Earth is notoriously undefended throughout Trek. The Klingon fleet approaching Earth when the 2256-57 war ends apparently runs into little or no opposition as it enters our solar system. The Enterprise is the only starship that can respond to face the V'Ger cloud. The Breen stage a successful attack on San Francisco and manage to inflict heavy damage on the city and escape with relatively few losses. For the central world and capital of an interstellar alliance spread over thousands of light-years it sure is easy to reach with a ship armed to the teeth with advanced weaponry.
“The Best of Both Worlds” would’ve been better off without seeing the Mars Defense Perimeter. One of those things they should’ve told and not shown.
The Mars Defense Perimeter may be analogous to the Neutral Zone. it may not be much more than a line drawn in space, but alarms may go off somewhere if someone violates it without permission. Those three ships may have been standard patrol craft or customs interception vehicles and were essentially sent up as cannon fodder. I also think that while most talk is about Wolf 359 and how many ships were lost there, that may have been simply the biggest battle of the First Borg Offensive. A single Borg ship cut straight to the heart of the Federation. I tend to think there were many other starships that were mowed down along the way, but Wolf 359 was the largest concentrated engagement, IMO.
During Wolf 359 and the Borg's initial attack on Earth, it literally Bitch Slapped everything in it's way without breaking a sweat.
Very much agreed. Wolf 359 is where starfleet made its stand with the ships that could made there and put together a coordinated effort, but nothing prevents the idea that there were several minor battles with other ships or very small fleets.
But as for actual manned ships destroyed, the total was only ever 39. Admiral Satie confirms this after the fact, and ALL of those ships were destroyed at Wolf 359. She never mentioned that there were, say, 275 other ships that were destroyed in other battles. Just 39. That means there were ZERO starships defending Earth, unless the Solar System's entire defense network is solely automated, which makes no sense either. There were no ships in Spacedock in Earth orbit to defend the planet with? They did the best they could with the budget, resources, and time that they had. They wouldn't have even had enough ships for the Wolf 359 wreckage if Michael Okuda and Rick Sternbach hadn't utilized the study models Ed Miarecki previously built and the wrecked Enterprise from STIII that was in their stock supply. Remember, other than the two models Greg Jein provided (cast from Ent-D, Ent-C and Stargazer molds he already had available) and the Mars Defense Perimeter drone, there were no other models actually built specifically for the battle. Okuda once said that he and Sternbach went out and bought a bunch of Trek and non-Trek model kits to use as parts in an effort to build their own fleet of kitbashes for BoBW Pt. 2, but there just wasn't enough time, and the only ship to come out of that was the Mars Defense drone (which, surprisingly enough, we have never seen photos of, while we have seen all of the other ships used for the scene...)
Ask Fleet Admiral Mahan. Star Trek ships fight like naval vessels in the pre-WWI era: given the range and type of weapons and propulsion used (and regardless of the anachronistic range and type of sensors involved), it is doctrinally suicidal to leave ships in reserve when going to the decisive battle. If Earth had starships, Hanson would have had no right to leave them behind when going to fight at Wolf 359, as leaving them behind would weaken Earth's defenses for zero gain. Wolf 359 would simply be Hanson's Mahanian Decisive Battle, absolutely requiring full attendance. The only assets Hanson would have been allowed to leave at Sol would be those incapable of going to Wolf 359. And the Mahan doctrine also assumes strong coastal fortifications, which again is in harmony with what we see in Star Trek. Dialogue and visuals establish the Borg fight with "coastal emplacements" at every turn when moving through Sol towards Earth - although they are a superior force and easily deal with all of those, and indeed take every opportunity to defeat the resistance in detail, the most efficient way to erase it all but not the most efficient way to achieve the goal of invading Earth. So we have to doubt the presumed Borg motivations here a bit - but obviously the Borg would not be beholden to Mahanian thinking, what with operating non-Mahanian hardware. Well, the Mars Defense Perimeter defended Mars. It's what it says on the tin, and consistent with what we hear of the Borg antics: they attack planets in Sol in a relentless sequence, neutralizing their defenses and then moving on. I don't see the MDP having a problem dealing with, the Klingons, say. It might already have had those killer sats and kite drones we later saw in PIC for defeating conventional enemies. And the some suicide drones for defeating invading Space Amoebae or Doomsday Machines. And obviously the Borg would be closer to the latter monsters than to the former conventional foe - but, alas, not a perfect match, as the Borg would have the ability and will to shoot back at threats the monsters wouldn't even recognize for threats. Timo Saloniemi
good point, but what about non-Starfleet ships? He doesn’t include in the 39 Klingon ships that we know from other episodes were present at wolf 359, after all... Were the Martian ships Starfleet or perhaps Martian police?
