What I would do with the Federation

[Royal Calathonia]

Scenario I (in charge of the Federation):

1. Pour lots of money into the fleet, especially sponsoring development of transwarp, improved transporters, improved phasers, and other new technologies.

2. Place all of the member worlds under the direct control of the central government and assign a governor to each world.

3. Conquer and annex those alien species who are pre-warp.

4. Expand and improve the communication system, build more starbases, and increase the size of the fleet.

5. Create a Federation army and give it advanced weapons, from artillery to grenades.

6. Arm Starfleet Security with more weapons.

7. Repeal the Prime Directive and other such unnecessary orders.

8. Make final treaty with Romulans and negotiate to get ban on cloaking devices lifted.

9. Maintain alliance with Klingons.

10. Prepare defenses for any future Borg incursion.

11. Sponsor exploration of undiscovered star systems.

[Batman]

So, just out of idle curiosity, where exactly would you get all the funds and resources for that? What would be the use of annexing those pre-Warp species? And what makes you think the Federation would actually go along with it? It's a Federation. Which means the rest of the members do get a say.

[Darth Tanner]

Results...

1 - Bankrupt the Federation building ships they can't afford to.
2 - Watch as the federation disintegrates from its members leaving as they don't want to live under dictatorship.
3 - Use up all military resources occupying useless worlds while bleeding your manpower dry leaving your actual boarders undefended. Also prevent anyone from ever actually seeking Federation membership due to new reputation as genocidal conquerors.
4 - Again further overextend your economy. And what’s wrong with Starfleet communication?
5 - And use it to what? Wage war against the alien? Did you even watch the show?
6 - Because they just don't have enough?
7 - Trigger as many wars between minor species as we want then look shocked when everyone starts hating us.
8 - Romulans say no. Fed builds cloaks anyway starting war.
9 - Duh!
10 - Just like their doing anyway
11 - Sponsor it? Starfleet privatised. Harry Mudd lays claim to entire galaxy.

[The Romulan Republic]

He did say negotiate, not just build cloaks regardless of what the Romulans say. Giving Starfleet security better weapons is also a very good idea. And Starfleet would benefit enormously if they had transwarp.

[Metahive]

It could be a mere coincidence that your handle features a name made up by that Youngla0450 dude who got himself banned almost two years ago, but I doubt it.

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... n#p3356683

Besides that, why is this in SWvsST when the topic features no SW?

[Batman]

Speculating on why it was started here, either because Royal Calathonia is a moron and/or eventually intended to get to asking how his magically bolstered by all his stupid ideas that wouldn't work UFP would fare against the GE.
As for why it hasn't been moved yet, we're like 5 posts in? Nobody noticed?

[Royal Calathonia]

Look guys. I admit that I am new and that I know not how to back up my reasoning for my proposals. I am just trying to get a start on here and see what kind of reactions I will gain. I know no one here is going to "kiss your ass", but I am also looking for at least some logical assistance on figuring these things out.

[Stofsk]

Some of your points are stupid. Others are senseless, or are already being done (sponsor exploration of unexplored star systems? Really? You don't think they're already doing that? Did you just miss the whole point of the show?)

About the only points I agree with are 1, 4, and 10. And there's no indication that Starfleet isn't already doing that.

2 and 3 are goddamn ridiculous. Conquer and annex prewarp civilisations? This is so beyond the character of the Federation it's astounding. And as for the whole 'put member worlds under direct control', what benefit would this bring to the Federation? You know, the most powerful interstellar civilisation in the Alpha Quadrant, which is built on diversity and dozens if not hundreds of races electing to join it peacefully?

5 and 6 sounds like wank to me, even so they already have a lot of those things: mortars, check ('Arena' TOS); phasor cannon, check ('The Cage' TOS); photon grenades, check ('Legacy' TNG, 'Homefront' DS9); 'personal forcefields', check ('Homefront' DS9). About the only thing we don't see are tanks and body armour, neither of which might be all that useful (phasers set to highest settings would make armour obsolete)

And 7, repeal the prime directive? No thanks. 'Let's go intervening in other people's business so that Star Trek can be more like SPACE AMERICA'. The hilarious thing is that the prime directive is already situationally enforced; it is mainly there to prevent cultural and political interference with a civilisation, usually prewarp but this can extend to other societies. But they will intervene in humanitarian concerns.

