Since Starfleet, per Aaron Waltke, is stretched thin personell wise in this era (due to rapid expansion, and presumably also due to the Dominion War), it's possible Tysess would have been named acting captain if Janeway hadn't been allowed by Starfleet to lead this one-vessel mission personally (due to lack of available captains). I suppose that Janeway is pulling double duty as mission commander (which an admiral could do, even if usually more ships would be involved) and de-facto acting ship captain. Janeway's experience in the Delta quadrant probably is a factor in this decision.
VADM Janeway
- Thread starter ThatsMrCaptaintoyou
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Starfleet's policy on flag officers commanding starships is IMO is something of a call back to the Royal Navy antecedents of the original concept as unlike in the US Navy flag officers (or at least the equivalent) did and do occassionally command certain high-profile and important vessels to this day:
There may be have been other examples historically, but the examples I've been able to verify (including with an officer who actually served one of the vessels in question):
1. HMY Britannia, due to being dual-hatted as a diplomatic vessel, was generally commanded by a Rear Admiral (OF-7) and was even commanded by a Vice Admiral (OF-8) for nearly a decade, who held the title of Commodore.
2. Possibly inspired by the above, Royal Navy aircraft carriers are (and have been since at least the late 90s) commanded by Commodore (OF-6, equivalent to a US one-star) holding the title of Captain. I haven't been able to confirm, but I suspect that this may be in part motivated by the wish to have a viable fleet second-in-command embarked by default.
There may be have been other examples historically, but the examples I've been able to verify (including with an officer who actually served one of the vessels in question):
1. HMY Britannia, due to being dual-hatted as a diplomatic vessel, was generally commanded by a Rear Admiral (OF-7) and was even commanded by a Vice Admiral (OF-8) for nearly a decade, who held the title of Commodore.
2. Possibly inspired by the above, Royal Navy aircraft carriers are (and have been since at least the late 90s) commanded by Commodore (OF-6, equivalent to a US one-star) holding the title of Captain. I haven't been able to confirm, but I suspect that this may be in part motivated by the wish to have a viable fleet second-in-command embarked by default.
All of this leaves me wondering who's running which desk(s) at SFHQ right "now"...
Janeway's off on detached duty, with Jellico as her supervisor. Picard's running the Romulan evacuation project. Clancy should be a low-level admiral at this point, not yet Commander, Starfleet.
Janeway's off on detached duty, with Jellico as her supervisor. Picard's running the Romulan evacuation project. Clancy should be a low-level admiral at this point, not yet Commander, Starfleet.
Only a Captain, according to the Picard prequel novel The Last Best Hope. According to that novel, Starfleet's current CinC is someone named Admiral Bordson, an original character created in that novel.
Yes, I know, not canon, Gene's Vision, crying puppies...
Admirals don't have to be chained to the desk to do their work.
I suspect some of the admirals (like Janeway) that don't want to necessarily sit around behind the desk all the time would prefer to be out in the field and do their duties while mobile.
Janeway can still do things a regular admiral at HQ could do while being on the Dauntless (thank you real time subspace and hypersubspace comms and Quantum slipstream).
I don't get why a lot of captians associate admiralty with a 'dead end desk job' when we know they can do field work (it may result in a bit less work than a captain would have, but that's a bit of a bonus if you ask me - potentially less stressful as well).
In fact, admirals CAN also spearhead certain projects of their own such as pushing for developments in new technologies, starship designs, upgrades of existing ships, etc.
The way I see it, admirals can have an easier time pushing for things than captains can... and the admirals that were postponing becoming admirals because of fear of being removed from command might also be more sympathetic towards some captains requests because they would be aware of how much difficulty they had as captains to push for some potentially much needed changes.
That... and it seems the SF built Dauntless was enlarged compared to the original one Arturis had.
Definitely. The Protostar appears to be about the same length and beam to the Connie or the Intrepid class but vertically slimmer due to a reduced deck count (high 200s to low 300s in metres), but the old Dauntless is generally assumed to be around 200m so would be noticeably smaller than the Protostar which is obviously not the case per on-screen canon.
I'm not wild about a Federation Dreadnought as an internal designation (other more militant cultures might call it that), particularly for a ship that is super large but not necessarily designed exclusively for combat, the old TNG-era designation of Explorer (or perhaps the expanded Exploratory Command Ship/Command Exploration Cruiser per various licensed sources) would seem to fit Starfleet's social and political posture.
Since SF is not a military (Picard's own words), they would never call it a dreadnought. The Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians and Dominion might... but at the same time, I don't think the SF built Dauntless is quite as big as that either.
From what I was able to gather, the Dauntless saucer has about 8 to 10 decks... add in another 4 or 5 decks to the secondary hull, and you get something the size of an Intrepid class starship or just a bit smaller.
If we go by official designation that the Protostar is just about 130 meters long and has about 4 decks... then the Dauntless having about 12 - 15 decks does make sense in terms of scale we saw (aka, 3 - 4x larger than the Protostar in fact).
Looking at the Protostar's external features, the saucer section is the 'livable' portion of the ship and has whaty seem to be 3 decks... deck 4 is the shuttlebay and goes backwards [merges with deck 3] for the engineering and third nacelle.
