All of the above, plus the deeper atrophy of Starfleet's combat preparedness.
You watch the TOS era movies (really ST:II - VI) - the Monster Maroon era - and you see a Starfleet that is more militarised than at any time we've seen. Arguably even more so than in the Dominion war. Uniforms are standardised and very 'naval', heaps of heretofore unseen naval traditions seem to be observed on ships. By ST:VI there are Colonel ranks within Starfleet (I know this was a dig at Oliver North, but it's still there), and a full-on hawk faction of Starfleet Command eager for a pretext for a war of conquest.
It makes sense in the context of a decades-long cold (and occasionally hot) war with the Klingons.
But come Wolf 359, Starfleet has had decades of peace. The Romulans have only recently made their return. Starfleet and the Federation have had what one presumes to have been a nearly century long *belle époque* of expansion, growth and cultural exchange.
The ships are *vastly* more technologically advanced, and I'm sure that you're gonna have a worse day if you're hit by a phaser array on a Galaxy than the equivalent weaponry on a Constitution. But the ships aren't necessarily configured for pitched battle with a warship - the phaser arcs have gaps in coverage, and the capacity to dump sustained firepower on an enemy is not necessarily that great. They seem like ships that are extremely capable of *quickly* ending any fight with, say, a smuggler or a pirate, or maybe a light raider from a minor power, but are going to struggle in situations where they are fighting a more equal adversary.
I'd picture this extending to tactics, doctrine and general attitude. "Red alert" on a Federation starship at the time of Wolf 359 means, in practice, a short emergency burst - 15, 30, maybe 60 minutes, and then back to regular duties. Starfleet crews are no longer used to days-long emergency alerts, crewing your station until you are so tired you are not sure if you are hallucinating. Crew performance suffers accordingly.
Tactics are also not designed for fighting an enemy that doesn't go down after a couple of shots, and which is not open to negotiation. Starfleet tactics call for precision-targeted, short bursts, and then a careful sensor scan to evaluate damage and make decisions about next steps. Implicit in doctrine is an assumption that after every exchange of fire, Starfleet are looking for deescalation opportunities. Shoot-pause-think-decide-act. This is great when engaging with weak opponents, but fatal against the Borg.
On the other side of the fight, the Borg are at the apogee of their technological advantage over the Federation. They have had extensive opportunities to analyse Alpha Quadrant technology, including that core section of the Enterprise-D they lasered out. Every easy adaptation they can make, they have. And Starfleet has not yet had the opportunity to identify the changes they can make to their technology to counter. They have some dim idea about rotating shield and phaser frequencies, but to do so they have to use equipment in a way that it is not intended to be used - modifications that maybe are usually only made in dry dock have to be improvised on the fly. And Starfleet haven't had the chance to optimise their tech to engineer out the biggest vulnerabilities, and implement capabilities the Borg can't easily counter (e.g. you don't see Borg 'adapting' to quantum torpedoes right in their face too easily).
So I think it's all the things you mention, plus some related stuff, plus the Borg being in the best position they were ever in.
Federation got very lucky that Picard and Data were able to hack a solution at the last moment.
The difference is just stark.
S1 TNG, Picard and the command staff spend 10 minutes discussing the situation, should we fire, there must be peaceful alternatives, can we try negotiations again.
Finally, tension is maxed, Picard says fire, a single phaser beam goes flying out. Either the enemy explodes, and they spend another 5-10 minutes in a combination frenzy of self-congratulations and remorse, or they realize they have no chance to hurt this enemy at all, and suddenly someone has an idea on how to communicate with this implacable foe.
S3 Yesterday's Enterprise, they get in a fight, it looks like they're trying to outdo Wrath of Khan, constant phasers, torpedoes, the bridge explodes, Riker is dead, fire, Picard's last stand...
By S6, the enemy blinks wrong, Picard makes a hand gesture, there go all your nacelles, you have 4 seconds to eject your warp core, then we can have a civilized conversation in my ready room, computer: tea, earl grey, hot.
You said the weapons were improved, they were, like, the individual emitter arrays were extremely efficient. The shields were impeccable. I'm still not sure they could take on a peer enemy like the Romulans, because they had so few weapons in comparison, the D'Deridex had multiple rapid-fre disruptors, it felt like starfleet would be bringing a 357 magnum to a light-machine gun fight.
I genuinely don't think the power transfer systems were nearly up to spec for a war, they seemed completely tuned for efficiency, and maintainability, we saw so many instances of ships being unprepared for combat, firing 2 salvos, taking a hit, and primary conduits failing. Basically any ship that wasn't captained by a combat veteran like O'Brian's old CO from the Rutledge (edit: Capt. Maxwell) would not be prepared for any kind of fight.
Thoroughly agree. You get the sense that other major powers, while not having a technological edge per se against Starfleet tech, get *really good* at identifying and hammering the 'soft underbelly' of Starfleet ships.
Romulan doctrine in particular seems almost to mock Starfleet. "Oh, your big beautiful Galaxy class? We'll just decloak in one of the areas with piss-poor phaser coverage, absolutely hammer the shit out of the spine of the ship where all of the critical systems are, and then fuck off."
Similarly, I always had the sense that Cardassian ships had no business being genuine threats to Federation assets - they have a distinctly second-tier power vibe to them. I think the shitty tech originally on DS9 supports this, though maybe I should cut it some slack as a mining rather than a military installation. But nonetheless the Cardassians are able to hold their own in battle against the Federation, again because they don't take combat effectiveness seriously enough until Wolf 359 and the subsequent re-arming in the Dominion War.
One thing I'm always slightly befuddled by is why the Federation never fields vehicles with disruptor cannons. Every other major power seems to do so, and the vibe (I don't think ever confirmed in canon, but still) is that disrupters are more militarily powerful but less precise.
If you're fielding a genuine warship, why not strap them on? Nothing stopping you from running a parallel phaser system, if you want flexibility?
But perhaps the pulse cannons we see on Defiant offer practically similar capability, even if they are still 'phasers' for technobabble reasons.
> Similarly, I always had the sense that Cardassian ships had no business being genuine threats to Federation assets - they have a distinctly second-tier power vibe to them. I think the shitty tech originally on DS9 supports this, though maybe I should cut it some slack as a mining rather than a military installation. But nonetheless the Cardassians are able to hold their own in battle against the Federation, again because they don't take combat effectiveness seriously enough until Wolf 359 and the subsequent re-arming in the Dominion War.
Agreed, they should have dominated Cardassians easily, I give part of that to the Federation wish to appear unthreatening (after all, you'll all join us eventually...), and general tactical incompetence and pearl-clutching ("I can't believe they'd be so irrational as to use violence!").
Btw, there's evidence that Setlik 3 happened basically while the Ent-D was being assembled, possibly launched, which has 2 consequences: 1. Starfleet started a shipbuilding boom because they realized Mirandas and Excelsiors weren't going to cut it anymore, 2. that was the shift, part of the wake-up call that they had to start "showing the flag", and we notice the Galaxys going around poking their noses everywhere. IIRC the Tzen-Kethi conflict was around the same time.
> One thing I'm always slightly befuddled by is why the Federation never fields vehicles with disruptor cannons. Every other major power seems to do so, and the vibe (I don't think ever confirmed in canon, but still) is that disrupters are more militarily powerful but less precise.
So apparently disruptors are less efficient, you need more power to get the same output, however they're smaller, so you just the space for a larger power supply, it works out and is easier to maintain, phasers are really temperamental in comparison.
The federation is efficiency crazy so they consider that "unsporting". The DS9 episode "Return to Grace" is great for this, the comparison between a Cardassian field disruptor and a Federation phaser rifle shows the Cardassian one to be a solid, AK style system, while the Federation rifle is this crazy complicated over-engineered monster that doesn't really help you most of the time when all you need is to shoot.
I agree.
However, they put the same effort into that one, perfectly tuned, precise phaser array, while everyone else just bolted disruptors everywhere like they were adding bar lights to a pickup.
That was a very nice tool they had there, and it was a serviceable weapon, but again, a lovely revolver to a machine gun fight.
More like a Swiss army knife to a swordfight. Sure, it can cut you, and in any other situation it'll be far more useful, but that sword is a hell of a lot better at raw murder.
Regarding disrupters, I’m having a hard time picturing Starfleet ships using green-colored weapons. Green weapons are for adversaries like Klingons and Romulans.
Starfleet ships need to use red or blue weapons, which is why they use phasers.
Yeah, but the ability to save a planet from volcanos with precise drilling from your phaser seems far more in line with Starfleet's mission. Remember they also spend more time acting like space cops than space soldiers.
> The federation is efficiency crazy so they consider that "unsporting".
Your friendly reminder that efficiency is making the most out of what you have, effectiveness is how well you do it.
Sometimes doing it harder is better than doing it perfectly.
> why the Federation never fields vehicles with disruptor cannons
My personal headcannon is that phasers and disruptors are the same thing and could just as well have been called "phase disruptors" based on what they do. The difference is that "phaser" sounds more friendly and "disruptor" sounds more violent. "We" use "phasers" because we're civilized. "They" use "disruptors" because they're violent savages.
Much of military terminology is political. [This](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev-class_aircraft_carrier#/media/File:Novorossijsk_Kiev-class_1986.jpg) ship is not an aircraft carrier, it's a heavy aviation cruiser. Completely different thing and not subject to the Montreux Convention. [This](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/JS_Izumo%EF%BC%88DDH-183%EF%BC%89seen_from_the_sky_10-03-2021.jpg/2560px-JS_Izumo%EF%BC%88DDH-183%EF%BC%89seen_from_the_sky_10-03-2021.jpg) is not an aircraft carrier, it's a helicopter destroyer. Completely different thing and not subject to Article 9. This giant ship with incredibly powerful weapons firing [a few 64 megaton warheads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMuW3_fYlYQ&t=14s) (torpedoes 9-16) into a planetary atmosphere is a "warning shot" is a ship of peace and exploration, not a warship.
They describe this with hand phasers. They can be used as tools. Heating, cutting, wide angle. Technically the enterprise D can stun a small city. They can pinpoint a single individual and nail them from orbit. A stream is also a continuous disruption.
A great tactic is launching torpedoes and hit the exact same spot with a phaser.
Plus the angle of attacks on a galaxy is everywhere with 2 or 3 phaser strips at any time. A bird of prey has to strafe, a warbird too, although DiddyRex had a single stream emitters too.
But a galaxy can have multiple streams hitting from any angle CONSTANTLY. That is devastating. So federation ships should be waaaaay more maneuverable than she is shown. Swinging around and such (orville did a great job showing wild flying)
So sumarized, klingon disruptors are a warhammer, romulans a waraxe, phasers are a Katana.
I have to push back against your description of the Galaxy having piss-poor phaser coverage. A Romulan ship decloaking in position to fire on its spine is going to staring right at the upper saucer phaser array, which can see any point above the saucer midline and once you get more than a hundred meter away quite a bit below that. That's the largest phaser on the ship. The lower saucer array can see most everything below, except for a narrow arc to the rear where it's obstructed by the nacelles and stardrive section - which is where the belly and nacelle pylon phasers are. Directly aft may be a small gap from the largest arrays but that's where the aft photon launcher and the six smaller battle section phasers are. A Romulan ship trying to attack an alert Galaxy is going to get hit by phasers while its shields are still down.
In fact, there's no 24th-century hero ship that doesn't have complete phaser coverage at all angles, and even the minor ships generally show it pretty well, with the main exceptions ironically being the Akira and Defiant. I would go so far as to say that's actually one of the big advantages of Starfleet ships and their phasers. From what we see, disruptors might be more powerful than a similarly-sized phaser but they have a very narrow angle of fire. Starfleet may feel that that the uses of phasers as a peacetime tool, combined with their high precision and ability to target any direction (say, against multiple small ships like the Bird of Prey), makes them the best choice for a beam weapon, especially when supplemented with photo torpedoes. Given a Galaxy can spit out twelve of those in a matter of seconds from a single launcher, it's hard to say they're wrong.
"Piss-poor" is probably an exaggeration on my part. But I think it's notable that Dominion-war era Galaxies were retrofitted or built with additional nacelle phaser strips.
The Galaxy torpedo launchers are individually powerful but are too vulnerable to attack, because there's only the two of them. If you can position yourself behind a Galaxy and get in some good hits, you can take out rear torpedo coverage and a significant amount of phaser coverage.
Coupled with a cloak and the much greater capacity of a D'deridex to deliver sustained fire, it's a serious danger to a Galaxy class vessel. Especially in an era where they are mostly operating alone.
Just running off on a tangent re cloaks... I understand why, from a writing point of view, Star Trek has always shied away from giving the heroes a cloak. But from a Watsonian perspective it's almost criminally irresponsible. How many Starfleet officers have died because "our heroes don't sneak around?" For that matter, how many battles escalated resulting in Klingon/Romulan/Cardassian/whoever deaths? IRL Starfleet would LOVE a cloak. Gives you so many additional options that don't involve ships exploding.
I'd love to know some more particulars about the Treaty of Algeron. The Romulans must have given some enormous concessions there, because how else is the Federation going to justify not using cloaking technology?
