Heh
Earth/Sol=DC
Rigel=NYC
Amarkia=Dallas
Andoria=Baltimore
Vuclan=Philadelphia
Tellar=Boston
Betazed=San Francisco
Indoria=Seattle
Apinae=?
Orion=New Jersey
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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
-
- Tags
- star trek exploration fully automated luxury gay space communism top level canon (canon) #hashtagcontent all-encompassing space amoeba cardassian boy bands cardassian magical girls darkest bureaucracy debate makes the qm cackle like palpatine hoh is an empire quest it has to be foreign infiltrators more ships ship happens singers delenda est starfleet this is not an empire quest ur waifu is collective?
Heh
Earth/Sol=DC
Rigel=NYC
Amarkia=Dallas
Andoria=Baltimore
Vuclan=Philadelphia
Tellar=Boston
Betazed=San Francisco
Indoria=Seattle
Apinae=?
Orion=New Jersey
If Starfleet required that all crew member put on spacesuits or at least rudimentary space survival gear, during yellow and red alerts, then spacing 200 crew members wouldn't be that bad.
- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
Man, I've lived in Philly for a couple years now, and I gotta say, if it is like Vulcan, it's like pre-Surak Vulcan. Especially if the Yankees are in town.
This is 100% accurate tho.
[X] Plan: Open force is broken, concentrate on burning the roots.
Well I feel it'd be more "about a hundred die from the impact, the rest from drastic DC measures" not "You, Chekhov, must kill 200 people"
The old, hippie/queer/alternative San Fran or the modern tech-yuppie version?
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Apinae = Salt Lake City?
Orion = Detroit. Once an economic powerhouse, now a wretched hive of scum and villainy that most civilians wouldn't move to if you paid them.
Alastor Mobius Toth
***** ***
- Location
- Neon Ghetto
When it comes to casualties, I could see it happen because of combination of boarding parties, and maybe a lucky crit hit going through the engineering hull, and causing a cascade of secondary explosions. Too deep to actually cause damage that would vent the hull or take out weapons, but enough to turn "deep" levels that you'd assume safe into slaughter houses as blast waves and clouds of his speed debris fillet the crew apart. I don't think boarding alone would do it, especially since boarding parties aren't a new thing in Trek.
Or Sydraxians hit a sickbay.
Or Sydraxians hit a sickbay.
[X] Plan Maximum Detectives, Maximum Impact
- Location
- Central Standard Time
Or they hit the Crew Quarters. With all of those windowed crew quarters, eventually someone's cabin is getting hit.
The Crew shouldn't be in their quarters during a battle. All those living spaces should be effectively ablative armour in a battle situation - it's uncomfortable to lose them, but not actively dangerous.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Oh, I could come up with half a dozen technobabble explanations for one hit rapidly killing off a quarter of the ship's original crew complement in battle if I wanted to, but they'd all boil down to "somebody made what were extremely poor design choices for a ship seriously intended to be capable of fighting a battle."
"Sydraxian boarding parties" is a much more... parsimonious... explanation, in that it doesn't require Endurance to have been a flying death trap for her crew from the moment the ship was launched.
Well, their only real rivals are the Gorn...
What it comes down to is that racking up large amounts of Militarization can prove very costly. Buying Militarization points back down is extremely expensive in political will, we can gain Militarization from random events (that happened on the CBZ once), and events like the recent Battle of Deva IX are highly likely to net us Militarization, especially if we don't do something counterproductive like demand that Ainsworth stop being willing to fight the enemy and what we've pretty much been told is going to be a war zone.
I can imagine this happening, but if so it would reflect extremely poorly on Ainsworth that she used one of her ships as bait in such a way that it took heavy damage and the worst casualties we've ever had on a ship that wasn't rendered a constructive total loss afterwards.
I prefer the 'boarding parties' explanation simply because it's the kind of thing that could very plausibly happen in battle with a species like the Sydraxians, without anyone having to be an evil idiot or an incompetent, and that could kill lots and lots of crew without causing total devastation to the hull.
Not necessarily, maybe it only had less shields when battle was joined, and then participating in the battle while weaker meant it took more hits. Also, we would be blaming Rivers rather than Ainsworth.
Balderdash. A starship is full of dangerous exotic substances, and if someone is blowing holes in it with a disruptor there's simply no way to ensure nothing extremely lethal gets released. You can armor and position the most vulnerable bits the best you can, but there's no "right" design choice to make everything safe. Calling that "extremely poor design choices" is ignoring the impossibility of ensuring that a bunch of squishy biological sapients are fully protected.
Sometimes a hit lands in that one perfect spot where you didn't want it to land, and no reasonable design could have mitigated matters.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
You're slightly missing what I'm trying to get at.
