Star Trek nerds, I need your help ID'ing these starships! But not the ones you're probably thinking of. [SOLVED]

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1

Is anyone here enough of a Star Trek nerd to help me identify some specific ships from the lore? I tried Googling a few things and even poking around on the fan wiki, but my takeaway is that Star Trek doesn’t romanticize hardware the way, say, Star Wars does. Which is making it difficult to find a breakdown of ship names accompanied with images. Although when I do find something like that, it seems like it’s mostly fans spooging over various incarnations of the Enterprise. I mean, I get it, the command disc and offset nacelles have been badass for 50+ years, but there are only so many remixes you can do before you’re just Taco Belling it. Anyway, that’s not what I’m looking for.

What I’m looking for are the names of specific “Romulan warbirds” and “Dominion starships”, taken from a boardgame published by Wizkids called Star Trek: Frontiers. Here are the images of the Romulan warbirds, labeled RW1 through RW6 [EDIT: added images of the actual tokens instead of teensy pics from rules book]:

Romulan warbirds blown up
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SOLVED SO FAR:
WB1: Science-class
WB2: Lenora-class scout
WB3: D’Dederix-class warship, cloakable, powered by a frickin’ BLACK HOLE
WB4: Valdore-class warship
WB5: Scimitar-class warship

And here are the Dominion starships, labeled DS1 through DS5:

Dominion starships

SOLVED SO FAR:
DS1: Jem’Hadar fighters, hopped up on drugs
DS2: Cardassian ship
DS3: Breen battlecruiser
DS4: Jem’Hadar battlecruiser
DS5: Jem’Hadar battleship

If I’m being perfectly honest, I wouldn’t know a Romulan from a Dominion if I met one on the street. For some reason, they’re the generic Bad Guys in this game where the orcs normally go. And for all I know, these are just artwork whipped up by some intern at Wizkids. But I suspect these are be based on real models used in actual episodes, some of which might even have a name, or at least some larger context. Like, “oh, that’s the ship that kidnapped Scotty in episode 12 of TNG: Voyager” or “that’s the Dominion ship that attacked Scott Bakula when he invented the warp drive” or “those are the ships that blockaded Q’s home planet during the Siege of Janeway” or whatever. It’s been a long time since I’ve played Starfleet Academy, which is my only reference for Star Trek hardware, and I honestly don’t even recall whether or how ships are named in the lore, so this might be a fool’s errand on my part.

Those are the best images I could manage, and I know it’s especially hard to make out any detail on those tiny drawings of the Romulan warbirds (EDIT: fixed by uploading new images). But if anyone can offer any context here, I’d be much obliged. One of my issues with Star Trek: Frontiers is that these ships are all just pictures and numbers, so I’m looking for a bit of narrative backfill here in my Star Trek exploration. Any assistance would be much appreciated!

EDIT2: I’m going to list the answers as y’all help me uncover them!

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I think DS1 is a pair of Jem’Haddar ships. The Jem’Haddar were a client race of the Founders from the far side of the galaxy, bred to be warriors, constantly fed drugs that get them all hopped up to fight and also kill them if they’re cut off from their drug supply. So yeah, that collective of bad guys led by the Founders were part of the Dominion. They wanted to (eventually) come in and Dominionate all over the rest of us aliens.

DS2, the orange one, is a Cardassian ship. Cardassians were the humorless grey guys with scaly shoulders, the ones that tried to make Captain Picard see the wrong number of lights and kept their hobnailed boots on the necks of the Bajorans for as long as they could. But their tailors were excellent. They weren’t originally in the Dominion but (spoilers for the DS9 show!) didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew.

WB-3 is a Romulan “D’deridex-class” warship. I had to look up how to spell it, but it’s one of my favorite fictional kinds of starships. It’s powered by a black hole, has cloaking, and are crewed by folks that try to be in touch with both their logical sides and their emotions.

warbird
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Squint as I might, I can’t make out what the other ships are. Too tiny plus I don’t know them!

Edit: I regret misspelling Jem’Hadar as “Jem’Haddar”. That must annoy someone as much as when I read someone writing “Lando Molarri”.

