Federation Strategy for Defeating the Empire

Junghalli · Post by **Junghalli** » 2005-01-26 02:31pm

Hey guys. This is my first post. Just thought I'd say hello.
I've read over the main site and generally agree with the conclusion that the Empire massively outmatches the Federation in virtually every concievable way.
That said, if you were in charge of the Federation and you were being overrun by the Empire what would you do? And please, don't say you'd surrender immediately. The OP is your country is being overrun by an evil despotic dictatorship that's massively more powerful than you, and you're trying to find some way of not being conquered.

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2005-01-26 02:33pm

retire, grant a planet to myself as pension, secede, and ask to be made a protectorate of the empire. then sell the planet, and live a life of luxury.

YT300000 · Post by **YT300000** » 2005-01-26 02:34pm

Junghalli wrote:The OP is your country is being overrun by an evil despotic dictatorship that's massively more powerful than you, and you're trying to find some way of not being conquered.

I'd order enforced mass suicides. Self-destruct every ship and every station, and kill everyone. A scorched earth policy to the maximum. Leave nothing behind.

It is literally the only way to avoid being conquered, as there is no way in hell you can resist or escape, and if you don't kill yourself and all of your people, the Empire will be able to capture what's left after they beat everything up.

wautd · Post by **wautd** » 2005-01-26 02:36pm

Let them come. Make millions with holodeck themeparks and if possible, become a tax paradise

Petrosjko · Post by **Petrosjko** » 2005-01-26 02:45pm

Junghalli wrote:Hey guys. This is my first post. Just thought I'd say hello.
I've read over the main site and generally agree with the conclusion that the Empire massively outmatches the Federation in virtually every concievable way.
That said, if you were in charge of the Federation and you were being overrun by the Empire what would you do? And please, don't say you'd surrender immediately. The OP is your country is being overrun by an evil despotic dictatorship that's massively more powerful than you, and you're trying to find some way of not being conquered.

Okay, assuming I'm CinC Starfleet?

I'd be sipping my tea one day, while reading... hmm... Othello. Then I would be crispy fried as one of the several hundred vessels that just appeared in orbit with no warning hits Starfleet Command with a surgical strike.

And that is the conundrum in a nutshell. The Empire quite likely would show up without warning, decapitate the command structure, and hammer every other Federation world simultaneously. They have the manpower to do it easily, given how superior their vessels are.

So militarily, there is no response. Surrender would be the only option to avoid massive destruction of civilian populations.

From there? Bide your time, learn the rules, see what weak spots there are among the invaders, and plot an uprising. Starfleet may be forced to surrender, but they'll never actually give up.

Realistic chances? Not great. But the Rebel Alliance had shitty odds too.

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2005-01-26 02:50pm

course, the feds have even *worse*. . .

wautd · Post by **wautd** » 2005-01-26 02:56pm

Contacting the Rebel Alliance would be the only thing you can do if you want to actually oppose the Empire. The rebels can always use more soldiers and pilots.

But Federation as a whole doesnt have a chance to give any opposition

Petrosjko · Post by **Petrosjko** » 2005-01-26 03:04pm

I'm talking about a long-term strategy of insurrection here. Decades and generations. Because there could be no meaningful resistance over the period of time that it would take for the subject populations of the AQ to be assimilated into the Empire. Hit an Imperial base? They'll flatten the surrounding cities in response.

No, it would have to be something that essentially works from the inside, like the Rebel Alliance did. Which means it would be a bastard offspring Imperial culture, by the time the whole thing started to come to fruition. Starfleet would be a legend by then, a memory of a better time, and a flag to rally around.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2005-01-26 03:06pm

It depends whether or not I knew that the Empire was coming, and how long I had.

I think it makes sense to break it down into time periods.

100 years, 50 years, 25 years, 5 years, 6 months.

As well, lets assume that you have the technical readouts of the capabilities of the Empire, so you can convince rational minded people (no guarantee that everybody is going to be rational though).

