Even my QM-Sadism has limits.
I mean.. in relation. This event is like.. 9/11 but worse. Or is it because Cost is a measure of unwillingness to continue pressing on the Syndicate, and major incidents like this potentially.. increase willingness in some areas to balance out unwillingness elsewhere? I suppose I could see Amarkia going on the warpath.
 
There will almost certainly be a mechanical penalty against us.

You don't hit 100+ cost and just brush it off without something pretty negative as a result.

Which is fine to me. Mechanically, every issue we've ran into has just slowed our forwards progress rather than anything that actually legitimately kicked us in the balls or forced us back a step.

I'm fine with taking a narrative + mechanical kick in the balls here.
 
Now I'm not one to complain about lower death tolls but photon torpedo warheads are already pretty damn small. They clock in at around 3kg and going off the schematics online are about 10cm in diameter.

Still all the other stuff would definitely apply!

There are very likely going to be lower yield torpedoes than the starship main battery grade ones. Ones designed to be launched from shuttles, or even ground vehicles, for use against targets where you don't want city destroying damage.

Also in canon it is repeatedly show that photon torpedoes can be detected by sensors, and presumably developed words actively scan for them across wide areas. Thus only a very small charge could be smuggled in to avoid detection.
 
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Sweet mother of holy fuck. What is the Syndicate thinking? The UFP isn't just going to shut up and go away if you bomb one of their member worlds. Wowza.

Same reasoning as terrorist organisations today. If you hit them hard enough, with enough publicity, they will crack down on the population you recruit from. This is perceived as injustice by those who are on the receiving end of the crackdown, radicalising them and convincing them to join the terror organisation to fight back.

On top of that, Amarkia seems to be on the verge of invading Orion space. The government cannot accept such a blatant breach of their sovereignity, they have to fight back against this or risk losing popular support. In the best case scenario for the syndicate Orion goes to war with Amarkia and the Federation over an attack on their territory, meaning the government has no resources left to mess with them.
 
Same reasoning as terrorist organisations today. If you hit them hard enough, with enough publicity, they will crack down on the population you recruit from. This is perceived as injustice by those who are on the receiving end of the crackdown, radicalising them and convincing them to join the terror organisation to fight back.
I don't really understand that part. It wont let the terrorist-organization win. It will destroy their goverment and population together with them.

If Orion had an actual chance to win a war against Amarkia, or worse, the Federation, it might make sense, but not as things are currently standing.

As someone pointed out, the Klingons and some other large powers would be glassing planets by now.
 
I don't really understand that part. It wont let the terrorist-organization win. It will destroy their goverment and population together with them.

If Orion had an actual chance to win a war against Amarkia, or worse, the Federation, it might make sense, but not as things are currently standing.

As someone pointed out, the Klingons and some other large powers would be glassing planets by now.

But the Federation won't. No matter how hard the Syndicate hits the Amarki, the Federation won't let them just exterminate the Orions, its utterly against their values and would horrify their neighbors enough to make further diplomatic expansion impossible. The worst plausible outcome of the war would be a Federation occupied Orion, which would be absolutely great for the Syndicate because it would provide them with tons of dissatisfied people that hate the Federation.

Its not like modern day terrorist organisations have any chance of defeating the West, and theoretically the West could also just nuke every Middle Eastern Country to hell. It's the same calculus.
 
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We can stop them?
We would actually fire on our own member's ships to protect Orion from Amarki retribution?
I mean, of course we'll do everything on the negotiation-table to stop that, but if the choice should actually come down to a war with Amarkia or letting them attack the Orion Union I' certainly vote for the latter.

All in theory of course, the Armarki are no monsters.
 
The Syndicate has just pulled a 9/11 on Amarkia.

The Syndicate will not survive.
 
Times of Amarkia

Check...? Check...? Are we back on air?

O-okay. We're back. Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my grave duty to report that a weapon of mass destruction has been set off in the capital. Many are dead, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Most of downtown is demolished. The blast is believed to have centred on the Courthouse...

[+20 Cost]

I gotta wonder, how is this going to be spun by syndicate sympathizers. I mean this is... fuck they murdered a city. If the orion union was jaded enough to that kind of mass murder they would have gone extinct. I do wonder if this is going to have a mechanical effect that future syndicate public relation opps are going to be a lot harder.
 
The Amarki are sure to be on the warpath. Which is potentially problematic, but most definitely understandable, and perhaps also appropriate: This was an act of war by the Syndicate against the Federation in general and Amarkia in particular.

