Himmelhand
Giant Sinkhole 2020
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It might be nice if there were explicit degrees of intervention possible, similar to the choices when the Romulan-Breen war was starting. Too late for that now though, I suspect.
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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NavySeel
"I don't know what I'm doing."
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Wait for what? The next crisis? The Cardassians will just see weakness and keep doing this if we don't intervene.
Bajor is bad enough and the Cardassians aren't going to just sit on their current fleet while we build up. How many races do they get to conquer before we're "ready"?
Alastor Mobius Toth
***** ***
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- Neon Ghetto
And keep doing what exactly?
You will notice there are only two major polities left around Cardassian space that we know of: Alupii and Chrystovians. Chrystovians had been established, for years now, to be unable to resist Cardassians. We know it, they know it, Cardassians know it. The Alupii and us, are meanwhile too big and developed to be subjugated without the apocalyptic level of industrial, interstellar conflict.
I'm frankly totally opposed to war until, at the very least, our STO and Indorian border is sufficiently secured. Which it is not.
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I think the update was pretty clear about how, if we had resolved the [Distant Stars: 5/100] tag, we'd have more and better options right now. We didn't, so any ships we send to Chrystovian space are likely to die.
Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
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We would've had options to maintain a task force in Chrystovian territory. It would not have prevented the Cardassians from attacking.
Until they attack an ally or affiliate of ours, or anyone we vaguely have some relationship with.
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We could have supported the Chrystovians industrially, built defenses in their territory, set up weird science tricks with their nebula...you did not push for any of that, because the Chrystovians do not matter to you. We could have turned the Chrystovians into a big enough problem to conquer that the Cardassians would have decided to back off. It was a 300 point tag.
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The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
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Well, unless we had a TF in their territory at the time.
Of course, doing that means we abandon something else, and about the only TF we could reasonably not have done since the system was introduced without the consequences also fucking us is the Yizgisi one.
Of course, doing that means we abandon something else, and about the only TF we could reasonably not have done since the system was introduced without the consequences also fucking us is the Yizgisi one.
Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
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No matter what we chose, we would've had a high risk of general war, and as evidenced by the voting people don't care for that. Their location trumps all of the above; we would've had to commit to general war no matter the cause. Everything you could have done is a speed bump to a determined adversary without heavy Starfleet support.
The squaidbois and squidgirlz are more fun and likeable and we worry more about them.
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The Cardassians are fundamentally not a constant aggression machine, they can and have backed off from opponents that are too tough to conquer without backing off from their other borders. If we had acted to strengthen the Chrystovians years ago, then they would have backed off rather than commit to a bloody conflict for minimal gain.
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...You have watched Star Trek, right?
We've been explicitly told that our options will be limited. It is very unlikely that anything we do will provide any intervention or help for the Chrystovians to reduce the degree of oppression they encounter, just as the Cardassians have been oppressing the Bajorans. And as they would continue to brutalize, kill, enslave, and steal from Bajor for another forty years in canon.
What are they doing that's more important than getting te Cardassians to stop conquering random neutral countries against their will?
Most of them are plausible, but they're not going to matter in the weeks or months it takes the Cardassians to roll over the Chrystovian navy if we don't give the Cardassians one hell of a good reason NOT to just throw their fleet into the mixing bowl.
Yeah, pretty much. That's exactly what's going to happen. There is no plausible circumstance under which Federation political opinion will support an offensive war of liberation. I mean, seriously, we've got enough people ideologically convinced not to fight as it is. Just randomly jumping the Cardassians one day and forcing them to give up the stuff they've captured? It's not happening. If it were going to, we'd have tried something along those lines after 45 Gabriel as an attempt to liberate Bajor, when the Cardassian fleet was badly damaged.
Like who? Be specific. I mean, are the Alupii supposed to think "well gee, the Federation didn't really do anything to help the Chrystovians, which means we should work extra hard to piss the Cardassians off by building up and fighting them? Maybe we should just negotiate a deal with them like the Goshawnar and the Konen, who seem to be doing pretty well."
It's not like the Alupii couldn't change their minds and flip pro-Cardassian if they wanted to, after all.
Given how the Cardassians behaved in canon on Bajor, letting the Cardassians conquer planets is not a reliable way to avoid atrocities.
My assessments of what the right thing to do is always include a cost-benefit analysis. I don't do everything on pure consequentialism, but I do use consequentialism.
Given that they're actively pro-war and enthusiastic about this, it sounds like the answer is "lots."
I don't agree that we'd have that option. Here's why.
Okay, let's put all the cards on the table.
We all know the Cardassians want to conquer Chrystovia. That's their goal. The accusations they're making in their declaration of war, insofar as any of them are true, are a pretext. We know this because we know the Cardassians do not give a shit about whether the Chrystovian government performs unethical experiments or not, as long as it doesn't threaten Cardassia. And we know that because we know the Cardassians will happily do things just as bad, or worse, to equally defenseless species, in order to profit Cardassia.
Realistically, the Cardassians want to conquer Chrystovia, and they know we don't want them to succeed in doing so. They know that anything we propose is, in reality, a ploy on our part to stop the Cardassians from conquering the people they want to conquer. Therefore, they have little or no incentive to accept the proposal, unless the consequences of not accepting it are potentially much worse.
If we don't mobilize, the Cardassians have every reason to say "no, we've already resolved this issue to our own satisfaction, we've got this, Federation interference will be viewed as an attempt to preserve the status quo or harass Cardassian peacekeepers and inhumanitarian intervention teams. Stay out or be fired upon." There's very little cost to them of warning us away, because if we haven't mobilized our fleet, the Cardassians have a much more credible ability to threaten us than we have to threaten them in the short term. And we'll be living in a world where the head of Starfleet just said to the President "I don't recommend that we fight over this."
