What was your character concept, just curious?
Here's a few excerpts from the draft I wrote up for the first 'quest post' of my "at last, the 2235 show!" concept. She is here being considered for the role of first CO of the Explorer Corps.
I said:
Captain T'Pak, Vulcan female
Born 2172
Chief of Staff, Klingon Border Zone
Captain T'Pak led Task Force Three's heroic stand against a 'renegade' Klingon battlegroup in the action off Archanis IV in 2229. She is one of Starfleet's most prominent fighting officers. Believing that Federation military preparedness is a logical reaction to Klingon aggression and the enigmatic Romulan threat, she literally wrote the book on heavy cruiser tactical operations.
While T'Pak recognizes that the Explorer Corps is not an elite military unit in the usual sense, she advocates careful efforts to prepare the Corps to respond to the most desperate emergencies in Federation space. She argues that these powerful ships with their crack crews have a special role in saving lives and protecting the Federation. She is inclined to focus on preparing the Explorer Corps to handle danger and the sometimes mysterious hazards of deep space.
She believes that the Explorer Corps' greatest role is to serve as "challengers of the unknown," to boldly go where no others have gone before.
I said:
April 2229:
General Kagaz, a noted Klingon warlord and tactician, takes command of Klingon forces in the disputed zone, with a force of four D5 battlecruisers led by the advanced ship IKZ Akva, of the then newly-identified "D6" class. He is supported by numerous scouts and Bird-of-Prey craft. Identifying the most threatened targets, Rear Admiral glov Korg divides the bulk of the Klingon Border Zone fleet into three task forces, reinforced by supporting ships, mostly drawn from the Andorian Navy.
Glov Korg attempts a feint by moving two roughly equal task forces (Two and Three) to forward outposts in the disputed zone, the dilithium mine at Archanis IV, and the biological research outpost at Tarsus IV. He directs his ships to make conspicuous signals revealing their presence. He then orders four of his fastest and newest ships to make a speed run under emissions control, with counter-detection protocols being run by the two Vulcan cruisers, from one task force to the other.
Thus Kagaz strikes at Archanis IV, the more desirable target- which unbeknownst to him has been significantly reinforced. However, the Klingons still have a powerful striking force and a heavily armed fleet. Early in the engagement, Kagaz succeds in killing Commodore Jiang aboard the flagship USS Lor'Vela by ordering his heaviest ships to concentrate their fire on a few of the relatively smaller Federation cruisers.
As senior-ranking captain, Captain T'Pak of the USS Cheron takes over the task force in the wake of the commodore's death. She deftly disengages the Federation fleet and leads Task Force Three in a running battle with the Klingons for hours, falling back slowly towards the Archanis IV colony. Several times, she manages to delay the larger Klingon force with precisely-timed counterattacks. T'Pak coordinates her cruisers and the heavily-gunned Andorian frigates to scatter the Klingon escorts and inflict minor damage on the battlecruisers.
Meanwhile, colony engineers on Archanis IV set up field generators to flood the planet's radiation belts with charged particle bursts. T'Pak takes up positions in the planetary thermosphere, draws the Klingons into close range, and triggers the burst generators, dissipating the Klingon shields and significantly impairing their fire control.
At the end of the day, three of the Klingon capital ships have been wrecked, Kagaz's flagship is heavily damaged, and at least seven smaller vessels have been accounted for. The Federation has lost three cruisers and four frigates. No further Klingon attacks occur for the next four years.
The Chancellor explains to an ambassadorial team from Vulcan that Kagaz sought to take over Archanis IV's dilithium to fuel personal ambitions against the High Council. Admiral Kagaz is summarily executed for exceeding his authority in attacking the Federation colony, though suspicions of treason are not proven to the satisfaction of Federation authorities.
Basically, I imagine her being to the 2240s and 2250s what Ainsworth is to our period of Federation history. Her coming out of retirement after this long might be a considerable surprise, but she knows how to make a convincing case for military preparedness to a bunch of Vulcans like few other living beings.
I'm impressed that you're even trying to write a character like Halkh. I wouldn't know how to begin making an argument in defense of the Arcadian Empire.
I don't think you understand Halkh very well, if you think that's what he's doing. Treating him like a simple Arcadian apologist is a pretty major strawmanning of his views.
