[X][NAME1] Spirit
[X][NAME2] Opportunity
To be honest. Despite what the Pacifists might think. I don't think the war will end unless one side is in orbit of the others homeword and has total supremacy of the surrounding space. The Cardassians will keep coming unless we do something about it.
If the Cardassians think they're losing, they will seek to make peace. It is likely that the Federation government will be in favor of letting that happen. I don't even disapprove, because most of our conflicts with the Cardassians are over territory or resources. It's usually not worth risking millions of lives, even
enemy lives, just to fight over territory or resources.
The Ashalla Pact, or at least the parts we're worried about, would be likely to fall apart naturally if the Cardassians actually lose a war. There's no way the Dawiar, Sydraxians, or Yrillians will want to hang around loyally with a bunch of people whose sole claim to fame is their hardass ability to win wars and Get Shit Done.... Not after they fail to actually win or get shit done. We don't need to make this part of the peace treaty, really, it's just gonna
happen, especially because the Cardassian allies bordering our space are likely to sign separate peace treaties with us after we overrun their space.
The only thing I'd really like to secure from the Cardassians in a war,
directly, is the guaranteed neutrality of Bajor. I think preventing the Occupation from growing into its full horror is important and worthwhile.
Thing is... I don't even want Bajor as a Federation member. Because unless they shake off the caste system on their own, it probably won't work. I just don't want Bajor to belong to Cardassia. I'd be perfectly happy with an agreement by which both sides agree on the planet as official neutral territory where they will abstain from firing weapons, sending any kind of troops, or otherwise interfering in local governance.
Everything else that I might want to demand from Cardassia is purely a cynical attempt to make Cardassia weaker and the Federation stronger. What are we going to do, take over their border starbases and mining colonies? Will we make the Cardassians sign over colonies to us, then have to deal with a sort of demented anti-Maquis of Cardassian colonists who refused to leave?
Again, the only reason to do this is to weaken Cardassia- but we've basically just established that the Cardassians aren't actually strong enough to conquer the Federation. We don't have an urgent
need to weaken them.
Nash almost certainly didn't serve under Kirk. I'm actually willing to just assert that she never even met The Man until time travel schenans happened
Yeah- that's a good start. But it's like, our best crop of officers circa 2330 is hopefully going to include a lot of people who served with Nash
and T'Lorel
and Eaton
and Thuir
and Straak and so on. We don't know who the other 'great captains' of the late 23rd century were, on the whole, but we can reasonably infer that they existed.
I meant 'Yes, take the free ships.'
Well, I'm not sure they're free as such, I think we have to pay for them in some way...?
Since The Konan were invaded and conquered by the Cardassians we might have a possible ally in them if we promise them their freedom once the war with the Cardassians begins.
This might actually work. On the other hand, it's likely that the current Konen government was put in place by the Cardassians and may depend on the Cardassians' favor for its continued survival. Certainly that's the usual Cardassian
modus operandi with conquered puppet states.
So if we make the offer to the
current Konen leaders, they may respond with a telepathic message about how thoroughly we can go... uh, do things we don't want to do.
we might have Parity with the Cardassians in terms of numbers but AFAIK we have been blooding our ships as fast as possible and transferring crews from Blooded ships to spread the experience around like we did with the crew for the Enterprise B.
That doesn't work.
Breaking up a Blooded crew among several ships doesn't get you several blooded ships. It would, at best, get you several ships with like +2 XP each.
It only worked with
Enterprise because we had an entire intact crew that could be broken up (we didn't need to leave anyone behind to fly the
Enterprise herself). And because
Enterprise was already Elite, with crew so good that even transferring a third of them to another ship would make a major difference in the performance of that other ship.
I don't think its the same for the Cardassians since AFAIK they haven't been fighting anywhere except for the GBZ and there can only be so many ships there at a time unless the Cardassians decide to make the GBZ a hot zone in which case we start sending more ships there. And that includes sending the ships that were just commissioned into the fleet to the GBZ as well.
We get most of our XP from
event checks, not from fighting battles. Some of the ships we've had 'ding' and level up have NEVER fought in a major battle as far as I can recall.
Our only Blooded ships that got veterancy through a war were
Challorn,
Kumari, and
Yukikaze, through service in the Biophage campaign. And they got it because of omakes and because we voted for them, not because they picked up a pile of XP.
Docana fought in the Biophage campaign, but she didn't earn Blooded status until over ten years later, after many successful event checks.
Cheron sat out the Biophage crisis because she was in the hospital- but she has that Old School Connie ability to kick ass on event checks, which nets her XP.
Bull and
Gale are
Centaurs that, again, leveled up by grinding away at one event check after another. Most of our other ships.
Thirishar leveled up too, by the power of "if at first you don't succeed at event checks, try, try again."
So far, every ship that has leveled up through any process other than QM fiat or player-voted awards, leveled up after grinding experience via event checks.
...
So in addition to the fact that our ships don't actually get XP from fighting, but rather from event checks, there's another issue- our leveled-up ships are few in number, and not overwhelmingly powerful with the exception of the Veteran/Elite ships in the Explorer Corps (who rarely participate in fleet battles).
Challorn, a blooded
Constellation (soon to be refitted if not already refitted) has Combat 4 Hull 3 Shields... 3 or 4, I don't remember if the refit boosts shields. Either way, barely a match for a gun
Takaaki, let alone a
Jaldun-class cruiser. The Cardies don't need a superior crew to beat her. Likewise for our three Blooded
Centaurs,
Yukikaze, Bull, and
Gale. None of them are reliably going to beat a Cardassian heavy in a fight, and even Cardassian frigates are still strong enough that the Blooded
Centaur-As don't outclass them.
The only ships we have that can use their veterancy to bully individual Cardassian units are, again,
explorers. Which are already more powerful than any single Cardassian unit except their pair of hangar-queen battlecruisers, and which just get to open the performance gap even wider by taking advantage of veterancy.
