Can I ask which posts this "Federation colonies are being enslaved on a regular basis" idea comes from? I've re-read the last several retrospectives and I'm just not finding anything that extreme. There are pirates on the frontier, and "random humans leave the Federation and discover that this is a mistake" is a classic plot, but I'm not finding that we're constantly failing people inside the UFP.
I, personally, infer that piracy within our borders is very likely to see an uptick in the aftermath of a hard, bloody war that's seen our fleet size notably diminish. As for the colonies, I'd imagine that's also something of an inference to Klingon glory (after all, capturing and subduing a 'Federation planet', even if it's only an outpost, is a good mark in a Klingon captain's record, I would imagine). I'd be perfectly content to be proven wrong.
Can I ask which posts this "Federation colonies are being enslaved on a regular basis" idea comes from? I've re-read the last several retrospectives and I'm just not finding anything that extreme. There are pirates on the frontier, and "random humans leave the Federation and discover that this is a mistake" is a classic plot, but I'm not finding that we're constantly failing people inside the UFP.
The qm has said there has been a lot of pirate attacks that the navy have not been able to respond to, and no one has said about whole planets being enslaved?
The qm has said there has been a lot of pirate attacks that the navy have not been able to respond to, and no one has said about whole planets being enslaved?
Yes, there will certainly be an uptick in piracy after the war, and during, given that we have bigger fish to fry, that's to be expected. However, there have in fact been several people claiming that entire federation colonies are getting enslaved in the last several pages.
The qm has said there has been a lot of pirate attacks that the navy have not been able to respond to, and no one has said about whole planets being enslaved?
There's a WORLD of difference between a competent but peaceful underdog against a bloodthirsty empire built on conquest, and what we got. Starfleet was so utterly LAX that they routinely let Colonies get de facto if not de jure enslaved by Pirates. They were so lax that most colonies would never ever see a Starfleet vessel. That's not competency. That's not utopia. That withering corruption at best.
Our Navy was a JOKE, a bad one at that. Outdated, outnumbered, underfunded and lacking personel. It was not the elite. It was a social club playing at being a navy and failing to fulfill even basic responsibilities even before the Klingons kicked its shit in with appalling ease. That does not match up to Star Trek representation of Starfleet at all.
It's a 4 year war, and we just got through the half way mark.
Can't wait to see the end of the dramatic turn around point battle, watch the Klingon political machine turn to shambles and the next tranche of Excaliburs come out.
And wow, it's seriously a theme that the heroic captains keep the Federation going despite the leadership, rather than because of the leadership, isn't it?
They are probably due for their annual body snatches/hive mind/ telepathic control/ ethical high horse check up.
I feel like a portion of our current argumentation stems from our spectator seat on the actual conflict. During the Romulan War we had multiple times to hastily develop wartime designs on the fly. Bit janky yes, but we had a chance to do our part.
This time around we're on the sidelines and playing with a science ship that will likely see use post-war. Even just a chance to have a say on some of the wartime refits of our prior designs would have been nice and potentially cool in a "oh no, the consequences of our actions" sense as the lack of a back-compatible warp 8 drive means a need for compromises and workarounds. But it would be ones we confront ourselves as part of the war.
Being able to stamp out a emergency wartime stopgap cruiser like the Ares class could be a thing to get re-involved. Maybe something we could do after this battle of Andoria?
But we were running high on the Excaliburs, and thought we had this in the bag.
Edit: It might have been cool to do an emergency redesign from science ship to pure war? The ability to land and drop troops would be cool, but probably limited compared to just firing stun phasers from orbit
So some people are overreacting but who would have thought with the implication that a core federation world got some it's cities torpedoed, that there would not be any like it seems either the Navy didn't voice it's concerns about the overreaching colonizing projects or just believed that they could some how police it with so few ships, like to me it's not a question of how this war happened it's more how the navy let there combat readiness just rot?
At some point the people in charge of Starfleet's budget allocation from the Federation's GDP need to be sat down and have explained to them that: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv1spjsvu-A
One thing the other factions in star trek do that Starfleet doesn't, is generalist ships that are presumably on the cheaper end. Starfleet either builds specialized ships, or ships with a small handful of roles, it doesn't ever go full generalist except with the Miranda.
Though I would argue that Starfleets issue is not related to available ships at all actually, and its rather more the fact that Starfleet is staffed by extremely competent people who generally would much rather be exploring space or inventing something than fighting a war. They don't want to be on generalist or military oriented ships, the ship we are building now, the xeno-botany one, is going to be the ship Starfleet officers would rather crew- its the prestige position that a lot of science officers probably want. If we want to build a ship design that buffs the federation in wartime, we have to get around that somehow.
