Crew Size for the Galaxy class stardrive

[Timo]

we later find that at least one ship survived the battle

Umm, we never do.

That is, no ship defined as a Wolf 359 survivor is ever shown or mentioned. Nor is there a general reference to any ship surviving. We don't know how many ships exactly were involved in the battle - we only know that 39 were lost. There could have been 39 ships involved, or then more, possibly many more (as Admiral Hanson originally says he has managed to get 40 ships, a round number that might mean 39 in reality, but is hoping that more would arrive).

(Yes, there is a ship named Ahwahnee in evidence in an Okudagram listing "Redemption" blockade fleet participants, and a ship model with that name on the saucer was included in the Wolf 359 wreckage, but the name was never seen or mentioned in connection of Wolf 359, and the registries don't match anyway.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

There is also Janeway going over the captain's logs with Borg experiance (which would have to be before she ended up in the Delta Quadrant as they had not yet contacted Starfleet). First was Picard of USS Enterprise, but there was a second in Captain Amasov of USS Endeavour. As this ship is seen again in TNG (one of the ships in Picard's blockade a year later, it was the last ship to clear the drydock, indicating it has been under repair), it is assumed to be a survivor. Also it was listed as being at the Battle of Sector 001 in First Contact, however Janeway would not have any logs of that yet.

A Nebula-class ship could hold a lot of survivors.

 

[Timo]

Then again, Wolf 359 wouldn't be Starfleet's only contact with the Borg. Even adding all of Picard's adventures with them cannot tell the whole truth, because in ST:FC, Picard says that the Borg advance and the Federation falls back. This never happens in Picard's own encounters, nor did it happen at Wolf 359, so something else must be happening to a bunch of other ships and captains. Amasov on the Endeavor might never have been at Wolf 359, then.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cyke101]

Then again, Wolf 359 wouldn't be Starfleet's only contact with the Borg. Even adding all of Picard's adventures with them cannot tell the whole truth, because in ST:FC, Picard says that the Borg advance and the Federation falls back. This never happens in Picard's own encounters, nor did it happen at Wolf 359, so something else must be happening to a bunch of other ships and captains. Amasov on the Endeavor might never have been at Wolf 359, then.

Timo Saloniemi

Personally, I subscribe to the idea that the Endeavor survived. However, Voyager showed a flashback of a Cube battling the Klingons, and an earlier episode of TNG (i believe) involved a piece of Borg debris found in their space (which I also believe to be the same incident, but I don't have much footing there, admittedly). It could very be that the Endeavor wasn't at Wolf 359, but perhaps assisted the Klingons in some way, on top of other theories like additional Starfleet/Borg encounters anyway.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

I don't like to think that the Klingons were at the battle. However, one of my completely unsupported theories had them arriving after the cube had warped out, picked up the few pods that survived, then cloaked and went silent running to lie low. Endeavor could have done the same thing(ish), but I prefer to believe that she encountered and survived some other incident. It doesn't ALWAYS have to be the Enterprise...

Mark

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Lying low while a foe is trudging about doesn't sound very Klingon. Maybe Romulan. They've already been butt-touched by the Borg, it'd make sense for them to shadow a major incursion into their neighbor's space.

Rescuing folk out of the kindness of their heart don't sound very Romulan, though.

Then again, Wolf 359 wouldn't be Starfleet's only contact with the Borg. Even adding all of Picard's adventures with them cannot tell the whole truth, because in ST:FC, Picard says that the Borg advance and the Federation falls back. This never happens in Picard's own encounters, nor did it happen at Wolf 359, so something else must be happening to a bunch of other ships and captains. Amasov on the Endeavor might never have been at Wolf 359, then.

Personally, I even doubt System J-25 was the first that Starfleet was aware of the Borg. Between Archer's sighting in the 22nd century, El Aurian refugees fleeing the Borg in the 23rd, and the Hansens studying them well before Picard's "first contact" with them, it's a foregone conclusion that someone in the Federation had some awareness of them. I'd go so far as to suggest that the existence of civilization-eating cyborg hordes could have been a classified secret, to prevent a public panic, and that all the J-25 and Wolf 359 incidents really did was blow the lid off the secret. Well, that and blow up a whole task force of Starfleet ships.

