Star Trek VS Other Sci-Fi unfair?

[Mike DiCenso]

The Maquis ship Chakotay's band flew around was much bigger and clearly of a different class of ship than the fighter-sized craft.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

The Maquis ship Chakotay's band flew around was much bigger and clearly of a different class of ship than the fighter-sized craft.
-Mike

And where does that come from?
I seem to remember Maquis ships fleeing the Defiant in DS9, and they seemed the same size as Chakotay's...

[Khas]

A small 2-man variant appeared in TNG's "Preemptive Strike".

[Mike DiCenso]

The Maquis ship Chakotay's band flew around was much bigger and clearly of a different class of ship than the fighter-sized craft.
-Mike

And where does that come from?
I seem to remember Maquis ships fleeing the Defiant in DS9, and they seemed the same size as Chakotay's...

There's a whole bunch of different variants. Chakotay's ship held at least 50 Maquis crew. Others seem to hold anywhere from 2 people to about half a dozen or so, and are of different configurations.

I suppose you can blame David Stipes for DS9's scaling issues.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

Then I blame David Stipes... :)

[Picard]

And Maquis fighters were shown to be stronger than runabouts...

Weren't they much bigger, though?
I seem to recall in Voyager that the Maquis ship was close to 1/5th of the length of Voyager, so about 60 something meters...

They were bigger, but not that much. I am talking about fighters, like ones in Sacrifice of Angels - same hulls were used by Hudson in episode when he defects to Maquis, and there, 2 Maquis fighters fought 3 Starfleet runabouts to draw.

In both of the above cases the use of out dated ordanence or mere disrupters were enough to get a knock out kill against an otherwise unbeatable enemy by getting them to lower thier shields. I would argue it is not too much of a stretch to assume Star Trek ships are primarily defended by their shields and navigational screens with hulls comparatively weak even if by our standards they are stupidly resilent.

Quite correct. Even Defiant (which has ablative armor and probably unusually strong hull for its size) had to redirect fire from Vor'cha class cruisers using its tractor beam, and even then was in quite danger until they raised shields again. Only other ships I can recall taking serious beating without having shields up are TNG nebula, DS9 Galaxies and Sovereign class. Odyssey took quite a beating, and probably could continue for few more minutes, althought by the end of the battle, she was falling apart (almost literally), but I can't recall anything about other ships (other than Miranda class ships getting holed in single shots during Sacrifice of Angels). So shields are primary defense, even with ablative armor, but even without shields, hulls can take quite a beating - althought that is probably helped by SIF. Sovereign class might have gotten ablative armor, going by look of its hull, as well as its general orientation towards combat, but that is never stated.

Not really. The runabout had effective shields, the Odyssey did not. The Odyssey took many more hits and still remained functional compared to the runabout. So relatively speaking, a runabout is kind of tough, but it's not that awesome of a ship in combat against even modest-sized capital ships, which was the point of the discussion.
-Mike

I was under impression that Federation shields in general were ineffective against Dominion weapons? Runabouts only survived beacouse they weren't primary target, Odyssey was.