How much did Voyager know of the Dominion as of "Caretaker"?

[t_smitts]

It seems quite probable Janeway knew of the events of "The Jem'Hadar", since one would expect word of a Galaxy class ship being destroyed by some new power in the Gamma Quadrant to travel quickly through Starfleet.

The stardate of "Caretaker" takes place after "The Search", so the Defiant was apparently already assigned to DS9 at the time Voyager docked, so one would expect them to know why this bad-ass warship had been assigned there. (Whether the Founders were common knowledge at this point is debatable).

(It should also be noted, however, that stardates across series don't always mesh. For example, "By Inferno's Light" has a lower stardate than "First Contact", even though the preceding "In Purgatory's Shadow" clearly referenced the "recent Borg attack" from that movie).

Apparently as late as the fourth season, neither Chakotay, nor the Doctor were familiar with the Dominion, though given their backgrounds, they may not have had reason to be informed.

I remember reading somewhere (possibly one of the official magazines) that the threat of the Dominion is one reason why Voyager didn't plot a course for the Gamma side of the Bajoran wormhole instead of the slightly-further Alpha Quadrant, though realistically, given the number of hostile aliens they had to fight off or outrun, they probably would've been no worse off.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The Dominon was no larger a threat than the other 12 neighbouring empires that destroyed a Starship that same week.

If the crew of Deep Space Nine didn't care, did it really seem like they were worried about a dominion invasion during episodes like Equilibrium, Meridian, or fascination, so I don't see why this lot straight from Humania would?

 

[indolover]

Janeway had to know. Which Starfleet Captain wouldn't have known? Most likely all Captains and above were briefed when the Odyssey was destroyed.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Briefing?

Hell no.

Every Captain, all the tens of thousands of them, was sent a memo they probably didn't read.

Tens of thousands of Federation Star Ship Captains receiving and sending hundreds of memos every day.

It's question of scale.

In the Best of Both Worlds, the loss of 37 ships was catastrophic.

The Bulk of the fleet.

The centre cannot hold.

Then along comes DS9 and their Dominion War.

Dozens of standing committed Fleets accounting for hundreds, maybe thousands of capital ships each.

One ship lost compared to that mess of activity?

Storm in a teacup.

Janeway didn't even Know that Data and Geordi had been tot he Delta Quadrant before her.

She didn't even know that Equinox had been captured by Caretaker 6 months before she had been captured by Caretaker, hell, she barely knew Ransom.

 

[LtChange]

in the episode Parturition in the Holodeck simulation at the beginning of episode you can see Jem'Hadar ships

 

[C.E. Evans]

The Voyager vanished several months after the first official contact with the Dominion, enough for Janeway and her crew to know that they were a potential threat to the Federation, particularly after their destruction of the Starship Odyssey. By the time the Voyager left DS9, information regarding the Jem'Hadar, the Founders, and the Vorta was also known to Starfleet.

 

[Christopher]

The stardate of "Caretaker" takes place after "The Search", so the Defiant was apparently already assigned to DS9 at the time Voyager docked, so one would expect them to know why this bad-ass warship had been assigned there. (Whether the Founders were common knowledge at this point is debatable).

The stardate of "Caretaker" is about 100 units above that of "The Search," suggesting it takes place about 1.2 months later. Although you're right, stardates are unreliable as date markers.

I remember reading somewhere (possibly one of the official magazines) that the threat of the Dominion is one reason why Voyager didn't plot a course for the Gamma side of the Bajoran wormhole instead of the slightly-further Alpha Quadrant, though realistically, given the number of hostile aliens they had to fight off or outrun, they probably would've been no worse off.

I'm not sure the slightly smaller distance would be worth it. Let's see, according to this graphic seen in Astrometrics in the 7th season, the Idran terminus of the Bajoran wormhole is almost as far from Voyager's arrival point as the Federation is. Per that map, the Idran system is about 59,000 light-years from Ocampa, or 85% the distance to the Federation. Going by the similar but noncanonical map in Star Charts, it's more like 63,000 ly, 90% of the distance. (That's assuming a distance of 70,000 ly. The maps make it look more like 74,000, in which case the percentage would be 79-85%.)