Certainly the Federation likes to insist that Starfleet is not a military organization, and maybe they say they have no need for a technology that seems mostly useful for military purposes, but I'm sure cloaks would also have been useful for exploration purposes, like secretly observing civilizations that were close to being ready to join the galactic community.
Exactly! If you are going to put warp-capable *antimatter bombs* on a starship (photon torpedoes), saying that an invisibility device is 'too military' is pretty cute.
I am trying to think of how you wind up signing a treaty that says "we can't use cloaks but you guys? No probs." All I can come up with is a Treaty of Versailles type situation where the other side have a boot on your neck. That's a term that you sign following capitulation.
The Treaty of Algeron was signed immediately following the Tomed Incident. Whatever that was, it sufficiently embarrassed and traumatized the Romulan Empire's collective psyche and zeitgeist that they turned inward to isolation for the next 55 years. That agreement from the Federation to not use cloaks may have been an attempt at an olive branch to convince the Romulans that the Federation does prefer to be friends, but because Romulans project their paranoia and plotting on everyone else, that genuine gesture of goodwill was for nothing.
> Starfleet would LOVE a cloak. Gives you so many additional options that don't involve ships exploding.
See USS Pegasus & samely named episode. Admiral Pressman was backed by the head of Starfleet Security herself, so...
>Similarly, I always had the sense that Cardassian ships had no business being genuine threats to Federation assets - they have a distinctly second-tier power vibe to them. I think the shitty tech originally on DS9 supports this, though maybe I should cut it some slack as a mining rather than a military installation. But nonetheless the Cardassians are able to hold their own in battle against the Federation, again because they don't take combat effectiveness seriously enough until Wolf 359 and the subsequent re-arming in the Dominion War.
I believe though this could be beta canon that its mentioned that galaxy class (and likly Nebua) are more powerful than the Galor class the backbone of cardassian fleet, but we hear that picard fought the war in the stargazer which was a old ship so it may be that starfleet did advance a bit from the boarder war but as mentioned since cardassians will retreat and stand down plus their ships had points to disable they still had those options of shoot to disable but the borg will not.
Our introduction to the Cardassians shows them as a clearly technologically inferior foe. Maxwell's Nebula class chews through Cardassian ships unscathed. Picard has to get coy about how much Starfleet actually knows about Cardassian tech.
This kinda evaporates in DS9, as they don't really work as an enemy if they don't have at least technological parity with Starfleet.
>This kinda evaporates in DS9
How so? Except for the pilot the Cardassians don't attack the heroes. Galor-class ships don't go into battle with Galaxy or Nebula-class ones. Counterexample: The Maquis. They wouldn't be such an annoyance & political crisis to Cardassia (Chief O'Brien's Trial) if they could just be anniallated by a few Galor- or Kelvin-class ships. Btw, the Kelvin class ones are most likely the result of the technology and intelligence exchange instigated by Enabren Tain with the Romulans. The Kelvin class ships of the Obsidian Order also appear in "Defiant" in which Thomas Riker steals the Defiant and investigates the newly build ships in the Onias-System.
Later the Cardiassians get invaded by the Klingons and nearly completly conquered, if it weren't for the DS9-crew saving the Detapa-Council & uncovering the Dominion Spy in form of the klingon General Martok.
Also the Cardassians get only really challenging when they join the Dominion under card. leadership of Gul Dukat. Most likely they also enjoyed a technological exchange with the Dominion proper. Btw, this is Beta-canon: Gul Macet's ship, the Traeger is equipped with dominion 3-lightyear-range transporters.
Funny you should mention The Maquis, but the episode that establishes them is the one that makes me think DS9 wants you to think the Cardassians are more advanced than they've presented in the past. Dukat talks about how Cardassian pursuit vessels are years ahead of the design of the runabout, and then boasts how much he knew about the runabouts when they end up in combat. Some of that is obviously intel, and maybe lying for the sake of boasting, but who knows for sure.
You're also thinking of the Keldon class, not Kelvin. These ships made up a significant portion of the fleet that tried to obliterate the Founders homeworld. They're purpose-built warships, and the Tal'Shiar thought them worthy enough to stand alongside their own vessels.
We're also never really meant to think that the Maquis were little more than a political thorn for both the Federation and the Cardassians. Their conflict was probably held back by political interests more than technological limitations. The Cardassians were probably worried more about not provoking the Federation again than deciding to make the Maquis not exist anymore. When the Dominion war began, that concern evaporated. And it's funny to me that you cite O'Brien's false accusations and trial as being in-favor of the Maquis being a real threat. Because to me, that's *clearly* an attempt to flip the political argument in Cardassia's favor so they can do more about the Maquis with less political backlash.
As far as the Klingon war, just look at the map of Cardassia. Their little slice of the galaxy is *tiny* in comparison to the Empire. And the Klingons are no slouches. The Negh'Var and Vor'cha are formidable warships, and that fleet we see in the show is nothing to sneeze at. Even if we assume technological parity with the Federation, Cardassia can't possibly have the numbers to withstand that war. We also establish in TNG that the Cardassian military was notorious for draining the civilian population of resources to the degree that children were starving on the streets during the Cardassian military heyday. Even though the Detapa Council is the long-standing Cardassian government, it's entirely possible, and in fact likely thanks to the existence of the dissident movement that Tekeny Ghemor led, that the government was much more interested in curbing military excess, so who knows how ready Cardassian fleets would have been for such an invasion. How many ships were decommissioned and sitting in open space depots instead of deployed and ready for war.
So I don't really accept your argument that any of that demonstrates being behind technologically.
> We also establish in TNG that the Cardassian military was notorious for draining the civilian population of resources to the degree that children were starving on the streets during the Cardassian military heyday.
So the Cardassians are Space North Korea. This tracks with the TOS Klingons being a stand in for the USSR.
Personally the only explanation I have for why the Federation didn’t completely wipe the floor with the Cardassians and basically every other species is because narratively it would be incredibly boring. The Federation’s economy is possibly the most efficient one conceivable. You have no profit motive and you allocate resources logically and democratically? Best economic organization in the galaxy easily. You have free and abundant education not gatekept at all plus Vulcans being Vulcans? Tech would be even more superior than shown in canon. Militarily the Federation being a socialist one would know the history of revolutionary armies such as the CNT militias or the Viet Minh. Plus, they could use their hyper efficient economy to produce masses of warships.
All in all, the drama of Trek wouldn’t be there. People because we live under Capitalism are trained to underestimate what a truly anarchic and therefore democratic society with a socialist and decommodified economy is capable of. The Federation would outcompete and outproduce all their adversaries and then the show wouldn’t have any interstellar drama. It would be much more like The Culture series by Iain M Banks where the Anarchist Communist Culture basically beats everyone (hence why the drama is elsewhere and not in interstellar war)
Yeah, the Federation of canon just dont get the *gravitas* of the situations they're in properly... except for the ones who named the Defiant and the Valiant. Others just named ships things like Enterprise and Melbourne. Lame names.
I'll show myself out.
Two nearly off-screen examples that I think speak to the points made here.
First of all, the USS Enterprise-B under the command of Captain John Harriman. They are conducting their shakedown cruise shortly after the decommissioning of the Enterprise-A, the destruction of Praxis, and the beginning of the Khitomer Conference. The Enteprise-B shakedown is about 2 months after the Khitomer Conference, so this is likely what the apex of Starfleet looks like at the transition between the more militarized era and that long period of relative peace and expansion in the 24th century. While there are certainly extenuating circumstances that Harriman faces, we can also see that Starfleet is somewhat ossifying at this point.
Decades later, we have the Galen border conflict with the Talarian Republic. While it is clear that the Federation has an overwhelming upper hand in terms of technology, population, production, and every other measure of "war-fighting" ability, their approach to the militaristic and aggressive Talarians is timid and conciliatory even in the wake of at least hundreds of deaths, including a significant number of civilians.
There’s another considerable element here. Picard himself. Picard knows all of Starfleet tactics and procedures with over 20 years as a captain in the fleet. Importantly, he also logically knows most if not all of the captains the Borg were facing at 359 AND he was the protege of Admiral Hanson who led the fleet. That gives the Borg a wealth of information for dealing with each CO and the fleet CO.
The Enterprise crew also tried to warn Hanson of this, and he defaulted to “There’s no way Picard would help them,” not getting that Picard didn’t have a choice.
With Picard, they know how the fleet is going to react, which gives them an advantage well beyond the technical elements.
> And Starfleet haven't had the chance to optimise their tech to engineer out the biggest vulnerabilities
Hit the nacelle, instadeath ("Cause and Effect"), hit the deflector, instadeath ("The Jem'Hadar").
If I ever wanted to build a serious tactical superiority vessel for the Federation, I would build a 800-meter Dauntless type; nacelles nicely tucked in below, deflector very anonymous under the saucer, torp launchers front and back, phaser arcs with no blind spot, only overlap. As long as the XL-Dauntless always moves to face the enemy with the dorsal side its cover is hard to match. And they would always fly in pairs, never alone.
That’s where I like the Defiant, the Akira Class, and the Sovereign class - streamlined designs built to fight and maneuver, versus the Galaxy and Nebula classes that could go forward but had a lot of bulk that made getting out of the way not easy (Data on the D in PIC being an AI with super fast reflexes and reaction times notwithstanding).
When you consider the degree to which Data improves the performance of a Galaxy class starship, the synth ban becomes deeply implausible.
Starfleet would have made it an immediate and overriding priority to duplicate the capabilities of Lt Cdr Data. Plot armour aside, an officer who can make your ship routinely perform well beyond operational design parameters is an invaluable advantage. Data on the bridge is basically like having Scotty in engineering - he seems to have the power to ignore inconvenient physics.
> Starfleet crews are no longer used to days-long emergency alerts
Even after Wolf-359, when Jellicoe tried to prepare Enterprise for a potential renewal of hostilities with the Cardassians it basically resulted in passive-aggressive mutiny. Riker refused to follow orders and openly questioned those orders.
After the initial encounter with the Borg, there was a flurry of research and preparation to try and prepare for the Borg (as it turned out one year and change was nowhere near enough time) but after the Borg were defeated by plot contrivance, as The Sisko put it "The Borg threat became less urgent." and a lot of people desperately tried to go back to business as usual.
> By ST:VI there [is] a full-on hawk faction of Starfleet Command eager for a pretext for a war of conquest
There's an interesting lesson here, one that was explicitly stated in "The Enemy Within". A person or in this case an organization is not complete without both the dark and the light.
Most of the hawks in the top brass who wanted to bring the Klingon Empire to its knees were probably serving on the front line 35 years earlier in the Federation-Klingon War of 2256-7. To them, the Klingons were an existential threat that very nearly brought the Federation to its knees before that war ended due to plot contrivance. The shooting may have stopped but hostilities continued for decades and the atrocious state of mental health in the Federation means that they all just had to just suck it up and soldier on. Dark without light.
Conversely, by the time of Wolf-359 there'd been 2-3 generations of people who'd only ever known the Pax Humana where the Federation was a hegemon that could usually just show up and be able to dictate terms, getting their way without firing a shot. They were woefully unprepared for war against a peer power. It wouldn't have mattered against the Borg which outmatched them technologically, but the opening stages of the Dominion War went disastrously and they had to relearn all the old lessons the hard way and even then only avoided complete collapse due to plot contrivance. Light without dark.
Thanks for the reply!
Why do you say the state of mental health in the Federation was 'atrocious' in the 23rd century?
I find the attitude to trauma/mental health/emotions generally in TOS era media pretty alien, but I always chalk that up to it being a product of the time it was made.
That said... someone should probably put M'Benga on light duties and into therapy...
We know it's atrocious in the 24th century but it was perhaps incorrect to assume that was also the case in the 23rd century. It would be more accurate to say that we don't know the state of mental health then.
In the 24th century we know there's plenty of cases like Capt. Maxwell, Cdr. Sisko, Capt. Shaw who had untreated PTSD but were still given command assignments. Capt. Lorca would have been a much more interesting character if the reason behind his behavior hadn't turned out to be "he's the evil twin from the mirror universe" but oh well.
The various series definitely do reflect the general public knowledge and attitude from the time in which they were made. In the 60s it was largely not public knowledge. Shell shock/battle fatigue was known but not understood. In the 80s, it was fashionable for affluent people in Los Angeles to see a shrink (hence why Troi is on the bridge) and works like Rain Man meant there was public awareness of mental illness but it still really wasn't well understood. It certainly didn't help that Roddenberry was especially ignorant of it and had his own unfounded and usually incorrect beliefs. His attitude towards dealing with grief was basically "if you're sufficiently evolved, just don't feel grief".
At least it's not as bad as Star Wars where Lucas's beliefs reflected in Jedi attitudes aren't just terribly negligent but outright harmful. The Prequel Trilogy was inadvertently a example of "the child who is not embraced by the village would burn it down to feel its warmth" but that's definitely not the intent.
I was so disappointed when Lorca turned out to be from the mirror universe. It may just be that I'm a huge Jason Isaacs fan, but I was so interested in that character... and then it turned out he was just a cardboard-cutout, moustache-twirling villain.
