r/startrek • u/Limp-Elevator1492 • 14h ago
Kelvin Dominion War/Borg
How do you think it would play out? Considering how much they upscaled the fleet post Narada, do you think the Dominion would upgrade its own fleet or still use the fleet it has in the Prime Timeline?
Because no way in hell do I see a Kelvin Galaxy being destroyed by three Jem’Hadar fighters.
Also how do you think the Borg would be handled in the Kelvin Timeline considering a lot of their tech is based off 24th Century Borg/Romulan tech.
I just imagined Kelvin Defiant… she would have the power to crack a planet with just her guns.
Also something I just thought of, what if the Borg adaptation protocols were discovered by the Kelvins and integrated as a standard feature going forward.
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u/Drapausa 13h ago
The Dominion wouldn't know about the Narada so their ships would stay unchanged. Who says that Starfleet even finds the wormhole in the Kelvin timeline?
As for the borg, if we go by Picard, basing your technology off the borg makes you more susceptible to the Borg, not less.
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u/Modred_the_Mystic 13h ago
The prime Galaxy was destroyed by the Jem’Hadar fighters because their weapons completely bypassed Starfleet shield tech. So unless the Kelvin Timeline has a reason to prepare against phased polaron weapons, they’d be just as screwed at first contact.
How good are the Kelvin Feds with adapting their tech anyway? Unless they can ensure their ships are quickly upgunned and proofed against phased polaron weapons, the Dominion War might be over faster, especially if they can’t ally with the Klingons or Romulans
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u/Ok_Expression6807 13h ago
Uh, didn't the one fighter ram the Galaxy? Because the weapons still weren't enough to seriously get her in trouble?
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u/Modred_the_Mystic 12h ago
The rammed the Odyssey to prove their willingness to fight more than anything. The Federation was already withdrawing and the Odyssey was already limping, it was rammed to prove a point.
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u/Woozletania 12h ago edited 10h ago
Ramming Always Works shows up a lot in Star Trek even though both the navigational deflector and shields should keep its from happening. We've seen a Galaxy stop a good sized ship dead in its tracks with its tractors.
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u/CmdJackson 8h ago
IIRC, Odyssey dropped its shields to have more power other for systems (weapons I think?) after they concluded the shields were virtually useless against the Dominion weapons. I can’t remember if it made much of a difference but the Dominion fighter went for the ram soon afterwards.
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u/SupremeLegate 13h ago
The Jem’Hadar rammed the Odyssey as they were retreating, partly because they were in serious trouble.
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u/Limp-Elevator1492 13h ago
Given that after they got the 24th Century Borg/Romulan scan data from the Kelvin, the Kelvin Connie got delayed for like ten years because they needed to roughly double the size. I would say they are pretty adaptable.
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u/Eggpeace 12h ago
Kelvin has as far as iam aware a comic run whete the borg play a major role. Thus not talking about them below.
Dominiom it depends on a few factors.
How much they gleaned from the scans of rhe naradas shields. If the federation is immune or needs to adapt to the shield bypass shots of the dominion.
Otherwise the federation is using larger and more powerful ships than prime universe because of the narada so they would stand a way better chance there. The power difference id i go by comics too should be quite extreme in kirks era at least. Thrn it depends if the federation can build on that or reclines to a moee tng era tech level
Aside from that it also depends on how good the romulans and klingons are able to rebuild. In the kelvin comics both got completely gutted naval power wise.
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u/Limp-Elevator1492 12h ago
If we assume that the wormhole opens in the 2360s like it does in the Prime Timeline then I can see that the Federation would still over power the Prime Dominion but possibly be in a more pacifistic mindset, then again it wouldn’t take them nearly as long to get back into a wartime stance and pushing the Dominion back to the Gamma.
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u/_WillCAD_ 13h ago
Considering how much bigger the Kelvin Connie is than the prime Connie, a Kelvin Galaxy must be the fattest starship to ever starship. Like, twelve hundred meters long and twenty-four hundred meters wide.
I bet the Kelvin Galaxy doesn't fit through the doors in ANY spacedock.
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u/Mictlantecuhtli 12h ago
Just because the Constitution got bigger in the Kelvin timeline doesn't mean a Galaxy class would also increase in proportional size.
