quote:Originally posted by Hobbes: I imagine their command center would look something like the large NASA control room in Armaggedon. Or perhaps DS9's Ops.
The closest reference I can think of is how the Navy breaks up it's fleets. Third Fleet (headquartered at Pearl Harbor) being the eastern Pacific, Fifth Fleet (headquartered in Bahrain) is Persian Gulf area, etc...
In this case, the starbases would command all fleet operations in a large area of space, while an outpost would command a more localized area.
I figure there's a large (heavily shielded) command center like the White House Situation Room for military/tactical oversight and another for starbase ops.
Each starbase probably has extensive training facilities, crew quarters and recreation facilities for visiting starships assuming the starbase is not orbiting some Fed planet.
The starbase would also serve as a massive communications relay for the sector.
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posted
Yeah, but Hobbes, as we've seen, Starfleet doesn't neccessarily assign starships to a starbase. The Enterprise-D was always going to different starbases, so I think it might be safe to say that Starfleet has some sort of modular way of tracking its fleet - or, that a central command authority may include numerous starbases within its field of command.
posted
So.. what the hell do all these people do on a starbase as large as Spacedock or SB 74. Do they live there? Is it just a 'storage facility' for Starfleet crew/reserves? Or is the mushroom-type station actually mostly empty?
And if there are a lot of people on a station, I would like there to be some sort of civilian administration too.
posted
For SB74 specifically, I gather repairing is an important task. The station in "11001001" only held three starships, all of which were badly broken down (as it would have taken 18 hours to get even one of them moving). Clearly, there were no "visiting" starships that weren't utterly disabled, since the heroes contemplated diverting a slow vessel 66 hours distant for an intercept, before even *mentioning* the ships at the base.
It could even be that SB74 handles no other Fleet tasks besides computer refitting, and only does that because it's so conveniently situated near Beta Magellan/Bynaus. If the station had other Fleet obligations, surely there would be pursuit-capable ships in the vicinity! (No doubt the station had thousands of runabout-category craft, but those can't pursue a starship, Kirk's suicidal stubbornness in "The Menagerie" notwithstanding.)
I rather fancy the idea that the mushrooms (the "small" Earth one, and the at least three huge TNG ones) are principally civilian facilities, with the "starbase" just a bunch of rooms somewhere within. The relationship of the base to the station would be much like that of a TOS surface starbase to the respective planet.
So in "11001001", Quinteros (if he was the SF boss) would have been in charge of perhaps a few thousand people running the Starfleet piers and docks, while the station held closer to a million people dedicated to other things (commerce, industry, research, entertainment, or just plain living there). The civilian adminstrator would in fact be a much bigger boss than Quinteros, perhaps even have some direct authority over him.
...Which, in terms of this thread, probably means the civilian leadership has much plusher facilities than the Starfleet one.
posted
I really don't like the "SB 74 is bigger than Spacedock" theory. Spacedock is already huge to begin with. And the interior shots are clearly meant to convey a 'cramped' look, with the D taking up a lot more space than the Nil and A in the movies. And the preliminary sketches by Sternbach show that they actually pondered about a different way of docking the huge Galaxy class ship to SB 74. It makes more sense to claim the doors on SB 74 are just larger than on Spacedock.
posted
Explaining that error away would mean that SB 74 was larger than Spacedock. Can't say anything about the doors in relation to the station simply because it was the same FX shot of Spacedock, just reused to represent SB 74
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posted
While it's an obvious scaling error, I agree with Harry: it would be one standard size design for those facilities: not some idiotic "bloated" later versions with the exact same window counts (windows 20-30 meters tall by the TNG scaling error!), same proportional egress doors.... it's silly.
Better by far to squint and assume that Starbase 74's egress doors are far larger than those on the STI(I Spacedock (though those would have been widened to accomidate larger ships by TNG's era (assuming it was not somehow towed to another location in-system: as we never saw it again after STV).
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posted
Actually, we did, in the 2370s of "Non Sequitur" (but admittedly in an alternate universe).
As an alternate to headache-inducing squinting, we could probably say that the doors of SB 74 were bigger than the doorway - that is, opening them to their full width would involve moving some of the wall sections that looked immovable from a distance... We just missed that part of the opening sequence when the camera angle changed. Or something.
posted
Man... Quinteros looks hella like Picard with a goatee in a couple of those shots.
Well, the door sign says "Starfleet Operational Support Services" right? I would feel comfortable saying that the room we see them in is simply the room dedicated to the refit operations of the Enterprise. There are probably similar rooms for every major repair operation going on in the dock. Perhaps since this room already had a direct link to the Enterprise's systems, they had taken command of the situation. The station ops deck called down to Quinteros and said, "Get that bloody ship outta here."
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posted
Okay, so what have we decided here? That a larger Starbase ops centre would likely not have any stations dedicated to ship traffic, docking or repair operations? I guess a smaller one would have one, or at least a dediacted segment on an ops station to summarize what's going on down there.
Interesting DS9 observation: in "Way of the Warrior", it clearly took several people to man all the weapons systems. Yet in "Call to Arms", it seemed only Work handled everything. Hmm.
quote:Originally posted by Mark Nguyen: Interesting DS9 observation: in "Way of the Warrior", it clearly took several people to man all the weapons systems. Yet in "Call to Arms", it seemed only Work handled everything. Hmm.
Mark
Probably de-centralized weapons stations instead of having everything centered in Ops: that way if Ops was destroyed, the weapons crews on-site could continue fighting.
Worf was probably only in direct control of a few key systems or overriding manned weapons stations as needed.
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posted
Indeed, it may have been a modification made to the station after the Klingon attack; when the Klingons disabled the shields and started beaming in, everyone in Ops stopped what they were doing and started working on the intruders. We do see that DS9 doesn't seem to fire a shot after this.
posted
Huh? Worf was handling everything in "ACtA" not on "TWotW" Mark you're talking about a modification that could have have happened in which Worf would later do everything as opposed to before where he wasn't (where no one was firing after the Klingons beamed aboard)
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