KlavoHunter
THOU SHALT WORSHIP NO GODS ABOVE ENTERPRISE!
Slipped this into Runabouts For Blind Disabled Orphans bill, and the Council rubber-stamped a tranche of 30 without even looking twice!
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Slipped this into Runabouts For Blind Disabled Orphans bill, and the Council rubber-stamped a tranche of 30 without even looking twice!
- Location
- Australia
It feels like what got the Federation wasn't stupidity, but culture shock.
No, seriously.
If you've ever experienced it, it's a strange sensation. It's the moment of realisation that even though everything on the surface made sense, actually everything underlying the decision is profoundly different and a decision or act gets made that conflicts completely with your expectations. It feels weird and wrong and breaks your brain until you can create a new framework of thinking.
From what we've been told, Starfleet knew what was going on, and the think tank very carefully weighed up all the factors and decided what the optimum responses for the Klingons would be, and prepared to counter them.
But they didn't actually grok the Klingons at all. There wasn't an actual understanding of the priorities, drives and needs of the Klingon political animal.
They went "The Klingons think just like us, just with more war. They are good at war. The best war decisions for them to take are X, y, z. Prepare"
But they do not think like us. And now on two major occasions starfleet has prepared for what a warlike starfleet would do in the Klingon position instead of what Klingons would do in the Klingon position.
This isn't stupidity. It's a lack of true experience working with aliens, with a touch of naivety. And the cost hurts absolutely.
I think the only real solution is time and funnily enough, empathy. You can't predict what you can't understand.
No, seriously.
If you've ever experienced it, it's a strange sensation. It's the moment of realisation that even though everything on the surface made sense, actually everything underlying the decision is profoundly different and a decision or act gets made that conflicts completely with your expectations. It feels weird and wrong and breaks your brain until you can create a new framework of thinking.
From what we've been told, Starfleet knew what was going on, and the think tank very carefully weighed up all the factors and decided what the optimum responses for the Klingons would be, and prepared to counter them.
But they didn't actually grok the Klingons at all. There wasn't an actual understanding of the priorities, drives and needs of the Klingon political animal.
They went "The Klingons think just like us, just with more war. They are good at war. The best war decisions for them to take are X, y, z. Prepare"
But they do not think like us. And now on two major occasions starfleet has prepared for what a warlike starfleet would do in the Klingon position instead of what Klingons would do in the Klingon position.
This isn't stupidity. It's a lack of true experience working with aliens, with a touch of naivety. And the cost hurts absolutely.
I think the only real solution is time and funnily enough, empathy. You can't predict what you can't understand.
So, fire the poor excuses of intelligence spooks we currently have and try to find people actually good at this stuff. Got it. Not just meme'ing here, our intelligence guys have consistently been awful.
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
The trouble with this is that Earth has had contact with the Klingons for about ninety years at this point, and other Federation members have had contact with the Klingons for longer.
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Actually, never mind, Qo'noS has had surreptitious contact with Earth, and a foundational effect on important parts of its culture, since at least the 1620s
Actually, never mind, Qo'noS has had surreptitious contact with Earth, and a foundational effect on important parts of its culture, since at least the 1620s
It's a bit over the top. Our intelligence agencies right now, while being on the same planet and both sides being human, routinely misinterpret and completely miss the ball on "enemy" thinking.
It's easy to see Starfleet messing up intelligence jobs. Not only are we trying to account for an alien culture, but you have at least four member races most likely not seeing the same thing from the same set of data and trying to juggle four different sets of priorities from that.
It's an expensive wake up call for command basically.
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A warp 7 ship, one that is going to be used for the large tasks of build defenses and rebuilding worlds. We're going to need something smaller for quick but vital deliveries. Because the Archer carries a lot more it's going to get missions prioritized based on how much it can carry and mission with less weight will get deprioritized for it. It's also SLOOOOOOOW, so for anything that requires a quick response it is entirely insufficient.
