That Riker was able to gather a hundred ships in a few days, and mobilize them to the synths' planet suggests to me that after the Dominion War, Starfleet must have maintained a major war footing. Where else would those ships have come from? Starfleet barely managed to muster 40 random ships at Wolf 359, next door to *Earth*. To assemble these ships either means ships are faster (to converge quickly) or there are more large fleets on maneuvers scattered widely across the Federation.
Keep in mind that the events of Q-Who kind of slapped Starfleet in the face and made them realize that they were far, far more weak and fairly impotent in terms of dealing with genuine threats. Starfleet more or less instituted a panic building/development program after the Borg encounter in J-25 and weren't even up to speed when the Borg launched their invasion. Starfleet lost hundreds, if not thousands, of ships in the Dominion War, an unknown number were destroyed by the Borg in 2373, but enough to where Starfleet was quite uncomfortable. Presumably after the Dominion War and facing the prospect of a radically destabilized galaxy with the collapse of the Romulan Emprie into faction states, Starfleet more than likely retired massive amounts of the legacy ships, IE the Miranda class, the Excelsiors, etc and replaced them with ships that were a satisfactory mix of being easy to build, powerful and could be built in sufficient numbers to replace a ton of ships whose designs were well over a century old by that point. Also keep in mind..where everything happened in Picard is in a very unstable 'frontier' region, it's not unreasonable to think that Starfleet had a large portion of the fleet in close proximity to the Romulan territories .
It's been talked about plenty, Starfleet likely has dedicated peace keeping fleets for situations like this. They don't want to get caught with their pants down by a Borg or Dominion threat again. I have no doubt they still have the larger ships, operating in deep space or on their own on scientific ships. The fleet we saw is likely the same idea behind the Defiant fleet that was mentioned.
Frankly, I hate these stupid giant fleets. Like the scene would have worked just as well with five ships per side. Starships used to be a big deal, every one powerful and precious. Now they're some sort of TIE-fighters.
Yeah, I agree, the smaller engagements make for more interesting battles over the years - Yesterdays Enterprise, Way of the Warrior and the MU Defiant off the top of my head - but it doesn't make sense for Starfleet to have a fleet of 30-40 being one of the largest assemblies of ships ever seen. This is a post-Dominion and Borg Starfleet, they've had years to prepare for future incursions and aren't going to be scrambling around to put together a fleet, mass producing or retrofitting Mirandas from ship graveyards. Blame DS9, which decided to really up the numbers on starships. We're 20 years on from that, the mid-24th Century was pretty traumatic for Starfleet and we're seeing the logical conclusion. Imagine they had a fleet like this to greet the Dominion at DS9 or the Wormhole? Or The Borg at Wolf 359? History would be a lot more favourable for the Federation.
I'm curious as to where the Enterprise is and why it wasn't the flagship. Even if the E-E is out of service, or renamed, there could be an E-F out there that should be THE flagship. It should ALWAYS be the Enterprise.
The Enterprise-E Is still operating and is still the Federation flagship. Riker was talking about the ship he was on being the flagship of that particular fleet. The Defiant acted as the flagship in several battles, including Operation Return, and Admiral Ross had his own flagship too. Flagship is just a term for the command vessel, usually has the Fleet Admiral on board, like in First Contact as well.
I'm hoping this implies the existence of a new drive (slipstream?) that allowed them to quickly muster a bunch of new and similarly classed ships, but only that newest class due to it being a new drive system.
We don't know that the Enterprise has always been the Federation flagship.. The only Enterprise directly mentioned as being the flagship is the E-D on film. I think the E-E has been referred to as the flagship, not in the movies though, but in books. The Enterprise in TOS wasn't the flagship (but of course it wasn't mentioned as not being the flagship either), I doubt severely the E-A was the flagship, more than likely that honor went to Excelsior.
