Best tactician? Kirk,Picard, Sisko or Janeway?
- Thread starter KlingonPredator
- Start date
- Status
The guy who invented "The Corbomite Maneuver"
Kirk and Sisko are the only two real choices here. Picard's more of a diplomat and Janeway 'Follows her gut'.
I'm surprised Sisko is beating Kirk in the war though. Sisko is good at war strategy, but he's not as much as a tactician. Strategy and tactics are two different things. Strategy is your overall approach to a large struggle, and tactics are specific maneuvers. The DS9 writers didn't focus as much on tactics as the TOS writers, there was nothing like The Corbomite Maneuver or Balance of Terror where Sisko has to take into account all the specifics of how an enemy might be thinking to trick them into making bad decisions.
Sisko is the best strategist, Kirk is the best tactician.
Picard is the best diplomat, Janeway is the best prison cook.
I'm surprised Sisko is beating Kirk in the war though. Sisko is good at war strategy, but he's not as much as a tactician. Strategy and tactics are two different things. Strategy is your overall approach to a large struggle, and tactics are specific maneuvers. The DS9 writers didn't focus as much on tactics as the TOS writers, there was nothing like The Corbomite Maneuver or Balance of Terror where Sisko has to take into account all the specifics of how an enemy might be thinking to trick them into making bad decisions.
Sisko is the best strategist, Kirk is the best tactician.
Picard is the best diplomat, Janeway is the best prison cook.
One of the best strategy episodes I ever saw was from Balance of Terror. First they discussed the whole thing at the table to make it tense.
Then it was one trick against the other, like Kirk pulling out the old nuclear warheads.
Picard was good in Yesterday's Enterprise, Riker in BOBW was good, but for me there was too much techno babble solutions in TNG.
One of the coolest things I ever saw Sisko do, battle and tactic wise, is fly into a fleet of Jem Hadar war ships to rescue someone, rescued them, and then fought his way out again.
Sisko also had WOTW, CTA, SOA--Sisko gets the win just based on all those battle experiences. He knows how to fight.
I like the way TOS handled their command--Scotty-- no nonsense stuff.
"This is the commander of the USS Enterprise. All cities and installations on Eminiar Seven have been located, identified, and fed into our fire-control system"... That sounded like an X.O.
Then it was one trick against the other, like Kirk pulling out the old nuclear warheads.
Picard was good in Yesterday's Enterprise, Riker in BOBW was good, but for me there was too much techno babble solutions in TNG.
One of the coolest things I ever saw Sisko do, battle and tactic wise, is fly into a fleet of Jem Hadar war ships to rescue someone, rescued them, and then fought his way out again.
Sisko also had WOTW, CTA, SOA--Sisko gets the win just based on all those battle experiences. He knows how to fight.
I like the way TOS handled their command--Scotty-- no nonsense stuff.
"This is the commander of the USS Enterprise. All cities and installations on Eminiar Seven have been located, identified, and fed into our fire-control system"... That sounded like an X.O.
Last edited:
Sisko is my pick.
TNG 'Rascals' Riker is a good tactician?
I would pick Archer. With an inferior ship, he outmatched klingons at least thrice, he found the solution to the xindi crisis, etc.
Kirk's achievements were far too often based on luck - because the writer said so (for example, star trek 11; TWOK Khan unable to understand space has 3 dimensions). And, in TWOK, he made a 'Rascals' worthy mistake - more than large enough to eliminate him from the competition.
Picard - beyond the Picard maneuver, he has little to show for; only the basics. A one trick pony does not a good tactician make.
Sisko mastered the fundamentals - but that's it. His achievements were based on the fire-power of his ship, not his tactics.
Janeway had technobabble and not much else.
Last edited:
Every captain has 'bad tactics' moments due to bad writing.
But Archer's solution to the Xindi problem was pretty much 'Make the Xindi feel morally awful about it'. His success in the Xindi conflict was a Diplomatic success, and an occasional fist-fight win.
The only real clever tactical moment I attribute to Archer was when he got the cult leader to execute him using the transporter.
But Archer's solution to the Xindi problem was pretty much 'Make the Xindi feel morally awful about it'. His success in the Xindi conflict was a Diplomatic success, and an occasional fist-fight win.
The only real clever tactical moment I attribute to Archer was when he got the cult leader to execute him using the transporter.
And outsmarting klingons by clever tactics whenever the situation required, etc.