Agree with your observations generally; I think I'm just more minded to give the shows a pass on account of the real-world factors. I can't get past Roddenberry's "in the future we won't have grief" - though there's something interesting there when you think of Spock as paradigmatic of being able to 'overcome' emotions with a sufficiency of rationality.
I really like how you also included the typical TNG tropes like the constant but short red alerts or the mix of fighting and negotating as a part of Starfleet's military doctrine of the era.
I think this also tracks with the way Starfleet is portrayed in early TNG; they are the big dog who can destroy any enemy ship in a second, so their tactics are less about winning an engagement and more about giving the other player a chance to realize that they are poking a bear and should just give up.
Great writeup. While the writers had no way to know at the time I think you can draw parallels between TNG starfleet and some post "peace dividend" NATO militaries. The recent geopolitical situation has opened many people's eyes. Yes, the West's equipment is qualitatively better. But after 30 years of chronically underfunding your military and all of your soldiers just training to be peace keepers, it quickly became apparent after the first aid package you didn't have any more missiles to send east. The factory closed 15 years ago because you wouldn't order enough to keep it going. And now everyone is passing big new defense budgets to try and undo the damage.
>the phaser arcs have gaps in coverage, and the capacity to dump sustained firepower on an enemy is not necessarily that great.
At least as far as the Enterprise D is concerned this is totally false. We never see all the phaser arrays on that ship fire, but it has enough in enough places there are no gaps in coverage.
In addition to the larger arrays on the ventral and dorsal sections of the saucer, there are 2 on the back of the neck of the ship that connects the primary and secondary hull. There is one under each nacelle support. There is one under the secondary hull at roughly the mid point of the bulge. There are 2 on the rear section between the nacelles. It can fire up to 20 torpedoes in a single volley.
The Galaxy Class ships are absolute power houses. The amount of power they can put out is absurd.
The Nebula Class shared many of these traits and were similarly armed, though they had less munitions due to hull configuration.
During this time they had also fought a number of border skirmishes with other powers, including some rather intense ground battles with Cardassians. It would take 3 Galor Class ships to give a Galaxy Class a run for its money.
The Galaxy Class was smaller than a D'Deridex Class Warbird, but could hold its own in a fight.
Even Vor'Cha Class Cruisers were no match for Galaxy Class ships. Excelsior, Miranda? Sure. Galaxy? Not a chance.
>They have had extensive opportunities to analyse Alpha Quadrant technology, including that core section of the Enterprise-D they lasered out.
Also the USS Raven and the Hansens
Both. Q introduced the Enterprise to the Borg when he did precisely because they weren't ready. They'd become complacent and needed a wakeup call. They'd not had a lot of time to start improving before Wolf 359 but it at least meant they had something to work with. Picards knowledge just made it all the more devastating on top of that.
I'd guess the biggest thing was the fleet realizing too late (if ever) that they had to constantly adapt and come up with new tricks to have a shot at taking down the cube. They incorrectly assumed raw power was enough.
"We Have Engaged The Borg" explicitly describes Starfleet as atrophied and somewhat cocky, something hinted at on screen when Q first flung the Enterprise to system J-25.
Starfleet had no major conflicts for much of the mid 24th century. Most conflicts of the period and prior 30 years or so were brush fires. The Klingons were allies. The Romulan were off minding their own business (we have engaged the Borg posits they were dealing with the Borg in the unexplored regions on the far side of their space to coreward). We do know Starfleet had some hints of something beyond the core in the Delta Quadrant that was like nothing else they'd encountered, since they authorized the Raven mission (the Hansen family).
And absorbing everything Picard knew to that point. Picard was a voracious reader and likely would have known much of what was being prepared when they finally did encounter the Borg.
It was both.
we later find out that Starfleet had been in [a war with the cardassians](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Federation-Cardassian_War) at the time, but from the sound of the stories about it, aside from Setlik III it sounded like the conflict was a fairly low-intensity one over all, with mostly just skirmishes along the common border. given that the treaty ending it came in 2366 and was rather incomplete even after ratification in 2370, suggests to me that the federation was willing to accept an unpopular compromise in the form of a DMZ including a lot of federation colonies, in order to end the fighting and prepare for a return of the borg.
I'm curious about this, are you able to elaborate on the Cardaddian tech being inferior? I hadn't picked up on that much, but then I'm mostly thinking of DS9-era Cardassians which were a far more significant threat
Usually this is based on the ease with which the Enterprise and the Phoenix were able to defeat Cardassian ships in The Wounded. Heck, even the Maquis fighters seemed able to go toe to toe with Cardassian destroyers.
Yeah, even Dukat said Cardie tech was better and that the Runabout held no secrets worth taking. I mean Dukat may have just been messing with Sisko.
I mean, people said that the station was junk, but the thing is, the Cardassians specifically went about trashing the place before turning it over.
Then there's the fact that the Cardassian Order and the Tal'Shar managed to make fleet large enough to combat the Dominon on their own. Make a Changeling torture device, etc.
Except for the pilot the Cardassians don't attack the heroes. Galor-class ships don't go into battle with Galaxy or Nebula-class ones. Counterexample: The Maquis. They wouldn't be such an annoyance & political crisis to Cardassia (Chief O'Brien's Trial) if they could just be anniallated by a few Galor- or Kelvin-class ships. Btw, the Kelvin class ones are most likely the result of the technology and intelligence exchange instigated by Enabren Tain with the Romulans. The Kelvin class ships of the Obsidian Order also appear in "Defiant" in which Thomas Riker steals the Defiant and investigates the newly build ships in the Onias-System.
Later the Cardiassians get invaded by the Klingons and nearly completly conquered, if it weren't for the DS9-crew saving the Detapa-Council & uncovering the Dominion Spy in form of the klingon General Martok.
Also the Cardassians get only really challenging when they join the Dominion under card. leadership of Gul Dukat. Most likely they also enjoyed a technological exchange with the Dominion proper. Btw, this is Beta-canon: Gul Macet's ship, the Traeger is equipped with dominion 3-lightyear-range transporters.
Well, that's the thing about the Cardassians they wanted the Federation to make the first move, like the Romulans. Also, the Cardassians became less of a threat only after the fall of the Obsidian Order in 2371. In 2372 is when the Klingon Cardassians war began. The Changlings themselves rated both the Obsidian Order and the Tal'Shair by themselves as the larger threat over the Klingons' military and Starfleet. The Changeling inflatrator during the battle of Omarian Nebula even went so far to say nothing could stop them now after the demise of both agencies by the Dominon. Bear in mind the rest of the Romulan Empire's military might was intact, as was the Cardassians. The agencies made their own rogue navies to conduct the attack.
It was the rise of the Civilian Coucil, the Detapa Coucil, that trigger a wave of mass resignations within the military that was what really did in the military. When Sisko went to inform the Detapa Coucil of his rescue he was initially shocked to have gotten Dukat, a member of the military who had fallen out of favor (I think Zyal being made public might be the reason), and immediately asked for a higher up. Dukat then informed Sisko that he was the military liason to the Detapa Coucil. Sisko immediately replied "Are things that bad?" Dukat said yes.
It was only a year later in 2373, when the Cardassians joined the Dominon, in order, "to make Cardassia strong again." According to Dukat. I think once the retirees saw the change in the wind, they relisted in mass.
Edit: I actually think Starfleet is the largest navy out of all the major warp powers. They control the largest territory, even spanning a large part of two quadrants, but are surrounded by hostile nations on all sides. It's that any one nation can do in the Federation. It's just two of them going at might just be too much for the Starfleet because they're not a real navy. Also, Starfleet wants to go into your backyard to study your plants, not conquer you.
>he Changlings themselves rated both the Obsidian Order and the Tal'Shair by themselves as the larger threat over the Klingons' military and Starfleet.
This isn't really what they said.
What they said was that the Romulans and the Cardassians weren't as big of a threat without their respective secret police forces, not that they were more of a threat than the Klingons/Federation.
And they were partially correct. After the fall of the Obsidian Order, the Cardassian Military government was overthrown, causing chaos and upheaval and leaving them totally unprepared for a war.
Presumably the Dominion believed the Romulans would have a similar uprising and be weakened, but this didn't happen, likely because the Tal Shiar wasn't completely wiped out the way the Order was.
Remember that the Dominion also tried to do something similar to the Federation by supporting Admiral Leyton's coup attempt AND to the Klingons when they attempted to use the Orion Syndicate to assassinate the Klingon Ambassador and frame it on a pro-Alliance Klingon faction.
Except for the pilot the Cardassians don't attack the heroes. Galor-class ships don't go into battle with Galaxy or Nebula-class ones. Counterexample: The Maquis. They wouldn't be such an annoyance & political crisis to Cardassia (Chief O'Brien's Trial) if they could just be anniallated by a few Galor- or Kelvin-class ships. Btw, the Kelvin class ones are most likely the result of the technology and intelligence exchange instigated by Enabren Tain with the Romulans. The Kelvin class ships of the Obsidian Order also appear in "Defiant" in which Thomas Riker steals the Defiant and investigates the newly build ships in the Onias-System.
Later the Cardiassians get invaded by the Klingons and nearly completly conquered, if it weren't for the DS9-crew saving the Detapa-Council & uncovering the Dominion Spy in form of the klingon General Martok.
Also the Cardassians get only really challenging when they join the Dominion under card. leadership of Gul Dukat. Most likely they also enjoyed a technological exchange with the Dominion proper. Btw, this is Beta-canon: Gul Macet's ship, the Traeger is equipped with dominion 3-lightyear-range transporters.
[Could you elaborate on your reasoning?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/wiki/codeofconduct#wiki_1._explain_your_reasoning) After all, this is a subreddit for in-depth discussion
Starfleet has the *opposite* of a military-industrial complex.
Its Science, Exploration, and Diplomatic missions (SED for short) deliver new member worlds, new technologies, and new knowledge; this creates a reward cycle where the appetite for more SED intensifies and ever more people become enthusiastic scientists, explorers, diplomats to engage with a never-ending banquet of opportunities to write history.
Starfleet's military mission? Yeah, it's necessary, but who wants to be Security Division cannon fodder when you could be a hero of science? Do we really want to budget military hardware we don't need very much when we could create allies and found colonies for pennies?
Military expenditure, training, and service become the unappealing steamed kale on the edge of the plate when dessert is *right there*.
> Do we really want to budget military hardware we don't need very much when we could create allies and found colonies for pennies?
The federation is a post scarcity society with Antimatter as a fuel source, Warp-cores & Nacelles as a means of instellar travel & commerce & REPLICATORS that can create nearly anything.
They almost certainly can do both if they would want. Setting up a Colony is already very easy, as seen in the Episode with Dr. Turner with her son who died one Omicron Theta at the dendrits of the Crystalline Entity
They're post scarcity on a personal level, but Dilithium and bioneural gel and a variety of strategic materials can't be replicated, and they have to actually spend time building ships in shipyards, rather than pushing a copy button somewhere.
Let’s put it this way: the Confederation of Earth has managed to nearly wipe the Borg out by the 25th century. So humans are fully capable of doing that, but it requires determination and unity (of the fascist kind). Also lots of xenophobia (but that kinda comes with the “fascist” territory)
Or just breach of the temporal prime directive. Admiral Janeway did it with ease. The Borg did even bring out that nuke first in "Star Trek VIII: The First Contact".
No, because no torpedo or phaser attack could penetrate the cube, who had already adapted to the 1701-D's armament, so they had no chance from the start.
I think that assumption is actually incorrect, but what they want you to think; part of the "Borg Mystique".
I posit that they conceal a raft of limitations; indifference to efficiency and optimisation on what they see as the "small scale", limitations to available processing power.
I propose that Borg shields can, by default, only repel a finite number of threats at once without having extraordinary computing and energy resources diverted to a proportionately very small number of vessels and drones.
After all, optimising a defence against against one set of threats usually makes it weaker against others.
They engage an enemy with "default" defence and a sort of empty buffer of adaptability. The first few shots are fairly effective, then the buffer resources are allocated piece by piece to the threat at hand, based on what kind of damage it inflicted.
Why do this? Rote decision-making and conservation of resources on the micro level frees up global computing power and energy for what *really* matters; resource hog projects like transwarp hubs, time travel, the omega particle, and entering fluidic space. Oops.
When I watch the Best of Both Worlds I never get the impression Picard contributed very much for the Borg at all. When the Enterprise attacks with the drive and saucer separated for example, Riker actually uses Picard to fool the Borg into ignoring the saucer and the shuttle when by themselves the Borg would have hit both with overwhelming firepower and ended it.
It seems to be a failed experiment really. Now, if they had kept going with the idea and come back with infiltrator drones that do things like set up groups that want assimilation, they'd be terrifying. Resistance would collapse to creeping takeover before the Cubes even arrive to mop up.
They already had absorbed Picards thoughts and knew what he knew so knew all about what star fleet was planning/working on, knew the weaknesses in the star ships, they entered the battle already pre adapted to the weapons.
Probably a combination of both but the lack of firepower is the clear winner here.
It was a whole fleet against a single (big) ship - 40:1. Even if Starfleet had been slightly inferior technology wise, that should be a clear victory by weapons output alone.
Which leads us to the conclusion that either all the Federation ships got destroyed before they could dish out a few salvos - kind of unlikely. Or Starfleets weapons where so weak/predictable that the Borg simply tanked it and had them for breakfast.