As for Borg advances... in I, Borg there are Borg ships freely moving about near (or in? I can never tell with TNG) Federation territory. A scout and a cube IIRC. The crew of the Enterprise isn't the center of the universe (well, not always ), and stuff happens to the rest of the galaxy when we're not watching them, I guess.

Really, Amasov could have had a run-in with the Borg anywhere in the 24th century.

 

[SicOne]

(1) I tend to think that USS Endeavour under Amasov was indeed part of the Wolf 359 battle force and the sole surviving mobile starship (clearly, USS Awahnee was utilized in "Redemption", so she was repairable); whether Endeavour participated from the get-go and was damaged to the point where she could no longer fight or came in at the very end of the battle and laid low is unknown. Has Endeavour's, and Amasov's, story been told in TrekLit anywhere? Anyway, when Enterprise-D came through the area later and detected no survivors, apparently someone had come along in the interim and collected all the lifeboats, beamed survivors out of wreckage, etc, and I tend to think that was Endeavour. Hansen's line of "forty starships" is one I take as an approximation rather than forty starships exactly showing up, so there could even have been a few more Federation ships showing up after the battle and assisting in rescue. If Enterprise-D had detected survivors, it probably would have stuck around to effect rescue ops, even if that consisted of dropping off a bunch of shuttles to gather lifeboats or the like; dialogue suggests no survivors detected in the wreckage, which tells me that someone else came and got them and collected the lifeboats.

(2) Matching the dialogue from BOBW and DS9's "The Emissary" suggests to me that the massive blasting of Melbourne's primary hull as depicted in Emissary came at the moment of dialogue in BOBW when Riker's talking to Hansen and he says, "The fight does not go well, Enterprise.", and somewhere around that line the background behind Hansen rocks dramatically (Melbourne's primary hull has just been blasted), and then when Hansen is cutoff midline at "Regroup at...", that's when Melbourne impacts the Borg cube's hull. After Melbourne is blasted in Emissary, the wrecked ship continues gliding rapidly towards the Borg cube. If Hansen is commanding the battle fleet from Melbourne rather than a tactically more-powerful Nebula or Ambassador, that suggests to me that Melbourne is a dedicated command ship and that Hansen was in the command station (presumably elsewhere in the ship than the blasted-out portion of the saucer...). That the Borg cube targeted Melbourne first suggests also that they either knew from Picard that Melbourne was a dedicated command-and-control ship, or that the Borg were able to detect significant subspace radio traffic from Melbourne before and during the engagement, assumed Melbourne had that role, and maneuvered to intercept. Sisko's Saratoga had the misfortune to be in the vicinity.

YMMV, but those are my thoughts.

 

[Timo]

in I, Borg there are Borg ships freely moving about near (or in? I can never tell with TNG) Federation territory.

Sounds like it's actually a case of the Federation advancing: Picard says he's scouting out this Argolis Cluster for possible future UFP colonization.

Later in "True Q", Picard offers aid to one of the native cultures in the Cluster, suggesting he didn't exactly "fall back" after spotting the Borg. In the Dominion War, this territory is suggested to be a gateway from Dominion/Cardassian holdings towards the core of the Federation, and it doesn't appear as if a Borg presence would be a factor there.

Has Endeavour's, and Amasov's, story been told in TrekLit anywhere?

There's a comic titled Loyalty that says Joseph Amasov commanded the Endeavor at Wolf 359 ("BoBW") and a RPG booklet saying he did it again at Earth (ST:FC), surviving both fights, and another from the "alien spotlight" series simply titled Borg that mentions him acting as a Borg expert.

Nothing in the novels, though - no first name is established for Amasov in those. An Endeavo(u)r is name-dropped in the Friedman novel Saratoga, without specific mention whether this would be the same ship Amasov (once) commanded.

If Hansen is commanding the battle fleet from Melbourne rather than a tactically more-powerful Nebula or Ambassador, that suggests to me that Melbourne is a dedicated command ship and that Hansen was in the command station

This is quite possible. OTOH, naval commanders ITRW have chosen "weak" ships as their flagships for a variety of reasons. Before effective realtime radio communications, fast ships such as cruisers were more useful for commanding than the cumbersome battleships; once radio emerged as a factor, battleships were disadvantaged by their very firepower, which tended to massively disrupt radio communications (the broadsides ripping out the ship's own antennas etc.), so those naval powers that could afford it fielded dedicated, essentially unarmed command ships; and now there's all this effortless networking, allowing the battle to be conducted from aboard just about any ship, with the hiding of the actual command ship's identity perhaps a factor in the choice of that vessel.

