USS Bonestell in BOBW Part II

[Ithekro]

Or in different services. While it wasn't the class ship there were two Enterprises in service in the world during World War II. The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (Yorktown-class) and the cruiser HMS Enterprise (E-class).

Why the Vulcans would have a ship class named after the Earth god Apollo is unclear, but the USS Enterprise did prove that Apollo was a really being, and perhaps he visited Vulcan at some point in their past, or Spock's report appealed to the ship designers and they named it Apollo.

 

[Timo]

It should be noted that "T'Pau = Apollo class" is a whole different category from what is otherwise being discussed here. There is no Okudagram making such a connection - merely a fan misunderstanding that such an Okudagram would exist in "Unification". The connetion factually rests on the Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia only, so Not Canon.

Apart from that, the low "Conspiracy" registries for ships by certain names can be split in twain (for those who care about registries in the first place): those that could represent two different ships (that is, those where the newer, seriously-on-your-face-onscreen ship has a high registry, preferably beginning with a 7 although a 6 will do in a cinch), and those that can't (even the newer ship has a very low registry for the 2360s). For the latter bunch, we might go back to Wolf 359 and decide that all the problematic "Conspiracy" ships took part in the battle, perished ah so valiantly, and had their names assigned to preexisting, low-registry ships to commemorate the dead.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ensign_Rowan_McGrath]

Starship registries have been all over the place and I put it down to Starfleet Bureaucracy on being them putting aside several numbers for different ship classes that don't exist yet and for over 200 years no one bothered to fix it (which is why Steamrunner, Akira, Norway and Saber classes were lower than Intrepid classes).

I've always accepted that the Bonestell was the Oberth class at Wolf 359 and the document turning up on twitter made me believe it even more.

 

[Dukhat]

Huh. A discussion about Wolf 359 ships from April, and I'm just seeing it now. Where was my head?

Anyway, here's my $0.02.

1. There wasn't an Oberth class ship in BoBW, Bonestell or otherwise. There really couldn't be. There would have been only two options at the time: Use the original Grissom studio model, or cast another model from the original mold (there wasn't and has never been a commercially available official model kit of the Oberth class.) Using the original model was out of the question, as they couldn't damage a filming model that could be used again for guest starships. They also didn't have time to cast a new model from the mold, and the only one who would have done that anyway would have been Greg Jein, and he only made two "kitbashed" ships from the Enterprise-D molds and would have had no reason to make a specific design like the Oberth class.

2. That ship list doesn't look in any way, shape or form official. A big giveaway is that the Aries from "The Icarus Factor" is described as a scout ship when the episode itself only refers to it as "an insignificant ship" (the scout ship thing was only fan speculation based on that description, when in fact Picard was only comparing the Aries to the Enterprise-D)

3. In "Emissary," we see an intact Oberth class ship for a few seconds before an explosion and then the now damaged ship is thrown past the screen. I believe that the original studio model (labeled "Yosemite" at the time because that was the last name it was labeled before its use in "Emissary") was filmed for this scene, and then replaced with the Vico from "Hero Worship" for the destruction scene. When the Encyclopedia came out, Okuda acknowledged this scene by making up a random name and registry number for the ship in that scene (i.e. the model was never labeled "Bonestell," nor was there another model built with that name.)

4. If there was in fact another model made for BoBW labeled "Bonestell NCC-31600," then Okuda would have let us know when Timo originally interviewed him about this during the Wolf 359 research project, but he didn't. I also once asked him if there were any other models built but not used, and he mentioned that if that were the case, they wouldn't have been anywhere near completed in time for filming. And since applying labels would be the final step before filming, I'm 99% sure that didn't happen.

5. The STIII study models: Since none of the Excelsior study models were ultimately used in BoBW (they were instead used in Unification without any change in markings or names), it's highly doubtful that the "Valiant" Grissom study model was used either, nor given any new labeling. As a matter of fact, the only reason why we even know of its existence was that photos of it taken during the production of STIII were shown on the DVD extras. For all we know, it was lost right afterwards.