Starbases close to Romulan space? They probably were there all along, even back in TNG and the TOS movie era, since that's where they would have been needed, not at tranquil Earth. Or Starfleet prepositioned the ships where they would be needed. It should be noted that whenever we saw a small formation of ships, the writers took extra pains to say "Ooh, what a pitiful force! How come we have so few ships? A damn shame that we were in such a hurry and couldn't bring thousands! Nobody can wage war with just dozens!"... On the other hand, if Starfleet could build more ships, it already would have. It's never at peace: in TOS and TNG alike, it's chronically and fatally short of ships, the hero vessel always being the only one that makes it to the weekly adventure in time. Or, just as often, a tad too late. No, TNG writers did that. DS9 just had the resources to show that, too. Of course we now retroactively have a 7,000-strong Starfleet in the 2250s. Which is what we'd expect anyway; now we just get the dialogue reference to it. Timo Saloniemi
This used to be the case, but PIC recently had the reporter make reference to Picard having moved from commanding the Flagship to trying to save Romulus. Supposedly, she would have been referring to the E-E rather than the E-D - although admittedly it's reporterspeak which isn't required to be factually relevant even if the facts themselves aren't incorrect: Picard would have commanded the Flagship E-D at one point and tried to save Romulus at another. Also, the reference there is to "Starfleet Flagship", while the E-D only ever was "Federation Flagship", FWIW. Or to some unseen Starshippy McStarshipface that wasn't experimental or otherwise suspect. DSC would now have us think that Starfleet never was short on big and impressive ships. Timo Saloniemi
That is a great question, I can't figure out how Riker had the time to do all of those things within the confines of those final remaining episodes. Time is non-sense in Star Trek: Picard, things just... happen... just because
It seems to me like the writers are glossing over the issue of how vast space is. Space is big. Like, really big. For there to be an enormous fleet pre-positioned this close to random synth planet, you would expect that there have to be hundreds of similarly-sized fleets just hanging around in range of dozens and hundreds of other strategic locations. Add to that the loads of other ships that would be dispersing between and beyond the fleets, doing day to day business, exploration, etc. I think the TNG model of a few, at most, ships being close enough to be able to respond to any given distress call is very reasonable. 10,000 starships in a volume the size of the UFP would still be pretty sparse, I would think. DS9 is a little different. Starfleet had weeks and months to bring together those fleets and it was basically communicated that doing so was a massive logistical nightmare. They were talking about groupings like "the 7th fleet" not "fleet #879". This episode makes it seem like Starfleet has grown by several orders of magnitude. IDK, maybe it has. But that really changes what Starfleet represented originally- they now seem to be more of a military and less of a corps of exploration. One additional question...how did that many Federation starships mask their enormous warp signature well enough to pop out of warp 100 km away from the Romulans without the Synths, the Borg cube, or the Romulans detecting them in advance? How did Oh not have any intel on them? Hmm...could Federation ships have cloaks now?
They always were a military its just that some were in denial about it, although I do appreciate why it would not sit well with those who think the Federation is a perfect Utopia that farts rainbows. You cant have a quadrant spanning Federation without a quadrant spanning military to defend it. We started to see this in DS9, its no surprise that Starfleet are using single role warships in large groups after the War and attack on Mars, now all I need to see is all the big Explorer ships (Galaxy upwards) getting their own escort ships, the Defiant class is perfect for that role. Having mass produced Warships available to react quickly to events frees up the actual Explorer ships to explore, plus its probably also because the Klingons are building lots of new Battle Cruisers to replace the losses from the War, with new enemies added to the mix like the K'Zinti. Personally I think its a good change and is far more realistic than what we had before.
As there generally isn't an admiral aboard the Enterprise, it generally is not a flagship. Enterprise did most of its work alone and not in task groups or fleet actions, such as its apparent omission from the Dominion War. (and only became a temporary "Flag" during the battle of Sector 001 when Picard disobeyed orders and took command of the fleet.) The statement that Enterprise was "the flagship of the Federation" seems more like a statement of pride than any sort of naval attribute. He did not say it was the "Flagship of Starfleet" and with apparently many admirals in Starfleet, just having one flagship would be quixotic. It sounds like they finally (only took a couple of centuries) learned their lesson and keep well placed rapid reaction task forces in key parts of the UFP. I would imagine the ships are faster, but also there are more of them and they are crewed.
We also don't know where Copellius/Ghulion IV is in relation to whatever else the Federation has going on in whatever region of what I assume to be the Beta Quadrant. Nor relative distances to Nepenthe and DS12.
MC is a bit fan of The Culture and also has talked about how large the Federation is - I think it is as simple as that in the showrunner's mind, a massive polity would have no problem fielding hundreds of ships regardless of what was doing on-screen before.