A >small< ship, but still no stars to steer her by

[classicdrogn]

I don't have a firm decision on the name, but I lean toward Sea Swallow due to the blue stripe, ability to lay the hurt on far beyond what its size would suggest, and general tiny cuteness. The "ears" are not really part of the design, but they are vaguely plausible as auxilliary sensor arrays and amuse me so I've mostly left them in place for renders up to now. I am definitely using the visually-oversized phaser strip because it drives home the scale in a way that just seeing a figure (or worse, a dudeslab sized to represent a figure but a featureless box to the eye) standing on top of the hull does not. For reference, the entire ship's top-down view is about the size of the bridge island on the original Enterprise, and at 48m the saucer is just about exactly the same diameter as the deflector dish on an Ambassador class like the Enterprise-C. Overall length is 75m, and I'm not sure of the height since I just got done making the pod and nacelles a little beefier, but I know it's still under 25m from the bottom of the nacelles. Figures for the Defiant tend to vary and it's #3 on my "ugly main Trek ships" list (after "Everything From Discovery" at #1 and the Galaxy second, still ahead of "JJ plz go & stay gone") so I don't make a habit of memorizing trivia about it, but the most plausible is 120m long, for what that's worth.


image source
They eat Portugese Man'o'War jellyfish, and collect the sting cells and poison in their own body to use against predators and grabby tourists!