Are lifeboats generally practical?
- Thread starter Hando
- Start date
Perhaps the shuttlecraft, or at least a certain number of them, are programmed to launch on autopilot when certain evacuation orders are given (NOT the one given in FC), in the hope that there will be one or more in comm range to connect to the pods for transport?
Or, if we go by the book, like Lt. Saavik?^^Well if you could go relativistic, weeks would seem like days.
Even if they aren't (due to the time needed to prep for launch), they're in space. You could literally just shove them out the door and worry about powering them up later, likely when an escape pod connects to it. It would be an interesting visual, seeing all these pods flying away from a dying ship, and a cluster of shuttlecraft getting "flushed" out the back end!
An exaggeration?Perhaps the shuttlecraft, or at least a certain number of them, are programmed to launch on autopilot when certain evacuation orders are given (NOT the one given in FC), in the hope that there will be one or more in comm range to connect to the pods for transport?
Or, if we go by the book, like Lt. Saavik?^^Well if you could go relativistic, weeks would seem like days.
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On the subject of shuttles, some Red Alert duties might be to man and prep the shuttles for launch.
A choice.An exaggeration?Perhaps the shuttlecraft, or at least a certain number of them, are programmed to launch on autopilot when certain evacuation orders are given (NOT the one given in FC), in the hope that there will be one or more in comm range to connect to the pods for transport?
Or, if we go by the book, like Lt. Saavik?^^Well if you could go relativistic, weeks would seem like days.
Lifepods may be able to link up, and there may be specialised pods too. Ones not meant for passengers but automatically launched cargo/equipment pods with either extra power, life support capabilities, replicators, subspace transcievers, inflatable refuges, anything.
Some shuttles could be automatically ejected in catastrophic situations and any shuttles not in an immediate launch position could at least raise shields to make their survival more likely.
A situation where hundreds of pods have gathered together to form a survival colony could theoretically survive for an extended period. At least long enough for a message to be picked up or a surviving shuttle to go for help...
Some shuttles could be automatically ejected in catastrophic situations and any shuttles not in an immediate launch position could at least raise shields to make their survival more likely.
A situation where hundreds of pods have gathered together to form a survival colony could theoretically survive for an extended period. At least long enough for a message to be picked up or a surviving shuttle to go for help...
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Starship lifeboats in general may be a nice-to-have feature with little practical use. A great number of starships were destroyed in the TV shows and movies, and save for the Defiant and the Valiant, none left behind any lifeboats!
Sure, we see at least the Saratoga launch some pods. But those disappear once launched - the E-D does not sense their presence in the battle zone. Indication that they have enough speed to leave the area? Or indication that it's standard practice to go vewy, vewy quiet and stay that way if launching in a combat zone? Whichever the explanation, we know Sisko survived the ordeal. (Thanks to the lifeboat, or because the Prophets protected him even though the lifeboat failed and everybody died?)
In contrast, civilian vessels are often mentioned as successfully launching lifeboats. But their failure modes might be quite different from those of starships.
Timo Saloniemi
Sure, we see at least the Saratoga launch some pods. But those disappear once launched - the E-D does not sense their presence in the battle zone. Indication that they have enough speed to leave the area? Or indication that it's standard practice to go vewy, vewy quiet and stay that way if launching in a combat zone? Whichever the explanation, we know Sisko survived the ordeal. (Thanks to the lifeboat, or because the Prophets protected him even though the lifeboat failed and everybody died?)
In contrast, civilian vessels are often mentioned as successfully launching lifeboats. But their failure modes might be quite different from those of starships.
Timo Saloniemi
So...human.A choice.An exaggeration?Perhaps the shuttlecraft, or at least a certain number of them, are programmed to launch on autopilot when certain evacuation orders are given (NOT the one given in FC), in the hope that there will be one or more in comm range to connect to the pods for transport?
Or, if we go by the book, like Lt. Saavik?
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The relativistic comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek , but the more I think about it, the better I like it. Sort of free stasis. The occupants experience very little passage of time yet any search teams could have days, weeks or even years to find them.
I guess when you're working on a regular cargo vessel or any other ship operating within your own territory a lifeboat would be quite usefull since Starfleet etc will know about where you are so they'll pretty much be able to get to you quite soon, if you're far outside exploring stuff it is possible that lifeboats are pretty much useless because no one can get to you in time.
In the ST:TNG technical manual, red alert require two shuttles minimum to be ready for a launch on 30 seconds notice.
When the model makers build the destroyed starships for the scene of the Enterprise entering the battle zone, they had the lifeboat hatches open on several of the ships.
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The assumption at that time was that the Borg destroyed all the lifepods or assimulated everyone.
