What Hard SF Universe Could Beat the Federation?

[Nova Andromeda]

-So it looks like Starglider is basically doing all of the AI defense for me which is fairly ironic since I believe he attacked me for suggesting it in the first place .

I'm pointing out that AGI can do some extremely impressive things, including greatly speeding up scientific research and new ship design. However this is not enough to win this war, because it's still bottlenecked by physical experimentation, prototyping and construction which sets the timescale well beyond what the Federation needs to blow away any plausible HSF civ.

-I never argued that the HSF civ could research its way into Trek technobabble.

You were trying to say 'superintelligence is actually magic and can win in ways we have no comprehension of'. Now unlike most debaters around here I accept that this is actually a valid argument in many situations. However there has to be some overlap, however tiny, in the capabilities of the two sides such that there is a chance of winning that superintelligence can maximise. When the required free variables aren't available, superintelligence doesn't help. It's true that you can never rule out the possibility of a being vastly more intelligent than you spotting something you missed, and I would never personally bet against one in a situation as complex as an interstellar war. But for the purposes of this debate, 'superintelligence will find a magic way to win that we're too stupid to think of' is a worthless argument.

-This is just a minor point I made because people seem so hell bent on trying to say this fight is entirely predictable and will definitely go for the Federation. The major points I'm making revolve around information warfare and diplomacy. BTW, I disagree with your use of the word 'magic' since it's bound to be misinterpreted as 'not possible in the real world.' The great thing about superintelligence is that is requires no 'fairy dust' / magic. It's simply hard to predict what it can do in a complex system. In any event, it appears we agree on this minor point.

The HSF civ may well be spending large amounts of its resources building equipment like a massive supercollider and/or computational facilities.

Not if they've already discovered all of physics in their home universe, which if they're so hot at science they probably would have a long time ago.

-There is no reason to believe that it is necessarily possible to discover 'all of physics.' It's entirely possible that some parts of physics cannot be known. In addition, it seems entirely possible that some parts of physics will require truly massive undertakings and that a Type II or even Type III HSF civ may well still be conducting that research.

In addition, its research abilities from previous eras (in terms of software) wouldn’t have simply evaporated like expertise that isn’t used in today's (human) society. Instead, those research abilities would be safely stored and ready for later use.

True. But the hardware will have been recycled - and even if it wasn't, it probably won't be suitable for testing subspace effects and warp drive designs. Anyway half the magic materials in trek were naturally occuring and had to be /discovered/, not invented.

-True, but I'm not arguing the whole research Trek technobabble in a day line. In fact, my interpretation of the OP is that technobabble is outside of the HSF civ's reach (regardless of super-mega-uber-tera-research abilities).

Do you think this is necessary for the information warfare and/or diplomatic strategies?

For those strategies to be viable the Federation would have to be run by complete morons.

-The Federation is run by complete morons, but let's assume they've had a change of leadership for this scenario. How are they going to prevent the HSF civ from making deals with other Trek powers? How are they going to avoid all contact (to prevent information warfare attacks) without doing something entirely unrealistic like doomsdaying the HSF civ from the word go. Is the Federation is going to commit genocide on an unheard of scale without even bothering to communicate with the HSF civ?!? Really?!

Damn. I hate arguing on the Trek side.

-I don't really care, but I find this particular scenario oddly interesting.

[Starglider]

Starglider's "AI defense" basically has to be accepted by people who are not AI buffs because they don't understand the jargon or the history.

I did not even use any jargon or cite the history.

You could have gotten to the point faster by pointing to real life examples of neural networks doing the things you say are possible.

No actually I couldn't, because no real life neural networks are genuinely creative. Current ANNs actually suck pretty badly; they're capable of only relatively limited types of pattern recognition and interpolation. Genetic programming is genuinely creative but only in the sense that natural selection is, and it sucks for all the same reasons. What I would have to point to are things like Letter Spirit, Eurisko and an assortment of very obscure mid-80s systems which you won't find material about online.

