Wolf 359 Questions

[PhoenixIreland]

1. Did the Klingons or Romulans help in the end? was there any confirmation of that?

2. Where did the escape pods of ships like the Saratoga do if the entire fleet was destroyed??

3. Not really W359 but in same area....why was the "Mars defense perimeter" three nats?

 

[The Old Mixer]

1. I can't recall that it was ever even hinted that they had anything to do with it. The Federation had enough problems scrambling together ships that were within their space, it's doubtful that any Klingons could have been there in time if they'd wanted to be, and there's no good reason why the Romulans would have pitched in at that point.

2. The entire Starfleet wasn't destroyed, just the ships that they managed to rally together in the Borg cube's path on little notice.

3. We don't know how effective those "gnats" would have been in the face of a threat that they were designed to handle...the Borg clearly overwhelmed the Federation in terms of pure force at the time. And one could rationalize that more ships would normally have been available to protect Earth when needed, but those ships had already been destroyed at Wolf 359. This "Mars Defense Perimeter" was no doubt the last-ditch defense that they never wanted to have to resort to. Like on a modern warship, you'd use your Vulcan cannon to try to shoot down an incoming missile if it managed to get that close, but ideally you'd have already shot it down with a fighter or a SAM while it was a lot farther away.

 

[Christopher]

1. Did the Klingons or Romulans help in the end? was there any confirmation of that?

2. Where did the escape pods of ships like the Saratoga do if the entire fleet was destroyed??

Hanson said the Klingons were sending warships to help, but there's no evidence that they made it in time. No Klingon wreckage was seen in BOBW and no Klingon vessels were seen in "Emissary." There was an issue of Marvel's Voyager comic book in which Voyager encountered Wolf 359 survivors who came through a space-time rift, and its depictions of the battle included Klingon ships, but that seems to conflict with the canonical evidence.

So my guess would be that the answer to your first two questions is the same: the Klingons sent warships, but they probably didn't arrive until after the battle, in which case they would have been the ones who retrieved the escape pods.

3. Not really W359 but in same area....why was the "Mars defense perimeter" three nats?

Because that's all the producers could afford to show. It's easy enough to assume those shots were just a sampling of a more extensive battle.

 

[SeerSGB]

3. Not really W359 but in same area....why was the "Mars defense perimeter" three nats?

Because that's all the producers could afford to show. It's easy enough to assume those shots were just a sampling of a more extensive battle.

That's been my general thoughts as well for a few years. Figure that they probably met the Borg at the outer edge of the Sol system and had a running firefight all the way back to Mars, with the episode only showing the last ditch efforts to hold them back.

 

[Timo]

We could also assume that the three ships were there only as a last-ditch defense of Mars, not of the entire Sol system. After all,

a) the Sol system is a big place to be defended, and a defense force launched from Mars would be impractical in stopping a threat that came from any other direction

b) the Borg took special care not to fly to Earth straight away, but to visit all the inhabited planets in the system (we saw Saturn and Mars and heard over the comms that Jupiter had been attacked) before settling on Earth orbit, so close-in defenses specific to Mars would have been forced to respond.

That is, there would have been a Jupiter Perimeter Defense to defend Jupiter, a Saturn Perimeter Defense to defend Saturn, and a Mars Perimeter Defense to defend Mars, quite separately from the Earth Perimeter Defense that defended Earth. And then there would no doubt have been various defensive layers to protect the Sol system as a whole, with the fleet at Wolf 359 perhaps being the outermost such layer.

As regards the Klingon presence, weren't there some visuals in either "Unity" or "Infinite Regress" to suggest the assimilation of a Klingon warrior in a space battle against a Borg cube? There is no particular need to assume that this battle was the Wolf 359 one, of course - but OTOH we could assume this if we wanted.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[PhoenixIreland]

3. Not really W359 but in same area....why was the "Mars defense perimeter" three nats?

Because that's all the producers could afford to show. It's easy enough to assume those shots were just a sampling of a more extensive battle.

That's been my general thoughts as well for a few years. Figure that they probably met the Borg at the outer edge of the Sol system and had a running firefight all the way back to Mars, with the episode only showing the last ditch efforts to hold them back.

I suppose for all we know those three things could have been WMDs

I didn't think all starfleet was gone, just that the 359 fleet was and was wondering who picked up the escape pods.
The klingon explanation is good enough for me.

