^^ Yes, there is a certain logic to that. But revisting the issue: Who claims there had just been one survivor? The escape shuttle of the Saratoga had more than one survivor. Bob
It makes 0 sense that Hansen arrives on Enterprise in an Excelsior just like every other admiral, then takes command of some mysterious Galaxy-class ship. That Vendetta book you guys are referring to....well, I respect Peter David as a writer, but he is full of fanwank sometimes. His Excalibur is a Galaxy class, he has two others in his novels (described as "hot rods"), and now I find out that he had yet another one in another book?? Is entire Starfleet made up of those ships?
They are saying that there was one surviving vessel, not one surviving person. The one surviving ship comes from Hansen's mention of 40 ships. Then, in "The Drumhead," Adm. Satie says that 39 ships were destroyed. Now, Memory Alpha says that Hansen mentions more ships on the way, so I guess that gives people wiggle room to say that more ships arrived and therefore the possibility that more ships survived. Personally, I think the idea of one surviving ship is more interesting. Which ship was it? How did it survive? Was its survival the result of a controversial decision by the captain to withdraw? Was it blind luck? We don't know the answers to these questions, of course, but they can be fun to explore in our imaginations.
As far as I'm concerned, the 40th ship was the USS Righteous from the Star Trek: Borg interactive movie.
But so far as people were concerned, until 2377, the Righteous was lost with all hands until that date. so Satie's line in The Drumhead would consider Righteous to have been lost.
Not really. Excelsiors do seem like standard "flag ferries", explaining why Hanson would use one to visit Jouret - but as soon as he arrives to his apparently haphazardy assembled fighting force, he would do well to pick a ship optimally suited for his fighting plan. That happens a lot in naval history: admirals hop onto fast ships for better situational awareness, or strong ships for combat persistence, or behind-the-lines ships with good communications gear for a combination of the two. But I'd certainly want to steer away from having any Galaxies at Wolf 359 when there are so many other ship classes to choose from. If we want to see a Galaxy-like bridge in the deliberately nondescript shots of Hanson, we can say it's a Nebula bridge. Arguably, though, the Excelsior that Hanson rode from Jouret to Wolf 359 should be among the ships lost in that battle - there's no reason why she should have left the system before the big fight. Unless Hanson hopped off her some time after the Jouret meeting, and this Excelsior never went anywhere near Wolf 359 but instead was off ferrying some other admiral to some other location when the balloon went up. It can also be argued that forty doesn't necessarily mean forty, but could stand for forty-two just as well. (Heck, in biblical language, forty simply means "a lot", generally "hundreds" - the Bible was put together well before this decimal business caught on.) Agreed. Although it's darned difficult to think why a) Starfleet would choose to withdraw any of its units or b) Locutus would allow a unit to escape. Surely out of a fleet of forty, a dozen ships should survive if Starfleet made a decision to withdraw! I mean, why would such a decision be made so late in the game that only one or two ships survive? At that point, it's clear this is Armageddon anyway, and there's nothing to be gained from staying alive because everybody back home, and eventually everywhere else as well, will be horribly lost. The Cube was destroying starships one by one, at a relatively sedate pace; there should have been plenty of time to choose the tactically sensible moment to withdraw, and OTOH if a dozen ships chose to withdraw, it should not have been possible for the Borg to shoot down eleven of those at the last second. Timo Saloniemi
I am inclined to think of the Amasov-led USS Endeavour encounter as a one-off, as opposed to part of the Wolf 359 fleet. There might (should...) be additional one-offs with the Borg, to feed the idea that not EVERY Borg encounter that Starfleet survived involved Enterprise or Voyager, as well as inspiring the Borg to invade the Alpha and Beta Quadrants wholesale in the Destiny trilogy. A handful of mosquito stings might be ignored, but if more encounters go in the Federation's favor, that would inspire a more forceful swat. And who's to say it's just the Federation doing the stinging? It is possible that other near-galactic entities also prevailed in Borg encounters. I'm not inclined to think that any Klingons did, though. Hi-diddle-diddle, straight down the middle, all disruptors blazing, tends to be the Klingon approach, and I'm thinking the Borg could see right through a cloaking device.
