Remove ads

To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

Linked contents
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
Reader mode
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
The Romulan strategy of giving ground to exhaust Klingon logistics and buy time for an economic advantage can work, but it's not as slam dunk as comparisons to Rome would suggest. In particular, I note two serious issues: a major shipyard is being threatened, and the Romulans have already committed their reserve. This is somewhat more reminiscent of the fall of France than of the Punic Wars or either of the famous campaigns against Russia.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
They have reinforced FROM their reserves; this is not the same as having committed the entire reserve. I must also note that the war's been going on for something like 12-18 months, so this isn't exactly the Romulans falling in a lightning campaign.

If they lose that shipyard, their production strategy falls apart, much as ours would if we lost a major yard outside Sol like 40E. Such a loss would set us back years of production. Additionally, the commitment of reserves doesn't bode well and removes strategic flexibility. Having reserves means the ability to quickly shift to the offense, and was key in pretty much every famous defensive campaign from Russia 1941 to Campania 217 BC. The Romulans aren't done yet, but if they can't defend Iberius and find additional reserves, they will quickly find themselves in an untenable situation despite perhaps possessing the advantage economically.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Without knowing the exact balance of production strength between the two empires, I can't say how badly off the Romulans will be if they lose Iberius, though I certainly can agree it sounds like that would be a major blow. On the other hand, a major battle for Iberius might actually be to the Romulans' advantage, because it would force the Klingons to settle on a single major target and commit a heavy force to it, even if they suspect a trap. So far the Klingons have been free to avoid battles where expected the Romulans to entrap them, and the Romulans excel at traps so this significantly undermines the Romulans' strategy.

But this could create a situation where, counterintuitively, decisive battle favors the Romulans while nibbling and sniping at the enemy favors the Klingons...

Another possibility (and this is purely speculative) is that the Romulans may have managed to fool us as to just how desperate their position is, in addition to fooling the Klingons, as part of a grand-scale ruse. I'm not saying this IS the case. But we should remember that all our impressions of the war are based on Starfleet Intelligence's knowledge, and Starfleet Intelligence is hardly infallible.

chriswriter90 said:
I think the Constellation-A would be a better choice than the Constitution.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's smaller and slower. I'm not so sure.
 
Hey @Nix can i make a map suggestion? Keep rigel as its own sector. Put the yan ros and honiani in their own sector. The laio and tauni in their own sector, and the ked paddah in their own sector.
 
DarknessSmiles said:
Hey @Nix can i make a map suggestion? Keep rigel as its own sector. Put the yan ros and honiani in their own sector. The laio and tauni in their own sector, and the ked paddah in their own sector.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Sectors are under the QM's jurisdiction, not Nix's.

Nix has a little latitude for specific locations within a coordinate grid, but the exact coordinates are up to the QM.
 
chriswriter90 said:
Thinking back to the Hospital Ship discussion; The Renaissance would get us fewer, more effective ships. The Constellation-A would get us more easier to build, if less effective ships.

The Constitution seems to be in an uncomfortable middle spot, not offering either numbers or effectiveness.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
A Constitution-based hull is just about the same size and speed as a Renaissance-based hull, and with comparable peak cruising speed.

A Constellation-based hull would give us easier to build ships of almost exactly the same size as the existing Ranger-based engineering ships. It wouldn't be an improvement in capability, and there really wouldn't be a point unless the existing engineering ships are so physically old that they're in danger of falling apart. Which doesn't seem to be the case.

Alastor Mobius Toth said:
I see Chang's students are earning their keep.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That, they would appear to be.
 
I wonder if the Cardassians are watching the Romulans and Klingons fight each other? Depending on what they may or may not know about what's happening on the other side of the federation. We may or may not have an advantage in the coming war since we are watching and learning from the mistakes that both sides are suffering as well as any tactics that they may use.
 
Joshrand1982 said:
I wonder if the Cardassians are watching the Romulans and Klingons fight each other? Depending on what they may or may not know about what's happening on the other side of the federation. We may or may not have an advantage in the coming war since we are watching and learning from the mistakes that both sides are suffering as well as any tactics that they may use.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
They probably know that they exist, but as they lack a long-range exploration program - it's a couple months of cruising speed - they probably do not have up to date information outside of hearsay.
 
