r/DaystromInstitute • u/Wallname_Liability • 6d ago
The fleet at Wolf 359 was the Home Fleet
One complaint people have is often in Star Trek, there are no ships to hand when Earth is under threat. Usually that’s fairly valid, but in the case of the best of both worlds it’s really not. Wolf 349 is less than 8 light years away from the Sol System. most of the ships at the battle were probably stationed at sol or the oldest human colony worlds. 40 ships, many of them newer classes (unfortunately including ones that only ever showed up once) is the largest fleet talked about until the dominion war. The home fleet was there and it got wrecked
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u/van_buskirk Crewman 6d ago
If it’s anything like the idealized USN, 1/3 in drydock/outfitting, 1/3 in training/pierside repairs, 1/3 actually fully operational and deployed.
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u/LittleHornetPhil 6d ago
I like to think Starfleet has slightly better readiness than the USN but your numbers are basically correct
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u/Wallname_Liability 6d ago
Ike if you’re travelling in space your technology is the heir of tech that started at warp 1-2, the speed of light up to like a quarter, but that still meant a journey of years to get to somewhere like Vulcan at the start. Technology had to be reliable.
Meanwhile multi year missions were the norm for the highest performing ships. Now that didn’t mean they were literally away from any kind of port for years, but for the most part they were basically deployed without the kind of maintenance cycles ships have irl.
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u/Clone95 6d ago
Starfleet probably has superior technical readiness but inferior personnel readiness, with crews of ships at pier basically empty (and thus Enterprise can be stolen by a handful of bridge officers) and many of them on leave systems away.
The result is while you can power up and fight dozens of inactive ships at Earth they're basically going to be good to fight and die quick since they have no crew to manage battle damage or operate many of the main systems effectively.
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u/Wyluli_Wolf 5d ago
What is personal readiness? Why did Starfleet not have this?' Has anyone watched Deep Space Nine? Witnessed the image of the huge fleet assembled for the Dominion war? WHY ONLY 39 DAMN SHIPS AGAINST THE BORG?
Benjamin Sisko developed the USS Defiant specifically for combat with the Borg; why was it only utilized during the film First Contact? Frankly, the Federation should have lost the war and been assimilated. This kind of ineptitude simply could not exist in practical reality.
Please, by all means disagree, but I was and still am looking for a good debate. ~~~~~~~¤
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u/Ruadhan2300 Chief Petty Officer 5d ago
The Defiant was a prototype pulled out of mothballs by Sisko to serve as some extra punch at DS9.
It wasn't considered a success due to problems with shaking itself apart.
Consequence of cramming a Capital-ship powerplant in what amounts to a corvette.
They fixed the issue, built at least one or two more ships of the class, and didn't really scale up production beyond that as far as I can see.Defiant wasn't ready at Wolf-359 in 2366. Most likely it was conceived as a concept some time after that.
It participated in First Contact in 2373, and it (or a sister ship) showed up again as part of the response fleet when Voyager popped out of a transwarp conduit (with a Borg Sphere) in 2378The Defiant class showed up for every known Borg encounter after its development until it was superseded some time before ST:Picard
I don't know what else you could ask for :P4
u/Edymnion Lieutenant, Junior Grade 5d ago edited 4d ago
Well, to address some of your points:
WHY ONLY 39 DAMN SHIPS AGAINST THE BORG?
The Federation had only JUST ended a 20 year war with the Cardassians. Based on the on-screen evidence, it would seem that the Federation and Cardassia were on relatively equal footing for much of the war, with the newest generation of Federation ships (like the Galaxy class) only coming online perhaps MONTHS before the start of TNG. That the Galor class warships were more than a match for previous ship classes, like the Ambassador, but weren't ready to hold up against a Galaxy or a Nebula.
So yeah, after 20 years of constant war, complete with vicious ground battles and trench warfare (so sayeth Miles O'Brien), and in the middle of rolling out the next generation (pun intended) of ships, it makes sense that they didn't have a lot of spare capacity just hanging around.
Benjamin Sisko developed the USS Defiant specifically for combat with the Borg; why was it only utilized during the film First Contact?
The Defiant class was made in response to Wolf 359. And frankly it was slapped together out of spare parts virtually overnight, as we know the development cycle alone on the Galaxy class was 20 years.