One thing the other factions in star trek do that Starfleet doesn't, is generalist ships that are presumably on the cheaper end. Starfleet either builds specialized ships, or ships with a small handful of roles, it doesn't ever go full generalist except with the Miranda.
Though I would argue that Starfleets issue is not related to available ships at all actually, and its rather more the fact that Starfleet is staffed by extremely competent people who generally would much rather be exploring space or inventing something than fighting a war. They don't want to be on generalist or military oriented ships, the ship we are building now, the xeno-botany one, is going to be the ship Starfleet officers would rather crew- its the prestige position that a lot of science officers probably want. If we want to build a ship design that buffs the federation in wartime, we have to get around that somehow.
Our explicit issue is that we are building tiny tranches of ships for the size of what we are doing, we need a fleet of hundreds of starships to adequately cover the Federation with some redundancy, we had 150ish at the start of this due mainly to the fact that Starfleet's budget is set by core world elected officials whom, bar the Vulcans, have not known hardship in living memory. This means that we just cannot respond to emergencies like pirate attacks with any sort of celerity without then uncovering a different area for pirates to strike at while the ship that left to respond to the emergency is enroute.
We simply need more ships and we just aren't given the budget to do so, the core worlds need their bread and circuses you know?
The Andorian Navy alone had 3 Excaliburs to the UFP's 12, so it's not entirely implausible that part of Starfleet having low number of ships was that the member nations had, uh, a lot more fleet% than the Federation proper.
The Excalibur was ordered in an initial block of four, constructed in parallel between 2234 and 2236: Excalibur, Enterprise, Curtana, and Durandal. The ships proved to be of major tactical benefit to Starfleet's general roster, being both more heavily shielded than the Newton and substantially more dangerous. After a year-long shakedown that resolved problems with the new torpedo launchers and further streamlined the thruster assemblies a further order of eight ships were made: Tizona, Caladbolg, Joyeuse, Kusanagi, Clarent, Hauteclere, Tyrfing, and Hrunting. All were commissioned in 2239 and entered full service the following year.
The outbreak of open war with the Klingon Empire in the spring of 2240 threw Starfleet on the back foot, and further orders of starships with secondary tactical roles were suspended. Instead in 2241 a further six Excalibur-class vessels were ordered and entered production, those being Dyrnwyn, Damocles, Dainsleif, Gram, Naegling, and Fragarach. The crash-builds saw the ships launch in late 2243 in time for the counteroffensive of early 2244.
So, Starfleet initially produced 4 Excaliburs (2234-2236), then was able to produce a further 8 Excaliburs (2239-2240). With a build time per ship of '2 years' and a capacity of '8', open warfare with the Klingons have the Excalibur on a crash-build run be built at 6 at a rate of.. 3 years? (2241-2243). Federation war production at crashbuild rates are at 2/year versus 4/year at peacetime rates. No other ships were being built; What happened?
I mean, maybe. But frankly there's only one thing I care about with the mark 4 nacelle. I mean, yeah, I'll grant the Callie's insane sprint speed has opened up a whole new spectrum of tactical options and has generally been much more satisfying than expected- but A) it was tuned so hard for sprint because cruise was capped, and B) it doesn't wash out the sour taste leftover from too goddamn many sprint-tuned builds for no reason.
The one thing I want out of the Mk4 nacelles is cruise speed. Literally the only thing I care about, and will shill for, and vote for, and argue for, and so on. I have been waaaaaaaaaiting for a cruise optimized ship. We're all more or less expecting the first ship with the Mk4 nacelles to be the new heavy explorer, the one triggered by the Callies' postwar losses. We're all- well, a lot of us- looking forward to vertical nacelles. Gimme some goddamn cruise nacelles for our cruise-configuration long-range cruising ship. Please for the love of god.
Look, if the stunning success of the Callies' sprint speed says anything, it says that "being really, REALLY good at SOMETHING is powerful." Let's make a really, really fast cruising ship. Especially for an explorer- even if you're not going crazy far, just yet, the benefits in terms of "time spent studying fuckin' quasars" versus "time spent going to the next quasar" are massive.
The Klingons explicitly have advantages in power generation and weapons technology.
Not in material science, or computer technology, or in sensor technology, or drive technology or shield technology.
Tiny point of order: they do, actually, have a massive lead in shield tech, but UFP/Starfleet's vessels are just a lot bigger, and so between their tech advantage and our mass advantage, shield strength comes out about even in practice.