Of course, we could be entirely wrong because the sizes could have been skewed due to different camera angles and ships being relatively far apart from each other.
Comparatively speaking, the Protostar being almost as large as the Intrepid doesn't make much sense when we contrast it to the number of decks both ships have... so its either that, or the Protostar has unusually high decks in comparison (but I don't think this is the case because the kids are teens and not fully mature) and could only be almost as long as the Intrepid thanks to large nacelles and pylons but otherwise has about 4 decks.
Protostar is a prototype vehicle for checking out new tech, not a production vessel?
That's correct. Experimental vessel (NX-designation).
They called the USS Vengeance a dreadnought in STID, even after repeating the claim that Starfleet supposedly isn't a military many times in that movie.
Which was specifically created as part of a shift to a more aggressive, militaristic organisation rather than the pseudo-pacificist, multi-role security organisation that existed at the time.
Under normal circumstances, the Starfleet brass would shy away from such a resource-hogging, single-purpose platform when more versatile platforms have stood them in good stead for over two centuries at this point (in fact, it's mean argued that the Dominion War, the only conflict we know that was fought according to that paradigm, was initially a failure because Starfleet tried to muscle it out militantly rather than explore other options)
I would disagree about the Dominion War. It was initially a failure because Starfleet and the Klingons lost battles (though they also won a large engagement at the very start of the war, with the destruction of some Dominion shipyards in the Alpha quadrant), not because of any paradigm. Moreso, if Starfleet has been more militaristic - in the sense of having more Defiants, Prometheus, Akira's etc ready as heavily armed vessels, presumably the war would have gone better, not worse. Being prepared (to a larger extent) is a plus.
It can be argued that the Federation could have avoided the Dominion War, but that would entail accepting Dominion dominance even over the direct environment of the Wormhole at the gamme quadrant side and probably still not have stopped Dominion infiltration in the Alpha and Beta quadrants, including the alliance with the Cardassians. IMO the Federation was correct not to let the Dominion dictate terms about where the Federation could (not) go, though blowing up/collapsing the wormhole entirely would have been the more prudent course of action (though not appreciated by their Bajoran allies, to be sure, nor by the Prophets).
Problem is, when Starfleet builds ships, only a small portion of the ship's systems are devoted to defense, because Starfleet's main mission is exploration. Look at the battle in "The Jem'Hadar". A Galaxy class ship's best attack didn't destroy any of the ships. The Defiant, a fraction of the Odyssey's size but built for combat, ripped one to pieces in seconds. They could have built a squadron of Defiants for the same price in resources... or a Galaxy-sized dreadnought with multiplex ablative armor, harmonic shields, CIWS arrays*, multidirectional pulse phasers, gatling torpedo launchers, tricobalt devices, and impulse-only parasite craft** to allow for assaults on multiple vectors. And then put someone like Edward Jellico in charge of it.
*Small, rapid fire weapons designed to take out incoming weapons. Equivalent to the Darwin kids' "aggressive" immune systems.
**Warp engines have to be pretty bulky. Strip them out, and you could have Defiant level phaser power in a much smaller and sleeker unit. So in addition to all it can do itself, this ship could put maybe six or eight Defiant-equivalent spacecraft into play, either to fight alongside them or to protect a small area.
*Small, rapid fire weapons designed to take out incoming weapons. Equivalent to the Darwin kids' "aggressive" immune systems.
**Warp engines have to be pretty bulky. Strip them out, and you could have Defiant level phaser power in a much smaller and sleeker unit. So in addition to all it can do itself, this ship could put maybe six or eight Defiant-equivalent spacecraft into play, either to fight alongside them or to protect a small area.
Improved armour and shields are defensive measures having them doesn't make a starship a 'single trick pony' like a battleship or "dreadnought"
CIWS are manifestly inferior to both existing options and basically redundant given the existence of shields.
There's nothing in canon to suggest that pulse phasers can be multi-directional and the fact that the Defiant's dorsal and ventral phasers (which are multi-directional) aren't pulse phasers somewhat argues against that.
The only ship to carry tri-cobalt devices -- and use them against a stationary target -- was another multi-role starship, not a dedicated warship. Which suggest that they are provided on mission-specific not type-specific basis.
The Galaxy class was already fitted for Danube-class runabouts, so less capable impulse-only craft that would therefore have vastly inferior shielding seems counter-intuitive.
I disagree.
Jellico was a rigid, pompous control freak who would order most of the improvements ripped out as "unreliable" or run the crew the crew into the ground before the first engagement "fixing" imaginary flaws.
Someone like Picard wouldn't necessarily be appropriate, but someone like Ross or Sisko could work.
As noted above, essentially pointless, especially by the TNG era, given the existence of shields (arguably the earlier ball turrets are CIWS or at least a hybrid of CIWS and autocannon).
I've already touched on the suicidal/criminally negligent aspects of that idea above, so I'll just reiterate that the runabout is about the largest auxiliary craft which could "parasite" on the Galaxy-class or similar.
YMMV to what extent they would actually be helpful.
The fight between the Odyssey and the Jem'Hadar may be somewhat misleading, as those vessels could fire from a distance because their weapons could just pass through the shields. Phaser fire from point blank range is probably more potent than fire from (much) longer distances, and the Defiant tended to come very close to fire its pulse phasers.