Meanwhile, some Mentat makes a multi-pronged spaceborne superweapon, combining psionic and biological warfare.

Moon-sized, Warp-capable Tribble. It's too fuzzy to resist while it eats your biosphere and purrs.
 
AlphaDelta said:
They probably know that they exist, but as they lack a long-range exploration program - it's a couple months of cruising speed - they probably do not have up to date information outside of hearsay.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It probably depends on how much our Media is reporting on the war, and how much the Cardies trust whatever portion the Federation public media they have tapped into.
 
Joshrand1982 said:
I wonder if the Cardassians are watching the Romulans and Klingons fight each other? Depending on what they may or may not know about what's happening on the other side of the federation. We may or may not have an advantage in the coming war since we are watching and learning from the mistakes that both sides are suffering as well as any tactics that they may use.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
AlphaDelta said:
They probably know that they exist, but as they lack a long-range exploration program - it's a couple months of cruising speed - they probably do not have up to date information outside of hearsay.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It doesn't make sense to talk about their knowledge about Klingons and Romulans as though it was anywhere close to on the same level.
The Cardassians have almost certainly made direct contact with the Klingons and may very well conduct intelligence on them, possibly in conjunction with the Lecarre. They very likely only have second hand knowledge of the Romulans, from Federation and Klingon sources.
 
Briefvoice said:
Hot Federation Political Take: The fact that United Earth gets a separate Council seat for both "Earth" and "Mars" rather than a single "Sol" Council seat is a blatant example of a political power play during the Federation's founding. That shit would never fly today, and is only grandfathered in because taking something away is very hard. Council members from other species will mutter sarcastically about the "double Sol seat".

Look at the economics, people! Earth and Mars are basically a single planet from an economics perspective and have far more free movement between them then you could ever see for two worlds in different star systems.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Well, part of the problem with analyzing this is we really don't know what separates a "council" planet from a colony. Is it strictly a population threshold or do you have to meet a benchmark for the Federation equivilent of the Human Development Index?

If the rule is, say, population of planet >= 300 million, get a council seat, and Mars has 320 million, it makes sense it would get a seat. It probably also represents Luna and the outer system colonies as well, while Big Earth gets its own council seat.

However, the political situation is also somewhat fraught. We know the Martians signed a Fundamental Declaration of Rights, which implies they ceded from Earth authority in the past, which is made explicit in Beta Canon and was planned for Enterprise Season 4 [PS: you can use this as an excuse to pretend The Expanse is actually a Dark Retelling of Enterprise if they'd never met the Vulcans :V]. At the time of the founding of the Federation is probable the memory of the Declaration was still fresh, and it was politically more expedient to bend the rules and grant them a Council seat rather than to stifle them under an overarching Earth representation. Maybe they also met the population threshold as well.

Hot Historical Take: Maybe the reason Mars and Alpha Centauri are such big hubs of population and industry so close to Earth is because early humans, in 4X parlance, built tall? After encountering several major powers in the nearby, sometimes hostile, and with inferior ships, they chose to focus on a few core colonies and send the NX's off to explore and diplomance. Hence why Mars has a big enough population to get a Council Seat and why Alpha Centauri, our close neighbour, also rates one. Vega's seat probably came a little later but probably falls into this category as well. After founding the Federation the Human's expansionist tendencies could finally bloom and Joburg IV, Lalande, and New Seoul were founded in very short order, and Vega was more heavily developed.

Basically the Humans built up and are now snowballing :V
 
Given the Biophage's penchant for eating its way out of containment systems, and mentats' penchant for poor experimental safety controls, I'm not sure they'd ever get the chance to try.
 
