To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

[UberJJK]

Whelp. I guess we're going to see first hand what a war between peer powers looks like now. I would solidly rate the Harmony now as high as the Biophage and TNG!Borg in regards to their threat to the very existence of the Federation. For all the evils of the Cardassians, Klingons, and Romulans there is still hope that things might get better. If nothing else the enslaved people can raise up and overthrow their masters as happened to countless empires in the past.

That isn't the case with Harmony. Their omnipresent monitoring and mind-control means there is no hope for internal change. Change can only come from the outside. From forces yet to be fully subverted yet. That is how the ISC and Tauni escaped; they still had enough uncompromised people left to fight back.

The Singer's must be destroyed. The only question is if this can be done without also destroying the Federation and Harmony in the process. I mean it ultimately doesn't matter since they are that serious a threat that the loss of the Federation and Harmony is an acceptable sacrifice if it means protecting the rest of the galaxy from them.

 

[MTB]

See, that is what I was talking about earlier - better to find a solution that stops only the Singers. Like the anti-Borg virus in canon.

 

[AKuz]

@AKuz

so out of curiosity, how many times did we flub the roll to start the harmony quest chain? if you don't mind me asking.

also, was it just rolling poorly all the time, or was there some way we were screwing up deployment?

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I like keeping my dice behind the screen as it were. But If you go back over the logs you can see where opportunities were missed.

 

[SynchronizedWritersBlock]

I think a good example might be the event where the Enterprise's warp engines fluctuated weirdly while the HoH cruisers were escorting it? That read to me like a technical bare pass on the event or at least the part of the event involving sabotage, but a fail on the discovery why or some kind of better success.

 

[random_npc]

I like keeping my dice behind the screen as it were. But If you go back over the logs you can see where opportunities were missed.

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is there a way to tell those failures from other fails?

but really, the pertinent question is, where we doing the right thing and just rolling shit, or did we actually fuck up? The reason I'm asking is that I want to know if there is anything the players can do to avoid a repeat. Because failing to even start engaging with the plot is just about the most unfun way to lose.

only put up "Event failed" because putting [Event failed, Harmony of Horizon takes another step into infiltrating your computer core production plants to preload copies onto every ship entering service or being refit] kinda gives the game away.

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wait, they had to roll to? I thought they were just getting a fiat level of infiltration? well, I guess then whatever level of comprised we are is fair at least.

 

[Briefvoice]

is there a way to tell those failures from other fails?

but really, the pertinent question is, where we doing the right thing and just rolling shit, or did we actually fuck up? The reason I'm asking is that I want to know if there is anything the players can do to avoid a repeat. Because failing to even start engaging with the plot is just about the most unfun way to lose.

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It's not even losing. It's nothing happening. "Ah-hah, the Harmony has succeeded in part 501 of its 13,361 part plan to conquer the Federation 40 years from now. As a result, the players continue to be told nothing is wrong and the gaslighting continues."

I mean, in a way SWB is right that they weren't all that far along in their 13,361 part plan. If they still had that much to go, then the absolute odds are that they had to flub a roll or we succeed at one eventually and it would all come crashing down. But that ignores the difficulty of months and months of real world time passing as the whole thing is frozen. At least when the Cardassians stole our sensor designs, they went and used the information immediately.

 

[MTB]

In a way it's an artifact of the quest format - if I read a novel, I don't expect to have to do something, I can enjoy some speculation and just read on. In a quest? I want to interact.

 

[random_npc]

It's not even losing. It's nothing happening. "Ah-hah, the Harmony has succeeded in part 501 of its 13,361 part plan to conquer the Federation 40 years from now. As a result, the players continue to be told nothing is wrong and the gaslighting continues."

Click to shrink...

I'm not so sure, some of there stuff reads like it was pretty close to getting nasty. I also almost wonder if there was a snowball effect in play, where each step they took debuffed efforts to uncover them. I mean, I bet them reading the explorer corps mail gave them one hell of a bonus against explorer corps ships. That computer thing along if they had pulled it off could have let them cripple Starfleet in a few in-game years.

 

[MTB]

Their predictive algorithms for Federation behavior must be comparatively good by now.

 

[uju32]

I'm not so sure, some of there stuff reads like it was pretty close to getting nasty. I also almost wonder if there was a snowball effect in play, where each step they took debuffed efforts to uncover them. I mean, I bet them reading the explorer corps mail gave them one hell of a bonus against explorer corps ships. That computer thing along if they had pulled it off could have let them cripple Starfleet in a few in-game years.