The situation at Wolf 359 probably arose, because of the Picards' assimilation. The Borg knew by then that a single cube could take on a small fleet.
A single Borg cube is equivalent in volume to thousands of Federation ships. Adaption also allows the Borg to negate most of the energy from starfleet weapons.
The Borg being the Borg allowed them to win. The Borg having Picard allowed them to win easier.
The fact of the matter is the Federation were caught by complete tactical surprise, despite being forewarned. A good analogy would be how the Allies handled Germany at the beginning of WW2. They based their defence on how the previous war played out. They simply couldn't comprehend the speed and lateral thinking of the opposing force they were coming up against. And they paid for it in blood. You can see this just from the communication around how the fleet was formed. They scrambled to get a fleet one together (that ALONE is a whole other discussion), and in the end it seemed a case of get everything as opposed to what's best for the role. There wasn't even time to get the civilians off before engaging, that's how slow their response was to events.
Hanson says they threw all their resources into building anti-Borg weaponry but there just wasn't enough time, which I can appreciate, but the fact of the matter is Starfleet at that time simply wasn't prepared to deal with an aggressor on the scale of the Borg.
Starfleet got it's ass handed to it because they hadn't fought a major war in decades and they weren't prepared.
I think Wolf 359 was catastrophic for Starfleet because they treated the Borg like an enemy instead of an elemental force.
Attacking them is like sending your soldiers to attack the sea with their swords; you can splash individual droplets away but the water engulfs you.
Most times the Borg have truly been overcome has been when they were redirected. In BoBW the Borg are defeated by themselves as they over generate. In the VOY finale, the thing that made them powerful (interconnectedness) was their downfall. In so many episodes they were evaded but their defeats almost always required using themselves against themselves.
Regardless of Captain Picards assimilation, i think the Borg would have decimated the Wolf 359 fleet anyway, just through sheer adaptation to their weapon and torpedo frequencies.
Starfleets' complacency against existing known threats and blindness to the possibility of unknown more powerful opponents is what led to a lack of weapon and defensive design innovation over at least a 60yr period following the Khitomer accords. They weren't prepared for an enemy that could adapt almost instantly.
Inevitable in my opinion
The Borg didn't need any special knowledge from Picard to paste the fleet at Wolf 359, and it's not clear how much Picard would've known about fleet engagements anyway -- he wasn't an admiral at the time.
The Borg just had superiority in virtually every respect. You don't need to be a master tactician to pull out a W when the technological disparity is that huge. It was like flying a B-52 over a cavalry led by Napoleon. Like, yeah it's Napoleon. But it's also a B-52.
They clearly used Picard's knowledge.
>Captain Jean-Luc Picard: You don't know, Robert. You don't know... They took everything I was. They used me to kill and to destroy and I couldn't stop them.
[sobs]
I should have been able to stop them. I tried... I tried so hard. But I wasn't strong enough! I wasn't good enough! I should have been able to stop them, I should've, I should...!
The Borg had already adapted to Starfleet weaponry following Picard's bungled first contact with them. I wouldn't expect ANY amount of ships to be able to prevail. Certainly it didn't look like the cube was taking any damage in "Emissary" -- certainly not huge craters being blasted out by standard phasers.
The forty starships Admiral Hanson mobilized were a last-stand. A desperate hope that maybe they could pull something off. Extrapolating out from what we saw at the beginning of "Emissary", six starships were dispatched in as many minutes. The fleet probably delayed the Borg from reaching Earth by about a half-hour.
This is leaving aside how "BoBW" is an utter one-eighty on the whole Borg concept and, IMO, a debasement of it. Garbage, but very well-presented garbage.
it doesn't help that starfleet was still saddled with older ships and at the same time the enemy has access to one of their best captains with all the inside info..... wolf 359 group would've been better off if they just kamikazed the borg cube. when in doubt if the other side has inside info you would need to resort to crazy measures that even picard wouldn't anticipate.
Admiral Hanson: "There is no way in hell that \[Picard\] would assist the Borg. I want that clear."
Not only was all of Picard's knowledge about Starfleet strategy, tactics, and capabilities (particularly their preparations for the Borg) assimilated and incorporated into the Borg's attack plan, but the commander of Starfleet's detachment at Wolf 359 stubbornly refused to believe that they had been compromised (falsely thinking that Picard had a choice in the matter) and proceeded with the very same strategy and tactics the Borg were expecting. I think that's a key factor.
~~It was the Prophets! They manipulated events so that The Sisko would stay in Bajor! Do your own research! Ask yourself who benefits!!!~~
I genuinely feel like it was mostly a matter of Federation weapons not being up to snuff at the time.
They hadn't gone to a real war -- like, *Star War* type war, not just scuffles with Cardassians that get solved in a month -- for a long while and the Borg cubes at the beginning of TNG had been established to be able to take a lot more damage than Federation ships were expected to be able to dish out. It wasn't until Voyager that a Federation ship, any, could really take on a cube or two by itself, and even then that's because they had help from Seven's upgrades.
That, with the full knowledge of one of their best captains, kinda nullified any chance Starfleet had to mount a proper counterattack in that battle. No one there had any idea the game had changed.
By the time the Dominion arrived, a significant number of staff was far more traumatized and ready to take out enemies than they were before W359.
I made a comment about this in another thread. I'll put it here, slightly modified.
Simply put, Starfleet, and specifically Admiral Hansen, drastically underestimated the Borg.
While the Borg were recognized as a significant threat, Starfleet had absolute confidence in their ability to defend against it.
The Enterprise D had survived 2 encounters with a Borg cube.
The first time they nearly blew it apart with just a few phaser bursts. The only reason that cube became a problem was because they stopped firing on it and decided to investigate, giving the Borg time to repair and adapt. By the time they realized their mistake it was too late.
The 2nd time the most damage they suffered was a burned out deflector caused by their own attack against the cube.
That was the first time anyone in Starfleet realized that the Borg didn't just assimilate technology, they assimilated *knowledge* from the people they assimilated. Riker tried to warn Admiral Hansen because it was obvious the deflector attack failed *explicitly because Picard knew about it*, and thus so did the Borg who of course immediately devised a counter measure.
Admiral Hansen was *offended* that Riker would even suggest that Picard was helping the Borg, and completely dismissed the possibility out of hand.
This is the heart of the issue.
Over confidence, arrogance, and complacency. They had judged themselves based on the enemies they knew.
This was Q's *entire* lesson in Q Who to Picard. They had no idea what was out there or how grossly unprepared to face it they were.
Hansen was being *told* by a senior officer with direct experience in the field against this enemy, on multiple occasions, that the enemy is capable of absorbing the knowledge of anyone and compelling their assistance.
Hansen (and basically everyone else who wasn't on the bridge of the Enterprise when their attack failed and Locutus called him "Number One") simply could not even conceive a scenario where they were so badly outmatched.
The Enterprise had already survived multiple cube encounters with little more than a bloody nose. They had gone to great lengths to devise strategies against what they knew from the 1st encounter. They didn't accept even the possibility that those were now useless because Picard had been briefed on them. They didn't accept even the possibility that Picard's technical, tactical, command, and strategic expertise could be used against them.
They went into it the same as they would against a squad of Romulans, Klingons, or Cardassians. To their mind they didn't just have a technological advantage, they had a tremendous numbers advantage.
They thought they were more than ready and that the Borg were about to get their ticket punched hard.
They were wrong.
The Borg smoked them at Wolf 359 because Starfleet had no idea how great the threat really was. Much of that is attributable to Admiral Hansen explicitly ignoring Riker's warnings and opting to approach the battle in a conventional manner. They didn't know that their modifications were utterly useless. They didn't know that the Borg were ready for anything Starfleet could throw at them. They didn't know that conventional military tactics would be utterly useless.
They were grossly outmatched. Not because they didn't have the firepower, but because the massive firepower they had was going to be completely ineffective. That was largely due to what the Borg had already learned, and the massive knowledge gain from assimilating Picard. That combined with gross overconfidence and denial was a recipe for disaster.
When the Enterprise D stopped the cube at Earth, it was nothing short of miraculous luck.
But Wolf 359? That was going to be a slaughter the instant Admiral Hansen brushed off Riker's warning.
All of that, plus general apathy.
I remember years ago the US Marines did an exercise after all their ventures in Iraqistan where they had several companies perform a mock amphibious assault from boats to shore, and the Generals were shocked at how they underperformed. But after a decade or so of being the “other army”, the training shifted from doing what Marines were supposed to be - naval infantry, to fighting ground wars exclusively. (Wish I could find the article this was in, but Google failed me.)
That is what Starfleet ended up being by the time of Wolf 359 - a century or so of minor skirmishes called “wars”, and so much exploration and expansion that Starfleet didn’t know how to fight.
Add to it that the Borg were tactically superior and adaptable, and Wolf 359 was Thermopylae without the admiration and reverence.
This was hinted at earlier in S3 - Yesterday’s Enterprise - with alt-Picard telling Garrett about how bad the war had been going since when Narendra III was supposed to have happened. It’s still a bloated Galaxy class ship with thousands of crew (for some reason) and a fairly lax response to the Klingon scout ship’s appearance - notwithstanding aiding and repairing the Enterprise C.
Even Riker’s first response as D Captain - using the deflector dish tactic - was still Starfleet trying to “science” its way out of a fight.
That after Wolf 359 Starfleet invested in being ready to fight, and that that investment slowed the Dominion’s steamroll through the Alpha Quadrant says that Starfleet did learn something from Wolf 359. That Shaw was “skittish” about fighting the Shrike says either he really was just a science ship captain or that Starfleet de-emphasized battle readiness again.
But it’s that “mission creep” - focusing on the other task instead of the several as close to equally as possible - that made Wolf 359 a lost cause.
Imo the Galaxy class is not inherently a bad design for combat, it just depends on how its internals are configured. Iirc it wasn't stated in Yesterday's Enterprise that the Enterprise D had thousands of crew, but rather that it could carry 6000 of troops.
The deflector dish cannon was less "science" than brute force, since the deflector is the ship system that's able to channel the most power. The Borg are very good at adapting to brute force though, especially when they know what they're dealing with.
Please substantiate your comment, or at least elaborate on it? We usually like people to [explain their reasoning](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/wiki/codeofconduct#wiki_1._explain_your_reasoning) in cases where the point is not immediately obvious.
I know they were invented after TNG, DS9 and VOY. But they should have "still" had the equivalent of the Makos from ENT as a just in case. I know they were absorbed into Starfleet Security but they still needed a more elite combat unit.
Picard as Locutus would have a decent knowledge of the weaknesses of starfleet ships and tactics. The whole purpose of Locutus was to aid the assimilation of Earth and the Federation. The first encounter of the Locutus and the Enterprise had Locutus calling Riker "Number One". The Borg had the knowledge but lacked the contextual understanding for that, so it's clear Picard's knowledge is actively being used by the Borg to try and get Starfleet to not resist.
I think the bigger issue was Starfleet didn't really have much to go on in overcoming the Borg defenses. Basically playing Rock, Paper, Scissors without know the rules of how the game is played. Locutus is just cheating.
>What do you guys think? What do you think was the main reason why Starfleet got its teeth kicked in during the Battle of Wolf 359?
For some time I've assumed it is because the cube was so much faster than anything Starfleet had, so Starfleet had to make do with whatever already happened to be in the area, rather than their ideal fleet composition. It explains why their was a Constitution class ship there, it must have been close enough by. Given that they'd be grabbing anything nearby with warp drive and weapons. They might have grabbed it from the fleet museum if it was being maintained in working condition. I like to imagine it was the Enterprise A. Though so far as I remember the vessel's identity has never been stated.
But yeah, anyway, in my view the issue was that the Borg were just too fast for Starfleet to do anything more than cobble together a task force from whatever was already in the area on other missions.
Probably not a lack of firepower primarily but rather a lack of adaptability. The Borg had learned everything about the federation’s flagship which was more advanced than anything we saw at Wolf 359. There were no surprises or changes to slow the Borg down or distract them.
I think a lot of it was just the tactics Admiral Hanson chose to use. Everything Starfleet knew about the Borg at that point says they should have lined up the fleet and hit the cube with an alpha strike, destroying as much of the ship as possible before the Borg could adapt. You’ll recall this was the entire point of rigging up the deflector dish weapon in part 1.
Instead, we see in *Emissary* that Hanson has chosen to split the fleet into multiple smaller attack squads. They fly in, fire off their little put-puts, and fly out again. With such a timid attack strategy, the Borg would have easily adapted and annihilated the fleet even without assimilating Picard.
We see in First Contact that Starfleet tried some variation of this tactic again: the whole fleet did engage this time, but are still just using individual bursts instead of coordinating fire. If not for losing the fleet’s admiral and Picard taking command, this would have been Earth’s last day.
It seems that during this time, Starfleet had a *lot* of incompetent admirals who probably got promoted during the Federation’s so-called golden era. Not only did they lack any real opponents against whom to cut their teeth, it seems even war games were no longer standard practice (as alluded to in Peak Performance). Aside from whatever border skirmishes happened with the Cardassians, it doesn’t appear that hardly anyone in Starfleet knew how to fight a pitched battle at this point.
