PROBERT in need of a little help-

[Probert]

Yup, it's me again... This time I'm trying to get some questions answered about StarFleet "LifeBoats" or "EscapePods".

The time and space? The battle of 'Wolf-359'.

The question... what sort of lifeboats/pods would have been predominantly used during that battle?

Once that's pretty well hashed out, how would they dock with a rescue ship? Seriously, I haven't had time to keep up with all that but I want to be accurate when I paint them into my 2013 SOTL calendar page... so I'm looking for information that will satisfy everyone when they see it (them)... I want them to be recognizable.

Thanks, all, for any help on this.
Andrew-

[Holdfast]

Sounds like a very interesting project; I hope someone here has specific/verifiable information for you. I look forward to seeing the final painting in the calendar. Always good to see you in the TNG forum too.

As a fan that doesn't really follow the technical canon side of things at all closely, on a personal note I think it would be fun if there was some aesthetic/design lineage with the only lifeboats I can recall seeing - the ones in First Contact from the E-E. A precursor variant of these would be good. I always assumed they'd be collected by tractor beam into the rescue ship shuttle bay (or if still under power from their thrusters, land under their own steam in the shuttle bay).

As I say, that's just my gut feeling, and not based on any sort of verifiable canon answer! I'm sure others will be along with more suggestions soon.

[Kirks_Flying_Wig]

IIRC is there not an example of a TNG-era escape pod in the TNG Tech Manual? Much more cubic-shaped than the First Contact/Voyager type. I would imagine those small types would have been abundant in the Wolf 359 battlefield, maybe with a smattering of the newer ones that have been ejected from newer ships.

Consider also the escape pod used by Sisko in "Emissary" that was attached to the Miranda-class Saratoga - no clear shot of the outside but I got the impression it resembled a shuttlepod with simple thrusters. Shuttles themselves could also have been used as lifeboats (cf. Star Trek 2009).

In terms of how the shuttles are recovered by ships, Holdfast has already mentioned tractor beams and their own thruster power. Depending on how safe the battlefield was to enter afterwards (lots of debris drifting around), survivors may also have just been beamed onto ships en masse (consider Ezri's recovery of Worf in "Penumbra").

The first part of Christopher L. Bennett's TNG novel The Buried Age describes the aftermath of the Battle of Maxia; weeks after the Stargazer has been abandoned, the surviving crewmembers have linked their escape pods to conserve resources.

I imagine the survivors of Wolf 359 would have done that sort of thing almost immediately as they might not know how long they'd be bobbing around for waiting for rescue.

[Dukhat]

Probert wrote:

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Yup, it's me again... This time I'm trying to get some questions answered about StarFleet "LifeBoats" or "EscapePods".

The time and space? The battle of 'Wolf-359'.

The question... what sort of lifeboats/pods would have been predominantly used during that battle?

Once that's pretty well hashed out, how would they dock with a rescue ship? Seriously, I haven't had time to keep up with all that but I want to be accurate when I paint them into my 2013 SOTL calendar page... so I'm looking for information that will satisfy everyone when they see it (them)... I want them to be recognizable.

Thanks, all, for any help on this.
Andrew-

Hello Mr. Probert,

I was one of the contributors to the Wolf 359 "research project" from a decade ago at Bernd Schneider's Ex-Astris-Scientia site: http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/wolf359.htm

Here's my expertise:

1. The only canon escape pod we ever saw during the battle was for the U.S.S. Saratoga, the one Sisko uses to escape. It seemed to resemble a large shuttlecraft, and seemed to launch from the ship's shuttlebays as well. Presumably they are meant to land in another ship's shuttlebay.

2. Many of the actual kitbashed models seen in BoBW Pt. II were based on the Enterprise-D, which had ASRVs. Close inspection of the Kyushu, Chekov, Buran, Ahwahnee and Melbourne models show the same type of hatches that the Ent-D had, so presumably those ships carried ASRV's too. I believe the TNG Tech Manual states that the pods can be docked together to form large clusters. As for docking with another ship, I would guess that tractor-beaming them into the shuttlebay would be the most efficient means of bringing them aboard.

Hope this helps!

[SPCTRE]

I'm sorry, I don't have better screencaps than the ones from TrekCore at hand.

The shape is super blurry.

Just to illustrate where I remember seeing TNG-era escape pods used, in this case specifically during the battle of Wolf 359.

[Dukhat]

SPCTRE wrote:

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I'm sorry, I don't have better screencaps than the ones from TrekCore at hand.

Star Trek Mechanics and the Star Trek Fact Files has photos of the pod filming model and diagrams, respectively. Both pics can be found at Bernd's site.

Oh, and Mr. Probert? If the creative mood strikes you when you make your painting, I for one would love to see a design for the Rigel Class U.S.S. Tolstoy (The script used "U.S.S. Chekov" but was changed to "Tolstoy" in post-production...so a Tolstoy model was never built).