Brian

Junghalli · Post by **Junghalli** » 2005-01-26 03:08pm

Yup, the defeatism here is pretty high. Can't say I blame you.
Since we're generally assuming that the Empire has access to our galaxy via wormhole I would focus on destroying the wormhole. To paraphrase Princess Lea, it's our only hope. All the theories about RL wormholes I've read indicate they'd be very fragile structures, and the bigger they are the less stable. To accomodate an SSD it would have to be at least a couple of kilometers wide, which would make it pretty big. Plus we also have in-universe evidence that it can be done. I forget the name, but there was one ep where a Bajoran Kon Ma agent was going to destroy the Bajor wormhole with what seemed to be a CHEMICAL explosive (ultritium), and he seemed fairly confident that it would work. So, I've created a couple of plans based on that. We're assuming the Imps have garrisoned the wormhole heavily.

(A) Install phase cloak on the largest ship in Starfleet (probably a Soveriegn but I'm not sure). Strap a huge bomb to the ship, as big as it can haul, and fill it with matter and antimatter. The ship will fly to the mouth of the wormhole under phase cloak, decloak, release the giant bomb right next to the wormhole, and warp out as quickly as possible. The bomb will carry a small battery with just enough juice to maintain the antimatter containment field for three seconds, at which point it will fail and the bomb will explode. If they Imperials shoot it down that will only make it explode prematurely, and since it's released within spitting distance of the wormhole that won't matter unless you're one of the guys on the delivery ship, who then wouldn't have time to get away.

(B) In case phase cloaks are unavailable. Have the bomb delivery ship escorted by Starfleet, in its entirety (if this doesn't work it won't matter anyway). Preferably have several bomb delivery ships, so if one is destroyed prematurely the others may have better luck. The Fed fleet will drop out of warp as close as possible to the wormhole (don't know how precise their warp navigation systems are). They need to stay alive just long enough for one of the bomb delivery vessels to get close to the wormhole. It would then release the bomb and the fleet will warp out (if possible, the Imps may set up interdictors but the destruction of the wormhole is worth more than the lives of the Starfleet officers and the ships). Either way when the bomb explodes it will hopefully be sufficient to collapse the wormhole, which will then explode and release enough energy to fry the whole solar system on both sides IIRC.
PS, I'm kind of new to this forum and not familiar with your system

. If this post shows up in the wrong thread please just erase of relocate it.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2005-01-26 03:10pm

That's of course assuming that they go through a wormhole and just don't FTL themselves into the ST galaxy from another galaxy.

Brian

Petrosjko · Post by **Petrosjko** » 2005-01-26 03:29pm

Destructionator XIII wrote:Even if reenforcements are slowed, they would still have to deal with the Imps already there. Just one ISD could more than likly maintain control waiting for the Empire to establish a new way to get reenforcements in.

One ISD would be pushing it, because you run into the 'You can do everything with a bayonet but sit on it' problem. There's just too much 'ground' in the Federation for a single ISD to truly secure it. It can pound planets at will, but control them? No.

But yes, the battlefleet that would be guarding the wormhole would almost certainly be enough to control the Federation's territory, if not the whole of the AQ.

Oh, and one aside on the OP. During my tenure as Starfleet CinC, I got rid of the banana phasers and instituted procurement of a more ergonomic model. I can't fix everything, but that one particular abomination of a weapon will not survive my tenure as the big cheese.

Junghalli · Post by **Junghalli** » 2005-01-26 03:41pm

Destructionator XIII wrote:Even if reenforcements are slowed, they would still have to deal with the Imps already there. Just one ISD could more than likly maintain control waiting for the Empire to establish a new way to get reenforcements in.

From what I've read about wormholes when a wormhole collapses it releases a fuckload of energy. IIRC to generate a wormhole 100 meters across you need an amount of energy equal to what you'd get if you turned the entire planet Jupiter into pure energy. And you can imagine what kind of titanic natural catastrophe would be required to rip open spacetime big enough for an SSD to fit through. And IIRC when you collapse a wormhole all the energy that went into making it gets released again. The blast should sterilize the solar systems on each end of the wormhole, and the Imp forces guarding the wormhole will be right on top of that explosion. I doubt they'll survive.
Of course, I'm no physicist. These calcs may be in error.

Petrosjko · Post by **Petrosjko** » 2005-01-26 03:56pm

Yeah, the big problem with the wormhole closure scenario is the assumption that Starfleet will recognize the threat in time to assemble their fleet and haul them to the wormhole. Remember, the Imperial fleet can move fast once they've committed, far faster than Starfleet can even dream of.

And if the Imperial fleet is reasonably sized, it would be pure luck to get a bomb ship through, because on the Imperial end it will be a great turkey shoot of Starfleet vessels.

