The Borg: breaking the no limits fallacy

[Mike DiCenso]

Do we know for a fact that the Borg gained anything of substance that gave them a upper hand for that battle?

The way the battle went, the fact that Picard would know about most of the strategies and tactics the fleet would use. The real kicker is that even before the battle, when the E-D fires off the deflector dish weapon and has no effect it is because of the Borg assimilating Picard's knowledge of it.

Memory Alpha suggests that 40 seconds elapsed between the beginning of the assault and the moment a distress call was sent.
What matters as much as ship numbers if not more is just how long they could fire at the Borg Cube.

Here is the dialog regarding the opening of the battle:

TROI (on intercom): Bridge to Captain Picard.

PICARD: Go ahead.

TROI (on intercom): We've just received word from the fleet. They've engaged the Borg.


[Enterprise-E bridge]

PICARD: Data, put Starfleet frequency one four eight six on audio.

DATA: Aye sir.

FLEET COMMUNICATIONS: Flagship to Endeavor. Standby to engage at grid A-fifteen. ...Defiant and Bozeman, fall back to mobile position one. ...Acknowledge. ...We have it in visual range. A Borg cube on course zero point two one five, speed warp point nine six.

BORG COMMUNICATIONS: We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

FLEET COMMUNICATIONS: All units open fire. ...They've broken through the defence perimeter. ... Continue to attack. ...We need reinforcements. ...Ninety-six dead and twenty-two wounded on the Lexington.

PICARD: Lieutenant Hawk. Set a course for Earth.

Note that the Defiant is there at beginging of the action Typhon sector. The other interesting thing is that no one is sending out a "distress signal", just some chatter about wounded and dead on the Lexington. Further more, the inital dialog from Troi is while Riker and Picard are below decks in Picard's quarters discussing why the E-E was not sent to join the fight, so in addition to the 30 to 40 seconds of dialog when they are on the bridge, there have to be a couple or so minutes' time allocated for them to reach to bridge.

Yet they clearly don't fire torps at that rate of fire continuously.

Not in the closing part of the battle near Earth, since by that time the fleet would have been exausted. It's clear they'd been fighting all the way to Earth from the Typhon sector, and when the E-E arrives on hand and restores the fleet's cohesion, they fire very heavy torpedo volleys at the cube along with phasers.

The fact that they still have anything to fire by then would actually undermine your point a lot, don't you think?

No, not really. Not as long as you understand that what I did in that little calculation exercise was using averages.

Considerable as "its DET part is superior to the DET of a torp"?
No, I don't think so.
And again, why insist I'm establishing a false dilemma when the show and the movies pretty prove me right about the fact that Trek is not Macross and they don't spam with all they have at once, firing all types of weapons?

Phaser's don't have to be superior to the DET of a photon torpedo for them to contribute in a significant amount to the total energy absorbed by the cube. Now I did take that into consideration in my little thought exercise, and you should bear that in mind as well.

Oh yes they do. In "Best of Both Worlds, Part 1 & 2", we see the E-D open fire with a barrage of both phasers and torpedoes. In "Arsenal of Freedom", the E-D opens fire with a simultaneous firing of torpedoes and phasers. In "The Survivors", we see the E-D fire torpedoes and phasers again at the same time at the illusionary Husnock vessel. The E-E fires phasers and torpedoes at the same time at the Scimitar once they got a good sighting on her.

What more do you need to know?

And what's that miraculous x100,000 factor you used there? Why should I even begin to accept the idea that that many torps were fired in total? It's totally absurd.

Again, it's an averaging. I'm not even using anywhere near the higher end. I even used 44 MT as part of the original calcs and I used 100 MT later to make a point, then gave a taste of how insane .5 to 1 GT would be. Since you're just handwaving things away without much substance, I have to conclude that you're roundabout conceding the issue.
-Mike

[KirkSkyWalker]

Do we know for a fact that the Borg gained anything of substance that gave them a upper hand for that battle?

The way the battle went, the fact that Picard would know about most of the strategies and tactics the fleet would use. The real kicker is that even before the battle, when the E-D fires off the deflector dish weapon and has no effect it is because of the Borg assimilating Picard's knowledge of it.

Maybe for you; but I always got a kick out of the fact that Greg Brady knew more than supposed "expert tactician" Riker; i.e. when Greg's high-school football playbook was copied by a spy, at least he had the brains to change the plays in order to set up the other team.