So why not make it official? We probably can't stop this from escalating at this point, but perhaps we can make it escalate in the right direction?

Step 1 would be to formally declare a state of war between the Federation and the Orion Syndicate. And I stress that we'd be declaring a war against the Syndicate, and the Syndicate only.

Step 2 would be to convince the Orion Union to give us a target. It's pretty obvious at this point that they have essentially no control over parts of their claimed territory - in other words, those places are currently under Syndicate occupation.

Sure, admitting to that might be politically problematic for the Union and they might not want to do that... but what if that admission is immediately followed by the Federation vowing to help the Union retake said territory and placing military assets at Orion disposal to do so? We'd have to consent to put the Orion Union forces in command of the operation, at least nominally and perhaps even actually, to make it perfectly clear that we're here as allies and not as invaders, but if we're willing to do that it might just be enough to strengthen the Union's legitimacy rather than weaken it.

Basically: We're not invading Orion territory. We're helping them take it back.
 
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The problem for the Syndicate in this situation is that even if the Cost of what they've just done reaches the level of where the Federation decides to start lowering the intensity of what they are doing, they're actions basically make it impossible for the Federation to actually do so.

Sure, before they pulled what's effectively a 'Pearl Harbour 2: Just Add Civilians' on us, the Federation Council would probably have told us to do something else, or change how we're operating, in a way that benefits the Syndicate long term. Now? Now... Well, They've woken the sleeping giant that is the Federation, and whilst the giant might be recoiling from the sucker punch they did, the giant will recover, and it'll be out for blood.

The biggest problem won't be 'Can we destroy the Syndicate?', it'll be 'Can we destroy the Syndicate in such a way that something worse isn't created in it's place?'.

Also, just look at how the political situation is:
We started by getting the help of the Expansionists in 2309 for the Anti-Syndicate Legislation. That's currently 7 Council Seats.
Apparently the Development faction are also involved with the Anti-Syndicate Legislation, possibly from the 2310 Budget 'Choose Your Backer' bit. That's currently 10 Council Seats.
Then, the 2310 Emergency Session got the Pacifists Involved. That's 11 Council Seats.
And if we think the Hawks aren't going to involved themselves, you need to see the doctor. That's another 6 seats.

Even if only two thirds of each political faction are involved with the anti-syndicate actions politically, that's still a very clear majority of the Federation Council being affected. This is going to be a horrific mess.
 
So on the bright side, it seems that progress is actually being made on Duaba. A planetary Shodar is dead and the Syndicate local forces are dying. High cost but outweighed by the impact. Now if we can just keep the president in power I think we're still on track to eradicate the Syndicate.
 
Step 1 would be to formally declare a state of war between the Federation and the Orion Syndicate. And I stress that we'd be declaring a war against the Syndicate, and the Syndicate only.
That doesn't really work, I think.

We can't treat the syndicate like a nation at war. They wont keep to any rules of engagement. They can't negotiate or surrender in the sense a nation can. We wont exchange prisoners with them. We can't only strike at legitimate military targets because a lot of our targets are part of otherwise normal Orion cities.

Trying to legally treat this like a war will make an even worse mess then its going to be anyway.
 
That doesn't really work, I think.

We can't treat the syndicate like a nation at war. They wont keep to any rules of engagement. They can't negotiate or surrender in the sense a nation can. We wont exchange prisoners with them. We can't only strike at legitimate military targets because a lot of our targets are part of otherwise normal Orion cities.

Trying to legally treat this like a war will make an even worse mess then its going to be anyway.
I'll admit to being unsure if it's really a good idea myself. Still, if escalation is inevitable it would be preferable to escalate on our terms.

A lot depends on the Amarki's reaction to this. We'll see what their councillors have to say in the coming emergency session.

Though I have to note that the Syndicate is definitely operating on a scale far above a mere crime syndicate or terrorist organisation here. The Union does seem to have lost control (or rather, the previous illusion of control was stripped away) of parts of its territory to the Syndicate.
 
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Because that is what happened to Al-Qaida or even the Taliban... Despite the best effort of the most powerful military in the world both groups are still active (and spawned a number of successors) .

just about everyone ins a position of leadership got droned, and the only reason there successors could take over like they did was because of a near comically inept handling of the situation. This may not end well for the federation, but it is certainly going to end badly for the syndicate.
 
