thing you almost never see are federation fighters.
(They made a brief cameo in DS9 Dominion war and the game "Star Trek Invasion" on the original Playstation)
Hmm the USS Typhon, now there is a starship.

2-3 squadrons of Valkyries and a Defiant or two in support, that Scimitar would've been toast, even with its "Scorpion class attack fliers"

Didn't they turn a shuttle craft into a mini warship in Voyager?

Yeah, you saw Federation fighters during DS9 in a few wide shots with a lot of ships in it, but they didn't really talk about it much.

As for games being canon, they only are until something else that is contradicts them.



The Jedi Master

Do you mean the Delta Flyer ?

Yes, that's it.

My memory not as good anymore.

Thanks!

Yes, the oversized shuttle they built out of spare parts! I always thought it a cop-out, I would've preferred it be an alien ship they found or something that they retrofitted with Fed tech a la DS9.

There were too many exceptions to the "stranded on the far side of the galaxy" theme in Voyager to really make it feel like it should have. I guess it would've strayed too far out of the comfort zone for ST at that time to do so. They were willing to push the boundaries only so far, and not as far as many would've liked.



The Jedi Master

Well, I looked up the fighters on the wiki and it looks like they were basically our equivalent to a B-52 bomber in size. I wonder how easy it would be to overrun a fleet with an almost exclusive makeup of capital ships not designed for straight up combat with a carrier and fighter wings.

Time for a Battlestar flight wing versus Enterprise fan fiction. (I know this exists somewhere, please spare me the actual horror of reading it )