Was there a Klingon battlecruiser at Wolf 359?

Which is often believed to be the USS Endeavor, based on the fact Janeway was reading a report from Endeavor's captain about the Borg, in addition to Picard's in Scorpion.

 

Memory Alpha says:
"39 Federation starships were annihilated and 11,000 personnel were lost at the Battle of Wolf 359."

Satie said that 39 Federation ships were destroyed by the Borg. If there were more than 40 that Hanson said, those would have been Klingon ships.

What happened to that one ship that wasn't destroyed? Maybe it wasn't blown into bits if the Borg boarded the ship and assimilated everybody? Who knows.

 

But it wasn’t stated that the Endeavour was at Wolf 359, just that it was in a battle with the Borg, which could have been a different conflict.

It’s most likely the Ahwahnee, which was definitely at Wolf 359 and shows up again later as one of the ships in Picard’s tachyon grid.

 

Oh, I know. But the idea is one fanon has really latched onto, to the point that there was even a comic which went with it.

Now that is an interesting idea.

 

Something from Memory Alpha:

Michael Okuda meant the USS Ahwahnee in "Redemption II" to be the same Ahwahnee as seen in "Best of Both Worlds, Part II.

 

So she wouldn't have escaped - she would have been destroyed, and then put back into service because the Borg did a half-assed job at starship destruction at Wolf 359. Why, it almost looks as if they utilized their mighty cutting beam like a cheap Dremel tool...

The thing about "escaping ship" is that there's little story demand for one, and it would be quite difficult to jam that in. Why would a ship escape and then fail to inform our heroes of everything that happened? And where would the ship escape to, if not Earth (which does not feature any starships we'd hear of)?

Also statistically somewhat odd is why exactly one ship would escape, if escaping was going to happen in the first place. What would be the point? Hanson's message already indicates the fleet was having second thoughts, a brief opportunity to reconsider tactics and approach; apparently, the fleet chose to keep on fighting and dying, despite the demonstrated hopelessness of it all. Why didn't one captain sign the suicide pact?

Satie and Hanson could be taken literally if 40 ships were destroyed but only 39 for good, so that one would later be patched up and the ghosts of crews past exorcised. But there's little need to take Hanson literally.

Timo Saloniemi

 

My appologies - I misunderstood your post and thought your photoshopped pic showed that shuttle. Whatever you photoshopped is definitely a Doppelgänger of the ship in the background of your first pic. If your photoshopped one is Klingon, then you prooved that at least one Klingon vessel participated in the battle and got damaged.

 

Sure, it’s possible there were only 39 ships and Hansen was just rounding up. But we see the Ahwahnee relatively intact in BoBW, and then a few years later it’s part of the tachyon grid. So I prefer to take Hansen literally.

 

My guess is that 40 Federations ships took part at the fight at Wolf 359 and Ahwahnee wasn't destroyed but damaged enough during the battle for the Borg to ignore it.

 

If we argue we "see" the ship in "BoBWII" (despite her being but an indistinct blob in the background), then we admit she did not survive the battle: our E-D heroes verify there's nobody alive in any of the wrecks. Why would Satie treat her differently from the other 39 lifeless wrecks in her mudslinging, then? To make Picard look less bad?

Timo Saloniemi

 

The structural integrity field could have collapsed, turning the crew to salsa while keeping the ship intact. The small blob we do see of the ship showed that it was seemingly intact after the battle, so it could have been collected afterwards and returned to service. How else to explain the ship appearing again later?

 

Or, rather, inertial dampeners could have failed. I tend to think that anything that would paste the crew would also damage many other parts of the ship as well, but I suppose it wouldn't necessarily render the ship irreparable or unsalvageable.

 

By arguing that she never did go to Wolf 359?

At best, we saw a Cheyenne class ship there. She was probably USS Jamake Highwater, NCC-50101, then. I mean, if we somehow could read the pennant art for real, we'd see she wasn't USS Ahwahnee, NCC-71620, but NCC-73620...