Firstly, we need to distinguish between the "Arcadian Empire" and the "Licori species." The two are not the same, any more than the "Roman Empire" and the "Latin-speaking peoples" were the same. There was a Licori species before the Empire took its present form. There will continue to be a Licori species now that it is gone.
That species has certain collective biological traits and collective cultural values. Some of those traits and aptitudes were twisted into dangerous or evil paths by the nature of the Arcadian imperial government. Others were unaffected, or even actively cultivated into virtues. Changing the Licori government may well change a great deal about what the Licori species does,
without changing the nature of the species.
Understanding this is critical to understanding Halkh.
...
Halkh is one of the figures trying to lead a nascent Licori nationalist movement, as distinct from the "Arcadian Empire" that is personally loyal to a "king of kings" monarch whose power flows from being the head of the strongest of the aristocratic Houses. This is alluded to in the second half of
Wine and Song and some of Nash's logs.
On the one hand, he has no problem admitting that huge swathes of the Arcadian government were deeply, grotesquely flawed. He's wrestling with trying to understand what in his culture made those flaws possible, and he's taking what steps he can behind the scenes to fix them on an institutional level, even when he might well be able to achieve greater personal success by playing the usual games of House against House.
On the other hand, he
IS a Licori nationalist. While he's got a keen sense of his own limitations, and those of others, he does not have a self-loathing or own-species-loathing bone in his body. He's not going to spit on his species and culture as a whole, purely because under a poorly structured government, it led to an escalating series of bad outcomes inflicted on them by foreign powers. He reacted to the war by resolving to learn from his conquerors, not by being abjectly broken and resolving to serve and imitate them in all ways.
...
So for example, he's not going to shed a single tear for House Kortennon, both because of his personal grudges and because of his contempt for them. If someone had given him the powers of a Q, it's a safe bet that within minutes if not seconds, every member of that House who had ever held decision-making authority would have died screaming. There might be a few exceptions, I suppose- but not many.
He's not going to shed more than a couple of sentimental tears over the fall of the Arcadian Empire- and those mostly over the high culture of its court, which he has personal nostalgic experience with, which has nothing to do with what he believes to be objectively right or wrong. He'd miss the dog he had twenty years ago, too, without denying it had to be put down for its own good.
He's not going to pretend other nations don't have a right to defend themselves against existential threats, or that creating weapons which present such a threat
isn't a grave provocation. He was entirely unsurprised that the Federation declared war after the
Courageous Incident, and if everyone involved had listened to him that incident would never have happened. Not least because every Kortennon of any note would have died screaming instead of continuing to fund star-breaker research.
He fully intends to do what he can to arrange matters so that all forms of abject servitude are abolished from Licori space to the greatest extent possible, so that the Licori treat all beings with dignity and respect, and so that the power of the noble houses be either broken or reshaped into a more constructive form.
...
At the same time, Halkh's not going to 'admit' that the existence of mentats is or was a bad thing. He considers their reduced lifespan a noble sacrifice made in the causes of science, art, and the greater good of Licori civilization. Their instability? A reason to manage mentats carefully, no doubt, but he's not going to harshly judge beings that are by far his intellectual superiors if they seem a bit... twitchy... to his eyes.
He believes a great many technological marvels and irreplaceable talents were destroyed with the fall of Ixaria, and he mourns their loss.
He's not going to 'overcome' his dislike and distrust of mechanical computers. Not quickly, and maybe not ever. He believes his people have good reasons to harbor that belief, and I strongly suspect they
do have reasons. He's not going to ignore or dismiss them just because other species have so far succeeded in avoiding disaster by following the 'thinking machine' route, even as the Licori were matching or surpassing them by following the 'mentat' route.
He's not going to abandon the personal belief that good people can do terrible things in extremity,
and still be good people. Of course, he also believes that sometimes you have to do the best you can to kill good people. There's a reason he was able to affably share a glass of wine with Nash, and play songs to entertain her command team around the dinner table, after she'd just gotten done kicking the tar out of both his own flagship and the Imperial fleet and government as a whole.
...
Halkh is, in short, a
Licori reformer, with both words being important to understanding who and what he is. He is not an Arcadian Empire diehard, and has no wish to preserve any of the forms of that government except insofar as they are useful or directly create something he loves. But he is not a Federation mini-me. He does not share all the Federation's values, nor does he oppose all that the Federation opposes.
Consequently, he's not going to thank the Federation for blowing up "the rot." Even if you convinced him that it was necessary, you'd never convince him to be
grateful.
