Batman wrote:A government that maintains a military that way is stupid.
No. Consider the foes the Federation has to face.
The Klingons - Prefer close range knife combat and wear ceremonial body armor. They use the same type of NDF weapons that the Feds do. Their artillery is pathetic, and Federation ground forces wouldn't charge on an open plain to be bombarded anyway given their reliance on transporters. The Klingons do not have APC's, armored vehicles, or support weapons. We have never seen Klingon ground transports. The Klingons do the exact same thing the Feds do, except worse. The Feds are more than a match for these Space Vikings.
The Romulans - We have never seen anything but ship's crew acting as soldiers. No body armor. No armored vehicles. No artillery. Use NDF weaponery. The Romulans do the same thing that the Feds do. A Romulan ground force versus a Federation ground force would be evenly matched.
I hope I don't have to mention the Cardassians and every species in the Alpha Quadrant to convince you that Federaton ground forces were a match and more for their counterparts.
Most militaries in the Alpha Quadrant work with this methodology (the exception being Tasha's romulan daughter and her plan to invade Vulcan with ground troops),the methodology being
1. Air superority is a necessity in a ground campaign.
2. Once you have air superority, you can use transporters with impunity.
3. If you can't use transporters, and you don't have air superority, it is not worth fighting.
However incorrect the methodology is, it is how the boys played in the Alpha Quadrant. And the Feds played this best.
Once the Dominion showed up, they did several things the Feds hadn't encountered before. Their soldiers had personal cloaking devices, perhaps throwing off the assisted-aiming feature of their Type-I's and Type-II's, forcing the Feds to upgrade their Type-III rifles. The Dominion relied on ground combat more than any other enemy the Feds had faced before (except possibly the Borg), sending a ground force into the heart of the Federation and occupying it. Despite Betazed being in the heart of the Federation, the Feds had a difficult time uprooting them.
The Dominion gave the Feds a shock with a different kind of warfare.
You're kidding, right? Banana phasers. No shooting ranges. Civilians aboard warships. No body armor. No support weapons. No ground transportation. Total tactical inability of it's ship captains. Exploding consoles. Forcefields instead of material doors. About the only thing they did fix was the Warp core of the original Galaxies.
You start out with this assumption,
"Banana-shaped weapons without iron-sights are totally unaimable."
Then conclude this,
"The Federation has unaimable weapons."
However, consider Star Wars. Walking robots are a brainbug. Other than walking through very rough terrain, walking robots wouldn't provide an advantage over wheeled vehicles in mobility. You would just need to destroy one of the legs of the walker, and it would be immobile. Therefore, the Empire should by your logic have ineffective armored vehicles. However, this would be ignoring the visual evidence and the fact that weapons in Star Wars are high powered enough that a hit anywhere is enough to destroy an unshielded vehicle.
You are making the same mistake about banana shaped phasers as I would if I said that walking robots are ineffective in Star Wars. The visual evidence contradicts your assumption. Assisted-aiming worked well, until the Dominion came along. And in true tactical situations, the Federation issues its "soldiers" phaser rifles, regulating Type-II's to backup weapons.
Body armor has not been demonstrated to deflect phaser and disruptor fire. Phasers and disruptors don't make a lot of shrapnel -- it either vaporizes or it doesn't. Body armor would help, but not as much as you think.
"No support weapons" would be justified in the way the Federation used its soliders, as I mentioned in the "methodology" above. So would ground transportation.
Examples of "tactical inability of ship's captains" please.
Exploding consoles is stupid, and I'm not going to try to defend them.
Force-fields instead of material doors is stupid, and I'm not going to defend that either.
However two instances of stupidity does not nullify the Federation's other achievements, and it is wrong to label the Federation stupid as a whole.
Everything the didn't fix in Starfleet. The Cardassian War. The Baku fiasco. The Prime Directive. Why don't YOU show me a smart one?