Iron Wolf said:
Hot Historical Take: Maybe the reason Mars and Alpha Centauri are such big hubs of population and industry so close to Earth is because early humans, in 4X parlance, built tall? After encountering several major powers in the nearby, sometimes hostile, and with inferior ships, they chose to focus on a few core colonies and send the NX's off to explore and diplomance. Hence why Mars has a big enough population to get a Council Seat and why Alpha Centauri, our close neighbour, also rates one. Vega's seat probably came a little later but probably falls into this category as well. After founding the Federation the Human's expansionist tendencies could finally bloom and Joburg IV, Lalande, and New Seoul were founded in very short order, and Vega was more heavily developed.

Basically the Humans built up and are now snowballing :V
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

And now the entire Federation has built up and started snowballing.
 
Iron Wolf said:
Well, part of the problem with analyzing this is we really don't know what separates a "council" planet from a colony. Is it strictly a population threshold or do you have to meet a benchmark for the Federation equivilent of the Human Development Index?

If the rule is, say, population of planet >= 300 million, get a council seat, and Mars has 320 million, it makes sense it would get a seat. It probably also represents Luna and the outer system colonies as well, while Big Earth gets its own council seat.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I can tell you that population requirements are likely much lower than that. We know that Solitude has its own Council seat, and when we considered evacuating it during the Biophage it had a population of only 400,000.

Personally that seems too low, but perhaps it isn't a hard and fast requirement and there were political circumstances that granted it a seat with a lower population than usual.
 
UberJJK said:
We're just lucky that Mentats weren't a problem a decade ago. Given their proximity to the Romulans and the Neutral Zone they'd have been in prime position to weaponize the Biophage!

Mentat enhanced Biophage is not something I want to contemplate.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Simon_Jester said:
Given the Biophage's penchant for eating its way out of containment systems, and mentats' penchant for poor experimental safety controls, I'm not sure they'd ever get the chance to try.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Biophage would have broken containment, gotten lose, and started killing their guys.

 
Re: Council Seats:

I suspect it turns out to be some massively complicated melding of planetary population, economic and political issues, and number of other planets in the jurisdiction. On the one hand, a very heavily populated colony world might well get a Council seat all by itself. On the other, if there's a huge swath of very lightly settled worlds stretching across a lot of space (i.e. the Federation colonies in the Romulan Border Zone), then it might be a practical necessity to appoint a Council seat to provide them with representation of some kind rather than just having them systematically get outvoted and ignored by homeworld populations.

If the Federation just picked counselors based on raw demographic numbers of votes, and appointed council seats based on the same criteria, only homeworlds and the very largest colonies would have any influence on elections. More scattered colonies would be electorally irrelevant even in aggregate, because there just aren't ever going to be nearly enough ten-thousand-person colonies to be relevant compared to the opinion of a billion homeworld voters.

While this is arguably good in an abstract sense where "one being, one vote" is considered good in itself, it doesn't represent a very stable political system. It lends itself to the kind of "frontier space colonist revolt" scenario so popular in Earthly science fiction (especially that of the United States). But the only way to avoid revolts by the frontier colonists is either to not colonize, or to make sure there are enough council seats clearly associated with colonial interests that the colonists aren't being ignored.
 
Briefvoice said:
I can tell you that population requirements are likely much lower than that. We know that Solitude has its own Council seat, and when we considered evacuating it during the Biophage it had a population of only 400,000.

Personally that seems too low, but perhaps it isn't a hard and fast requirement and there were political circumstances that granted it a seat with a lower population than usual.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's possible, as @Simon_Jester noted, that Solitude is the hub of a bunch of minor colonies. Still, doubtful they'd reach 300 million total population; but that was just a random number.

If Solitude is getting a seat it's highly likely Mars deserves one as well strictly by population. Maybe even Luna :V
 
Do they actually want to though?

It would all very much depend on how government is set up, and how internal United Earth politics work. It could very well be that Earth Councillor is elected by the vote of the entire Sol system, in which case they don't really need new councilor.

As people pointed out, with Federation travel tech, you can go out of your Lunar flat, hop into a shuttle or even transporter pad, and eat lunch in Paris. There's absolutely no reason for their voting regions to not encompass the entire system; it's just by tradition the Sol Councillor gets called "Earth" one because everyone calls Sol III "Earth" in same way every human calls their home "the Solar System" and has to roll their eyes every time aliens call it "Sol".
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top