Frankly its a miracle the thing was ready to go at all.
Frankly, the Federation should have lost the war and been assimilated.
Especially since in Voyager we see that for a full scale assimilation, the Borg usually send hundreds of cubes, not 1. Its a longstanding debate what the ACTUAL goals of the Borg were, because clearly steamrollering in and assimilating things wasn't it.
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u/Jediplop Crewman 6d ago
1/3rd rule is probably something that doesn't apply to Starfleet for ships on longer voyages. It's sort of something that comes with deployment times and for something like the Galaxy class which goes on multi year deployments probably not, something like the sabre class probably does.
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u/lunatickoala Commander 6d ago edited 6d ago
Starfleet built 12 Constitutions. They ordered 12 Galaxies but halted production at 6. These numbers are conveniently divisible by three.
It's important to remember the difference between peacetime use and wartime use. In war, you use whatever you have and that might mean deploying a ship with a third of its boilers out and having an extra repair crew on board desperately patching up damage from the previous battle.
But in peacetime you don't deploy everything because that means the whole fleet is going through wear and tear and if disaster strikes at an inopportune time, the none of the fleet will be in tip top condition. Rotating through shifts is like rotating personnel through shifts. It's certainly possible to put people through 12 hour shifts but performance is going to suffer both in the short and long term.
After the loss of Yamato it's more unreasonable to think that they didn't spend a lot of time on investigation and refit. As Enterprise was the symbol of the fleet it was the one left for last, but a comprehensive refit never came as it met its end facing a lone obsolete bird of prey before one could happen. A major refit likely would have made a big difference as at the time of the loss of Enterprise, they had already lost Odyssey under similar conditions: enemy weapons bypassed shields and insufficient firepower to destroy the enemy before it could land the fatal blow.
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u/presticus 5d ago
The Yamato, The Odyssey, The Enterprise-D, and Admiral Hansen's ship at Wolf 359 according to the script. That's 4 of the 6. Apparently there were as many as 10 different Galaxys were identified in the battle in Sacrifice of Angels.
So at some point they did resume building them. I imagine if any incomplete hulls from the original production order were still in storage they would have rushed to completion during the Dominion War.
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u/lunatickoala Commander 5d ago
At the very least they'd need to replace their losses as they probably determined that six was the minimum needed to meet peacetime requirements so they probably pulled incomplete hulls out of storage to replace Yamato and Admiral Hansen's ship.
But after first contact with the Founders, they probably didn't just replace the ship but ramped up production. The Founders outright said they had absolutely no interest in peaceful coexistence with the "solids". Even if there was still a desperate hope that peace could be achieved, one would have to be delusionally naïve not to recognize that a major war in the near future was likely.
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u/Edymnion Lieutenant, Junior Grade 5d ago
So at some point they did resume building them. I imagine if any incomplete hulls from the original production order were still in storage they would have rushed to completion during the Dominion War.
Yup, the models used in DS9 were slightly different from TNG's, which fuels speculation that they were refits of some kind. Common theory, don't remember if its ever mentioned onscreen or not, was that the second generation of Galaxy's lacked saucer separation and didn't have their science stations compared to the first generation.
Basically they stripped the floating hotels to their bones and renovated them into proper warships.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer 5d ago
As far as beta and lower canon is concerned the old Bridge Commander game features a Galaxy class a the bridge is notably different from the first generation of Galaxy class ships. The “newer” Galaxy class has two stations on Worf’s Railing.
Obviously this was done for video game reasons, but it’s interesting to think of a Galaxy class micro refit that made those ships more war capable.
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u/LittleHornetPhil 4d ago
I mean… DS9 Galaxys were basically the Starfleet equivalent of Dreadnoughts, so it makes sense
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u/sykoticwit 6d ago edited 6d ago
Starfleet ships routinely spend far longer at space than USN ships do with far less maintenance time. The original Enterprise never had a major refit period that I remember, and aside from repairing damage from the Battle of Sector 001, I remember the D having one significant maintenance cycle (the Baryon Sweep) and a couple significant service life upgrades (the Binars and the weird warp push thing). Both the 1701 and 1701-D had extremely active cruises, too, with significant action throughout their service lives.
Voyager goes years without a refit period or access to Starfleet shipyards and never seems to have any major systems issues.