The Federation manages to balance the egos and maintain the support of perhaps a hundred different races, each of them having little common history, no common culture, and perhaps no common language. They do so without coersion -- practically the only leverage the Federation could deal to a planet that refused to join it would be to deny military aid in the case of an agressive neighbour, which would only work on worlds near borders. And given the Federation's humanitarian aid policy, if a world was under attack by the Klingons, individual Captains in the vicinity would probably rush to the aid of the planet (assuming it was warp-capable, and since only warp-capable races can join the Federation this point is moot) forcing the Federation into the conflict.
The diplomatic prowress of the Federation is its strength.
Bullshit. The Admiral explicitely said the Federation knew of this operation when Picard threatened to blow the whistle. Furthermore, he called the planet Federation territory. Either it was, in which case relocating the Baku should have been entirely doable above-board.It's done all the time in real life. Or it wasn't, in which case that was the most badly executed illegal operation in history.
"What the Admiral said" is hardly enough proof. The Admiral could have been lying, trying to discourage Picard. It was not doable, and ultimately failed, being "the most badly executed illegal operation in history" -- which does not hurt the Federation argument.
Too bad that BOTH of them are irrational. My point stands.
There are differences between practical irrationality and theoretical irrationality.
For example, the United States should theoretically follow its belief in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and go around crusading freeing everybody. The goals are so important that one could argue that it would be worth dying for, sacrificing every other aspect of your life considering that the Declaration promotes "the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people." Worth dying for wouldn't you agree? But the United States does not do this. Not declaring war on every totalitarian state is theoretically irrational, but practically rational. The United States doesn't have the practical means to despose the world's despots.
If you want to say that the Federation is militarily irrational, then you have no argument from me. But if you want to argue that most Federation decisions are irrational, and therefore the Federation is "stupid", I disagree.
The problem being that there is EVERYTHING wrong with their practical rationality. Their plans and intentions regularly make no sense.
Examples of plans, and if you claim regularity, examples of many plans.
Blatant lie. People miss with Type II's all the time.
For every time you show a Type-II missing, I can find a screenshot with a Type-II hitting, and I can probably explain why the Type-II missed. If the Type-II was fired at a Dominion soldier, the Dominion seemed to use personal cloaking technology and a lot of tricorder jamming, which would have nullified the advantage of assisted aiming. "People missing with Type-II"s all the time" suggest that Type-II's always miss, which they do not.
No it wasn't, because people regularly miss with the bloody thing, at point-blank range as often as not.
Examples please.
Assisted aiming isn't idiotic. It makes damn good sense. Relying on assisted aiming to compensate for shoddy design and COMPLETE LACK of training is idiotic.
Agreed. But this does not mean that the entire Federation is idoitic.
While maintaining sidearms that are utterly unaimable.
Refitting all Type-II's with ironsights, or throwing them away, would have been a logistical nightmare for the Federation at the height of the Dominion war. Their sidearms work by the assisted-aiming mechanism, which would be useful in certain situations. The Federation uses its phasers to heat rocks, sterilize staircases, and so on. So refitting their Type-II's to be a deadly weapon would not be consistent with the Type-II's use. That's what the phaser rifles are for.
Maintaining a military that you consider useless is the very height of idiocy. Either you need a military and do you best to maintain a useful one, or you don't and get rid of them.
Very well. However, I thought about the types of enemies that the Federation would face, and revised my position. See my above points about the Klingons and Romulans.
Phaser design. Civilians on ships. No body armor. Tactical ineptitude of its captains. No ground forces worth mentioning. No air force, period. Exploding consoles. No shooting ranges...
Phaser design of Type-II's is bad, but consistent with the way they are used. Body armor is not as useful as you might think in the Trek universe. Lack of ground forces -- every major power in the Alpha Quadrant maintains similar forces. Air superority means space superority. Exploding consoles is stupid, and so is letting your marksmanship skills go down the drain, but are hardly a judge of the Federation as an institution and more a judge of the Federation's technical and military capabilities.