Keep in mind that BoBW was extremely rushed. The only reason why we even got most of the ships we saw was because Ed Miarecki had made study models beforehand and they were available to be modified by Okuda & Sternbach. And if Greg Jein wasn't such a master modelmaker who could churn out ships quickly and under budget, we wouldn't have gotten the Princeton and the Firebrand either.

 

[matthunter]

Realistically, even if Starfleet were pushed to get 40 ships to Wolf 359, why the hell take an Oberth? It's like taking a nerf gun when your opponent has a 50-cal, even against regular opponents, let alone the damn Borg! May as well deploy a squadron of runabouts - at least they'll be harder to hit and divide the enemy fire.

 

[B.J.]

^ One small gun is better than no gun at all, especially when your entire species' existence is on the line.

 

[Ithekro]

Maybe they had fitted her out with one of those prototype anti-Borg weapons that was more science tech and needed some sort of heavy duty sensor array that the old science ship had and could be quickly converted for combat use. It was worthless, but still, they tried. (Or they attempted to use its secondary hull as a makeshift weapon pod)

 

[Dukhat]

BoBW Implied that getting 40 ships into a battle in a few days was a pretty monumental task; either the bulk of the fleet was not in the area at the time, or Starfleet simply didn't have that many ships to begin with. If it was the former, then if an Oberth was available, it was being sent to Wolf 359, even if all it did was fire a few shots.

 

[Ensign_Rowan_McGrath]

BoBW Implied that getting 40 ships into a battle in a few days was a pretty monumental task; either the bulk of the fleet was not in the area at the time, or Starfleet simply didn't have that many ships to begin with. If it was the former, then if an Oberth was available, it was being sent to Wolf 359, even if all it did was fire a few shots.

Considering the number of exploration ships they have, most of which are heavy cruiser class, are often on exploration missions thousands of light years from Earth, most of the ships pulled together were either just returning from long-range assignments, in spacedock for refits and maintenance, or just departing. Wouldn't be a surprise that Starfleet and the Federation Council never would've considered that the central worlds being threatened since nearly two hundred years ago (Earth-Romulan War) and as a result never considered any defense/attack craft were necessary.

Having 40 ships available for engagement might've been just the luck of the draw of what was near Earth and the central worlds and why so many ships were small and barely weaponized, including the Bonestell and Saratoga.

They may have changed by the Battle of Sector 001 as the ships there were largely battleship variety though with the Dominion threatening to invade, Hayes barely grabbed the 30+ ships to meet at Typhon and the Oberth and Miranda class starships were likely pulled in to add numbers (then again, they clearly survived onscreen better than the newer Akira, Steamrunner and Saber classes).

 

[Timo]

Then again, many of the ships that made it to Wolf 359 were among the best and most powerful in Starfleet (there were a couple of Nebula giants there). Is that because they were also among the fastest, and thus made it there from wherever they were assigned? Or because Earth keeps a few of these superships close at hand at all times?

No telling whether the ST:First Contact ship designs are newer than older than the usual TNG stock. Designwise, some of them are different from Picard's ship (say, Steamrunner and Saber), but this might mean they are older. Some aren't all that different (Akira). And the registry numbers on them indeed place the obviously different ships in the relatively distant past, sometimes by twenty thousand registry numbers or so, and the Akira in the more recent past.

Are these "warships"? Quite possibly there are so many available because Starfleet is slowly assembling the fleets it plans to use in the upcoming big war with the Dominion, and Earth is one of the places where these are being assembled. And quite possibly the "different" ships were never seen in peacetime because they have little utility there and are dedicated to war. But they probably aren't "battleships", as the Steamrunner for one appears to be virtually unarmed and blows up from the first impact in the fight. Perhaps they are the Starfleet analogue to amphibious attack ships - clumsy and flimsy commercial vessels optimized for disgorging troops and vehicles onto planets, with token defensive armaments. Like the Oberth at Wolf 359 (and the at least two Oberths at S001!), they'd be forced to fight by virtue of happening to be there.

The other alternative is that so many ships make it into the ST:FC fight because they tag along with the Borg Cube as it thunders towards S001. Some don't manage to keep up with the Cube, due to getting damaged in the running fight or simply due to not being fast enough. But others join the fray, and then a gaggle of them, with the Cube in the middle, arrive at Earth. In that case, the nature of the ships following the Cube is not given - they may be local defenses or frontier explorers or just random armed transports within interception range.