Really agree. Like imagine being the prime minister of Austria and waking up one morning to hear that, say, Slovenia has united Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kosovo, and you're getting invaded by the Balkan Empire. That's about the level of political whatthefuckery that was involved in the Klingons all moving on a single target at once. Did we know they collectively outclassed us to a hilarious degree if they ever got their act together? Oh hell yes. Did literally anyone expect them to get their act together? EVER? Absolutely the fuck not.
Starfleet wasn't close to surpassing the Klingons, but the Federation's population and tech advancement was at least rapidly approaching them, and if that did happen then Starfleet surpassing them could only really be a generation later at most. Remember, we started out close to two full generations of tech behind them (on average, of course; there's a LOT of variation in particular techs) and as of the start of the war were behind on average by less than one and the Federation had only existed for- what- seventy years?
THE KLINGONS ARE NOT PEER OPPONENTS. The Klingons are overwhelmingly superior opponents. We are the scrappy underdogs here and we would be even with a reasonable defense budget because the Empire is just THAT MUCH older, better, and BIGGER than us.
seeming DECADES of rampant Colony abuse where if your colony was not a key resource extraction node you were at best ignored by everyone at worst enslaved by pirates in all but name because Starfleet never even bothered
Can I ask which posts this "Federation colonies are being enslaved on a regular basis" idea comes from? I've re-read the last several retrospectives and I'm just not finding anything that extreme. There are pirates on the frontier, and "random humans leave the Federation and discover that this is a mistake" is a classic plot, but I'm not finding that we're constantly failing people inside the UFP.
I have literally no idea where this comes from either- I kinda expect it to happen briefly in the aftermath of the war, yeah, but it's pretty damn clear that piracy on the Federations' frontiers did not existas a meaningful problem between the second decade of the Cygnus-class' existence and the mid-2200s when the Orion Syndicate got their act together:
Over the next two decades, Starfleet would commission twenty eight starships of the Cygnus-class, practically all of which never set foot outside Federation-claimed space. But what they accomplished was nonetheless transformative.
The first task of the Cygnus was to completely expunge piracy from Federation territory, a task that had essentially been completed along the main trade lanes by the increased presence of the Andorian and Vulcan member fleets, both now willing to draw down longterm military deployments and redistribute them to constructive ends. But this did not account for the long-standing Naussican and Orion presences near the outer colonies, which were often subject to protection rackets and exploitation of the raw materials they produced. These were not the profit-focused and criminal enterprises of the Orion Syndicate that would necessarily come to characterise piracy in the 23rd century against the proactive response of Starfleet, and precisely because of this opportunistic and squatting lifestyle they proved unable to mount a real resistance.
Sure, things aren't quite as spotless as they were for a while there, but while pirates out on the fringes inevitably exist, and they might get to run amok for five or ten or twelve years after the war, in the leadup to it everything was still generally totally fine.
it's clear our efforts to improve the Federation's economy have made a difference. It's also clear from the price tag that Starfleet is taking things extremely seriously.
A lot of the complaints people are making in this thread are just factually wrong, and it's getting frustrating at this point. There are a lot of reasons we wound up in this war, and it's not just because the rest of Starfleet is asleep at the wheel.
Hard agree. It's not even mostly because the rest of Starfleet is asleep at the wheel. And thanks for posting the price and class size comparison table. Hopefully people will keep it in mind more often.
Our explicit issue is that we are building tiny tranches of ships for the size of what we are doing, we need a fleet of hundreds of starships to adequately cover the Federation with some redundancy, we had 150ish at the start of this due mainly to the fact that Starfleet's budget is set by core world elected officials whom, bar the Vulcans, have not known hardship in living memory.
Could you please point to a post in which we were told this? Yes, it's true, we don't have enough ships, that part I'm not going to dispute. What I absolutely will dispute is the second part of your argument here, that this is all the fault of the weak elected officials who don't know that they need to make hard choices, like building warships, instead of "bread and circuses" for the core worlds. I don't think we've been given any indication of that by Sayle even once. Frankly, this is the argument that gets advanced by the endless succession of TNG and DS9 era badmirals who keep trying coups because they "know better," and it's pretty disheartening to see it picked up by so many people.
What we have been told instead is that we expanded quickly, there haven't been enough ships to go around, and that the Klingons are currently in a position of strength relative to us that they are unlikely to attain again. Their current victories required Romulan aid, a huge buildup of loot, and a remarkably effective leader to unite the great houses.
