Star Trek: Why DS9’s Second Starship Wasn’t Named Defiant-A

Star Trek: Deep Space Ninegot a second USS Defiant late in season 7 and there was a practical reason why the replacement wasn’t named the USS Defiant-A. For Trekkers who love starship legacies, like the many vessels named USS Enterprise, it was always a bit strange that Captain Benjamin Sisko’s (Avery Brooks) successor ship simply took the name Defiant and its callsign (NX-74205), but it all came down to the show’s budget.

The producers of DS9 fought for three years to get a starship to accompany the space station the series was set in. DS9 only had three tiny Runabouts for off-station adventures. After Executive Producer Ira Steven Behr and DS9‘s writing staff introduced the Dominion as villains, they knew the Runabouts were inadequate to meet this new threat. Paramount and Star Trek Producer Rick Berman relented and the USS Defiant was introduced in DS9 season 3 along with Commander Sisko’s long-deserved promotion to Captain. As per studio edict, the Defiant was a much smaller starship than the Enterprise or the USS Voyager and it was designed primarily for war, but it also had unique features like a Romulan cloaking device. The Defiant became a fan-favorite starship that even appeared in the film Star Trek: First Contact, but it was finally destroyed late in DS9 season 7 as the Dominion War storyline built to its epic conclusion.

In “The Dogs of War”, the penultimate episode before the two-part DS9 series finale, “What You Leave Behind”, Sisko received his replacement for the lost Defiant: the USS Sao Paulo, which was a nearly-identical Defiant-class starship with the callsign NCC-75633. But Admiral Ross (Barry Jenner) had a surprise for Sisko and revealed that, out of respect for the Captain and his previous command, the Sao Paulo received special Starfleet dispensation to be renamed USS Defiant. DS9 had its beloved starship back, although the new Defiant was brand-new, and it had physical and operational differences the crew disliked at first and had to get used to. But why was the Sao Paulo renamed Defiant and not Defiant-A like the Enterprise‘s legacy starships?

In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, executive producer Ronald D. Moore said he wanted the Sao Paulo to be named Defiant-A. After all, Moore and Brannon Braga were the writers of Star Trek Generations who destroyed the Enterprise-D and replaced it with the Enterprise-E in Star Trek: First Contact. Moore said, “I fought quite a bit on this rather minute point because I’m a Star Trek aficionado and I feel strongly about these types of things.” According to Moore, “I drove Ira up the wall on this “A” business, trying to get the “A” onto the [Defiant’s] model [used for filming].”

But at that point, there were only three episodes left of DS9 to produce, and the show’s tight budget made it cost-prohibitive to repaint the Defiant’s model decals and reshoot it as well as go back into all of the Defiant’s stock visual effects and digitally alter the lettering on the ship. “We had to bite the bullet,” Behr explained. “We didn’t have to end the series without the ship… but we weren’t going to build a new ship at the end of the show, and we weren’t going to change [all of] the decals”. Moore still essentially considers the Sao Paulo the Defiant-A, but most Trekkers didn’t mind since it meant DS9 got their awesome starship back in time to win the Dominion War.

DS9‘s situation was unique and it was easy to gloss over the lack of legacy renaming since the Sao Paulo was virtually identical to the original Defiant. But it’s a different scenario from the Constitution-class Enterprise of Star Trek: The Original Series, which was completely refitted for Star Trek: The Motion Picture yet kept the name Enterprise. It was the replacement ship after the Enterprise was destroyed that got the name Enterprise-A. Further, Star Trek: Discovery did their own thing when the USS Discovery received a 32nd-century refit and was redesignated Discovery-A in season 3. The inconsistent legacy naming is unusual for the Star Trek franchise, but each show’s producers do what they feel suits their particular series and starship best.

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