In any case, assembling a fleet to stop the Cardassians or the Klingons should be easier than assembling one to stop the Borg, simply because the Borg are unusually fast. In "Best of Both Worlds", Starfleet had at most a week to assemble the Wolf 359 response. With a Klingon assault, the early warnings would probably come a bit earlier, and the enemy fleet itself would move more slowly from the outer borders of the UFP towards the core. Perhaps Starfleet's response is optimized for a certain invasion speed?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ensign_Rowan_McGrath]

Then again, many of the ships that made it to Wolf 359 were among the best and most powerful in Starfleet (there were a couple of Nebula giants there). Is that because they were also among the fastest, and thus made it there from wherever they were assigned? Or because Earth keeps a few of these superships close at hand at all times?

No telling whether the ST:First Contact ship designs are newer than older than the usual TNG stock. Designwise, some of them are different from Picard's ship (say, Steamrunner and Saber), but this might mean they are older. Some aren't all that different (Akira). And the registry numbers on them indeed place the obviously different ships in the relatively distant past, sometimes by twenty thousand registry numbers or so, and the Akira in the more recent past.

Are these "warships"? Quite possibly there are so many available because Starfleet is slowly assembling the fleets it plans to use in the upcoming big war with the Dominion, and Earth is one of the places where these are being assembled. And quite possibly the "different" ships were never seen in peacetime because they have little utility there and are dedicated to war. But they probably aren't "battleships", as the Steamrunner for one appears to be virtually unarmed and blows up from the first impact in the fight. Perhaps they are the Starfleet analogue to amphibious attack ships - clumsy and flimsy commercial vessels optimized for disgorging troops and vehicles onto planets, with token defensive armaments. Like the Oberth at Wolf 359 (and the at least two Oberths at S001!), they'd be forced to fight by virtue of happening to be there.

The other alternative is that so many ships make it into the ST:FC fight because they tag along with the Borg Cube as it thunders towards S001. Some don't manage to keep up with the Cube, due to getting damaged in the running fight or simply due to not being fast enough. But others join the fray, and then a gaggle of them, with the Cube in the middle, arrive at Earth. In that case, the nature of the ships following the Cube is not given - they may be local defenses or frontier explorers or just random armed transports within interception range.

In any case, assembling a fleet to stop the Cardassians or the Klingons should be easier than assembling one to stop the Borg, simply because the Borg are unusually fast. In "Best of Both Worlds", Starfleet had at most a week to assemble the Wolf 359 response. With a Klingon assault, the early warnings would probably come a bit earlier, and the enemy fleet itself would move more slowly from the outer borders of the UFP towards the core. Perhaps Starfleet's response is optimized for a certain invasion speed?

Timo Saloniemi

The low registrations on Steamrunner, Saber, Norway and Akira I put down to Starfleet bureaucracy being stupid and setting aside the numbers decades ago for new starships and class names without actual designs and then some poor designer has to take these numbers and class names. Look at the Nova/Sovereign thing for Enterprise-E.

 

[Timo]

It's an odd way to view what one sees, though. A bit like saying that all humans are one-legged and the 99.9999% two-legged ones on the streets must be some sort of an error.

Low registries in Trek correlate with old ships pretty well, and high ones with new ones. Exceptions are quite rare (indeed, what exception is there but the VOY ship Prometheus that is explicitly brand new but has a hull registry in the 50000 rather than 7-80000 range?).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

Some observations:

- At the end of BoBW, Shelby makes an odd statement. She says, "We'll have the fleet back up and running in less than a year" (or something like that; I don't have the episode script in front of me at the moment.) I call this odd because it seems to imply that those 40 ships that were lost were the bulk of Starfleet, period, when in fact we know this not to be the case, since by the time of DS9 we see hundreds of ships that are mostly older classes (lots of Excelsiors and Mirandas, with a small sprinkling of newer Galaxies, Nebulas, and FC ships). So where were all these ships during Wolf 359?

