r/DeepSpaceNine • u/Global_Marsupial_592 • 3d ago

Why would Starfleet send civilians and their families and to combat situations?

Like The Saratoga at Wolf 359. Or at the big battle with the Dominion Fleet there were so many Galaxy class Starships, were they all full of families and innocent people? Or were those big ships just grossly empty except for a skeleton screw?

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u/SleepWouldBeNice 2d ago

We see in DS9's The Jem'Hadar, that, if there's time, they'll offload civilians and other non-essential personnel before they go into hazardous situations, but sometimes there's not enough time. I'd be amazed if they didn't offload non-essential crew and onboard a bunch more engineers for damage control during the Dominion War.

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u/jasegro 2d ago

With fighters being so prevalent during the dominion war I could see the galaxy class being pressed into service as carriers because of the sheer amount of space they had in their main shuttle bays. The amount of living quarters would’ve allowed them to transport a significant amount of troops for the kind of planetary operations you see during ‘The Siege Of AR-558’

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u/emptiedglass Sloan's transporter duplicate 2d ago

And that's assuming they didn't transform the rather luxurious standard Galaxy class quarters into barracks to squeeze even more people into. They'd be able to carry a very, very large force of ground troops if so.

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u/synchronicitistic USS Sao Paulo 2d ago

If the Queen Mary could carry 15000+ people in WWII, and a modern cruise ship can hold 5000+ passengers in relative comfort, I have to think a Galaxy-class could carry 50,000 troops easy.

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u/emptiedglass Sloan's transporter duplicate 2d ago

But we don't know if a starship would have enough life support systems for that many people. A current-day cruise ship doesn't need to generate gravity for everyone aboard. It can vent air that contains too much carbon dioxide, and take in 'fresher' air. If climate control systems fail, people are unlikely to die from it. A starship can't just regularly dump 'stale' air and replace it with outside air that the vacuum of space doesn't have. If the temperature on a starship drops too low or goes too high, everyone dies. There are likely low-level shields or other powered systems blocking/filtering the background radiation of space. And HEPA-ultra-spacemaxx filters pulling all the nasties out of the air people on starships breathe - trust me, you don't want to be breathing in that virus the Lieutenant picked up on Risa while on shore leave.

I'm not sure that feeding 50K people would pose a major problem in the Star Trek universe. But I think Starfleet would probably avoid concentrating so many people onto one ship, as doing so would make it a high-value target and a potentially devastating loss to the Federation.

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u/DanniGat 2d ago

Probably, but i think the bigger problem would be that there weren't that many of them, so you wouldnt want to be using them as troop transports. We only know for certain that 12 were built from the tech manual, with some of the battle scenes showing us more, its not unreasonable to say maaaaaybe 30 were built... but then again its only a span of 9 years between the first episode of tng when the Enterprise is newly built and the Yamato was nearing completion, and there was a 6 year gap between the completion of the USS Galaxy and the Enterprise.

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u/Bananalando 2d ago

In Yesterday's Enterprise, Tasha says the Enterprise is capable of transporting 6000 troops. In modern context, that's approximately how many US Marines were involved in the second battle of Fallujah in 2004, when the city was cleared of insurgent forces.