posted
"The Best of Both Worlds" -- the episode that never grows old!
I've looked briefly at the forum archives, finding a few old threads but nothing that discusses this directly.
Based on BoBW, I'm starting to believe that the battle took no longer than 15 minutes, total. I'm watching the reruns on TNN... err, that is, SpikeTV.
Anyway, Riker's in Engineering, talking with Shelby. Data comms him from the Bridge, reporting that they got a message that the fleet had engaged the Borg. The scene immediately cuts to the Bridge, with Riker exiting the turbolift in a hurry, and they get Admiral Hanson's message that the battle's gone bad.
That means that the battle could've taken no more than fifteen minutes total. Let's assume that the message wasn't sent out the second the battle started, but maybe five minutes after the beginning we saw in "Emissary." Then another five minutes for Riker to take the turbolift from Engineering (Deck 36) to the Bridge. And maybe another five minutes after the comm is cut off, as the Borg mop up the remnants.
I also dug up this photo from the Star Trek world tour (or whatever they're calling it these days) from early this year. Although the map is of course non-canon and less than reliable in terms of the ship names, upon close examination I think that the vectors themselves, along with the white spots indicating destruction points, are probably acceptable. I've superimposed my own speculation about the sequence and directions. The fleet was probably marshalled in a single formation at point (1), then the advance wing attacked along vector (2). The Borg blew through them so quickly, then, that the remaining ships had no chance to react aside from reversing course and actually trying to catch up to the cube for a last-ditch assault, which of course also failed.
Also, considering the time frame after the battle messages -- in which the E-D crew had time to hold another conference and have Riker promote Shelby to first officer -- I'd say that there were at least two to three hours between the end of the battle and the time the E-D arrived in the vicinity. That would be plenty of time for the few survivors of the battle to be picked up by the one surviving ship, which would then skedaddle in the opposite direction.
Dangit, now I'm gonna have to make up a little map of my own here...
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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posted
Woo! We haven't had some 359 discussion in a while. May as well!
A few years back I had some prelim work for my own theories of the battle, in which the attack was broken down into several "waves" as well. An attack force including the Melbourne, Saratoga, Yamaguchi, Gage, and Bonestell as a rescue ship would have been at least the second of these waves, after which the whole battle would have dissolved into one big turkey shoot while the Saratoga was being assimilated/probed.
It's important to note that this was very likely a runnign battle, and no dialogue stated that we joined "Emissary" at the beginning of the battle; it's easily acceptable that the Saratoga and the other ships could be at an engagement after the initial contact, since they would have moved beyond the wreckage from the first wave(s) of ships.
A time frame of fiteen minutes is not unreasonable, though I doubt it'd take five minutes for Riker to take the elevator up to the bridge. Probably less than a minute IMO, judging from various other episodes. After Hanson's ship was destroyed, there would be plenty of ship left to slaughter.
posted
Yeah, I know five minutes is a long turbolift ride for such a crisis situation. I wanted to stick to round numbers.
Concerning the start of the battle... don't forget that the episode opens with Locutus giving the usual "you will be assimilated" line. Based on the reactions of the crew, I really think that the Saratoga was part of the first wave.
(This part's not exactly canon, but the suggestion that it's the first wave is even stronger in the novelization of "Emissary," which I read about 8 or 9 years ago...)
I know it's almost certainly a running battle -- I agree there. However, considering the extremely short nature of the engagement, I would find it suicidal if the Saratoga and her sister ships were anything BUT the first wave! Based on what I recall of the dialogue, the ships seen, and the wreckage, there were probably between five and seven cruisers involved, plus the Bonestell. Out of a fleet of forty, that's a rather small percentage to commit for a last-ditch defense. But it WOULD make sense if they were the first group, sent in to "test the waters" (so to speak), see how the Borg react to multiple ships firing on them at once, before they advance the entire fleet.
Finally, the demeanor of the Saratoga crew before they actually open fire, really doesn't strike me as one where people had already witnessed several thousand comrades go up in a blaze of glory. The Vulcan captain (played by J.G. Hertzler!) would be understandable, of course, but not Sisko or any of the other Bridge officers!
