- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I think we've been relying in large part on the influx of crew from new member races. The problem is that that only carries us so far, and we don't actually have a lot of new members coming in for the next few years either.
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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- 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?
Random Member
Gardener of Human Happiness
- Location
- Behind You
Clearly this means we should get new members fast.
....
And I just realised that the Federation's expansion is driven by Starfleet's continuous expansion in order protect the Federation. "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
Sort of, but resources and crew have a "natural increase" from adding more members and affiliates, while berth space increases only if we build more berths. I could go with one Academy expansion, but that plus adjusting Academy output so it favors Officers more (for our Explorers) would go a long way on its own.
We've got the Apiata (once their events are cleared) and the Indorians (if the Cardassians don't manage to block them). I expect the Orions will get a massive relationship boost (+100 or something) once the Syndicate is ground down below a certain level that will take them straight to membership, which probably means within the next three years. (Having cast their lot with the Federation against the Syndicate, the Orion Union have basically committed themselves.) Beyond that, it depend on Events. Though don't forget, +300 Affiliates also give crew and resources, so the Qloathi will begin contributing something pretty soon.
- Location
- the Moon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
My head canon is that Antares was built at the confluence of 2-3 major trade routes that happened to be near a nebula. Kinda like how a lot of cities in the Midwest USA got really big as a consequence of interstates intersecting. That doesn't really exist in our current UFP so a large yard like that doesn't make sense to us right now
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Okay, so, in the long history of Romulans in Star Trek, here is a list of anyone they have used as a proxy or a minion without having attempted to assume total control of them first: Duras maybe, though given the anti-Romulan sentiment in the Klingon Empire and the stuff they had on him regarding the Khitomer Massacre he was probably so far in their pockets he had to look up to see the loose change.
It's a short list with more qualifiers than entries. This is a species whose list of defining traits includes extreme xenophobia and isolationism, to the point they fought at least one war around Archer's time without having ever been seen directly by anyone on the opposing side, and ghosted out on the galactic community from after that war until TOS. If they want proxies, they build robotic telepresences to do it for them and hold a gun to the head of the operator just to be sure. They've only affiliated closely with a literal slave species that we know of. Their official government stance during the 22nd Century was "Manifest Destiny 2: Manifest Harder" and that dream has not yet completely died judging from the way they're eyeing the Klingons now. Depending on how much you care about the novels the only reason they went into isolation after losing the war rather than rebuilding and going again in another few years was the result of a fratricidal spree of assassinations that left them without military leadership who could have actually prosecuted such a war.
So no, I don't think that we'll encounter minions, proxies, or any other group that serves the Romulans. Their mistrust can be satisfied when dealing with an individual, hence their relatively cordial relationship with Nash during the Biophage Crisis. (The Romulans were basically coordinating with Nash personally rather than the Federation at large, even at the end.) But a group? At best they'll stand a short ways off and watch their every move like a hawk. People might certainly act to appease their Romulan watchers or pay them deference, and I suppose you could argue that's the same thing, but the Romulans themselves would only regard such actions with greater suspicion.
As to Klingon affiliate groups, well, there's the obvious point that canon doesn't contain any, but I find that concept entirely believable regardless. The Klingons have always been able to recognize value in non-Klingons and work with them; the Romulans have always been a question mark on those points.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I only just now took time to sit down and read @Iron Wolf's recent omake, and hot damn that was a good one.
And anyway, the real problem with this is that expanding the Federation drives up our crew supply, but it drives up our defense requirements just as fast, maybe even faster. And it can entangle us with hostile foreign powers that make trouble for us.
So at some point we need to stop and take the 'development' approach rather than the 'expansionist' approach. Concentrate on establishing the infrastructure to build and maintain a large force of crew for all our ships within our territory, so that we're not constantly struggling to crew the bare minimum of ships we need to protect ourselves.
Remind me again what assumptions you're making about casualties and future expansion of our recruitment?
I think we're probably okay with crewing the berths we have, but we're still potentially vulnerable to problems- and if we drastically expand our berthing infrastructure now, we may struggle to fill the resulting ships with crew even if we're fine with the berths we have. I'd really like to build up a buffer of crew.
This is why I favor both Academy and berth expansion this year, and to stick a few more crew-boosting projects in over the next few years. Rather than waiting until we have another crew crunch due to some factor as yet not fully foreseen, how about we get proactive instead?
...Which I heard in Leonard Nimoy's voice because I played Civilization IV so much.
And anyway, the real problem with this is that expanding the Federation drives up our crew supply, but it drives up our defense requirements just as fast, maybe even faster. And it can entangle us with hostile foreign powers that make trouble for us.
So at some point we need to stop and take the 'development' approach rather than the 'expansionist' approach. Concentrate on establishing the infrastructure to build and maintain a large force of crew for all our ships within our territory, so that we're not constantly struggling to crew the bare minimum of ships we need to protect ourselves.