What evidence would we have that any Klingon ships made it to this specific engagement? The Klingons in VOY flashbacks or in the Collective could have fought and been assimilated in any number of engagements; most of those appear to go unseen, as Picard in ST:FC speaks of the Borg advancing and the Feds falling back, a description that certainly doesn't match any of his own onscreen adventures. VOY "Infinite Regress" features just one Seven persona who mentions Wolf 359 specifically, and a son who was there (and hopes that he hears mommy is fine, so is either said mommy herself, or then daddy relaying the news). But we don't really learn whether he or she him- or herself was actually present at Wolf 359 (he or she refers to having had the intent of going there, and mentions a battle, but that's not conclusive yet), and we have little reason to think he or she would not have been aboard one of the 39 Starfleet ships if he or she did attend the specific battle (all we hear is that it was too late for his or her ship to "turn back", potentially an unlikely course of action for a Starfleet ship). In contrast, "Unity" gives us a human Starfleet character who clearly states she was assimilated at Wolf 359. "Survival Instinct" refers to a character who was assimilated from the "night shift" of the Excalibur, and thus probably wasn't at Wolf 359 at all - Starfleet went to that battle on its own volition, so there would have been no "night" on any vessel at the time the assimilations happened. And that's about it for VOY. Timo Saloniemi
Well, there are hints in later episodes, but most importantly Hanson says that the Klingons were sending warships and the romulans might help too...I guess we don’t know if the Klingons arrived in time for the battle, but where were them if they hadn’t?
In the actual wreckage scenes at Wolf 359, we’ve been able to identify every piece of destroyed starship and flotsam that was used, with only one exception: a piece of debris that’s floating directly above the Kyushu in the first shot. It’s very small and far away from the camera, but the Blu-ray special features show the different VFX passes from the scene, and the object looks vaguely like the main hull and at least one nacelle of a TMP Klingon battlecruiser (the model kit of which was the only Klingon ship available at the time other than the TOS battlecruiser which would have been too old.) I’m not 100% sure that’s what it is, but if so, that would be an indication that the Klingons did send reinforcements. There’s also a scene in an episode of VOY where a former Borg drone is having a flashback to the battle and we see a Klingon BoP (although it’s just stock footage from some other battle).
Originally there was a different fight sequence with the Klingons in TMP and they had a few models to destroy. So it might have been one of those.
Those of us who have been long time Trek fans know that in TOS and the original cast movies that starfleet was much smaller. Yet another thing that DSC got wrong. If in that era Starfleet had 7000 ships, that would include all shuttles and other small service craft. What we would practically consider a ship would be just the larger ones and probably numbered pretty low. Especially those that could be called in to protect from an outside threat. The Enterprise was so often the only ship in the quadrant. So that 7000 number is wrong for all practical purposes.
*blows dust off the thread* Sorry -- had a bad winter. Cross-pollenating with the whole TOS-era Starfleet-registry question, real-world politics that led to TPTB rejecting a registry system that makes sense (and very pointedly ignoring that no one apparently ever asked the guy who came UP with starship registries what the system was), and ignoring the Remastered registries that derive from all of that wrong-headed illogic (starting with Greg Jein's "Case of Jonathan Doe Starship" article in T-Negative)... Going with Jeffries' intended model for TOS, there are <100 of any of the extant ship classes -- more for the smaller, easier-built ships, fewer for the big Heavy Cruisers. There are maybe thirty Constitutions built prior to the TMP refit. There's a smattering of Mirandas, of varying subclasses (base class at 1800, Soyuz 'corrected' to 1840, Avenger at 1860 -- we know at least thirty-three base Mirandas were built, a handful of Soyuzes, at least twenty-four Avengers...). The Republic was a training ship, so we can consider the class at 1300 to be quasi-obsolete if the seventy-first ship of that class was on training duty. From the Starbase 11 wall chart, we know the class at 1600 nearly maxed out its block -- but all the numbers are in the upper half of the range, and we don't know if the earlier-built ships are still in service. Between shipbuilding capacity and attrition, outside of active wartime, I'd say an actual original-timeline Starfleet vessel count between 2220 and 2280 would be several hundred Starships of a dozen or so classes, and maybe a couple thousand of what Cartwright referred to as "smaller vessels" (Starfleet-registered, but not "Starships" -- Cruisers) like the Grissom, of maybe another dozen or so classes -- cargo ships, surveyors, scouts, couriers, etc, 7000 is ridiculous.
A few hundred ships seems like enough for TOS-era stories to me. Not sure if I said this already, but to me, it seems like the 1701-A could be the last ship of its class to be in service and the Miranda's (or whatever newer variants) and Excelsior's had split the duties up between them. Perhaps the 7000 was a reference to NCC-7100 or Picard's model in his room. By its design, the Constellation-class could have been from the movie era, and that number was taken too literally? Can elaborate on what you call "real world politics"?
I would go even farther and say that during the TNG era there were also a couple hundred starships in service, which would make the 39 ships lost at Wolf 359 a far more devastating number than if Starfleet had, say, 10,000+ ships at its disposal. I doubt that was the reason. They probably just pulled "7,000" out of their ass at random.