Such extremely high casualty rates from a ship that was still flying and at least marginally combat-capable at the end of the battle suggest one of several possibilities from a narrative standpoint:
1) The Sydraxians used some unusual tactic that caused exceptionally heavy casualties without correspondingly massive damage to the ship (e.g. boarding parties, chemical weapons introduced to the life support systems, etc.)
OR
2) The Sydraxians got amazingly, freakishly lucky and managed to land a couple of hits with perfectly ordinary weapons... that killed something like 30% of the crew. And did this without causing unusual levels of damage to the hull, despite all the countermeasures you'd normally expect to be in place (compartmentalization, internal force fields, et cetera)
OR
3) Something about the Excelsior design makes it relatively straightforward for this sort of thing to happen, without the enemy getting particularly lucky. In which case we can expect this to happen again and again, and Excelsiors become in effect flying bombs that it is extremely unwise to take into combat.
...
I am not trying to argue that (2) is impossible. However, (2) would require extreme good luck on the part of the Sydraxians, and such extreme good luck is not in any other way evident.
For purposes of having a narrative within the game, it is desirable to have explanations for massive horrible events besides "the enemy got lucky." Which leaves us with either "The Excelsiors are flying bombs" (an undesirable conclusion) or "the Sydraxians deliberately and knowingly did something to kill a whole lot of redshirts without causing proportionate damage to the physical structure of the ship."
Frankly, the idea that the Sydraxians beamed hundreds of marines aboard the Endurance and that it came down to bloody fighting in the corridors is much more compelling and appealing to me than "the Sydraxians split open a gas line and a gas leak killed 200 people, then another one killed 100 people a minute later."
I mean, which would make a better Star Trek episode? Bitter fighting to repel boarders, or "ship randomly has a gas leak wipe out everyone on four decks?"
Hm. Well, frankly I don't want her taking a bludgeoning either. Especially given that Endurance suffered so many of those crew losses from the enemy just happening to roll a pair of critical hits, rather than from the enemy shooting at them vastly more times or anything. That doesn't sound like "Endurance was left dangerously overexposed by the battle plan" so much as "Endurance was targeted in some unusual way.
On a totally unrelated note that I forgot to write earlier:
Enterprise:
"SQUEEEeeeee..."
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Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Sure there is. Don't have it aboard. This is doubly true in an enclosed environment like a starship, where it poses a serious day-to-day risk. Real-world navies are serious enough about this sort of thing that a lot of them treat paint as a HAZMAT risk and prefer not to have to it aboard when at sea. A starship can't be that full of dangerous exotic substances, otherwise people would be dying all the time of minor mistakes like hooking up the EPS conduits wrong.
Well, since I'm catching up on the Expanse and just watched CQB, I am pretty onboard with borders. I think there's also a super mundane explanation available as well if needed.
Temporal shenanigans...?
We literally build starships out of dangerous exotic substances. What exactly do you think "special resources" are, anyway?
EDIT: Also, have you see Star Trek? People do in fact die all the time from minor mistakes. An Andorian Guard ship was nearly lost due to a few mistakes in the same set of Captain's Logs, and the Starfleet captain was like, "Well, these things happen." Starships are flying death traps at the best of times.
Wasn't that lucky for them, since it left the Endurance still capable of fighting. I think you're overblowing this. Anything that can kill 50 people can kill a few hundred pretty easily.
But hey, I can't control the mental construct you're required to have in your head to make things make sense to you, even if it seems odd to me. If you need to believe in Sydraxian boarding parties, whatever fills your heart with calm.
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Another note: unless the logs are specific it's possible a torpedo "shot" consists of more than one torpedo, so the critical hit could just have been the Endurance got hit by three torpedos instead of one, with subsequent more crew damage but potentially consistent hull damage as the spread only damages surface areas and doesn't concentrate in one spot.
Unless the combat engine is explicit that one torpedo attack = one torpedo fired, in which case plz ignore.
Unless the combat engine is explicit that one torpedo attack = one torpedo fired, in which case plz ignore.
- Location
- Central Standard Time
*Console Explosion in Engineering, EPS explosion in hallway*
"Sir, there's EPS breaches on decks 5, 6, 8, 10, and 11!"
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Okay, fine, my idea of writing a story about Sydraxian boarding parties was a stupid idea.
There's no reason to assume that's what happened. And my only reason for sticking up for 'boarding parties' runs something like this:
"It would make a cooler story than 200 people getting killed by a gas leak, plus this whole event involves characters I'd already sketched out in my mind, some of whom are almost certainly dead now, and all of whom have had most of their friends die..."
None of that is a reason to get into an argument, or for that matter write a story, I suppose.
There's no reason to assume that's what happened. And my only reason for sticking up for 'boarding parties' runs something like this:
"It would make a cooler story than 200 people getting killed by a gas leak, plus this whole event involves characters I'd already sketched out in my mind, some of whom are almost certainly dead now, and all of whom have had most of their friends die..."
None of that is a reason to get into an argument, or for that matter write a story, I suppose.
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