I had previously made the suggestion that Rigel and the Core-Federation could enter the GBZ at
Sector E-4 using the Yan-Ros as a midway point.
That involves a long supply line through neutral space (there may even be another whole warp-capable species kicking around up there for all we know). It would have been an extremely bad idea before Deva IX, a pretty bad idea after Deva IX, and I suspect it's
still a bad idea now after Lora. Although less of a bad idea, because for at least the next few years, the Sydraxians are going to have trouble scraping up the ships to indulge in raiding.
Then again, they can just pay off Yrillians to attack us, forcing us to heavily escort all civilian auxiliaries flying through the space coreward of their territory. Convoys could get through, but we'd have to tie down a lot of ships
just protecting the convoys. They wouldn't be able to do much of anything else.
...Hm. Thinking about it... I wouldn't be surprised if the Sydraxians transition to a pure raiding strategy. Their ships are a match for the ships we use to escort our convoys one-on-one. It's the big battles where we can clock them over the head with a massed force backed by multiple explorers that they keep losing. Raiding will keep us off balance and buy time for the Cardassians and Dylaarians to build up and hopefully push us back out of the region, without presenting us with any vulnerable targets to destroy within the area of operations. It's the obvious counter to Ainsworth and Rivers' massive overwhelming asskicking powers.
Well what else do you expect the Dwarfs to do? What options do they have? Unless they've got a Wormhole or Mass Relay or something similar in their territory, they've got nowhere to expand into except for into Lecarre territory.
Well, we HOPE the Dawiar will negotiate with us, in which case they can share anything we find near their space. The Risans are pretty chill and will probably be happy to share, and the Caitians have a large "backcountry" in their sector to coreward and trailward of their 'heartland.' They don't
need the stuff right next to the Dawiar quite so badly, with Federation membership as an option.
Basically, if the Dawiar break with the Ashalla Pact (which would be a prerequisite for attacking the Lecarre anyway), their obvious next move is to negotiate territory and resource sharing arrangements with
us, at which point we won't have too much trouble gaining access.
They're still pretty hung up on their Manifest Destiny or whatever. I can totally see them breaking with the Cardassians, but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't sign up with the Federation just yet.
The problem there is that they're completely surrounded, and they
already tried fighting their way out of the encirclement created by the Federation and its affiliates. They failed, badly. Plus, they now get to observe the Sydraxians trying to do the same thing on the other side of our space, and it's going even worse for the Sydraxians than it did for the Dawiar.
They may not want to join the Federation per se, but they
have to find some way to negotiate sharing the resources of the surrounding sectors with us. Indeed, from their point of view the Treaty of Celos represents an agonizing loss of opportunities for expansion, because every year that goes by with the Dawiar NOT talking to us, we further cement our encirclement of their space, and we keep taking over more and more colony sites that
could have been Dawiar colonies, or at least joint Dawiar/Somebodyelse sites... if only the Dawiar were free to negotiate with us.
Are you actually trying to justify Voyager's biomemetic gel packs as offshots of the Biophage? I'm not sure whether to be impressed or screaming in terror.
Oh god, the inevitable conclusion is that our vaccines were cheese
I'm sorry. I don't buy it. No thing derived from the Biophage could ever,
ever be disabled by cheese. Not even Neelix's cheese.
