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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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Ok, this is a long shot, but maybe worth pursuing? Or at leas figuring out a rough plan for?

The Cardassians are sneaky bastards. The Federation does not have any cultures in it that are particularly sneaky. But relations are improving with the Romulans. What would it take to get the Tal Shiar to declare a shadow war on the Cardassians and the Obsidian Order.

For more convnetional work, we should integrate Betazoids into our counterintelligence ASAP.
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
Captain's Log, USS Cheron, Stardate 22439.2

I have two dead crew members and three dead Cardassian agents sitting in sickbay's morgue right now that say T'Mir was on the money about Cardassians being in-system. The Indorians are apologetic for our loss and are attempting to locate the source of the agents.

However, the insidious problem is that there is open murmuring among the pragmatic Indorians; can the Federation protect them?

...

Captain's Log, USS Cheron, Stardate 22441.1

Anti-matter mines nearly blew the bow off the old girl. Thankfully, we have made a habit of travelling anywhere outside the Federation with shields up. We have the Challorn's hyper-paranoid crew to thank for that.

An Indorian escort was not so lucky as us, and plowed right into a different mine before we could sweep the area. Were they meant for us, or for the Indorians? Or was hitting us meant to speak to the Indorians?

There is a definite element of "You may not like us, but you better stick with a winner," approach in all this.
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Is this a tacit declaration of war? It sure sounds like one.
 
Briefvoice said:
Though I have to say, this wasn't a particularly rewarding set of Logs economically. +10pp, a new species at 40/100, some br we didn't really need, and even though we're at +25 with the Indorians the Cardassians made some progress with them too.
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Indeed. Fucking Cardassians are Hard Mode.

pbluekan said:
Welcome to the Interstellar Cold War folks.
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I wonder how long before Obsidian Order agents are shooting up the Sydraxian Capital, or we're getting little green (grey in this case idk) men appearing on Indorian planets.

Alright, enough memeing, I had something serious I wanted to discuss:
Nix said:
:jackiechan:
Stesk, what do you even want us to do? Let them bully civilian ships of affiliates? We didn't even fire any shots or do anything more aggressive than necessary. I mean, gaining a militarization point when the Enterprise essentially fought a battle over the right to survey a star would have been understandable, but this?
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Briefvoice said:
Okay, I am thinking this right here is where we earned our Militarization point. Instead letting them make their excuses and playing it cool, it out the Cheron closed with them aggressively as per our "don't back down" discussion. @OneirosTheWriter is that about the size of it?

I think "don't back down" in the ROE is going to earn us a lot of problems. I know there was a lot of discussion in the thread about not letting the Cardassians see us as "weak" and that's the same old excuse that always gets trotted out whenever aggressive military action is called for. As though perception is more important than reality.
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I bear some blame -- it didn't actually occur to me that after Blue Kirk shot the shit out of a Cardassian ship in self-defense we'd have to worry about militarization points, because I forgot rule #1 of Star Trek -- there rules for the Kirks in Starfleet, and there are vastly different rules for everyone else.

That being said, I don't know if we should commit to a different ROE yet. Certainly I think the past few logs have shown the value of patrolling outside our borders, as we've uncovered a few Cardassian plots (also, it was a 5YM that made a huge fuckup :V). It's not just about not appearing 'weak' to the Cardassians, it's proving we can credibly stand up to them to the unaffiliated species, something explicitly noted by one of the captains as being an issue in the logs.

I need to know though -- how bad is it for us if we gain another militarization point? I think we need to stick to ranged patrols, but we might have to roll back the ROE to some degree if it does have bad knock-on effects for future plans.

EDIT: Of course, the Cardassians might well know about our peacenik government, and are hoping we back down from enough close encounters. Uuuugh. Space Russians.
 
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Ugh. TBH I think we should of had Sulu as intelligence officer. Having effective agents would have been nice to root out Cardassian agents before they become a problem. Sigint can only do so much.
 
[:V] Consult the Russians for tips on how to counter deceptive opponents.
[:V] Refer to the Art of War. Perhaps some wisdom is to be found there...
 