Yes, but it'd be really nice to have security in regards to our supply of crew. Looking at your spreadsheet, we run pretty low in the mid-2310s. Right now we don't seem to wind up in the red (at least not before 2317-8 or so, when your spreadsheet stops), but when I looked at it a few days ago I'm pretty sure we did.
Remind me again what assumptions you're making about casualties and future expansion of our recruitment?
Yeah.
I think we're probably okay with crewing the berths we have, but we're still potentially vulnerable to problems- and if we drastically expand our berthing infrastructure now, we may struggle to fill the resulting ships with crew even if we're fine with the berths we have. I'd really like to build up a buffer of crew.
This is why I favor both Academy and berth expansion this year, and to stick a few more crew-boosting projects in over the next few years. Rather than waiting until we have another crew crunch due to some factor as yet not fully foreseen, how about we get proactive instead?
So then.... what exactly is happening to non-Romulan sapient species in the area that the Romulans control? If they aren't making those races into minions, proxies, or other group... what are they doing to keep them from being a threat?
Are we talking a whole lot of genocides?
I would suspect any Romulan 'client' species are kept deliberately invisible and probably out of the capital, perhaps confined even to their own planets.
So it's entirely possible they exist but we won't be meaningfully seeing them any time soon.
So maybe not genocide but certainly mass enslavement.
So it's entirely possible they exist but we won't be meaningfully seeing them any time soon.
So maybe not genocide but certainly mass enslavement.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
@Briefvoice don't suppose you could link to your ship building spreadsheet/ledger?
So I just finished making some adjustments. Right now I have:
1. An Academy expansion next Snakepit
2. Apiata expected to join by end of 2312
3. Assume that next Academy Steering meeting in 2313 we adjust intake towards officers.
4. 0.75 Casualties expected in every standard crew category every year; 0.25 casualties in Explorer Corps every year (Obviously this is meant to average out over many years.)
I'm not including any other members or affiliates right now.
@SuperSonicSound see link above.
Orbital bombardment covereth a multitude of sins.
That is to say that I wouldn't be surprised if Romulan space is full of species trying to be Gurren Lagann protagonists but without spiral power.
Sad, but not surprised.
"You fool, by defeating me you will only attract the attention of a race that will doom us all."
"The anti-spirals???"
"No, a species infinitely more dangerous: the Romulans."
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Okay, I see your point. The problem is, the Romulans are no doubt in the same position we are, in that when they try to expand they bump into the territory of other species.
This is basically the question Briefvoice is asking: What can they do in response to that? How can they be a growing polity that's expanding economically and technologically?
Basically, there are two possibilities. One is that the Romulans methodically exterminate every alien species they encounter, excepting only those too powerful to destroy, whom they isolate themselves from. The trouble with this is that word tends to spread, and pretty soon the Romulans wind up ringed with nations that are armed against them and have every reason to combine against them. If that were happening, you'd expect the Romulans to have gotten crushed already. Or at least to be engaged in constant, eternal border wars on all sides with literally everyone, which isn't what we see the Romulans doing in canon.
The other option is that the Romulans have at least SOME concept of diplomacy and interaction with other species. In particular, they have a proven track record of playing other species off against each other, or playing off factions within a species against each other. You can't do that with a species that you aren't interacting with on some level. You wouldn't even have any experiential basis for how to do it, because if you don't interact with aliens at all, you won't know enough xenopsych and xenosociology to know how to manipulate them.
So maybe the Ked Paddah aren't "servants" of the Romulans, don't have an ongoing dialogue with them, aren't somehow in the process of being politically integrated into the Romulan Star Empire... but are still being in some way propped up and encouraged by the Romulans. Maybe they're not even a species or a nation as such, they're a faction that the Romulans are arming to make trouble for other factions, planning to swoop in and subjugate a larger region once its inhabitants are softened up by internal fighting. Heck, that's pretty much what the Romulans tried to do to the four races that later became the Federation, back in the 2100s. Would it be a surprise if they did the same thing somewhere else?
(2) is probably optimistic. The Apiata are arguably at war right now and we don't bring in members who are at war. And while the Apiata caste issues have been partially resolved, I don't think they've been entirely resolved. That's probably going to require another event chain, over and above us figuring out a way to stop the Apiata from poking the Cardies and the Sydraxians hard enough to draw us into a war. All of which is likely to take more than a year to resolve.
(4) strikes me as a bit optimistic as well, especially as the size of the Federation and the fleet increases, resulting in more ships rolling more events, and therefore encountering more ways to get redshirts killed. Looking at the Explorer Corps...
I mean, Courageous took nine points of crew casualties back in '09 all by itself. At 0.75 total crew losses per year (average over time), that would be twelve years of crew losses for the Explorer Corps. And, yes, that's pretty much the ONLY event we've had that killed large numbers of Explorer Corps- but we HAVE taken casualties before, even if you exclude the pitched battles of the Biophage campaign. Plus, for most of the past eleven years, we've only had three or four explorers operating at a time. In the near future we'll be up to six or seven... and the probability of high-casualty events scales more or less linearly with the number of explorers.
