posted
I was re-watching "Call to Arms" today, and it jsut occurred to me - where'd the runabouts go when Starfleet abandonned the station? They obviously didn't leave with the Defiant and Rotarran, and leaving them on the station doesn't make any sense - leaving them intact to be captured doesn't make sense.
I suppose they could have been used to evacuate the station of non-Bajoran non-combatants prior to the battle, and waited out the intervening months at Starbase 375 (or be used on small-scale missions during the war). Another possibility would be that they were "donated" to Bajor when they took over the station and been somewhere on the planet. Still, no mention is made of what happened to them. Thoughts?
Mark
PS - I also just realized why they never used the station's weapons array as shown in this episode and "Way of the Warrior": they destroyed it! It ain't coming back after that!
posted
Wasn't this already brought up a while back. Anyway, you're right about the runabouts possibly being on Bajor for the time being. Presumably they were used to help evacuate the Bajorans and simply remained on the planet under Bajoran care. The Dominion can't touch them because it would probably strain the relationship between the Bajorans and the Dominion.
And i assume you're saying that Starfleet destroyed the weapons array to prevent the Dominion from laying hands on it. It could have been rebuilt when Starfleet returned. Still we won't ever see it again simply because they no longer make DS9.
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posted
Yah... this was brought up before. It may have even been me that brought it up....
I don't know, I remember thinking the same thing though. I think the general concensus was that they were stored on Bajor. Another possibility is that the crew totally wiped their computers rendering them large hunks of metal. Sure, the dominion could've pulled out some tech for study, but it's doubtful that a runabout's defensive systems would be a huge security problem.
Still... it just doesn't seem right that they would leave the vessels on the station. So my vote is for the big U-Store-It in the Kendra Province on Bajor.
posted
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but surely we saw lots of Starfleet personnel who weren't leaving on the Defiant board other ships through airlocks (Robert Wolfe, for one). Why weren't some of these runabouts? The things are warp capable after all. It seems most likely to me that they were among the ships evacuating offscreen before the hammer dropped, as it were.
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posted
Problem with the runabouts leaving with the Defiant and the Rotaran is that they're much slower, making themselves a liability.
As for the weapons array, I always figure that the special "Sisko" program fried every major computing-related system onboard the station. The hardware of the phasers and torpedoe launchers are there, but all their control systems are fried. Manufacturing Dominion or Cardassian replacement parts, spares, and consumables (torpedoe casings, phaser capacitors) would have been prohibitively expensive and time consuming (might not even be possible, especially with torpedoes), but so would replacing all those weapons completely. So they sat on the decision until Starfleet made it for them.
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posted
Don't forget the fact that the runabouts can't cloak.
Also, I clearly remember Dukat ordering the station to open fire on the Defiant as it approached the wormhole in "Sacrifice of Angels." Only its weapons had been disabled by Rom's sabotage.
Presumably the Cardassians replaced the weaponry -- first, DS9/Terok Nor was a Cardassian-designed station in the first place, and second, the Dominion was there to assist. Not to mention that they had a greatly improved industrial base, and especially that the station had become a crucial military outpost, instead of a backwater mining facility.
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posted
Another reason for never using the "WotW" extra weapons after "Call to Arms" would be that the station never came under attack that would have required the use of such weapons...
I doubt the limited speed of the runabouts would have mattered much in the evacuation. As long as they could do warp 5 or so, the Dominion forces would have had no interest in pursuing them. They had a station to occupy and a wormhole to secure.
Taking potshots at the runabouts just out of spite would have been very much unlike the disciplined Jem'Hadar, especially if it required a warp-speed pursuit (even if at low warp). And Dukat no doubt wanted to dedicate his Cardassian forces to securing the station, since it would have been very bad symbolically to let the Jem'Hadar do the liberating.
Later on, the runabouts would naturally have headed for a safe harbor, since their value to the big battlefleet would have been nil. And the way they filmed the end of "Call to Arms", it appeared as if the fleet were immediately heading for a combat engagement of some sort, with the two DS9 vessels joining in. So the runabouts would have gone their separate ways.
posted
Yes.. the weapons (if they had been disabled by the Sisko program) had been replaced. The problem they were having was not using the weapons, it was how to destroy the mine field. Destroying even several at a time would've done no good since the mines could replicate.
posted
^Some of the weapon systems have no doubt been restored, but all of it? I don't think so. We only saw one beam head out to destroy the mine field, and that could easily have come from one of the original weapons sails. They're the easiest part of the weapon systems to replace, since they can swap out the Federation gear for their own easily (O'Brian had always been trying to modify Starfleet equipement to work with the Cardassian station, not the other way around). As for everything else, probably not. It took a over a year to get DS9's enhanced weapons running, and the Dominion had less than 6 months.