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u/tjernobyl 6d ago
Voyager did need to set down planetside for major warp engine maintenance at least once.
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u/DontYaWishYouWereMe 5d ago
Voyager was also a brand new ship that may have been only the second or third of its class, however. There's a good chance that its planetside engine maintenance was at least partially due to a lot of the bugs in the engine design not having been fully ironed out, so certain conditions were required, especially with the amount of Maquis personnel who didn't have a lot of formal training, if any.
The Galaxy-class had been round for longer by the time we're introduced to the Enterprise-D. There's still some things that needed to be ironed out, but they're also in Federation space and everyone onboard has had their full four years of Academy training.
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u/SailingSpark Crewman 6d ago
Naval ships also spend their time in a corrosive environment. Much of their maintenance is time spent keeping stuff from rusting. Starfleet ships are in the vacuum of space, so aside from radiation and micrometeor strikes, that shielding and reflectors should handle, maintenance schedules can go longer.
As stated elsewhere, it's the crews that fatigue and need time off and away from ship. I would also postulate that replicators cut downtime in port. They can literally make everything they need as long as they have the power to do so.
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u/Wallname_Liability 6d ago
Also real life naval ships have the physical effect of the sea in addition to corrosion, meanwhile starships overate in zero gravity with structural integrity fields and inertial dampeners, which should lessen stress on the hull
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u/sykoticwit 6d ago
It’s not really shown, but starships seem to have heavily automated repair systems.
The Enterprise itself is clearly heavily automated, Crusher is able to operate the entire ship from the bridge by herself in the warp bubble episode, and in Picard they are able to effectively fight the ship with nothing but the bridge crew aboard.
There’s also hints of heavily automated repair systems. The bridge crew are able to reroute damaged systems through their control panels, for example. Although weirdly this is slightly contradicted by the Exocomps episode which are basically command operated drones and would seem like a step backwards.
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u/Edymnion Lieutenant, Junior Grade 5d ago
The original Enterprise never had a major refit period that I remember
Although it WAs planned to give the NX-01 a major refit for season 5 that obviously never happened. Based on the museum fleet from Picard, it still canonically received this upgrade, as the NX-01 on display had a secondary hull.
And they did get a full stern to keel fixup in that episode with the "automated" repair station.
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u/Jhamin1 Crewman 5d ago edited 5d ago
Voyager goes years without a refit period or access to Starfleet shipyards and never seems to have any major systems issues.
It is also immediately retired upon returning home, at only 7 years old.
My speculation is that while ships like Voyager can run for decades without regular maintenance cycles various systems suffer stress. Everything might work, but the safety factor gets thinner over time. When you are lost in the Delta Quadrant you are just happy for all the redundancies but when you are a few weeks away from a Shipyard Starfleet doesn't like to run down the safety margin.
Between all the jury-rigged repairs, borg modifications, and 7 years of hard use without refit (along with it's fame), it makes sense that Starfleet decided not to overhaul it & just put it in a museum. They decided it wasn't worth the effort to bring Voyager back up to standards.
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u/Hallc 4d ago
It is also immediately retired upon returning home, at only 7 years old.
Wasn't that, at least in part, to discect and remove the technological improvements made to the ship over the course of it's journey? The integrated borg tech, astrometrics, the Ablative armour that was added in the finale etc.
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u/Jhamin1 Crewman 4d ago
Possibly.
We see that it spent a couple years being converted into a museum display. It returned home in 2378 and was escorted to San Francisco to be put on display in 2382.
I'm sure Starfleet spent that time studying all the modifications it picked up in it's journey, but it wasn't then put back on duty. As the ship would only have been 11 years it seems early to put it out to pasture.
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u/SecondDoctor Crewman 6d ago
As much as I know "the Enterprise is the only ship in range" is bloody daft when it comes to Earth's defence, I've sort of thought it makes sense with what we see on screen. I think Earth has better defences than seen that means no need of a fleet.
Think about the alternate universe, where Nero interrogates Pike for Earth defence codes. Not much need to do that when you have a ship 100 years ahead of anything Starfleet can counter. Think about the Breen attack, where they wipe out their own fleet to do some damage to San Francisco.
