26 Phaser Arrays? The Cardenas Class Starship

As someone who served in the US Navy, I think you're overlooking one of this design's greatest strengths: Redundancy. This is a HUGE feature in the modern Navy, you have back-ups for EVERYTHING, even engines. This design not only gives you a pair of back-up nacelles you can use if one of them is damaged in a fight, but gives you back-up and independant power supplies on every turret. That is a HUGE advantage in combat, as even if the central power goes down, you can keep fighting! No wonder these lasted as long as they did in universe, they probably just tanked their way through any problem until the Klinks rolled in with their superior firepower. Seriously, you gotta give a warship design like that props for just being too stubborn to die, and having back-ups for its back-ups.

I love the predecessor to the warp coasting system. It's fun to create prototypes that are worse than the later developments and give them very specific faults. I can 100% see the engineers on a Cardenas class arguing with the command staff that they need to drop out of warp to degauss the nacelles before the warp field starts to lose cohesion and they go hurling out of a warp bubble. It's a limitation that makes all future ships with 4 nacelles seem so much more powerful.

Discovering these ships through STO has been a positive influence for me. I learn of cool ships mostly on their own merits rather than being attached to a specific show.

It makes sense that in the beginning years of the Federation it would need a "Hammer" as it would be needed to standup to other galactic powers and any threats out there and as the Federation established itself and other powers joined it, one would find a hammer less and less useful as the saying goes "If all you have is a hammer, everything and everyone will look like a nail" LLAP 🖖

A really strong-looking ship class - the hard "X" of the warp nacelle struts shows a real sense of being a no-nonsense vessel, while the stepped back Bridge, although the 'softest' looking part of the design, is protected by the shoulders of the saucer section, looking like a raincoat that's been pulled up to cover the ears.

It makes sense that early Starfleet ships would get real big and then get smaller. Miniaturization of technology is one of the biggest challenges to making new technology practical for mobile applications.

Of all the Discovery designs pre-time travel, this is by far my favorite.This ship is the flagship for my Disco Captain and my headcannon qoute for his thoughts on it is "SHe is old and falling apart constantly, but as long as we have show our hands at damage-control, we can tank anything that is thrown at us."

Not a bad looking class for the early years of StarFleet. Iconic.

I’m unimpressed by most ships designed for ST:D but this class has it all. Plenty of legs, plenty of teeth, plenty of range, plenty of room for non-combat work. The bridge placement looks cool but suffers from the same exposure issue that most Starfleet ships do. The bridge should be buried deep in the hull with plenty of extra armor, but here we are. Good coverage in this video for a ship class that should have had more of its stories told.

So…just to be clear…Star Trek Online has this class listed as a Command Dreadnought Cruiser…which would explain its sheer size and mass for the era. I don’t know if you mentioned all that but I felt it was worth mentioning.

A luxuriously large engineering section even given how big it was for its day, that thing would have been a flying fab shop - and probably had to be, with two shuttlebays, all those phaser turrets to refit, and a loadout that meant one set of nacelles or the other was always being worked on, given Starfleet wanting to get the most out of its then-fantastic warp capabilities. The Cardenas probably needed one shuttlecraft just to fit all the workbees needed to keep the thing working. And kudos to its designer, it feels very much like a Road Not Taken for the Federation - you COULD see this design possibly being extended into the future, with an elongated engineering deck 'stalk' surrounded by hab and science decks, before the "quick-eject" vertical engineering section so emblematic of the Federation took over; it very much feels like detaching the engineering decks was ever so slightly in this ship's future.

So this ship class was supposed to be 60 years old by the time we saw it, but the examples we saw had higher registry numbers than the fresh-off-the-line Discovery. I really wish the makers of Star Trek over the decades had kept some semblance of sense to how registry numbers work.

Loved what the STO team did with the Buran, the Battleaxe.

Rick your videos are among my absolute FAVORITE of all YouTube content 💯

Getting a 24th century neo design of this class with escorts being more popular would be interesting.

One of the best ships seen on Discovery

Ah yes the boom box

Love getting lore about all different ships and designs and stories about them

Sorry to be picky here, but aren't they technically phaser banks, not arrays? The Ambassador class as far as we know was the first class to utilize phaser arrays, before then Starfleet vessels had phaser beam banks

My favorite earlier vessel.. great looking and very powerful