Star Trek: 10 Most Unique Starfleet Ships

The story of the Dauntless is pretty ridiculous. Originally, Voyager encountered the ship in the episode Hope And Fear, and thought it was a Federation ship sent to rescue them. The ship was equipped with a quantum slipstream engine, a new propulsion technique far faster than warp. Unfortunately, this Dauntless turned out to be created by an alien named Arturis who planned to use it to hand the Voyager crew over to the Borg as revenge. The ship was lost, but before Voyager escaped they were able to get a lot of scans of it and began working on reverse engineering the quantum slipstream engine.

Their experiments on Voyager were less than successful, but Starfleet apparently continued their research when they got back to Earth, since Janeway commands a near exact replica of Arturis’ Dauntless in Star Trek: Prodigy.

It does make sense that Starfleet would reverse engineer the exact ship as a next step in their research. Maybe the ship needs to be shaped a certain way to handle quantum slipstream travel. Still, it's odd that the bridge is even the same, considering that was only a holographic illusion on Arturis’ Dauntless, made to look like Federation tech. There are a few small differences between the two ships, but the major one is that Starfleet's Dauntless is considerably larger than the original.