Why Didn't The Defiant Have Its Own Crew?
- Thread starter CuttingEdge100
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Depends on how long she was fighting. If the Enterprise didn't arrive when she did it might've been destroyed.
That said, it is a tough little ship, and faired better than the other starships there.
Defiant was one of the first ships on the scene. You can hear orders being given to the Defiant and the Bozemen right before they engage the Cube, when the Enterprise crew are monitoring the fleet in the Neutral Zone.
That's not to say the Defiant didn't, oh, say, hop in and out of battle, doing quick repairs everytime she retreated.
A klingon? Leave the battle to fix something? They do that?
DS9's crew was the Defiant's crew, that's easily explained. I'm more confused how all the senior staff, including Kira and Odo (even though they weren't Starfleet officers) would just go off on a mission together. Surely leaving someone of seniority i.e. Kira and Odo behind would be better? I mean I know nothing was going to happen where the main cast weren't, but it was still confusing!
Heh, point taken. But in another thread, someone was arguing that Klingons have enough tactical engineering skill to continually upgrade a TOS-era cruiser to Voyager standards. That might've done something to my noggin.
As was said before, they probably have more then one shift.
Sisko, Odo, Kira, O'Brian, Bashier, Worf, and Dax were shift one.
Jim-Bob, Jim-John, Joe-Jim, Joe-Bob, Bob-Bob, Mary-Jean, and Bubba are shift too
And there's probably a third shift that I don't care to name right now.
My guess is shift two and three get extended shifts while Sisko and friends are off galavanting around the cosmos.
Thats one thing I didn't like about Trek. They didn't show crew rotations very well. It seemed like the main command crew was on the bridge 24/7 save for a catnap here and there.
They had Harry Kim on night shift occasionally on Voyager, but then again no one ever slept on that show.
Except in waking moments.
Lol, it sounds like you're trying to cast the Defiant as a peice of shit when that's really not what the show intended. We didn't see any long-term cruises because the show's name was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine not Star Trek: Defiant. As for taking refuge in the armpit of the station, that happened all of once and only after the Defiant engaged multiple Klingon ships while beaming aboard Cardassian survivors with shields down.
Plus, from "A Call to Arms" onward we see other Defiant-class ships on both Voyager and DS9, so it obviously wasn't a completely junky ship. I don't think the Defiant is some miracle battleship. It was just designed for a specific purpose and ended up being pretty good at it.
I always feel the need to do something cool after posting something like this because my god I just wrote something insanely nerdy.
So good it was mothballed.
No, really, they said pretty clearly the ship would almost tear itself apart. We cannot imagine it met Starfleet specifications in any way when we hear this and couple it with the fact that the project was put aside. They clearly did produce at least a few more examples of the class as an emergency stopgap measure during the Dominion War, probably because it was possible to build them so quickly. The writers managed to find occasional follow-throughs on her problematic engineering, such as the fact that she couldn't safely exceed warp factor 9 without depleting her phasers.This ties into the question of crew: due to the unusual origins and status of the Defiant, I imagine there wouldn't be a standard evaluation for crew to become rated on this design. It was probably catch as catch can for those first few years at least.
As I recall it was mothballed because they didn't need it. It was designed to fight the borg, when they vanished they put it on the back burner. Dominion show up, it has a purpose again.
So good it was mothballed.
This ties into the question of crew: due to the unusual origins and status of the Defiant, I imagine there wouldn't be a standard evaluation for crew to become rated on this design. It was probably catch as catch can for those first few years at least.
While this does seem to have been the case on the show (i.e. that nobody besides Worf was manning Defiant during downtime), it doesn't make much sense to me. If somebody decides to Pearl Harbor the station during night shift, it'll take precious time to re-man (and undock) Defiant--assuming it isn't destroyed before they get a chance to try. As a military asset attached to a starbase in a potential war zone, the ship ought to be permanently manned at full strength even in dock. Yeah, the crew will end up spending most of its time running drills and killing time, but if they're protecting a station gthat could be attacked at any moment, that's their job. "Hurry up and wait."
The time it takes to man the ship is probably next to nothing. I mean they probably just do a site to site transport
As I recall it was mothballed because they didn't need it. It was designed to fight the borg, when they vanished they put it on the back burner. Dominion show up, it has a purpose again.
So good it was mothballed.
This ties into the question of crew: due to the unusual origins and status of the Defiant, I imagine there wouldn't be a standard evaluation for crew to become rated on this design. It was probably catch as catch can for those first few years at least.
Sort of, the flaws that turned up in her shake down cruise in conjunction with the Borg threat diminishing resulted in Starfleet deciding that it just wasn't worth the effort. I have to admit Starfleet seems to be run by morons. The Borg may not be a constant threat but such a powerful (at the time) enemy surely couldn't be dismissed so easily, plus true to form Starfleet seems to ignore the whole point of Q introducing the Borg to the Federation in the first place: There are some pretty big hostile threats out there! Que the Dominion!
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Which is why even after they got the Defiant, they kept upgrading the weapons systems - we didn't see the Defiant involved in the fight in 'Way of the Warrior' and the station managed to hold its own, fighting the Klingons to a standstill until reinforcements could arrive.
Really, the ship's mission never was to defend the station. That would be like assigning a mongoose to escort a tiger through the jungle... Sure, the mongoose is a fierce fighter on its own, but still, come on!