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Those Romulan images are crazy small. You can’t blow them up a bit?
WB3 is definitely the TNG era Romulan Warbird “D’deridex-class”

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I think six is supposed to be the Scimitar from Star Trek nemesis, and four the newer model warbirds from that same movie.

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I hope that somewhere someone is standing up, pumping their fist, and saying “Nice!”

6

WB1 might be the Romulan Scout Ship.. In Armada it’s called a Lanora Class ship

WB2 might be a Romulan Science ship. Better image from Armada

WB6 appears to be the Valdore Class warbird (again, better image from Armada)

It looks like, especially from the last, the best bet is to look at images of Romulan ships from Star Trek Armada.

7

Agree on scout ship

This may be useful as well. Which leads me to say WB6 is a Scimitar class, not Valdore class. But admittedly they have very similar profiles and are hard to differentiate with the image quality present.

8

Holy cats, this is exactly what I wanted, and I see that Ex Astris Scientia site is a treasure trove for hunting down specifics. But it’s nothing compared to @Djscman’s breakdown, which is more than I could have hoped for. In fact, I have a couple of follow-up questions from that post!

Oooooh, so the Dominion isn’t a single race! That makes way more sense now. Is the idea that they’re an evil/misunderstood counterpart to the Federation? Whatever the case, it really helps to know these five “Dominion startships” are intended to be from different factions/races/people. That was a very helpful reveal. : )

So I might be asking something way out of turn, but how are the Borg related to the Dominion? Or are they? Is one an umbrella for the other or are they completely separate? I always thought that “Picard shouting about the number of lights” meme was a Borg mindwashing scene, but it was the Cardassians! Sheesh, Picard sure did get kidnapped a lot. I bet he could give Jack Bauer’s daughter a run for her money!

Whoa, that is badass. The drawing on the token makes it look kinda derpy, but that image is downright majestic. I guess it’s partly the scale? But now I’m wondering why such an awesome ship is relegated to the equivalent of “rats in the tavern basement” in terms of game balance. What you describe sounds formidable; what the game presents is trivial fodder for captains playing their first turn or two. That seems to me like a weird thematic disconnect, but I guess it’s because the real Bad Guys in Star Trek: Frontier are the Borg, so they have to tamp down on the in-game Romulan power curve.

Or is it just that the Federations starships are that much more powerful than whatever the Romulans can field? Because that’s how the game presents Romulans in terms of its overall “RPG ecology”. The Romulans are the rats in the tavern basement you fight at first level, the Dominion are the orcs you fight once you’ve leveled up a bit, and the Borg are the real threat for which you have to gear up and push into the endgame. Does that sound totally out of whack with the lore?

God, they really are, aren’t they? I took pictures of the actual tokens instead and edited them into the original post. That should be better.

Ah, Chris Marquardson, my friend, my brother, you always know how to put a smile on my face.

9

The strength of any of these ships are whatever the writers need for that episode, but this does line up with the narrative antagonism of these groups.

Romulan: Villain in a one off episode
Dominion: Villain in a multi-season arc
Borg: Villain in a multi-season arc or movie

10

WB5: Romulan drone ship | Memory Alpha | Fandom

11

I think the lower left ship in the first group is a Romulan Valdore. I recognize it because I play a Trek phone game, a bunch of folks in my guild swear by that ship.

image
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12

Yeah, the Dominion is led by a secret planet of shapeshifters (spoilers blurred in case anyone still needs to get around to watching DS9 but isn’t averse to catching up on a '90s TV show). Their neighbors feared they could be infiltrated and manipulated and ultimately conquered by the shapeshifters, so they nearly wiped them out. The shapeshifters regrouped and resettled to another planet. Then they decided they didn’t ever want to get wiped out again, so they infiltrated, manipulated, and ultimately conquered as many of their neighboring races as they could. Then they started using their conquered races as foot soldiers or public faces, and forced them to be totally devoted to the founding shapeshifting race of this dominion. (But wait, you might say. Wasn’t one of the guys from McCabe & Mrs. Miller on DS9 as a shapeshifting alien? Is he one of those shapeshifting Founders of the Dominion aliens? Sure!) And then they kept on conquering, for their own protection. Map-blobbing, if they were a playable force in a Paradox grand strategy game. So the idea of an interstellar empire, a big bad guy, built on absolute power springing from the fear of nearly being eradicated, is an interesting contrast to the Federation. There, the humans of the Federation were nearly wiped out in the 21st century and got to an understanding that peace, diplomacy, and mutual understanding were better than domination.