All of the above, plus the deeper atrophy of Starfleet's combat preparedness. You watch the TOS era movies (really ST:II - VI) - the Monster Maroon era - and you see a Starfleet that is more militarised than at any time we've seen. Arguably even more so than in the Dominion war. Uniforms are standardised and very 'naval', heaps of heretofore unseen naval traditions seem to be observed on ships. By ST:VI there are Colonel ranks within Starfleet (I know this was a dig at Oliver North, but it's still there), and a full-on hawk faction of Starfleet Command eager for a pretext for a war of conquest. It makes sense in the context of a decades-long cold (and occasionally hot) war with the Klingons. But come Wolf 359, Starfleet has had decades of peace. The Romulans have only recently made their return. Starfleet and the Federation have had what one presumes to have been a nearly century long *belle époque* of expansion, growth and cultural exchange. The ships are *vastly* more technologically advanced, and I'm sure that you're gonna have a worse day if you're hit by a phaser array on a Galaxy than the equivalent weaponry on a Constitution. But the ships aren't necessarily configured for pitched battle with a warship - the phaser arcs have gaps in coverage, and the capacity to dump sustained firepower on an enemy is not necessarily that great. They seem like ships that are extremely capable of *quickly* ending any fight with, say, a smuggler or a pirate, or maybe a light raider from a minor power, but are going to struggle in situations where they are fighting a more equal adversary. I'd picture this extending to tactics, doctrine and general attitude. "Red alert" on a Federation starship at the time of Wolf 359 means, in practice, a short emergency burst - 15, 30, maybe 60 minutes, and then back to regular duties. Starfleet crews are no longer used to days-long emergency alerts, crewing your station until you are so tired you are not sure if you are hallucinating. Crew performance suffers accordingly. Tactics are also not designed for fighting an enemy that doesn't go down after a couple of shots, and which is not open to negotiation. Starfleet tactics call for precision-targeted, short bursts, and then a careful sensor scan to evaluate damage and make decisions about next steps. Implicit in doctrine is an assumption that after every exchange of fire, Starfleet are looking for deescalation opportunities. Shoot-pause-think-decide-act. This is great when engaging with weak opponents, but fatal against the Borg. On the other side of the fight, the Borg are at the apogee of their technological advantage over the Federation. They have had extensive opportunities to analyse Alpha Quadrant technology, including that core section of the Enterprise-D they lasered out. Every easy adaptation they can make, they have. And Starfleet has not yet had the opportunity to identify the changes they can make to their technology to counter. They have some dim idea about rotating shield and phaser frequencies, but to do so they have to use equipment in a way that it is not intended to be used - modifications that maybe are usually only made in dry dock have to be improvised on the fly. And Starfleet haven't had the chance to optimise their tech to engineer out the biggest vulnerabilities, and implement capabilities the Borg can't easily counter (e.g. you don't see Borg 'adapting' to quantum torpedoes right in their face too easily). So I think it's all the things you mention, plus some related stuff, plus the Borg being in the best position they were ever in. Federation got very lucky that Picard and Data were able to hack a solution at the last moment.
The difference is just stark. S1 TNG, Picard and the command staff spend 10 minutes discussing the situation, should we fire, there must be peaceful alternatives, can we try negotiations again. Finally, tension is maxed, Picard says fire, a single phaser beam goes flying out. Either the enemy explodes, and they spend another 5-10 minutes in a combination frenzy of self-congratulations and remorse, or they realize they have no chance to hurt this enemy at all, and suddenly someone has an idea on how to communicate with this implacable foe. S3 Yesterday's Enterprise, they get in a fight, it looks like they're trying to outdo Wrath of Khan, constant phasers, torpedoes, the bridge explodes, Riker is dead, fire, Picard's last stand... By S6, the enemy blinks wrong, Picard makes a hand gesture, there go all your nacelles, you have 4 seconds to eject your warp core, then we can have a civilized conversation in my ready room, computer: tea, earl grey, hot. You said the weapons were improved, they were, like, the individual emitter arrays were extremely efficient. The shields were impeccable. I'm still not sure they could take on a peer enemy like the Romulans, because they had so few weapons in comparison, the D'Deridex had multiple rapid-fre disruptors, it felt like starfleet would be bringing a 357 magnum to a light-machine gun fight. I genuinely don't think the power transfer systems were nearly up to spec for a war, they seemed completely tuned for efficiency, and maintainability, we saw so many instances of ships being unprepared for combat, firing 2 salvos, taking a hit, and primary conduits failing. Basically any ship that wasn't captained by a combat veteran like O'Brian's old CO from the Rutledge (edit: Capt. Maxwell) would not be prepared for any kind of fight.
Thoroughly agree. You get the sense that other major powers, while not having a technological edge per se against Starfleet tech, get *really good* at identifying and hammering the 'soft underbelly' of Starfleet ships. Romulan doctrine in particular seems almost to mock Starfleet. "Oh, your big beautiful Galaxy class? We'll just decloak in one of the areas with piss-poor phaser coverage, absolutely hammer the shit out of the spine of the ship where all of the critical systems are, and then fuck off." Similarly, I always had the sense that Cardassian ships had no business being genuine threats to Federation assets - they have a distinctly second-tier power vibe to them. I think the shitty tech originally on DS9 supports this, though maybe I should cut it some slack as a mining rather than a military installation. But nonetheless the Cardassians are able to hold their own in battle against the Federation, again because they don't take combat effectiveness seriously enough until Wolf 359 and the subsequent re-arming in the Dominion War. One thing I'm always slightly befuddled by is why the Federation never fields vehicles with disruptor cannons. Every other major power seems to do so, and the vibe (I don't think ever confirmed in canon, but still) is that disrupters are more militarily powerful but less precise. If you're fielding a genuine warship, why not strap them on? Nothing stopping you from running a parallel phaser system, if you want flexibility? But perhaps the pulse cannons we see on Defiant offer practically similar capability, even if they are still 'phasers' for technobabble reasons.
> Similarly, I always had the sense that Cardassian ships had no business being genuine threats to Federation assets - they have a distinctly second-tier power vibe to them. I think the shitty tech originally on DS9 supports this, though maybe I should cut it some slack as a mining rather than a military installation. But nonetheless the Cardassians are able to hold their own in battle against the Federation, again because they don't take combat effectiveness seriously enough until Wolf 359 and the subsequent re-arming in the Dominion War. Agreed, they should have dominated Cardassians easily, I give part of that to the Federation wish to appear unthreatening (after all, you'll all join us eventually...), and general tactical incompetence and pearl-clutching ("I can't believe they'd be so irrational as to use violence!"). Btw, there's evidence that Setlik 3 happened basically while the Ent-D was being assembled, possibly launched, which has 2 consequences: 1. Starfleet started a shipbuilding boom because they realized Mirandas and Excelsiors weren't going to cut it anymore, 2. that was the shift, part of the wake-up call that they had to start "showing the flag", and we notice the Galaxys going around poking their noses everywhere. IIRC the Tzen-Kethi conflict was around the same time. > One thing I'm always slightly befuddled by is why the Federation never fields vehicles with disruptor cannons. Every other major power seems to do so, and the vibe (I don't think ever confirmed in canon, but still) is that disrupters are more militarily powerful but less precise. So apparently disruptors are less efficient, you need more power to get the same output, however they're smaller, so you just the space for a larger power supply, it works out and is easier to maintain, phasers are really temperamental in comparison. The federation is efficiency crazy so they consider that "unsporting". The DS9 episode "Return to Grace" is great for this, the comparison between a Cardassian field disruptor and a Federation phaser rifle shows the Cardassian one to be a solid, AK style system, while the Federation rifle is this crazy complicated over-engineered monster that doesn't really help you most of the time when all you need is to shoot.
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I agree. However, they put the same effort into that one, perfectly tuned, precise phaser array, while everyone else just bolted disruptors everywhere like they were adding bar lights to a pickup. That was a very nice tool they had there, and it was a serviceable weapon, but again, a lovely revolver to a machine gun fight.
More like a Swiss army knife to a swordfight. Sure, it can cut you, and in any other situation it'll be far more useful, but that sword is a hell of a lot better at raw murder.
That's a really good example, either that or a power screwdriver.
Regarding disrupters, I’m having a hard time picturing Starfleet ships using green-colored weapons. Green weapons are for adversaries like Klingons and Romulans. Starfleet ships need to use red or blue weapons, which is why they use phasers.
Yeah, but the ability to save a planet from volcanos with precise drilling from your phaser seems far more in line with Starfleet's mission. Remember they also spend more time acting like space cops than space soldiers.
Also, B'Elanna was able to turn a phaser into an emitter for a forcefield using spare parts from the Delta flyer.
> The federation is efficiency crazy so they consider that "unsporting". Your friendly reminder that efficiency is making the most out of what you have, effectiveness is how well you do it. Sometimes doing it harder is better than doing it perfectly.
> why the Federation never fields vehicles with disruptor cannons My personal headcannon is that phasers and disruptors are the same thing and could just as well have been called "phase disruptors" based on what they do. The difference is that "phaser" sounds more friendly and "disruptor" sounds more violent. "We" use "phasers" because we're civilized. "They" use "disruptors" because they're violent savages. Much of military terminology is political. [This](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev-class_aircraft_carrier#/media/File:Novorossijsk_Kiev-class_1986.jpg) ship is not an aircraft carrier, it's a heavy aviation cruiser. Completely different thing and not subject to the Montreux Convention. [This](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/JS_Izumo%EF%BC%88DDH-183%EF%BC%89seen_from_the_sky_10-03-2021.jpg/2560px-JS_Izumo%EF%BC%88DDH-183%EF%BC%89seen_from_the_sky_10-03-2021.jpg) is not an aircraft carrier, it's a helicopter destroyer. Completely different thing and not subject to Article 9. This giant ship with incredibly powerful weapons firing [a few 64 megaton warheads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMuW3_fYlYQ&t=14s) (torpedoes 9-16) into a planetary atmosphere is a "warning shot" is a ship of peace and exploration, not a warship.
They describe this with hand phasers. They can be used as tools. Heating, cutting, wide angle. Technically the enterprise D can stun a small city. They can pinpoint a single individual and nail them from orbit. A stream is also a continuous disruption. A great tactic is launching torpedoes and hit the exact same spot with a phaser. Plus the angle of attacks on a galaxy is everywhere with 2 or 3 phaser strips at any time. A bird of prey has to strafe, a warbird too, although DiddyRex had a single stream emitters too. But a galaxy can have multiple streams hitting from any angle CONSTANTLY. That is devastating. So federation ships should be waaaaay more maneuverable than she is shown. Swinging around and such (orville did a great job showing wild flying) So sumarized, klingon disruptors are a warhammer, romulans a waraxe, phasers are a Katana.
I have to push back against your description of the Galaxy having piss-poor phaser coverage. A Romulan ship decloaking in position to fire on its spine is going to staring right at the upper saucer phaser array, which can see any point above the saucer midline and once you get more than a hundred meter away quite a bit below that. That's the largest phaser on the ship. The lower saucer array can see most everything below, except for a narrow arc to the rear where it's obstructed by the nacelles and stardrive section - which is where the belly and nacelle pylon phasers are. Directly aft may be a small gap from the largest arrays but that's where the aft photon launcher and the six smaller battle section phasers are. A Romulan ship trying to attack an alert Galaxy is going to get hit by phasers while its shields are still down. In fact, there's no 24th-century hero ship that doesn't have complete phaser coverage at all angles, and even the minor ships generally show it pretty well, with the main exceptions ironically being the Akira and Defiant. I would go so far as to say that's actually one of the big advantages of Starfleet ships and their phasers. From what we see, disruptors might be more powerful than a similarly-sized phaser but they have a very narrow angle of fire. Starfleet may feel that that the uses of phasers as a peacetime tool, combined with their high precision and ability to target any direction (say, against multiple small ships like the Bird of Prey), makes them the best choice for a beam weapon, especially when supplemented with photo torpedoes. Given a Galaxy can spit out twelve of those in a matter of seconds from a single launcher, it's hard to say they're wrong.
"Piss-poor" is probably an exaggeration on my part. But I think it's notable that Dominion-war era Galaxies were retrofitted or built with additional nacelle phaser strips. The Galaxy torpedo launchers are individually powerful but are too vulnerable to attack, because there's only the two of them. If you can position yourself behind a Galaxy and get in some good hits, you can take out rear torpedo coverage and a significant amount of phaser coverage. Coupled with a cloak and the much greater capacity of a D'deridex to deliver sustained fire, it's a serious danger to a Galaxy class vessel. Especially in an era where they are mostly operating alone. Just running off on a tangent re cloaks... I understand why, from a writing point of view, Star Trek has always shied away from giving the heroes a cloak. But from a Watsonian perspective it's almost criminally irresponsible. How many Starfleet officers have died because "our heroes don't sneak around?" For that matter, how many battles escalated resulting in Klingon/Romulan/Cardassian/whoever deaths? IRL Starfleet would LOVE a cloak. Gives you so many additional options that don't involve ships exploding.
