This is open to some debate. Probably too off-topic to go into in a lot of detail, but destroying existing technology is bound to kill an awful lot of the population to start with (because they don't have any food) and in some ways rebuilding tech is harder the second time around. Easier in that you know it's possible; harder in that a lot of the easily accessible mineral ores have already been mined, fossils fuels close to the surface have been used up, etc.
To go with some very classic sci-fi, it reminds me of the situation in A Mote in God's Eye where the 'motie' aliens were noted as having repeatedly knocked themselves back to pre-modern civilization, and how this meant that they had to proceed directly from wood-powered steam engines to fusion reactors because all the fossil fuels and rare earth minerals had been mined long ago.
Right. Well, that's less true on a relatively mid-range colony planet (where not
all easily exploited resources have been exploited), but it's a real thing.
What I'm getting at is that there are basically three levels of "knocked back by interstellar war/collapse." One is knocked back to the point where you still have spaceships. The second is knocked back to the point where you can't build spaceships, but you still have some kind of clearly recognizable industrial technology base that runs on machines instead of oxen or whatever. The third level is knocked straight back to Iron Age villages (or worse yet, Stone Age nomads).
In the first and second cases, there will probably be a pretty clear collective memory of what happened to your society and why. The details may get distorted or be selectively edited like any other historical record. But it's
history, not mythology.
In the third case... all that's going to be left is mythology, or something indistinguishable from same (e.g. Amarki interactions with the Orion Empire).
Of course not, in FASA they won their revolution thousands of years ago.
They secretly undermined and subverted the alliance of races that enslaved them, were helped their people form a Galactic power which dominated the Alpha quadrant for a few centuries.
This after tens of thousands of years of slavery.
Of course, the Orion empire is long gone, and the Syndicate has evolved (or devolved) away from their origins as a secret revolutionary cabal and become more focused on simply being a criminal group (rather than being criminal in order to bankroll a revolution).
So they are (in FASA Trek) seen as a bit unsavory and a bit romantic by Orions, they carry the legacy of honoured heroes of Orion history, and hey, they'll be there next time someone tries to enslave the entire Orion species, right?
So if this Syndicate is like the FASA Syndicate, they will be working to force the Federation to act as a modern version of the ancient alliance of slavers who subjugated their people, so that THEY can re-enact the part of the revolutionary cabal they pose as the continuation of.
Put this way- the motives are there. But the
actual history is quite different (Hur'q cast as the 'coalition of species that enslaved the Orions,' glory days of the Orion Empire being BEFORE that time and not after it, and so on). Consequently, I'd rather not try too hard to refer back to material that is questionably applicable to our situation, when we have a wealth of material that is.
I freely acknowledge that the FASA material (which, yes, I am sadly unfamiliar with) may be in some way ancestral to the version of the Orions we have in
To Boldly Go. But given that there are very clear differences between the Orions we have and the Orions FASA has, I'd rather discuss the Orions
we have on their own terms, without reference to FASA, if said references can be avoided.
