New Orleans-Class

You know, you're right. I totally forgot the "give orders and then step back" mentality of high-ranking officers. But the Oberth? Even as a non-front-line ship, there's no way in hell I'd be commanding from an Oberth.

 

I'm so surprised that we've seen Oberths engage the Borg as part of an assembled fleet on TWO occasions. If I were captain of an Oberth and Starfleet command ordered me to go into battle, I'd just pull a Chekov and Sulu on shore leave and try to blow really hard into my comm unit.

 

This is just speculation on my part on some in-universe explanations, but...if Hanson was commanding from a specialized communications center on Melbourne, tailor-made for fleet C3I situations and ostensibly better than what he could use on a Nebula-class not necessarily fitted thusly, that could explain why he didn't transfer over to a better or more well-defended ship. Melbourne's registry number is indicative of a recently constructed ship (and no, I don't want to get into THAT war...) and thus the Tigger-provided explanation of a command ship fits the situation handily, thank you.

And we don't necessarily know how early in the battle Melbourne was wiped. In "Emissary", there was a gap of several seconds between the Borg telling the task force that they'd be assimilated and the time that Saratoga (Sisko's ship) began firing, and almost immediately after Saratoga's volley was when Melbourne bit it, but I find it hard to believe that the relatively-weak Saratoga led off the fight when there was much heavier firepower available with that Ambassador and Nebula tag-teaming (as well as probably another Ambassador and Nebula there as well). So I am inclined to think that a few heavy-hitters attacked immediately and were obliterated in that few seconds gap between the end of the Borg's declaration and when Captain Satelk (or whatever his name was) ordered Saratoga into the fight.

Additionally, however, and this is the more likely explanation, the Borg could have been monitoring communications between Melbourne and the rest of the fleet and though Melbourne was intending to hang back and send in the heavies, the Borg cube might have tracked comms and maneuvered to intercept and destroy Melbourne first, giving the Leeroy Jenkins treatment to Hansen's carefully thought-out battle plan, and Saratoga had the bad misfortune to be in that breach, fired a few volleys, and was held in the tractor beam.

Which does, however, lead to an interesting question...why was Saratoga tractor-beamed instead of downright destroyed? I mean, there'd be no Sisko on DS9 if Saratoga was just wiped out with the ease that Melbourne was, but there should be an in-universe explanation of why that was. Maybe the Borg had never encountered a Bolian before and was planning to send drones to capture Sisko's crewer once they'd finished obliterating the fleet, to better study and evaluate that species possible betterment of the collective? Maybe the Borg thought they'd lose more drones than they did and had held Saratoga with the intentions of transporting survivors out of it to be Borgified, then decided against it and fired a blast that set off the Dreaded Warp Core Timer?

Regarding the Oberth, I am inclined to think that its job was to lurk about the perimeter of battle and transport survivors, then get the hell out of there. I don't think it was meant to participate as an actual combatant, and perhaps upon detecting warp core damage on Saratoga it was trying to maneuver to transport Saratoga crew to safety when it got wiped.

 

I have another question...if 40 starships were assembled at Wolf 359, and Hanson even said he'd miss Enterprise-D at the party, but only 39 were destroyed, who was the survivor? The dialogue suggests it wasn't Enterprise. And when Enterprise moved through the debris field, they didn't find any survivors...had they, they would have felt obligated to conduct rescue operations, which would have slowed the dramatic pacing of the episode as they rushed to Earth to stop the cube.

So...who survived, and who picked up the survivors' lifeboats and evac'd the intact portions of the destroyed ships?

 

It *could* be the USS Endeavour, Nebula-class, based on the fact that Janeway had read Captain Asamov's log about encountering the Borg, and that Voyager left after Wolf 359 but before the next battle in First Contact. The Star Trek Encyclopedia also believes that it's the Endeavour.

The funny thing is that we see the Endeavour fighting the Borg again in First Contact. assuming the captain is the same, that makes Asamov one tough cookie, perhaps the only Starfleet vessel other than Voyager to fight two Borg cubes and live another day.

 

The point of the "Emissary" scene (and confirmed by Rob Legato, who filmed the scene) was that the ships were just entering the battle; they were the "first wave," if you will. So that lends even more credence that the Melbourne was not Hanson's ship, as it was the first vessel of the 40 to be destroyed.

Because the script needed it to be that way

Evidence suggests the surviving ship was the Ahwahnee (as it appears again as part of Picard's tachyon detection grid in "Redemption"). However, it couldn't have been the ship that retrieved the escape pods, because it was still there when the Enteprise arrived and determined there were no life signs, so perhaps the ship was salvaged after the battle, repaired, and returned to active duty. So it could have been any of the 30 or so other unknown ships.

 

Well based on "Scorpion" where Janeway references stuff said by a Captain Amasov of Endeavour, it's probably likely that was the one ship that survived and got the heck out of dodge. The same ship would later show up in First Contact, so perhaps it was tapped to be part of that battle because it was the only one to survive Wolf 359.

