TFF, and even that didn't make sense. If they wanted Kirk and his senior crew all they had to do was give him temporary command of another ship.
Why is Earth so poorly defended?
- Thread starter BoredShipCapt'n
- Start date
TFF, and even that didn't make sense. If they wanted Kirk and his senior crew all they had to do was give him temporary command of another ship.
If they would have other ships around. they surely would have send one, and ofcourse a different crew.
Would you have liked to see a different crew? No? so it seems they had such poor defences for the box office. Now get a life
Clark Terrell
Lieutenant Commander
According to Chekov, some sort of planetary defense system was in place, but V'Ger shut it down as easily as one of us clicks a mouse.
Politics?
I think that's what he meant, that TOS often had Enterprise be the only ship in the sector/quadrant. It makes sense that the Enterprise could be the only ship in the quadrant during TOS. Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. In a given sector of space, especially out toward the edge of the Federation, it stands to reason there will only be one starship in the area. In contrast, the closer one gets to more heavily populated areas of the Federation, we should see more ships. One would think that Earth, the capitol of the Federation, would have a couple of shipyards and a whole bunch of ships floating around.
Compare it with the navies on Earth. There may be only 1 US ship at some particular spot in the ocean, but there are a whole bunch of ships docked at Washington Navy Yard.
On the other hand, maybe they expect the planetary defenses to be enough.
I'm not intending to be snarky here, but I was curious and after a bit of research I can't find any ships listed as being stationed at the Washington Navy Yard (except for a museum ship, which I think falls outside our implicit bounds of discussing active-duty ships of any tactical value). I can find plenty with homeports of Baltimore, Norfolk, or Newport News, which would seem to be close enough for practical purposes, but none of which are actually Washington. (And I'm aware of the difference between a homeport and where the ship might happen to be.)
Has anyone got a reference for what ships there actually are in Washington at the moment?
Quadrants are also smaller parts of a sector. They are used in TNG as well.
See I don't agree with the notion that you have to make the Enterprise the "only ship in range" or anything like that for the sake of dramatic tension. It actually has a counter effect after awhile if it is handled as sloppily as say, Generations or Star Trek Into Darkness. If you actually give it any thought at all it becomes ridiculous.
This is one of the reasons that TOS was set out in the frontier. The Enterprise being on her own, with little or no backup, made sense.
With TMP the answer was already mentioned in this thread. Have a defense fleet stationed around Earth, and just say that the Enterprise is the ship with the most cutting edge technology that has any hope of stopping this overwhelming force. Indeed, it's new deflector screens are able to hold out against V'ger's digitizing plasma weapon. Why not just make that little change, keep Enterprise as top dog, and not make SF look like total doops?
I'd argue, that the rare instances where we've seen SF mount a desperate defense only to get squashed were more dramatically interesting than when they didn't. IE: in Best of Both Worlds.
Another example, Star Trek 2009 did a good job of this by telling us that the main fleet was dealing with a crisis elsewhere while the Earth defense flotilla was sent to Vulcan. The Enterprise being the only ship made sense in this context.
This is one of the reasons that TOS was set out in the frontier. The Enterprise being on her own, with little or no backup, made sense.
With TMP the answer was already mentioned in this thread. Have a defense fleet stationed around Earth, and just say that the Enterprise is the ship with the most cutting edge technology that has any hope of stopping this overwhelming force. Indeed, it's new deflector screens are able to hold out against V'ger's digitizing plasma weapon. Why not just make that little change, keep Enterprise as top dog, and not make SF look like total doops?
I'd argue, that the rare instances where we've seen SF mount a desperate defense only to get squashed were more dramatically interesting than when they didn't. IE: in Best of Both Worlds.
Another example, Star Trek 2009 did a good job of this by telling us that the main fleet was dealing with a crisis elsewhere while the Earth defense flotilla was sent to Vulcan. The Enterprise being the only ship made sense in this context.
It doesn't make sense, Earth spacedock is likely heavily armed and would have a lot of ships regularly stationed there.