They would have been pissed they missed the fight.

 

[Christopher]

We could also assume that the three ships were there only as a last-ditch defense of Mars, not of the entire Sol system. After all,

a) the Sol system is a big place to be defended, and a defense force launched from Mars would be impractical in stopping a threat that came from any other direction

Indeed. If we go by the assumption that a season covers an entire calendar year from January 1 to December 31, then BOBW Pt. 2 (stardate 44001.4) would've taken place on or about January 1, 2367. On that date, according to the Celestia simulator, Mars will be on the opposite side of the Earth from Wolf 359. So the Borg would reach Earth before they reached Mars. In fact, there's no time between about October '65 and September '67 when Mars would be more or less directly between Wolf 359 and Earth.

b) the Borg took special care not to fly to Earth straight away, but to visit all the inhabited planets in the system (we saw Saturn and Mars and heard over the comms that Jupiter had been attacked) before settling on Earth orbit, so close-in defenses specific to Mars would have been forced to respond.

That's right. I'm looking at my Celestia display for January 2367, and it's oriented so that Wolf 359 is way off to the left (at 9 o'clock). Treating Earth as the center, Mars is at about 2:30 to 3 o'clock, Jupiter's roughly the same direction but farther away, and Saturn is at 7 o'clock, but about 10 times farther than Mars. This could work if the cube followed a spiral course around the Sun, first getting a bit of a gravity assist from Saturn to aim it toward Jupiter, then looping about 90-120 degrees around Jupiter to get on course for Mars and Earth, coming in from just about exactly the opposite direction from Wolf 359.

But the question is, why would the Borg bother to do that instead of going directly to Earth? Did they specifically want to take out the defenses at Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars before tackling Earth itself? Were they figuring that most of Sol System's defenses would've been between Earth and Wolf 359, so they looped around the back to take us by surprise? Why would they have bothered, when we had nothing that could pose a threat to them?

Of course, the real explanation is that fiction writers always assume that the planets are in a straight line. Bad enough they almost never think 3-dimensionally about space, this is a case where people usually forget to think even 2-dimensionally.

 

[Timo]

I would think it perfectly typical of the Borg to try and pick up as many fights as possible. It would pose two advantages for them: they would destroy the enemy in detail, leaving not even the smallest of forces to stab them at the back during the final assimilation run; and they would gain the maximum amount of assimilable knowledge from their inevitable victories.

I rather like the implications of the writer/director choice here, however unintended. Basically, we are now supposed to believe that mankind/UPF has a significant presence throughout the Sol system, outside Earth, and that there are real assets at Jupiter or Saturn, and the means to protect them there.

As for those suicide ships launched from Mars, I once postulated that Starfleet might have built something like that back in the 2260s, after Kirk discovered the Space Amoeba and the Doomsday Machine. Those clumsy and nearly defenseless behemoths would be ideally defended against by launching big bombs like this. Say, the weapons could be modifications of smallish crewed spacecraft of the era, as they look rather similar to the TOS-R Aurora.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[WalkinMan]

Hopefully those Mars Defense Perimeter 'missiles' were unmanned...

 

[The Old Mixer]

I didn't think all starfleet was gone, just that the 359 fleet was and was wondering who picked up the escape pods.
The klingon explanation is good enough for me.

There also would have been other Starfleet ships that couldn't make it in time for the battle.

 

[BolianAuthor]

1. Did the Klingons or Romulans help in the end? was there any confirmation of that?

2. Where did the escape pods of ships like the Saratoga do if the entire fleet was destroyed??

Hanson said the Klingons were sending warships to help, but there's no evidence that they made it in time. No Klingon wreckage was seen in BOBW and no Klingon vessels were seen in "Emissary." There was an issue of Marvel's Voyager comic book in which Voyager encountered Wolf 359 survivors who came through a space-time rift, and its depictions of the battle included Klingon ships, but that seems to conflict with the canonical evidence.

So my guess would be that the answer to your first two questions is the same: the Klingons sent warships, but they probably didn't arrive until after the battle, in which case they would have been the ones who retrieved the escape pods.

3. Not really W359 but in same area....why was the "Mars defense perimeter" three nats?

Because that's all the producers could afford to show. It's easy enough to assume those shots were just a sampling of a more extensive battle.