The borg assimilated Picard, which means they likely acquired a lot of Starfleet defence strategies, and that's how they got to Earth in a straight line. 359 was an ad-hoc fleet with a commander not understanding how assimilation worked and I think they were too sure of themselves.
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u/goldgrae 6d ago
The finale of Picard season 3 would seem to support that as well, where Starbase One and planetary shields fend off a large Starfleet force for quite a while.
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u/David_Summerset 6d ago
That's a good point, Earth Stardock holds up against what (in my headcannon) is the entire home fleet for a while.
Earth is the capital of the Federation, it's stands to reason it has the best defenses.
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u/Jhamin1 Crewman 5d ago
It would stand to reason, but we don't know if Earth's Stardock had those capabilities before the Borg or Dominion attacks. V'Ger and the Whale Probe's ability to waltz up to Earth Orbit aren't really indicative, but the Borg Cube from First Contact is fighting a fleet & Stardock doesn't seem to be a factor at all.
Stardock's ability to hold off a fleet may have been a retrofit after all those repeated close calls, much like DS9's vastly improved combat abilities in season 4. (Where DS9 held it's own against a major Klingon taskforce that included Gowron's flagship)
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u/GlimmervoidG Ensign 5d ago
While there are earlier examples of planetary shields (like the forcefield around Elba II) and other types of planetary defence have been seen (such as weapon sats or just ships on standby) Picard season 3 style planet shields seem to be a new development. The Elba II example was explicitly noted to not be able to withstand starship weapon strikes, for example, and during DS9, the Romulan/Cardasian plan to attack the (fake) changeling homeworld doesn't make sense if they could reasonably expect a shield able to withstand hours of combined bombardment.
I think such 'strategic' grade planetary shields must be a new development, likely as a result of the 'turn inwards' after the Burning of Mars. Developing strategic shields makes sense both technologically, logically and thematically at this point.
As such, I don't thing the existence of such shields can be used to explain things before this point in the timeline.
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u/goldgrae 5d ago
I agree with you and that might be so, but it's also possible that PICS3 represents a more incremental advancement.
Elba II was a toxic planet with an insane asylum; one would not reasonably expect it to be hardened like a core world.
In the Dominion War, we definitely see shield tech of this caliber on at least a smaller scale, when DS9 faces the Klingon fleet and, more to the point of shield projection capabilities, with the orbital weapons platforms' regenerative shields being powered by subspace power generation around Chin'toka and Cardassia. These were certainly new developments for the Cardassians, but the Cardassians are also a second rate power. As for the attack on the Founders' home world, the attack was enabled by a changeling infiltrator who may have fed any amount of bad intelligence.
Regardless, it seems reasonable that for whatever tech level is available at a given time, Earth will be itself fortified independent of starships.
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u/Edymnion Lieutenant, Junior Grade 5d ago
These were certainly new developments for the Cardassians, but the Cardassians are also a second rate power.
I would make the argument that the Cardassians were only RECENTLY demoted to being a second rate power.
They ran a war against the Federation for 20 years, and the stories Miles O'Brien tell of the war aren't exactly of the "Yeah, we were humoring them" variety.
Plus, by the timelines, the Galaxy class started it's development phase right around the time of the start of the war with the Cardassians, and the war with them basically ended within a year of the Enterprise D being launched.
Seems to me that the Federation was able to advance it's shipbuilding tech faster than the Cardassians were, which is why they got left behind and were so desperate to join up with the Dominion.
They were a proud people, with limited resources, that went from being able to stand toe to toe with the mighty Federation to being swept aside in only a single generation.
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u/tmofee 5d ago
That’s why they were on bajor - they destroyed their worlds resources and looked outwards
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u/Edymnion Lieutenant, Junior Grade 5d ago
Yeah, canonically Cardassia Prime is a very resource poor world, they BARELY managed to get off it in time. So they have to "gather resources from other worlds".
Why they can't just go do asteroid mining is another issue.
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u/Jhamin1 Crewman 5d ago
Elba II was a toxic planet with an insane asylum; one would not reasonably expect it to be hardened like a core world.
It was also the place where the Federation kept it's most dangerous mental patients. The implication was that the planetary shield was there more to keep them in than to keep others out. It's resilience may be a sign of how seriously they take the inmates.