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posted
I'm of the opinion that program "Sisko-197" destroyed nearly EVERYTHING of value; this speculation is all but confirmed in the dialogue:
WEYOUN: I assume Captain Sisko removed or destroyed everything of value? DUKAT: It can be repaired.
To leave even the superstructure that supports all those weapons intact would not make any real military sense. The shield technology in particular must have been destroyed, so as to keep the Dominion scratching their heads a bit longer. All the other weaponry would probably be of little value to them, but leaving intact and operable (or repairable) weapons in a strategically important place, for your enemy to waltz in and just use, doesn't seem too smart IMO.
What probably happened was that the station was repaired mostly by Cardassians and Bajorans to a point where it was better-armed than the original spec, but probably not super-duper armed as one may expect. In "Sacrifice of Angels" Dukat notes that the Defiant is no match for the station; obviously it had been re-armed with Cardassian weapons and probably a few Dominion ones in the interm. Given the Dominion's low regard for keeping much of their technology a secret (they LET Sisko essentially walk away with that attack ship in "The Ship") I'm willing to be that they left all that stuff in place when they abandonned the station in turn.
Afterwards, I'm further going to surmise that regardless of the state of weaponry on the station, there was probably little effort to improve it back to super duper levels. Following "Sacrifice", DS9 became one of the centres of the war; headquarters for the ninth fleet, and so forth. We almost never saw an exterior shot of DS9 without some starships closeby. What with all the ships around, there was less need for DS9 to be rebuilt to a mega battlestation anymore - and so it's probably less urgent a priority as it became for the Federation to get every ship flying and to keep it that way.
So in summation, I think that the super duper weapons array we saw on DS9 was destroyed in "Call to Arms", replaced by a lesser, possibly very inferior Cardassian/Dominion edition by "Sacrifice of Angels", and basically never used thereafter because DS9 became an almost unreachable target with all the starships she had around her.
Mark
[ June 20, 2002, 16:55: Message edited by: Mark Nguyen ]
posted
I'm with those who think that the runabouts helped evacuate station personnel. There's no way that all of the Starfleet officers on DS9 could fit on just a BOP and Defiant, and those cozy little runabouts have been seen countless times traveling through hostile territory and holding their own, like the episode with Odo and the defective Weyoun. The runabouts could have easily escaped well-before the Dominion made their advance on the station itself.
As for the weapons being disabled, it would appear that the station did have more then just the weapons disabled. All those electrical effects and so forth in Ops when the program was activated seems to imply that the computer system was being fried. An overload in the phaser emitters, as well as many other systems, would more then likely fuse several key components or simply burn out. Kinda like a car with flood damage... sure, the shell looks fine, but it's worthless because nothing inside works and its cheaper to replace. Hmm... subsitute "flood" with "EMP pulse" for better effect... yeah.
posted
Y'know... maybe the Runabouts simply vacated the area before the Dominion fleet arrived. The only problem with that is that Starfleet didn't begin to evacuate the station (AT ALL) until after the minefield had been activated.
Let's consider how much room there is on the Defiant... I generally consider that 50 crewmen is a bit on the light side, but she's still a small ship. Could the Defiant have evacuated 300 Starfleet officers from the station? Maybe.
Regarding DS9's weapons capabilities, I'd also like to point out that DS9's original super-duper weapons array was installed when the actual threat was much lower than after "Sacrifice of Angels." Yeah, the Dominion was threatening to enter the Alpha Quadrant, but full-scale war was still considered to be a long way off.
The Cardassians and Dominion, on the other hand, would have poured as many resources as they could into getting the station repaired quickly after "Call to Arms." As would Starfleet after "Sacrifice of Angels." DS9 was no longer the backwater outpost that it was in the first three seasons.
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posted
Ok... I have a question here. Where the super duper weapons that we saw in Way of the Warrior (the spinning torpedo / phaser turrets and the rising phaser platforms) totally design, constructed and installed by Starfleet personnel? Or were they merely modified and updated from existing Cardassian equipment?
I've always been under the impression that O'Brien supervised the first option. I think those weapons were completely new systems. Unless I missed something in dialouge, it would seem unlikely that the Cardies would equip an unchallenged mining station in neutral territory with all that fire power.
posted
If they are from the Soyuz hulls... I've assumed that to mean that they used the parts from those old ships and rearranged them into the new design... so the turrets and such as we see them are unique to DS9.
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