When asked to come up with a new design for a new small science vessel, Sternbach first considered doing a refit of the Oberth-class, but dismissed the idea since that design was over eighty years old. He then recalled the design he had done for the Manual a year earlier, "The Nova class USS Equinox began as a small pencil drawing of a ship that was to have been the space-going equivalent of a PT boat in the Alpha and Beta Quadrant theaters. In the fictional history of the USS Defiant, as recorded in the DS9 Technical Manual, a fast and heavily armed "Borg Buster" with multiple torpedo launchers was modified with tucked-in engines and new ablative armor to fight the Cardassians, the Jem'Hadar, and the Dominion, among various other Alpha Quadrant baddies. The pathfinder form of that fast at