Well, I guess that would constitute saving maybe 8-10 years, so that might've been worth considering. But there could be other advantages to heading toward known space. For one thing, more of it would be known; even territory the UFP hadn't visited could be territory that it had scanned remotely, or might be known to neighboring powers the UFP had made contact with. So toward the tail end of their journey, maybe they could've expected to find themselves in friendly territory or at least found a way to contact home. There's also the psychological benefit of feeling you're heading homeward rather than going sideways toward yet another unknown quadrant.

 

[zarkon]

The biggest problem for heading to the gamma quadrant is that you're relying on a phenomena you don't fully understand still being there.

 

[Christopher]

Of course, the whole "set a course for home" thing was basically self-deluding. The 75-year estimate to get home was a best-speed sort of thing, and given how many times they stopped somewhere or got sidetracked, it realistically would've taken centuries if they hadn't found all those shortcuts. What they should've done was found some advanced, benevolent civilization they could ally with and settle in, then use their technological resources to develop a means of establishing regular communication with the Federation.

Also, I have a hard time forgiving Janeway for never bothering to look for any of the other refugees abducted by the Caretaker. They should've tracked them all down and banded together, traveling in a caravan for mutual support and protection. Maybe they could've found the Equinox earlier and spared them from five years of hell.

 

[t_smitts]

Of course, the whole "set a course for home" thing was basically self-deluding. The 75-year estimate to get home was a best-speed sort of thing, and given how many times they stopped somewhere or got sidetracked, it realistically would've taken centuries if they hadn't found all those shortcuts. What they should've done was found some advanced, benevolent civilization they could ally with and settle in, then use their technological resources to develop a means of establishing regular communication with the Federation.

Also, I have a hard time forgiving Janeway for never bothering to look for any of the other refugees abducted by the Caretaker. They should've tracked them all down and banded together, traveling in a caravan for mutual support and protection. Maybe they could've found the Equinox earlier and spared them from five years of hell.

They weren't totally clear on what happened to those other individuals. "The Voyager Conspiracy" suggested the Caretaker may have sent those ships back where they came from (though we know that wasn't the case with the Dreadnaught missle or the Equinox. Maybe both made a run for it, before he could sent them back).

Me, I still would've taken my chances with the Barzan wormhole, even if both sides were unstable.

Or better yet, I would've given Neelix and Kes whatever they needed so that they could destroy the Caretaker's array after I used it to get home.

 

[Christopher]

Or better yet, I would've given Neelix and Kes whatever they needed so that they could destroy the Caretaker's array after I used it to get home.

Wouldn't have worked. The Caretaker died before he could send them home, and the Kazon were attacking the Array. Voyager didn't have enough firepower to prevent the Kazon from capturing the Array, and if that had happened, it's likely they would've shielded it against attack. So the crew wouldn't have had the opportunity to either use it to go home or destroy it once that happened. They had to destroy it in that brief window before the Kazon captured it.

 

[t_smitts]

Well, you may be right.

Back to the original subject...

Regarding Voyager post-"Message in a Bottle", it's interesting that, while we do get a reaction from Chakotay and B'Elanna about the Maquis being wiped out, we get no reaction from the Starfleet people about the news that the Federation is now at war, one in which a good many people and ships have been lost and was going rather badly for Starfleet for a while.

Considering how hard it was to transfer letters, I doubt they got much detail in the way of casualty lists, but it would've been interesting to have Harry or Paris or somebody learn that their cousin serving as assistant chief engineer on the Yorktown had been killed in a skirmish with the Dominoin at Gamma Canis VII.

 

[Christopher]

^Sure, it would've been a nice bit of continuity, but from a practical standpoint, the two shows had to stand on their own, since there was no guarantee that viewers of one show would be familiar with the other -- also since one was on UPN and the other was syndicated. "The Maquis were wiped out last year" isn't as distracting a bit of out-of-series continuity as "The Federation we're trying to reach is at war and may not exist when we get back."

 

[Jim Gamma]

^Except that they could have swung it round and said "This means we need to get home even more, to help with the war effort". At least, until the war actually ended.

