Yeah I had a hunch that was coming after reading the thread dealing with a teaser screen shot and the following statement got made:

Yeah.. and my guess is that this will just be a re-skin of the Kar'fi. Only it'll probobly have:

Cmd Tac
Lt Tac
Lt Engi
LtC Sci
Ensign Sci


Although if it was instead:
Cmd Tac
Lt Universal
Lt Engi
LtC Universal
Ensign Sci

It'd be even better then the Kar'fi.

*sigh* I was actually hoping it wouldn't appear this soon, also the Akira as a Carrier. Come on Cryptic, you gotta be kidding!

You guys are jumping to conclusions quite quickly.

Call it cumulative experience. We already knew it was coming in all honesty, Cryptic is dead set on cloning the KDF so they can completely abolish the ques, this is the next step.

At this point we've gotten so good at calling things before they happen we can virtually word for word quote a dev response before they even say it.

the karfi is basically a cruiser with to many tactical and science stations, a tier 5 akira escort will be nothing like that. i'd be shocked if it doesn't have these stations

COM tac
LTC eng
LT tac
LT sci
ENS tac

2 eng consoles
2 sci consoles
4 tac consoles
1 hanger

Acctually, it does have front shuttle bay doors..

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/sc...stcontact1.htm

The first three images show the shuttlebays on the bow of the ship. The fourth image points them out.
They're tiny, but there.

at least you went to the trouble of only highlighting what you read, apparently. those 3 opens/ports/windows were mentioned in the next paragraph. the area those 3 openings take up is smaller then ten forward on a galaxy class, that is not a hanger regardless of what some picture from a magazine says. i have the magazine on my shelf were that's from, that picture was never seen on scree and is not canon, its just something someone put together based on early design notes. when the ship was 50% bigger during the design phase those could have been hangers, but now they are just windows or something that are only about as tall as a man standing upright.

just look at the size of the windows on the saucer, if they are the same size as the windows on the top of a galaxy's saucer, its easy to tell just how short that front section is. just compare the opening's size to the aft shuttle bay doors, at their most narrow point they are still twice as tall as those openings. it simply is physically impossible, and there is not even a momentary clip of those fighters ever coming from any akira class in any of the scenes they are in to link a carrier precedent to the akira in canon.

why didn't that akira that chased down the prometheus launch its fighters if it had them? that was such a critical situation that its inexcusable for the akira's captain not to do everything in his power to fight off those romulans

Why didn't it fire out of more then one of it's 15 launchers either, or launching fighters? The same reason the Defiant never landed on a planet, dispite it's MSD clearly showing landing struts. SFX budget constrains.

Even Alex Jaeger has said it has forward shuttlebays.
http://www.starshipdatalink.net/art/akira.html

Hmm.. interesting... Especially with saying how the Akira is supposed to almost be as big as the Enterprise E (Some what) And with the mentions on the Shuttle bay description it definitely fits as a Carrier class. Escort Carrier might be like flight Deck Cruiser, but I don't think it will be. I suspect it'll be more like the Kar'fi Battle Carrier.