Junghalli · Post by **Junghalli** » 2005-01-26 04:17pm

I don't know about the calculations either, but we can be sure that it won't annilatiate the Imperial forces. They wouldn't put all their assests in one place. Even if they did, the energy can only propagate at a maximum of the speed of light, so the Imps would just see the plan and hyperjump to saftey.

If possible you'd want to take them as much by surprise as you can. How accurate is warp navigation on Fed ships? Can they target an area down to a couple of kilometers? If so, they could give the Imps exactly five seconds warning (two to drop the bomb, three to warp out) and hopefully the wormhole will blow and sterilize the system before they know what's going on. I know that's the way I'd try to do it if I was them.
Sure, the Imps might already have formidable forces deployed in the MW, but the Fed would still be infinitely better off than it was before. At least now they'd be outnumbered and cut off from their bases of resupply. After destroying the wormhole I'd fight a war of attrition, gradually whittling down their numbers. Sure they could BDZ planets, but now that they're stuck here they're going to have to take as many as possible intact or starve eventually. And even TNG redshirts at their worst could swamp Stormtroopers under sheer weight of numbers

.

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2005-01-26 04:33pm

The problem of your scenario is you'd have to contend for five years against people who slag everything on your planet to a useless state.

Really, how long do your think your people are going to tolerate you commiting acts that make the imperial commander go "And today Vulcan lost 200,000,000 lives."

Petrosjko · Post by **Petrosjko** » 2005-01-26 04:40pm

Junghalli wrote: If possible you'd want to take them as much by surprise as you can. How accurate is warp navigation on Fed ships? Can they target an area down to a couple of kilometers? If so, they could give the Imps exactly five seconds warning (two to drop the bomb, three to warp out) and hopefully the wormhole will blow and sterilize the system before they know what's going on. I know that's the way I'd try to do it if I was them.
Sure, the Imps might already have formidable forces deployed in the MW, but the Fed would still be infinitely better off than it was before. At least now they'd be outnumbered and cut off from their bases of resupply. After destroying the wormhole I'd fight a war of attrition, gradually whittling down their numbers. Sure they could BDZ planets, but now that they're stuck here they're going to have to take as many as possible intact or starve eventually. And even TNG redshirts at their worst could swamp Stormtroopers under sheer weight of numbers .

Somebody actually versed on the physics of the matter would have to take a swing at the whole 'Wormhole destroys the guarding fleet' issue. But even assuming they have less than a dozen or so ISDs wandering about, with a contingent of Carracks and so on, there is no whittling down their spaceborne forces. Imperial firepower and shielding so massively overwhelms Federation firepower and shielding, it's not even funny. Add to that the Empire's ability to totally dictate the terms of confrontation by the speed of their hyperdrives... no. At best, you're still seeing worlds get BDZed, and Starfleet on the run. Truth be told, the wormhole scenario might even result in a higher degree of Imperial brutality because as Destructionator mentioned, they'll have little choice but to go Tarkin on the Feds.

Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba · Post by **Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba** » 2005-01-26 05:01pm

My idea:

1. Get a cloaked ship- the Defiant, a loaned BOP, a stolen Romulan Warbird- to fly to the edge of the system where the Wormhole is and send as many of these warping Trilitium torpedoes into the wormhole as possible. We know that Dr. Soran had warp-capable Trilitium torpedoes, and the Dominion has them too, so we can assume that by now the Federation has them stockpiled in place with things like the Genesis Device, Grays and Section 31. Maybe their sun-destroying power will even hurt ISDs, who knows? However, ISDs, while accurate, cannot hit FTL things, so a barrage of those rockets would easily hit the maw of the Wormhole.

2. (If 1 fails) Begin training all civilians in guerilla tacticas and indoctrinate them so they can kill. If the Imps want to conquer us, they'll find very angry, well-armed guerillas waiting for them.

3. (If 1 and 2 fail) Send a ship to the Galactic Barrier. If a hundred Gary Mitchells are created, hope that they decide to kill the Emperor, and not you.

4. (If 1, 2, and 3 fail) Pray to Q.