 

[Guy Gardener]

If Janeway in the beginning believed that the Federation was going to fall to the Dominion and that by the time they reached formerly Federation Space, that Earth and all the worlds they knew as home soil would then now be loyal, acclimatized and happy with their new aliens overlords, then logically a 30 year trip to Dominion Space from Caretakers array, where most probably the Federation Government Apparatus would have been moved to to reflect the change in administration by the time they got there, would be a wiser use of their finite resources, so that she too could report for duty as an Officer in the Irregular Dominion Foreign Legion like any admiral that still represented the phantom of the command structure that used to be Starfleet would order her to make it so.

Kathryn Janeway plotted a course home through Borg, Klingon and Romulan Space.

##### did not know what she was doing.

 

[Christopher]

^Except that they could have swung it round and said "This means we need to get home even more, to help with the war effort". At least, until the war actually ended.

But then their show would've been driven by events on a different show that wasn't on the same network, and that's not a desirable thing. Berman and the various Trek showrunners preferred to keep their projects mostly independent of each other, which was why the Dominion War was barely acknowledged in the TNG movies. It even went so far as DS9 never using a Sovereign-class ship and rarely using an Intrepid (with the exception of "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," where it was cheaper to shoot on the Voyager sets than to build sets for a whole new starship). True, the Maquis storylines in TNG and DS9 were meant to set up VGR (and Gul Evek appeared in all the Maquis episodes up through "Caretaker"), but after that, they all went pretty much their own ways with only infrequent crossover elements.

 

[exodus]

Also, I have a hard time forgiving Janeway for never bothering to look for any of the other refugees abducted by the Caretaker. They should've tracked them all down and banded together, traveling in a caravan for mutual support and protection. Maybe they could've found the Equinox earlier and spared them from five years of hell.

Based on what?
The info they received about the Caretaker taking others, came from the Ocampa. People who lived underground and didn't understand who, what or where the others went after the Caretaker was done with them. Janeway didn't know that there could be others until nearly 4 or 5 years later, in "Voyager Conspiracy" As vast as space is, it would be a waste of time and resources looking for people you aren't sure are out there. It was a billion to one chance they found the Equinox.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Neelix said there was an epidemic of alien ships dragged here into the Delta Quadrant, and all the Ocampa said was that every time after some alien species started dying of Caretaker rape, that their city was used as a hospice.

B'Elanna had been raped and murdered.

Explain to me why she wasn't going on a killing spree till she had de-throated every last one of Caretakers pets?

It's the rules of the sociopath.

Klingons ain't socipaths by nature?

If someone is too tough to take out, you kill their family and then run away.

Which is the plot to almost every Charles Bronson movie.

 

[Lance]

I agree with the thoughts expressed earlier, that Janeway (and the other Starfleet guys) probably knew. I suspect the reason Chakotay exhibits no knowledge of the Dominion has got more to do with him resigning his commission before Starfleet had first contact with the Jem'Hadar, so maybe he never even heard about the destruction of the Odyssey. As a "private citizen" he likely lost most (if not all) of his Starfleet links, and he was effectively fighting his own skirmishes as a Maquis, so might have been "out of the loop" so to speak. Still no reason why Janeway couldn't have filled him in when she made him her XO, but hey-ho.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Well it all depends on when Eddington took over the Maquis, if he was their absolute leader from the beginning and did only move his base of operations from Earth to Bajor as of DS9 season 3, rather than he just stumbled into the job after Cal Hudson bought the farm.

Not only would Eddington, as head of DS9 Security, have known about the Dominion, but if he was half the Statesman he thought of himself as, Mike would have opened feelers to the Dominion for an alliance on some level to contend with the Cardassians. If Eddington went himself to the homeworld of the Founders, it all would have been hush hush, but if he farmed out the responsibility to some thug lieutenant, word amongst the Maquis would have spread about a potential new white knight ally that was going to save everyone. In fact, it was probably this brief alliance and it's catastrophic failure behind the scenes in season 3 ds9 which is why the Dominion reacted so damn strongly when it became their job to answer the Maquis question.

My point is.

My obvious point is... Chakotay could have told Kathryn allllllllllllllllllllllllllll about the Dominion.