- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I wonder how the Klingons would respond to that.
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
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- 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?
Alastor Mobius Toth
***** ***
- Location
- Neon Ghetto
Regarding the Breen, something to bear in mind is that canonically, the Romulans invaded Breen space pretty early in their history; the fleet involved never came back.
There's no information on what they did exactly, but the Breen would since have a murderboner for Romulans strong enough that they were willing to side with Dominion on moment's notice when Romulans joined the anti-Dominion alliance, explicitly for nothing more than the promise Romulans would be given over to Breen's tender care. And that Breen stuck with Dominion for it even when the circumstances drastically changed against them.
I'm starting to feel this isn't a "conventional" conflict - if Breen are as fanatical as they are presented, they might view this as a rightful war of vengeance against their ancient aggressors. So they'll be probably be willing to warcrime a whole planet, if that's not actually the goal from the start. It would also mean that they would be perfectly willing to take their war to the knife if needed be.
But then again....this is the Breen Alliance and not the Confederacy.
EDIT: Something that has been brought up to my attention, is that some sources claim that it was Klingons who actually attacked the Breen, and not Romulans. It's honestly been a while since I checked on these things, so I'm not sure which version of the story is correct.
But the Romulans are the ones with the saying, so it stands to reason they had previous experience with the Breen, and it hasn't been all too happy.
There's no information on what they did exactly, but the Breen would since have a murderboner for Romulans strong enough that they were willing to side with Dominion on moment's notice when Romulans joined the anti-Dominion alliance, explicitly for nothing more than the promise Romulans would be given over to Breen's tender care. And that Breen stuck with Dominion for it even when the circumstances drastically changed against them.
I'm starting to feel this isn't a "conventional" conflict - if Breen are as fanatical as they are presented, they might view this as a rightful war of vengeance against their ancient aggressors. So they'll be probably be willing to warcrime a whole planet, if that's not actually the goal from the start. It would also mean that they would be perfectly willing to take their war to the knife if needed be.
But then again....this is the Breen Alliance and not the Confederacy.
EDIT: Something that has been brought up to my attention, is that some sources claim that it was Klingons who actually attacked the Breen, and not Romulans. It's honestly been a while since I checked on these things, so I'm not sure which version of the story is correct.
But the Romulans are the ones with the saying, so it stands to reason they had previous experience with the Breen, and it hasn't been all too happy.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
What laws of war?
I mean, seriously, Earth's laws of war as we know them are the product of a broadly uniform cultural framework, of wars fought with more or less similar technology (everyone uses incendiary bombs, for a long time everyone used land mines, but no one seriously uses true bioweapons) under similar circumstances, by a species with certain biological imperatives, in similar ecological circumstances (where things like food and habitable land are usually plentiful, tending to avert 'life is cheap' mentalities).
It's very unlikely that all species or even most actually have a consensus definition of what the laws of war are.
Enerael
We Shall Wake to Sanity
Dont do to them what you dont want them to do to you.
You pull a knife in a fist fight, be prepared to be stabbed. Glass a planet, expect your planets to be glassed.
I would say that some rules or unspoken agreements arise naturally.
And then are broken by the sufficiently desperate/powerful assholes thinking that they are beyond retaliation, but some understandings should be there.
Regarding the Licori, I think a lot of the issues will be resolved when they join the Federation. The main reason for this is because the lower classes can go where ever they want now, meaning that the Licori have to have relative parity in their treatment of the lower class, or the lower class will just leave.
I think it's called the Stationary Bandit Problem? They have to treat them well enough that tolerating them is less of a hassle than moving somewhere else.
I suppose it could end in bloody revolution, but I like to think that the FDS would make enough preparations to avoid that.
I think it's called the Stationary Bandit Problem? They have to treat them well enough that tolerating them is less of a hassle than moving somewhere else.
I suppose it could end in bloody revolution, but I like to think that the FDS would make enough preparations to avoid that.
Enerael
We Shall Wake to Sanity
Not so simple. TBG civilian interstellar travel is rare, expensive, and slow.
You are not making a dent in the population of a major world without enormous amount of effort.
We have to fix them before they become eligible for membership anyway.
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Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
- Pronouns
- He/Him
People should stop worrying about the Licori. They literally have a tag called "Unequal Feudal Society" that needs to be resolved before membership. In the process of clearing that tag, their society will see change. Enough said.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
If it were that rare, that expensive, and that slow, the Licori would not be at war. Because piracy would not be commercially viable due to lack of targets and inability to sell loot.
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Enerael
We Shall Wake to Sanity
Let me rephrase that. In TBG interstellar travel is stupid rare per capita.
Non military ships can cross a map square in two months I think? Or a month.
Now, think of how many freighters and space liners various polities have, and how big those are.
Largest supertankers can transport about 300kt of oil, for comparison.
Military ships are much faster, but also needed elsewhere generally, are far more expensive, and have vastly less space for people then freighters and liners, relatively.