Are Excelsiors, the preferred command ships in TNG (see also "Descent"), nimbler than the big battlewagons? Nothing onscreen suggests this. Are they so inferior as to be relegated to behind-the-lines command duties? The fight at Wolf 359 had the Melbourne dashing in rather than standing off. Are they inconspicuous? Depends on how communications traffic can be monitored by the various enemies and hidden by Starfleet. (On the latter, one would assume all ships would be transmitting and receiving like there was no tomorrow, so the enemy would specifically have to divine the content of the messages rather than just their existence.)

A DS9 "Field of Fire" reference suggests a crew of 1,200 or more for an Excelsior. Command staff aboard? Troops being transported? An aged vessel requiring massively more crew than her more modern counterparts? OTOH, the episode doesn't really specify the class of that starship - it's noncanon inference from background material only. Might be a Galaxy or a Nebula instead.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SicOne]

Timo, thanks for the information about the comic story "Loyalty". Do you happen to know in what series and issue that appeared?

I thought I had read somewhere that the Excelsior-class had a crew complement of 750. If the one from DS9's "Field of Fire" has some 1,200 that would suggest 450-500 troops.

Rewatching "Emissary" on YouTube, while Saratoga comes in guns-a-blazin' (from the lower sensor dome, no less...), the Excelsior on the left (assumed to be Melbourne) didn't appear to be moving very quickly. I'm of the opinion that the Borg cube headed straight for Melbourne (whether the Borg picked up extra subspace radio traffic from Melbourne as Hansen quarterbacked the task force response, or whether Picard just knew which ship of the task force was Melbourne, is unknown and unknowable), Melbourne had just began moving and was spooling up to bank out of the cube's path and maneuver further when the camera's eye panned across her, and Saratoga was volleying on the cube to distract the Borg and give Melbourne time to escape.

One of the online Ships of the Star Fleet books, IIRC, suggested that Melbourne and another Excelsior (Zeebrugge?) were constructed towards the end of the 2350s as dedicated command ships.

I wouldn't think the Excelsiors would be any more nimble than later classes like Galaxy or Nebula. We see a lot of them in task forces and battle scenes (especially the Dominion War) but I rather think that is just by sheer dint of numbers than any kind of dedicated combat capability. If you subscribe to the registry theory (and, boy, if THIS doesn't open up a big can of worms... ) that ships are batched in blocks of 100 ships apiece and that there are, what, ten to fifteen separate registry blocks that would then therefore belong to the Excelsior-class, then it would appear that Excelsiors outnumber all the other classes. Perhaps even all the other classes combined. Kind of like the AK-47 of Starfleet ships...

 

[Timo]

Do you happen to know in what series and issue that appeared?

Memory Beta has the goods:

http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Loyalty

I thought I had read somewhere that the Excelsior-class had a crew complement of 750. If the one from DS9's "Field of Fire" has some 1,200 that would suggest 450-500 troops.

The crew count might be dependent on the era, batch etc. of a starship even within a single class. Possibly the Excelsior originally required 750 crew in the late 23rd century, but other ships from that era seem to operate with very small crews in the TNG era...

The theory on what the Melbourne was doing sounds pretty good!

One of the online Ships of the Star Fleet books, IIRC, suggested that Melbourne and another Excelsior (Zeebrugge?) were constructed towards the end of the 2350s as dedicated command ships.

Heh. Zeebrugge - that's just from my own Hobbyist's Guide to the UFP Starfleet, something I made up to explain why an Excelsior would have a registry number as high as those of Galaxy style starships, without having to assume that there were actual newbuilds that late in the story of the class. IIRC, those were rebuilds of preexisting hulls both.

ships are batched in blocks of 100 ships apiece and that there are, what, ten to fifteen separate registry blocks that would then therefore belong to the Excelsior-class

I'll subscribe to the latter part, but believing in large numbers of ships per batch isn't easy - because sometimes those Okuda registries place two completely dissimilar ships back to back in the registry order. IIRC, the Hobbyist's Guide goes with batches of just a few dozen each, ending up with a couple of hundred Excelsiors in all.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SicOne]

^ Thanks for the Memory Beta nod, Timo. I have a number of Trek comics buried in my messy office, but no manga, sadly.