[Collossus]

Speaking of Item number #1 hadn’t the Federation done away with money and material gain by this point? I understand that may not apply and the larger scale when your ordering up starships by the dozen but in all seriousness how do they motivate or pay for more ships out of thin air?

[Stofsk]

Speaking of Item number #1 hadn’t the Federation done away with money and material gain by this point?

Yeah sort of.

I understand that may not apply and the larger scale when your ordering up starships by the dozen but in all seriousness how do they motivate or pay for more ships out of thin air?

The Federation has an economy. It's just not a capitalist one.

For all the amount of episodes we have to draw upon, we know surprisingly little about the way Federation society and culture is structured. We know they don't have money (Kirk says this in STIV The Voyage Home, and it's also repeated in TNG and DS9), but is that the end of the story? On the other hand we've heard Kirk say things like 'Scotty, you've earned your pay for the week!' ('The Doomsday Machine') and Scotty saying 'I just bought a boat.' (STVI The Undiscovered Country). But those could just be an expression rather than a literal statement. We don't know who builds the ships, and we don't know how they're paid for. The Federation likely employs some kind of command economy (zomg communists!!!1) which has advantages from technology like industrial replicators and plentiful energy to power them.

A bigger problem with point #1 is who are you going to get to crew those ships? Saying 'ok let's just increase the fleet by an order of magnitude' is easy, but you need to have crews for those new ships. They need to be trained, officers need to go through the Academy (hell everyone apparently goes to the Academy), and that shit also costs money - or whatever the Federation uses that is a reasonable analogue to it - as well as time. All those ships need antimatter as well, and dilithium crystals, and we have no idea how scarce or available both of those resources are (antimatter likely is produced in vast quantities via space-based solar power, but for all we know you'd need to increase this production if you're going to increase the ship production by a lot more. And as for dilithium, well in TOS it was fairly rare but I think by TVH they were on the track of reusing crystals which might have mitigated this problem somewhat - for example, in TUC Praxis exploded, and it was the klingon empire's chief dilithium production facility. Yet by the time of TNG the klingons seemed to have recovered, which might indicate that the Federation shared the technology Spock devised in TVH).

[Royal Calathonia]

Speaking of Item number #1 hadn’t the Federation done away with money and material gain by this point?

Yeah sort of.

I understand that may not apply and the larger scale when your ordering up starships by the dozen but in all seriousness how do they motivate or pay for more ships out of thin air?

The Federation has an economy. It's just not a capitalist one.

For all the amount of episodes we have to draw upon, we know surprisingly little about the way Federation society and culture is structured. We know they don't have money (Kirk says this in STIV The Voyage Home, and it's also repeated in TNG and DS9), but is that the end of the story? On the other hand we've heard Kirk say things like 'Scotty, you've earned your pay for the week!' ('The Doomsday Machine') and Scotty saying 'I just bought a boat.' (STVI The Undiscovered Country). But those could just be an expression rather than a literal statement. We don't know who builds the ships, and we don't know how they're paid for. The Federation likely employs some kind of command economy (zomg communists!!!1) which has advantages from technology like industrial replicators and plentiful energy to power them.

A bigger problem with point #1 is who are you going to get to crew those ships? Saying 'ok let's just increase the fleet by an order of magnitude' is easy, but you need to have crews for those new ships. They need to be trained, officers need to go through the Academy (hell everyone apparently goes to the Academy), and that shit also costs money - or whatever the Federation uses that is a reasonable analogue to it - as well as time. All those ships need antimatter as well, and dilithium crystals, and we have no idea how scarce or available both of those resources are (antimatter likely is produced in vast quantities via space-based solar power, but for all we know you'd need to increase this production if you're going to increase the ship production by a lot more. And as for dilithium, well in TOS it was fairly rare but I think by TVH they were on the track of reusing crystals which might have mitigated this problem somewhat - for example, in TUC Praxis exploded, and it was the klingon empire's chief dilithium production facility. Yet by the time of TNG the klingons seemed to have recovered, which might indicate that the Federation shared the technology Spock devised in TVH).

So you are basically saying that Star Trek leaves us uninformed about certain things..That is true, many episodes are very vague about points, but that doesn't mean that it can't be done.