Civilians on ships is consistent with the Federation playing a multi-role organization. Starfleet is not just a military organization -- it is tasked with exploration and scientific discovery. These could be done without your families, but what kind of scientist or explorer would want a militarily spartan lifestyle?
That's why those things are usually called shrapnel proof vests. Oh wait. They aren't.
A lot of Body armor's usefulness would be in retarding shrapnel. No shrapnel means less of an argument for body armor. Unless body armor could be proven to be effective against phaser/disruptor fire -- and you cannot assume that it is -- body armor wouldn't be the groundshaking concept that we would like to believe.
Body armor has not been demonstrated in the TNG era PERIOD. ONe wonders then why the guards in ST VI DID wear body armor if it was completely useless...
Yes. Which guards are you talking about? The Klingon guards?
Body armor is useful the instant you are in a situation were you are likely to be fired upon. IT is canon fact not only that there are materials that are highly phaser resistant, but ALSO that they are plentyful enough that everybody and their dog use it for packing crates.
Additionally, while modern day body armor is of limited usefulness thanks to a hit usually still incapacitating you through KE/momentum transfer, there is no indication of phasers doing anything besides thermal/NDF damage.
As you are now no doubt going to trot out the 'the material may be too heavy' argument, by all means show those crates being exceptionally heavy, or a Borg tactical drone being significantly heavier than a human, and being so on account of the armor.
I cannot prove that Borg drones are heavier on account of their armor. Nor can I show that the crates are exceptionally heavy. However, I can show that tritanium is used on ship's hulls and crates lifted by anti-grav units. You cannot show that tritanium is used on objects designed for personal garments.
Borg drones are strong -- in "Descent Part I", a Borg drone increased by strength by twenty percent was able to hold off Data for a moment. Considering Data can take out a Klingon with ease, Borg drones are strong stuff. Of course you could argue that Data could have been running the simulation gradually, increasing the Borg's strength as he went along. However, Data did say that the "Borg represented a genuine threat" to his life during the hand-to-hand combat, which he would not say if his opponent was a human being.
I am not saying that this strength would be required to wear the Tritanium armor -- for all we know Tritanium armor is lightweight, and Borg drones are slow because they are programmed that way. However, you cannot show that Tritanium is lightweight enough to be fashioned into armor, or even armor shards. You cannot assume this.
I do not have to show that crates are exceptionally heavy. The burden of proof is on you to find evidence that Trek technology is able to create useful (light enough not to require the strength of a Borg Drone) armor with these materials, which you cannot provide. All we have seen are Borg Drones who have enough strength to be a "risk" to Data's life wear the armor, hardly proof that tritanium can be used on human armor.
What makes you think large-scale ground battles are the only situation where armor is important? Police rarely fight those, so why do they bother with bullet-proof vests?
Bullet-resistant vests are useful because they are effective against bullets and lightweight. Body armor in the Trek universe hasn't been proven to be effective against phasers. Yes, "absence of proof does not mean proof of absence", however can you show that Trek can engineer body armor that wouldn't make someone as slow as a Borg drone?
They miss at point-blank ranges all the time, too, and they DO seem to have assisted aiming so...
Missing at point-blank range in a few instances hardly means that the weapon is useless, and is more telling about the operator. Unless you can show a massive hit-to-miss ratio, I won't be convinced that the weapons were useless.
brianeyci wrote:
Sorry, didn't read it properly. And no, they are not "stupid", they make bad military decisions based on their irrational belief.
Brian
*scratches head*
Sounds like stupidity to me.
I don't disagree that the Federation is militarily handicapped. However, they have accomplished the feat of uniting perhaps hundreds of races under a common form of trade, self-defense, and exploration, and did so without using force. This is the accomplishment to me that the Federation should be most proud of.
Brian