Seeing that Sisko survived, it makes sense that in the many hours between the start of the Battle of Wolf 359 and the USS Enterprise arrival, the lifepod, lifeboats, and shuttlecraft of the destroyed starships left the area, or were picked up by a surviving starship long before Enterprise arrived.
Seeing that Sisko survived, it makes sense that in the many hours between the start of the Battle of Wolf 359 and the USS Enterprise arrival, the lifepod, lifeboats, and shuttlecraft of the destroyed starships left the area, or were picked up by a surviving starship long before Enterprise arrived.
I don't think the Borg would've destroyed the lifepods, but taken the opportunity to 'pick up new drones'.
And unfortunately for those who reached the escape pods, and couldn't get away from those tractor beams, those surviving crew members would've made very tempting, excellent drones.
And unfortunately for those who reached the escape pods, and couldn't get away from those tractor beams, those surviving crew members would've made very tempting, excellent drones.
Regarding the Wolf 359 survivors, I assume it was the starship Endeavour that picked them up.
Endeavour is mentioned by Janeway in "Scorpion" as a starship that had encountered the Borg and survived, and while it's entirely possible that other Federation starships not named Enterprise encountered the Borg and survived, it's clearly not a routine manner. I prefer to think that of the 40 starships (yeah, I know it's probably more an approximation than an exact number, despite Hanson's dialogue...) assembled at Wolf 359 when the Borg cube came charging in, somehow Endeavour managed to survive...not only survive, but also with damage light enough to be able to participate in Picard's blockade in "Redemption" later that year.
If there were lifeboats with survivors floating around when Enterprise-D showed up, I would think they would have felt responsible for sticking around and conducting rescue operations. And there were no lifesigns detected in the wreckage of the task force. We don't know if all 39 ships that were destroyed were scanned for survivors, but it does seem likely that in undestroyed portions of the ships, there were survivors needing rescue that were unable to make it to escape pods. The fact that Ent-D detected no one does suggest that at least one starship survived, with the capacity of rescuing survivors, both from lifeboats as well as beaming them out of damaged portions of the derelicts. I am thinking that was Endeavour, and she then headed towards the nearest Starbase before Ent-D arrived at the scene of battle.
Thoughts?
I am also thinking that there are various pre-existing protocols in place for emergencies in deep-space, as opposed to in-system. In-system, the escape pods would probably be pre-programmed to head for the nearest Class-M planet (or whatever class planet(oid) would be capable of supporting humanoid life while awaiting rescue), while in deep-space, the escape pods would be pre-programmed to enter gaggle-mode after launching and heading beyond the blast radius of a warp core breach.
There might also be an emergency transporter protocol that beams recipients into launched escape pods, for crewers who don't have time to get to the pods but do have time to get to a transporter room.
There might also be an emergency transporter protocol that beams recipients into launched escape pods, for crewers who don't have time to get to the pods but do have time to get to a transporter room.
I'd argue the exact opposite. Picard's ST:FC speech about the UFP falling back and the Borg advancing paints the Collective as the Federation's nemesis number one, yet Picard has virtually zero adventures involving these adversaries - and certainly none involving the UFP falling back. Somebody else must be carrying the burden.
As for Wolf 359 survivors, I don't think there's any reason to assume any starships survived. If they did survive for a while, the Borg would have finished the job eventually. If they returned to pick up survivors, they would not have left again. The actual fight was apparently over in a heartbeat, yet for some reason the Borg were delayed enough that the E-D caught up with them before they reached Earth; the implication is that they lingered, perhaps turning some of the starships into further Borg vessels (consistently with ENT "Regeneration", and explaining how Wolf 359 assimilees are found in the Delta Quadrant often enough), perhaps also recuperating like in "Q Who?". If the Endeavour dared make an appearance, then Captain Amasov's log would be a posthumous one...
Why the E-D detected no lifepods and no lifesigns could be simply explained by the lifepods hiding. After all, that would be the only possible survival tactic against the Borg. It would also be the only possible survival tactic against most opponents, so extreme stealth might well be a defining characteristic of lifeboat design. (Admittedly, the Defiant and Voyager lifepods are armed with phaser strips, but still!)
Or even a site-to-site protocol that grabs everybody, or at least everybody wearing a commbadge, and whisks them to some safety-enhancing location.
But transporters tend to be unreliable in combat (what with all the shield action), which is a likely scenario for evacuations. Hiccuping warp cores also supposedly interfere with delicate equipment like that (as per "Heart of Glory" at least).
Timo Saloniemi
Scientifically speaking: No. Not in a solar system or in deep space.
Because in the real world, even assuming every solar system has a habitable planet in it (even in Trek this is not the case) there's a VERY small chance that you are within easy flight distance of it. Unless those lifeboats have much better propulsive capabilities than they appear to have -- actual impulse engines and such -- then you have almost no chance of reaching that planet safely. You could, of course, try to ditch on an uninhabited planet or asteroid nearby, but since that's not much better than just floating out in space waiting for a rescue, why bother?
