In-Universe:
The I.S.S. Defiant (Mirror Universe Defiant) begins it's attack on the Regent's battle cruiser.
Production:
The episode called for huge space battles; Glenn Neufeld and Gary Hutzel again joined forces to complete the work. "It was a very big show for a single episode," Hutzel says. "If you compare them, it was actually larger than 'The Way of the Warrior,' because that was two hours. I mostly did motion-control photography on it, but it was all Glenn's design. "Shattered" had five-times the regular effects budget."
The Negh'Var, originally built for TNG's "All Good Things..." and modified for "The Way of the Warrior," and that model was the same size as the Defiant, two and a half feet long. "To have the Defiant dive and strafe and move in as tight on the Negh'Var as described in the script, the Klingon model would have to twenty-five times larger than the Defiant," Neufeld notes. And he couldn't shoot close-ups of the Negh'Var, enlarge them, and composite the Defiant over them, because the detail on the Klingon model wouldn't hold up to scale.
That's when Neufeld made a decision. "I called the producers and said, 'I'm going to change your battle sequence a little bit, so that the Defiant will attack the top of the cruiser only from far away. But when it attacks the bottom of the cruiser, I can get in there close up." The producers approved the proposal, and Neufeld contracted model maker Tony Meininger to build a twenty-foot mock-up of "the underbelly only" of the Klingon cruiser.