Crew size has always seemed a tad off to me, throughout the entire history of Trek. On one hand, surely computerization and automation has eliminated the necessity for a crew size like you'd find on a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, but on the other hand, one would think that a starship with more deck space than most early 21st-century skyscrapers would have more crew to more fully utilize the ship. Something like Voyager, which is about as long as the Sears (Willis) Tower is tall, only has 150 people aboard her. At 15 decks, she averages ten crew per deck. And they're good-sized decks, not something like an Oberth-class. Other than the Bridge and Main Engineering, I'm thinking that the ship's a virtual ghost town.

Hah, I should have known Zeebruge was from your work...I remember thinking that even as I was typing it out, wondering if I should have first gone down to my "Hoarders"-like office and dug out the stack of your Hobbyist Guide that I had printed out to read leisurely. A healthy reminder.

Sorry, let me clarify the registry thing...what I meant to suggest was that Federation ship registry numbers were reserved in blocks of 100 ships each (62100-62199, for example) for a specific class, but not necessarily constructed to fill the entire block of one hundred. Just that by that reckoning, the ten to fifteen or so 100-ship registry blocks would tend to suggest that there could be a few hundred Excelsiors, or several hundred, though I'm thinking the number would be closer to a few hundred (and that does bring to mind questions about the overall size of Starfleet, from era to era). I do remember you speaking about this registry-vs-numbers-built in a thread some time ago, but would have to do some digging to check it out.

Hmmm. Didn't know there were dissimilar ships back-to-back in registry order. Do you know which ships? That would mess up my Sheldon Cooper-like understanding of the registry system....

 

[Timo]

The pair I was referring to is the Excelsior class Charleston, NCC-42285, and the unknown class kitbash Curry, NCC-42286. But neither of these is an onscreen celebrity as such, and while the hawkeyed among us can spot the Charleston registry in a "Brothers" Okudagram, the one for the Curry isn't visible anywhere...

...Which is why my source for it seems to have gotten it wrong: a photo of the kitbash actually exists and shows NCC-42254. So I yield, and hopefully dodge the Arguing With Sheldon bullet!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SicOne]

^ Hopefully I'm not THAT bad!

But if my theory of all 100 of that batch belonging to the same starship class is to have any credence, then all of the registries 42200-42299 should belong to Excelsior. Charleston being 42285 and Curry being 42254 still fit...as though Curry is kitbash, it still has Excelsior-class components, and thus still fits the parameters of my mental registry organization.

(was tempted to add a "Bazinga" at the end, but, nawwww)

 

[J.T.B.]

If Hansen is commanding the battle fleet from Melbourne rather than a tactically more-powerful Nebula or Ambassador, that suggests to me that Melbourne is a dedicated command ship and that Hansen was in the command station

This is quite possible. OTOH, naval commanders ITRW have chosen "weak" ships as their flagships for a variety of reasons. Before effective realtime radio communications, fast ships such as cruisers were more useful for commanding than the cumbersome battleships [...]

I'm not thinking of many good examples of that in the battle line/visual signalling era. In a battle fleet action, the main fight would unfold at the pace of the battleships, so cruiser speed wasn't an advantage. And if the fleet commander wanted to see what was going on, his cruiser would have to be on the engaged side of the battle line, where its useful life was likely to be quite short and painful.

After reliable radio, the fleet commander-in-chief could stay ashore and usually did, though Yamamoto did go to sea in Yamato for the Midway operation. In WW2, until the fast battleships came out, a flattop was the natural choice for flagship of a carrier task force, and amphibious operations were so different from surface combat that their flagships could be -- or were even preferred to be -- merchant-based designs.

A relevant example might be US Admiral Spruance in WW2. As Commander 5th Fleet in the Pacific, he preferred to fly his flag in the old treaty cruiser Indianapolis. She was uncomfortably cramped with his staff aboard, but he preferred to be able to go anywhere within the operating area without necessarily taking away a major fighting unit. The old cruiser could keep up with the carriers, but wouldn't be missed too much if Spruance decided he wanted to stay close to the beaches. Maybe Hanson's intentions were similar; as the overall commander, he wanted to leave the Galaxies, Ambassadors and Nebulas to their respective division/squadron/task group/whatever commanders to use as they saw fit.