They’re both powerful Big Bad Guys for the good guys to eventually defeat through the power of love and creativity. The Borg are bad guys from the Delta quadrant, which is way over on the other side of the galaxy. The Dominion are bad guys from the Gamma quadrant, which is also way over on the other side of the galaxy but in a different direction. So they’re far enough apart that they haven’t tangled with each other, but have tangled with the Federation in the Alpha & Beta quadrants — because they wanted to expand in Earth’s direction because Earth is where the “Star Trek” shows were made.

The D’Dire… Next Gen warbird was sold as being capable in a toe-to-toe match against the Galaxy-class ship, the flagship of Starfleet. (And I love those little bright windows, which really make it comparable to the Enterprise-D and its little lit up windows. Imagine one or more crewmen peeping out of each of them. Without those windows, the ship may as well have one guy sitting in a recliner in the front part of the ship.) Is Star Trek: Frontier set in a later year than when the Next Generation show was set, so that the warbird might be as formidable as the Bismarck might be against a modern-day fleet? But then, the Federation/Starfleet could probably pump out way more Galaxy-class ships than the Romulan Empire could match, delivered with love, creativity, and a desire for communication.

13

I was getting a 403 error when trying to edit my post, but wanted to add: Otherwise, the Borg want to assimilate, the Dominion want to dominate. They may both be multiracial empires. The Borg are covered with implants but are pretty much all bipedal hominids, and are joined in a group-mind. You can join them if you get assimilated! The Dominion have different slave races on retainer, yet only their secret leaders join in a sexy group mind. You can join the ranks of the enslaved, but not the sexy group mind, if you get captured!

14

Thanks so much for this post, @Djscman! I love your ability to convey the broad sweeps of Trek, peppered with details like the drugged Jem’Haddar, your breakdown of the Dominion motivation, and even the map layout! You’ve basically given me what I was going to try to watch a whole multi-season show to learn, and in a fraction of the time. : )

I think you’ve nailed it, Mr. DJ South Carolina Man! I had been picturing some sort of fighter big enough for one dude to curl up in the nose, which lends itself to a more derpy visual. But the moment you put those tiny pinpoint windows along the side, it’s as big as an ocean liner, which is as big as a skycraper! Now it’s been catapulted into a whole other category of majestic things.

It is pretty dead-sexy, isn’t it? Not as fearsome looking as that Scimitar, which looks like it’s going to make someone have a Very Bad Day. But certainly sexier! It looks like the Italian sports car of Romulan warships.

15

You know, that’s probably the most correct answer to my questions. Sometimes I have to be reminded to be cynical. : )

16

I’m not exactly trying to be cynical. It’s just that Star Trek audiences don’t have internalized rules on the strength of different ships, because whenever one shows up we wait for our characters to tell us how we should feel about it, and it rarely lines up across episodes.

Like a Ferenghi merchant vessel could appear, which I wouldn’t expect to be a threat, but a character can turn that around with a single line (“They have an illegal tachyon disruptor! We’re dead in the water!”) and it’s like okay, got it.

It’s a consequence of the protagonists almost always being alone in a single ship. Contrast that with something like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, where we see big battles with cannon fodder getting blown up in the same ships our protagonists are flying.

17

Isn’t blowing them up the job of the Klingons?

18

“Cynical” is probably a bit too harsh, but I totally got what you meant. Basically that ship lore takes a distant back seat to narrative, right? And to its credit, I feel like Star Trek cares more about characters than hardware or even science or consistency. I can think of a few other franchises that would benefit from the same predilection.

Can we get a rimshot, but in space? : )

Also, y’all have been incredibly helpful, but I’ve called in the big guns. We’ll see what I find out.

EDIT: A fellow on BGG named Kristopher ID’ed the last three!

19

Asking a serious question. I thought you hated Mage Knight. And I thought this is Mage Knight in a Star Trek wrapper. But is Frontiers a game that Tom Chick likes?

20

This comment made me adjust in my seat and think “Nice.” I’m not sure why I wandered into a Star Trek thread but now I’m glad I did.