[Batman]

It doesn't mean it can be done either. As you're the one claiming it can onus is on you to show how that is the case. If this was supposed to be a 'let's blithely assume the Federation somehow has all the resources needed for it' scenario, you should have said so. Until then, we're working with the Federation as presented in the canon, which means you have to show they can actually do all the things you claim they'd do and provide a solution to the problems that were pointed out.

[Metahive]

So you are basically saying that Star Trek leaves us uninformed about certain things..That is true, many episodes are very vague about points, but that doesn't mean that it can't be done.

Wow, are you taking lessons from the darthy/marsh8472 school of debate, too? As in "throw in stupidly improbable hypotheticals and treat them as absolute fact"? Also, I don't think the thing the Galactic Empire (remember those guys? Yeah, just throwing them in here because you won't) has over the Federation is that they are the bigger imperialists.

The Dominion War was kind of a test run for what a war against the Empire would be like, it had a much higher industrial output, a bigger military machine, a higher tech base and was an oppressive dictatorship. The Federation won that one barely and only because they had to just face down the Dominion's comparatively small beachhead and even then they needed most other major Alpha and Beta Quadrant powers to help them, including the Cardassians defecting at the last minute. It's not wrong to assume the Federation was already producing ships and weapons as fast as they could for that conflict and that was already not enough to win a war of attrition with a power that had only a minuscule portion of its military fighting them, so just saying they should just make more is stupid to say the least. It's just not within their capability, period.
Funnily enough, Insurrection dropped a line about how the Dominion War was compelling the Federation to seek out new members faster. So they kind of did what you proposed. Guess letting those scaly, buttheaded midgets join really turned the tide, eh?

To sum it up, the Empire is the Dominion a hundred or thousandfold. Do the math.



You know, now that I think of it, marsh8472 did threaten to come back under an assumed identity...

[EnterpriseSovereign]

About the only thing we don't see are tanks and body armour, neither of which might be all that useful (phasers set to highest settings would make armour obsolete)

Phasers vs armour is an interesting one, because in practice phasers are far less effective vs armour compared to other things. The only time that a phaser is known to have disintegrated armour was in an ep of DS9 (I forget which one) where a Cardassian (in uniform) was shot with a Cardassian phaser.

On the other hand, in "The way of the Warrior", many Klingons were one-shotted using phasers, despite their armour. Of course, it could well be that the armour worn by the Klingons was relatively useless, since it didn't seem to offer much protection in hand-to-hand combat. Admittedly, many were finished with blows to the head, but that just highlights another deficiency- armour which provides zero head protection (i.e. a helmet)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V_tp5C27TQ

[Luke Skywalker]

Scenario I (in charge of the Federation):

1. Pour lots of money into the fleet, especially sponsoring development of transwarp, improved transporters, improved phasers, and other new technologies.

2. Place all of the member worlds under the direct control of the central government and assign a governor to each world.

3. Conquer and annex those alien species who are pre-warp.

4. Expand and improve the communication system, build more starbases, and increase the size of the fleet.

5. Create a Federation army and give it advanced weapons, from artillery to grenades.

6. Arm Starfleet Security with more weapons.

7. Repeal the Prime Directive and other such unnecessary orders.

8. Make final treaty with Romulans and negotiate to get ban on cloaking devices lifted.

9. Maintain alliance with Klingons.

10. Prepare defenses for any future Borg incursion.

11. Sponsor exploration of undiscovered star systems.

Wait, this is posted in the "Star Wars vs Star Trek" forum; I'd imagine that you plan for your Federation to be capable of resisting an invasion from, say, the Galactic Empire.

It...won't work. For example, it would literally take billions of years, if technology stagnates, for your total industry to match the output of a single year's output of the Empire (look: Death Star). And even transwarp, which the Federation has already been researching for decades, is still an order of magnitude slower than even outdated hyperdrives. So I don't see how this would prepare for any Warsie invasion.

And building up a larger and more militant starfleet still would do jack and shit if the borg actually decide to send more than one or two cubes to face you. If anything, it'll simply increase your threat, and target, status to them.