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You know, blowing up that courthouse serves a double-purpose. It probably also killed off a bunch of the prisoners the Amarkians were holding.
 
If we allow the Amarki to invade Orion space I am pretty sure it will lead to the fall of the current government, and since we can only operate in Orion space because the current government allows it...
 
I guess they should be glad that we're the Federation. I imagine the other 3 big players would just start glassing planets or something at this point.
After the terrorist attacks on senior members of our government a few years ago, most likely.

If we go off the old Technical Manuel numbers a photon torpedo has a yield of 64.4 megatons. If that is the case here then Lironh is gone along with anyone who lived in a roughly 20km radius.
"Photon torpedo" like "nuclear warhead" can mean almost anything. The lowest-yield nuclear warheads ever devised have a yield around 10-20 tons of TNT, the highest yield ever designed and tested was fifty million tons with an option on twice that.

We've seen photon torpedo blasts that are totally inconsistent with a sixty-megaton explosion in terms of their effects, and blasts that are fully consistent with sixty megatons or even more. The torpedo in question was almost certainly not a Federation standard munition, further complicating the issue. So the exact magnitude of the damage could be anything from "everyone within a twenty kilometer radius is injured and all the buildings not hardened against 5 psi blast overpressure fall down, plus a fallout plume" to 'only' something like Hiroshima. Plus a fallout plume, because it was a groundburst.

"Most of downtown" in a preeminent city on a technologically advanced planet suggests something towards the upper end of the scale, with a multi-megaton warhead. But a death toll that isn't obviously in the millions to the point where news reporters would say "perhaps hundreds of thousands" tends to suggest the lower end of the scale.

[EDIT: Alternate explanation, Amarki large buildings tend to be designed to withstand significant blast overpressure that would cause 20th century skyscrapers to collapse, because they built their capital in the expectation that someone would be throwing around kiloton-range explosions. If so, the high-end blast estimates could be compatible with the low-end casualty figures, because much of the destructive energy gets absorbed by the first rounds of populated buildings around the courthouse and/or reflected into space by various shielded structures.]

I mean the 32 cost in the sense that there were probably important things destroyed in the 20 cost bomb.

In addition to the million or so innocent people.

Don't want to think about that.

But I mean, only 20 cost? I mean the attack on Duaba was 12 cost (and 5), and no member world suffered anything really significant in it, but a major terrorist attack in the heart of a member state is only 20?
Cost is a measure of how much disruption of the Council's political will to do what Starfleet asks we've suffered- that's why it hits our political points. The attack on Duaba causes high cost because it makes Councillors wonder if the Orions are going berserk. Now, the attack on the Amarki capital causes high cost because it makes another, different set of Councillors very angry and most likely blaming Starfleet for not fixing everything really fast and thus preventing the attack.

The Amarkians are a martial people. This hurts, but it's probably not as big a deal as doing it to, say, Earth would be.
There are a lot of ways that Cost can screw us up. Not all of them involve reducing the Federation's will to fight. Don't make assumptions about how bad it is until we've seen the (literal) fallout settle.

You'd think so, but since this event gave us Cost and not pp, it seems like the Federation isn't big on responding to crimes against sapientity.
We get pp if something increases our political leverage in the Council. We get Cost (and lose pp) if something decreases that political leverage. We don't automatically get more leverage every time Federation members feel more belligerent. Because it's very likely that the Amarki councillors will do something like demand that Starfleet start smashing things, causing chaos in the Council that reduces Sousa's freedom to suggest courses of action and negotiate for Starfleet projects not directly related to the Syndicate.

just about everyone ins a position of leadership got droned, and the only reason there successors could take over like they did was because of a near comically inept handling of the situation. This may not end well for the federation, but it is certainly going to end badly for the syndicate.
The flip side is that the real organizations in question "went viral-" they have a cell structure, so while blowing up the leadership gets rid of it, the whole thing scatters like droplets of mercury smashed with a hammer. Only more toxic.
 
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I saw the captains log and was like yes, very good overall diplomacy for the win.... then I read the Master of Orion and optimism gone... but man these Syndicate guys are idiots, they kept on launching attacks until they provoked us to intervene, and now they launch on attack and nuke civilians? Amarkia will be crying for blood and I don't think even Stesk would be willing to stop trying to dismantle the Syndicate which may be our most potent weapon.

Still I would have liked it if someone had managed to get the Amarkia to turn over some of the syndicate they captured to the Orion Union for trial. Now I can't see that happening.
 
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