There actually WAS a very short glimpse of Klingon debris, in BoBW... we see the "head" of a K'Tinga-Class warship, in the "graveyard" scene. The Klingons did send help. Admiral Hanson said that Starfleet had "thought" of opening communications with the Romulans.

 

[mythme]

There actually WAS a very short glimpse of Klingon debris, in BoBW... we see the "head" of a K'Tinga-Class warship, in the "graveyard" scene. The Klingons did send help. Admiral Hanson said that Starfleet had "thought" of opening communications with the Romulans.

Can you confirm that? "Ex Astris Scientia" extensive analysis of the graveyard scene makes no mention of any Klingon debris - and I consider Bernd an authority on such matters.

 

[BolianAuthor]

There actually WAS a very short glimpse of Klingon debris, in BoBW... we see the "head" of a K'Tinga-Class warship, in the "graveyard" scene. The Klingons did send help. Admiral Hanson said that Starfleet had "thought" of opening communications with the Romulans.

Can you confirm that? "Ex Astris Scientia" extensive analysis of the graveyard scene makes no mention of any Klingon debris - and I consider Bernd an authority on such matters.

Bernd is NOT the final authority on Trek, as good and thorough as his site is. It is in the scene where the Enterprise is passing through the graveyard of ships... if you pay attention, you will see it... you may hae to rewind and go through a few times, but it is there... I THINK it's in the middle left of the screen, but I could be wrong on that.

 

[nx1701g]

^ I know it's not canon but there was a comic a few years ago that involved Wolf 359. In it a Klingon Battlecruiser was seen among the Debris, but I know it's not canon.

 

[Christopher]

^ I know it's not canon but there was a comic a few years ago that involved Wolf 359. In it a Klingon Battlecruiser was seen among the Debris, but I know it's not canon.

That's the comic I mentioned in post #7. It shows the actual battle in progress (courtesy of a time warp), not the debris, and as I recall, it depicts more than one Klingon vessel engaged in combat. Also, the survivors who come through the time warp and board Voyager include at least one Klingon. (Of course, their stay is not permanent.)

 

[Timo]

Bernd is NOT the final authority on Trek, as good and thorough as his site is. It is in the scene where the Enterprise is passing through the graveyard of ships... if you pay attention, you will see it... you may hae to rewind and go through a few times, but it is there... I THINK it's in the middle left of the screen, but I could be wrong on that.

Oh, there definitely is an entire intact K't'inga in the "graveyard scene", in the middle left of the screen. It's just not in "Best of Both Worlds", and has got nothing to do with Wolf 359.

That is, the debris field first used in "BoBW" is reused to depict the Qualor II depot in "Unification", and in the latter episode the Klingon (or possibly Romulan) vessel is added, a planet is inserted in the background, a few space stations are added, and the fire effects are removed from the shipwrecks.

In the original "BoBW" scenes, there are no major or pieces of wreckage that would appear in the foreground and would not be identifiable as Starfleet ships, save for one piece that was custom-made to look like a nondescript section of hull or perhaps a hatch. If one of the tiny background pieces is a Klingon ship, it's pretty much impossible to tell from the DVD shots.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kadratis]

HANSON [on monitor]: Your engagements have given us valuable time. We've mobilised a fleet of forty starships at Wolf three five nine, and that's just for starters. The Klingons are sending warships. Hell, we've even thought about opening communications with the Romulans.

Source

I'd say this line alone in BoBW Pt. 2 reinforces the idea that the Klingons did participate in the battle.

 

[Christopher]

But "are sending warships" doesn't mean those warships arrived in time for the battle. After all, Wolf 359 is the third-closest star system to Earth. It's deep in the heart of UFP territory. Naturally a Starfleet armada would've gotten there well before a Klingon force could.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Didn't VOY's "Unity" show flashbacks of Wolf 359 in which Klingon ships were taking part in the battle?

I don't think it would take that much longer for Klingon vessels to get there. They are, after all, allies of the Federation. Some Klingon ships may have been operating in UFP space already. The Klingons probably sent all of their vessels that were available.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

Didn't VOY's "Unity" show flashbacks of Wolf 359 in which Klingon ships were taking part in the battle?

I don't think it would take that much longer for Klingon vessels to get there. They are, after all, allies of the Federation. Some Klingon ships may have been operating in UFP space already. The Klingons probably sent all of their vessels that were available.

As I understand it, basically all sorts of stock footage of space battles were thrown together there, not necessarily as an indication of the actual battle.