Lost Fed' ships.

[TheSeeker]

Braaaiiins.... Braaaiiiinnnnnsssss...

Indeed.

First off, I'd like to welcome you to The Trek BBS @Robert Paterson. It's always great to have enthusiastic new posters.

Having said that, you may have been a tad overenthusiastic in resurrecting this thread which was last active almost a full decade ago! One of our rules here at Trek BBS is not to post in long-dead threads. If it hasn't had a post in it in over a year, please let in rest in peace.

Now, as a newcomer you can't be expected to know all the rules, and given the fact that some of the same posters who were active in this thread a decade ago have come back to participate I will leave the thread open. However, in future please start a new thread and, if necessary, link back to the old thread if there is a particular point you'd like to address.

And finally, you can find a brief guide to posting on the Trek BBS here.

Happy posting!

 

[Farscape One]

There is also the possibility that the Starfleet 'Fleets' (7th Fleet, 2nd, etc.) were also composed of ships that were not actually Starfleet vessels. They might have been augmented by ships from the founding worlds like Andor or Vulcan... the Federation has over 150 member worlds. Certainly said worlds would assign some of their ships to help fight with Starfleet ships.

Sort of like how some members of the U.N. like Britain and Australia would assist the U.S. during our forays in the middle east.

 

[Longinus]

There was certainly a some sort of a paradigm shift in the writing in the middle of DS9. I really don't think throwing the huge numbers really helped making the situation seem dire. The defeat at Wolf 359 felt always much more devastating than anything shown (or referred to) in DS9. TOS and TNG gave the impression that starships were rare and special, and 40 seemed like a plenty to me. Having the fleet of thousands or even tens of thousands just trivialises the starships and makes each loss to seem less meaningful.

My rationalisation is that capital ships like we usually see in Trek are indeed rare, and Starfleet has only hundreds of those. These are ships that usually operate alone in deep space for extended periods of time. Then there are smaller ships like runabouts, attack crafts (ships similar to the Maquis Raider. It was originally a Fed ship.) At the peace time these vessels are usually just used to patrol the area near the Federation member planets and they rarely venture far in the deep space. No such ships were present at Wolf, as the fleet was hastily gathered and only true starships were fast enough to make it in time. However, once the Dominion War started, the small vessels were mobilised too and took part in the war in large numbers. So when in DS9 they refer hundreds or thousands of ships, I assume that most of them are not capital ships but smaller runabout sized vessels.