Of course, if we do want to have two ships of the same name and design but with a different registry, we can plead E-A: Starfleet might have felt the need to pretend no ships were lost at Wolf 359, just like the USN wanted to pretend no ships were lost for good at Pearl Harbor, and, in addition to undertaking insanely extensive rebuilding, proceeded to build replicas or rename existing ships. Since the registry goes down rather than up, a renaming seems the preferable to newbuilding.

Perhaps the same was done with all the ships lost? It's not as if we would have seen "successor" ships with the same name but different registry on screen so far. (Edit: Save for the Bellerophon. Perhaps she was the one ship out of the 40 too far gone to warrant resurrection? )

Timo Saloniemi

 

The ship is listed in official sources as being at Wolf 359. That’s good enough for me.

 

Actually, the hulk in question does bear a resemblance to a Saber-Class ship from the rear angle. Now, obstensibly the Sabers are newer designs made to fight the Borg AFTER Wolf 359, but what if there was an early prototype that just did particularly well at that battle and thus got mass-produced due to the "lasted longer than she should have" idea?

 

Except that model isn’t a Saber class ship. So it’s kind of a moot point.

 

Uncleanable?

 

Heh.

 

Well, if there wasn't a single escaping starship, or maybe more than one if Hanson's 40 starships was actually rounded down, we can ask with the Nitpicker's Guide what happened to Ben and Jake Sisko.

When the Enterprise arrives at Wolf 359 after the battle in "The Best of Both Worlds Part 2":

Riker asked about life signs, and Data answered:

That seems to be a very strong indication that there are no detectable life forms in range of the scanners, soon after the battle.

So that seems to mean that Ben and Jake Sisko are either already dead, or else are still alive but undetected by the scanners of the Enterprise, and so doomed to drift in space until they die, or else have already traveled out of range of the scanners, or else have already be assimilated by the Borg and left the battle scene.

Could the survivors from the Saratoga and other starships get out of scanning range on their own, before the Enterprise arrived, or did they need help from some more powerful and faster non Borg space ship, perhaps the hypothetical escaping Federation starship?

 

Where did the idea of escaping Federation ship come from?

 

In "BoBW," Admiral Hansen states that he's assembled a fleet of 40 starships at Wolf 359. Then in "The Drumhead," Admiral Satie mentions that 39 ships were destroyed at Wolf 359. People have taken this to mean that one ship escaped, which would almost certainly have had to be the case if there were survivors.

 

...The old chestnut there is that "BoBW" is adamant that there were no survivors while "Emissary" tells us at least Sisko and Jake came out of it alive.

We can invent various explanations for why our TNG heroes did not observe any survivors. Perhaps the escape pods were lying low while trying to coast their way out of the carnage unseen by the Borg, who were going through the battlefield with a fine comb, assimilating survivors and turning wrecks into further Borg vessels? Perhaps a single ship rounded up all the lifepods and warped out of Dodge without as much as signaling Starfleet that the battle was lost and Earth would be next?

Whether a starship survived is separate from whether people survived, as already evidenced by people leaving the mayhem in lifeboats. A ship might survive by being reduced to a wreck and then rebuilt, or be declared lost even if only the crew got assimilated by courteous Drones that rampaged through the interiors but did not harm the hardware at all.

So there are multiple approaches to this even if we skip the obvious and decide that 40 is just 39 rounded up. No single model is automatically superior, not the least because we never ever hear of a surviving ship and therefore get no defining details.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'm pretty sure the lifeboats did not have warp capability, and zero chance that they would have been out of range once the Enterprise showed up. So either the Enterprise's scans were faulty, or they were rescued by another ship which left before the Enterprise arrived. My vote is #2. Granted, this would mean that the Ahwahnee wasn't the ship that escaped since it's still floating dead in the graveyard, but it's also possible that a Klingon ship rescued the lifeboats.

And on that subject, I'm still patiently waiting for Misters Okuda or Sternbach to pipe in about my theory...

 

I always took it to mean the Enterprise was the 40th ship. They were supposed to join the battle, but it was already over when they arrived.