The lifeboats are practical to the extent that they can provide survivors with a stash of emergency supplies to sustain themselves until they can either obtain better transportation (from their doomed ship's shuttlebay, maybe?) or get someone to come and rescue them. But conceptually, it's like bailing out of an airplane with a hot air balloon instead of a parachute.
In universe, lifeboats are equipped with an improbability drive that gaurantees that they are always launched within 5,000km of an M-class planet. Lest you ask one of those "black box" questions, it's obvious that the lifepod improbability drive cannot practically be scaled up to the entire starship, so even if the starship is doomed to crash on Venus, your lifepods will somehow end up in Earth orbit within six lines of dialog or less.
This is actually one of the reasons I lied the enlarged shuttlebats in the Abramsverse. If you need to evacuate the entire crew and get them to safety, you're going to want to do that in a large group of warp-capable spacecraft that could probably take care of themselves.
That doesn't follow at all. In particular, the Borg didn't attack Enterprise on sight at Wolf-359. In fact, the Borg left Enterprise completely in the dust once they had Picard on board, and happily ditched them in deep space -- very much intact -- after their homemade Wave Motion Gun blew out their engines.
It also seems they only attacked the fleet at Wolf-359 because Starfleet went out of its way to intercept them. They issued that helpful ultimatum first, to which Starfleet responded with concentrated phaser fire.
If Endeavor was the last ship left standing, the Borg would have ignored it for the same reason they ignored the Enterprise: probably the ship was disabled or otherwise removed from combat, restoring power in time to collect survivors from the rest of the fleet but not fast enough to assist when the Enterprise arrived. It's likely that a few of those wrecked ships were actually wrecked but not completely lifeless (e.g. USS Constellation in "Doomsday Machine") but that there simply wasn't enough time to scan them all for life signs, let alone conduct a rescue operation on that scale. This was, after all, still an active battlefield and Riker's priority was stopping the Borg.
Consider, especially, that the only reason Sisko evacuated the Saratoga was because the Borg had sliced off a chunk of the warp core and their containment was breaking down. Suppose the Borg had simply sliced off the front of the saucer and one of the warp nacelles; Saratoga would have been completely mission killed in that case (and Jennifer would probably still be dead) but the rest of the crew would still be intact, running around frantically putting out fires and trying to keep emergency life support functioning. If Saratoga had been a newer ship with more advanced technology, they might also have to deal with a couple of Borg boarding parties come to raid the ship for parts, and anyone who got in the way might end up borgified on general principle.
Since not all or even most of the ships at the battle scene were as thoroughly destroyed as Saratoga, I think catastrophic warp core detonation is the exception rather than the rule. It's likely that most if not ALL of the derelicts had survivors on board, but that the ships themselves were too badly damaged to be salvaged.
Actually no, it seems to have gone on for several minutes, perhaps half an hour or more, as Starfleet attacked the cube in waves trying to overwhelm its defenses while at the same time trying to find some kind of attack that would be effective against them. We got to see the very first phase of the attack in "The Emissary", a scene which only shows us the first 5 or 6 ships to be destroyed. It takes the Borg several minutes to finish off the Saratoga, apparently because of interference by two or three more powerful vessels that divide their attention.
Which brings us to:
I always thought the reason is obvious: the cube had been heavily damaged during the pwnage of Hansen's fleet and had slunk away to regenerate. They were part way back to full power when Enterprise caught with them, and probably assumed that even in their damaged state they could still handle a single ship with engine trouble.
That or their being too busy to look. Remember, the first thing Riker does is try to locate the cube, assuming that it's still hanging out somewhere in the area. For all he knows, a portion of the fleet is still trying to engage it; if TNG had had a more extensive budget, that could easily have been the case.
I might also chalk it up to a rare instance of sensors actually working the way they should -- meaning not being magical-find-o-matics -- and the only way to really know what is going on aboard those ships is to physically board them and look around.
Yet they did attack the fleet that had been there earlier. This despite there being no reason for them to attack the fleet!
So a bunch of starships amasses at or near the Wolf 359 system (which in the Trek universe might have planets, or then not). Why should the Borg care? They could sail to Earth untouched, bypassing that fleet entirely. Yet Picard chooses to stop and pick a fight. And not a "get out of my way" fight, either, but a fight where 39 starships are blasted to bits, so totally that there are no survivors left when the invaders move on.
It was Picard's choice, and Picard chose to kill or assimilate everybody who didn't manage to flee. Perhaps that was his Starfleet tactics speaking, removing a force that might cause trouble later on at Earth. Or then it was his new Borg expertise speaking, wanting to assimilate every last bit of Starfleet expertise, especially if Picard himself was fighting against the Collective attempts at pumping those secrets directly out of the Captain's mind. Or then it was a clever Picard ploy, intended to delay the Borg so that some sort of more effective resistance could be mounted...
