[Tom Tiberius]

If Insurrection and First Contact take place during DS9, then why are there no Sovereign class ships used in the Dominion War?

Surely the Federation would send everything it had to repel the Gamma invaders?

[Captain_Hair]

Darned if I know. I always thought it was odd. Though I seem to remember some interview stating that they avoided putting in Sovereigns because if any blew up, people might think it was the Enterprise-E.

Of course, they could have gotten around that by making the name very clear on screen, but then that would detract from the overall action.

[WeatherManNX01]

Part of it is the fact that the couldn't be bothered to create new battle sequences, instead using old ones over and over again (hence the reason the [i]Sao Paulo[/i] was renamed [i]Defiant[/i] and given the prototype registry number back even though the class was in full production: so they could reuse old CGI).

In addition, I should think that even though it wasn't the first of its class, it was probably very early in the [i]Sovereign[/i] run when the Dominion War ended, meaning that there were probably very few of those ships around.

[Chroniton]

That and they wanted to keep the Sovergien class exclusive for the films.

[Ezri]

That is strange. First they said during TNG that the Galaxy class starship is uncommon and they had tons of them during the war. Do not bye the idea that they wanted to be cheap and used old stuff over and over again. Do not also bye the idea that it would be the Enterprise also.

[1701-Z]

I always thought that Starfleet focused on building more warlike ships during the Dominion War, like more [i]Defiant[/i] class ships. The [i]Sovereign[/i] class was more for exploration.

[Baconnaise]

Realistically I think the Federation would have ramped up production of Defiant class vessels as they were small powerful and took minimal crew to operate. Starfleet or the Federation has grown and stayed in power mainly due to economics and out producing the other empires. Building Defiants and having them in duos or pairs for patrols make more sense.

[BolianAdmiral]

The "behind the scenes" explanation was that they simply didn't want anyone in the audience to think that every time you saw a Sovereign-Class, that you thought it was the Enterprise-E... they did it to avoid confusion... same reason we never saw a stock Intrepid-Class in any of the war fleets... just kitbashes with Intrepid parts.

[Antoniemey]

In my capacity as the R&D Director for an RPG Fleet, I have been asked this question...

The answer I've always given from an in-character perspective (and also the one I believe to be true) is that there were only 2 or 3 Sovvies around during the war (and also only a handful of Intrepids, though more of those than Sovvies) and we just happened to never see a battle where one was involved. Probably since the Sovereign was geared towards exploration and Diplomacy they were put under the command of Captains with a lot of diplomatic ability and, much like the Enterprise, sent around putting out the small fires that the war created.