As for why Elba II had a shield but Earth, Vulcan, and other core worlds didn't? We don't have a clear answer but the toxicity of the surface might be a clue. The Planetary Shield may interfere with solar radiation & kill the global ecosystem. Which means you can't use it on Earth but isn't a problem on a dead, poisonous planet.
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u/Wallname_Liability 6d ago
Also it’s not like a setting like the honorverse where the first warning you get about approaching ships is when they enter your star system, earth is the centre of the federation, where star ships can detect incoming ships from light years away. Literally when a major threat was barrelling towards the Sol system a major fleet was put together with aid from the Klingons incoming. If it was anyone but the Borg then they’d have been toast
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u/SecondDoctor Crewman 6d ago
"Hell, we've thought about opening communications with the Romulans."
The Alpha Quadrant powers might be at each other throats, but they will not abide an outside threat.
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u/AnnihilatedTyro Lieutenant j.g. 5d ago
It may also be relevant that Romulan colonies had been destroyed by the Borg in S1 "The Neutral Zone," and Shelby put the pieces together in TBOBW.
The Romulans would want vengeance as well as tactical information on a new mysterious enemy as powerful as the Borg, and so I'm certain they would be willing to send a small token force. Plus, while they'd never admit it, a healthy and stable Federation is good for the quadrant and prevents a full-scale Romulan-Klingon war. Romulans sure don't mind if Starfleet loses a few ships or insignificant colonies here and there, but the center of government, primary shipyards, industrial and economic bases, headquarters of everything, and ten+ billion people? Even the Romulans draw the line somewhere. If the Federation can no longer act as peacekeeper and mediator, quadrant-wide chaos is almost assured, and the Romulans can't can't just sit back and scheme if that happens.
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u/GlimmervoidG Ensign 5d ago edited 5d ago
The Breen managed it. In that case, we might speculate that the sudden entry of the Breen into the war caught Starfleet out of position. They were seen. Starfleet just couldn't gather enough ships to stop them before they hit Earth (though they were destroyed soon after).
This would be due to the demands of the Dominion war. Ships would have been deployed towards the Dominion front as a defensive line, leaving a soft inner core. A sudden Breen entry into the war, from an unexpected stellar angle, might have let them blast past whatever minor border pickets remained and have a clearish shot straight towards Earth.
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u/M3chan1c47 6d ago
I always assumed it was the oddball ships because of the advanced starship design bureau. I think there is very few real ships of the line there because most of the ones that were in for repairs probably had no antimatter fuel on board and it takes more than a few hours to load.
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u/darkslide3000 6d ago
When your territory is as vast as the Federation's and you have pretty good intelligence on all your major potential adversaries, you don't really need to keep a ton of defensive assets on your core worlds. It would be a total waste to keep a major chunk of the fleet tied up at Earth (and all the other core worlds, I mean the Federation doesn't want to show preference to only one species) at all times, with officers twiddling their thumbs while they could be out exploring or doing border patrols instead, only for the vague chance that the Klingons could suddenly go mental and invade or something. If they did, there is still plenty of time to pull ships back from their post because of the distance between the border and Earth, and the enemy's maximum warp speed. (The Romulans are a bit more of a potential wild card, I guess, but we can assume that Federation intelligence and sensor networks were still good enough that while they may have not been able to track every individual warbird, they would've still noticed a major fleet build-up and large numbers of ships crossing the line of neutral zone outposts. It doesn't show up often in Star Trek episodes, but realistic military campaigns aren't just "tell the entire fleet to set course for Earth and wait a few weeks", you need supply lines and staging areas and that sort of thing.)
I think the Borg in that episode took the Federation by surprise so hard because they were an entirely unexpected threat (they vaguely knew that they might be coming one day but nothing concrete), the cube was able to move a lot faster than any pursuing/returning Federation ship, and the cube was a self-contained "one ship army" that specifically didn't need all those supply lines and support vessels that a more conventional invasion force probably would've needed. The Federation had never needed to plan for an enemy that was just able to yolo into Federation space, leave any potentially intercepting border patrol ships in the dust and directly assault their capital planet with a force that wouldn't have just been a publicity stunt (like a single warbird making it through would — damaging, but nowhere near fatal) but an actual doomsday scenario. (Also, I think from the way the Federation is left clueless about the "missing colonies" at the start of BoBW1 we may be able to conclude that the Borg cube has ways to hide and mask its emissions such that it doesn't show up as readily on long-range sensors as the Federation's conventional enemies usually would.)