Only if we mobilize do we have the credibility to signal to the Cardassians "yes, we're willing to fight, here is a face-saving alternative to fighting that gets you what you said you wanted without having to risk a war against a larger polity." At which point accepting the inspectors as a face-saving compromise starts looking better to them.
Perhaps more to the point from their point of view, why would they let the valuable starships those slaves are flying away in escape? The Cardassians can replace a few thousand slave laborers a lot more easily than they can replace a ship.
I think that to discuss the degree of intervention, we first have to discuss whether to intervene.
Yeah. I mean, the current generation of Cardassian ships are designs from the previous decade. What are they working on now? They may well have a much stronger, nastier fleet in 2335 when the next crisis blows up; we're not the only ones who can develop and field new ships capable of amazing performance.
If Cardassian space and its surroundings are anything like ours, there are more polities out there around them.We just haven't found them yet, because the sum total of our knowledge of the back side of Cardassian space consists of like one or two five-year missions that arced around there plus whatever we could hack out of Cardassian databases.
In all probability, they're not out of people to conquer, or expanding into an unpopulated void, unless of course it's a void of their own making.
Moreover, we have no assurance that our border will ever be 'sufficiently secured' relative to the scale of attack the Cardassians can bring to bear. Their fleet will continue to grow and add more capable ships even as we fortify.
Could you please cut it out with the kind of accusations made in the underlined?
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In retrospect it would have been better for our credibility if we had blown halkh out of the sky as he crossed the OSA border but oh well, ten thousand deaths and the impression we won't defend our affiliates from autocratic aggression
Himmelhand
Giant Sinkhole 2020
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- Midwestern US
But.. they're not affiliates. The Chrystovians are a completely neutral, independent party.
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Exactly. If we won't defend our affiliates in the OSA from Licori aggression, why should we defend the Chrystovians? There is no "loss of credibility" because our affiliates already know we won't protect them. They have to be allies for that.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
We also didn't defend our ally the Laio from OSA aggression, or restrain the OSA from carrying out aggression in the first place- the way we once restrained the Apiata from attacking the Sydraxians and Cardassians.
The recent war involving the OSA was a war between one of our affiliates and one of our allies, with the Licori being brought in as co-belligerents by our ally because they had the same grievance against our affiliate that our ally did. Notice how when the Laio agreed to a negotiated end to the conflict, the Licori didn't try to keep fighting. Even though there's little or no evidence that we threatened them, and even though the OSA fleet had been hammered pretty badly in the previous battles, especially with the corporate fleets thrown into total disarray.
Because at no point did the Licori make it obvious they were going to conquer the OSA and enslave its people for decades, as everyone around knows that the Cardassians are going to do to the Chrystovians because they're already doing that to the Bajorans?
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Idle question for those asking to intervene - where do you get the resources, and which of the balls we are juggling do you want to drop? Because it's not like we don't do stuff with the ships we have. So, drop the Gorn mission? Accept a Gorn-Itick-ka war, possibly supported by Cardassia? What about the Romulans, at peace now with a population unhappy about the Federation? What about the consolidated Breen - will they accept our Dreamer mission on their doorstep if we cannot credibly escalate? What about the Horizon, masters of the word? Mind control is so much less visible than whips, after all.
If the Chrystovians were affiliates, I would vote to help them, no question, if it was even a matter for a vote. No matter how dangerous and unpleasant, you have to keep your commitments.
I won't vote to enter a hugely destructive war for a neutral species that has signed no treaty with the Federation, though. You have to draw the border on "who will we fight a major war for" somewhere, and the affiliate/non-affiliate divide makes as much sense to me as anywhere to put it.
I won't vote to enter a hugely destructive war for a neutral species that has signed no treaty with the Federation, though. You have to draw the border on "who will we fight a major war for" somewhere, and the affiliate/non-affiliate divide makes as much sense to me as anywhere to put it.
If we do something that we think may turn into war, we need to place the HoH force in the line of fire along with ours. We need to create a situation where the Cardassians would be directly picking a fight with them and not just us. That changes the equation quite a bit. Without that, war means the HoH finds and excuse to slink of, or says "we're helping!" and diplomances everyone behind our backs while doing nothing.
MTB, I think the Dreamers will be fine. Trek cosmozoans are usually threats to a starship, and the Dreamers can field them in infantry numbers if they get attacked.
MTB, I think the Dreamers will be fine. Trek cosmozoans are usually threats to a starship, and the Dreamers can field them in infantry numbers if they get attacked.
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Are you taking the rant of the Horizon ambassador at face value? Because how do you force the Horizon to fight versus Cardassians - if it's not in their interest to do so?
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- Illinois
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I think the Horizon is probably serious about dispatching peacekeeping forces. It's a cause we're not going to complain about, and neither is their population, which loves this kind of thing.
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- Germany
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... yes, they'll be sending ships. How do you know what these ships are going to do?
Plausible scenario: they let situations escalate and rescue the day. While the trivid-recorders run. Some coverage from Cardassian (occupied) planets to show their population at home how good they live.
Are you willing to delay the extra months it will take for them to be on the front lines?
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- Mid-Atlantic
My own inclination would be to draw down the aforementioned task forces- not eliminate in most cases, shrink. Maybe they won't make progress, maybe they'll actively lose progress, but they'll at least still be in there keeping our enemies from getting to make their own unopposed checks. Then we delay the Dreamer task force, roll most if not all of Task Force Unity into the frontlines against Cardassia, and start heavily calling up ships from Amarkia and United Earth.
That nets us a good few hundred C worth of ships jut for starters.