So I'm rewatching Voyager and I've come to the episode where Tom is giving Kes flight lessons. For a few seconds during the simulations there is a squadron of Jem Hadar fighters on the viewscreen. Here's my issue:
If you look at the stardates, which I don't really know how to read exactly, there's very little time between the incident in DS9's chronology when the Dominion was first introduced as a threat (and Jem Hadar fighters were first observed by the Federation), and the stardate of Voyager's launch.
Voy launch: 48038.5
Odyssey destroyed / "Jem Hadar" DS9 ep: 47987.5
Regardless of exactly how you read these stardates, they're pretty close together. If you take the view that they're about 1 day per stardate, that's 51 days. Ok, so that's reasonably appreciable - but I've also read somewhere it makes more sense if they're half-days, so that's about 25 days. So here are the two sides to this argument, which I was having with BolianAdmiral a few minutes ago.
In my view, the construction and launch of a Starship is such a massive task that as minor a step as installing the holodeck simulation database in which in the tactical simulations would reside would probably be completed at some point relatively early in the process. In fact, it would stand to reason that a fair bit of this process is something that would've been standardized long ago. It's probable that the entire holocore would have been assembled and a pre-selected set of tactical simulations approved by some mundane officer at Starfleet Security - the selection of, and updating of which, would probably evolve about as quickly as the educational videos you watch in public school. The set of tactical simulations that Voyager has would never have included schematics or flight profiles of Jem Hadar fighters because the event was simply too soon right before Voyager's launch to be included.
Bolian's argument is that in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the Odyssey, Starfleet became aware (both due to Sisko's urgent warnings and the simultaneous destruction of the Bajoran colonies in the GQ), that the Dominion was a serious, imminent threat and would have installed tactical simulation programs with Dominion forces in them on all out-going starships.
My counterargument would be that while I'm sure Janeway, as captain, would be informed of the threat of the Dominion since her mission took her into the Badlands and relatively near the wormhole; immediately after the Odyssey's destruction, Starfleet Command was in fact completely ignorant of the Dominion's strategic posture - and indeed had absolutely no idea what it was in for yet. This would seem to fit with DS9 chronology since it was quite some time after "Jem Hadar" that any serious efforts took place to fortify the station, post reinforcements in the Bajoran sector, or start accelerating shipbuilding. In my view, even if there had been a means by which such a tactical simulation could've found its way onto Voyager, Starfleet did not in fact have the foresight at that time as evidenced by the flow of DS9's storyline, to know that the Dominion was that big of a threat yet.
So the question is, was it a genuine flub - a mistake, something that shouldn't have been there, a lazy VFX guy just grabbed the nearest object and threw it in; or, was it a genuine attempt to suggest that the times worked out. Thoughts?
If you look at the stardates, which I don't really know how to read exactly, there's very little time between the incident in DS9's chronology when the Dominion was first introduced as a threat (and Jem Hadar fighters were first observed by the Federation), and the stardate of Voyager's launch.
Voy launch: 48038.5
Odyssey destroyed / "Jem Hadar" DS9 ep: 47987.5
Regardless of exactly how you read these stardates, they're pretty close together. If you take the view that they're about 1 day per stardate, that's 51 days. Ok, so that's reasonably appreciable - but I've also read somewhere it makes more sense if they're half-days, so that's about 25 days. So here are the two sides to this argument, which I was having with BolianAdmiral a few minutes ago.
In my view, the construction and launch of a Starship is such a massive task that as minor a step as installing the holodeck simulation database in which in the tactical simulations would reside would probably be completed at some point relatively early in the process. In fact, it would stand to reason that a fair bit of this process is something that would've been standardized long ago. It's probable that the entire holocore would have been assembled and a pre-selected set of tactical simulations approved by some mundane officer at Starfleet Security - the selection of, and updating of which, would probably evolve about as quickly as the educational videos you watch in public school. The set of tactical simulations that Voyager has would never have included schematics or flight profiles of Jem Hadar fighters because the event was simply too soon right before Voyager's launch to be included.
Bolian's argument is that in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the Odyssey, Starfleet became aware (both due to Sisko's urgent warnings and the simultaneous destruction of the Bajoran colonies in the GQ), that the Dominion was a serious, imminent threat and would have installed tactical simulation programs with Dominion forces in them on all out-going starships.
My counterargument would be that while I'm sure Janeway, as captain, would be informed of the threat of the Dominion since her mission took her into the Badlands and relatively near the wormhole; immediately after the Odyssey's destruction, Starfleet Command was in fact completely ignorant of the Dominion's strategic posture - and indeed had absolutely no idea what it was in for yet. This would seem to fit with DS9 chronology since it was quite some time after "Jem Hadar" that any serious efforts took place to fortify the station, post reinforcements in the Bajoran sector, or start accelerating shipbuilding. In my view, even if there had been a means by which such a tactical simulation could've found its way onto Voyager, Starfleet did not in fact have the foresight at that time as evidenced by the flow of DS9's storyline, to know that the Dominion was that big of a threat yet.
So the question is, was it a genuine flub - a mistake, something that shouldn't have been there, a lazy VFX guy just grabbed the nearest object and threw it in; or, was it a genuine attempt to suggest that the times worked out. Thoughts?