If you had been in charge of one of the "last ship(s) standing" would you have sacrificed your ship and crew or instead decided to withdraw from the battle? It's one thing to start with 40 ships against a single cube, but by the time you realize that you aren't even putting a dent into that darn cube with all your combined force, the option to withdraw (or try to) must have been on the mind of the last commanders. Of course, the odd thing would be that apparently nobody showed up after the battle to look for survivors. Bob
The thing is, Excelsiors are among the most powerful. They might be old, but they are the workhorses of the fleet and obviously upgradable. Admiralty might even have a soft spot for them, being that they are all older officers, and in their day, these ships were like Sovereign-class. We never see admirals to have a preference for powerful ships. In First Contact, they could have relieved Picard of duty and used the Enterprise, but they didn't think one ship would make a difference, and they were right. There are around 6 Galaxies or so at the time, may be not all have even been built, and they are deep space explorers, so I just find it hard to believe that they would be around Sector 001. We know it wasn't Enterprise, Yamato, Odyssey, Venture, or Galaxy, so that leaves us with very small chance that the one or two Galaxies even happened to have been built at the time, let alone find themselves floating in that wreckage. For what its worth, if you want to go with the similar bridge with "ancient" red alert panel, better theory would be Ambassador class. Not only do we see her, but her bridge is very similar to battle bridge. But even then, I would wager that he just stayed on the Melbourne which happened to need a captain anyways.
Actually, at the time that the Enterprise was commission, there were already 6 galaxy class in service. The USS. Galaxy, Odyssey, Venture, Yamoto and Challenger, and the one that start with the letter T. I can't remember it name. The Endeavor actually didn't escape, it was disable. She was one of the ships under repair that Picard had gather to take part in blockading the Romulans during the Klingon Civil War. Also the Endeavor is the Nebula class starship seen with the weapons damage on it pylon above it starboard nacelle when the fleet started to move out from the starbase.
No, all we know for sure is that the Galaxy was the prototype and that the Enterprise and the Yamato were sister ships. We do not know the exact date of any Galaxy class ship construction other than the Enterprise. That was the Sutherland, not the Endeavor. While the Endeavor was part of the detection grid, it was never shown on screen, either as a Nebula class ship or any other class. And we also don't know if this Endeavor and the Endeavor that Janeway mentions are even the same ship. To my knowledge, there has never been a proven sighting of a ship named the Trinculo on screen. If you would kindly link to a screencap that proves what you're saying, I'd appreciate it.
One wonders why Starfleet would haul damaged and destroyed Wolf 359 ships all the way to the Romulan border. But there you have it: wreckage identical to that witnessed at Wolf 359 is clearly stored at Qualor II, right next to the RNZ as per certain other eps. So some of the ships Picard enlists for the tachyon grid might be Borg veterans, too. But there's no telling which ones, if any. As for the fleet seen launching, none of the four ships can actually be identified: there are no registries or names visible. Which is understandable, because it is a montage of stock footage shots for the most part, and stock footage would have been shot for generic use, with as few unique or identifying factors as possible. Timo Saloniemi
I assume you are joking that 40 and mean 42. I didn't mean that Starfleet ordered the retreat, although it could be. In the scenario I was imagining, it was the captain of the surviving ship that made a decision to retreat, not Starfleet.
Actually, the fleet launching scene is not in fact stock footage, but new footage filmed for that episode. The only stock footage used was the scene between the Enterprise and the Excalibur, which was taken from "Yesterday's Enterprise." As for the Nebula, the same nacelle damage seen in the initial fleet launching scene is present on the model when we see her as the Sutherland; hence, that ship was the Sutherland.
I very much doubt that. Each of the individual ship shots looks identical to the previous appearances of said ships from rear angles... Save for the Sutherland, of course - that's footage from elsewhere in the same episode, as you point out. Timo Saloniemi
There were three ships in that shot besides the Enterprise: The Sutherland, the Excalibur and the Hathaway. They are all departing at the same time and flying in formation away from the camera. I don't believe there are any corresponding stock footage clips showing this particular formation with any of the three ships (there's a similar shot of the Enterprise and the Zhukov, but the distance between the two ships isn't exactly the same as the distance between the Enterprise and the Excalibur).
The "formation" would be an artifact of how the shot was composited. In the originals, each of the ships would have been at a slightly different position of the viewscreen: translations like that are easily accomplished in reuse of stock elements. Timo Saloniemi
Yes, I know that. My point was that to my knowledge, none of the individual ships ever had been filmed the way they were seen in that shot to provide stock footage for this scene, no matter how the shot may have been composited. If you can find previous episodes where the models in question appeared the same way they did here, I'll stand corrected.