What it was not was an attempt to break through to Earth; if it were that, the Borg either would not have stopped, or would have just cleared a route and then used their superior speed to continue.
But the Borg did not ignore any ships in the fight we witnessed. They could have ignored basically all of them, leaving e.g. the Saratoga adrift after ruining her. Instead, they proceeded to completion.
The sensors of the E-D have never been that bad. And even if the E-D were in a hurry, other ships would have been conducting rescue operations there still, not having any reason not to - after all, by that time, the Borg had left, and the putative rescuers would know that even if the E-D did not have the patience to find out.
No, everybody was either dead or carefully hiding without hope of rescue. This is not consistent with an operational starship or several engaging in rescue ops, nor with unarmed or shot-to-hell ships conducting said ops, at any timepoint after the battle but before the departure of the E-D anyway.
Agreed. But the fate of Sisko's ship is supposedly also typical, in that this weakling of a vessel was carefully held in a tractor beam for a great length of time, to no obvious tactical benefit. Picard wanted the ships to be processed in great detail, including operationally worthless ones. Again, this may have been a sound Starfleet tactic, a sound Borg tactic, or a devious plan to delay the Borg; whatever it was, it did result in a significant delay. That is, the battle itself was seen in its entirety in DS9 "Emissary", from the first Borg threat to the sight of the last ships dying and nobody firing any more, and did not last particularly long - but the E-D was much farther behind yet still caught up, heavily suggesting a careful mop-up after the battle was won.
I'd argue the exact opposite, because we were told for a fact that there were no survivors there, yet some of the ships did seem repairable.
...Which is my definition of a heartbeat, and see above. Nowhere near enough to explain why the E-D caught up. Not even if we count the Borg dragging their feet through the Sol system (or Picard deviously dragging them).
Quite possible - but not consistent with something like the Endeavour surviving and buzzing around the battlefield while the Borg did nothing. After all, the Borg did assimilate people from that battle and send them to Delta, an activity they could perform even while repairing their original ship; and they did conclude with the battlefield empty of survivors; and they had been paying exceptional attention to all ships, potent or impotent, just moments before.
Agreed on that in principle, but I prefer consistency over realism in Trek, as so much of Trek has to be accepted as unrealistic anyway...
Timo Saloniemi
We know USS Enterprise was something like 12 hours away from Wolf 359 when the battle started. We know Hanson had gathered 40 starships well before the battle started, and that more were on the way along with Klingon ships.
For some reason the Borg cube didn't press on the Earth as maximum warp following the battle. They were still a ways from Earth when Enterprise intercepted them to get Picard.
The battle seems to have taken a little while as it would take the Borg a little bit of time to make sure that resistance was stopped before they headed to Earth. Hanson's last message to Enterprise gave word that they were attempting to withdraw and regroup. 39 starships were destroyed. If more than 39 arrived, than some managed to withdraw but given their loses and battle damage could not effectively regroup for another attack. The Borg would not give chase as they were no longer a theat. (USS Saratoga could be a threat as without the tractor beam on it, the vessel could have been used to ram the Borg cube, and Sisko probably would have done so.) The surviving starships would wait until the cube moved on, then returned to the system to pick up survivors. Since that could take maybe six hours, they would still be gone by the time Enterprise arrived. Subspace interference would likely make contacting Enterprise difficult to impractical.
The surviving starships would not head for Earth, as they would not be in condition to fight, but need to get someplace the Borg were not heading. Means they would head for Alpha Centauri, Andor, or perhaps Axanar. Vulcan would be a little farther away.
For some reason the Borg cube didn't press on the Earth as maximum warp following the battle. They were still a ways from Earth when Enterprise intercepted them to get Picard.
The battle seems to have taken a little while as it would take the Borg a little bit of time to make sure that resistance was stopped before they headed to Earth. Hanson's last message to Enterprise gave word that they were attempting to withdraw and regroup. 39 starships were destroyed. If more than 39 arrived, than some managed to withdraw but given their loses and battle damage could not effectively regroup for another attack. The Borg would not give chase as they were no longer a theat. (USS Saratoga could be a threat as without the tractor beam on it, the vessel could have been used to ram the Borg cube, and Sisko probably would have done so.) The surviving starships would wait until the cube moved on, then returned to the system to pick up survivors. Since that could take maybe six hours, they would still be gone by the time Enterprise arrived. Subspace interference would likely make contacting Enterprise difficult to impractical.
The surviving starships would not head for Earth, as they would not be in condition to fight, but need to get someplace the Borg were not heading. Means they would head for Alpha Centauri, Andor, or perhaps Axanar. Vulcan would be a little farther away.
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