[The Romulan Republic]

Keep in mind that the Borg are, I think, pretty much gone after the end of Voyager. And the idea that the Federation should keep their military perpetually small to avoid a fight with the Borg is a terrible idea. The Borg are clearly going to keep trying to attack Earth, and leaving oneself helpless to avoid fighting an enemy that is clearly going to try to attack you anyway is a lousy idea.

Transwarp isn't going to make the FTL disadvantage go away, true, but it would be a hell of an improvement, and the Federation has a relatively small territory, so they could cross it fairly fast with transwarp.

Also, the idea it would take billions of years depends on stagnation, as you noted.

And its not as if the Empire will send everything it has against the Federation. The Empire is very thinly spread. This is stated in Return of the Jedi (the fleet is running around looking for the Rebels), and they are trying to patrol a territory of tens of millions of systems spread out across a vast galaxy with only 25,000 Star Destroyers. Yes, they have other ships, but the big ships, at least, are probably in short supply. You might be able to trounce a Federation task force with a dinky little corvette or frigate, but you won't be able to quickly pull off a Base Delta Zero, transport enough forces to occupy a major world, or assault Unimatrix 001 with one.

While I'm not going to argue that the Federation can win an all-out war, I don't think its quite as bad as you think.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

The Empire won't be in much better shape at the end of ROTJ than the Borg after Endgame, while their military is for the most part unaffected (save for the loss of the DSII), the power vacuum caused the Empire to break up, thus they'd be fighting amongst themselves as opposed to attacking the Federation.

As far as I can see, the only in-universe reason that the Borg hadn't assimilated the Federation prior is simply because it's on the other side of the galaxy to them, the Borg are going to be far more interested (and able) in assimilating local races and expanding their territory, as opposed to assimilating a relatively small region of space and then defending it against counterattacks, necessitating reinforcements from the Delta Quadrant

[The Romulan Republic]

I'd say being divided is a lot better than being obliterated. Also, they were nearly strong enough to beat the New Republic on at least a couple occasions.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

We know that the transwarp hub and unicomplex were both destroyed, what is unknown is the fate of the Borg fleet itself.

[Eternal_Freedom]

We know that the transwarp hub and unicomplex were both destroyed, what is unknown is the fate of the Borg fleet itself.

One of the transwarp hubs was destroyed. According to Seven there are five others. So their strategic assets have taken a hit but not a crippling one IMHO.

[The Romulan Republic]

Hmm, I just watched a clip of the scene on Youtube, and your right, its possible the Borg survived.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

We know that the transwarp hub and unicomplex were both destroyed, what is unknown is the fate of the Borg fleet itself.

One of the transwarp hubs was destroyed. According to Seven there are five others. So their strategic assets have taken a hit but not a crippling one IMHO.

I forgot there were 6 in total, I never bought into the whole "destroy one=cripple Borg" thing they kept insisting would happen. I might have had it been such that destroying one would cause the rest to explode in some chain reaction, like the Sphere Network from Enterprise.

[Eternal_Freedom]

We know that the transwarp hub and unicomplex were both destroyed, what is unknown is the fate of the Borg fleet itself.

One of the transwarp hubs was destroyed. According to Seven there are five others. So their strategic assets have taken a hit but not a crippling one IMHO.

I forgot there were 6 in total, I never bought into the whole "destroy one=cripple Borg" thing they kept insisting would happen. I might have had it been such that destroying one would cause the rest to explode in some chain reaction, like the Sphere Network from Enterprise.

Janeway describes taking it out as "dealing a crippling blow to the Borg." But hey, this is Janeway we're talking about Besides, if you interpret crippling in a different way (as in, a crippling blow is one that severely affects the opponent) it still makes sense. Taking one hub out is going to hamper the Borg, slow them down a bit, but it's not permenant. The other 5 may be able to recover and restore the network of conduits but it won't be immediate. So the Borg are hampered for a while until they can repair.

[The Romulan Republic]

On the other hand, the Borg have probably made a shit load of enemies who might take advantage of their weakness to rip them a new one.

[Eternal_Freedom]

True, but given the scale of the Borg, the fact that their ships are still faster than the best Federationships even i]without/i] the transwarp conduits, the fact that their ships are still very powerful, I doubt many of those enemies will be able to inflict serious losses. Besides, unless these enemies can get into the conduits/are monitoring the hubs, how will they know?