Picard (TNG) in the Delta Quadrant.

jake477

So essentially if Picard instead of Janeway and his crew were lost in the Delta Quadrant. For the sake of fairness, there will be no Enterprise-E (which had many Voyager upgrades from her experience btw). All involved will be from TNG only.

In this scenario, this is the Coming of Age Season 3 crew, around the time they encounter Kevin and Rushan Uxbridge aka when they were at their most badass. The Caretaker gets ahold of the Ent-D and she starts out exactly as Voyager does.

In Star Trek canon the TNG crew are the A-Team and for the longest time the Enterprise-D was the biggest nastiest thing the Federation had to offer and she was born for missions like this. Geordi or Data could give Seven a run for her money any day of the week. Seven's Borg insights was used as a crutch on Voyager too often. Plus the family atmosphere of the crew would be a major plus in the beginning then the Maquis/Starfleet angst on Voyager. Oh and ah no traitors either on the TNG crew. So none of the Seska drama.

Relative top speed to Voyager's but slightly slower, but packing with far more weapons and tools. Saucer separation being one of those tools.

How would the TNG crew handle the Delta Quadrant compared to Voyager and would they do better or worse?

Personally due to Picard's command style and the fact this crew was the flagship of the Federation. They would have done a far better job then Janeway who's crew was too new and Captain out of her league (sometimes psychotic) and half of her crew were wanted terrorists and convicts.

Picard's team were highly trained professionals with years under their belts and Picard already had both command and battle experience on Stargazer.

The difference would be night and day, plus the Enterprise-D wouldn't get knocked on its butt so easily like Voyager. (TNG writers here not the Generations idiots). A lot of the species Voyager encountered would be little more then knats to the Ent-D so Picard wouldn't have to play ball like Janeway and in many cases the Ent-Ds size would intimidate them.

So what are your thoughts.....

phoenixc

The Galaxy class was built for missions like that, something like a third of the ship is just unfinished space so they have room to expand into if they get thrown to some distant point or their warp engines get destroyed when they are beyond the borders of the Federation or something else happens to make the deployment take decades or even a century or two instead of months or years.

They would not have any of the power problems Voyager did because the warp drives were designed to be able to use just the rotgut the bussards scooped up if need be. They had a small city on the ship for all practical purposes so they had a pool of talent besides the Starfleet personnel. They had extensive storage and better on-board manufacturing than Voyager did.

In fact, except for any possible casualties from the Caretaker's grabbing them it would just be business as usual, the only difference being that they would be doing a lot more first contacts and would not be laying over in starbases for extra cleaning and whatnot like they normally would.

Also, their offensive systems were mainly phaser based, the photon torpedoes were a secondary armament so all they need is energy to fire the things.

Voyager had the misfortune of being primarily torpedo armed, its phasers were its secondary weapons system so were proportionately a bit weaker than the Galaxy's and the torpedoes had parts that could not be replicated nor could they build them onboard since they sacrificed that level of manufacturing capability for extra speed and bigger torpedo magazines (unfortunately the passage was extremely rough on the torpedoes and only something like 39 survived).

starkaos

phoenixc#0738 wrote: »

Voyager had the misfortune of being primarily torpedo armed, its phasers were its secondary weapons system so were proportionately a bit weaker than the Galaxy's and the torpedoes had parts that could not be replicated nor could they build them onboard since they sacrificed that level of manufacturing capability for extra speed and bigger torpedo magazines (unfortunately the passage was extremely rough on the torpedoes and only something like 39 survived).

And yet they somehow used about twice as many torpedoes than they originally had. There is also the possibility that they used some torpedoes offscreen.

phoenixc

***duplicated post****

phoenixc

starkaos wrote: »

phoenixc#0738 wrote: »

Voyager had the misfortune of being primarily torpedo armed, its phasers were its secondary weapons system so were proportionately a bit weaker than the Galaxy's and the torpedoes had parts that could not be replicated nor could they build them onboard since they sacrificed that level of manufacturing capability for extra speed and bigger torpedo magazines (unfortunately the passage was extremely rough on the torpedoes and only something like 39 survived).