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People are underestimating the value of what access the Harmony already have. If it came to a war now, barring some unknown deficiency in their military, what they already have would prove decisive.

With much less penetration of Japanese comms, the US was able to assassinate the commander and chief strategist of the Imperial Japanese Navy Isoroku Yamamoto and to predict Japanese naval movements well enough to stage the decisive naval battles of Midway and Coral Sea, which crippled Japanese carrier power.

And they were only reading their mail and tracking ship movements.
They didn't have what's basically senate/cabinet level political penetration, as well as influence on critical RnD and active penetration of capital ship functions of a significant percentage of Starfleet's best explorers.

I'm not even counting the intelligence benefits from penetration of Federation ship building industry and day to day ship performance, which means they have very exact data on what our ships can and cannot do, and how to spoof them. Remember what happened to combat performance when the Lecarre got a good look at our targeting sensors? This is approximately a thousand times worse.

Assuming Great Power competence from the HoH navy, we'd lose a fight right now. Hard.
Unless the Singers tried to micromanage shit through comm lag and fucked up.

 

[SynchronizedWritersBlock]

I'd strongly disagree. The sheer weight of numbers is on our side by an incredible amount. If the penetration and subversion was at the level I had predicted, absolutely it could be decisive, but in this case it has to overcome the incredible weight advantage that member fleets provide, and the listed advantages don't quite make it there. Remember that they don't have deep access to our advanced production facilities, for example, as the intel dump lists that they're trying to get access still.

Don't forget that in USA vs Japan the US had an industrial advantage greater than an entire order of magnitude. They could have lost every single battle decisively you listed and still crushed Japan by 1945.

 

[Alliterate]

whereas Starfleet specialises in periodically getting FDS bosses fired.

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I may be missing some career-enders, but do you mean 'periodically getting SFI bosses fired'?

 

[uju32]

I'd strongly disagree. The sheer weight of numbers is on our side by an incredible amount. If the penetration and subversion was at the level I had predicted, absolutely it could be decisive, but in this case it has to overcome the incredible weight advantage that member fleets provide, and the listed advantages don't quite make it there. Remember that they don't have deep access to our advanced production facilities, for example, as the intel dump lists that they're trying to get access still.

Don't forget that in USA vs Japan the US had an industrial advantage greater than an entire order of magnitude. They could have lost every single battle decisively you listed and still crushed Japan by 1945.

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Sheer weight of numbers is not enough if your opponent can concentrate force better because they are literally reading your mail.

It doesn't matter how many ships you can build if they can spoof your sensors well enough that you're down to 50% of theireticsl combat capacity. And I have my doubts that we can meaningfully outbuild the Harmony anyway. Not to the point of having two or more times their numbers of ships. Especially since we know fuckall about the industrial capacity of the polities they've been eating.

This isn't the low-level border skirmishes with the Ashalla Pact, where all that was at stake was real estate and pride.
Total war with a peer opponent is not going to give us time to go back and reassess. Especially when they are actively subverting your command structure.

========================
The US would have won their war against Japan eventually. Like you said, industrial capacity will tell eventually.
But if they'd lost Midway, they'd have lost at least a year of combat ops before they could bring sufficient carriers online for a rematch. They'd have had to divert industrial resources from the Atlantic theater. The Russians and Brits would have been under more stress.

The Germans would have had time to run their genocide programs in Europe for longer, and maybe get those cruise missile programs into proper shape.Consequences.

 

[SynchronizedWritersBlock]

I may be missing some career-enders, but do you mean 'periodically getting SFI bosses fired'?

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No, circumstances have gotten the FDS boss more than they've gotten the SFI admiral fired.

 

[Enerael]

Well.

I expected most of those, but it still hit me hard.

Scrubbing Singer influence will be a big job, and they came worryingly close to pulling some crippling stuff, but I am far more concerned with the HoH public currently.

Because we are making much of this public. We have to. We have to give the minor powers the info they need to protect themselves, and we owe it to the HoH citizens.

This might result in a nasty civil war and/or anarchy.

But, I do not believe that the Singers do not have plans in case that they are revealed.