Consider how powerful DS9 is, and thats a 100 year old mining platform retrofitted, Spacedock is about 100X the size, and is a starfleet construction right next to earth, the thing should be capiable of defending against fleets, and you'd think it should have 100's of fighters, as well as at least 4-5 starships stationed there for local operations (at least excelsior class ships) as well as there being 10-15 other starships there for shore leave, refits, repairs etc that they could roll out. This isn't to mention the armemant a thing that size would be packing.
Consider how powerful DS9 is, and thats a 100 year old mining platform retrofitted, Spacedock is about 100X the size, and is a starfleet construction right next to earth, the thing should be capiable of defending against fleets, and you'd think it should have 100's of fighters, as well as at least 4-5 starships stationed there for local operations (at least excelsior class ships) as well as there being 10-15 other starships there for shore leave, refits, repairs etc that they could roll out. This isn't to mention the armemant a thing that size would be packing.
Personally, I think during TOS Starfleet wasn't very big and starships were analogous to modern-day aircraft carriers in which they only comprised a percentage of the fleet (the rest were cruisers, freighters, scouts, and various other smaller spaceship types). As such, the term "the only starship in range" didn't mean the only Starfleet vessel in range, but the only starship-type vessel in range, IMO.
In TNG, the term starship became more of a common term for almost any warp-capable vessel. But even with presumably more vessels designated as starships, I think that the very three-dimensional nature of space makes defending any stationary object (be it a planet or a space station) next to impossible. Unless you have an essentially unlimited number of ships and defense platforms, there's always going to be a gap in a defense perimeter that an invading force can slip through, utilizing various tactics (like feints and decoys) to draw ships away from assigned patrol areas--I wouldn't be surprised if the Breen used such tactics to attack Earth during the Dominion War.
In other instances, like the Borg incursions of 2366 and 2373 (or even a terrorist attack of 2258 that led to the destruction of Vulcan in another reality), it could just be a case of Starfleet forces being overwhelmed by a more powerful adversary until something last-minute could stop them or enough ships could arrive on the scene.
In TNG, the term starship became more of a common term for almost any warp-capable vessel. But even with presumably more vessels designated as starships, I think that the very three-dimensional nature of space makes defending any stationary object (be it a planet or a space station) next to impossible. Unless you have an essentially unlimited number of ships and defense platforms, there's always going to be a gap in a defense perimeter that an invading force can slip through, utilizing various tactics (like feints and decoys) to draw ships away from assigned patrol areas--I wouldn't be surprised if the Breen used such tactics to attack Earth during the Dominion War.
In other instances, like the Borg incursions of 2366 and 2373 (or even a terrorist attack of 2258 that led to the destruction of Vulcan in another reality), it could just be a case of Starfleet forces being overwhelmed by a more powerful adversary until something last-minute could stop them or enough ships could arrive on the scene.
IIRC the earlier drafts of the TMP script did address the issue head-on of why they would send a fresh-out-of-the-drydock new Enterprise to confront V'ger, instead of assigning other, more "service ready" starships. But this was one of those little details that ended up getting trimmed in the rewrites, when they turned the script into The Motion Picture instead of it just being a TV pilot episode.
I meant all the series, really not so much TOS as they were never by Earth unless it was in the past. DS9 had the Breen attack Earth, Borg in TNG, although in both those instances the fleet was engaged else where (like Wolf 351 etc..). By Voyagers Endgame they seemed to have learned there lesson about having ships nearby.
The Enterprise episode Zero Hour was the best example, where were the Starfleet ships?? They knew a weapon could come at anytime yet no defense at all beside Shran coming to help, that was never explained. Yet, when the Enterprise came back from the past 2 episodes later, the fleet was there to great them.
For TMP, at least, being the only ship "in range" doesn't mean it was the only ship near Earth. The Enterprise was sent out specifically because it could intercept V'Ger the quickest. There could have been 50 ships in Earth orbit, but they wouldn't have the "range" to intercept in time.