- Additionally, with the "fleet back up and running in a year" comment: Exactly what ships were the replacements? When I first saw First Contact, I immediately assumed that the four FC ship designs were the replacements, only to find later that their registry numbers were too low (if registries are chronological, which I don't believe they are, at least not all the time.) I know there's differing opinions about this, but their designs look more advanced to me than the 5XXXX and 6XXXX Galaxy family of ships (Galaxy, Nebula, New Orleans, Springfield, Challenger, Cheyenne, etc.) So were these the replacements or not?

Low registries in Trek correlate with old ships pretty well, and high ones with new ones. Exceptions are quite rare (indeed, what exception is there but the VOY ship Prometheus that is explicitly brand new but has a hull registry in the 50000 rather than 7-80000 range?).

What springs to mind for me are the low 1XXXX and 2XXXX registries for the Ambassador class, and the high 3XXXX registries for the Miranda class and the 4XXXX registries for the Excelsior class, when the former is clearly a more advanced design than the latter two (although there is a convoluted reason why this is so.)

 

[Unicron]

We heard numbered fleet units referred to in DS9 on several occasions ("Favor The Bold" is the immediate example that springs to my mind, but there are likely others), so perhaps that's one possibility. The ships that were at W359 could have come in large part from a specific fleet unit, and this is what Shelby refers to being rebuilt.

Idle speculation, anyway... But that seems to me a possible solution.

 

[Dukhat]

Then I would think Hansen would have said something like "We've assembled the Fifth Fleet to rendezvous at Wolf 359" instead of implying that they hastily assembled whatever ships they could get. But who knows.

 

[Timo]

A more probable scenario would involve a specific Fleet tasked with Earth defense forming the bulk of the response, but random ships also forming a significant part because the 3rd Fleet or whatever would be at a peacetime stance and not up to the DS9'esque strength of 300 immediately available ships. Scattershot losses to other fleets would not warrant comment, but the loss of 40 out of 300 for the 3rd Fleet would be an issue.

In any case, 40 ships wasn't a big deal in TNG. In VFX terms, showing four lit and mobile ships was the absolute maximum, and the writers realized this would not suffice - so they wrote around it, having e.g. "Redemption" show those four ships, feature a graphic of twenty-plus, and then include dialogue establishing that the twenty-plus were a pittance that makes the Romulans wonder why Starfleet isn't sending more of their ships.

Heck, 40 ships wasn't a big deal even in terms of "BoBW", hence the lighthearted comment at the end. A tragedy, yes, but a single police officer brutally slain doesn't mean the NYPD is powerless to prevent crime till next New Year.

Additionally, with the "fleet back up and running in a year" comment: Exactly what ships were the replacements?

Might have been mere reassignments, since it appears it takes longer than a year to build an individual ship (we certainly never heard of faster construction in DS9, save for the Mirror Defiant, and we never saw recently built ships, save again for a Defiant). Might have been nifty and modern-looking ships that were all sent elsewhere, away from Bajor which was an inactive front just like Washington/Richmond - or then the scene of suicide attacks where expensive units might be held back or then only used as a silver-bullet "Galaxy Wing" that stands ready to escape at the first sign of trouble and leave the cannonfodder relics to die.

What springs to mind for me are the low 1XXXX and 2XXXX registries for the Ambassador class, and the high 3XXXX registries for the Miranda class and the 4XXXX registries for the Excelsior class, when the former is clearly a more advanced design than the latter two (although there is a convoluted reason why this is so.)

I'm not so sure about the more advanced bit - the Ambassador just looks like a bigger Excelsior, but with a throwback secondary hull more akin to Kirk's ones. There could have been a "generation" of ships featuring a first wave of all designs but successive batches of only certain smaller, attrition types.

The same doesn't appear to be the immediately evident case with the "generation" involving the likes of Steamrunner or the one involving the Galaxy, though - the second coming of Galaxy lookalikes might still be in the future, but where's the second coming of those dark and angular Steamrunners and Sabers? (Well, the Saber numbers actually are high enough to put them in the rehash category if we wish to read them that way.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

The later TNG and DS9 episodes suggest that the Cardassian Wars ended just around the time of Wolf 359. Perhaps the reason the Federation ended the war with an unfavorable treaty was because of the Borg attack. The ships use at Wolf 359 were those that happened to be close to Earth or in the path of the cube. The rest of the fleet was on the Cardassian border. With the loses at Wolf 359, Starfleet wouldn't be able to backup its forces for a year or more, and couldn't constantly counter the Cardassians. Thus a treaty.

