I'd rather have Rennies, Connies, or Excelsiors. Especially Excelsiors. But I don't have the time on a regular basis to try to build multiyear build plans, so when I see a vote that's between Miranda's and Centaurs, I'm going to pick the latter and argue for them on the basis that less bad is better than more bad.
Are you aware of the crew problems we get from building all cruisers and explorers, to the exclusion of escorts? Do you believe that escorts are
always the wrong thing to build, or only when we aren't specifically anticipating needing them in the near future?
A lot of people aren't going to necessarily trust the Cardassians or the Federation to tell the truth about any kind of interaction with anyone in particular. But they can look at a map and see what it says and trust that. Most people who might have been on the fence with the Federation really aren't going to like when they see we're expanding even further, in aggressive fashion to separate people who we aren't actually at war with.
This is the same area that the Cardassians have been practicing piracy in for years in an attempt to deter
anyone else from occupying it... even though they aren't prepared to negotiate or clearly define their own borders.
Us supporting Apiata expansion into the Gabriel Expanse can be viewed as a Federation land grab.
Us NOT supporting Apiata expansion, and the Apiata having to put up with Cardassian piracy, can be viewed as the Federation not supporting its friends because it's afraid of a fight.
Us not supporting Apiata expansion, but somehow taking an aggressive stance towards the Cardassians in other areas, can be viewed as us using the Apiata as attack dogs and trying to start a war. Or whatever.
Literally every possible course of action can
SOMEHOW be spun as evil (or weak, or otherwise bad) by a determined propagandist. At some point, I just have to say "well, people will think what they want to think" and do what is right for the people who have stood by the Federation, rather than worrying about the opinions of hypothetical neutrals who presumably haven't actually dealt with Cardassians. Because almost anyone who's dealt with Cardassians in this setting is going to know how asinine they can be and how they will openly, aggressively raid and attack anyone who has something they want. And won't have much respect for Cardassian attempts to obfuscate that issue.
Funny, in a draft post on the military situation I mentioned that a possible non-rational Cardassian plan would be to Pearl Harbor us. I deleted that as not relevant to my point. But in that case, they'd have to strike somewhere actually militarily relevant. The problem of course is it's next to impossible to hit any Federation concentration of force or industry, because we don't have such concentrations any farther forward than Amarkia. I think they would basically have to hit the primary Apiata fleet base, given that not even Themis for the CBZ or whatever our new center of operations in the GBZ would really cut it.
If somewhere like Tales Har or Sol gets hit, it would require a weeks-long penetration, perhaps out of Sydraxian space. I can't see a Pearl Harbor plan working except maybe Apinae.
This also underscores how important the Gretarians and Yrillians are to securing our northern flank.
Yes. It is also one of the reasons the prospect of Cardassian cloaking devices is so destabilizing. It's unclear just how far a ship can travel under cloak, but it does make deep strike attempts much more plausible.
So I went on Photoshop and drew up a basic idea of that the GEZ might look like if the Amarki are indeed splitting claims with the Apiata and traversing their space...
Well, border claims THAT ambitious are certainly... pushing it...
I do wonder if we can broker a deal with Development to allow us to get pushes on non-affiliates at a cheaper price, at the cost of not being allowed to push affiliates at all for a few years. We could sell it as preventing the Cardassians from assimilating minor powers while slowing down our rate of growth.
But I suspect that we're probably going to be buying more Orion Impact or ways to leverage more resources against the Cardies instead.
Yeah. Among other things, I suspect Development doesn't really agree with the fundamental premise that the Federation should be trying to recruit everyone in the galaxy in order to be stronger than Cardassia. I think they're more likely to think we should, well,
outbuild them.
The idea of building an
Excelsior for every
Jaldun, and presumably an
Ambassador for every post-
Jaldun cruiser and a [i}Galaxy[/i] for every
Galor... That is very much a Development approach to dealing with Cardassia. NOT an Expansionist approach, which would be more about building up a coalition so strong we could drown them in member world fleets in the event of war. So far we've actually been pursuing a combination of the two.
So you figure it's something like this then?
I think that's a bit more plausible.
Among other things, I think the Federation as a whole IS still hoping to bring the Cardassians, Sydraxians, and Federation together for serious negotiations that will draw borders and provide redress of Sydraxian grievances and so on. If we lay unilateral claim to too much of the space between the Cardassians and Sydraxians, it makes it harder for us to provide them with an incentive to come to an agreement later.
Because if we've said "all of this is ours, until you talk to us, then we'll negotiate over how much is yours..."
We'd be in the position of handing over territory we'd already claimed and built minor colonies in, and giving those worlds to the Cardassians. And we know how well THAT turned out in canon.
