Starfleet Exploration of the Gamma Quadrant

It's been a while since I have watched the show, and I wondered what mention of other starships and other Starfleet expeditions happened in the Gamma Quadrant canonically, besides the brief trips there using runabouts from DS9 that we saw in the early on in the show?

I seem to remember there were a few mentions of ships in the Gamma Quadrant that had been lost to the Dominion, before the Odyssey Incident took place, but I don't clearly recall. I know there was a Bajoran colony that got wiped out in the early days of contact with the Dominion. I seem to remember the Dominion also wiped out Starfleet Coms satellites in the Gamma Quadrant too?

 

Yea, that about sums it up. The Bajorans rushed to make a colony (fair, as it's in their system and they should control traffic on both sides of the wormhole), the Federation did a few missions, and for a while even the Federation met minor Gamma Quadrant powers. The Dominion rushed in to the area, actually, than controlling it, as soon as they heard there was a wormhole.

 

I remember Odo running into a Vulcan survey ship.

 

Apparently in one episode they mention three ships, the USS Maryland, USS Sarajevo, and the USS Proxima as being presumed lost in the Gamma Quadrant, likely destroyed by the Dominion.

I don't know if, logically, there would have been any other ships dispatched to the quadrant before the war... I keep thinking it would be interesting for one of those ships to be in a Voyager style situation, where the mining of the wormhole and some bad luck would leave them stranded out there, with no choice but to make for home the long way and hope they find a quicker way to get back to Starfleet in the meantime.

 

That could have been an interesting way to spin Voyager off of DS9. Then they'd have to think up some other reason to have the crew be half Maquis... although they never really made much use of that plot point anyway.

 

I'd suspect in the pre-Dominion days that a large number of Starfleet and Federation ships passed through (I mean at the end of "Emissary" three civvie science ships rocked up on their doorstep), but since they were never prevalent to the plot then we didn't hear about them.

 

I mean, it would have been entirely plausible for Voyager to capture some Maquis along the way to her assignment... it would have been amusing if the DS9 personnel celebrated finally having a permanently assigned starship at DS9, only to have it lost by the end of the week of it's arrival!

As it is, I'm sort of glad that they didn't show too much on screen of exploring the Gamma Quadrant, as it leaves much untouched to speculate about . I do wonder what sort of ships you'd assign to the quadrant, out of the standard types, though? I imagine it being heavy on Science Ships, since they seem to come running from Episode 1. On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd want to be aboard an Oberth facing off against the Jem Hadar! Starfleet isn't especially logical when it comes to assigning ships tasks either, so it's hard to say.

 

A Galaxy with a flotilla of Defiants just in case.

 

Actually, the Defiant was assigned to the station about a month to six weeks before Caretaker based on stardates. It was certainly around the same time.

 

I'm guessing that, given the Federation took some three years to encounter the Dominion, they would have sent more standard types of starship to the Gamma Quadrant.

I'm pretty sure that the USS. Oddesy is supposed to be the largest, most powerful ship that Starfleet had sent to the quadrant before the war. That preserves her destruction as remarkable. If I recall correctly, Defiant is one-of-a-kind for a while, until the Dominion War happens, wherein they build the Sao Paulo and the several other of the class we see in Voyager.

It's interesting that the Defiant was at the station before the Voyager showed up, on her mission to track down the Maquis... since in someways you'd think Defiant would be better for that mission. On the other hand, Janeway evidently wanted to stick around and survey the Badlands, no doubt based out of Deep Space 9. Having both Voyager and Defiant stationed at DS9 would have had some interesting implications, had Voyager not gotten stranded in the Delta Quadrant.

The question then becomes, I suppose, how many resources that Starfleet would have allocated to exploring the Gamma Quadrant in the first three years of DS9. In terms of what ships would have been sent, I wonder if Starfleet would have preferred sending older or newer ships? Given how little of the Gamma Quadrant being explored gets mentioned in cannon, it may not be high priority and thus get older and less consequential ships assigned to it. If such ships wound up lost because the wormhole collapsed or were cut off, presumably it would hurt a post-Wolf 359 Starfleet in need of as many modern ships as they need to loose older ships. On the other hand, the Gamma Quadrant is totally unexplored and presumably quite dangerous, so sending newer ships would make sense too. Thoughts? This might a good place to make use of ships like the Cheyenne or Springfeild classes that are cannon designs, or non-cannon ship types mentioned in cannon like the Merced.

 

The Dominion becoming the next grand Star Trek threat napalmed any creative ideas of exploring the opportunities of the Gamma Quadrant. What a waste of a concept?

 

Not necessarilly.



There's quite some distance between the Bajoran Worm Hole and Dominion Space.

And there's a giant chunk of Gamma Quadrant surrounding the Dominion that can be explored without having to violate Dominion territory if the writing staff wanted to do so.

DS9 just happened to focus on the Dominion War.

 

The Dominion was THE creative opportunity of the Gamma Quadrant. The Gamma Quadrant pre-dominion was boring. There was nothing there that made it distinctive from the Alpha Quadrant and the potential of the Gamma Quadrant was only realised when the Dominion was introduced. The whole point of the Dominion was to explore the concept of what happens when the Federation boldly goes into someone else's backyard and doesn't receive a warm welcome. It was a follow up to the idea from 'Q who' that the Federation was massively unprepared for the threats they were bound to encounter the further they explored.

What Deep space nine did with the Gamma Quadrant is a thousand times better than what Voyager did with the Delta Quadrant.

 

Disagree completely but I can understand this threads lack of vision. Voyager may not have fulfilled its potential but it did, at least, travelled most of their run in the Delta Quadrant, DS9 just scratched the surface then had a war with the Dominion. Did you watch the two shows in its entirety???

 

Yep. That's exactly what was narrated on the series

 

Did you like the Dominion War arc?

 

What I find the most interesting aspect of UFP exploration of Gamma is that the heroes of the show weren't supposed to be doing any of it...

Sisko was basically just the gatekeeper for those who'd want to go through and explore. He did a couple of trips to the other side for clerical purposes, and two or three joyrides (all of which ended pretty disastrously for him or his passengers). When he talked Starfleet into giving him the Defiant and the associated suicide mission of meeting with the Dominion, he was going well past his supposed mandate. And when he returned from that mission against all expectation, he got new orders, which were the same as the old orders: stay the hell out of Gamma. Except for certain armed recce missions, often of his own making, and very rarely leading into finding something unrelated to the intended target of said armed recce.

"Explorers of Gamma" would have been a different show altogether. And no doubt a highly entertaining one, too. But it's pretty cool the two show concepts never were merged or otherwise mixed.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I tend to view DS9 as what happens when a first contact goes terribly wrong--when going boldly results in disruptor fire. I think it was (in hindsight) important to show that sometimes there's a high price to be paid for going where no one has gone before, and it can take quite a while for things to be resolved, IMO.

 

Only about 100 times and to the point I can recite dialogue for entire episodes

My point exactly. Voyager spent seven years travelling without fulfilling it's potential or making the most of the creative opportunities that came with it's setting.

 

DS9 was never intended to be the show that explored the Gamma Quadrant. The two metaphors that informed the series were The Rifleman, about a man who settled with his son on a frontier town, and Gibraltar, the gateway between to areas that mediated conflict. Rather than the ship pulling up to a problem, the problems would come to them. The introduction of the Dominion was perfectly in line with the ideas that formed the show: the Gamma Quadrant would come to the station, causing problems, and the crew would essentially be in the position of defending their hometown.