Because there's enough difference and variation on weapons we can pick and choose. Look at the Kea and how we are now forced to add a torpedo to every cruiser, end of discussion. We're allowed to make mistakes, but we're expected to pay for them or learn from them. Which given the eternal hand wringing on war bad, weapons bad, doesn't seem likely.
I'm aware that with the new Nacelle our Warp cruise and maximum warp will skyrocket, the issue issue is even on the Darwin where we took a relatively minor warp factor hit for the ability to make more of them easier and at less cost we have been inundated with complaints about how slow it is, how utterly unsuited it is to anything besides the sit on planet role, and how if we want a ship it need to be full expense and maximum speed or else it's not useful. Which is find asinine but people were legitimately arguing the Darwin was too slow to serve as a Hospital ship despite, you know, being our second fastest vessel. So you are going to have to fight against a deeply ingrained aversion to not spending absolutely everything and making numbers be the highest possible to make an affordable ship. Which is a herculean task.
Yes, but that would likely require years of refits and put such a vessel behind the curve, if Starfleet even bothers at all and doesn't make someone build a new one from scratch given how hyper focused we made a ship for a niche that's about to fall out of favor harder than horses did in favor for automobiles.
No. We literally have in the retrospective that surviving Swords that lived long enough to reach the refit were given new nacelles in their upgrade package. Also frankly, it'd be the peak of foolishness to make ships with a warp 8 engine not able to take the new nacelles that were literally designed for said engine.
The Hull design while odd isn't a deal breaker. We've seen Starfleet make odder or even downright silly designs work, and this ship is still the second fastest ship we have, or likely will have until the new nacelle drops and blows warp wide open.
As for the Romulans, all they did was help the D7 be better design than the D6, they have no dog in this fight, becuase the Klingons would turn on them for kill stealing if they did and cost the Leader his seat at the head of the table, with accusations of being a puppet being rampant. Because Klingons are just like that.
If you had been paying attention at all the two designs people proposed were either a Modern-day Shark patrol frigate, or what amounts to a either a less expensive Connie and/or a Curiosity and Cygnus smashed into an amalgam Decent at everything cruiser with modern tech. While the former is clos-ish the latter is not and you being sour grapes on us having to plan out what amounts to reconstructive surgery on the fleet while under threat by multiple hostile polities is dangerously close to being bait.
While this is true, the Klingons aren't someone we've just met. We've had dealing with them for a while now, and we should have at least some ideas of how they worked. Instead, Intelligence has missed the mark so badly on multiple occasions that at this point, any real life organization would be looking at a sharply slashed budget if not dissolution.
Thanks, that's really nice to know.
To be fair to Starfleet Intelligence, Klingon Great House politics have been a complete shitshow with lots of weak Chancellors who couldn't recentralise since the last Imperial Dynasty failed in the 2100s. This also had the happy side effect of being self-perpetuating, because the perpetual warfare kept the Empire focused inwards and fighting each other most of the time without a Chancellor strong enough to rein them in. Then weak Chancellors weren't respected or were deposed, repeat ad infinitum. For the vast majority of their spacefaring history the Klingons have been a Great Power in the region happy to throw down with big military expeditions into their neighbours, with the lack of organisation up until the Federation/Klingon Wars being pretty atypical. It's a bit like how for most of human history China has usually been the most populated and organised state on the planet, but was very much marginalised for a couple of centuries.
Karhammur is the start of the process that turns the Chancellor from First Among Equals who is nominally in charge to "actually, I am in charge" of the TMP/TNG era.
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Honestly my issue is less that we're getting hit hard, it's that we're seemingly doing significantly worse than canon starfleet despite building some seemingly pretty darn good ships.
Last I checked, the Four Years War and/or Federation/Klingon Wars as depicted in media all involved the Federation being spanked rosy-red. In the Discovery version (the only "canon" depiction) the Klingons were so dominant that Starbase One was sacked. In Sol's Kuiper Belt.