That said, heavy mind control is very unlikely I think. There must be limits to the Singers ability, and they are trying to make the perfect society. That's why they are doing this. They dont want mind controlled drones, just easily influenced and directed citizens. Drones would defeat the entire point.

At least one good thing will come out of this though: Lower PP costs for Intel expansions.

I think we need an S-test approach here. Find a way to subvert and disable their implants all at once, propitiating through the network, or something of the sort. Pretty much any other approach we might choose to take will become vastly more effective in the immediate aftermath of that.

Failing that, maybe Zara can convince the Singers of the error of their ways? Her memetic skill at befriending might just be up to the challenge.

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Seconded. Disabling all the implants permanently would be the perfect victory for us.

Would allow us to try befriending the Singers. I doubt that they would listen, or that we could afford to try for long, with the implants working.

Killing all the Singers (well, bar Cassie?) should be pretty down our list of options, but it is probably an acceptable one.

Hopefully Stesk would agree (and not be the one compromised, though Vulcans seem to be able to see/feel something shady about the HoH).

That isn't the case with Harmony. Their omnipresent monitoring and mind-control means there is no hope for internal change. Change can only come from the outside. From forces yet to be fully subverted yet. That is how the ISC and Tauni escaped; they still had enough uncompromised people left to fight back.

The Singer's must be destroyed. The only question is if this can be done without also destroying the Federation and Harmony in the process. I mean it ultimately doesn't matter since they are that serious a threat that the loss of the Federation and Harmony is an acceptable sacrifice if it means protecting the rest of the galaxy from them.

Click to shrink...

Change can come from within the Singers. See Cassie.

But, with their massive aversion to disunity, disharmony, and with the age and stuff...

It is unlikely.

As for Singer destruction, no to that. Romulans have done worse stuff, and we dont call to exterminate them.

But their mind control has to be neutralized, yes. It might come to us doing that by exterminating the Singers.

But hopefully not.

 

[Nervos Belli]

So who do we think the dominated Councillor or Councillors are? My best guess is one of the ones who was heavily in favor of intervening against the Cardassians. Worst case scenario Haley Singh is under control. That would be disastrous for the Expansionist party, who are historically our biggest supporters.

 

[Enerael]

Sheer weight of numbers is not enough if your opponent can concentrate force better because they are literally reading your mail.

It doesn't matter how many ships you can build if they can spoof your sensors well enough that you're down to 50% of theireticsl combat capacity. And I have my doubts that we can meaningfully outbuild the Harmony anyway. Not to the point of having two or more times their numbers of ships. Especially since we know fuckall about the industrial capacity of the polities they've been eating.

Click to shrink...

You are probably overestimating how long it would take us to resecure our stuff, now that we know about this.

Also, there are ways to f**k with people reading your mail, and tactics that could minimize their advantage. If war started now, it would be a huge blow, but a recoverable one.

It does, if you can build up more then twice the enemy fleet.

As for outbuilding the Harmony, that is trivial. Seriously. UFP has a stupid amount of starship industry.

The number of our berths is downright silly. And its decentralized too. Even loosing UP would cost us only a fraction of our berths.

I tried to find how many HoH has, but couldnt. I do know, however, that we have over two hundred starship berths Federation wide (which means member berths included).

And enough income (in a state of emergency) to have them building 1.5y war frigates nonstop.

200 of these each one and a half years.

And the HoH cant stop this, because our berths are heavily decentralized. No few production centers to destroy.

Its not our guns or our fleets that make the UFP terrifying to wage war against, its our industry and research.

 

[Glassware]

So who do we think the dominated Councillor or Councillors are? My best guess is one of the ones who was heavily in favor of intervening against the Cardassians. Worst case scenario Haley Singh is under control. That would be disastrous for the Expansionist party, who are historically our biggest supporters.

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The most likely scenario to my mind is someone from a polity that has a decent amount of exposure to the Harmony, recently admitted to the Federation. Basically probably the Laio.

 

[Derpmind]

200 of these each one and a half years.

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You misunderstand, the goal of the 200 berth strategy isn't to build 200 ships at the same time. Even at max emergency economy, we can't afford the resources or crew for even half that number. (IIRC it was a bit more than 50 of them? Probably remembering that estimate wrong.) The point of the plan is to have ships that can be build in any of our 200+ berths, including the possible super-small 400kt design. That's why there are so many other designs listed there. We can force them down to the 1.5 year buildtime limit, and crash build without prototyping, the only question is how many of the berths we could fill total if we had to. That's where the unnamed 400kt design comes from, so we could use them to fill in the numbers.

