quote:Originally posted by Toadkiller: None of this is to distract from your work. It is honestly none of my business how someone chooses to imagine the trek-verse. But in the interest of an increase in posts round these parts:
Great I love these kinds of discussions.
quote: I guess my thought isn't so much political as logistical. Any sort of offensive "ground" operation against a well populated planet seems unfeasible. The target has: local knowledge, replicators for making weapons or weapons on hand and a huge numerical advantage. Sending "army troops" isn't going to be sustainable. Either you dictate terms from orbit and "occupy" with relatively few troops or you aren't going to win.
Local knowledge, supply lines and numerical advantage has been a consideration in warfare for thousands of years. There have always been ways to surmount them.
I hold to the axiom that if you don't have boots on the ground, you don't control it. Trek is replete with waves, particles, materials and random minerals that can obscure and occlude sensors, disrupt their weapons, disable transporters and so forth. Any fighting force worth their salt would know these and employ them tactically. So unless you're willing to employ torpedoes against the surface (essentially using planet-cracking nuclear weapons) then the only way to properly control it *is* to get people on the ground.
If I was defending my planet against Starfleet, I'd load my atmosphere with all these nice obscuring particles and waves, put generators on the ground and turn my planet into one giant blindspot then spend my time launching surface-to-orbit weapons up at them until I knock them out of the sky.
High ground is not always the advantage it seems.
quote: A Galaxy class can carry 15,000 tops and probably only a fraction of that if you want them able to fight days or weeks later. Less again if you want to carry equipment, vehicles and any sort of "artillery", Dedicated troop ships might do a little better but given trek ship sizes I'd think a 5,000 troop ship would be pretty big. Say you have 10 of them for an assault and for tactical reasons the fleet can't stay in orbit for more than 10 hours. (An off hand guess based on current day Marine ops that I've read about in books.)
I would imagine them using dedicated troop ships for the most part. A Galaxy carrying 15,000 troops should not be an indicator of how much a dedicated ship could carry. Troop ships in WWII could carry up to 10,000 troops and they were a tiny fraction of all but the smallest starships. In Star Trek we see ships appointed like flying hotels. We've never seen a really stripped down ship dedicated more toward efficiency than the needs of a tv show set. A ship hundreds of meters long and dozens of meters tall can hold a crapload of people. Add to that dedicated vehicle carriers and you can move a substantial force - in convoy as it's always been done.
The number of hours a ship can stay in orbit I can't begin to guess at. That would entirely depend on the situation.
quote: Can you beam/shuttle down 50,000 troops and gear in 10 hours? If you do, can they "take" a planet of 1 billion hostile folks? Wouldn't it just be the Iraq situation times about 1,000,000? How do 50,000 troops deal with 1 billion hostages scattered across the planet's surface? With transporters and IED's?
I don't subscribe to the hour limitation, but I can say right off that I don't think you could effectively fight a war on a planetary scale (assuming the planet is of reasonable population) without a ground floor minimum of a quarter million troops.
As ever in war, the vast majority of the population won't be fighting. But even so, you don't just drop a million troops on the ground and call it a day. They would be supported by Starfleet and some kind of an air force and perhaps even the Fed Naval Patrol depending on the situation, as well as other military units, to give them an advantage so they can take territory - which is the purpose of an army.
quote: Is any of the above something that it seems like the Federation would be interested in doing?
You say that like they have a choice. Having an army is a necessity, not a weekend project. You can't protect and police your own territory without one.
quote: My counter with the "militia" idea is that each member world and colony would have a force to 1) counter the above scenario 2) serve as a emergency management force like the national guard 3) be able to be "federalized" to assist other member worlds in an emergency of sufficient magnitude. These militias could, I suppose, be collectively referred to as the "Federation Army" and certainly those with a political reason (I'm looking at your Romulans) for doing so could call them that.