Tommy J · Post by **Tommy J** » 2005-01-26 05:17pm

Junghalli wrote:Hey guys. This is my first post. Just thought I'd say hello.
I've read over the main site and generally agree with the conclusion that the Empire massively outmatches the Federation in virtually every concievable way.
That said, if you were in charge of the Federation and you were being overrun by the Empire what would you do? And please, don't say you'd surrender immediately. The OP is your country is being overrun by an evil despotic dictatorship that's massively more powerful than you, and you're trying to find some way of not being conquered.

I'd take a tactic like the Ferengi and sell out someone else. Mike also points out in his Fan Fic that what the Federation members could do in the long run is terrorist tactics over time.

The Empire might become fed up with bombings and assinations and just say it's not worth the effort. This requires however that the Fed and its citizens abandon all of their values.

Like the US with Vietnam, it just became tiresome to continue.

Junghalli · Post by **Junghalli** » 2005-01-26 07:27pm

If the wormhole was destroyed the Fed would still have a hard time, but at least they wouldn't be facing insurmountable odds to their survival. Think of what would happen if you transported a fleet of aircraft carriers back in time and pitted against the Roman Empire. It would rule the world for the first few months, but then they'd run out of jet fuel and they'd be screwed. If ISDs and other Imp tech runs off stuff that isn't available in our galaxy with its present tech (hypermatter for instance), then probably the most painless course of action would be to surrender, wait a couple of months or years for their reactors to run down, and then rebel.
Alternately, let them win every battle but make it a Pyrrhic victory. Whenever they try to take over a planet throw redshirts at them like there's no tommorrow, and when you run out of redshirts give every able bodies man and woman on the planet a phaser (they probably won't do much worse than redshirts anyway

). Make it simply IMPOSSIBLE for them to take major planets because the Stormtroopers are always getting swamped by sheer weight of numbers. This strategy would be completely fruitless against the Empire, but against a remnant force with no source of resupply...
Of course, the downside to such a strategy is obvious. Sooner of later they'd get frustrated and start doing BDZs. It wouldn't help them, they'd still be living in borrowed time. But they could throw some mighty destructive temper tantrums before going down

.

Post by **Coyote** » 2005-01-26 08:10pm

Really, your best bet is to simply let them come and take over, and gradually take whatever opportunity you have to kill a couple guys here and there, take their blasters, kill a few more, take their speeder, and so on...

In other words, just become a branch office of the Rebellion in the ST continuum, slowly acquiring Imperial tech when possible and maintain a guerrilla war.

That's about all you can do. Red Dawn in space.

Kazuaki Shimazaki · Post by **Kazuaki Shimazaki** » 2005-01-26 09:19pm

Junghalli wrote:Yup, the defeatism here is pretty high. Can't say I blame you.
Since we're generally assuming that the Empire has access to our galaxy via wormhole I would focus on destroying the wormhole.

Let's start with plausible scenario for:
1) The Feds figuring out the Imps came from a wormhole.
and
2) The Feds finding the wormhole.
and of course
3) assuming it is close enough for you to reach.

Enola Straight · Post by **Enola Straight** » 2005-01-26 10:03pm

In the face of such overwhelming force, fight dirty...

Time Travel, baby.

Get your most advanced ship, fill it with all the state of the art tech you can get your hands on...including whatever imperial tech you could steal...collate as much tactical data as possible, and go back in time.

Use either warp ten into a star's gravity well and hook a left, or time/antimatter implosion.

If we're talking about an invasion during the TNG era, try to go bact to around the TOS era. Say to Starfllet Command" Hey, this culture which took over this galaxy far, far away, and IS going to conquer this galaxy in less than a century...

UNLESS...

You take everything I give you now and start geting your shit together with this hundred year head start.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2005-01-26 11:40pm

Junghalli wrote:Yup, the defeatism here is pretty high. Can't say I blame you.

Since we're generally assuming that the Empire has access to our galaxy via wormhole I would focus on destroying the wormhole. To paraphrase Princess Lea, it's our only hope. All the theories about RL wormholes I've read indicate they'd be very fragile structures, and the bigger they are the less stable. To accomodate an SSD it would have to be at least a couple of kilometers wide, which would make it pretty big. Plus we also have in-universe evidence that it can be done. I forget the name, but there was one ep where a Bajoran Kon Ma agent was going to destroy the Bajor wormhole with what seemed to be a CHEMICAL explosive (ultritium), and he seemed fairly confident that it would work. So, I've created a couple of plans based on that. We're assuming the Imps have garrisoned the wormhole heavily.