Yeangst said:
The Cardassians are sneaky bastards. The Federation does not have any cultures in it that are particularly sneaky. But relations are improving with the Romulans. What would it take to get the Tal Shiar to declare a shadow war on the Cardassians and the Obsidian Order.
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They're prepping for conflict with the Klingons.

For more convnetional work, we should integrate Betazoids into our counterintelligence ASAP.
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Agreed.

aceraptor said:
Ugh. TBH I think we should of had Sulu as intelligence officer. Having effective agents would have been nice to root out Cardassian agents before they become a problem. Sigint can only do so much.
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Well, SIGINT via T'Mir did help this time around.
 
Yeangst said:
For more convnetional work, we should integrate Betazoids into our counterintelligence ASAP.
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Hell yes!

I know the Betazoids are a peaceful, highly ethical people... but one thing their ethics seems to allow for is reading the mind of everyone around them with no shame or shyness. If the Cardassians are going to be all sneak-sneaky then having our own telepaths around to out their every dirty secret would be a huge advantage.

And remember, it's canon that even by TNG era the Federation never managed to develop any technology capable of blocking telepathy, so the Cardassians probbaly have no chance of doing so.
 
Iron Wolf said:
I need to know though -- how bad is it for us if we gain another militarization point? I think we need to stick to ranged patrols, but we might have to roll back the ROE to some degree if it does have bad knock-on effects for future plans.
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I don't think we will get more militarization points just for continuing the current policies, at least not all that fast. If we got militarization points for the same thing quickly in a row it would be pretty much a hard limit, not a soft limit.
 
Yeangst said:
Ok, this is a long shot, but maybe worth pursuing? Or at leas figuring out a rough plan for?

The Cardassians are sneaky bastards. The Federation does not have any cultures in it that are particularly sneaky. But relations are improving with the Romulans. What would it take to get the Tal Shiar to declare a shadow war on the Cardassians and the Obsidian Order.

For more convnetional work, we should integrate Betazoids into our counterintelligence ASAP.
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It would take the Romulans considering the Cardassians a threat to them to get them to consider moving against the Cardassians. Given Klingon-Romulan tensions right now, it would have to be a substantial threat to pull assets off that border.

And finally, it would require a massive improvement in relations to get them to share intelligence and cooperate with us. The Biophage incident is a massive outlier in Romulan foreign relations, and unless a lot of things change they won't be working as closely with us anytime soon.
 
Briefvoice said:
I know the Betazoids are a peaceful, highly ethical people... but one thing their ethics seems to allow for is reading the mind of everyone around them with no shame or shyness. If the Cardassians are going to be all sneak-sneaky then having our own telepaths around to out their every dirty secret would be a huge advantage.
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Oh my god

What if these are the Cardassian equivilent of Magneto's psi-blocking helmet?

CARDASSIAN
[:V] Research Team - M.A.G.N.E.T.O Helmet
 
Iron Wolf said:
I bear some blame -- it didn't actually occur to me that after Blue Kirk shot the shit out of a Cardassian ship in self-defense we'd have to worry about militarization points, because I forgot rule #1 of Star Trek -- there rules for the Kirks in Starfleet, and there are vastly different rules for everyone else.
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"Kirk rules" is what you pay the princely sum of 5 PP / year for ;V
 
Nervos Belli said:
It would take the Romulans considering the Cardassians a threat to them to get them to consider moving against the Cardassians. Given Klingon-Romulan tensions right now, it would have to be a substantial threat to pull assets off that border.

And finally, it would require a massive improvement in relations to get them to share intelligence and cooperate with us. The Biophage incident is a massive outlier in Romulan foreign relations, and unless a lot of things change they won't be working as closely with us anytime soon.
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For fighting the Cardassians together we'd probably be more likely to get the Klingons. Because 1) the Cardassians are assholes and the Klingons don't like competition in the Space Asshole department, and 2) they're itching for a war with someone.
 
Glassware said:
For fighting the Cardassians together we'd probably be more likely to get the Klingons. Because 1) the Cardassians are assholes and the Klingons don't like competition in the Space Asshole department, and 2) they're itching for a war with someone.
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Definitely, but even that's going to take a while. Klingon High Command isn't going to start a war just because we say so.
 
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