If I could find the origional post in the SDB therad, I'd link it, but it's quicker for me to blather this post out.

 

[Briefvoice]

So who do we think the dominated Councillor or Councillors are? My best guess is one of the ones who was heavily in favor of intervening against the Cardassians. Worst case scenario Haley Singh is under control. That would be disastrous for the Expansionist party, who are historically our biggest supporters.

Click to shrink...

My guess is it's one of the Gaeni Councillors.

1. Astrographically close
2. They have all sorts of cybernetic implants anyway, so the control is easy to conceal.

 

[Enerael]

You misunderstand, the goal of the 200 berth strategy isn't to build 200 ships at the same time. Even at max emergency economy, we can't afford the resources or crew for even half that number. (IIRC it was a bit more than 50 of them? Probably remembering that estimate wrong.) The point of the plan is to have ships that can be build in any of our 200+ berths, including the possible super-small 400kt design. That's why there are so many other designs listed there. We can force them down to the 1.5 year buildtime limit, and crash build without prototyping, the only question is how many of the berths we could fill total if we had to. That's where the unnamed 400kt design comes from, so we could use them to fill in the numbers.

If I could find the origional post in the SDB therad, I'd link it, but it's quicker for me to blather this post out.

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I couldn't find the original post either, tried again, failed. Where is it hiding?!

I could have sworn that we could use all of those berths, perhaps member fleets would pay for their own builds?

Gonna need a quote or something here to be convinced, and I cant find the post damn it...

 

[ilbgar123]

So, 400kt ships would be the equivalent of Destroyers (as in, the class that precedes Escort in size) here. The chaff for the chaff.

 

[Nervos Belli]

My guess is it's one of the Gaeni Councillors.

1. Astrographically close
2. They have all sorts of cybernetic implants anyway, so the control is easy to conceal.

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That makes logical sense, but from a narrative perspective I feel like it should be a Councillor who has gotten some screen time. I can't remember anything about the Gaeni Councillors.

 

[MTB]

So, 400kt ships would be the equivalent of Destroyers (as in, the class that precedes Escort in size) here. The chaff for the chaff.

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Sensors, Warp engine, basic life support, sublight, torpedoes. I guess.

 

[Derpmind]

I couldn't find the original post either, tried again, failed. Where is it hiding?!

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Conversation in-thread seems to start around here:

To show how crazy this is lets consider two situations; Limited Mobilization and Total Mobilization.

If we go to Limited Mobilization for 150% normal income and -2Qtrs off construction time we have:

BR: 3,067/yr
SR: 2,460/yr
O: 55.6/yr
E: 75.7/yr
T: 68.4/yr​

Meanwhile even SWB's 200 Berth micro-frigate requires 50BR/40SR 1/1/1 Crew. So we could build a maximum of 55.6/yr with our Officer income being the cap. Given that the absolute minimum build time is 1.5yrs we could occupy at most 83 berths before we start running out of raw resources. With C4/H2/L4 that is a combined 332C/166H/332L every 1.5yrs.

Meanwhile if we got to Total War we get 250% income and -50% build time. This gives an income of:

BR: 5,111/yr
SR: 4,100/yr
O: 92.6/yr
E: 126.1/yr
T: 114/yr​

and once again the limiting factor is Officers giving a maximum production yield of 92.6 micro-frigates per year. Given the 1.5yr build time that means 138 under construction at any given time. With C4/H2/L4 that comes to a grand maximum of 552C/276H/552L being added to our fleet every 1.5 years.

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There's a bunch more on the following pages. But I think the most important point is that, well, these are frigates. The current fleet battle system means frigates usually don't stick around in the Heavy Metal phase, and it's there where most ships actually get blown up. We couldn't just order up a bunch of these and call it a day, we'd need to make a (much more complicated) complete build plan including capital-sized ships to also be completed for the emergency fleet. Hence why it's a design the SDB has on file but we don't actually have a ready-to-go plan for implementing it. We'd have to look at what currently-building ships we had, exactly what our resource and crew situation looked like, what we'd expect the conflict to look like in 1.5 years, etc. etc.

That, and we still need to wait for this year's research turn to have the weapons tech to bump it up to C4.