Frigates have served both Terran Hegemony and Star League navies as heavily armed surveillance ships, rather than in a more traditional escort and interdiction role. The Quixote-class Frigate, on the other hand, was in a class of its own. Originally designated as a battlecruiser, the SLDF reclassified the ship as a frigate midway through the design process. Engineers endeavored to reduce cost by reusing existing components, such as the drives found in the Lola-class Destroyers. This miscalculation by the engineers, however, allowed the use of drives too small to give the acceleration normally found in a frigate-class WarShip. To make matters worse, a bureaucrat from the Procurement Department authorized 250 Quixotes for production. Later evidence suggests this is an error purposefully made in order to circumvent the objections of the Admiralty and curb their spending at a time when resources were slim.
         When the admiralty realized they were stuck with a mediocre ship, they modified it. The Admiralty had the ship reclassified as a missile frigate and armed it with missile launchers to compensate for its lack of speed. The Quixote, though a slow vessel, was not a useless ship by any means. Its armor included 1,100 tons of improved ferro-aluminum armor, giving it better protection than most heavy cruisers. The ship's main armament was eighteen Killer Whale missiles, the largest type of its kind. Supplementing these were twenty-four White Shark and Barracuda missile launchers. In addition, an assortment of heavy naval weapons made the ship dangerous at all ranges.
         Convoy ships and their escorts, like the Farragut or the Monsoon, enjoyed the protection the Quixote's missile batteries and fighters offered when deployed. The Quixote-class served until the more well rounded Congress-class frigate replaced them. Placed in mothballs, the vessels were reactivated for duty in 2709 and modified into the Volga-class transport.