That's workable too. But I don't believe that would be the smartest way to handle it. Many countries have standing armies as well as 'guard' units. They have two different kinds for very specific reasons. Reasons that will be as true four centuries from now as they were four centuries ago.
quote: I'd imagine that a culture that refers to battleships as "explorers" would call it something like a "Emergency Response Cadre" or something.
I chalk all that up to Roddenberry's hippie bullshit influencing TNG and what came after. Willful denial of the facts doesn't actually change those facts. They are battleships even if you call them luxury yachts.
Trek's insistence on euphemizing aggressive terms doesn't make any difference. They are what they are.
quote: Homemade donuts calling from other room....
Yum... glazed? ::hopeful::
Anyway, I enjoy these sorts of ideological discussions. I know they're drastically at odds with the average Trek fan, but I'm used to tht
Registered: Nov 2001
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Well, if we really want to pursue this, what possible reason is there for an interstellar war? What possible resource is easier to acquire by traveling billions of miles and fighting billions of weird things than it is at home? No possible resource, is what. And if, say, you're concerned about some alien launching a relativistic bomb at you before you can do the same to them, you either launch your own at any planet you find with free oxygen, or you die, or it turns out there aren't any aliens with relativistic bombs and you just spend your time being paranoid.
(Except religion and/or ideology, I suppose.)
Registered: Mar 1999
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If resources mean nothing, why is it every three or four episodes our heroes run into some kind of mining ship/planet/person or freighters carrying cargo?
Resources always matter and they're not always the purpose of war even when you discount religion or ideology.
Registered: Nov 2001
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As for other reasons to wage war, perhaps just plain vengence. Like perhaps Species A was mad at species B because they insulted their supreme god in their last comunique. That may be reason enough. Maybe not for the Federation though...
-------------------- "Kosh, I'd like to introduce you to our Resident schmuck and his side kick Kick Me."-Ritten
"Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity". -George Carlin
Registered: Jul 2007
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Flying hotels is right. A ship as large as the Galaxy-class only having 1000 people onboard while US carriers have a crew compliment of 5000.
I mean I see a certain amount of internal space being used for large compartments and areas such as science labs, stellar cartography, fuel storage, computer cores, etc...
However you still could fit maybe 10,000 on a Galaxy-class if you bunked people up. The USS Fitzgerald I served on was only 500 feet but had over 300 people onboard. This also has to do with the fact all enlisted E-6 and below stayed in berthings with lots of racks. I was in berthing 3, the Operations Department berthing which had about 80 racks. Combat Systems Department has close to 100 racks. E-7 and above chiefs stayed in their own chief's berthing. Most officers doubled up in their staterooms, 2 per room. Only the CO and XO had their own private rooms. The CO actually has 2 rooms. His main stateroom and a small room near the bridge to stay at during extended time on bridge duty. Think of it terms of Picard's ready room, but with a bunk and restroom.
-------------------- I'm slightly annoyed at Hobbes' rather rude decision to be much more attractive than me though. That's just rude. - PsyLiam, Oct 27, 2005.
Registered: May 1999
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No "hot bunking". I had an assigned rack that was mine and mine alone. Berthing 3 Rack 40. Racks are 3 high and open up with a storage area underneath for your personal shit, as well as a high school type locker in berthing for your stuff.
For a starship I would have something similar in a fanfic with enlisted having berthings and junior officers having to share a stateroom with O-4 and above with their own personal staterooms.
-------------------- I'm slightly annoyed at Hobbes' rather rude decision to be much more attractive than me though. That's just rude. - PsyLiam, Oct 27, 2005.
Registered: May 1999
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There's lots of room for realistic portrayal in Trek. That's what I focus on. Okay, so a Galaxy can carry 15,000. Fine. But perhaps an Anzac-class troop ship half the dimensions can carry many times as much in dedicated, no-frills barracking berths and still use a few decks for storing vehicles and equipment, allowing you to put down a very substantial force with a single ship.
