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I need some information on Klingon-Fed combat during TOS and pre-TOS and Klingon ships in general. I know about Axanar (maybe) and Donatu V, but are there any canon (meaning on-screen, either live action of ANIMATED) references to combat during this time. Can anyone site any instance of combat between a D7 and a Constitution? Here's what I know.
1. According to Trimble's Concordance, in TAS "More Tribbles, More Trouble" Koloth's ship "Devisor" paralyzes Enterprise with some sort of disruption field, which this site (http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/3751/KlingonShip.html) describes as a poorly functioning projected stasis field with enormous power requirements. The Klingons are also said to have a new weapon, the photon torpedo. Can anyone confirm this or tell me more about how this device worked? Did the Klingons have photon torps in TOS?
2. In another thread Phelps mentioned an attack on Federation outpost on Caleb IV by Kor and Kang in the old, cloak-capable D-5 cruisers. Any guesses when this actually happened? Does the presence of cloaks suggest it happened after TOS?
3. According to Trimble, the D7 has a crew of 440, per Day of the Dove. Any other refernences to crew size?
4. What's the name of the Klingon fleet? Trimble say "Imperial Fleet" is used in "Friday's child" and "Time Trap," but TNG and DS9 seem to use "Klingon Defense Forces." Any comments?
5. What was the extent of combat between Kor's Klothos and Enterprise in "Time Trap"?
6. Trimble says a Klingon "battleship" is mentioned in Friday's child. It is supposedly the largest in the KIF, carries troops, and is "armed with a heavy deflector shield, which is almost a cloaking device." Comments?
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quote: Comments?
Trimble makes a lot of stuff up. None of this sounds very likely.
1) I seem to recall the Klingons pulling some 'stasis weapon' shit in 'MTMT', or one of the TAS episodes, anyway.. the explanation that it didnt work and was energy-expensive is a good explanation for why it should stay buried. Good riddance...
1a) We dont know specifically what a lot of Klingon weapons are, but I wouldnt trust TAS to dictate that Klingons might not have had photorps.. its one of those semantics issues like 'Romulans having simple impulse'.. its vague and confuses something that otherwise should be quite clear.. Klingons have always had launching weapons.. thats what the big hole is for in the front.. the nature of the warhead is what is at question, and we have no information as to what they fired in ENT or TOS.
I believe the only weapons seen firing in TOS were the disruptors on the ends of the warp nacelles, in 'Elaan of Troyius' We know that by TMP they were definitely firing torpedoes, but i doubt they were ever specified to be photon torpedoes.. They fired torpedoes from their rear tube in ENT too..
2) No information to be found here.. I sincerely doubt the TAS Klothos was called a D-5, but thats just my opinion.. I do assume however that Klingons didnt have cloaks until after 'Enterprise Incident' where the Romulans had D7s. Kor seemed to be the Klingon fleet's equivalent of Kirk, so its likely he could command two ships of the same name 'Klothos', and possibly the second one was of a different design.
3) The D7 has less internal volume than the Constitution-class, so i doubt it had more crew (remember, Constitutions were the most packed of Federation ships at 430.. Voyager has a similar internal volume but 1/3 that crew).. however, more non-canon sources have stated that Klingon ships sometimes carried troops in cryo-stasis. A few bays of a hundred or so frozen troops would justify that estimate, but it seems really far-fetched
4)The United States has an Armed Forces consisting of a Navy, an Army Corps, a Marine Corps, an Air Force and a Coast Guard. It seems like the Klingon Empire could have a Klingon Defense Force with an Imperial Fleet, maybe a Colonial Infantry, and whatever contradictory term they want to throw at us tomorrow.. its not really a conflict at all. (the example of frozen soldiers i remember from a patch i saw at a convention.. instead of the motto 'to protect and serve' it said 'Klingon Imperial Cryo-Marines -- To Reheat and Serve'.. i laughed until i stopped!)
5) Not sure on that one.. they had to make friends and physically dock the two ships together to escape as i recall..
6) Deflectors as cloaks.. hmmm.. kind of like using a toaster as a telephone? Maybe spock means some kind of signal deflecting countermeasures, but seeing as the ship wasnt invisible, i think this could mean that TOS era Klingons definitely didnt have cloaks readily available to all ships, since they were half-assing it using a deflector to cover their emissions
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quote:Originally posted by Masao: I know about Axanar (maybe) and Donatu V,
Just be sure that you get the date for Donatu V right, if you use it. The battle was twenty-three years before "The Trouble With Tribbles" (TOS), set in 2267. That puts the battle in 2244, not 2242 as Okuda erroneously places it in his Chronology... despite mentioning the twenty-three year gap in the notes!
quote:Originally posted by Masao: 1. According to Trimble's Concordance, in TAS "More Tribbles, More Trouble" Koloth's ship "Devisor" paralyzes Enterprise with some sort of disruption field, which this site (http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/3751/KlingonShip.html) describes as a poorly functioning projected stasis field with enormous power requirements. The Klingons are also said to have a new weapon, the photon torpedo. Can anyone confirm this or tell me more about how this device worked? Did the Klingons have photon torps in TOS?