However Riker just went ahead with his plan, despite that Guinan even warned him that the Borg would know everything that Picard knew-- including the oldest trick in the Picard-playbook, i.e. "the old modified deflector-dish trick."

Likewise for all the hype about Riker's being an expert poker-player, he didn't even use the Corbomite-maneuver. Result: EPIC FAIL, and Wolf 359... not that you can really fail worse than being pwned by the Brady-Bunch.



"Resistance is... impossible."

[Mike DiCenso]

They were making good progress with the Defiant-class warship, however Sisko said that these were discontinued "when the Borg became less of a threat."

Not exactly as this dialog shows:

SISKO: Desperate times breed desperate measures, Major. Five years ago, Starfleet began exploring the possibility of building a new class of starship. This ship would have no families, no science labs, no luxuries of any kind. It was designed for one purpose only, to fight and defeat the Borg. The Defiant was the prototype, the first ship in what would have been a new Federation battle fleet.

DAX: So what happened?

SISKO: The Borg threat became less urgent. Also, some design flaws cropped up during the ship's shakedown cruise, so Starfleet decided to abandon the project.

O'BRIEN: What sort of design flaws?

SISKO: You'll have complete access to the ship evaluation reports but to put it simply, it's overgunned and overpowered for a ship its size. During battle drills, it nearly tore itself apart when the engines were tested at full capacity.

So it wasn't that the Defiant project was simply abandoned because the Borg threat diminished, it was because the ship had some serious flaws. Eventually the class did go into production as at least two are seen in the big fleet at the end of "A Call to Arms", then two unnamed ones are seen escort an Akira in VOY's "A Message in a Bottle", later the U.S.S Valiant was seen in DS9's "Valiant", the U.S.S. Sao Paulo was renamed by Sisko "Defiant" when assigned as a replacement for the NX-74205 which had been lost in action at the Second Battle of Chintoka, and finally in VOY's "Endgame" two unnamed Defiants are seen escorting Voyager home to Earth. So at least 7 DCS built.

(This claim seems odd, however, given the problems in First Contact, as well as the notion that the Borg have a conduit which leads right to Earth in "Endgame.")

See above. The Borg transwarp conduit was only a recent development, and Voyager destroyed the only transwarp hub capable of generating it.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

Do we know for a fact that the Borg gained anything of substance that gave them a upper hand for that battle?

The way the battle went, the fact that Picard would know about most of the strategies and tactics the fleet would use. The real kicker is that even before the battle, when the E-D fires off the deflector dish weapon and has no effect it is because of the Borg assimilating Picard's knowledge of it.

Maybe for you; but I always got a kick out of the fact that Greg Brady knew more than supposed "expert tactician" Riker; i.e. when Greg's high-school football playbook was copied by a spy, at least he had the brains to change the plays in order to set up the other team.

However Riker just went ahead with his plan, despite that Guinan even warned him that the Borg would know everything that Picard knew-- including the oldest trick in the Picard-playbook, i.e. "the old modified deflector-dish trick."

Likewise for all the hype about Riker's being an expert poker-player, he didn't even use the Corbomite-maneuver. Result: EPIC FAIL, and Wolf 359.

Which shows that you didn't watch the episode. Riker went ahead using the saucer seperation plan knowing that Picard knew that, and gambled on the Borg ignoring the saucer section until it started firing the antimatter charges at them, then while they were distracted by that, Data and Worf in the shuttlecraft snuck in and got Picard/Locutus back. So he did change the play, twisting a known game plan so that it could be used to his advantage.
-Mike

[KirkSkyWalker]

They were making good progress with the Defiant-class warship, however Sisko said that these were discontinued "when the Borg became less of a threat."

Not exactly as this dialog shows:

SISKO:
DAX: So what happened?

SISKO: The Borg threat became less urgent. Also,
(snip)
So it wasn't that the Defiant project was simply abandoned because the Borg threat diminished

Yes it was; that's why they didn't pursue it in order to correct these flaws, i.e. the Borg were less of a threat-- like I said. Flaws or not, the Defiant clearly could still pwn ANY other Federation ship in combat, so clearly these "flaws" weren't the reason it was discontinued.

When the Federation wasn't at war or being directly threatened, it would simply go against directives in order to produce warships.