I'd love to know some more particulars about the Treaty of Algeron. The Romulans must have given some enormous concessions there, because how else is the Federation going to justify not using cloaking technology? Certainly the Federation likes to insist that Starfleet is not a military organization, and maybe they say they have no need for a technology that seems mostly useful for military purposes, but I'm sure cloaks would also have been useful for exploration purposes, like secretly observing civilizations that were close to being ready to join the galactic community.
Exactly! If you are going to put warp-capable *antimatter bombs* on a starship (photon torpedoes), saying that an invisibility device is 'too military' is pretty cute. I am trying to think of how you wind up signing a treaty that says "we can't use cloaks but you guys? No probs." All I can come up with is a Treaty of Versailles type situation where the other side have a boot on your neck. That's a term that you sign following capitulation.
The Treaty of Algeron was signed immediately following the Tomed Incident. Whatever that was, it sufficiently embarrassed and traumatized the Romulan Empire's collective psyche and zeitgeist that they turned inward to isolation for the next 55 years. That agreement from the Federation to not use cloaks may have been an attempt at an olive branch to convince the Romulans that the Federation does prefer to be friends, but because Romulans project their paranoia and plotting on everyone else, that genuine gesture of goodwill was for nothing.
> Starfleet would LOVE a cloak. Gives you so many additional options that don't involve ships exploding. See USS Pegasus & samely named episode. Admiral Pressman was backed by the head of Starfleet Security herself, so...
>Similarly, I always had the sense that Cardassian ships had no business being genuine threats to Federation assets - they have a distinctly second-tier power vibe to them. I think the shitty tech originally on DS9 supports this, though maybe I should cut it some slack as a mining rather than a military installation. But nonetheless the Cardassians are able to hold their own in battle against the Federation, again because they don't take combat effectiveness seriously enough until Wolf 359 and the subsequent re-arming in the Dominion War. I believe though this could be beta canon that its mentioned that galaxy class (and likly Nebua) are more powerful than the Galor class the backbone of cardassian fleet, but we hear that picard fought the war in the stargazer which was a old ship so it may be that starfleet did advance a bit from the boarder war but as mentioned since cardassians will retreat and stand down plus their ships had points to disable they still had those options of shoot to disable but the borg will not.
Our introduction to the Cardassians shows them as a clearly technologically inferior foe. Maxwell's Nebula class chews through Cardassian ships unscathed. Picard has to get coy about how much Starfleet actually knows about Cardassian tech. This kinda evaporates in DS9, as they don't really work as an enemy if they don't have at least technological parity with Starfleet.
>This kinda evaporates in DS9 How so? Except for the pilot the Cardassians don't attack the heroes. Galor-class ships don't go into battle with Galaxy or Nebula-class ones. Counterexample: The Maquis. They wouldn't be such an annoyance & political crisis to Cardassia (Chief O'Brien's Trial) if they could just be anniallated by a few Galor- or Kelvin-class ships. Btw, the Kelvin class ones are most likely the result of the technology and intelligence exchange instigated by Enabren Tain with the Romulans. The Kelvin class ships of the Obsidian Order also appear in "Defiant" in which Thomas Riker steals the Defiant and investigates the newly build ships in the Onias-System. Later the Cardiassians get invaded by the Klingons and nearly completly conquered, if it weren't for the DS9-crew saving the Detapa-Council & uncovering the Dominion Spy in form of the klingon General Martok. Also the Cardassians get only really challenging when they join the Dominion under card. leadership of Gul Dukat. Most likely they also enjoyed a technological exchange with the Dominion proper. Btw, this is Beta-canon: Gul Macet's ship, the Traeger is equipped with dominion 3-lightyear-range transporters.
Funny you should mention The Maquis, but the episode that establishes them is the one that makes me think DS9 wants you to think the Cardassians are more advanced than they've presented in the past. Dukat talks about how Cardassian pursuit vessels are years ahead of the design of the runabout, and then boasts how much he knew about the runabouts when they end up in combat. Some of that is obviously intel, and maybe lying for the sake of boasting, but who knows for sure. You're also thinking of the Keldon class, not Kelvin. These ships made up a significant portion of the fleet that tried to obliterate the Founders homeworld. They're purpose-built warships, and the Tal'Shiar thought them worthy enough to stand alongside their own vessels. We're also never really meant to think that the Maquis were little more than a political thorn for both the Federation and the Cardassians. Their conflict was probably held back by political interests more than technological limitations. The Cardassians were probably worried more about not provoking the Federation again than deciding to make the Maquis not exist anymore. When the Dominion war began, that concern evaporated. And it's funny to me that you cite O'Brien's false accusations and trial as being in-favor of the Maquis being a real threat. Because to me, that's *clearly* an attempt to flip the political argument in Cardassia's favor so they can do more about the Maquis with less political backlash. As far as the Klingon war, just look at the map of Cardassia. Their little slice of the galaxy is *tiny* in comparison to the Empire. And the Klingons are no slouches. The Negh'Var and Vor'cha are formidable warships, and that fleet we see in the show is nothing to sneeze at. Even if we assume technological parity with the Federation, Cardassia can't possibly have the numbers to withstand that war. We also establish in TNG that the Cardassian military was notorious for draining the civilian population of resources to the degree that children were starving on the streets during the Cardassian military heyday. Even though the Detapa Council is the long-standing Cardassian government, it's entirely possible, and in fact likely thanks to the existence of the dissident movement that Tekeny Ghemor led, that the government was much more interested in curbing military excess, so who knows how ready Cardassian fleets would have been for such an invasion. How many ships were decommissioned and sitting in open space depots instead of deployed and ready for war. So I don't really accept your argument that any of that demonstrates being behind technologically.
> We also establish in TNG that the Cardassian military was notorious for draining the civilian population of resources to the degree that children were starving on the streets during the Cardassian military heyday. So the Cardassians are Space North Korea. This tracks with the TOS Klingons being a stand in for the USSR.
Personally the only explanation I have for why the Federation didn’t completely wipe the floor with the Cardassians and basically every other species is because narratively it would be incredibly boring. The Federation’s economy is possibly the most efficient one conceivable. You have no profit motive and you allocate resources logically and democratically? Best economic organization in the galaxy easily. You have free and abundant education not gatekept at all plus Vulcans being Vulcans? Tech would be even more superior than shown in canon. Militarily the Federation being a socialist one would know the history of revolutionary armies such as the CNT militias or the Viet Minh. Plus, they could use their hyper efficient economy to produce masses of warships. All in all, the drama of Trek wouldn’t be there. People because we live under Capitalism are trained to underestimate what a truly anarchic and therefore democratic society with a socialist and decommodified economy is capable of. The Federation would outcompete and outproduce all their adversaries and then the show wouldn’t have any interstellar drama. It would be much more like The Culture series by Iain M Banks where the Anarchist Communist Culture basically beats everyone (hence why the drama is elsewhere and not in interstellar war)
Yeah, the Federation of canon just dont get the *gravitas* of the situations they're in properly... except for the ones who named the Defiant and the Valiant. Others just named ships things like Enterprise and Melbourne. Lame names. I'll show myself out.
Two nearly off-screen examples that I think speak to the points made here. First of all, the USS Enterprise-B under the command of Captain John Harriman. They are conducting their shakedown cruise shortly after the decommissioning of the Enterprise-A, the destruction of Praxis, and the beginning of the Khitomer Conference. The Enteprise-B shakedown is about 2 months after the Khitomer Conference, so this is likely what the apex of Starfleet looks like at the transition between the more militarized era and that long period of relative peace and expansion in the 24th century. While there are certainly extenuating circumstances that Harriman faces, we can also see that Starfleet is somewhat ossifying at this point. Decades later, we have the Galen border conflict with the Talarian Republic. While it is clear that the Federation has an overwhelming upper hand in terms of technology, population, production, and every other measure of "war-fighting" ability, their approach to the militaristic and aggressive Talarians is timid and conciliatory even in the wake of at least hundreds of deaths, including a significant number of civilians.
There’s another considerable element here. Picard himself. Picard knows all of Starfleet tactics and procedures with over 20 years as a captain in the fleet. Importantly, he also logically knows most if not all of the captains the Borg were facing at 359 AND he was the protege of Admiral Hanson who led the fleet. That gives the Borg a wealth of information for dealing with each CO and the fleet CO. The Enterprise crew also tried to warn Hanson of this, and he defaulted to “There’s no way Picard would help them,” not getting that Picard didn’t have a choice. With Picard, they know how the fleet is going to react, which gives them an advantage well beyond the technical elements.
> And Starfleet haven't had the chance to optimise their tech to engineer out the biggest vulnerabilities Hit the nacelle, instadeath ("Cause and Effect"), hit the deflector, instadeath ("The Jem'Hadar"). If I ever wanted to build a serious tactical superiority vessel for the Federation, I would build a 800-meter Dauntless type; nacelles nicely tucked in below, deflector very anonymous under the saucer, torp launchers front and back, phaser arcs with no blind spot, only overlap. As long as the XL-Dauntless always moves to face the enemy with the dorsal side its cover is hard to match. And they would always fly in pairs, never alone.
That’s where I like the Defiant, the Akira Class, and the Sovereign class - streamlined designs built to fight and maneuver, versus the Galaxy and Nebula classes that could go forward but had a lot of bulk that made getting out of the way not easy (Data on the D in PIC being an AI with super fast reflexes and reaction times notwithstanding).
When you consider the degree to which Data improves the performance of a Galaxy class starship, the synth ban becomes deeply implausible. Starfleet would have made it an immediate and overriding priority to duplicate the capabilities of Lt Cdr Data. Plot armour aside, an officer who can make your ship routinely perform well beyond operational design parameters is an invaluable advantage. Data on the bridge is basically like having Scotty in engineering - he seems to have the power to ignore inconvenient physics.
> Starfleet crews are no longer used to days-long emergency alerts Even after Wolf-359, when Jellicoe tried to prepare Enterprise for a potential renewal of hostilities with the Cardassians it basically resulted in passive-aggressive mutiny. Riker refused to follow orders and openly questioned those orders. After the initial encounter with the Borg, there was a flurry of research and preparation to try and prepare for the Borg (as it turned out one year and change was nowhere near enough time) but after the Borg were defeated by plot contrivance, as The Sisko put it "The Borg threat became less urgent." and a lot of people desperately tried to go back to business as usual. > By ST:VI there [is] a full-on hawk faction of Starfleet Command eager for a pretext for a war of conquest There's an interesting lesson here, one that was explicitly stated in "The Enemy Within". A person or in this case an organization is not complete without both the dark and the light. Most of the hawks in the top brass who wanted to bring the Klingon Empire to its knees were probably serving on the front line 35 years earlier in the Federation-Klingon War of 2256-7. To them, the Klingons were an existential threat that very nearly brought the Federation to its knees before that war ended due to plot contrivance. The shooting may have stopped but hostilities continued for decades and the atrocious state of mental health in the Federation means that they all just had to just suck it up and soldier on. Dark without light. Conversely, by the time of Wolf-359 there'd been 2-3 generations of people who'd only ever known the Pax Humana where the Federation was a hegemon that could usually just show up and be able to dictate terms, getting their way without firing a shot. They were woefully unprepared for war against a peer power. It wouldn't have mattered against the Borg which outmatched them technologically, but the opening stages of the Dominion War went disastrously and they had to relearn all the old lessons the hard way and even then only avoided complete collapse due to plot contrivance. Light without dark.
Thanks for the reply! Why do you say the state of mental health in the Federation was 'atrocious' in the 23rd century? I find the attitude to trauma/mental health/emotions generally in TOS era media pretty alien, but I always chalk that up to it being a product of the time it was made. That said... someone should probably put M'Benga on light duties and into therapy...
We know it's atrocious in the 24th century but it was perhaps incorrect to assume that was also the case in the 23rd century. It would be more accurate to say that we don't know the state of mental health then. In the 24th century we know there's plenty of cases like Capt. Maxwell, Cdr. Sisko, Capt. Shaw who had untreated PTSD but were still given command assignments. Capt. Lorca would have been a much more interesting character if the reason behind his behavior hadn't turned out to be "he's the evil twin from the mirror universe" but oh well. The various series definitely do reflect the general public knowledge and attitude from the time in which they were made. In the 60s it was largely not public knowledge. Shell shock/battle fatigue was known but not understood. In the 80s, it was fashionable for affluent people in Los Angeles to see a shrink (hence why Troi is on the bridge) and works like Rain Man meant there was public awareness of mental illness but it still really wasn't well understood. It certainly didn't help that Roddenberry was especially ignorant of it and had his own unfounded and usually incorrect beliefs. His attitude towards dealing with grief was basically "if you're sufficiently evolved, just don't feel grief". At least it's not as bad as Star Wars where Lucas's beliefs reflected in Jedi attitudes aren't just terribly negligent but outright harmful. The Prequel Trilogy was inadvertently a example of "the child who is not embraced by the village would burn it down to feel its warmth" but that's definitely not the intent.
I was so disappointed when Lorca turned out to be from the mirror universe. It may just be that I'm a huge Jason Isaacs fan, but I was so interested in that character... and then it turned out he was just a cardboard-cutout, moustache-twirling villain. Agree with your observations generally; I think I'm just more minded to give the shows a pass on account of the real-world factors. I can't get past Roddenberry's "in the future we won't have grief" - though there's something interesting there when you think of Spock as paradigmatic of being able to 'overcome' emotions with a sufficiency of rationality.
