The Federation-Klingon War of 2372-73 and the following Borg attack and the Dominion War, were the periods where the Star Destroyer and the Base Star and the other ships derived from 20th and 21st century Earth's pop culture, and the other warship class designs were given their due. For some time, the different ships were sent out on patrols or exploration missions, the sight of them imposing as they travelled at warp, or the newer propulsion methods pioneered over the last decade since Wolf 359.

Without them, the Federation might have lost all three incidents. The more agile Defiant, Akira, Nebula X, and Millennium Falcon class ships were able to launch major blows against the Klingons, proving to their old enemy that the Federation still possessed some teeth, and were far from helpless, and thanks to the armours the ships used, they proved to be more than a match for the Klingon Empire's attacks. The last decade had not been spent idling around. Under Admiral Baker's leadership, Starfleet began a massive program of constructing new starships in the shape of Destroyers, Defiants, and Delta-class saucers inspired by the movie Forbidden Planet and the Doctor Who television series where the Daleks possessed saucer-shaped warships.

Heavily armed, very agile and powerful, the Delta-class saucers made short work of the battle-hardened warships of the Klingon Empire, but one of the key contributions to the decade of research and development was the discovery of Shunt Drive.

Shunt drive was a faster-than-light drive which used time travel to travel across space, instantaneously. Understandably many in Starfleet were wary about using such a potentially dangerous FTL drive, but with other forms of interstellar or even intergalactic drives risky, or containing so many difficult theoretical concepts to deal with, it was believed that the simplest solution was the better option. Shunt drive was devised on the suggestion made by someone looking through the accounts and the log entries of Starfleet captains currently in space, following the surprise visit by a time-travelling conman, Berlinghoff Rasmussen, who had stolen a Time-Travel pod from a legitimate and luckless historian, who had visited the 22nd century from his 26th, and met Rasmussen, who stole his clothes and his time pod, and attempted to use it to steal from the crew of the Enterprise.

An interesting note about the event was the Time Travel Pod appeared without any engines and it was theorised the Time Travel Pod moved through space using time travel, but without the Pod, this was hard to prove, but theoretical and practical research was activated and ordered at once to see if there was any way of building a time-travel propulsion drive for space travel only. The job for the development of the Shunt Drive was passed over to the Daystrom Institute, that noble institution for scientific research.

The criteria for the project were simple; first, they were to study if time travel could be used in space travel only while ensuring there were no effects on the timeline. Second, to design and test a prototype starship that would make the drive practical. Third, they were not allowed to travel into either the past or the future and would possess some kind of locking mechanism to prevent such temporal displacement. And lastly, the Temporal investigations Team were to supervise the work, to make sure the main objectives were met and satisfactory. It took the Daystrom Institute three years to pass the necessary preliminary theoretical data, to find a temporal rift that helped them devise the drive and solve several problems they were having, and another 3 to develop test ships, but they were not produced for the fleet until the Klingon War.

For the Klingons, the war was as brutal as they had yearned for, with many battles termed "glorious" by the Klingon warriors. The war was a brief one, following the discovery of the Martok changeling. Following the Klingon war, the Star Destroyers and the other classes built following Wolf 359 were given the battle against the Borg. With the ship's heavier armour and powerful weapons, and the Shunt Drive-driven missiles, the Borg Cube that arrived in Sector 001 received tremendous amounts of damage, with the very centre of the Cube itself suffering from extreme damage, to say nothing of what the outer hull took.

But the biggest challenge came from the 4 year-long war with the Dominion. Ever since their first contact and the capture of a Jem'Hadar fighter ship, Starfleet had been outfitting their Star Destroyers with polaron beam weapons. They had taken the Dominion counterpart and augmented and improved them twenty times over, and they proved to be more than a match for the Dominion war machine. A fleet consisting of many starships and cruisers led by 450 Star Destroyers was sent into the Gamma Quadrant, using the Shunt Drive to take the war to the Dominion.

By the end of the war, only 246 of those ships had survived.

The Dominion War was a brutal one for both sides, since the Base Stars, Battlestars and Star Destroyers and Sovereign, Prometheus, and Galaxy X class ships had the power to smash the number of attack ships down to virtually nothing. By the time the war ended with a two-pronged attack on the Dominion which ended in the Dominion receiving the bloodiest nose they had ever received, the pop culture-inspired ships made Starfleet and the Federation realise they could not just banish the designs into the pages of history.

No.

Many Starfleet cadets had boasted about serving on such ships, and even 10 years following the wars, the ships received new models and new classes, and continued Starfleet's mission of exploration, as technology expanded and grew. Shortly after the war was declared, Starfleet had learned the Intrepid-class ship, Voyager, was lost in the Delta Quadrant, and a detailed list of instructions for the development of Shunt Drive was sent with their EMH program, following the EMH's successful battle with the Romulans.

Voyager's time in the Delta Quadrant brought back new discoveries made by the Federation, revolutionising the Alpha Quadrant for years to come.

And with that, a totally different decision following Wolf 359 changed everything.

Author's Note - I was inspired by a Star Trek 2009/Battlestar Galactica one-shot titled 'Way of the Battlestar' where Starfleet in the Kelvin reality changed their approach to starship design and I found it interesting and it made sense for it to happen since Federation starships are very easy to destroy and aren't really designed with the kind of forethought which went into designing warships from Star Wars.