[zar]

Holdfast wrote:

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As a fan that doesn't really follow the technical canon side of things at all closely, on a personal note I think it would be fun if there was some aesthetic/design lineage with the only lifeboats I can recall seeing - the ones in First Contact from the E-E.

You can see the triangular outlines on the E, but on the D they are beige rectangles.

I think the only other times there is a clear external shot of Starfleet escape pods is when the Valiant and Defiant are destroyed ("Valiant" and "The Changing Face of Evil"). Those ones were hexagonal.

[Probert]

Wow, lots of responses already... thanks.

Was the battle of Wolf-359 featured in DS-9 as well?... since I didn't watch that show. If it were me (painting for myself) I would only use the lifeboats from the Galaxy Class / TNG-era ships; the boxy ones. But, again, I wanna cover all the bases.

Thanks again,
Andrew-

[C.E. Evans]

I think most lifeboats would have been fairly simplistic in shape--a basic cube with a hatch/docking port, a small viewport, some maneuvering jets (RCS thrusters), and one primary thruster that was used primarily for escaping the ship.

I believe it was in Rick and Mike's TNG Technical Manual that it was suggested that lifeboats could be linked together in a way not too much unlike the way the old Soyuz and Apollo capsules could, so modularity would probably be very important. Rescue starships might be able to tow linked escape pods in a chain/cluster or simply beam dozens of 'em directly into their various cargo and shuttle bays if they're big enough to hold them.

[Gep Malakai]

Probert wrote:

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Was the battle of Wolf-359 featured in DS-9 as well?... since I didn't watch that show. If it were me (painting for myself) I would only use the lifeboats from the Galaxy Class / TNG-era ships; the boxy ones. But, again, I wanna cover all the bases.

It was seen in the pilot episode as part of Sisko's backstory. (Both he and his wife were involved in the battle; his wife got killed.)

I was always under the impression that the squares on the Ent-D were hatches covering the real pods, since that's how the USS Voyager handled it:

Dukhat wrote:

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Star Trek Mechanics and the Star Trek Fact Files has photos of the pod filming model and diagrams, respectively. Both pics can be found at Bernd's site.

And here's the images:

[KNH]

Presumably, this is as good of a shot as we have for Galaxy-Class lifeboats:

The TNG Technical Manual also mentions that, in accordance with the example above, they're meant to interlock and form clusters to increase efficiency and survival chances.

As for your question, yes - the battle of Wolf 359 was a key point of the DS9 premiere; Sisko participated and lost his wife in it, leading to some animosity towards Picard.

[Dukhat]

Gep Malakai wrote:

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I was always under the impression that the squares on the Ent-D were hatches covering the real pods, since that's how the USS Voyager handled it

Yes, that's correct; they're just the hatches. In the TNG Companion, Larry Nemecek stated that Greg Jein's purposely-built-with-battle-damage ship models had open lifeboat hatches, but I've yet to see anything like that in photos of the two known models he built.

Probert wrote:

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Was the battle of Wolf-359 featured in DS-9 as well?... since I didn't watch that show. If it were me (painting for myself) I would only use the lifeboats from the Galaxy Class / TNG-era ships; the boxy ones. But, again, I wanna cover all the bases.

There were only four ships featured in the battle in DS9's pilot: The Miranda class Saratoga mentioned before, the Ambassador class Yamaguchi, the Nebula class Bellerophon, and the Excelsior class Melbourne (changed from a Nebula class study model). The Bellerophon would have had ASRVs like the Ent-D, but who knows what type of pods the Ambassador or Excelsior classes had?

[zar]

Probert wrote:

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If it were me (painting for myself) I would only use the lifeboats from the Galaxy Class / TNG-era ships; the boxy ones.

Well don't forget the TNG-era (and beyond) still included older ships, like that Excelsior that kept showing up, and there was definitely a Constitution and a Miranda (Sisko's ship) at Wolf 359.

[GeorgeKirk]

I wonder, would any of the ships that fought at Wolf 359 be using the TOS Movie-era lifeboats shown in Mr. Scott's Guide To The Enterprise? It seems there was at least 1 Constitution-class ship in that batter, after all.

[Dukhat]

zar wrote:

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...and there was definitely a Constitution...at Wolf 359.

GeorgeKirk wrote:

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I wonder, would any of the ships that fought at Wolf 359 be using the TOS Movie-era lifeboats shown in Mr. Scott's Guide To The Enterprise? It seems there was at least 1 Constitution-class ship in that batter, after all.

Not to be needlessly nitpicky, but there's no direct evidence that a Connie was at Wolf 359. All we see is part of a saucer in one scene, and part of a secondary hull in another scene. There's no indication that they were part of the same ship, or that the ship those hulls came from was a Constitution (i.e. another class of ship could have had an identical secondary hull, etc.)

Now speaking real-world, that's exactly what they were, because that saucer and secondary hull was from the destroyed Enterprise from STIII. The saucer was used again for the U.S.S. Olympia, but again that doesn't mean the Olympia was a Constitution either.