Way of the Warrior Station Battle

[All Seeing Eye]

That Sisko is so crap at battles its unreal, the station is getting pounded by Klingon ships and instead of saying get the weapons online and fire at will and blast those ships to dust he instead says fire on my command, waits 3 minutes and says 'fire even numbered torpedos' (2 minutes later) 'fire odd numbered torpedos' (2 minutes later) 'fire phasers'.
I mean what the hell? never mind fire them at separate times just fire them all at once and blast those Klingons back to the Beta Quadrant!! and what was with the whole waiting 3 minutes at the start before returning fire when the station was getting pounded!

As for the tactics why the heck would you waste torpedoes on Birds of Prey, anyone with a decent level a battle sense would have took the BOPs out with the phasers and torpedoed the Vor'Chas and then that would be AFTER firing every single torpedo at the Negh'Var first! if you're going to win a battle you start by taking out the flag ship.

Oh well, it was still a good episode of course but I just like to nitpick.

 

[TeutonicNights]

Sisko figured those ships would be fighting on his side eventually.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

TeutonicNights said:
Sisko figured those ships would be fighting on his side eventually.

Yes but the entire attack on Cardassia comprised of only one third of the entire Klingon Fleet and the majority of that fleet was still fighting in cardassian space so the ships attacking the station were only a small number of ships and im sure the Klingon empire could quickly build some more and I highly doubt Sisko was trying to disable them, he was trying to destroy them thus his tactics in doing so still sucked.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Check out the battle again.

 

[TeutonicNights]

Hm...I guess you're right.
But I didn't mean he wanted to save as many Kling ships as possible, but that Sisko saw the whole conflict as a waste and an indirect Dominion victory whoever wins, so he was rather reluctant to unleash the full power of DS9's weapons.

Only after Worf has told him the Klingons won't be ready to talk until they are at a clear disadvantage, he decides to kick their asses mercilessly.


What I didn't get about the battle is that they obviously were targetting ships that were already heavily damaged, when disabling those ships would be more than enough.
It was a pain seeing those ships destroyed. I almost wanted the Klingons to win

 

[JoeZhang]

For a warrior race, Klingons sure are poor hand to hand fighters...

 

[TeutonicNights]

I wonder what happened to those knocked-down warriors in ops. Very nice of them to stay unconscious until the battle was over.
BTW do you think they killed or stunned those Klingons beaming in?

 

[misskim86]

I'm gonna trust a Captain in Star Fleet

 

[JoeZhang]

TeutonicNights said:
I wonder what happened to those knocked-down warriors in ops. Very nice of them to stay unconscious until the battle was over.
BTW do you think they killed or stunned those Klingons beaming in?

The Klingons are one of those races who never match up to what we are told about them - every fight we see them in, they are creampuffs!

 

[Ezri]

Klingons are creampuffs ... hmmmm ... what taste filling is inside Worf ...I say vanilla

 

[Photon]

Also, in the battle of DS9 2 (vs Dominion) The battlebugs going after Jadzia and the Defiant (laying the mines) Sisko ordered Worf to get em...and he fired a photon volley and nailed him. The phasers were very effective vs the battlebugs and Keldons. So I was wondering the same thing in that battle. Why waste the torpedoes?

 

[-Brett-]

Well, if we're going to apply Voyager/Enterprise logic to DS9, why didn't Sisko just target their weapons arrays and render the entire Klingon fleet as harmless as a puppy with one shot?

Seriously though. One, these were trusted allies only a day before. Sisko was probably reluctant to start shooting at them. Two, only firing certain weapons was probably intended as a demonstration. He was hoping the Klingons would think twice about pushing it. Three, as I recall there was a scene establishing that the new weapons were untested. Starting out small might limit the chance that the whole rig fails catastrophically.

 

[Dane_Whitman]

-Brett- said:
weapons arrays

That's one word I hope never to hear again in Trek to come.

 

[ShamelessMcBundy]

Dane_Whitman said:

-Brett- said:
weapons arrays

That's one word I hope never to hear again in Trek to come.

Well, it's two words, so you're safe.

 

[HRHTheKING]

That Sisko is so crap at battles its unreal, the station is getting pounded by Klingon ships and instead of saying get the weapons online and fire at will and blast those ships to dust he instead says fire on my command, waits 3 minutes and says 'fire even numbered torpedos' (2 minutes later) 'fire odd numbered torpedos' (2 minutes later) 'fire phasers'.
I mean what the hell? never mind fire them at separate times just fire them all at once and blast those Klingons back to the Beta Quadrant!! and what was with the whole waiting 3 minutes at the start before returning fire when the station was getting pounded!

As for the tactics why the heck would you waste torpedoes on Birds of Prey, anyone with a decent level a battle sense would have took the BOPs out with the phasers and torpedoed the Vor'Chas and then that would be AFTER firing every single torpedo at the Negh'Var first! if you're going to win a battle you start by taking out the flag ship.