And I've always thought the crew numbers on starships in Trek are ridiculously low. Even if you account for a certain amount of automation (doesn't seem to help since people are always manually fixing shit int he show), you still wouldn't have the bodies to throw at a real emergency. God forbid you get boarded where you have one person to defend every 300 cubic meters of territory on the ship all by their lonesome. They'd get steamrolled.
Registered: Nov 2001
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Dear god, imagine how many they could stuff into a Galaxy class, with all enlisted crew and everyone under the rank of LCDR bunking up, perhaps 6 or more to a set of quarters. Using rotating bunk schedules " hot bunking", you could probably double that number. And, with it's shuttle capacity, the GCS might make a nice dedicated troop transport, if a few were outfitted as such later in life.
Hobbes, I'm not sure if you would know this, but do submariners actually get the best food in the NAVY? In fact, is the food any good at all? Although I probably don't know what good food is...I love MREs
-------------------- "Kosh, I'd like to introduce you to our Resident schmuck and his side kick Kick Me."-Ritten
"Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity". -George Carlin
Registered: Jul 2007
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My point is that Star Trek is already at such right angles to the possible that nitpicking the details like this is, well, fun, sure, but I mean, let's keep this in mind.
Registered: Mar 1999
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I understand what you're saying, Sol. But my position is that it doesn't have to be that way.
I look past the script on the screen and try to see the 'real' world behind it. Everything on the screen is there to serve the plot of that particular episode and nothing more. The problem is we've tried to stitch that together over the years, and it comes together into a jumbled mess of a world full of contradiction and things that just don't make sense.
I figure Star Trek as a media is no more a realistic portrayal of their world than Andy Capp is of being in the Army.
Registered: Nov 2001
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"Hot bunking" and "six to a room" is not conducive to having a fighting force on the other end. I used to help build troop transports for the Navy and Uncle Sam's Misguided Children and the population density is nothing like what you're talking about.
They can't just lay in their racks for weeks and then get up and fight.
Sub food is good, modern subs are not like what you see on Operation Petticoat.
I think you mean Beetle Bailey not Andy Capp .
Sol - I agree, but hey that's what we're here for, huh? Although this might need to resume in Timo's place.
-------------------- Twee bieren tevreden, zullen mijn vriend betalen.
Registered: Oct 2000
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They don't have to be stuffed like sardines to have high density. 10,000 troops on the Queen Mary which was built to carry 3000 passengers and crew was able to cross the atlantic in the middle of WWII. I should think four centuries from now, a ship four to five times her size should be able to carry quite a few, especially if they're built to do so from the jump.
The fact remains, it's a surmountable problem. It doesn't have to be solved by using the ships we've already on the screen as the yardstick.
Registered: Nov 2001
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My point is though that the troops on the QM were not going directly into battle. They would get to the UK and stage, build up and then take shorter hops.
I could more buy that if you wanted to invade a planet like Earth that you'd seize something undefended in the outer system and then make the main assault at sublight after the planetary defenses were down.
My main contention though is that we've never seen the Federation do quarter million people level operations. They *should* probably work at that scale, but certainly that's not the scale Trek has been on TV. Maybe the Federation is much more sparsely populated that we'd think.
Certainly help explain why entire planets all where the same kind of clothes and have the same hair style.
-------------------- Twee bieren tevreden, zullen mijn vriend betalen.
Registered: Oct 2000
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I think that the writers of trek have seriously misunderestimated the abilities of their ships. We predict, what 15,000 as the number of troops a GCS can carry? I am currently watching "Yesterday's Enterprise", and Tasha just mentioned to Castillo that the Enterprise could carry 6,000 troops. This is in an alternate universe where the Federation has been at war for 20 years, so I'm guessing that that number would have been tried and tested as the optimum number of troops to stuff into a GCS.
Of course, Tasha also said that the Enterprise D is the first Galaxy class produced...
-------------------- "Kosh, I'd like to introduce you to our Resident schmuck and his side kick Kick Me."-Ritten
"Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity". -George Carlin
Registered: Jul 2007
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![[Smile]](smile.gif)
I love these kinds of discussions. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
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