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- Location
- The internet
I'll admit, I'm tempted to move the ship design to a point buy system. Ship hulls would have a certain number of Ship Points for you to play with, with the weapons, automation, ect. tech changing the point cost of appropriate stats. With, of course, options to buy extra points for more SR. It would have the benefit of being far easier to scale up and down the size chart, and for application to abnormal situations like runabout squadrons.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Alternatively, they're broken by people who simply take for granted that all fights are knife fights.
Like, imagine a civilization that evolves on a planet whose ecology collapses due to natural or artificial catastrophe. The inhabitants rebuild their technology in an environment where life is cheap but resources are scarce. Populations easily outpace the sustainable numbers, quickly rebound from demographic catastrophes, and the only way you can really expand your own population and economic base is by robbing someone else. Let that mindset sink in.
If that species ever DOES manage to reach space, they may have a very different attitude towards, say, killing all the aliens that live on a planet with bioweapons so they can take the place over. They already have norms that implicitly expect others to behave that way, they've historically treated themselves that way, so they are fairly likely to treat others that way.
The trick is, we can't get the Licori all the way into the Federation without resolving the gross economic injustices and (more to the point) the laws that enforce slavery or second-class citizenship on most of the Licori species. We can either wait for those tags to go away on their own, which is likely to take several decades given the rate at which tags spontaneously resolve... Or we can set a task force on the job.
Right, but that does require us to actually put effort into clearing those tags, which we have so far not seen fit to do. We had other priorities, which is fine- but the Licori will remain more or less as they are now if we don't actively work to change them.
I suspect that civilian ships are actually comparatively numerous precisely because they are so slow. Civilian ships use less of the advanced SR-hungry technology that goes into warships, and are correspondingly much slower and less capable... but it's hard to build much of a trading economy around ships that take several months to get where they're going. I mean, you CAN, but the trick is that to maintain any kind of a supply chain you need a whole lot of ships running back and forth. You can't just have a couple of ships a year sailing back and forth like the Manila Galleon unless your entire 'trade' schema reduces to "import giant blobs of treasure in exchange for a pittance, profit from hawking the random infusions of treasure." And industrialized economies usually don't work that way.
I suspect a lot of small tramp freighters simply aren't tracked, being smaller than the multi-hundred-kiloton vessels we normally look at in our stats.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
My draft rules for the very incomplete '2235 game' just abstract everything out; a ship of a given tonnage with given technology can have X points of stats, and no one stat can exceed a cap defined by the ship's weight class and (other technology). You can, in principle, design a ship with a pocket calculator if you know what the available tech gives you as input parameters.
We had something a lot like point buy for stats.
Oneiros replaced it with parts. Compared to that system parts make about a million times more sense.
A much simplified "customise this base" system could work fine in certain quests.
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Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It doesn't surprise me at all that the Breen aren't invading. Given that in TBG-verse that a planet doesn't have a lot of ways to project power against starships, simply taking the system and destroying all defenses/defenders is enough to hold the territory. Depending on how the war ends, either they'll force the Romulans to cede them the system(s) and thus force the planets to surrender, or they'll lose some systems and there was no point to invading on the ground in the first place.
Given that we've seen starships enter atmosphere to deliver CAS before and installations capable of engaging starships on a surface-to-orbit basis seem to be vanishingly rare, I suspect that the customs of war basically devolve to "he who holds the orbitals holds the planet." Open field battle is basically suicide, so you're down to guerilla warfare and MAYBE urban combat (if the Starship can sit at a thousand feet it can probably pick off vehicles with precise energy weapon strikes and then you're just down to unsupported unsupplied light infantry, and that's a recipe for losing a groundside war).
... You have GOT to be shitting me, SJ. C'mon. We've put pushes on them 5 out of the last 6 Snakepits and there's a massive taskforce working on the tags that are blocking us from working on societal issues and affiliating them. There literally isn't anything else we can do.
My issue is that parts is a massive headache to do research timing for. Because we need to time parts to complete for specific dates and such, it's like... gaaaahhh. Non-parts research is relatively simple and super fun, I would agree
Given that we've seen starships enter atmosphere to deliver CAS before and installations capable of engaging starships on a surface-to-orbit basis seem to be vanishingly rare, I suspect that the customs of war basically devolve to "he who holds the orbitals holds the planet." Open field battle is basically suicide, so you're down to guerilla warfare and MAYBE urban combat (if the Starship can sit at a thousand feet it can probably pick off vehicles with precise energy weapon strikes and then you're just down to unsupported unsupplied light infantry, and that's a recipe for losing a groundside war).
... You have GOT to be shitting me, SJ. C'mon. We've put pushes on them 5 out of the last 6 Snakepits and there's a massive taskforce working on the tags that are blocking us from working on societal issues and affiliating them. There literally isn't anything else we can do.
I seem to be the only person in the thread who thinks the research system is fun.
My issue is that parts is a massive headache to do research timing for. Because we need to time parts to complete for specific dates and such, it's like... gaaaahhh. Non-parts research is relatively simple and super fun, I would agree
- Location
- Infraspace
Maybe it would be possible to split those? So we might have:My issue is that parts is a massive headache to do research timing for. Because we need to time parts to complete for specific dates and such, it's like... gaaaahhh. Non-parts research is relatively simple and super fun, I would agree
- general research, for non-parts and breakthrough techs (isolinear, pArrays etc.)
