The Cheron is going to single-handedly end the Syndicate at this rate.
This is part of why Uhura thanked Commander Amin for saving it.
Is the Romulan/ neutral zone problem even ours to fix? I wasn't aware that, despite our political will being used to do the Federation Diplomacy Service's job, we could make changes to important treaties like that.
It's not our problem to fix, but it's going to be OUR PROBLEM sooner or later if the Romulans decide we're encroaching on their space by trying to do an end-run around the Neutral Zone. They may be warming up to us, but they're starting a long way from 'friendly.'
So we can't behave as if we're blind to the issue and expect a good outcome from that
*10 years and one Rommie-Klingon war later*
I'm not going to promise it'll always be a border with the Klingons, but it isn't going to be
going anywhere unless one side or the other of that war attacks
us. Maybe not even then, knowing the Federation's predilections.
What stops the KBZ being renamed the Caldonia sector, but still being treated as a border sector, since you know, it is on the border with the Klingons?
As far as in knew Border zones were jsut specailized sectors that better enabled us to control the frontiers of the Federation. We can't move Caldonia, nor the border with the Klingons so Caldonia sector would have to be a border sector.
IIRC in canon the central part of what we have been calling the KBZ, was referred to as the Archanis sector. Centered on the research colony of Archanis IV
[BEGIN ZE WALL OF TEXT...]
@Simon_Jester you were asking why I would want a second UP facility. One of techs under Forward Defense is duplicating critical industry. Right now UP is our big shipyard and is likely the one that will be expanded the most since it tends to be cheaper and quicker to do so. In addition there seem to be some benefits for a large yard (some construction techniques work better, easier to defend). However if we go too much into UP and it gets hit there goes our industry, having a second designed yard that can be expanded like UP can ensures that opponents would have to hit two facilities to wipe our major shipyards. Of course having some yard at each member homeworld distributes it and makes strikes to cripple shipbuilding harder.
The problem, which I think you sort of sailed right past in here, is that two superyards plus the existing member world yard infrastructure is significantly more shipbuilding than Starfleet needs, or is capable of crewing, in the near future. If we do it any time soon we'll have an awful lot of berths sitting around doing nothing.
Furthermore, building a superyard is a huge project (think 100 political will or more), especially when any advisor the Federation Council talks to will point out that we can't actually crew all the construction that would come out of it... yet.
If the goal is to achieve a long term objective like "dispersion," then we should be focusing on member world yards. Those aren't
quite as efficient for us as expanding Utopia Planitia, but they're close. So it doesn't just devour our budget uselessly, the way that buying our extra berths at places like San Francisco and Vulcan would. And it achieves your stated goal of reducing our vulnerability to a strike against Sol system, and making Starfleet less human-dominated.
Once we have minor shipyard nodes at most or all of our member worlds, AND a respectable-sized main yard at Utopia Planitia, then it might start making sense to talk about building a second superyard. But realistically it's going to be 2330 or something before that happens.
So basically my response to your post to me is that I've already thought of just about everything you're saying, it's not new, we've been discussing this for a long time. And the key point is simply that starting a second superyard on the scale of Utopia Planitia isn't really part of the solution to the problems you've identified, at least not any time soon.
Also, and you may not be aware of this, but we
already have shipyards over Andoria and Tellar Prime, and one of the motivating factors behind that was all this you're saying about how we need to give more member races a sense of having a stake in the Federation. This isn't something anyone involved has been ignoring.
(The other reason is that it was politically easier to build new shipyard facilities around new planets than to expand existing ones. With Mars we finally have a facility that costs less to expand than it would to start a new yard from scratch... but it just happens to be in the same star system as one of our biggest member world yards, so we don't want to take things too far yet.)
Okay switching tracks onto Seruk and why I want to bump him up to a Vice Admiral. One reason is to expand his staff... All of that means the number of Starfleet personnel has exploded. And that means BeauPers needs more people to manage all of that, and some of them need the rank to correspond to their duties but that is restricted by the guy at the top.
The size of Starfleet has roughly doubled. This
may mean we need twice as many people in Personnel (depending on the exact nature of how Personnel handles its duties). But to what extent does it mean we need higher-ranking people? A navy captain is the equivalent of an army colonel, and is generally considered high enough in rank to command a couple of thousand people. A commodore is considered capable of coordinating the actions of numerous captains.
Do we have specific reason to think there are any
specific departments within Personnel that are so very large that it would require a rear admiral (the equivalent of a two-star general commanding a full division of army troops) to manage? Because that seems to be your argument.
Sometimes they need the standing, and for that matter it is likely that there is an officer in charge of personnel for major areas such as sectors, the academy and major fleet yards like the UP. Those officers would be Commodores but they need to give orders that impact Rear Admirals.
Yes. That happens in the military. A freshly recruited infantry private can give orders to a general, under some circumstances- say, if the general is trying to enter a military base through a gate guarded by the private. Under those circumstances the private is fully entitled to tell the general to do things in keeping with military protocol, like keeping hands away from weapons, showing identification, and so on.
A low-ranking Personnel officer,
in their capacity as Personnel officer, may well give instructions that are binding on a higher-ranking officer, like "fill out your paperwork."