 

According to Andrew Probert and his proposoal for the Ships-of-the-Line Calendar 2014 it would have looked something like that: http://www.thetrekcollective.com/2011/12/ships-if-line-2014-preview.html

Bob

 

I think what SicOne was asking was what ship collected the escape pods and left the scene of the immediate aftermath of the battle, not what salvage operations took place long after the battle was over.

 

Yeah, I think the Captain Amasov from the log entry Janeway read in Scorpion Pt. I must've been the commander of the only ship that survived 359.

 

But did Janeway explicitly state that the Endeavour was at Wolf 359? If not, then the ship could have just encountered the Borg at any other time. I also think she mentioned the Excalibur encountering the Borg too, and that ship was also seen after BoBW. But I don't know if that ship was specifically stated to have been in the battle either.

 

Agreed. Contrary to what the producers of the show tell you, it doesn't ALWAYS have to be the Enterprise that does all the cool stuff.

I was using the Oberth earlier as an example. Hanson could have been aboard ANY ship, and I was also suggesting that the E-D battle bridge set could have been the "standard" BB that was installed into ships that had them. The set was different than the S1 set anyway, so it could have been a fleet-wide upgrade (or at least to several classes of ship) explaining why Hanson's bridge was used in the first place. BTW, I also think that Oberth was trying to get close enough to pick up escape pods, but got a little too close...

Regarding Saratoga, I figured that there was SOMETHING aboard her that the Borg thought would be interesting, and so they detained it for examination via assimilation. Alternatively, they could have lost some drones during the altercations with the Enterprise leading up to Wolf 359, and so picked the weakest ships out of that first wave (I doubt many would argue that Saratoga was the least capable of them, including an Excelsior, Nebula and Ambassador) to capture and subsequently destroy when they were done. Either way, while Sisko was doing his thing as portrayed, I personally have little doubt that several decks of Saratoga were busy being swarmed by Borg.

Mark

 

Or one of several big encounters which happened off-screen post-BoBW. Remember Picard's ranty speech from First Contact, "They invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back..."

 

That's interesting. Was the Feds losing a world every few months or years and Starfleet just suppressed the bad news?

 

I'd suggest the Borg wanted ships assimilated so that these could be turned into further Cubes and sent to reinforce the mighty Borg Collective - and to propel newly captured interesting samples (a category that does not include any of the technology or passengers of the dull old Saratoga) away from the battle site, and to further hijinks in another quadrant and another spinoff show.

It's just that the Saratoga is trivially assimilable intact, while bigger and more interesting ships are going to put up a better fight...

I'm not a big fan of the idea of there having been exactly 40 ships present, and exactly one survivor. For all we know, there were no surviving ships whatsoever (why should the Borg have allowed for such?), and the pods escaped simply because that's what they were designed to do. Surely an escape pod would be provided with the best possible means to escape an aggressor - stealth to defeat starship sensors being the most obvious such means, since superfast warp engines don't appear likely. And by stealth I don't mean invisibility cloaks, I mean the ability to mask onboard lifesigns and pretend to be a piece of jetsam.

It's just that those pods that broadcast a "pick me up" signal were duly assimilated or then destroyed, while those whose occupants were clever enough to turn off the signal beacon survived and remained invisible to the E-D, despite lingering in the vicinity.

As for Picard's "we fall back" speech, those need not be Federation worlds. The Borg apparently got to the Argolis cluster ahead of the Federation, for example, and may have assimilated various uninhabited or inhabited worlds there. At which point the Feds had the option of doing something about it, or of falling back, and they chose the latter, with zero losses of UFP lives or property.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Well, the Borg do things in their own mysterious ways, but might have adopted some humanoid concepts, like leaving one survivor behind to tell others how the Borg defeated Starfleet at Wolf 359.

Psychologic warfare could be an instrument they make use of, saves a lot of energy to see others surrender at the first sight of a Borg cube rather than to engage in a fight.

That's a great one! Even a scan of the area (is it safe to show up, yet?) could have attracted the Borg (or others of their vessels following?), so better to play dead and hope that the one who is eventually opening your pod doesn't have strange implants in the face.

Bob

(I already mentioned it's good to have you back? The "interestingness" of various threads noticably increased, at least that's the way I feel about it)

 

That is what they want you to think, Timo.

Wolf 359 was an inside job. And the architects? The Starfleet Science-Industrial Complex.

They don't want you to think there was a surviving ship because the Endeavour was a black project (continuation of Project Blue Beam vis a vis Section 31 and the New Galactic Order). The events of the next few years were awfully convenient... the death of the Soliton Wave project which would have liberated us from the yoke of Big Dilithium interests, the sudden and arbitrary declaration that warp drive was destroying space, allowing Starfleet to control civilian traffic by limiting us to Warp 5, and the kicker - the threat of the "Borg", manufactured by the Federation to justify militarization of the Starfleet. I could go on, but its clear you're just a sheeple like the rest of them.

 

The borg goal was to get to Earth, not to set around and fight a battle with 40 or more starships and then assimilated the crew of those starships. They more likely either disable or destroy them with out stopping and kept on going.