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If you were an admiral at Starfleet command at the start of DS9, what ships would you have assigned to DS9? I would probably assign some more runabouts and perhaps a Miranda or an Oberth.

Depends what period you're talking about. End of the Occupation? Discovery of the wormhole? Contact with the Jem'Hadar? The Klingon War? After Cardassia joined the Dominion? The list is potentially endless.

Start of DS9. Emmisary.

In which case a few runabouts are plenty. The vast majority of travel will be by transporter between the station and the surface, and the only other locations they're likely to travel to are very sparsely populated other planets and moons within the system.

At its start, I would have left them with the Runabouts. Maybe sent a Miranda once in a while if they needed something bigger.

stitch626 wrote:Maybe sent a Miranda once in a while if they needed something bigger.

There might occasionally be incidents that require more capable ships, but in those cases the ship's CO would be in charge of the mission and DS9 would probably have little, if any, involvement. Given that most ships are commanded by Captains, they'd outrank Sisko anyway.

Not to mention that they had the Enterprise operating in the vacinity for a prolonged perdiod, or so it seems. (At least at the end of Season 2 The Tribunal, the Enterprise was still mentioned as one of those ships ordered to the vicinity of cardassia as a show of force).

So, I would say right at the beginning they had more than enough ships going around to handle themselves. It was just after the Odyssey was destroyed imho, that they should have assigned MUCH more ships than a single, unproven, potentially not even working correctly prototype ship. And even with the Defiant working as intended, they should have assigned at least one capital ship to guard the station.

Atekimogus wrote:It was just after the Odyssey was destroyed imho, that they should have assigned MUCH more ships than a single, unproven, potentially not even working correctly prototype ship. And even with the Defiant working as intended, they should have assigned at least one capital ship to guard the station.

Agreed, although the core of the problem was treating the Defiant as simply an add-on to the station and sharing its command crew.

Stations like that should ideally be drawing with recent graduates of the academy and have half a dozen clunker ships assigned to them. All graduates spend a couple of years serving with them.

In reference to a point Seafort made. I'm not sure ALL star ships are captained by rank captains. Most the the ships and captains we see tend to be for big important or new ships. I imagin clunker ships like Miranda, Oberth ect would only get commanders.

We have seen a LT COMM in charge of a Nebula once or twice, not to mention the defiant.

Captain Seafort wrote: Agreed, although the core of the problem was treating the Defiant as simply an add-on to the station and sharing its command crew.

Well, things got better when Worf arrived, but nevertheless, excellent point.

However, from a oou view it is understandable, if they approached the point with more sense they would have needed to introduce basically a whole new set of actors as Defiant bridge crew doing all the interesting stuff while the rest sits on the station doing nothing.

If it wasn't for the large cost, they probably could have done that.

Could have, but still wouldn't have. It wouldn't make much sense to add on another half dozen or so characters just for the odd away mission story when they were able to just have the existing characters do the job. While it might not have made perfect sense to have the station officers running off for those stories, they are our main characters, and the plot is pretty much supposed to be centered on what they are doing.

Lighthawk wrote:Could have, but still wouldn't have. It wouldn't make much sense to add on another half dozen or so characters just for the odd away mission story when they were able to just have the existing characters do the job. While it might not have made perfect sense to have the station officers running off for those stories, they are our main characters, and the plot is pretty much supposed to be centered on what they are doing.

And it was a Bajoran station after all. I'm sure there was Bajoran officers that could handle the station just fine on their own -- at least after season 1 when thing on Bajor and the nature of Bajors relationship with the Federation calmed down.

Sonic Glitch wrote: And it was a Bajoran station after all. I'm sure there was Bajoran officers that could handle the station just fine on their own -- at least after season 1 when thing on Bajor and the nature of Bajors relationship with the Federation calmed down.

I am sure the Bajorans were perfectly capable of "handling" the station from Day 1 on forward but "protecting" it? The Federation presence there was only to make sure the Cardassians stay away and if the UFP is in ANY way only marginally similar to other superpowers, as soon as the wormhole was discovered they sure weren't leave on their own.

And truthfully, as soon as the dominion arc began in season 3 I never ever had the impression that DS9 was anything else than a UFP starbase, they used the "but it's actually a bajoran base" only ever again when it fitted their needs.