U.S.S. Defiant NX-74205 (Legacy)

Myriad Universes: U.S.S. Defiant

Prime Timeline • Prime Timeline (Defiant II) • Columbia Timeline • First Splinter Timeline • First Splinter Timeline (Defiant II) • First Splinter-M Timeline • KLVX2 Timeline • Legacy Timeline • LUG Timeline • Mirror Universe • STO Timeline • STOM Timeline

U.S.S. Defiant

Defiant class (DSN 537)

Registry	NX-74205
Class	Defiant
Commissioned	2370
Status	Destroyed (2375, Battle of Chin'toka, Dominion War)
First Appearance	DSN 447 (26 Sep 1994)
Advertising	Amazon

Myriad Universes
(Infinite worlds, infinite possibilities)

The lead vessel of the Defiant class, the Federation Starship Defiant was officially classified as an escort, but began development in 2366 as a small, highly-powered, heavily-armed starship intended to defend the Federation against the Borg. The Defiant was the first of what was to be a new Federation battle fleet. Starfleet abandoned the project when the Borg threat became less urgent and after design flaws turned up during the Defiant's shakedown cruise.^[1]

After its construction, the Defiant went on a trial run to the Romulan Neutral Zone, where it was tested under the command of Commander Benjamin Sisko. During this test run, the Defiant discovered a derelict D'Deridex class warbird in Federation space. Upon further investigation, the Defiant encountered a group of warbirds under the command of Valerius of the Tal Shiar, who had laid a trap for a rogue Vulcan criminal named T'Uerell. When Commander Sisko challenged the Romulan officer, Valerius's attack forced the Defiant to flee into a nebula, where it left an emergency distress beacon. When the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D came to assist the Defiant, they discovered that the smaller vessel had fallen into Romulan hands, and the Romulans were beginning to study it at a secret base. A Starfleet task force managed to destroy the base and allow the Defiant to escape.^[2]

On Stardate 48213.1, the Defiant was assigned to Deep Space 9—again under the command of Commander Sisko, who also commanded the station—to help counter the threat posed by the Dominion; the ship was equipped with a cloaking device on loan from the Romulan Star Empire. The ship had minimal crew accommodations, a small sickbay, and no provisions for families.^[1]

On Stardate 48467.3, Maquis member Thomas Riker hijacked the Defiant from Deep Space 9 to investigate a suspected Cardassian military buildup in the Orias system.^[3]

On Stardate 48481.2, the Defiant was caught in a temporal eddy and spared from catastrophic changes to the timeline during an accidental transport of several personnel to early 21st-century Earth, and the Defiant was able to make use of the temporal instability to rescue the missing crewmembers after they had repaired the damage to the timeline.^[4]^[5]

Later, the Defiant traveled to the Gamma Quadrant to observe a subspace inversion of the Bajoran wormhole. During the mission, an accident in the engine room pulled Commander Sisko into subspace, spawning the D476 Timeline, but several decades later, an elderly Jake Sisko managed to prevent the accident. In the corrected timeline, the accident was averted, leaving Sisko, who still remembered the original timeline, disoriented but unharmed.^[6]

The Defiant battled the U.S.S. Lakota NCC-42768 when transporting Lieutenant Arriaga, a key witness in the case against Admiral Leyton's attempted coup, to Earth.^[7]

About a week prior to Stardate 50308.7, the Defiant was inadvertently transported back in time to Stardate 4523.3. Thanks to its cloaking device, it remained undetected by the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701, which was at Deep Space K-7. The Defiant prevented a Klingon agent from the 24th century from assassinating Captain James T. Kirk of the Enterprise, and the ship returned to its own time.^[8]

Later, the Defiant encountered a settlement on the planet Gaia IV. While attempting to leave the planet, a future version of the ship was sent two centuries into the past, and the stranded crew was forced to live out their lives on the planet. The Defiant's crew elected to recreate the accident that led to their future counterparts being stranded on the planet rather than allow their eight thousand descendants be erased from history, but the alternate Odo reprogrammed the Defiant's computers to avoid the accident so that Kira would not die as she had in the original timeline.^[9]

When the Borg launched an invasion of the Federation on Stardate 50893.5, the Defiant was one of the first ships to arrive in the Typhon Sector to combat the Borg cube, which was on course for Earth. Under Lieutenant Commander Worf's command, the Defiant fought a running battle with the Borg, scoring a number of hits on the cube's surface. The Defiant, which had continued fighting all the way to Earth, was seriously damaged by the Borg. Its shields had failed by this time and its weapons had been depleted. Worf was in the process of ordering the Defiant to ram the cube when the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-E arrived, which blocked an energy beam fired at the Defiant by the cube. The Defiant's life support system began to fail, and its crew was beamed aboard the Enterprise. The Defiant survived the destruction of the cube and Captain Jean-Luc Picard took great pleasure in telling Worf the Defiant was "adrift, but salvageable." The Enterprise followed a Borg sphere through a temporal rift, preventing the Borg from altering history.^[10]

Three months later, Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax commanded a repaired Defiant on several missions, including an attack on a sensor array in the Argolis Cluster on Stardate 51145.3.^[11]

The Defiant was destroyed by Breen forces during the Battle of Chin'toka in Legacy, just weeks before the end of the Dominion War.^[12]