About the xindi crisis: Archer achieved a diplomatic/strategic success of that calibre, and he tricked Degra, gained access to the wormhole that lead to Degra by creative tactics, chose to teleport inside the xindi weapon, etc.
And not a single instance of tactical incompetence as uncompromising as Rascals or The wrath of Khan in all of Enterprise.
By comparison to Archer, Kirk and Riker were depicted as tactical ignoramuses.
About the xindi crisis: Archer achieved a diplomatic/strategic success of that calibre, and he tricked Degra, gained access to the wormhole that lead to Degra by creative tactics, chose to teleport inside the xindi weapon, etc.
And not a single instance of tactical incompetence as uncompromising as Rascals or The wrath of Khan in all of Enterprise.
By comparison to Archer, Kirk and Riker were depicted as tactical ignoramuses.
Kirk's "bad tactics" moment in TWOK was not bad writing, IMO. It was part of the theme of the film: he was a guy who'd been out of the game for a long time at that point who, having successfully flown by the seat of his pants and gutted out the perils of overconfidence as a younger man, had to come face to face with the reality as a middle-aged man that you can't get away with that forever. It was probably some of the best work either Shatner or the writers ever did with that character.
Kirk is most certainly not "portrayed as a tactical ignoramus" prior to that. His tactical competence in "Balance of Terror" is better sold and flows more naturally from the script and the events than much of anything we see with later Captains, Archer included. You could tell that script was written by someone who understood and had probably experienced the naval warfare for which the episode's space warfare functioned as analogy.
Archer can be argued to have spent a lot of time winning by writers' contrivance (admittedly I can't speak to much of the Xindi arc -- the show had mostly lost me by then); the same was frequently true of Janeway and her confrontations with the Nerf Borg and the absurd Species 8472, and I do note that the biggest threat she really faced (the mad Krenim Annorax and his chrono-weaponry) she had to resort to a suicide attack to defeat.
Kirk is most certainly not "portrayed as a tactical ignoramus" prior to that. His tactical competence in "Balance of Terror" is better sold and flows more naturally from the script and the events than much of anything we see with later Captains, Archer included. You could tell that script was written by someone who understood and had probably experienced the naval warfare for which the episode's space warfare functioned as analogy.
Archer can be argued to have spent a lot of time winning by writers' contrivance (admittedly I can't speak to much of the Xindi arc -- the show had mostly lost me by then); the same was frequently true of Janeway and her confrontations with the Nerf Borg and the absurd Species 8472, and I do note that the biggest threat she really faced (the mad Krenim Annorax and his chrono-weaponry) she had to resort to a suicide attack to defeat.
Archer
Just for the hell of it
Just for the hell of it
Not sure I agree with your reasoning here. You're saying that Sisko's to blame for losing his ship to a direct hit from a weapon that the Federation wasn't even aware of is his fault, but it's not Kirk's fault his chief engineer didn't have enough common sense to prepare the ship for combat? And bear in mind that it was Kirk's choice to take only five people aboard Enterprise. Plot device or no, what he did was exceptionally risky and worked out only because he was up against commander who managed to be stupider than he was.
--Sran
Kirk's leadership by arrogance approach is shown throughout the films. He finally stops in TUC because the stakes are extremely high (and his arrest prevents him from commanding the Enterprise until Spock is able to piece together the facts surrounding Gorkon's death).
--Sran
Exactly why they should have stopped with TWOK, I always thought. The later films were more about trying to cash in on sentimentality than about convincingly developing the characters or setting. (And it would have shown far more guts to kill Spock and leave him dead. Nimoy could still have made his cameo cheddar in flashbacks and alternate reality episodes.)
Have to say Janeway because she was in the middle of nowhere with no support from Starfleet whatsoever.
Sisko is my close second. Very close.
Sisko is my close second. Very close.
A person with medium IQ, with no experience and training whatsoever would not have made the mistake Kirk made in TWOK.
Kirk was utterly PATHETIC. A tactical ignoramus.
That would be 'by someone who watched 'The enemy below''. The episode is practically a copy thereof.
And there are quite a few other episodes where Kirk won because he got lucky. The kind of luck that can make one win the lottery.
Archer was written as depending far less on luck than Kirk.
Even if true: fact remains the ep is still a more convincing tactical scenario than we see in most of Trek.
No argument there. Also, however, true of most of the Trek Captains: particularly if we count "encountering improbably Nerfed enemies" as "luck" in the cases of Voyager and Enterprise.
Since the writing in general in Archer's show was nonsensical, though, it's kind of apples to oranges.
- Status