Did having children and families onboard make sense?

[Timo]

Captain Keogh agreed that he might need more fire power to rescue Sisko, determine Dominion intentions and strengths, then get out of there. He had O'Brien refit the Runabouts just for that.

It seemed to me that Keogh was just humoring our DS9 heroes, letting them symbolically help with rescuing their commanding officer and his family. He didn't put any faith on the runabouts actually being useful in combat.

And I'm not sure if they were useful in the end. Sure, Keogh was able to send one of them to fetch Sisko and Quark - but he would have had that one (Sisko's original one) available in any case, and he could have sent one of his own shuttlecraft to do it if he didn't stumble on Sisko's craft.

And whether the DS9 runabouts took any pressure off the Odyssey, only the Jem'Hadar really know. They might have been going easy on the runabouts in order to leave witnesses for the inevitable destruction of the big ship...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kegek]

Timo said:
It seemed to me that Keogh was just humoring our DS9 heroes, letting them symbolically help with rescuing their commanding officer and his family. He didn't put any faith on the runabouts actually being useful in combat.

It was a bit more than humouring them. As Dax rightly pointed out, all they knew about the Dominion is that they're very dangerous and he'd need all the help he could get - including the runabouts.

And I always felt the children on the ship gave the show a consciously 'city in space' feel. The Enterprise-D isn't just a starship, it's a community drifting off into the unknown. As the show downplayed the unknown as the years went on, and enmeshed the ship in many more obviously battleship situations, the children did become more and more improbable. Which is why they were written off the successor ship entirely - or we would have seen children be assimilated in First Contact...

 

[Timo]

Now that would have been a sight. And it would have served the movie well, IMHO.

Now, what would have happened to the very young while the ship was in the Briar Patch in ST:INS? Nurse Ogawa losing her baby to the anti-time phenomenon in "All Good Things..." was shocking enough.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dorothy_Zbornak]

Timo said:
Now that would have been a sight. And it would have served the movie well, IMHO.

Now, what would have happened to the very young while the ship was in the Briar Patch in ST:INS? Nurse Ogawa losing her baby to the anti-time phenomenon in "All Good Things..." was shocking enough.

Timo Saloniemi

There were Ba'ku children though. I believe there was a line that said the regenerative properties of the radiation only affected post-pubescents.

 

[Christopher]

Besides, the maturation of a child and the aging/deterioration of an adult are not caused by the same thing; if anything, they're opposite processes. Getting old is what happens when the body's growth and regeneration mechanisms stop working and decay goes unrepaired. A process that reversed the decay of aging and restored adults to health and vigor would not reverse the maturation of a child, and might even accelerate it.

 

[Timo]

Good point - this wasn't a literal anti-time effect but rather a fountain of youth. Heh, how about having Wesley back onboard and seeing him grow to the burly form Q once offered him?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JoeZhang]

Christopher said:

The problem wasn't that there were families onboard a military ship. The problem was that it wasn't really supposed to be on military missions, but the writers ended up increasingly using it that way and pretty much abandoned the idea of a long-term deep-space exploration mission. So it wasn't that the idea didn't make sense to begin with, it was that it ended up not being used the way it was supposed to be.

(Although I disagree with Gertch that a show about exploration would be boring. Personally I find exploration stories a whole lot more engaging than combat stories.)

I've just been re-reading the DC Comics 6 issue mini-series from 1988 - in the first issue, the ship is way way out in unknown space and there are large sections devoted to explaining why families are needed and Picard's thoughts on their presence.

In the second issue, they are in federation space and on their way to a starbase....

 

[DWF]

Christopher said:

Vanyel said:

Christopher said:
When DS9 came along, I kept wishing the TNG producers would send the Enterprise through the wormhole for an extended mission in the Gamma Quadrant....

Only thing is though the Enterprise D would most likely have ended up toast like the USS Odyssey.

Not necessarily. There's this tendency to assume that Gamma Quadrant = Dominion space, but that's just not true. Nobody from the Alpha Quadrant even began hearing hints of the Dominion's existence until a year after they began exploring the GQ, and they didn't actually encounter the Dominion directly until nearly two years had elapsed. And then, when ships did travel to Dominion space from the wormhole, it was shown as something that took time and occurred because a ship was specifically setting course there. There's no question that Dominion space is some distance from the wormhole and that there's plenty of the Gamma Quadrant they don't control.

Besides, even if the Enterprise had run into the Jem'Hadar, they would've done better than the Odyssey, because main characters always survive things that are quickly fatal to guest stars.

Well the Dominion knew about the Federation and earth some time ago the wormhole just brought the confrontation sooner than they expected.

http://www.exisle.net/mb/index.php?showtopic=14822&st=100&p=300423&#entry300423

 

[Son_of_Soong]

Depends on the ship type. The Defiant is a warship... definately no families there. The Enterprise-E was pretty much the same. I always thought of hte Original Enterprise as a strictly military vessel... no families there either.

The Enterprise D however was a ship of exploration. It wasn't built with military or wars in mind. Granted there is still danger aboard any type of ship but I'm sure the families knew this, they just concidered the danger less enough to warrant living aboard.

 

[DumbDumb2007]

NO!