Why would the station's state of equip as of the second half of "Emissary" reflect anything much about Starfleet thinking or Cardassian thinking or whatnot? This was only days after Cardassia had thrashed and abandoned the station, and basically hours after Starfleet was allowed in; even with Starfleet's finest toiling with the place in the certain knowledge that a thousand warships would be arriving tomorrow, it doesn't sound likely that much in the way of results could be achieved. There just wouldn't be time.
What we know of the station's state of equip before the thrashing is, well, very little. Half the things that are seen firing Starfleet weapons at various points of the show could originally have been Cardassian anchoring bollards or fueling sockets or something equally unrelated to defense, and the original station might have been virtually unarmed. Or then the original already had all the guns in place, and Starfleet just swapped UFP models for Cardassian ones. And the pseudo-truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
Amusingly, the station's six "weapon sails" each feature a Starfleet-style phaser strip at mid-span from the get-go (that is, the model has those in "Emissary" and never changes), instead of a Cardassian phaser pyramid. And so do the Mirror Terok Nor and the regular Empok Nor! But we can ignore that and assume that there were pyramids there "originally". There's a tractor beam at the flat tip, and that may have been there "originally", too. There's a torpedo hole at the very top of the tip, and we may speculate on whether the Cardassians had anything there at all because none of their other combat assets feature torpedo technology of any sort. And then there are all the extra doodads from "Way of the Warrior" on, and it's anybody's guess whether any of that was in place "originally" before the Cardassians left.
As for ramming, it has generally been a tactic dismissed by our heroes and not practiced the villains, for whatever reason. Riker only considers it as a last-ditch maneuver against the Borg in "BoBW", even though there should have been a need for a suicide attack at several earlier timepoints already - it sounds as if he wants to go out with a bang, without much hope of achieving anything. And it actually fails in "The Hunted" (intentionally). So, what changes in "Tears of the Prophets", the first-ever instance of ramming working against shields? Are all shields modified to withstand phased polaron beams automatically incapable of stopping ramming? If so, then DS9 should have been suspect in "Call to Arms" already, as its new shields did repel PPBs. But of course the Dominion had little intention of destroying the station at that point yet, and little idea that it really should be considering that exact move!
Timo Saloniemi