(A) Install phase cloak on the largest ship in Starfleet (probably a Soveriegn but I'm not sure). Strap a huge bomb to the ship, as big as it can haul, and fill it with matter and antimatter. The ship will fly to the mouth of the wormhole under phase cloak, decloak, release the giant bomb right next to the wormhole, and warp out as quickly as possible. The bomb will carry a small battery with just enough juice to maintain the antimatter containment field for three seconds, at which point it will fail and the bomb will explode. If they Imperials shoot it down that will only make it explode prematurely, and since it's released within spitting distance of the wormhole that won't matter unless you're one of the guys on the delivery ship, who then wouldn't have time to get away.

The first problem with this scenario is the assumption that the Imperials would open a wormhole anywhere within easy range of Earth. They could as easily open it near to the galactic core or at the edge of the galaxy and lose virtually no advantage in terms of speed and travel times to the AQ civilisations (or any of the civilisations in the galaxy). A distance which is only a day by Imperial hyperspace could easily translate into ten years by Federation warp drive. This alone makes a strike on the Imperial wormhole infeasible.

In terms of strategy (A): a phasing-cloak would not provide a measurable advantage. Even a phase-cloaked object interacts electromagnetically with the outside universe (elsewise the ship would be blind and utterly unable to navigate) and its own sensors would give it away. The ship can do nothing until it decloaks, so there is still vulnerability on that score as well. This of course would assume that any Federation ship could reach the wormhole before an Imperial fleet would have pounded its home civilisation to dust or forced its surrender.

(B) In case phase cloaks are unavailable. Have the bomb delivery ship escorted by Starfleet, in its entirety (if this doesn't work it won't matter anyway). Preferably have several bomb delivery ships, so if one is destroyed prematurely the others may have better luck. The Fed fleet will drop out of warp as close as possible to the wormhole (don't know how precise their warp navigation systems are). They need to stay alive just long enough for one of the bomb delivery vessels to get close to the wormhole. It would then release the bomb and the fleet will warp out (if possible, the Imps may set up interdictors but the destruction of the wormhole is worth more than the lives of the Starfleet officers and the ships). Either way when the bomb explodes it will hopefully be sufficient to collapse the wormhole, which will then explode and release enough energy to fry the whole solar system on both sides IIRC.

Strategy (B) is a non-starter. Given the speed disparity and distances involved, even if the Imperials were foolish enough to locate their wormhole terminus anywhere near Federation space (within a 10000ly radius from Earth), this strategy could be nullified by simply sending several Death Squadrons into undefended Federation space to commence pounding their homeworlds to slag; accompanied by uninterrupted live broadcasts of the devestation on every subspace channel. This would guarantee either wholesale mutinies and desertions or recall of ships to try to defend what worlds are left —that is those that would not have immediately announced their secession from the Federation and subsequent surrender to the Empire. It would not even require a significant number of Imperial ships to carry out the raids or defend the wormhole. One hundred stardestroyers should provide enough firepower and overlapping defensive coverage to turn any approach path to the wormhole into a freefire killing zone.

And as the collapse of the Bajoran wormhole was never projected to wreak destruction on the Bajoran home system in any scenario, it is doubtful that such an strike on the Imperial wormhole, even in the very unlikely event of its success, would destroy the entire star system on either side (assuming it would be located within a star system in the first place), and as Imperial technology opened the wormhole in the first place, it would not be a hugely difficult feat for the passage to be reopened; just another construction project for Sinear Fleet Systems to contract out for.

And the time-travel scenario is simply ludicrous for reasons which have already been stated several dozen times already in numerous threads on the subject, as well as being a tacit admission that the Federation is hideously outmatched in every category.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-01-27 02:16am

Would the Feds really care? They're used to a controlled, top-heavy society. They're used to doing what the military says. They're be a few days of odd transmissions coming in, some shuffling in the council, and then it'd be over and most civilians would never even have known there was a war on. Since the Imps are likely (AFAIK) to just install a Moff above the existing Fed government and slowly assimilate them culturally, I don't see what level of resistance would really be offered. Most Feddies would never even see an Imperial vessel and live. The remmants of Starfleet and minor fleet auxillaries would be enough to maintain control while they conquer the rest of the galaxy, and they're hardly going to set up fucking death camps or repossess all property are they?

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