(This claim seems odd, however, given the problems in First Contact, as well as the notion that the Borg have a conduit which leads right to Earth in "Endgame.")

See above. The Borg transwarp conduit was only a recent development, and Voyager destroyed the only transwarp hub capable of generating it.
-Mike

How recent? It was discovered by Starfleet in the episode "Descent," however where's the proof of when they developed it?

Which shows that you didn't watch the episode. Riker went ahead using the saucer seperation plan knowing that Picard knew that, and gambled on the Borg ignoring the saucer section until it started firing the antimatter charges at them, then while they were distracted by that, Data and Worf in the shuttlecraft snuck in and got Picard/Locutus back. So he did change the play, twisting a known game plan so that it could be used to his advantage.
-Mike

ROTFLMAO. From before the very beginning of the episode-- i.e. at the very end of the prior one-- Riker ordered the deflector-dish weapon fired; he didn't even modify it-- or any other plan-- in order to take advantage of likely Borg-adaptations to it. As a result, the weapon had NO EFFECT; and W359 happened after this, as a result-- and BEFORE they re-captured Picard/Locutus.

And likewise, they did this through pure PLOT-HOLE: i.e. the Borg pwned the entire Federation fleet at W359-- but not the Enterprise acting all by its lonesome, simply because of separating the saucer-section and some anti-matter spray blah-blah-blah completely baffles the Borg to the point that their commanding drone gets captured.
Again, this is pure Greg-Brady pwnage.

The tell-all moment came, however, when they beat the Borg by literally BORING them to death.

[Mike DiCenso]

ROTFLMAO. From before the very beginning of the episode-- i.e. at the very end of the prior one-- Riker ordered the deflector-dish weapon fired; he didn't even modify it-- or any other plan-- in order to take advantage of likely Borg-adaptations to it. As a result, the weapon had NO EFFECT; and W359 happened after this, as a result-- and BEFORE they re-captured Picard/Locutus.

Here again you neglect to note the proper context. They did not have time to make those modifications as the ship's warp drive was becoming dangerously overtaxed and the sole purpose of Shelby's boarding party was not only to attempt a retrival of Picard, but also to bring the Borg cube out of warp so that the E-D could even make an attempt at firing the weapon at all. When retriving Picard at that time failed, Riker did the only thing he could do and that was fire the weapon off before the Borg regenerated and headed back into warp and on to Earth.

And likewise, they did this through pure PLOT-HOLE: i.e. the Borg pwned the entire Federation fleet at W359-- but not the Enterprise acting all by its lonesome, simply because of separating the saucer-section and some anti-matter spray blah-blah-blah completely baffles the Borg to the point that their commanding drone gets captured.

The E-D is more advanced than most of the ships that participated at Wolf-359, the E-D crew had more time to prepare because of their late arrival, and they did not try to destroy the cube, just keep it distracted long enough to cover for Data and Worf's mission to extract Picard/Locutus to be accomplished.
-Mike

[Lucky]

In Desent part 2 isn't the cube destroyed by a fictional solar event called a "solar fusion eruption"?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Do we know for a fact that the Borg gained anything of substance that gave them a upper hand for that battle?

The way the battle went, the fact that Picard would know about most of the strategies and tactics the fleet would use. The real kicker is that even before the battle, when the E-D fires off the deflector dish weapon and has no effect it is because of the Borg assimilating Picard's knowledge of it.

Is that the same dish that was running with terawatts of power, as per Riker?
A beam is still a beam though. The only difference it would make is if the Borg knew about it and, for example, put all or most of their shields over the area which they knew would be hit, because of the way the beam is fired: straight forward.

Memory Alpha suggests that 40 seconds elapsed between the beginning of the assault and the moment a distress call was sent.
What matters as much as ship numbers if not more is just how long they could fire at the Borg Cube.

Here is the dialog regarding the opening of the battle:

TROI (on intercom): Bridge to Captain Picard.

PICARD: Go ahead.

TROI (on intercom): We've just received word from the fleet. They've engaged the Borg.


[Enterprise-E bridge]

PICARD: Data, put Starfleet frequency one four eight six on audio.

DATA: Aye sir.

FLEET COMMUNICATIONS: Flagship to Endeavor. Standby to engage at grid A-fifteen. ...Defiant and Bozeman, fall back to mobile position one. ...Acknowledge. ...We have it in visual range. A Borg cube on course zero point two one five, speed warp point nine six.