I doubt that our casualty rate over the 2310s is going to average a mere 0.25 each of techs, officers, and enlisted per year.
Similar arguments apply to the regular fleet, although when a regular fleet ship takes casualties we often wind up losing the ship, which at least means our loss of crew is canceled out by having one less ship to fill with the crew in the first place.
In all honesty, the Romulans don't need to be so card-carrying EVULZ about their imperialism.
There are plenty of historical empires that ran similar 'isolating from foreign influences' policies. To be honest, that is pretty much exactly what the Monroe Doctrine was. When you are trying to isolate a planet within your territory and you have sensors, it's not exactly rocket science. Set up economic barriers and 'regulations' that prevent said client species from achieving their own fleet, and if they try to buck the trend have it get mysteriously attacked by 'pirates'.
Exploiting another species economically is also an easy thing: It's hardly the Romulans fault if they keep getting the better end of a lot of trade deals. And if the Qplothians or whoever tend to be mostly poor and their upper class works the vast majority in what amounts to slave labor- well, that's hardly the Romulans' fault, they don't dictate Qplothian economic policy.
Even if you're heavy handed about things, you don't have to be OPENLY heavy handed. Speak softly and carry a big stick.
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They're at war with the same people we are and to about the same extent.... but anyway, I figure either the Apiata will join or the Indorians will if they get an average or better diplomatic roll in the Snakepit. There's some chance both will and some chance neither will, so assuming one of the two seems fair enough for these kinds of loosy-goosy projections.
On the other hand, a number of these technologies we're researching are supposed to reduce crew losses during bad events. But hey, if you'd like to suggest numbers to use I'm all ears. I suppose I could take the 2311 Career Casualties and divide by 11, but as you say that doesn't account that for many of those cases where the entire ship was lost. What numbers would you suggest we assume?
Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
- Pronouns
- He/Him
-looks at the Cost summary-
sooooo... 2pp per omake, right? Can we get that confirmed? Cuz I think we're gonna need it..
sooooo... 2pp per omake, right? Can we get that confirmed? Cuz I think we're gonna need it..
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
We've never once actually attacked either the Sydraxians, or the Cardassians except for their own intrusive bases in our space. The Apiata have raided at least one Cardassian/Sydraxian convoy.
This suggests a fundamental mismatch about how the Apiata will want to proceed after joining the Federation, and how we will want them to proceed.
That mismatch must, in some way, be resolved, before they agree to membership.
Why don't we just edge the numbers up a bit, say to 0.35s in Explorers and to 1s in regular crew? Maybe it's pessimistic, but I'd rather have pessimistic crew projections than optimistic ones, because I'd rather have crew and need to build more berths to make ships to put them in, than have ships sitting empty with no crew.
- Location
- United States
[X] Vice Admiral Valentina Sousa
She's been angling for this job for a while - as in since the last change-over.
Hopefully our 'old guard' won't snub her as much as the last set did to us.
She's been angling for this job for a while - as in since the last change-over.
Hopefully our 'old guard' won't snub her as much as the last set did to us.
KnightDisciple
Love God. Do Right. Fear No Man.
- Location
- Midwest, USA
[X] Vice Admiral Valentina Sousa
Yes, yes.... In the first post on the matter I said that Events would have to resolve. I just think it's something that's going to happen and then it'll be done; I don't expect it to drag out for a lot of years unresolved.
Okay sure, done.
Some humorous food for thought: A stock Galaxy takes about 6 years to build-but does that include the various construction improvement techs we can expect to get by Tier 4? If 2330s and 2320s build techniques stack, then it gets 6 quarters chopped off it's build time, or only 5 if they are applied sequentially. If we then account for industrial replicators and subtract another 5 quarters, we're looking at only 13 or so quarters of construction time. That's three quarters less than the current build time for an Excelsior. With tier 5 replicators, they actually run headlong into the minimum three year build times for Explorers, and would probably take only 10 quarters without those, -1 for each previous explorer from that berth!
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I figure we're going to have at least two Big Things happen involving the Apiata first. I also expect those things to happen in a reasonably timely manner.
However, depending on exactly how they resolve, it could take a few years. We'd know the reason for the delay, but it might still happen.
- Location
- Nova Scotia, Canada
One thing we should consider is upgrading the outpost at Tipperary into a starbase. The KBZ is the only border zone we have without one and while it isn't needed for the D requirements it could help with missions. We've seen the Romulans plan to use our space to flank the Klingons. The Klingons might try the same thing.
That said I would prioritize a shipyard (I prefer UP but am fine with one at Ferasa) and academy expansion over a starbase. For diplomacy I'd like to keep working on the Dawiar and don't feel strongly about the other races.
That said I would prioritize a shipyard (I prefer UP but am fine with one at Ferasa) and academy expansion over a starbase. For diplomacy I'd like to keep working on the Dawiar and don't feel strongly about the other races.
- Location
- somewhere
Why would we want a starbase at Tipperary rather than Caldonia, built after the war breaks out and the Klingons aren't in the position to object?