General AI is a fundamentally different thing from narrow AI. At the moment we have narrow AI but not general AI. We only have ideas about how to build the latter. You cannot extrapolate from narrow AI to general AI, because the design is completely different. Or rather, you can in very specific cases, but even experts get this wrong more often than not. Arguments along the lines of 'trivial prototype X can do Y, obviously much more advanced version Z will be able to do Q' are frequently bullshit - it is exactly these kind of arguments that have given AI such a bad reputation.

Yeah you like nice simple scaling examples from physical engineering, where internal structure is not so critical. Yes you bitch and whine and complain about me 'failing to get to the point' by talking about what really matters, structure. I DO NOT GIVE A FUCK. You are not qualified to even recognise a valid technical argument in this field. I am simplifying what I know down to a level that doesn't need jargon or a book length tract to explain, and it will inevitably have to stand on authority.

The traditional AI field is rather dead,

AI is getting plenty of funding. It's just certain approaches (e.g. symbolic AI) are somewhat out of favour, but even there there are hundreds of active research projects around the world (many of them rebranded under 'semantic web machine parsing technologies' or similar).

But I do know you're doing the same overhyping you're accusing those guys in the 70's and 80's of.

No you don't. You don't have a clue.

The problem is Starglider you assume a software problem is something that can be solved or would be solved by human beings.

'Can be' yes. Other posters are assuming that a dyson sphere of solar panels is something that can be built by human beings. IMHO my assumption is a lot more reasonable.

Tim Sweeney's view on game programming is that bugs and errors in programming have made game programming orders of magnitude harder. Computers have gotten better, but the human factor has not.

Actually what happened was that software development tools stopped getting better. There were three generations that improved quite successfully; machine language, then assemblers, then 'high level language'. Pick up any compsci textbook from the 1980s and it will have a roadmap for the next two generations; logic languages and report generators, then the 'fifth generation', natural language programming. The idea being that you just tell the computer what you want and it generates the code for you. This never happened; the fourth generation was a commercial failure and the fifth generation did not appear.

As it happens the company I work for is gearing up to produce a range of fifth generation software development tools, that autogenerate code from a functional spec (though specified via UML-like diagrams and some simple maths/logic, natural language sucks). The selling point is exactly that it automates away design complexity, making software much cheaper and faster to develop and reducing the defect rate. Negotiations on a $5M funding deal to support this have been dragging on which is essentially while I still have time to talk here. But guess what happens when you feed the specifications for probabilistic logic, expected utility and the other fundamentals of general reasoning into this type of code generator? You get a general AI without having to manually design everything, that is capable of self-understanding (the tech is reversible - this is the basis of some cool legacy system migration products we've got planned) and self-improvement.

By himself he made a hit shareware game but as the games got more an more complex they now take an entire team of developers and testers and the bugs still aren't worked out.

Humans are awful at programming. Our brains just aren't designed for it. Even relatively simple AI systems can potentially be vastly better. The basic reason this didn't happen is that the last major push to make automated programming systems, in the mid 80s, a) used boolean logic rather than probabilistic logic, b) wasn't reflective, c) didn't use variable level of detail models and d) had inadequate hardware (several orders of magnitude less power than we have now). It failed hard enough to put everyone else off trying for the next two decades. But the problems are solvable. I know this because I was the one who build the exploratory prototypes which we're currently using to convince the investors the technology works.

The workaround is of course, AI's creating other AI's and programming them that way, but that has unpredictable and uncontrollable results and could result in AI dominion. In short, it's entirely possible any sane civilization would not develop AI's to the extent you propose.

This is a very serious (actually more or less unavoidable) problem with 'evolutionary methods'. It's also a problem that hardly anyone appreciates (just try saying 'evolved AIs will take over the world' to the average politician - go on, I dare you). So IMHO civilisations of biological sentients are highly likely to unintentionally replace themselves in this way anyway. However the problem isn't inherent to AI-created-AIs. If you use transparent, logical methods that meet certain predictability criteria, you can tightly control the goal systems of the general AIs produced by the process (in principle - this is an open research area currently in its infancy).

No, "creativity" and "inventiveness" cannot be quantified because they are fucking qualities!