The ship was ideal for the one mission that our heroes performed with her before and during the war: aggressive, armed reconnaissance. Modern militaries do that with armored cars or comparable special vehicles, or sometimes with armed jeeps, not with main battle tanks. But modern militaries don't defend key locations with armored cars or armed jeeps.
That in mind, it only makes sense that the ship would seldom be crewed when docked. She would not be expected to do any sort of emergency response - only carefully preplanned recce sorties. She might well have a crew of her own, people who are basically idled and on shore leave when there is no recce mission being planned. Or then some of the hundreds of Starfleeters could pull double duty, having non-crucial stationside assignments that they could drop when the needs of the ship so required.
And yes, I think it does make sense that some top DS9 officers would sail with the ship virtually every time she departed on one of her strategically important sorties. What makes less sense is that ALL of them would do that at the same time - and that there would be no permanently assigned skipper to handle the "technical" sides of the mission so that the hero officers could concentrate on the intelligence gathering side. Worf would have been an ideal skipper, but the writers left that concept half-baked.
Timo Saloniemi
The ship was ideal for the one mission that our heroes performed with her before and during the war: aggressive, armed reconnaissance. Modern militaries do that with armored cars or comparable special vehicles, or sometimes with armed jeeps, not with main battle tanks. But modern militaries don't defend key locations with armored cars or armed jeeps.
That in mind, it only makes sense that the ship would seldom be crewed when docked. She would not be expected to do any sort of emergency response - only carefully preplanned recce sorties. She might well have a crew of her own, people who are basically idled and on shore leave when there is no recce mission being planned. Or then some of the hundreds of Starfleeters could pull double duty, having non-crucial stationside assignments that they could drop when the needs of the ship so required.
And yes, I think it does make sense that some top DS9 officers would sail with the ship virtually every time she departed on one of her strategically important sorties. What makes less sense is that ALL of them would do that at the same time - and that there would be no permanently assigned skipper to handle the "technical" sides of the mission so that the hero officers could concentrate on the intelligence gathering side. Worf would have been an ideal skipper, but the writers left that concept half-baked.
Timo Saloniemi
There's no support for that interpretation. The Memory Alpha entry on the Defiant: http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Defiant_class quotes Ronald Moore as saying with regards to the Defiants in Call to Arms "We just decided that the Fed was now cranking out Defiant-class vessels based on Sisko's recommendations to SF Command."
From that statement, it seems pretty clear that Starfleet was able to iron out a lot of the initial flaws of the class to the point that they began "cranking out Defiant-class vessels". Not "throwing together a few of those rusty cans cause hey at least they're cheap" but "cranking them out". Make of that what you will.
FWIW, the one other Defiant class vessel we could see up close, the Sao Paulo, was also the only wartime vessel that had a registry number that was higher than those of prewar vessels. It might be that the Defiant class was the only one that Starfleet was either capable or willing to build during the war...
...Which might support the "cheap/fast to make" interpretation more than the "they are so good we simply must have more" one. That is, if we witnessed even one large starship being built during the war, then we could argue that the small size of the Defiant wasn't all that crucial for the construction schedule, and that other factors might have affected the ordering of multiple new Defiants. But we don't.
Timo Saloniemi
...Which might support the "cheap/fast to make" interpretation more than the "they are so good we simply must have more" one. That is, if we witnessed even one large starship being built during the war, then we could argue that the small size of the Defiant wasn't all that crucial for the construction schedule, and that other factors might have affected the ordering of multiple new Defiants. But we don't.
Timo Saloniemi
it's really very simple. The defiant was a prototype ship, which had been constructed to help combat the threat of the borg. It didn't work. The ship had too much power for its size and every time it got up to full steam it would start to tear itself apart. Until the chief gave everything a full work over.
Starfleet took that ship out of whatever dock it was stuck in and gave it to Sisko to help with the growing threat of the Jem ha'dar. So in a sense it was given to DS9 and it's crew to look after. in a sense it was put into action before it was ready.
Meanwhile the Defiant-class went on to be developed, using notes from Cheif o'brian and further research from starfleet engineering corp which resulted in ships like The Valient being built.
that's why the defiant didn't have a crew, because it wasn't finished and then it was given to DS9. DS9's crew became the Defiant's crew.
Starfleet took that ship out of whatever dock it was stuck in and gave it to Sisko to help with the growing threat of the Jem ha'dar. So in a sense it was given to DS9 and it's crew to look after. in a sense it was put into action before it was ready.
Meanwhile the Defiant-class went on to be developed, using notes from Cheif o'brian and further research from starfleet engineering corp which resulted in ships like The Valient being built.
that's why the defiant didn't have a crew, because it wasn't finished and then it was given to DS9. DS9's crew became the Defiant's crew.
Let's remember how the ship was supposed to "help": it was supposed to perform a suicide mission to the heart of the Dominion, ostensibly to establish some sort of contact with the enigmatic Founders. Starfleet didn't think the ship or her crew would come back: we explicitly heard them give zero odds for success before the mission launched. So perhaps the main attribute of the Defiant was "expendable"?
But unlike the Sao Paulo, the Valiant had a low registry similar to that of the original Defiant. So the Valiant probably was another failed prototype from the late 2360s, and might not have benefited from the Chief's recommendations much.
Timo Saloniemi
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