Star Trek

I think after they proved the Defiant to be a workable design the Federation realized it was too specialized. It was designed with a narrow profile and to dogfight enemy ships, carrying mostly forward facing weapons. If their sole purpose was as an escort vessel those would be great traits, but as a standalone ship they were often well outside their weight class.

The Defiant was built to fight The Borg so 'big ass does not do any kind of maneuvering' Cube with poor multi targeting abilities. it's built for high speed strafing runs against those akin to a fighter or bomber.

The concept was abandoned when she nearly shook herself apart with those high speed runs, interestingly enough after this we see actual fighters appear run by the Maquee and actual Federation forces.

After it was abandoned they went back to the old era and looking at the more effective smaller designs like the Excelsior class and scale.

It took Sisko to finish it and show that it actually did work, with tactics that are similar to Bird Of Prey and even did well vs the modified Excelsior class 1v1. Which in turn the Federation started mass production without cloaks during the dominion war.

In terms of numbers during the Dominion War they were running at least 7k ships at the start, based on the fact that 7 fleets are mentioned and each time they had at least 1k in em, although by the end number were probably significantly less than that.

The 40 ships lost a Wolf 359 are kinda retconned into being just the biggest ships, since 40 ships really is not that many ships when you look at how big the Federation actually is.

40 ships and only 11,000 lost? Considering the Enterprise holds over 1,000 on her own, that's really not many people per ship.

The Borg did not stop to assimilate all 40 ships, there were lots of survivors like Sisko.

But again Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale was at work throughout the entire thing.

Moore did kinda retcon it in interviews later that 'the massive loss of ships' to be just the ones station in and around the Sol System, so the loss was basically the entire Royal Guard. And he said that the Federation has at least 30,000 ships counting everything in response to why the registry numbers were getting so high.

edited 10th Oct '15 5:38:02 AM by Memers

The Dominion is basically why I bothered with DS 9 in the first place. All other love for it came later.

Also, one resource that I find that helps with DS 9 is a political map of the alpha quadrant. I dunno about the rest of y'all but until then, a lot of the Dominion threat seemed vague.

Of course, once I looked at said map, I began to wonder about other possible issues with the Dominion presence in Alpha Quadrant, but....

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

The Enterprise-D is a flying city, THE largest ship class in the fleet at that time (ship size actually decreased after Wolf 359, we know from Flash Forward glimpses that Federation ships would start getting larger again). Enterprise-E was also one of the larger ships of its time but had a crew of 700-ish. Not to mention not all Federation ships are well armed and fully combat capable. Voyager itself was more science ship than combat vessel. In Wolf 359 the average ship probably only had a crew of 300 versus the Enterprise-D at 1,000.

There were times when the small size of the Defiant was used to their advantage, the mirror universe episode specifically where it hugged the massive Klingon Battlestar so close it couldn't get a lock on it (one of their weapons was the same size as the Defiant itself). But Borg Cubes have superb multi-targeting abilities, Wolf 359 is the result of that. The idea behind the Defiant was more of a Zerg Rush, deal as much damage as you could with as small a ship you can make. Later classes like Akira, Steamroller and Saber had similar armaments but were a bit more durable.

It's been a few weeks and I'm still impressed with that dogfight through the empty space the station surrounds at the end of Way of the Warrior part 2.

... I've been through a whole season and a bit.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

Nah, At least 1 Nebula class ship was there 750 officers and crew and at least one Ambassador Class as well which has 700 to 1300 officers onboard.

Most of the kitbash ships were taken from those two ship designs so one would assume they have around the same complement. So aside from the Oberth, Miranda and Constitution Class that were there at the battle everything is at least 500 or greater.

Also Best Of Both Worlds kinda shows they are not good at multitarget via the saucer separation part and the start of DS 9. They are single minded like that, once they get you in a tractor beam someone else has to try really hard to distract them.

edited 10th Oct '15 10:34:48 PM by Memers

The Defiant was like the A-10 or the old World War Two "tin can" destroyers: pack lots of guns into a fast moving ship. The A-10 is just a gun with a plane built around it. Many US WWII era destroyers had whatever the Navy could bolt/weld to the hull, many could not survive a direct hit but were expected to run and gun.

Wolf 359 was really explored on Deep Space Nine, TNG hinted at it, but yea, it was the "9/11" of Star Trek.

Without the Borg, would the Federation have gone apesh_t over the Changelings? Would the Jemhadar have scared Starfleet? When the Founders sprang their trap on the Tal'Shar and the Obsidian Order, the Admiral that Sisko was chatting with compared the Curb-Stomp Battle to Wolf 359. He was that shaken.

What would Picard have done? He'd probly try to negotiate with the Founders, but would they would have forced him into the position Sikso was in: go from a peaceful explorer fleet into a war fleet.

Voyager never took chances: a desperate crew without supplies, without reinforcements is storytelling gold. Yet the writers just fell into "TNG Season 8-10" before really getting into storied with meat on them.

edited 10th Oct '15 10:38:47 PM by TairaMai

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48

They even tried the Picard route with the Odyssey. Even its captain, Keogh, was a slightly more cocky Picard. And well...

edited 10th Oct '15 10:42:28 PM by Memers

The Dominion pretty much became a paper tiger for me after "Sacrifice of Angels". The literal deus ex machina there would have been an unsatisfactory ending to the whole show, but it was even worse as an early season arc resolution. The dialogue scene with the wormhole aliens could have all but replaced "the game must continue" with "we're not cancelled yet" in terms of how logical it really was... before the Space Jesus Sisko retcon anyway.

