Naah. It's so vulnerable, period.
It's telling that the Defiant has never contributed to the defense of the station. Starbases need starship defenses like fish need tiger-striped pajamas while biking: those weaklings just get in the way of the thousand torpedoes and the fifty Type XXIII½ phaser beams.
This is something DS9 got right, even if it was implicit in all earlier Trek as well. Starships stand no chance against fixed fortifications, which is why the galaxy remains unconquered and undestroyed even though ever since the days of Kirk (or Archer), a single starship has possessed the firepower to terminate any planet it wishes. You need hundreds upon hundreds of ships to defeat fortifications (the often mentioned but seldom seen "planetary defenses"), while the fortifications don't need any ships to defeat the invaders.
That Starfleet sent a handful of ships to assist DS9 on occasion (six in "Way of the Warrior", nine in "The Die is Cast", etc.) was less a tactical reinforcement and more a show of dedication to the cause. Gowron here might pretend he's fighting Bajorans, Cardassians or Founders, but he can't keep pretending that if half a dozen Starfleet ships line up between him and the station.
Although of course Gowron would only have half a dozen ships left when the "reinforcements" arrived, were the battle to continue...
Timo Saloniemi
