It's best to assume the sheet is in a constant state of flux, and nobody can predict what is possible tomorrow.
...This. [sighs]
Knowing that Licori get a 5% bonus against ships with lower science.
That seems a bit narrow. Evasion and detection and maneuvers outside of combat play a
very large role in shaping what battles we fight, how our ships function, and in addressing questions like "how much Science does a viable combat frigate need, anyway?"
Asking the Gaeni to do their best Licori impersonation in hopes that we'll learn something specific to this war about an incremental bonus that makes less difference than whether we brought one extra
Miranda in an entire 12-ship assault fleet, on the other hand... I don't think we're going to learn very much that is both applicable
AND likely to change the outcome of the war noticeably.
I wouldn't be. Okay, step back and let's think about how the Licori have been fighting the war up to date. We have absolutely no indications that they have been using a tactic of "put a mentat on a weakly defended high Science ship and sneak them into some place to unleash a weapon of mass destruction". If they haven't done it to the Ked Peddah, why are you so worried about it happening to us?
Because they can fight the Ked Peddah on roughly equal terms without resorting to weapons of (cosmic-sized) mass destruction. They can maybe even fight the Gaeni and the Ked Peddah at the same time on those terms, maybe, they could plausibly hope.
They cannot fight the Federation that way, and unless they are Kazon-level stupid they know it. Which means there is a very high risk of them doing something desperate and horrific in an attempt to even up the odds or force us to back off.
If they're planning to do it in a fleet battle, watching one or two Gaeni ships in action won't tell us
specifically what form that might take. It won't prepare us for a fleet-eating weapon, it'll at best tip us off to something mildly significant like a 5% combat bonus against us.
If they're planning to do it by devastating or destroying one of our major planets, a bit of preparation and drill could make the difference between billions dead and a member species effectively knocked out of the Federation, versus a minor footnote in the history books.
We do have some indication they're using super-science shenanigans, but not that its happening by the mechanism you're describing or how you think the T'Mir should emulate.
Do you think the mentat that touched off the quantum filament in the Vulcan Sector, or the mentat that triggered the partial stellar collapse that flash-fried the
Courageous, were flying around in battleships or cruisers? From the way you're presenting this issue, you seem to think the answer is "yes."
You also seem to be very, very offense-minded here, to the point where you are downplaying the importance of our own defense. The entire reason Task Force Four even exists is because of a concern that Licori ships may try 'deep strikes' against our space using star-breaking or other extremely devastating weapons. That's a threat we need to practice against. And
T'Mir is better suited to the task of playing "aggressor squadron" to impersonate this threat, by experience doing something partially comparable against the Cardassians, than any other ship we have.
No... no we aren't! You just made that suggestion up out of nothing! You make up this "sneak past us" tactic and are asserting it's a thing when there's no evidence it's a thing.
You invented this "concern" without any evidence behind it!
Tell it to Vol Chad and Rosalee McAdams, who had ships crippled by individual mentats in civilian vessels performing astrophysics experiments. Between the
Sappho and the
Courageous, if I don't have a round
three million tons of evidence for this threat, it's only because a chunk of the two ships' mass boiled off in the cosmic catastrophes that disabled them.