Actually they can and must be quantified by the deployment of appropriate test suites, which consist of a series of progressively more difficult tests in virtual environments. Historically there have been numerous small ad-hoc attempts to do this, but AGIRI is developing a fairly impressive set of these at present.

You would be far more convincing if you detailed what the primitive versions of current technology can do and extrapolated from there.

Maybe to you, but that shows your ignorance of the field. Such extrapolations generally aren't valid. Don't feel too bad. Novices all make this mistake.

It's hard to imagine all but the most extreme of stories with millions of artificial intelligences, in robot bodies, all thinking millions or billions of times faster than a human being, all in a single solar system and considered HSF.

Your failures of imagination are not my problem. 'Hard' refers to physical possibility, and it's both physically possible and has a reasonably plausible development path. I don't have to provide ironclad proof that the development challenges are summountable for plausibility; I just have to show that there are reasonably promising routes ahead. You have to prove that there are insurmountable roadblocks to negate that.

[Starglider]

I did not even use any jargon or cite the history.

Hah, actually rereading my reply to DW, I suppose I did. It's just that things like 'probabilistic logic', 'expected utility', 'knowledge representation' and 'complex prior' are sufficiently common and relatively well-understood terms that I didn't mentally register them as 'jargon'. 'Jargon' would be something like 'sequitur generation via a spreading activation semantic network', 'dynamic toplogy ANN using the neural gas model to grow a reccurent layered visual modality ' or 'heterogenous operator genetic programming system implemented via the island model'.

[Patrick Degan]

The Federation is run by complete morons, but let's assume they've had a change of leadership for this scenario. How are they going to prevent the HSF civ from making deals with other Trek powers? How are they going to avoid all contact (to prevent information warfare attacks) without doing something entirely unrealistic like doomsdaying the HSF civ from the word go. Is the Federation is going to commit genocide on an unheard of scale without even bothering to communicate with the HSF civ?!? Really?!

Leaving aside the fact that the Federation actually did attempt genocide against an enemy (the Founders), the question remains: how is the HSF going to be making deals with anybody while limited to lightspeed communication?

I will also point out that the Federation hardly needs to "commit genocide on an unprecedented scale" against the HSF; they need only inflict sufficient damage to send their civilisation into chaos. This isn't an either/or scenario.

[Nova Andromeda]

The Federation is run by complete morons, but let's assume they've had a change of leadership for this scenario. How are they going to prevent the HSF civ from making deals with other Trek powers? How are they going to avoid all contact (to prevent information warfare attacks) without doing something entirely unrealistic like doomsdaying the HSF civ from the word go. Is the Federation is going to commit genocide on an unheard of scale without even bothering to communicate with the HSF civ?!? Really?!

Leaving aside the fact that the Federation actually did attempt genocide against an enemy (the Founders), the question remains: how is the HSF going to be making deals with anybody while limited to lightspeed communication?

-You're ignoring the most realistic scenarios which involve initial contact/communication between the Federation and the HSF civ which somehow goes south very very badly.
-There are tons of other powers in Trek. Do you really think they won't notice a conflict of this scale? In fact, the OP says almost nothing about the starting conditions. It's entirely realistic for the entire alpha quadrant to know about the HSF civ. before this war even starts nevermind escalates to level where the Federation is willing to commit mass genocide.
-I'm not a Trek expert, but I seem to recall that the genocide attack against the Founders wasn't sanctioned by the Federation's gov., it was done well after communication had been firmly established, and it was Federation personel that saved the Founders in the end.

I will also point out that the Federation hardly needs to "commit genocide on an unprecedented scale" against the HSF; they need only inflict sufficient damage to send their civilisation into chaos. This isn't an either/or scenario.

-Really? Care to mention why an HSF civ run by AGI would disolve into chaos and why said chaos (which you need to define) would cripple the strategies I've suggested?

[Patrick Degan]

The Federation is run by complete morons, but let's assume they've had a change of leadership for this scenario. How are they going to prevent the HSF civ from making deals with other Trek powers? How are they going to avoid all contact (to prevent information warfare attacks) without doing something entirely unrealistic like doomsdaying the HSF civ from the word go. Is the Federation is going to commit genocide on an unheard of scale without even bothering to communicate with the HSF civ?!? Really?!