Photon torpedoes were never seen in use by Klingons during the original series, but the Klingons do have them in 2151 (and an upcoming episode of Enterprise will discuss that fact in more detail), so it's just coincidence that they never used them on screen. The only weaponry I remember seeing a D-7 fire are green bolts that emerged from the front of the nacelles. (If, of course, this is in the Starfleet Museum universe, the Klingons may or may not have photon torpedoes at that time ).
As to the stasis field, your information is accurate. I'm not sure if it was called a "stasis field" in the episode, but I think it really just worked like the Breen energy disruptor. The Enterprise was frozen mechanically, but it wasn't true time-stopping stasis because the crew was unchanged.
quote:Originally posted by Masao: 2. In another thread Phelps mentioned an attack on Federation outpost on Caleb IV by Kor and Kang in the old, cloak-capable D-5 cruisers. Any guesses when this actually happened? Does the presence of cloaks suggest it happened after TOS?
Any guess as to the time would be purely a guess... but I would certainly put it after the Romulan alliance due to the cloak. On the other hand, Kor was going senile at the time. For all we know, the ship wasn't a D-5 and didn't have a cloak after all.
quote:Originally posted by Masao: 3. According to Trimble, the D7 has a crew of 440, per Day of the Dove. Any other refernences to crew size?
Not that I know of, but the "Day of the Dove" reference is accurate, despite the above complaints.
I can't really help you with the other questions, sorry.
[ December 05, 2001: Message edited by: Ryan McReynolds ]
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Oh, i thought the 440 number was one of Trimbles suppositions.. did the episode explicitly state that number? (Oh wait.. did we even see that Kangs ship was a D-7? it could have been a D-4 or a D-8�.. oh well)
[ December 05, 2001: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]
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Quote: "...but the Klingons do have them in 2151 (and an upcoming episode of Enterprise will discuss that fact in more detail), so it's just coincidence that they never used them on screen."
"Enterprise" ain't canon. The Ghost of Roddenberry told me so. Anyways, my Starfleet Museum article (which is now a boring 10,000 words long) is going to describe classes D2 through D7, and only the last one looks like a K'tinga.
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Kor said that the cloak was new at the time, then went on to tell about how he operated the device for three days, being one of the few engineers who knew how. To me, that sounds like TOS era. On the other hand, the Sherlock Holmes wanna-be's in Star Trek VI were quite certain that the cloaked ship could be nothing but a BoP. How would they conclude that a battlecruiser is, say, too big to fit underneath the Enterprise if they didn't even have video footage of the torpedo exiting the launcher, footage that could've proved there and then that the Enterprise never fired? Nobody questioned the BoP conclusion for a second.
Then again, strictly canonically the "D-5 cruiser" Klothos could easily be an early BoP. Martok used Kor and Kang's Caleb IV tactic of strafing runs with his five BoPs -- how do you do a strafing run with a battlecruiser? Alternatively, the D-5's could've been decomissioned by the 2290s, and the BoPs remained the only Klingon ships with cloaks.
BTW, nobody questioned Kor's story in that scene, although they'd *always* do when he lapsed, so I doubt anyone held back out of respect. On the other hand, many said they didn't know he was at Caleb IV, so how could they check?
MARTOK (nods) I'm going to send the Malpara and Ning'tao in ahead of the rest of the squadron.
21 CONTINUED: (2)
MARTOK (Cont'd) They'll make a single strafing run on the base and then head out of the system. When the enemy sends out repair crews to assess the damage, then the rest of the squadron will decloak.
Eager grins go around the table.
MARTOK (continuing) With any luck, we'll catch them with their entire damage control effort underway.
KOR Excellent! An excellent plan, general.
MARTOK I'm glad you approve.
KOR Of course. It's the same tactic Kang and I used against the Federation during the battle of Caleb Four.
KOLANA You were at Caleb Four?
DAROK Of course he was! (to Kor) Forgive the ignorance of these children.
KOR I was a young officer once; I know how irrelevant the past can seem.
KOLANA We would be honored if you would tell us about Caleb Four.
21 CONTINUED: (3)
DAROK SYNON Tell the tale. Yes, tell us!
Kor hesitates for only a moment.
KOR There's not much to tell really... the battle was over almost before the Federation knew it had begun.
(beat) I commanded the first division from the Klothos -- one of the old D-Five cruisers -- while Kang commanded the second division.