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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posted
I disagree - given typical Starfleet bravado, I can interpret that look on Sisko's face as a "yeah, you messed us up but good - now we're gonna kick your asses back!" sorta look. Mind you, that's how he looks a lot of the time. And as for Locutus' line, the Borg open almost EVERY encounter with that line. Par for the course, I'd say.
And if you think about it, assuming the other ships we KNOW were in the battle, the ones we see in "Emissary" were decidedly less advanced. The newest ship was arguably the Nebula-class Bellerophon (sorry, not the Gage). I can see the ships in "Emissary" as part of the last wave, or as a bunch of thips consolidated from the earlier attacks, or something like that.
As an aside, I wonder if we can get in contact with the bloke that put said graphic together... If not to see it ourselvess, then to know what rationalizations he put into it, if any.
posted
From crew chatter on the Saratoga, it sounded like they hadn't engaged the Borg at that point. They were still experimenting with rotating shield frequencies/shapes.
It's interesting to note now that since the Yamaguchi and Bellerophon also fired deflector weapon blasts at the Borg ship, but since the Borg already felt the Enterprise's blast, the second and third shots didn't seem to do any damage.
The way the end of the 'Emmissary' intro ends, it seems like the entire Wolf 359 battle took place in the span of that intro. While Sisko was below decks, the battle was still raging on...we saw the Bonestell fly past the window...the Borg could've mopped up the fleet in that amount of time.
I always assumed Admiral Hansen was aboard the USS Melbourne given: 1) we see him arrive in an Excelsior Class ship, 2) when he says to Picard it's offered to Riker, he says it so nonchalantly that it sounds like we're to assume he means the ship out the Ready Room window over there, and 3) Shelby seems to pick out the Melbourne from the wreckage with extra emphasis on the word...I assumed not because fate might have delivered Riker there, but rather that the admiral had been aboard.
With those assumptions in mind, it sounds funny that Hansen says: "the fight does not go well" when the Saratoga had only taken a couple of shots and the Melbourne was the first of 39 ships torn into!
The Novelization for Emmisary , places the saratoga as the very first ship to arrive at W359 (they were in the area) and I guess the Borg arrived sooner than predicted by starfleet and the fleet was not assembled. If 359 was fought in waves (with each wave proving ineffective) starfleet probably jumped the Cube from First Contact with a huge number of ships and fought a running battle to earth.
I'd give the W359 battle something closer to 30 minutes in length. The cube was leisurely disecting the Saratoga while the Ambassador and Nebula engaged it (and I'd give each ship something close to a full minute of battle time before being destroyed). Consider how many ships bit it at W359 and then give each one at least 30 seconds (except the poor Bonestell, that is)and you'll get between 25-30 minutes. Enterprise was pretty far behind the Cube IIRC.
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posted
I must agree that the look on Sisko's face at the beginning was one of a person who's seen a lot of comrades die. Why should he feel "emotionally involved" if the battle had not yet started? AFAWK, he had no relatives on the colonies lost to the Borg so far. He was unfamiliar with the horrors of assimilation. His brother wasn't serving on the Lalo. He hadn't just been told that his request for leave next week had been turned down.
I must also agree that the battle didn't start or end with Hanson dying. His words suggest lots of prior fighting, and Locutus would be sure to take him out at a relatively early stage of the battle.
Would this be a running battle, though? The ships were all at impulse. The Cube had chosen to navigate into a star system, and seemed not to be interested in moving. Was this behavior something that Starfleet had expected, as it had assembled the fleet in this system? Or had Starfleet been expecting a running battle, with Wolf 359 merely a convenient base of operations?
I could see the battle (or its low-intensity tail end) dragging on for several hours, really. It would be very difficult for the E-D to catch up with the Cube on the final run otherwise. After the first fifteen minutes to half an hour had deprived the starships of mobility, the Drones would move in and begin assimilating the crews, while the Cube carved up some souvenirs. It would take some time to sweep up every lifepod and extinguish every lifesign, as had obviously happened by the time the E-D reached the scene. And the crews wouldn't give up without a fight, so the endgame would be a "battle" as much as the torpedo-lobbing had been.