BORG COMMUNICATIONS: We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

FLEET COMMUNICATIONS: All units open fire. ...They've broken through the defence perimeter. ... Continue to attack. ...We need reinforcements. ...Ninety-six dead and twenty-two wounded on the Lexington.

PICARD: Lieutenant Hawk. Set a course for Earth.

Note that the Defiant is there at beginging of the action Typhon sector.

Defiant and Bozeman are asked to "fall back to mobile position one". Doesn't really give the impression that they engaged the Cube right off the bat like other ships did.

The other interesting thing is that no one is sending out a "distress signal", just some chatter about wounded and dead on the Lexington.

Huhy, "we need reinforcements" on some open channel is close enough. Does it matter though? Ships were destroyed.

Further more, the inital dialog from Troi is while Riker and Picard are below decks in Picard's quarters discussing why the E-E was not sent to join the fight, so in addition to the 30 to 40 seconds of dialog when they are on the bridge, there have to be a couple or so minutes' time allocated for them to reach to bridge.

Couple or so minutes during an urgent time, for Picard and Riker to go from Picard's quarters to the bridge with some turbolift?
Where are those quarters? In the tailpipe of one of those nacelles?

Yet they clearly don't fire torps at that rate of fire continuously.

Not in the closing part of the battle near Earth, since by that time the fleet would have been exausted. It's clear they'd been fighting all the way to Earth from the Typhon sector, and when the E-E arrives on hand and restores the fleet's cohesion, they fire very heavy torpedo volleys at the cube along with phasers.

The fact that they still had torps pretty much supports my point. Any sensible captain knowing a thing or two about an alpha strike would already be running on phasers only at that point.
And what's that story about cohesion? Don't you think your average captain wouldn't know about, I don't know... concentrating firepower on the same point, on and on? And wouldn't other captains notice some ships doing so, and would do the same? What about firing in the center of any face of that Cube? It's obviously going to be closest point to the Cube's center. Quite an obvious point to shoot at.
The only genius battle tactic the UFP would still have up their sleeves which the Borg could not adapt to would be ramming speed.
Seems like Mr. Brains was the smartest dude in that part of the galaxy that day...

Not to say, once again, that they don't even do it when they're given a target by Picard: any ship that fires torpedoes doesn't fire phasers at the same time.
Or when the Cube arrives, calmly, undisturbed. before the first hits. Do we see a spam of phasers and torps? No. Not at all.

The fact that they still have anything to fire by then would actually undermine your point a lot, don't you think?

No, not really. Not as long as you understand that what I did in that little calculation exercise was using averages.

You're kidding me? You calculated an average on the assumption that most torps were fired.
That's an average of a favourable assumption, an upper end.
Remember your calculation:

You went with 100 ships and an average of 150-200 torps per ship.

Yet you claim 100 ships because of the large casualties. Obviously, there's a problem here, because if you have high casualties in a few minutes, you won't have each ship firing like 150-200 torps on the average. Far from that.
You said they had lost a dozen ships in a mere two minutes of fighting, at the battle of Sector 001.
That makes the survival rate of those ships about ten seconds. Or just long enough to eventually pass an order to fire some torps.
Let's be generous and say 5 torps.
There, you have a count to start playing with.
And when we look at the battle, only the Defiant and the E-E, which has just arrived, are capable of sustaining hits without blowing up. ALL other ships explode when hit by a Borg torpedo or their green beams instantly blow up or get seriously damaged beyond any capacity to maintain the slimmest hope of combat capability.

Plus, there's another odd thing. It's from the battle between Voyager and the Borg coffin. We see that the photon torpedo's "warhead" charges up, with two lines of 6 rectangles already red, and four off. Looking at how long it took for the last rectangles to light up before the explosion, 4 seconds, we see that it would take full ten seconds for the warheads to be ready.
And that was for a megajoule yield by the way.

Considerable as "its DET part is superior to the DET of a torp"?
No, I don't think so.
And again, why insist I'm establishing a false dilemma when the show and the movies pretty prove me right about the fact that Trek is not Macross and they don't spam with all they have at once, firing all types of weapons?

Phaser's don't have to be superior to the DET of a photon torpedo for them to contribute in a significant amount to the total energy absorbed by the cube.
Now I did take that into consideration in my little thought exercise, and you should bear that in mind as well.