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I want to say for the Record here, This is the First quest I have ever cared about enough to actually post in, even for voting. @Sayle you have done an AMAZING job with this quest, 100% love the war posts. Legit reread them with a bag of popcorn today. Your art for the quest is top tier as well. The only "gripes" I have with the quest are shared with OG ST in general. And TBH I can't really argue about it because despite its faults they took a budget of "What do we have laying around to use" and turned it into a multi-generational loved icon.
I went back and looked again. It was the Miranda class that got a huge number. There were never more then 20-30 Connies built... Unless you look at new cannon... And most of them got smushed by the Klingons as well.
So its going to stick around for decades never really go away and have mass popular support for eternity? I can live with that. Automobiles were around for like 50 - 80 Years before they caught on ya know.
I went back and looked again. It was the Miranda class that got a huge number. There were never more then 20-30 Connies built... Unless you look at new cannon... And most of them got smushed by the Klingons as well.
So its going to stick around for decades never really go away and have mass popular support for eternity? I can live with that. Automobiles were around for like 50 - 80 Years before they caught on ya know.
I'm not exactly a Trek expert but from what people on this quest have been saying Canon Starfleet never lost a core world. That honestly seems worse to me than a starbase
I mean, if we are in fact doing better than canon I retract my complaints. I'm mostly going off thread information here
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Well, Betazed was occupied in the Dominion War. The "core" worlds of the Federation have always implicitly meant the quadrumviate of Earth, Vulcan, Tellar, and Andoria. Maybe excluding Tellar, depending on how powerful you consider them to have been. I read Tellar as more of an Italy to Vulcan/Andoria/Earth's France, Germany, and Belgium.
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- Location
- England
We've made the Excalibur, but one ship class alone does not a battlefleet make. Our other designs post-Selachii, a 50-year old frigate, are all some kind of not tactically focused, including the Warp 8 Engine design which is explicitly the reason this war is happening now in the first place. Some pretty darn good ships don't blow up Klingon cruisers by virtue of their solid engineering alone, unfortunately.
Starbase One was in Sol. The Klingons were taking over a starbase literally less than an hour's Warp from Earth. That's significantly worse than them merely contesting Andoria, a planet which IIRC is much closer to the Klingon border.
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- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I mean, not really. While yard A is making standard Darwins, yard B can make Mod-Darwins with the alternate internal layout. You don't have to make a bunch of standard Darwins then wait to refit them, just build a variant right now.
You'll still need years to refit/change the design. To make sure everything works, and that's assuming Starfleet wishes to even bother to do so in the first place.
To be fair, in Discovery they decided to give the Klingons cloaking devices before they got cloaking technology (2250s+, maybe? Those pesky Romulans...), so you could make an argument that it meant Starfleet in addition to getting absolutely thrashed also couldn't tell where the Klingons would pop up, so they could just gank Starbase One before a response. But that would imply that the Discovery writers care about the in-universe applications of what they wrote and what that might imply.
...yeah, I don't buy that either.
- Location
- Australia
I wonder if us having beaten the Romulans so thoroughly will actually lead to the Klingons using less cloaking devices in the future. After all, it would be significantly less effective against us than in OTL, and after this war chances are they will make a lot of strategic decisions based on us.
darkstarling
Brilliantly Crazed
- Location
- Columbus, Ohio
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So just like both canon and the real world then.
At a diplomatic distance of 'shoot them first to make a point' which I hardly think counts. And they've been a long way away for most of our history. Improved warp just made them a lot closer.
SpeakIng of which, our better technical capacity is what gave us a three week warning on the push for Andoria when we caught their fleet on long range sensors. The klingons were hoping to achieve surprise.
ZeldaFan
Thinker of Ideas
- Location
- Florida-Land of Madness and Sunshine
That's definitely a ship class that's proven worthy of Honor.
Endorfinator
Awkwardly Social
- Location
- California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Remind me what the STO explanation is?
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If that was the case, how did the Federation even survive? If Starbase One was sacked, Earth was wide open and the Federation's power broken.