 

[SicOne]

^ Additionally, by remaining on Melbourne, Hansen probably figured he could stand off at a sufficiently "safe" distance while he sent the major combatants (Galaxies, Ambassadors, Nebulas, what-have-you) in for the action, while Melbourne remained at a remove and could concentrate on command-and-control rather than combat actions. If Hansen had shifted his flag and staff to one of the heavies, there was every possibility the combat actions (and damage incurred) could have affected his ability to quarterback the battle as a whole. Plus, even if Melbourne wasn't a dedicated command ship, he and his staff would probably feel more comfortable in familiar surroundings rather than having to set up in a Nebula and reconfigure it in a command ship capacity on the eve of battle, etc.

One of the other side benefits of having Melbourne stand away from the closest combat would be to have the resources of an Excelsior-class ship at hand for damage control and rescue and escape pod roundup in the inevitable aftermath once they had destroyed the cube. Or so I could see them thinking that before the battle, not realizing it would go down like it did...

 

[Maurice]

Oh, I don't think they had any illusions that they were going to win.

 

[Timo]

I sort of think they did. Sure, they had recent data that a Galaxy was no match for the Cube, but they also had slightly older data suggesting a Galaxy could easily cut a Cube to tiny pieces ("Q Who?"). They probably assumed that the truth would be somewhere in between, and that forty starships each trying out the dirtiest tricks in Starfleet arsenal would prevail where a single ship trying a single dirty trick had failed.

Hanson no doubt realizes that Picard is a traitor, and is just in denial about that part - or perhaps even the denial is just faked for boosting morale among his troops, and Hanson is already busy thinking about which codes and tactics Picard has compromised and about all the ways he can exploit his old friend's known weaknesses. But his general confidence might be more than mere propagandist bolstering... Else his efforts would be more on the evacuation of Earth or the creation of Beta Sites, embryo vaults or other doomsday solutions than on a futile fight against the invaders!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SicOne]

What surprises me is that the Borg cube was able to handle all that was thrown at it.

Yeah, I know that they can adapt to known frequencies of phaser blasts and they have enough shielding to shrug off multiple photon torpedoes, but when you consider the sheer quantity of phasers and photorps that 40-odd starships can toss at a single target, it's hard to imagine that a single Borg ship could withstand that amount of high energy as well as dish it out in spades.

I know that the requirements of the story needed the single cube to withstand the assault and then destroy the Starfleet force assembled against it, but I wouldn't mind more in-universe explanation on just how in the F that a single ship could handle that much firepower unleashed against it.

 

[SicOne]

Timo, I can't remember chapter, line, and verse of that episode, but do we know if it was communicated to Hanson by the Enterprise crew that the assimilated Picard was actively assisting the Borg? Hitherto that point, I don't know if the crew really knew the depths that the Borg had their hooks into Picard. I can see Hanson knowing that Picard was assimilated, but I can also see him thinking that he was merely another Borg drone, and not knowing how the Borg would leverage all the information Picard had. One more Borg drone on a ship of 128,000 of 'em isn't that substantial of a difference, and it is entirely possible that Hanson didn't change any of his strategy that late in the game, not realizing how the Borg would take advantage of Picard's tactical and strategic knowledge.

And even if Hanson thought Picard's experiences would be used in that manner, he might very well have thought that the overwhelming firepower at his disposal would turn the tide of battle. When your task force is heaving dozens of photon torpedoes and phaser blasts per second at a single threat, you feel confident.

 

[Ithekro]

From "Best of Both Worlds" I was under the impression the battle was lasting a while before Riker got in contact with the fleet. Hanson's ship was being rocked about until he was cut off. Hanson givens the impression that things were not going well and that the fleet was going to regroup, suggesting the battle had also been going for a while with poor results. "Emissary" would seem like Hanson's ship was the first one shot down. If he was in that Excelsior-class ship, instead of the Nebula-class prototype ship. Emissary also suggests that Starfleet ships came in small groups to attack the cube. Two to three ships at a time.

"First Contact" on the other hand has a massive ball of Starfleet ships swarming around the Cube. But then it seems to have been after a long running fight all the way to Earth. It may have been days of battle, depending on how long it takes the Enterprise-E to get from the Romulan Neutral Zone to Earth. We also aren't sure how many ships intercepted that cube. We do know that the Federation was prepared for war by that point as it was only months before the Dominion War started. Starfleet having pulled back a lot of ships towards the core world and then back out towards the Cardassia and ajor, after redeploying from the Klingon borders.