I never said they had to be superior.
I simply left them out because to me, phasers or torps, that was about the same, even if I tend to put phasers below torps - but phasers have advantages like a focused area of fire (although I don't know if that matters for Trek shields) and that very useful NDF ability, and because I don't see any evidence that for any prolongated engagement, ships can fire both types of weapons.

That is why, above, I said "continuous". See your examples below:

Oh yes they do. In "Best of Both Worlds, Part 1 & 2", we see the E-D open fire with a barrage of both phasers and torpedoes. In "Arsenal of Freedom", the E-D opens fire with a simultaneous firing of torpedoes and phasers. In "The Survivors", we see the E-D fire torpedoes and phasers again at the same time at the illusionary Husnock vessel. The E-E fires phasers and torpedoes at the same time at the Scimitar once they got a good sighting on her.

What more do you need to know?

Simple. Does any one of those examples show a ship doing that combination of fire over more than one or two volleys?
Because that's pretty much essential to your argument (which is already moot as far as FC shows, as pointed out just above).

I also checked out the Nemesis case, because that's one of the few I can look at. There's combined fire when Picard orders to fire at will. However, it's not always achieved, and above all, we don't even have any proof that they had time to fully charge either torps or phasers when doing so.

Considering how long the battle lasted and the number of shots both sides took, it's almost like watching Star Wars instead of Trek. I'm pretty sure most people here have said at least once that a couple torpedoes were good enough to bring shields down.
In comparison, what we see in Nemesis is sticking out. Another reason to think they were favouring ROF over yield?

Reminds me of the spam in the new Trek movie, with torps fired at the Naranda along phasers. We know that at this ROF, phasers were just good enough to destroy unshielded missiles, nothing like terajoules or petajoules which would have vaporized nearby missiles through area effect destruction. That, from a ship which obviously was a step further on the offensive part.

Oh and DS9's battles, full of non combined fire.

And what's that miraculous x100,000 factor you used there? Why should I even begin to accept the idea that that many torps were fired in total? It's totally absurd.

Again, it's an averaging. I'm not even using anywhere near the higher end. I even used 44 MT as part of the original calcs and I used 100 MT later to make a point, then gave a taste of how insane .5 to 1 GT would be. Since you're just handwaving things away without much substance, I have to conclude that you're roundabout conceding the issue.
-Mike

I'm not talking about the yield but the number of torps fired. 100,000 is nothing like a real average. It's like saying a ship's shields can withstand between 30~80 megatons and 20~70 teratons and claiming that the ~ between 40 and 70 is the average.

With a fleet of +100 ships, claiming that on the average, each one of them managed to fire about 100 torps is not s'rious. >:[
Even in Nemesis, when they have a lock, there are pauses.
You need to reconsider your directives.

[Praeothmin]

Flaws or not, the Defiant clearly could still pwn ANY other Federation ship in combat

Not true, it was getting beat up pretty bad by the Lakota, an upgraded Excelsior-class.
Yes, I believe it would have won, but it did not pawn it at all...
And I very much doubt the Defiant could pawn a War-Refit GCS, or a Sovereign, or a Prometheus...

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Flaws or not, the Defiant clearly could still pwn ANY other Federation ship in combat

Not true, it was getting beat up pretty bad by the Lakota, an upgraded Excelsior-class.
Yes, I believe it would have won, but it did not pawn it at all...
And I very much doubt the Defiant could pawn a War-Refit GCS, or a Sovereign, or a Prometheus...

In the lakota vs defiant fight that both ships were seriously holding back, if you watch when sisko was flying it against the breen ect he was launching full volleys of quantum torps from both forward launchers and blasting with phasers on approach to enemy vessels.

If it had it been loaded with jems ect and both ships were fighting at full capacity and trying to destroy each other the defiant would have raped it very quickly.

[Praeothmin]

If it had it been loaded with jems ect and both ships were fighting at full capacity and trying to destroy each other the defiant would have raped it very quickly.

How do you know that?
Where is it stated?
We see both ships holding back, and both get damaged quite heavily by the other ship, so how do you know that an all-out firing Defiant would actually cream the Lakota?
Can you actually prove this? ;)

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

If it had it been loaded with jems ect and both ships were fighting at full capacity and trying to destroy each other the defiant would have raped it very quickly.