As Kor launches into his story, Martok pushes back from the table and silently fumes. Worf knows that there's trouble brewing on the horizon...
KOR (continuing) Now, you must remember that in those days, the cloaking device was a new piece of technology... there were only a handful of engineers in the Imperial Fleet who knew how to operate them. So before we left Chronos, I spent three days in the engine room...
And that's all about the subject -- Kor's story is interrupted here.
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Wow! Thanks a lot, Phelps!!! Very interesting.
My initial interpretation of that bit of dialogue would be that Caleb IV happened sometime before TOS, in particular the mention that they were "young officers" and the designation of D-5. Also the fact that the peace imposed by the Organia would have ruled out that kind of stuff. Of course, we have to reconcile this with the possibilty that Klothos is same ship in the post-TOS TAS and the idea that the Klingons got the cloaking device from the Romulans sometime during TOS. Could be a different Klothos and maybe this is a cloaking device independently developed by the Klingons. Is the idea that the Klingons got cloaks from the Romulans mentioned on-screen or is it something we've all just assumed?
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We've only assumed that Klingons got the cloak from the Romulans.
Note: Kor says that like everybody else, he was a young officer *once*, not *at the time*. He already had his own command, of the Klothos, regardless of the practical need to spend a few days working the cloak.
As for the date -- in "Day of the Dove" Kang was outraged at the supposed violation of the treaty by the attack on the Klingon planet (actually done by the alien), suggesting that something on the scale of Caleb IV happened before "Errand of Mercy". However, it also should've happened after "Balance of Terror", or the crew wouldn't have acted so surprised by the new Romulan "invisibility shield" (they'd rather say "Ok, so the Romulans can cloak, just like the Klingons at Caleb IV").
I think the perfect date for the battle is 2266, right before the Organian Treaty. Being such a disaster for the Federation, and such a victory for the Klingons, it might explain why they were about to go to war.
quote:. Anyways, my Starfleet Museum article (which is now a boring 10,000 words long) is going to describe classes D2 through D7, and only the last one looks like a K'tinga.
Drool...
As for the Kor/D-5/cloaking device debacle...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Kor was telling a tall tale there. Maybe the tactics that Kor used at Caleb IV were similar, but didn't use a cloaking device.
I'm going to quote a Museum article to support my point: "...the Federation historian must naturally approach the Klingon records with a healthy dose of skepticism, since combat reports are often intended to glorify a ship's commander rather than to give an accurate account of a specific event." ([url= http://www.starfleet-museum.org/postwar-romulans.htm]Source[/url])
I think the same is true for old geezers telling war stories. Probably Kor did indeed exhaustively study the cloaking device during one campaign, but it probably wasn't during the Caleb IV campaign.
In fact, I'd bet that Federation-Klingon hostile activities were almost totally curtailed at any point after the Organian Peace Treaty. There might have been a few skirmishes, but no major actions at all after 2267.
Regarding the crew size of the D-7, remember that a Klingon's idea of a good bunk is a simple hard shelf. So they probably bunk together in a rather small space. Plus, there's no need for extensive science or medical facilities, and so that accounts for the much smaller volume of the Klingon ship compared to the Constitution-class.
About the Klothos and it being a D-5 cruiser... well, if the Federation can re-use ship names, so can the Klingons. The Klothos seen in TAS was simply a different ship.
quote:"Enterprise" ain't canon. The Ghost of Roddenberry told me so.
Amen to that. I prefer to believe that the entire series is taking place in an alternate timeline, given how Braga is f*cking with temporal mechanics...
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The fact that this cloak was so hard to operate suggests to me that it wasn't the plug and play Romulan cloaking device we saw in the Enterprise Incident. That device just needed to be plugged in and turned on. On maybe Klingon engineer are a lot less intelligent than Starfleet engineer. I'm thinking that this might be a Klingon version of a cloaking device, which took a lot of very precise balancing of output from various devices but still didn't work very well. So, maybe Starfleet didn't even recognize it as a true cloak. I'm assuming that the Klingons had encounter the Romulan cloaking systems sometime before "Balance of Terror." For all we know the Klingons and Romulans had been fighting for decades and the Romulans were getting the upper hand because of their effective cloaking device. To Klingons attempted to cobble together a rather unstable cloaking system themselves. Since it didn't work that well, they were willing to trade a complete ship and reactor system (D7) for the Romulan cloak.
(All these contortions are killing my back)
I'd like to believe that ship designations, like Starfleet registries, are at least semi-chronological, so I'm thinking these events predate the appearance of the D7 by a considerable time. So, unless we assume this is the Romulan cloaking device, this Caleb IV could have happened almost anytime before Errand of Mercy
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