- 'refinement' research, where existing parts get improved on a predictable basis
So, once we develop production isolinear computers, for example, that gets spun off into developing Mk II, III, IV versions etc. in a separate system
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Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
I don't think introducing more systems is the best way to reduce complexity, which is the point of this exercise.
- Location
- Infraspace
The point would be to replace a large part of the more complex system with a less complex one, but still keep the more complex one where it appears to be more desirable.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Okay. The thought in my mind wasn't "we have done literally nothing about the Licori." It was more "we haven't specifically put a task force on them."
And we DO have other things to worry about, potentially including other Licori-related things. They're important things. I'm not trying to do the passive-aggressive "oh we're too stupid to do the smart/right thing." I'm saying "the Licori aren't going to change any time soon just because of natural causes, unless we specifically go out of our way to grind those problems down ourselves." A task force is almost certainly the most efficient way to do so, because otherwise we're going to have to build up like 1500 points of relationship via PP expenditure on diplomatic pushes.
So if people are deeply unhappy with the Licori government and want it to change fast, instead of basically being like Russia under Alexander II (who freed the serfs but was still, well, Czar of all the Russias)... we can do something about that but it will require more focused and deliberate effort than we've been able to spare to date.
Hm, one question for @OneirosTheWriter . Is the "Uncontrolled Mentats" tag still a thing? I thought that was originally put in as a 'tag you already cleared with the Licori War forcing them to exercise mentats control and stop saying 'mentats don't kill people, superweapons being fired at people kill people.''
Jenny
anonymous user
- Location
- maryland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's not still a thing. Strikethrough just occasionally doesn't come through properly when copy-pasting.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
We have a lot of possibilities for task forces. The Breen and Gorn task forces may need reinforcement, the Ur'razzi need a task force to affiliate them urgently given their positioning, the Chrystovians could use a task force to deal with their Distant Stars modifier, I suspect that if we dedicated a task force to the Yizgisi we'd quickly discover some hidden tag given the dangling plot hook about the people responsible for the gray goo incident partly escaping justice, there's the Dreamers, we could use a task force to get more regular contact with the Ittick-ka, and it might be worthwhile to dedicate a task force to the long-term work of helping the Hishmeri become less of a mobile sophontitarian catastrophe...
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
Sad to say, the Chrystovians are almost certainly fucked. Any serious attempt to affiliate them is all but certain to provoke Cardassian intervention or outright invasion unless we can roll in with enough force to prevent that, and by the time we have both the spare ships and the logistical support to do that (which pretty much requires at least allying the Ashidi if not inducting them as members) the Cardassians are likely to have made their move to incorporate them into the Pact.
The Hishmeri, meanwhile, are likely to get themselves smashed by the Imelak with Pact support given enough time to work themselves up to doing something stupid. And frankly if we want to set up an anti-slavery TF to Rimward I'd say the Ittick-la are a higher priority target.
As far as other priorities go, the Lamarck, the Sydraxians, the Yrillians, and the Tauni all have substantial tags to clear and would shore up our position along their borders.
The biggest thing will be when we develop the Unified Psychological Model in a few years. That should make clearing tags a good bit easier all around.
On the Breen issue, it might at least be worth looking into whether we can solve some of the Klingon mercenary issue by hiring as many as we can find and then pointing them at Breen space. At the very least that would make a decent next step short of entering the war ourselves if the Breen do something that requires us to escalate, and should thin out the number of Klingons who didn't get their fill of fighting during the Klingon-Romulan War.
The Hishmeri, meanwhile, are likely to get themselves smashed by the Imelak with Pact support given enough time to work themselves up to doing something stupid. And frankly if we want to set up an anti-slavery TF to Rimward I'd say the Ittick-la are a higher priority target.
As far as other priorities go, the Lamarck, the Sydraxians, the Yrillians, and the Tauni all have substantial tags to clear and would shore up our position along their borders.
The biggest thing will be when we develop the Unified Psychological Model in a few years. That should make clearing tags a good bit easier all around.
On the Breen issue, it might at least be worth looking into whether we can solve some of the Klingon mercenary issue by hiring as many as we can find and then pointing them at Breen space. At the very least that would make a decent next step short of entering the war ourselves if the Breen do something that requires us to escalate, and should thin out the number of Klingons who didn't get their fill of fighting during the Klingon-Romulan War.
Sadly, certain short-sighted members of the Federation Council would probably refuse to approve our very reasonable "hire Klingon mercenaries" budget line.
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
They'd be sent into Breen space, actually.Sending Klingon mercs into Romulan space while they are on a war footing - I can see no way that this would go wrong ...
"If we don't hire them, somebody else will. Like, for example, the Breen."
I mean, they're already in the region anyway thanks to the Coreward War. Redirecting them to useful purposes lessens the chance of them doing something we don't want them to do, and removes one of the factors that helped cause the war in the first place.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
At the point where we're hiring mercenaries to attack the Breen we're basically at war with them anyway, and would be better served dropping Beyond and Unity on the heads of their main battlefleet.