How do you know that?
Where is it stated?
We see both ships holding back, and both get damaged quite heavily by the other ship, so how do you know that an all-out firing Defiant would actually cream the Lakota?
Can you actually prove this? ;)

We are talking about a ship of exploration from kirks era (OK upgraded but still old) vs a state of the art warship that had also been upgraded with ablative amour unknowingly to the Lakota.

The Defiant is going to know all the weaknesses of the Lakotas design in regard to combat but the Defiant was designed not to have any or if it does have any they would be well protected ect.

Maneuverability and firepower, i am betting the forward firepower of the defiant is loads greater than the forward firepower of the upgraded Lakota and tons greater than the aft fire power so with the defiant maneuverability they could sit in the Lakotas weakest firing arc transfer power to forward shields, blast away with the forward guns and rip it a new one.

[Cocytus]

If it had it been loaded with jems ect and both ships were fighting at full capacity and trying to destroy each other the defiant would have raped it very quickly.

How do you know that?
Where is it stated?
We see both ships holding back, and both get damaged quite heavily by the other ship, so how do you know that an all-out firing Defiant would actually cream the Lakota?
Can you actually prove this? ;)

We are talking about a ship of exploration from kirks era (OK upgraded but still old) vs a state of the art warship that had also been upgraded with ablative amour unknowingly to the Lakota.

The Defiant is going to know all the weaknesses of the Lakotas design in regard to combat but the Defiant was designed not to have any or if it does have any they would be well protected ect.

Maneuverability and firepower, i am betting the forward firepower of the defiant is loads greater than the forward firepower of the upgraded Lakota and tons greater than the aft fire power so with the defiant maneuverability they could sit in the Lakotas weakest firing arc transfer power to forward shields, blast away with the forward guns and rip it a new one.

I think the Defiant would have come out on top in an all-out brawl, but it wouldn't have "creamed" the Lakota by any stretch. The Lakota itself had been upgraded unbeknownst to the Defiant. O'Brien: "Someone's been upgrading the Lakota's weapons. That's a lot of firepower for an Excelsior class ship." This is also why they chose not to try and outrun the Lakota, the rationale being "who knows what they've done to the warp drive."

Then later, in Layton's office:
"The Lakota's carrying quantum torpedoes isn't she?"
"Yes"
"Then use them."
"Captain, you know as well as I that there aren't any changelings on the Defiant. Use those quantum torpedoes and you will be killing 50 Starfleet officers."

It's true the Lakota came off worse even in the restrained fight, as per Kira: "They're in worse shape. One good hit will probably finish them." But the Defiant was bady beaten up, and Sisko, who knew the design of his ship better than pretty much anyone, fully expected the Lakota to be able to land a killing blow with quantum torpedoes. As for the Defiant's maneuverability, she was doing quite a bit of maneuvering. I didn't see the Lakota miss once.

Additionally, given that Layton was an admiral and Benteen his prize student, it stands to reason he would have given her ship the best upgrades he could lay his hands on, especially if he was expecting to have to use it against the Defiant. The Defiant came off better in the exchange than the Lakota, and would have come off better in a straight-up fight, but she wouldn't have simply "raped" the Lakota.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

As for the Defiant's maneuverability, she was doing quite a bit of maneuvering. I didn't see the Lakota miss once.

I would say there is a difference between maneuvering to reduce the accuracy incoming fire to critical systems while trying to hit the lakotas without destroying it, rather than sitting in the weakest part of the lakotas firing arc and blasting the hell out of it with the defiants forward guns and torps.

The upgrades helped the Lakota a lot i expect and it was likely setup for as much power to weapons ect as possible as it was going after the defiant but even with them it would still be a poor match to a all out balls to the wall fighting machine, the defiant took out actual warships of other races easily, even multiple warships in a lot of cases and it did so pretty easily when it was unrestrained.

[Praeothmin]

Kor, you ignore the fact that the upgraded Lakota did much damage to the Defiant, and had they been both fighting "balls-to-walls", both would have taken heavy damage, since even Quantorps that fail to hit critical systems would have done much damage to the Defiant.

We all agree the Defiant would win, but it would not dominate like you seem to think.
Do not forget the warships the Defiant fought were Cardassians (not the most powerful ships, and not the most precise), Klingons (BoP are not very powerful, and one on one, a Vorch'a is less powerful than a GCS, and also not as precise), and mostly?
None of them had QuanTorps...