And yet they somehow used about twice as many torpedoes than they originally had. There is also the possibility that they used some torpedoes offscreen.

They bought about a dozen from some race that had compatible technology and could easily produce them, but then as usual something happened to make the deal fall through for more than that first test batch, and then they ended up moving on shortly thereafter.

They also repurposed some captured Krenim torpedoes in Year of Hell iirc but that was erased in the reset at the end, and managed to scrape up a few candidates here and there but it was a sort of running joke that it almost never worked (they were in the process of scavenging some Cardassian quantums from Dreadnaught before it woke up but as usual failed for instance).

There are a number of websites where they do counts of torpedoes and they did stay within the amount they had plus the few they were able to acquire, but they would have been pretty much running on empty when the older Janeway showed up with the transphasics (though that still brings up the point of how did she have room in that shuttle to carry more than a few). [/quote]

somtaawkhar wrote: »

If Picard and crew were stuck out in the DQ instead of Janeway they would have almost certainly been dead by the end of season 1.

The problem with Picard is that hes a person who puts his moral high ground before the reality of the situations he is facing, often times ignoring the advance of Riker, and Worf, who tell him to take a more substantive defensive action, or a more substantive offensive action, resulting in enemies often getting shots on the Enterprise that were otherwise avoidable, and costing his ship, and crew, unnecessary losses.

Picard was only able to do as well as he did in TNG because he had the full force of the Federation behind him, and was more often then not sent on diplomatic missions with species far inferior to the Federation, where simply being in a Galaxy class gave him all the cards.

In actual war-time, or battle like, situations, or situations where he was cut off from the Federation, Picard's command style fails miserably(as most often seen in the movies) because hes mentally unable to work beyond the fact that, while morals and ideals are nice to strive for, theres just some enemies who simply do not care, and will do anything and everything to destroy you, and trying to play the moral high ground against those kinds of people doesn't work.

Picard and the ENT-D would have been destroyed by the relentless assault of the Kazon in S1 due to the way he acts in these sorts of situations, and if not S1, then destroyed in S2, or early S3. They would have never reached the Nekrit Expanse.

Its the same problem with trying to put Picard in Sisko's place during the Dominion War, or Picard in Kirk's place in TOS, or Archer's place in ENT. Picard's command style only works in one, very narrow, set of situations, and the Delta Quadrant just isn't that.

Interesting analysis. The only point that could be shaky is the one about the Kazon and a seldom seen aspect of Picard himself.

The Kazon would be no threat at all unless they threw a large number of ships at the Enterprise. The only reason Voyager had much trouble with them was that the Kazon ships were so big they made good damage sponges against Voyagers secondary weapons (their phasers) and they simply did not have enough torpedoes to make the job trivial. The D was a gun based ship, not primarily a torpedo based one so they had enough energy firepower to fry the Kazon in short order.

Also, Picard did have a "war face" side to his personality, though as you pointed out by the time he decides to use it they are always waist deep in alligators and desperately fighting their way out when they should have been quicker on the draw. Locutus was built on that side of him, which is part of why he went so obsessively Rambo under the stress of the Borg boarding action and the constant whisper of their network in the deep dark recesses of his mind stirring that part of him up.

phoenixc

coldnapalm wrote: »

So...the main reason that the maquis and the Voyager crew had to work together is that BOTH ships took massive casualties and serious damages when they got grabbed. Since there is no reason why the same would not hold true for the Enterprise crew...ANY singular ship that ended up the DQ like Voyager did would be ROYALLY F*ed.

The D would not be as bad off as a typical warship like Voyager. Though rather macabre the fact is that there are four times as many civilians as there are active Starfleet personnel on board so there is only a one in four chance that any particular casualty would be a crewmember. In theory that would leave them with about the same relative crewstrengh as Voyager had with the survivors of both crews together on Voyager.

And since many of the dependents and other civilians were scientists (like Keiko), theoretical/design engineers, or other potentially useful professions as seen in a few (too few in fact, they wasted a lot of story potential ignoring them) episodes, along with older teens who were almost ready to leave the nest and launch their own careers, they had a ready pool of replacements without having to go outside the ship to find and recruit them.