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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Ahkileez: [QB] [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:[/QUOTE]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. [/QUOTE]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.) [/QUOTE]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? [/QUOTE]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? [/QUOTE]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. [/QUOTE]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. [/QUOTE]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.... [/QUOTE]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 :) [/QB][/QUOTE]
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