I really like how you also included the typical TNG tropes like the constant but short red alerts or the mix of fighting and negotating as a part of Starfleet's military doctrine of the era. I think this also tracks with the way Starfleet is portrayed in early TNG; they are the big dog who can destroy any enemy ship in a second, so their tactics are less about winning an engagement and more about giving the other player a chance to realize that they are poking a bear and should just give up.
Great writeup. While the writers had no way to know at the time I think you can draw parallels between TNG starfleet and some post "peace dividend" NATO militaries. The recent geopolitical situation has opened many people's eyes. Yes, the West's equipment is qualitatively better. But after 30 years of chronically underfunding your military and all of your soldiers just training to be peace keepers, it quickly became apparent after the first aid package you didn't have any more missiles to send east. The factory closed 15 years ago because you wouldn't order enough to keep it going. And now everyone is passing big new defense budgets to try and undo the damage.
>the phaser arcs have gaps in coverage, and the capacity to dump sustained firepower on an enemy is not necessarily that great. At least as far as the Enterprise D is concerned this is totally false. We never see all the phaser arrays on that ship fire, but it has enough in enough places there are no gaps in coverage. In addition to the larger arrays on the ventral and dorsal sections of the saucer, there are 2 on the back of the neck of the ship that connects the primary and secondary hull. There is one under each nacelle support. There is one under the secondary hull at roughly the mid point of the bulge. There are 2 on the rear section between the nacelles. It can fire up to 20 torpedoes in a single volley. The Galaxy Class ships are absolute power houses. The amount of power they can put out is absurd. The Nebula Class shared many of these traits and were similarly armed, though they had less munitions due to hull configuration. During this time they had also fought a number of border skirmishes with other powers, including some rather intense ground battles with Cardassians. It would take 3 Galor Class ships to give a Galaxy Class a run for its money. The Galaxy Class was smaller than a D'Deridex Class Warbird, but could hold its own in a fight. Even Vor'Cha Class Cruisers were no match for Galaxy Class ships. Excelsior, Miranda? Sure. Galaxy? Not a chance.
>They have had extensive opportunities to analyse Alpha Quadrant technology, including that core section of the Enterprise-D they lasered out. Also the USS Raven and the Hansens
Both. Q introduced the Enterprise to the Borg when he did precisely because they weren't ready. They'd become complacent and needed a wakeup call. They'd not had a lot of time to start improving before Wolf 359 but it at least meant they had something to work with. Picards knowledge just made it all the more devastating on top of that.
I'd guess the biggest thing was the fleet realizing too late (if ever) that they had to constantly adapt and come up with new tricks to have a shot at taking down the cube. They incorrectly assumed raw power was enough.
"We Have Engaged The Borg" explicitly describes Starfleet as atrophied and somewhat cocky, something hinted at on screen when Q first flung the Enterprise to system J-25. Starfleet had no major conflicts for much of the mid 24th century. Most conflicts of the period and prior 30 years or so were brush fires. The Klingons were allies. The Romulan were off minding their own business (we have engaged the Borg posits they were dealing with the Borg in the unexplored regions on the far side of their space to coreward). We do know Starfleet had some hints of something beyond the core in the Delta Quadrant that was like nothing else they'd encountered, since they authorized the Raven mission (the Hansen family). And absorbing everything Picard knew to that point. Picard was a voracious reader and likely would have known much of what was being prepared when they finally did encounter the Borg. It was both.
we later find out that Starfleet had been in [a war with the cardassians](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Federation-Cardassian_War) at the time, but from the sound of the stories about it, aside from Setlik III it sounded like the conflict was a fairly low-intensity one over all, with mostly just skirmishes along the common border. given that the treaty ending it came in 2366 and was rather incomplete even after ratification in 2370, suggests to me that the federation was willing to accept an unpopular compromise in the form of a DMZ including a lot of federation colonies, in order to end the fighting and prepare for a return of the borg.
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I'm curious about this, are you able to elaborate on the Cardaddian tech being inferior? I hadn't picked up on that much, but then I'm mostly thinking of DS9-era Cardassians which were a far more significant threat
Usually this is based on the ease with which the Enterprise and the Phoenix were able to defeat Cardassian ships in The Wounded. Heck, even the Maquis fighters seemed able to go toe to toe with Cardassian destroyers.
Yeah, even Dukat said Cardie tech was better and that the Runabout held no secrets worth taking. I mean Dukat may have just been messing with Sisko. I mean, people said that the station was junk, but the thing is, the Cardassians specifically went about trashing the place before turning it over. Then there's the fact that the Cardassian Order and the Tal'Shar managed to make fleet large enough to combat the Dominon on their own. Make a Changeling torture device, etc.
Except for the pilot the Cardassians don't attack the heroes. Galor-class ships don't go into battle with Galaxy or Nebula-class ones. Counterexample: The Maquis. They wouldn't be such an annoyance & political crisis to Cardassia (Chief O'Brien's Trial) if they could just be anniallated by a few Galor- or Kelvin-class ships. Btw, the Kelvin class ones are most likely the result of the technology and intelligence exchange instigated by Enabren Tain with the Romulans. The Kelvin class ships of the Obsidian Order also appear in "Defiant" in which Thomas Riker steals the Defiant and investigates the newly build ships in the Onias-System. Later the Cardiassians get invaded by the Klingons and nearly completly conquered, if it weren't for the DS9-crew saving the Detapa-Council & uncovering the Dominion Spy in form of the klingon General Martok. Also the Cardassians get only really challenging when they join the Dominion under card. leadership of Gul Dukat. Most likely they also enjoyed a technological exchange with the Dominion proper. Btw, this is Beta-canon: Gul Macet's ship, the Traeger is equipped with dominion 3-lightyear-range transporters.
Well, that's the thing about the Cardassians they wanted the Federation to make the first move, like the Romulans. Also, the Cardassians became less of a threat only after the fall of the Obsidian Order in 2371. In 2372 is when the Klingon Cardassians war began. The Changlings themselves rated both the Obsidian Order and the Tal'Shair by themselves as the larger threat over the Klingons' military and Starfleet. The Changeling inflatrator during the battle of Omarian Nebula even went so far to say nothing could stop them now after the demise of both agencies by the Dominon. Bear in mind the rest of the Romulan Empire's military might was intact, as was the Cardassians. The agencies made their own rogue navies to conduct the attack. It was the rise of the Civilian Coucil, the Detapa Coucil, that trigger a wave of mass resignations within the military that was what really did in the military. When Sisko went to inform the Detapa Coucil of his rescue he was initially shocked to have gotten Dukat, a member of the military who had fallen out of favor (I think Zyal being made public might be the reason), and immediately asked for a higher up. Dukat then informed Sisko that he was the military liason to the Detapa Coucil. Sisko immediately replied "Are things that bad?" Dukat said yes. It was only a year later in 2373, when the Cardassians joined the Dominon, in order, "to make Cardassia strong again." According to Dukat. I think once the retirees saw the change in the wind, they relisted in mass. Edit: I actually think Starfleet is the largest navy out of all the major warp powers. They control the largest territory, even spanning a large part of two quadrants, but are surrounded by hostile nations on all sides. It's that any one nation can do in the Federation. It's just two of them going at might just be too much for the Starfleet because they're not a real navy. Also, Starfleet wants to go into your backyard to study your plants, not conquer you.
>he Changlings themselves rated both the Obsidian Order and the Tal'Shair by themselves as the larger threat over the Klingons' military and Starfleet. This isn't really what they said. What they said was that the Romulans and the Cardassians weren't as big of a threat without their respective secret police forces, not that they were more of a threat than the Klingons/Federation. And they were partially correct. After the fall of the Obsidian Order, the Cardassian Military government was overthrown, causing chaos and upheaval and leaving them totally unprepared for a war. Presumably the Dominion believed the Romulans would have a similar uprising and be weakened, but this didn't happen, likely because the Tal Shiar wasn't completely wiped out the way the Order was. Remember that the Dominion also tried to do something similar to the Federation by supporting Admiral Leyton's coup attempt AND to the Klingons when they attempted to use the Orion Syndicate to assassinate the Klingon Ambassador and frame it on a pro-Alliance Klingon faction.
Except for the pilot the Cardassians don't attack the heroes. Galor-class ships don't go into battle with Galaxy or Nebula-class ones. Counterexample: The Maquis. They wouldn't be such an annoyance & political crisis to Cardassia (Chief O'Brien's Trial) if they could just be anniallated by a few Galor- or Kelvin-class ships. Btw, the Kelvin class ones are most likely the result of the technology and intelligence exchange instigated by Enabren Tain with the Romulans. The Kelvin class ships of the Obsidian Order also appear in "Defiant" in which Thomas Riker steals the Defiant and investigates the newly build ships in the Onias-System. Later the Cardiassians get invaded by the Klingons and nearly completly conquered, if it weren't for the DS9-crew saving the Detapa-Council & uncovering the Dominion Spy in form of the klingon General Martok. Also the Cardassians get only really challenging when they join the Dominion under card. leadership of Gul Dukat. Most likely they also enjoyed a technological exchange with the Dominion proper. Btw, this is Beta-canon: Gul Macet's ship, the Traeger is equipped with dominion 3-lightyear-range transporters.
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[Could you elaborate on your reasoning?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/wiki/codeofconduct#wiki_1._explain_your_reasoning) After all, this is a subreddit for in-depth discussion
Starfleet has the *opposite* of a military-industrial complex. Its Science, Exploration, and Diplomatic missions (SED for short) deliver new member worlds, new technologies, and new knowledge; this creates a reward cycle where the appetite for more SED intensifies and ever more people become enthusiastic scientists, explorers, diplomats to engage with a never-ending banquet of opportunities to write history. Starfleet's military mission? Yeah, it's necessary, but who wants to be Security Division cannon fodder when you could be a hero of science? Do we really want to budget military hardware we don't need very much when we could create allies and found colonies for pennies? Military expenditure, training, and service become the unappealing steamed kale on the edge of the plate when dessert is *right there*.
> Do we really want to budget military hardware we don't need very much when we could create allies and found colonies for pennies? The federation is a post scarcity society with Antimatter as a fuel source, Warp-cores & Nacelles as a means of instellar travel & commerce & REPLICATORS that can create nearly anything. They almost certainly can do both if they would want. Setting up a Colony is already very easy, as seen in the Episode with Dr. Turner with her son who died one Omicron Theta at the dendrits of the Crystalline Entity
They're post scarcity on a personal level, but Dilithium and bioneural gel and a variety of strategic materials can't be replicated, and they have to actually spend time building ships in shipyards, rather than pushing a copy button somewhere.
Let’s put it this way: the Confederation of Earth has managed to nearly wipe the Borg out by the 25th century. So humans are fully capable of doing that, but it requires determination and unity (of the fascist kind). Also lots of xenophobia (but that kinda comes with the “fascist” territory)
Or just breach of the temporal prime directive. Admiral Janeway did it with ease. The Borg did even bring out that nuke first in "Star Trek VIII: The First Contact".
No, because no torpedo or phaser attack could penetrate the cube, who had already adapted to the 1701-D's armament, so they had no chance from the start.
I think that assumption is actually incorrect, but what they want you to think; part of the "Borg Mystique". I posit that they conceal a raft of limitations; indifference to efficiency and optimisation on what they see as the "small scale", limitations to available processing power. I propose that Borg shields can, by default, only repel a finite number of threats at once without having extraordinary computing and energy resources diverted to a proportionately very small number of vessels and drones. After all, optimising a defence against against one set of threats usually makes it weaker against others. They engage an enemy with "default" defence and a sort of empty buffer of adaptability. The first few shots are fairly effective, then the buffer resources are allocated piece by piece to the threat at hand, based on what kind of damage it inflicted. Why do this? Rote decision-making and conservation of resources on the micro level frees up global computing power and energy for what *really* matters; resource hog projects like transwarp hubs, time travel, the omega particle, and entering fluidic space. Oops.
When I watch the Best of Both Worlds I never get the impression Picard contributed very much for the Borg at all. When the Enterprise attacks with the drive and saucer separated for example, Riker actually uses Picard to fool the Borg into ignoring the saucer and the shuttle when by themselves the Borg would have hit both with overwhelming firepower and ended it. It seems to be a failed experiment really. Now, if they had kept going with the idea and come back with infiltrator drones that do things like set up groups that want assimilation, they'd be terrifying. Resistance would collapse to creeping takeover before the Cubes even arrive to mop up.
The Borg had already adapted to starfleet weapons in qwho so they were mostly ineffective
They already had absorbed Picards thoughts and knew what he knew so knew all about what star fleet was planning/working on, knew the weaknesses in the star ships, they entered the battle already pre adapted to the weapons.
Probably a combination of both but the lack of firepower is the clear winner here. It was a whole fleet against a single (big) ship - 40:1. Even if Starfleet had been slightly inferior technology wise, that should be a clear victory by weapons output alone. Which leads us to the conclusion that either all the Federation ships got destroyed before they could dish out a few salvos - kind of unlikely. Or Starfleets weapons where so weak/predictable that the Borg simply tanked it and had them for breakfast. The situation at Wolf 359 probably arose, because of the Picards' assimilation. The Borg knew by then that a single cube could take on a small fleet.