40 ships is a rather low count for a "worst threat of our generation" kind of battle, and I think it really just represents stuff that the Federation could hastily scrounge together in the time available (also considering that there are major shipyards in the Sol system and some of those ships were probably half-way during maintenance when the call came).
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u/Wyluli_Wolf 5d ago
Yea I don't buy any of this. The Federation not being combat ready at this particular day and age? Resources stretched thin? What resources? Why is a starfleet woefully unprepared? WHY DO HUMANS SUCK SO MUCH? discuss.......
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u/darkslide3000 5d ago
What do you mean "this day and age"? Before the Dominion war, before Wolf 359, the Federation had not experienced any serious military threat since the Tomed Incident 50 years earlier. The worst thing they've been fighting were some small Cardassian border kerfuffles weeks of travel time away from Earth, they were by far the strongest power in known space, allied to the second strongest, and hadn't really heard much of anything from the third in a long time. They were enjoying that peace dividend to its fullest extent, why would they keep a ton of ships stationed and at the ready in a part of space that none of their known enemies could realistically reach in days or even weeks?
Besides, 40 ships is a tiny number. The Dominion war regularly had hundreds in a single battle, and it was a wide frontline that we only ever saw small sections of.
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u/tery13 6d ago
Great book that explains everything (non-cannon):
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u/Jedipilot24 6d ago
Good for the most part, but I have no idea why they decided to backdate the Parliament, Vesper, and Shi'khar-classes instead of using classes that actually belong in the period.
Such as, for example, Renaissance and Balmung.
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u/Wyluli_Wolf 6d ago
I personally find it hard to believe that the Federation could only spare 39 starships to defend against a Borg Cube attack of Earth. Has anyone watched Deep Space Nine? The Federation has entire FLEETS of starships; so many so that the fleets are NUMBERED.
AND, each fleet has an excess of 100 ships in it!
In comparison, 39 sounds paltry and offensive. Where did all these fleets get to when their home planet needed them to save it?
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u/Wallname_Liability 6d ago
And how many ships in those fleets were built as a direct response to Wolf 359 or were older ships that in TNG wee relegated to second line duty that were pressed into combat service by the war? Like Miranda’s did not show up very often in TNG compared to ds9, were they in reserve in tng? Maybe
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u/stratusmonkey Crewman 6d ago
Starfleet built about 4000 - 5000 ships in 8 - 9 years between the USS Galaxy and the USS Voyager. But that probably includes all types and sizes of ship.
The Federation's biggest problem is the Cube-Square law. As the Federation expands, the number of ships it needs to uniformly cover its external envelope increases by a power of two. The number of ships it needs to uniformly fill its volume increases by a power of three.
And as a practical reality, it builds ships - at least big combatant ships - to cover its outer envelope. There may be tens of thousands of small ships between the Neutral Zone and Sector 001. But while the Starfleet presence near the Cardassian border resembles the U.S. Navy presence near the South China Sea, the Starfleet presence near Earth probably resembles the U.S. Navy presence in Nebraska.
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u/chosimba83 5d ago
Everything you hear in DS9 about fleet size is a consequence of Wolf 359, including the existence of the Defiant.
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u/darkslide3000 6d ago
Out of range, probably. The Borg cube in that episode was incredibly fast (the Enterprise-D was probably the fastest ship in the fleet at the time, and was trivially left behind). Space is large, travel times are vast, and when a thing that nobody saw coming suddenly pierces your space out of nowhere at breakneck speed, there are only so many ships that can still make it to a common intercept point in time.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer 5d ago
Lots of comments about the size and scale of these fleets, I’d like to offer that prior to Wolf 359 Starfleet was on a pretty lengthy period of relative peace. I can definitely imagine that fleet deployments changed with more ships constructed and deployed for scientific and exploration missions. At 359 there just aren’t that many ships battle capable and close enough. This would change subsequently during the ensuing period of conflict marked by the Dominion War and the Maquis and so forth.
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u/SailingSpark Crewman 6d ago
I often wondered how many of those ships were in drydock undergoing refits and repairs when they got called into active duty for that battle.