Oh well, it was still a good episode of course but I just like to nitpick.

It's done for dramatic effect. Waiting to launch weapons adds tension to the scene. It would have been crap had he just fired everything and smoked the coolest ships.

From a story perspective I suppose it could be explained that he was trying to show the Klingons that "look we are packing heat here....so back off" and he actually tried to contact them to end the fighting fairly early.

 

[AdmiralGarak]

It's poor tactics to waste all of your weapons before the enemy's gotten into range. DS9 would have fired a massive salvo scoring only minimal damage to the Klingon fleet. Then the Klingons would have been able to get in close and unload an entire fleet's worth of firepower on the station during the time it would take to reload the torpedoes and recharge the phasers.

Sisko's strategy left the station with 1/2 the torpedo launchers active while the other half needed to reload. He saved the phasers until the Klingons were at point-blank range, setting up an effective killzone.

Besides, Sisko's intent was to delay the Klingons, not obliterate them. He only needed to wait for the Starfleet cavalry to chase them off.

 

[Ethros]

It's a brilliant battle, but as I always ask- where was the Defiant???

It could have helped out a bit, no?

 

[AdmiralGarak]

^If by "help" you mean "die immediately", then yes. It was crippled (no aft shields or cloaking device), had no wingmates (unless you count three small Runabouts), and was up against a massive fleet. The Defiant has been shown to be able to handle two or three ships by its lonesome; certainly not hundreds.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, the Defiant has never been shown offering any sort of direct protection to the station. Instead, she's mainly a reconnaissance asset, one that requires protection from the station whenever there is a real battle...

Which is perfectly logical in light of the station's defensive abilities. But this does beg the question of how the handful of Starfleet ships that were approaching would have been of significance in the battle. Perhaps this thing isn't symmetric: perhaps you need hundreds of ships to overwhelm a space station, but you only need a couple of ships to make life hell for the hundreds of ships that are trying to attack the station?

Hm...I guess you're right.

I don't really think so. There is no "three-minute wait" in the episode, for example: Sisko opens fire as soon as it becomes evident the Klingons are not going to be swayed by talk.

And "all weapons fire at will", while sounding cool, is the kind of command given by a desperate commander when everything is lost. As said, it is sound practice to tell which weapons to fire and which to reload or cool down or whatever. But more importantly, it is important to allocate fire properly, to ensure that only the required number of weapons hit each target and no shots are wasted on a target that is already being hit by a sufficient number of weapons.

"Fire at will" defeats that, and is a command usually uttered only when one's fire control systems have been destroyed, or when one has become so totally confused or surprised that one cannot allocate targets.

Going by WWII catchphrases, "Free fire", combined with instructions on what to target, might be more proper. That is, each weapon would know its target but wouldn't have to wait for any commands, and could fire when most convenient.

But there's something to be said for synchronizing the firing moment with a single command. The psychological effect of multiple simultaneous hits is often devastating, as opposed to that of a couple of initial hits that don't necessarily yet destroy anything, and in fact build up the confidence of the target...

Generally, I enjoyed seeing how the battle in "Way of the Warrior" actually had something resembling a structure. There were specialized Klingon ships that fired different types of ordnance at different targets; there was boarding action simultaneously with starship combat; there were clear tactical and strategic aims for both sides, beyond just getting the opponent killed. And in an interesting twist, it was a battle that nobody wanted, a battle where victory would be defeat and would solve nothing. There was dramatic tension about every minute the battle dragged on, because every tick of the clock brought both sides closer to defeat. One could see desperation on both sides, and sympathize with both. For Trek's first super-sized furball, this was a remarkably coherent and dramatically interesting battle - in addition to being eye candy, of course.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Timo said:
But this does beg the question of how the handful of Starfleet ships that were approaching would have been of significance in the battle. Perhaps this thing isn't symmetric: perhaps you need hundreds of ships to overwhelm a space station, but you only need a couple of ships to make life hell for the hundreds of ships that are trying to attack the station?

It was mentioned by Dax (in the presence of Garak) that only 100 ships were attacking cardassian space which as we saw was the entire Klingon task force that was orbiting DS9, when the Klingon ships attacked DS9 a large number of those ships were still in Cardassian space fighting the Cardassians therefore chances are there was maybe only 30 ships at most actually attacking DS9 and the majority of those were probably BOPs and D7 Battlecruisers, the Klingon fleet was already struggling against the station and had lost several ships including Vor'Chas so 6 additional Federation Starships with no damage and weilding fully powered phasers and a full compliment of Photon Torpedoes would likely pose a significant threat to the already ravaged Klingon fleet, as was mentioned in the episode by sisko the federation ships would arrive long before Klingon re-inforcements so the Klingons were on the losing side which is one of the reasons Gowron ordered retreat and ordered the rest of his fleet out of Cardassian space.