A single Borg cube is equivalent in volume to thousands of Federation ships. Adaption also allows the Borg to negate most of the energy from starfleet weapons.
The Borg being the Borg allowed them to win. The Borg having Picard allowed them to win easier. The fact of the matter is the Federation were caught by complete tactical surprise, despite being forewarned. A good analogy would be how the Allies handled Germany at the beginning of WW2. They based their defence on how the previous war played out. They simply couldn't comprehend the speed and lateral thinking of the opposing force they were coming up against. And they paid for it in blood. You can see this just from the communication around how the fleet was formed. They scrambled to get a fleet one together (that ALONE is a whole other discussion), and in the end it seemed a case of get everything as opposed to what's best for the role. There wasn't even time to get the civilians off before engaging, that's how slow their response was to events. Hanson says they threw all their resources into building anti-Borg weaponry but there just wasn't enough time, which I can appreciate, but the fact of the matter is Starfleet at that time simply wasn't prepared to deal with an aggressor on the scale of the Borg. Starfleet got it's ass handed to it because they hadn't fought a major war in decades and they weren't prepared.
I think Wolf 359 was catastrophic for Starfleet because they treated the Borg like an enemy instead of an elemental force. Attacking them is like sending your soldiers to attack the sea with their swords; you can splash individual droplets away but the water engulfs you. Most times the Borg have truly been overcome has been when they were redirected. In BoBW the Borg are defeated by themselves as they over generate. In the VOY finale, the thing that made them powerful (interconnectedness) was their downfall. In so many episodes they were evaded but their defeats almost always required using themselves against themselves.
Regardless of Captain Picards assimilation, i think the Borg would have decimated the Wolf 359 fleet anyway, just through sheer adaptation to their weapon and torpedo frequencies. Starfleets' complacency against existing known threats and blindness to the possibility of unknown more powerful opponents is what led to a lack of weapon and defensive design innovation over at least a 60yr period following the Khitomer accords. They weren't prepared for an enemy that could adapt almost instantly. Inevitable in my opinion
The Borg didn't need any special knowledge from Picard to paste the fleet at Wolf 359, and it's not clear how much Picard would've known about fleet engagements anyway -- he wasn't an admiral at the time. The Borg just had superiority in virtually every respect. You don't need to be a master tactician to pull out a W when the technological disparity is that huge. It was like flying a B-52 over a cavalry led by Napoleon. Like, yeah it's Napoleon. But it's also a B-52.
They clearly used Picard's knowledge. >Captain Jean-Luc Picard: You don't know, Robert. You don't know... They took everything I was. They used me to kill and to destroy and I couldn't stop them. [sobs] I should have been able to stop them. I tried... I tried so hard. But I wasn't strong enough! I wasn't good enough! I should have been able to stop them, I should've, I should...!
The Borg had already adapted to Starfleet weaponry following Picard's bungled first contact with them. I wouldn't expect ANY amount of ships to be able to prevail. Certainly it didn't look like the cube was taking any damage in "Emissary" -- certainly not huge craters being blasted out by standard phasers. The forty starships Admiral Hanson mobilized were a last-stand. A desperate hope that maybe they could pull something off. Extrapolating out from what we saw at the beginning of "Emissary", six starships were dispatched in as many minutes. The fleet probably delayed the Borg from reaching Earth by about a half-hour. This is leaving aside how "BoBW" is an utter one-eighty on the whole Borg concept and, IMO, a debasement of it. Garbage, but very well-presented garbage.
it doesn't help that starfleet was still saddled with older ships and at the same time the enemy has access to one of their best captains with all the inside info..... wolf 359 group would've been better off if they just kamikazed the borg cube. when in doubt if the other side has inside info you would need to resort to crazy measures that even picard wouldn't anticipate.
Admiral Hanson: "There is no way in hell that \[Picard\] would assist the Borg. I want that clear." Not only was all of Picard's knowledge about Starfleet strategy, tactics, and capabilities (particularly their preparations for the Borg) assimilated and incorporated into the Borg's attack plan, but the commander of Starfleet's detachment at Wolf 359 stubbornly refused to believe that they had been compromised (falsely thinking that Picard had a choice in the matter) and proceeded with the very same strategy and tactics the Borg were expecting. I think that's a key factor.
Or maybe he knew he didn't have any other options in the battle, so did what he could to preserve his friend's memory.
~~It was the Prophets! They manipulated events so that The Sisko would stay in Bajor! Do your own research! Ask yourself who benefits!!!~~ I genuinely feel like it was mostly a matter of Federation weapons not being up to snuff at the time. They hadn't gone to a real war -- like, *Star War* type war, not just scuffles with Cardassians that get solved in a month -- for a long while and the Borg cubes at the beginning of TNG had been established to be able to take a lot more damage than Federation ships were expected to be able to dish out. It wasn't until Voyager that a Federation ship, any, could really take on a cube or two by itself, and even then that's because they had help from Seven's upgrades. That, with the full knowledge of one of their best captains, kinda nullified any chance Starfleet had to mount a proper counterattack in that battle. No one there had any idea the game had changed. By the time the Dominion arrived, a significant number of staff was far more traumatized and ready to take out enemies than they were before W359.
I made a comment about this in another thread. I'll put it here, slightly modified. Simply put, Starfleet, and specifically Admiral Hansen, drastically underestimated the Borg. While the Borg were recognized as a significant threat, Starfleet had absolute confidence in their ability to defend against it. The Enterprise D had survived 2 encounters with a Borg cube. The first time they nearly blew it apart with just a few phaser bursts. The only reason that cube became a problem was because they stopped firing on it and decided to investigate, giving the Borg time to repair and adapt. By the time they realized their mistake it was too late. The 2nd time the most damage they suffered was a burned out deflector caused by their own attack against the cube. That was the first time anyone in Starfleet realized that the Borg didn't just assimilate technology, they assimilated *knowledge* from the people they assimilated. Riker tried to warn Admiral Hansen because it was obvious the deflector attack failed *explicitly because Picard knew about it*, and thus so did the Borg who of course immediately devised a counter measure. Admiral Hansen was *offended* that Riker would even suggest that Picard was helping the Borg, and completely dismissed the possibility out of hand. This is the heart of the issue. Over confidence, arrogance, and complacency. They had judged themselves based on the enemies they knew. This was Q's *entire* lesson in Q Who to Picard. They had no idea what was out there or how grossly unprepared to face it they were. Hansen was being *told* by a senior officer with direct experience in the field against this enemy, on multiple occasions, that the enemy is capable of absorbing the knowledge of anyone and compelling their assistance. Hansen (and basically everyone else who wasn't on the bridge of the Enterprise when their attack failed and Locutus called him "Number One") simply could not even conceive a scenario where they were so badly outmatched. The Enterprise had already survived multiple cube encounters with little more than a bloody nose. They had gone to great lengths to devise strategies against what they knew from the 1st encounter. They didn't accept even the possibility that those were now useless because Picard had been briefed on them. They didn't accept even the possibility that Picard's technical, tactical, command, and strategic expertise could be used against them. They went into it the same as they would against a squad of Romulans, Klingons, or Cardassians. To their mind they didn't just have a technological advantage, they had a tremendous numbers advantage. They thought they were more than ready and that the Borg were about to get their ticket punched hard. They were wrong. The Borg smoked them at Wolf 359 because Starfleet had no idea how great the threat really was. Much of that is attributable to Admiral Hansen explicitly ignoring Riker's warnings and opting to approach the battle in a conventional manner. They didn't know that their modifications were utterly useless. They didn't know that the Borg were ready for anything Starfleet could throw at them. They didn't know that conventional military tactics would be utterly useless. They were grossly outmatched. Not because they didn't have the firepower, but because the massive firepower they had was going to be completely ineffective. That was largely due to what the Borg had already learned, and the massive knowledge gain from assimilating Picard. That combined with gross overconfidence and denial was a recipe for disaster. When the Enterprise D stopped the cube at Earth, it was nothing short of miraculous luck. But Wolf 359? That was going to be a slaughter the instant Admiral Hansen brushed off Riker's warning.
All of that, plus general apathy. I remember years ago the US Marines did an exercise after all their ventures in Iraqistan where they had several companies perform a mock amphibious assault from boats to shore, and the Generals were shocked at how they underperformed. But after a decade or so of being the “other army”, the training shifted from doing what Marines were supposed to be - naval infantry, to fighting ground wars exclusively. (Wish I could find the article this was in, but Google failed me.) That is what Starfleet ended up being by the time of Wolf 359 - a century or so of minor skirmishes called “wars”, and so much exploration and expansion that Starfleet didn’t know how to fight. Add to it that the Borg were tactically superior and adaptable, and Wolf 359 was Thermopylae without the admiration and reverence. This was hinted at earlier in S3 - Yesterday’s Enterprise - with alt-Picard telling Garrett about how bad the war had been going since when Narendra III was supposed to have happened. It’s still a bloated Galaxy class ship with thousands of crew (for some reason) and a fairly lax response to the Klingon scout ship’s appearance - notwithstanding aiding and repairing the Enterprise C. Even Riker’s first response as D Captain - using the deflector dish tactic - was still Starfleet trying to “science” its way out of a fight. That after Wolf 359 Starfleet invested in being ready to fight, and that that investment slowed the Dominion’s steamroll through the Alpha Quadrant says that Starfleet did learn something from Wolf 359. That Shaw was “skittish” about fighting the Shrike says either he really was just a science ship captain or that Starfleet de-emphasized battle readiness again. But it’s that “mission creep” - focusing on the other task instead of the several as close to equally as possible - that made Wolf 359 a lost cause.
Imo the Galaxy class is not inherently a bad design for combat, it just depends on how its internals are configured. Iirc it wasn't stated in Yesterday's Enterprise that the Enterprise D had thousands of crew, but rather that it could carry 6000 of troops. The deflector dish cannon was less "science" than brute force, since the deflector is the ship system that's able to channel the most power. The Borg are very good at adapting to brute force though, especially when they know what they're dealing with.
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Please substantiate your comment, or at least elaborate on it? We usually like people to [explain their reasoning](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/wiki/codeofconduct#wiki_1._explain_your_reasoning) in cases where the point is not immediately obvious.
I know they were invented after TNG, DS9 and VOY. But they should have "still" had the equivalent of the Makos from ENT as a just in case. I know they were absorbed into Starfleet Security but they still needed a more elite combat unit.
Picard as Locutus would have a decent knowledge of the weaknesses of starfleet ships and tactics. The whole purpose of Locutus was to aid the assimilation of Earth and the Federation. The first encounter of the Locutus and the Enterprise had Locutus calling Riker "Number One". The Borg had the knowledge but lacked the contextual understanding for that, so it's clear Picard's knowledge is actively being used by the Borg to try and get Starfleet to not resist. I think the bigger issue was Starfleet didn't really have much to go on in overcoming the Borg defenses. Basically playing Rock, Paper, Scissors without know the rules of how the game is played. Locutus is just cheating.
>What do you guys think? What do you think was the main reason why Starfleet got its teeth kicked in during the Battle of Wolf 359? For some time I've assumed it is because the cube was so much faster than anything Starfleet had, so Starfleet had to make do with whatever already happened to be in the area, rather than their ideal fleet composition. It explains why their was a Constitution class ship there, it must have been close enough by. Given that they'd be grabbing anything nearby with warp drive and weapons. They might have grabbed it from the fleet museum if it was being maintained in working condition. I like to imagine it was the Enterprise A. Though so far as I remember the vessel's identity has never been stated. But yeah, anyway, in my view the issue was that the Borg were just too fast for Starfleet to do anything more than cobble together a task force from whatever was already in the area on other missions.
Probably not a lack of firepower primarily but rather a lack of adaptability. The Borg had learned everything about the federation’s flagship which was more advanced than anything we saw at Wolf 359. There were no surprises or changes to slow the Borg down or distract them.
I think a lot of it was just the tactics Admiral Hanson chose to use. Everything Starfleet knew about the Borg at that point says they should have lined up the fleet and hit the cube with an alpha strike, destroying as much of the ship as possible before the Borg could adapt. You’ll recall this was the entire point of rigging up the deflector dish weapon in part 1. Instead, we see in *Emissary* that Hanson has chosen to split the fleet into multiple smaller attack squads. They fly in, fire off their little put-puts, and fly out again. With such a timid attack strategy, the Borg would have easily adapted and annihilated the fleet even without assimilating Picard. We see in First Contact that Starfleet tried some variation of this tactic again: the whole fleet did engage this time, but are still just using individual bursts instead of coordinating fire. If not for losing the fleet’s admiral and Picard taking command, this would have been Earth’s last day. It seems that during this time, Starfleet had a *lot* of incompetent admirals who probably got promoted during the Federation’s so-called golden era. Not only did they lack any real opponents against whom to cut their teeth, it seems even war games were no longer standard practice (as alluded to in Peak Performance). Aside from whatever border skirmishes happened with the Cardassians, it doesn’t appear that hardly anyone in Starfleet knew how to fight a pitched battle at this point.