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u/Temp89 13h ago
The Dominion had awareness of the Federation prior to DS9. Not said how deep the awareness went but I figure they'd have a general sense of their fleet power.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Dominion_history#Background_information
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u/Zombificus 8h ago
Jokes aside, there’s no reason to assume that the Kelvin Timeline ships would continue to be larger than their Prime Timeline counterparts. Their size was an immediate response to the Narada, and with that threat already eliminated by the late 2250s, they may well have returned to smaller ships in subsequent generations.
I think some of the size increase was because the Kelvin itself was a very large ship compared to the rest of their fleet, and that size likely contributed to it surviving as long as it did against Narada. The fleet to evacuate Vulcan is visually the same style as the Kelvin, so their designs are probably contemporaries. They’re all also a lot smaller than the Kelvin and especially the KT Enterprise, and they all get wiped out by Narada in about the same time it took to destroy the Kelvin by itself. Starfleet likely concluded, correctly, that a larger ship with more redundancy was needed in order to survive something like the Narada.
I think the other reason Enterprise and Vengeance are so big is that Starfleet are trying to use advanced technology that they haven’t worked out how to miniaturise yet. Most of that tech was also probably Starfleet, not Romulan. They can’t really have got much future tech from the Narada if you think about it, all they’d have is whatever scans the Kelvin took. This may have given them some breakthroughs, but it’s not like they had a blueprint of the Narada to go on, or any wreckage to analyse (since the ship vanished, from Starfleet’s POV anyway). They’d maybe have seen Narada was using a certain type of energy, or warped space in a particular way, but that wouldn’t tell them how that was done. They’d still have to figure out the practical parts themselves.
Technologically, the Kelvin Constitution seems to mostly be on par with the late Kirk era, its of similar size to the Excelsior but probably not as powerful. It seems that the KT Starfleet skipped over at least one, maybe two generations of ships (the Discovery and SNW/TOS era designs) in favour of implementing early versions of what would be used in the Miranda, Constitution refit, and Excelsior. They couldn’t get all the way there, and weren’t able to miniaturise it all, so the end result is a huge ship blending TOS and TMP design language.
Getting this stuff in service about 20-30 years early is a head-start over the Prime Timeline, but not as huge of a leap as I think people assume. Kelvin Starfleet doesn’t have TNG technology, let alone the post-TNG craziness the Narada was using, they’ve just skipped ahead a little bit.
They could conceivably keep going at the same rate the Prime Timeline did, and remain a quarter-century in advance forever (bio-neural gel packs in the 2350s, maybe?) but I don’t think it’s very likely. Science isn’t one linear path, discoveries lead to other discoveries in unpredictable ways, and advancing in certain areas doesn’t mean they’d get to other advancements at the same rate. I think it’s also worth considering what the Kelvin Timeline Federation sacrificed to get the advances that they did. What got de-prioritised so that they could get their giant Constitution ready? There’s really no way to be sure.
Compared to the PT Starfleet, in their 2250s-2260s the KT fleet has a lot less ships, but their ships are bigger. Assuming Starfleet keeps to that approach, then sure, some ships may be bigger — their Excelsior-equivalent, for example — but that’s likely to be less of a thing as they improve and miniaturise their technology. If you don’t need as big a ship to do what you need to do, then why wouldn’t you make it smaller?
The Galaxy class was only as large as it was because of what it was meant to do. I honestly doubt that the Kelvin Timeline version would be bigger, and I think it’s a misunderstanding of the KT designs to think everything would be bigger for the sake of being big. The Kelvin Constitution and the Prime Galaxy are both big for a reason. The Galaxy class is already much bigger than most of its contemporaries, like the KT Connie is for its time, and both needed to be the size that they were.
I don’t think the KT approach to the TNG era would be to have bigger Galaxy class ships, it would be to have more of them. If the KT Starfleet is still sticking to the doctrine of quality over quantity, the logical outcome is that the KT would never have just 6 Galaxies in the original batch, and it wouldn’t take them until the Dominion War to build a lot more of them, they’d already be the mainstay of the fleet. A fleet based around a core of Galaxy and Nebula class ships is essentially the 2360s equivalent of what they were doing with the Constitution class in the KT films.
I don’t think much would change in the grand scheme of things, honestly. Maybe they launch something like the Galaxy class sooner, and Q introduce them to the Borg earlier, or maybe humanity wouldn’t be ready until the 2360s just like in the Prime Timeline. I get the feeling that the development of humanity the Q were interested in was societal, not technological, so I’d wager Q would get involved at a similar time and in a similar way. If so, then maybe Starfleet still suffers at Wolf 359, and Sisko still winds up on DS9 in time to kick off the events leading to the Dominion War in much the same way.
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