I always assumed Admiral Hansen was aboard the USS Melbourne given: 1) we see him arrive in an Excelsior Class ship, 2) when he says to Picard it's offered to Riker, he says it so nonchalantly that it sounds like we're to assume he means the ship out the Ready Room window over there, and 3) Shelby seems to pick out the Melbourne from the wreckage with extra emphasis on the word...I assumed not because fate might have delivered Riker there, but rather that the admiral had been aboard.
With those assumptions in mind, it sounds funny that Hansen says: "the fight does not go well" when the Saratoga had only taken a couple of shots and the Melbourne was the first of 39 ships torn into! [/QB]
That was always my impression as well.
What if the first part of the battle involved getting the Cube to decellerate from Warp? The Borg changed tactics because of Locutus's influence and decided not to bother fighting but instead bypass the fleet and head straight for Earth.
The fleet engages the Borg Cube in a running battle near Wolf 359 to try and get it to slow down. This depletes the shields of the Starfleet ships but does little damage to the Cube. Hanson radios the Enterprise during this exchange and tell them things aren't going well.
Finally, after a long running battle, they damage the Borg Cube enough to get it to drop out of warp.
This is when Locutus makes his "Resistance is Futile..." speech. This is when Hanson in the already shield depleted Melbourne approaches the Cube first and get's promptly destroyed.
I mean, I know the Excelsior's and Miranda's shields are supposed to be weaker then the Galaxy Class, but they get destroyed or disabled in one shot while the Galaxy Class could resist Borg shield drainer tractor beams and cutting beams for up to a minute or more continiously?
I think the Melbourne and Saratoga (and the other ships) had already been engaging the Cube for a while before that and that's why their shields were depleted. Each group of ships would probably engage the Cube for a minute then back off and the next group would jump in until the Cube slowed down. The Starfleet ships would keep "leapfrogging" into the battle off and on.
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quote: I think the Melbourne and Saratoga (and the other ships) had already been engaging the Cube for a while before that and that's why their shields were depleted. Each group of ships would probably engage the Cube for a minute then back off and the next group would jump in until the Cube slowed down. The Starfleet ships would keep "leapfrogging" into the battle off and on.
Sounds like a good tactic for dealing with Borg weapons but you would have to balence it with the need to concentrate as many weapons as possible on the cube to try and destroy it as quickly as possible. After all, this is a Next Gen Borg cube, not a Voyager one . I can see Hanson perhaps launching a mass attack first and then, when that failed to do anything more than force the cube out of warp to switch to the wave tactics as his shields were depleted.
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posted
I think once they got the Cube out of warp that's what happened. They switched tactics to a mass attack.
But your right in "Emmisary" and "First Contact" the best strategy would have been for all the ships to fire simultaneously on a small area (like what later happened after Picard took control of the fleet in "First Contact").
I guess the Cube just broke the fleet up and forced them to stay in motion or get obliterated.
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posted
I find it hard to believe that the Borg DIDN'T want to engage the fleet at Wolf 359. Considering the scale of interstellar space and the speeds that the cube was capable of, it would've been a simple matter for them to avoid flying right up to meet the defenders. And seeing as how the fleet was made up of a bunch of older, slower ships too, the would never have been able to catch up if the Borg just warped past outside the system.
Therefore, the Borg WANTED to fight the fleet at Wolf 359. They allowed Starfleet to choose the time and place of the battle, because resistance was of course futile. The Borg got the chance to assimilate extra victims, not to mention wiping out the local defense fleet. I'd be willing to bet that the Borg would've been most vulnerable after they started the process of assimilating Earth, when their resources had to be focused on subduing the local population. If the Wolf 359 fleet had been bypassed and then caught up with them in Earth orbit, that might've actually posed a (slightly larger) threat to the Borg.
Anyway, I don't see anything wrong with assuming that the Borg took their time in assimilating victims after the battle was over -- after all, the Enterprise caught up to the cube shortly after passing through the debris field.
One pet peeve of mine... why does everyone INSIST that the Melbourne was that Excelsior-class ship in "Emissary"? Is it simply the listing from the Encyclopedia that that assertion is based on? I've never, ever been able to read the Excelsior's hull lettering that clearly at all. Or is there some other evidence that I've forgotten about?
