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Lt. Commander Michael Eddington
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Timo: [QB] It's the mechanism of Trek-style space war that makes me disbelieve in massive casualties. Even if all of Starfleet (let's say 10,000 ships, with 500 crew and 5,000 troops on each/shore personnel backing each) was lost at once, that would still *only* be roughly on par with what we managed to do on our own planet in a full century of war and misery. We need a clear mechanism by which people would die in great numbers. Trek basically offers two: orbital bombardment, or massive punitive surface slaughter of a population already subdued. Yet why did the heroes NEVER mention anything like that? They spoke of the thousand-people-a-week casualties as if those were a bad thing, or of the loss and retaking of a planet without mentioning the population. Only the bad guys spoke of losing millions, for some weird reason. It is entirely possible that billions were vaporised when the camera looked the other way. But it smells to high heaven. Why did the heroes look the other way, too? Why did they pay *zero* attention to such losses? It would be quite plausible for the Dominion to want to sterilize the entire quadrant, saving perhaps just a few planets for spoils-of-war type compensation. The hundreds of billions predicted in "Statistical Probabilities" would then make sense. But from what we heard, this never came to be. Nobody mentioned a Dominion intent to erase all life. Nobody mentioned a planet bombarded to such an end. Weoyun's designs for Earth came as a big surprise to his compadres, who thought that the planet would be conquered. Why would they think that, if the modus operandi of the Dominion was to kill kill kill? And the other side "played fair" by all accounts. When Damar worried about massive casualties, those were troops he spoke of. It sounded more like the Western Front falling in WWII, with Hitler getting all his troops mindlessly slaughtered but with relatively light associated civilian casualties (never mind those civilians that he relabeled as "troops"). And quite unlike the Eastern Front falling... Frankly, I'm surprised that millions would have died in the border wars as per "Journey's End". "Borders" are supposed to be rather empty in Trek, with all those agrarian colonies that fit in a single matte painting, colonies whose fates can be swayed by a single starship or even a single away team. How did they scrape together the millions? The war with the Klingons in "Yesterday's Enterprise"... Now that I could accept as claiming billions of lives. From the sounds of it, human species was to be eradicated there (and probably aliens sympathetic to it, too). But "the sounds of it" were so very different during the Dominion war. Were Sisko and pals so detached from reality that the issue never arose in dialogue, that the emotional burden never manifested? Timo Saloniemi [/QB][/QUOTE]
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