That's what made zero sense to me.. Wolf 359 battle with sisko. Why in the HELL were jenifer and jake on board during the battle? I mean it wasn't like the ship was.. Surprise! Borg! No.. It traveled to the battleground.. You'd think that family and non essential would be off loaded or put on a shuttle before the battle.. For the whole battle fleet..
I'm not sure why this particular battle would have called for unloading the civilians.
1) Jennifer and Jake had consented to being aboard in the first place, the baseline assumption being that the ship would engage in fights (or get eaten by space amoebae) without any sort of warning or chance to go ashore.
2) Going ashore at this particular time would not improve their situation. Everybody would assuredly die or worse within the next few hours; it was just a choice between doing so aboard the
Saratoga together, or somewhere else separated from Ben.
3) It's not as if the ship fought less well for the presence of the civilians, as far as we can tell. And who knows, perhaps one of them would have come up with the Achilles heel of these cybermen? That's the most fearsome weapon aboard any Starfleet ship - the spectrum of bright minds unchained by rules.
It takes some effort, but I think it's worth putting ourselves back in a TOS mindframe, before TNG existed. The word "quadrant" was used very casually back then, and not very consistently. It almost certainly doesn't mean "quarter of the galaxy" as it later came to be understood; I'm more inclined to read it as equivalent to "sector" or, if absolutely necessary, "quarter of UFP-explored space."
If anything, the word in TOS refers to that volume of space a starship is supposed to be minding, generally alone. There are references to Kirk moving from quadrant to quadrant during his missions; to him being expected to know what is happening in his current quadrant, i.e. his sensors covering all of it; and to it being possible but generally unlikely that there would be several ships in a given quadrant. OTOH, there's a reference or two to it being a bit unusual that there is only a single spaceport in a quadrant, so a quadrant generally is likely to encompass several star systems.
Likewise, the word "starship" had more status. This was before the Constitution class was established as a thing; the Enterprise was "Starship Class," and that's the sense in which there were only twelve like her.
Let's not confuse two things here. The hero ship was a starship; there were twelve like her. It does NOT follow that there would only be twelve starships - that's an elementary logical fallacy.
This might be different if starshipness and twelveness were somehow connected semantically and thus perhaps logically in a single phrase or discussion. But this never happens. The hero ship just happens to have these two attributes, mentioned separately, in separate adventures. And it happens to be light grey, another no doubt equally unrelated attribute.
We never got any idea on how many starships there would be, except for things like "one per quadrant" (so a couple of dozen from TOS/TAS/TOS movie references alone), or "only one in a million could command a starship" (meaning thousands of such skippers from mankind alone).
In light of that, I've generally assumed the TOS-era Starfleet to be fairly small.
...Say, 7,000 ships strong? If, say, fifty of those were "proper starships", it would still be fantastically unlikely for two of them to randomly happen on the same star system, yet this did happen at least twice ("Doomsday Machine" and "Omega Glory"). But if 200 of them were, the ratio of capital ships to support units would be a tad high.
There may be larger numbers (scores? hundreds?) of lesser ships, but only a dozen comparable to the Enterprise, with the latest military capability, long mission profiles, and a Warp 6 cruising speed.
Let's remember, though, that none of the above qualities were quoted to apply to the
Enterprise. Okay, perhaps her cruising speed
was warp six, but nothing suggested this would be particularly high for Starfleet. Or particularly low, or anything else informative. Certainly nothing about her was "latest" in any bit of dialogue, except when she was the testbed for M-5, and Kirk's disdain for new things nicely surfaced there...
The
Enterprise may have been one of the challenges the heroes had to face: an obsolete piece of equipment only deemed good for a number of menial tasks and errands, yet stumbling upon adventures where she got a chance to shine.
Starfleet almost certainly operates overlapping generations of starships. So it would be nice to know if a ship with a 1700 range registry is "new" or "old" for the 2260s, as we could then pretend that the numbers are chronological (they sorta were in TOS - the sole dialog reference to a starship registry number, in "Court Martial", gave an older ship a lower registry, clearly on purpose) and argue that there would be about 1700 vessels ("new"), including the retired ones; or more than 1700 vessels ("old"), again including those no longer serving. Or whatever factor we assign for turning a registry number into the number of ships built (it's a bit inconvenient that Kirk's ship is an "01" rather than, say, a "72", if the system is one of starting anew from double zeroes for every new class).
I don't read the implications the same way. I take "we" to refer to all the sapient races from the UFP, not just humans (otherwise it would seem a bit chauvinistic), and "on a thousand worlds" to mean both UFP members and colony worlds, from fully-settled independent planets to brand-new outposts. It's still an impressive statement, but it doesn't imply such a big need for warships.
Why would Kirk not be chauvinist? Cochrane was asking specifically about mankind, after all, being a man himself.
If anything, it would be a bit insulting of Kirk to say that "we" are spreading, if "we" included those folks who were native to the areas where the spreading was taking place...
Timo Saloniemi