I suppose I can accept Riker being offered command of the Melbourne if that ship were merely coincidentally commandeered by Admiral Hanson for his emergency jaunt out to Jouret IV, and was not his personal ship. (I wouldn't want to get command of a ship if I was going to get pushed aside every week when the Admiral came aboard!) But then, don't forget that the Melbourne was originally a Nebula-class, too... (One of those old SWDAO's...)
Also, don't forget the context of Shelby and Riker observing the wreckage -- Of course it might've been a bit more distant, but I certainly didn't see anything that resembled a standard Excelsior-class starship among the wreckage there. And with one or two exceptions, none of the ships from BOBW were seen in "Emissary," which strongly implies that we saw the portions of two separate groups of the fleet.
Therefore, since the class of the USS Gage was never established (aside from the uncertain Apollo-class in the Encyclopedia), perhaps the *Gage* was the Excelsior that bought it?
Finally, regarding the issue of the point in which the Saratoga's engagement occurred, I just remembered one MAJOR line from "Emissary"... Captain Storil says, "Load all torpedo bays, ready phasers." That's not something you say in the middle of a battle, it's what you say at the BEGINNING!
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Something else people seam to have forgotten; in his "the fight does not go well" transmission, Hansen is ordering a retreat just as the transmission is cut. So he couldn't have been aboard that Excelsior if it was destroyed right at the start of the battle. More likely Hansen's transmission occurred sometime after Sisko abandoned ship since I don't believe a couple minutes (or however long it took Sisko to get from the bridge to his quarters and then to the shuttlebay) is long enough for the other 30 or so ships to be destroyed and for the Borg to start abducing people.
posted
Well, we were definitely seeing the beginning of the Saratoga's engagement... but was that the beginning of the battle itself? Who knows. If the Saratoga was one of the first ships on the scene, then probably.
Hansen said that they were assembling a fleet at Wolf 359... so it suggests that all the ships that were going to be there were there when the battle started. But they were probably divvied up into groups.
I have always assumed that the ship Hanson arrived on was the Melbourne. From the very first time I saw the episode. The way Hanson tells Picard about Riker's command offer always seemed to indicate to me that he was talking about the ship he came on.
posted
I just took a look at the script for "Emissary"... unfortunately, they specifically refer to the first ship destroyed (in the sequence) as the Melbourne. So that basically settles the ship identity issue.
I'm still convinced that the "Emissary" sequence was the opening shots of the battle. Sisko's demeanor is certainly not that of one who's been sitting on the sidelines and watching as a dozen or more starships are destroyed.
I think that Starfleet might not have been sure exactly where the Cube would've entered the system, and so could've scattered a few ships around the likely approach vectors. The Saratoga would've been one of these ships, and as the Cube entered the system, the three other ships -- the Melbourne, the Kyushu, and the Gage (in dialogue) -- were sent in for support and to make a probing engagement, while the main fleet formed up for their attack.
Then, when the initial force was virtually wiped out, the Yamaguchi and the Bellerophon raced in to try to draw their fire and help the Saratoga escape, but that obviously didn't work. (They might've been other vanguard ships, too, but that's not necessarily true.)
So, in my opinion, we're left with one question: was it really the Melbourne that Hanson and Shelby rode in on in BOBW1? Personally, I'm not convinced that it was -- partly because of the "personal command ship" issue, but also because of the fact that if it really WAS the Melbourne in BOBW1, that would mean that Hanson had to have transferred his flag to another ship for the actual battle.
That last option might not be a bad idea necessarily, except for one problem -- in the static-y comm message, you can clearly see an old "Wrath of Khan"-style screen reading "Alert: Condition Red." If Hanson were going to transfer his flag to another ship, he would've moved to one of the newer, more powerful ships in the fleet. (Like the Galaxy-class ship that was suggested to have been at the battle.) Instead, it's got an older-style background that's more appropriate to an Excelsior or a Miranda.
Since we know that Hanson wasn't killed at the beginning of the battle, that tells me that the Melbourne was not the ship at Jouret IV in BOBW1.
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![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
And as for Locutus' line, the Borg open almost EVERY encounter with that line. Par for the course, I'd say.
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