To the argument that our ships haven't been sufficiently tactically focused, I would point out that of our current generation of designs, only a single ship (the Archer-class engineering support cruiser) got less than a B-rating, and that had a C-, which we can assume to mean "somewhat below average." We have hulls that are outdated, and we don't have enough hulls, but frankly the Klingons also have quite a few obsolete ships in these fights, and we're already building ships that are perfectly competent warships. We just need more hulls, and I think the idea that the Federation Council is sabotaging us to prevent us from having them is pretty silly. The canon Federation, and even much more militarized versions of it (see TNG: Yesterday's Enterprise, where every Starfleet officer carries a sidearm and they call the Enterprise a battleship) repeatedly came close to losing wars with the Klingons, and we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves in a similarly tough spot! The Klingons are big, powerful, and obsessed with war! Ultimately, there's no point to writing something where we just win all the time, it's more exciting if we're put in a bad position from time to time. We're almost certainly about to see how our last design, the Excalibur, brings the turn of the tide, and lets us take the offensive, just like we did when the commerce raiding started.
Meanwhile, we're working on a new science ship, which looks like she'll have a very respectable armament, and I expect that trend to continue, especially now that our ships are large enough for that to not seriously cut into their primary mission space.
Edit on Connie build numbers: While my headcanon would be higher than 12 on total canon-Connie build numbers, I think it's a pretty reasonable number. What is not a reasonable number, given everything else we know and what we see in TOS, is the 100+ hull names and registries that show up in the TOS technical manual. I love the TOS tech manual, I read it a bunch as a kid, it's sitting on a bookshelf near me as I write this. I love all the Connie names that are given in it. But the actual numbers don't make sense, even internally to the universe of just the technical manual. There's far too many hulls in that one section, with every other Starfleet ship listed having far smaller production runs, even when the ships are much smaller. Further, not a single one of the later ones is ever listed as having been lost in action. My take is that the tech manual provides a good list of potential names and registries for Starfleet ships, and maybe even for a maximum size interpretation of Starfleet if the other classes were scaled appropriately, but that in all other cases, those huge later flights of ships should just be ignored.
The Andorian Navy alone had 3 Excaliburs to the UFP's 12, so it's not entirely implausible that part of Starfleet having low number of ships was that the member nations had, uh, a lot more fleet% than the Federation proper.
Edit:
What is odd to me, though, is this:
So, Starfleet initially produced 4 Excaliburs (2234-2236), then was able to produce a further 8 Excaliburs (2239-2240). With a build time per ship of '2 years' and a capacity of '8', open warfare with the Klingons have the Excalibur on a crash-build run be built at 6 at a rate of.. 3 years? (2241-2243). Federation war production at crashbuild rates are at 2/year versus 4/year at peacetime rates. No other ships were being built; What happened?
In wartime, larger, longer lead time ships are often deprioritized in favor of getting partially built ships out the door. Additionally, the infrastructure of shipbuilding is also the infrastructure of ship maintenance, and under construction ships are also prime spare parts depots - see the #5 iowa-class getting heavily delayed and then cancelled because one of the complete sisters needed a new bow, ASAP.
If they scaled up Excalibur production significantly then more could have been built, but I'd guess they're turning up the newton lines in order to get as many budget shitbuckets out the door as possible instead.
Our explicit issue is that we are building tiny tranches of ships for the size of what we are doing, we need a fleet of hundreds of starships to adequately cover the Federation with some redundancy, we had 150ish at the start of this due mainly to the fact that Starfleet's budget is set by core world elected officials whom, bar the Vulcans, have not known hardship in living memory. This means that we just cannot respond to emergencies like pirate attacks with any sort of celerity without then uncovering a different area for pirates to strike at while the ship that left to respond to the emergency is enroute.
We simply need more ships and we just aren't given the budget to do so, the core worlds need their bread and circuses you know?
That doesn't really seem to stand up to scrutiny, though. The Klingon fleet at Andoria is explicitly the greatest concentration of military force they have ever assembled, and it consists of 22 D7, ~36 D6, and ~80 birds of prey. The Federation in contrast has 19 modern cruisers and 4 Vulcan explorators, along with dozens of other cruiser or frigate weight ships which outclass the birds of prey that make up the bulk of the Klingon fleet. These are not hugely disparate forces here; our modern core is better than theirs, but their older bulk ships are better than ours. We just don't build as small as they do, so we can't build as many ships.
A bunch of people are freaking out about how we're so under armed, but we already know that Starfleet defeats the greatest Klingon fleet in history and then launches a counter-offensive to retake lost territory. Considering that we're a much younger power with explicitly worse technology, that's not bad at all. If we had made the warp 8 core backwards compatible or just put more guns on our old ships, this battle would probably be a slaughter.
Like, what the do you want, for Starfleet to be able to overmatch the older, more advanced empire that places a huge emphasis on their military prowess? We took all the ships we had and threw them at all the ships they could send, and we won.
