Why did Lorca attend the meeting in person?

Question

In Episode 5 of Season 1 of Discovery ("Choose Your Pain"), Captain Lorca attends a meeting with a small number of Starfleet admirals to discuss

the war effort, the wider deployment of spore drives, and the scaling back of Discovery's involvement in the war until that wider deployment.

Why did Lorca attend the meeting in person, especially when holographic communication has been emphasized so heavily in these new episodes?

It seems odd for Lorca to travel to meet with the admirals in person in rather dangerous times in what appears to be a fairly simple shuttle that

was clearly no match for the Klingons who eventually stormed it.

It seems that they could have used the holographic communicators for their conference call, or that Discovery could have chauffeured Lorca directly to the meeting.

Is there a reason why Lorca needed to see them in person and why Discovery couldn't take him there directly?

We have already seen admirals appear holographically, including in this very episode, where an admiral appears holographically to announce to Saru that

Lorca has been captured.

Answer 1

For Discovery not taking him, that can be explained by the ship still being classified. The Klingons know the name because they presumably have scans of the ship that's attacked them multiple times, but it wouldn't be surprising if Starfleet made a point of keeping it out of the way to reduce the chances of it being observed closely by potential spies, which it could be if parked over Earth or some starbase waiting for Lorca's meetings to end and who knows what civilian traffic might be around. Note that when they rescued the colony when they finally had the spore drive working, they simply took off and didn't reveal to the survivors who they were.

As for the in-person meeting, there's all sorts of reasons for that: there was the one meeting with the admirals, but Lorca could have had a bunch of others lined up to deal with while he was there, but we just didn't see them because it's not that interesting to watch a meeting with the Quartermaster-General over an issue with the number of photon warheads being delivered. He could have been attending a larger strategy meeting regarding the war. He could have been taking a day off to attend his sister's wedding. Starfleet Command might have decided there'd be more security with an in-person meeting. He might have been meeting with his Section 31 contacts. Whatever.

This sort of thing isn't unprecedented. Sisko and Picard were occasionally shown to be going to, at, coming back from, or their absence explained by some kind of meeting they were attending in person.