And in general, the supposed scale of the conflict pretty much poisoned the well for other concurrent Star Trek stories, to the point where another ship had to be thrown into the Gamma Quadrant to have something with the old flavor. It just... didn't fit the verse, in neither themes nor story. Sisko punches out Q no problem, but then takes his status with the wormhole aliens seriously - what's the logic there? Shouldn't he know better? The average Federation starship encounters beings just as weird on a weekly basis, without converting to a religion in their honor. Or maybe the point was to denounce Q as a false god, same as how the Dominion were deliberately styled as an evil theocracy, so the overall conflict would have the subtext of "my religion and gods are better than yours"... before the introduction of the Pah-wraiths turned that into text as well.

edited 10th Oct '15 10:50:32 PM by indiana404

^^^^ Point is not all of them have compliments of 1,000 each like the Enterprise. A high estimate of total people at that battle would be 30,000 (40 ships, 750 people per ship). More realistically it would be closer to 20,000. We know the fleet at the battle was not solely those big cruisers but included much smaller ships like the Miranda Class and Excelsior Class with crews of less than 500.

The Borg in general rely on sheer malevolence over complex tactics. Destroy the first thing, move on to the next. They certainly didn't build those enormous cubes to do any complex maneuvers and avoid enemy fire. The battle shown in First Contact shows tractor beams and torpedoes fanning out in all directions. The saucer separation was not exploiting a weakness of multitasking but trying to put themselves in a better tactical position to implement their plan (first proposed for the deflector dish overload, then used for the retrieval of Picard).

Excelsior Class had a crew of 750 as well, Constitution class were around 450, Miranda had 220, and Oberth class had a crew of 80.

I honestly have no idea why an Oberth class was there though considering how stupidly weak they are.

First Contact really changed the Borg's tactics from previous appearances, higher budget probably, but writers still used the old tactics before that.

edited 11th Oct '15 12:01:47 AM by Memers

Oberth class are known for having powerful shields - could be they were useful for tactical cover or running interference.

Since when? They couldn't survive a bird of pray trying to disable them.

As far as I knew they were just weak science ships not intended for combat at all but all sensors.

edited 11th Oct '15 12:04:48 AM by Memers

Why the Oberths and such? Perhaps the same reason that the CVEs^* derisively referred to as Combustible, Vulnerable, and Expendable and "tin cans"^* Destroyers and Destroyer Escorts of Taffy-3 engaged IJN battlewagons (including the Yamato, which alone outmassed the entire task force) off the island of Samar: because they were there.

Most of the time you go to battle/war with the military you have, not the one you want.

edited 11th Oct '15 12:08:49 AM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump

There's fluff about Oberths having powerful shields in order to withstand whatever astrophysical anomalies they're tasked with studying; though I agree it doesn't show in practice. Otherwise yeah, desperate situations breed desperate tactics.

It's actually interesting, I started looking into it on Memory Alpha and the truth is a lot of these numbers have discrepancies between different sources and the people writing the manuals and encyclopedias had to sometimes make things up. The original Enterprise was originally said to have a crew of 200, later changed to 400. I recall on-screen dialogue that puts the Enterprise-D crew at around 1,000 (which explicitly included a lot of non Starfleet individuals), Voyager at 150 and the NX Enterprise at around 90. When the DS9 crew visited the original Enterprise they even noted that it seemed a lot more crowded than modern Starfleet ships.

I know that schematically most other ships of the time were close to half the length of the Enterprise-D (using it as the baseline), which considering the largely homogenous design of a saucer section with secondary hull would make them about 1/4 the cubic mass. The Nebula class is the only ship of the time period even close to it, mostly because it still had a secondary hull and had a near identical saucer section. The Wolf 359 graveyard scene had them kitbash from existing models, including those of Enterprise-D, but were all intended to be smaller than the scale of the original. This is also not regarding mistakes in scaling.

A lot of the D was just empty space that the budget could never actually show, deck 8 specifically was just multipurpose rooms that could be outfitted with whatever role was needed as talked about in umm Liaisons. The alternate D could hold 6,000 combat troops and gear, presumably using those multipurpose decks. Comparing it to a cruise ship is a very apt description.

The Ambassador class was supposed to be the same way but not quite as extreme hence its size but having an Excelsior crew compliment.

Other ships like the Nebula Class did not have that much space but still had the same engines, weaponry and close to the same crew compliment.

Voyager always had storage and supply issues due to its size despite its small crew compliment and the fact that it was suppose to be a long range vessel, writers failing again.

edited 11th Oct '15 3:20:34 AM by Memers

@indiana404 - There have been other cases in Trek where the starfleet officer has willingly gone native, for whatever reason, so I don't agree with you on that point.

I do with everything else though. Thats where the "love for everything else" part kicked in: By then, I was committed to all the characters.

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

I'd say going native in terms of culture is one thing; but there was just too much emphasis on Sisko being "of Bajor", as a leading religious figure no less. However, what actually irked me was how the story set up characters like Kai Winn and eventually even Dukat as the resenters over what really was just an arbitrary decision on part of the writers Prophets. On the spiritual side, it made for a lopsided conflict, all leading up to... Sisko tackling Ducat down a fire pit. All in all, there was little rhyme or reason for Sisko ever being the Emissary, and once the Prophets interfered directly in the war, that plot went under as well.

Honestly, they could have worked that out better simply by saying there was a prophecy about the Dominion invading and causing a massive war. And Sisko was the leader prophesied to get everyone through it.

No need for religious stuff at all, given that these were creatures who stood outside of time and space and actually could know everything that was to come. Still nonsensical, but not beyond the realm of science fiction the way actual religions are.

Guh, the Enterprise finale. What was the point of all this again?

That Berman & Braga needed to remind every viewer of Enterprise how much they hated them personally.

It was a finale to the era of TNG spinoffs.

Fresh-eyed movie blog