Could you please point to a post in which we were told this? Yes, it's true, we don't have enough ships, that part I'm not going to dispute. What I absolutely will dispute is the second part of your argument here, that this is all the fault of the weak elected officials who don't know that they need to make hard choices, like building warships, instead of "bread and circuses" for the core worlds. I don't think we've been given any indication of that by Sayle even once. Frankly, this is the argument that gets advanced by the endless succession of TNG and DS9 era badmirals who keep trying coups because they "know better," and it's pretty disheartening to see it picked up by so many people.
What we have been told instead is that we expanded quickly, there haven't been enough ships to go around, and that the Klingons are currently in a position of strength relative to us that they are unlikely to attain again. Their current victories required Romulan aid, a huge buildup of loot, and a remarkably effective leader to unite the great houses.
To the argument that our ships haven't been sufficiently tactically focused, I would point out that of our current generation of designs, only a single ship (the Archer-class engineering support cruiser) got less than a B-rating, and that had a C-, which we can assume to mean "somewhat below average." We have hulls that are outdated, and we don't have enough hulls, but frankly the Klingons also have quite a few obsolete ships in these fights, and we're already building ships that are perfectly competent warships. We just need more hulls, and I think the idea that the Federation Council is sabotaging us to prevent us from having them is pretty silly. The canon Federation, and even much more militarized versions of it (see TNG: Yesterday's Enterprise, where every Starfleet officer carries a sidearm and they call the Enterprise a battleship) repeatedly came close to losing wars with the Klingons, and we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves in a similarly tough spot! The Klingons are big, powerful, and obsessed with war! Ultimately, there's no point to writing something where we just win all the time, it's more exciting if we're put in a bad position from time to time. We're almost certainly about to see how our last design, the Excalibur, brings the turn of the tide, and lets us take the offensive, just like we did when the commerce raiding started.
Meanwhile, we're working on a new science ship, which looks like she'll have a very respectable armament, and I expect that trend to continue, especially now that our ships are large enough for that to not seriously cut into their primary mission space.
Who the hell is advocating for a coup?!?? And one of the problems I have is Like by the the navy leadership either didn't stop the colonizing over expansion even when they knew they couldn't protect much of it if a war actually happened, or they somehow believed they could protect it with so few ships.
In wartime, larger, longer lead time ships are often deprioritized in favor of getting partially built ships out the door. Additionally, the infrastructure of shipbuilding is also the infrastructure of ship maintenance, and under construction ships are also prime spare parts depots - see the #5 iowa-class getting heavily delayed and then cancelled because one of the complete sisters needed a new bow, ASAP.
If they scaled up Excalibur production significantly then more could have been built, but I'd guess they're turning up the newton lines in order to get as many budget shitbuckets out the door as possible instead.
Newtons were perfectly respectable as combat ships. A bigger problem was likely the need to do crash refits of Keas and other older ships to put in the new phasers to help counter the swarms of Birds of Prey
Not for nothing was the 23rd century considered the Golden Age of Orion Piracy, where criminal extortion was common and sometimes the orbits were contested not by criminals and Starfleet but criminals and other criminals.
Could you please point to a post in which we were told this? Yes, it's true, we don't have enough ships, that part I'm not going to dispute. What I absolutely will dispute is the second part of your argument here, that this is all the fault of the weak elected officials who don't know that they need to make hard choices, like building warships, instead of "bread and circuses" for the core worlds. I don't think we've been given any indication of that by Sayle even once. Frankly, this is the argument that gets advanced by the endless succession of TNG and DS9 era badmirals who keep trying coups because they "know better," and it's pretty disheartening to see it picked up by so many people.
I helpfully highlighted and underlined your putting words in my mouth, since you felt the need to flanderize what I said to fit your argument.
My argument was the Starfleets actual factual budget is SET BY THE FEDERATION COUNCIL, of whom currently all or near all member are from the core Federation members who, living in the core systems of the Federation, never see any of the shit happening on the frontier unless they explicitly go looking for it. Nothing about "hard choices, like building warships, instead of "bread and circuses" for the core worlds" I specifically said STARSHIPS in general, please take the time to read before altering what was said.
Like, what the do you want, for Starfleet to be able to overmatch the older, more advanced empire that places a huge emphasis on their military prowess? We took all the ships we had and threw them at all the ships they could send, and we won.
My complaint is pretty simple, we keep getting increase obligations and responsibilities due to the actions of the Federation gov, without corresponding increased budget and infrastructure to actually service said responsibilities and obligations. Instead we have an multiplicatively expanding area of responsibility with mostly linear growth in ability to do so.
