Okay, I FINALLY have time to actually review the... OMG... pages of discussion and talk about this?
ON THE TACTICS
Hmm... I have a suspicion Nash going on the offensive is exactly how the Konen expect her to react. Granted, I may be overestimating them, but still, it seems plausible that they would seek to play such mind games.
What if we send Nash reinforcements / material for digging in, but also orders not to attack? Instead, let's instruct her to come up with something... more creative. A trap of some sort. Maybe get a few more of our more inventive officers on the case.
I know, not much of a plan at this point. But it's food for thought.
Bear in mind that rescuing the hundreds of people being held captive by either the Cardassians or the Konen (both torture-happy species) is a priority here. Trapping the Konen ships is a great idea but it doesn't address that issue.
Also, the Konen may expect Nash to attack, but they wouldn't be the first people to misestimate or underestimate her...
Once again we simply lack the ships to make a difference. Why does Starfleet always get the short end of the stick when it comes a the Federation's democratic system.
We actually seem to outweigh the Ashalla Pact forces pretty significantly (if the Dylaarians aren't counted). I don't understand where people get the idea that we're
helpless here.
Yes. I keep looking for when we vote to green light member fleets, but I can't see it. (Prob just missed it)
No one else has signed up to jump into that cauldron in the last few years. We don't have magic abilities to
MAKE people agree to participate in a war zone for a share of the (susceptible to Cardassian attack) loot.
So, we are letting our dislike of President Kit Kat getting the better of us? guys, again, we got blindsided, if those charges were inside the Republic, and I think they were, we have an Obsidian Order problem somewhere inside our Gabriel Expanse forces, probably in the logistics tail as it is the easier way of getting something inside one of our ships.
We need that issue taken care of before we can go on the offensive, lest we risk opening ourselves to raids while we conduct our counter attack.
I really, Really, want to pummel the cardies over this, but at this point the risk is a tad too high and seem to outstrip any possible advantage
If the Cardassians have managed to sabotage
all our ships, or even most of them, the odds of their saboteurs being detected go up exponentially.
I mean, it's actually far from unheard of in Star Trek for someone to covertly smuggle something nasty onto one ship. Things can
teleport in Star Trek. It's not necessarily that hard. But if they were doing this to all our ships, including explorers with excellent sensor suites and science teams and very large crews,
someone would have spotted it.
I strongly suspect this was a one-off. The Cardassians sabotaged
Republic using a trick that wouldn't have worked if they tried it a dozen times, sort of like how we probably couldn't have gotten away with sneaking into a dozen Cardassian outpost systems back in the oughts and blowing up a dozen of their installations using solar flares. Sooner or later they'd have worked out what we did and how to counter it, if we spammed the technique.
Furthermore, it's safe to assume that the Gabriel Border Zone fleet's security and intelligence officers, who are not
utter idiots, will be running a great many sweeps and checks and reviews of their own. If the Cardassians have implemented a widespread program of sabotage somehow, I suspect they're going to get caught really fast.
ON THE POLITICS
i would rather not get fired nor have nash go off the reservation.
Does nobody give a damn about Trump!Cat firing Sulu!? We know from previous experience that she'll do it.
Basically, I don't consider leaving potentially about 300 people in Konen hands acceptable if there's a realistic chance of rescuing them. I don't consider getting Admiral Sulu fired over this to be that much of a drawback, though I think it would be a
spectacular example of President N'Gir being gratuitously antagonistic to the playerbase.
I mean, I like having Sulu in charge, but that's because Sulu is
awesome. If Sulu stops being willing to command daring actions and bold moves, he's... not awesome any more. I'd feel like he was selling out. I'd rather replace him than accept that.
If we get fired can we go on record saying that using politics to justify ignoring an attack on the Federation is no different than selling the lives of starfleet on a whim of convenience?
Also inebriated so my explanation is borked I think.
Honestly, I agree with this. The Federation's external enemies are under no obligation to abstain from attacking at inconvenient moments in the Federation's election cycle. Indeed, the opposite is arguably true; they have every reason to do exactly that. If the Council accepts the precedent that it's fundamentally
wrong for Starfleet to launch a counterattack in an established war zone shortly before the Core Four hold their elections, then we can confidently expect foreign to play
all kinds of shenanigans in the runup to the 2324 elections, in the full expectation that we'll be afraid to do anything about it.
Yeah but like, would you do this if Stesk was president?
It's such a political quagmire for murky benefit I am not sure it's worth it.
Would Stesk fire us for endangering his political career?
We might refrain by ourselves due to not want to throw a shadow on his next election, but would the current threat of firing exist?
If Stesk were president, we likely wouldn't
be in the Gabriel Expanse to begin with. Stesk would have insisted on some kind of partition agreement- and if the Pacifist Party had enough leverage to make Stesk president, they'd likely succeed in finding a way to make this happen. This situation wouldn't have arisen.
Now, the situation we'd have instead might or might not be "better" from our point of view. We might see colony sites ceded to the Ashalla Pact, or the Cardassians given uncontested access to resources we think we could stop them from getting. But it wouldn't be quite the same.
N'Gir, by contrast, seems pretty much content to bask in the political advantages of having Starfleet on the warpath in the Gabriel Expanse (lots of opportunities for development, potential 'pork' for member races willing to take a sliceof the pie). She doesn't want us out of the Expanse... she just doesn't want us undertaking major military operations during campaign season.
I'm not very sympathetic to this attitude. Once you declare a free-fire zone, you can't expect the enemy to just sit down and be quiet because it would be politically awkward to fight them right then. Nor can you just let them do whatever they want during the election season. If you're not prepared to take those risks,
get out of the free-fire zone.
Basically, this is only a political quagmire because it's a politically explosive
event. The event was not of our choosing; we're not the ones who decided to have a bunch of torturing aliens sabotage one of our ships and kidnap the crew.
