Oh my Elements.
That's probably exactly what happened. Theyou got a message saying "The Corporate Republic of Celos has overthrown the illegal and illegitimate Union government and is fighting along with de-radicalized Syndicate to finally bring an end to the Union and throw out their puppetmasters. And got a call from the new megalomaniacal president of the Corporate Republic telling them how great she is, believe her, she has the best people, she'Ll make Orion great again, make the best trade deals with Cardassia.
And then the Cardassians say "That sounds fucking great. These promises are amazing. The Federation is openly reporting on all of these setbacks and protests and fighting; the reality must be so much worse!"
So they say to the galaxy: "The Celosians and the Syndicate have a fleet, they have an army, and now they have a Capital. They must be protected..." and so on.
So now they show up (and he'll we can even take their diplomat to Celos and show him or her around) and that Cardassian will find himself in a golden bunker with Garita going "Your army is literally mind washed slaves. THAT ARE LOOSING. Your Navy is nowhere to be found. And you don't even control your own capital building. You have half a city president. Half a city /that is on fire/ protected only by zombies. Cardassia isn't even going to waste the energy it would take to beam you up with me. Goodbye "Mrs. President""
I love it.
It depends.
Do they care about the situation on the ground in Celos?
Or do they care simply that the Corporate Republic exists as a pretense for other things?
Clearly, the solution is for the Corporate Republic to cease to exist. But I don't know if little trivialities like "you control half a city" matter in the world of pretenses.
Well, what it comes down to is that if they try to make demands on behalf of a political entity that has a life expectancy measured in days...
1) They look
stupid for backing a blatantly losing team. Like, seriously, you were really prepared to even
pretend to be willing to go to war on behalf of a woman whose 'nation' is one half of a burning city guarded only by zombies?
2) Related to being made to look stupid, but slightly different: They are also made to look weak for having said 'we will protect the Republic of Celos,' only for the Republic of Celos to immediately fall. It devalues future claims of Cardassian protection.
These are the reasons that a guerilla movement fighting for independence
USUALLY has to inflict some significant defeats on the government forces before foreign powers start paying any attention (e.g. the American Revolution and the battle of Saratoga).
Eh, my thoughts were simply that it would be worth eating a point or two in order to design a combat focused ship, escort or cruiser, since we don't tend to use Militarization for anything else.
Yes, that's mostly because we may
really need militarization in the near future. And because we don't want to bring militarization close to Threat if we can reasonably help it. It's the one currency we cannot easily replace; buying down a point of militarization costs something like 50-60 political will.
Some day we may really, really want to spend +3 militarization on something we think we
need (say, pushing the Federation to keep fighting Cardassians until Bajor is liberated). When that day comes, our overall effort to keep militarization as low as possible is going to pay off big-time.
I have read all of the Biophage pages and I haven't read anything about what the consequences were for the Romulans over letting the Biophage get so far out of control and not telling the Federation and Klingons about it. I am interested in what happened in Romulan space after the crisis was over since the entire thing was their fault in the first place. I am pretty sure that the Federation and the Klingons were quite angry with them for withholding that information.
The Romulans were "punished" by suffering worse losses to the Biophage than the other two major powers. They lost a major capital ship and a number of other ships. They had to evacuate just as many colonies, if not more.
And afterwards, the Federation in particular did NOT seek to punish them, because frankly the Romulans even telling us about the Biophage at all represented a huge step forward in mutual trust for the Romulan-Federation relationship.
Look at how Romulan-Federation interactions look in either the TOS era or the TNG era. The Romulans grudgingly getting around to
actually telling us about a massive threat we need to work together in order to stop... that's an improvement! Romulan-Federation relationships as a result of that crisis are much better than in canon. Not just 'in canon as of the early 2300s." Better than they EVER were, at any point whatsoever, in the roughly 220 years the two nations were interacting in canon.
So for the Federation, being bitter towards the Romulans would be spiteful and foolish. They came out of their shell for literally the first time ever and were willing to work with us, peaceably and honestly? And you want to
punish them for that? On account of how things could hypothetically have gone better, if they had (totally against their national character and culture) been even
more forthcoming?
The Klingons, by contrast, may be harboring some resentment. For all we know that's one of the reasons they're now planning for war with the Romulans. But we don't have the kind of detailed information on Klingon/Romulan internal politics that would tell us what's going on between them.