The Klingon Civil War, a year later, has Picard taking 22 ships to the Klingon/Romulan border region. Dragging a number of ships out of spacedock that were not quite ready to deploy his net. The Klingon border being a reasonably quiet one given that they are allies.

Years later with the Dominion coming, and the Klingons at war with the Federation, Starfleet starts pulling ships from all over the Federation to the Core worlds to give them a reasonably response force against either the Klingons or the Dominion. With the Dominion entering in to an alliance with Cardassia, and the Klingons reentering their alliance with the Federation, the ships at the Klingon border are pulled back to redeploy near Cardassian space. In the middle of this the Borg cube arrives. Theses ships are the ones that have to deal with the Borg, including USS Defiant. This additional loss of ships doesn't help the fleet against the Dominion, but it did allow for Starfleet to gather its forces so that once the Dominion starts invading Bajorian space, Starfleet and the Klingons can go to work in taking out a Dominion shipyard. It goes badly for about six months, until they can gain a reversal as the results of Operation Return (to DS9).

 

[Timo]

It's difficult to see why Starfleet would miss those 40 ships on the Cardassian front when the Cardassians are no threat at all at that stage. The UFP isn't pressing for unconditional surrender and total crushing of the enemy - Bajor is left unliberated. OTOH, the UFP isn't holding back from almost completely crushing the union - Bajor is left unliberated right next door to Cardassia Prime while every planet around Bajor in DS9 soon thereafter is "neutral" (if Cardassian-minded) instead of Cardassian.

So I really want to ask, what unfavorable treaty? After driving that bloody wedge into the heart of the Union, should the Feds have asked for surrender of the enemy Homeworld, too? Should they have conquered all those planets to which Cardassia had expanded without questionable means? Supposedly, all the colonies involved in the "Journey's End"/"Maquis"/"Preemptive Strike" dispute were settlements rather than conquests, or at least we were never told otherwise.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

With the mixture of the Borg attack, the still not entirely understood nature of the Ferengi Alliance, and the newly reopened threat of Romulas, Starfleet might be spread too thin following Wolf 359. Add potentially whatever weird redeployments the "Conspiracy" parasites did could but Starfleet well out of position for a few years. That the Bajoran resistance finally manages to become too costly for Central Command is an unexpected windfall for Starfleet just a few years later.

 

[Timo]

But here we face two opposite questions:

1) Starfleet is always tangled up in a thousand things. Is the situation here really exceptional?

2) Do we really observe some sort of a "consequence" that would warrant speculating on a "cause"?

The first question calls for relative assessment when we don't even know the absolutes. Perhaps Starfleet was strung even tighter back when it nevertheless decided to invade the Klingon Empire in the 2290s? Perhaps it had nothing else to do and ten thousand surplus ships to burn when it decided to stop the Romulan War and, instead of completing a conquest, establish the RNZ?

The second question hinges on the Cardassians getting the soft touch. In the old war, they don't appear to get it - their Union is torn to pieces. In "The Wounded", Picard stops short of slaughtering the frankly quite helpless Cardassians because he prefers peace as the means of keeping them from doing further harm. In "Chain of Command", Jellico slaps the mighty Cardassian invasion fleet on the wrist and tells them not to be silly again or he might actually get angry.

The latter two incidents might count as Starfleet secretly holding a weak hand, but the soft touch is in practice accompanied by a clear demonstration of a strong hand instead. And in neither occasion is the hand under any pressure to go anywhere else to do more important things. It takes its time to hover menacingly over the Cardassians instead.

Perhaps Starfleet is short on ships and therefore can't guard its outer holdings against the constant petty raids of the Union - but it is still stronger militarily and could crush the Union whenever it wanted. Forty ships here or there shouldn't alter that.

Timo Saloniemi