How feasible would it be to have rapid response teams? Powerful assets that can be brought into play quickly enough to turn back whatever forces are trying to encroach on our territory might be able to close the gap, particularly if the defensive line stays to the defense...
What do you think a 'defense' looks like in space? It's not like we have a wall of ships garrisoning some dotted line or invisible plane in space. We'd have individual ships or small groups flying around, and when approaching enemies are detected, the ships or small groups would be commanded to go intercept them.
Probably not an option, since we're drawing down, but fun to think about. How long until the shiny new Ambassador can mosey over there and say hi?
About six years, and that's if we want to not have one of those ships be Explorer Corps? Right now, the plan is to send those ships into the Explorer Corps, but in that case they'd be too busy flying around the galaxy exploring to sit around terrorizing Cardassians in one place.
The Current Fleet Status is kind of a crap resource for just identifying the names of all our ships and that's not literally every ship in Starfleet there, it actually excludes a lot of them that didn't respond to an event.
Uh... what do you mean? It lists every location in the Federation and the ships assigned to each location. All our regular fleet and Explorer Corps ships are in there somewhere. Or are you talking about auxiliaries?
I'm sure there's a database somewhere but I don't have it handy.
The same Googledoc that has the list of all character names also has the list of all active-duty ship names. I mean, it doesn't have names for every last cargo ship, but that's probably because many of the cargo ships
have not been named. We've never encountered them in an after-action report, and their names matter very little to us.
We should focus on only building Freighters, Cargo Vessels, and Super Freighters this time. The refits can wait.
Let's
not overreact to our situation by frantically cramming in transport builds and nothing else and forgetting all our existing plans. Having an effective, high-performance fleet is important, and refits don't increase the total logistical burden of Starfleet in the long run so they're certainly not making our problems worse.
Especially since we pay a political will cost for building more than a few such ships in our own berths.
So, got time to actually type something in now.
Going from the last couple of GBZ reports, the Cardassians trying to get through to Syndraxian space have been mostly running into Task Force 6, so I'm assuming TF 6 is in the core-ward area of GBZ while TF 1 is hanging around the Federation claimed areas in rim-ward GBZ. Unfortunately, we just stole Nash's Excelsior to ward off space nomads.
We replaced it; her new explorer flagship is the USS
Sojourner.
Given what is happening to the Red faction (pro-Cardassia), I'm guessing the Cardies will need to get a sizeable load of troops through, as there is a lot of people that are nominally in their camp getting murdered. Hostile factions have a strong claim over (what is left of) the Syndraxian Navy, so those troops transports will need a reasonably large escort, or risk taking unacceptable losses for no benefit.
If I were the Cardassians I wouldn't even try this, except as a 'humanitarian' convoy sent to evacuate large numbers of key VIPs with prior Federation consent. Any large fleet they send to Sydraxian space will be subject to resistance and counterattacks against its supply line. Even if they bash through our territory by pushing aside one or more of our task forces, they'd be arriving in Sydraxian territory with damaged ships and a diminished fleet, and they'd be arriving in the middle of a civil war. Not a recipe for success. Nor can they easily deploy enough ground personnel to make much of a dent in any ongoing conflict compared to the sheer numbers of the Sydraxians themselves.
With occupying, say, Bajor, they have the advantage that their ships can fly to and from the planet in question without interruption, building up their forces over time. Here, only the most heavily escorted Cardassian convoys imaginable could get through the Gabriel Expanse at all, and the risk of harassment would still be considerable.