Leaving aside the fact that the Federation actually did attempt genocide against an enemy (the Founders), the question remains: how is the HSF going to be making deals with anybody while limited to lightspeed communication?

-You're ignoring the most realistic scenarios which involve initial contact/communication between the Federation and the HSF civ which somehow goes south very very badly.

How does this erase the HSF's problem with lightspeed lag in its communications with anybody?

-There are tons of other powers in Trek. Do you really think they won't notice a conflict of this scale? In fact, the OP says almost nothing about the starting conditions. It's entirely realistic for the entire alpha quadrant to know about the HSF civ. before this war even starts nevermind escalates to level where the Federation is willing to commit mass genocide.

And their reason for interfering in a war involving the UFP but not themselves is...?

-I'm not a Trek expert, but I seem to recall that the genocide attack against the Founders wasn't sanctioned by the Federation's gov., it was done well after communication had been firmly established, and it was Federation personel that saved the Founders in the end.

Please. Section 31 answers to the president. The fact that Federation personnel involved themselves in an attempt to save the Founders is a Red Herring in regards to the central point.

"]I will also point out that the Federation hardly needs to "commit genocide on an unprecedented scale" against the HSF; they need only inflict sufficient damage to send their civilisation into chaos. This isn't an either/or scenario.

-Really? Care to mention why an HSF civ run by AGI would disolve into chaos and why said chaos (which you need to define) would cripple the strategies I've suggested?

They're not going to be able to do much when their dockyards and a good number of their solar power satellites (along with a few colonies) have been blasted into radioactive debris, now are they? All of which can be inflicted by the use of barrages of warp missiles and without involving a single ship.

[kinnison]

Patrick, you still haven't got it, have you?

In a type II civilisation they have simply too many targets. There are likely to be millions or billions of habitats, thousands of dockyards (at the very least, and other industrial units can be diverted to this use), and trillions and up of SPS. Just how many warp missiles can the Feds fire? And assuming they fire some planet-smashers - there are maybe half a dozen targets for those.

And assuming the initial barrage fails - well, the HSF civilisation diverts 0.01% of its industrial capacity and maybe 1% of its scientific minds to solving the problem. And, within days to weeks, they solve it. In another month, the warp missiles get returned in kind - except this time there are millions of them. And the Feds have less targets to shoot at.

The only thing that saves the Federation in this scenario is Act of Q - somehow the laws of physics are different for the two sides, as in the OP. Or perhaps they find a Tox Uthat.

[Teleros]

In a type II civilisation they have simply too many targets. There are likely to be millions or billions of habitats, thousands of dockyards (at the very least, and other industrial units can be diverted to this use), and trillions and up of SPS. Just how many warp missiles can the Feds fire? And assuming they fire some planet-smashers - there are maybe half a dozen targets for those.

Yes but what do you think will happen when an enemy starts blowing some of them up with weapons and there's almost nothing you can do in return? You don't think being practically defenceless in a total war would cause major upheaval ?

And assuming the initial barrage fails - well, the HSF civilisation diverts 0.01% of its industrial capacity and maybe 1% of its scientific minds to solving the problem. And, within days to weeks, they solve it. In another month, the warp missiles get returned in kind - except this time there are millions of them. And the Feds have less targets to shoot at.

Reread the OP: the HSF lot have to stick to known physics. If they were to somehow capture Federation warp missiles then they could try using them, but I really wouldn't recommend it given the situation.
So sure they can divert some of their industrial capacity & scientific minds to building warp missiles... except wait a sec - they'll never be able to as per the OP. The best they can do is build the missiles, stick a regular STL drive on, and somehow hope that next time the Federation attacks they'll hang around long enough to get hit . If they're lucky, in a few years they might have information as to which local stars have Federation worlds - and at that point they can launch their STL counterattack .

[brianeyci]

Since when the hell do economic and industrial factors favor the HSF? What the fuck is this? Without FTL communications an interstellar empire is impossible. When I've been thinking of HSF I've been thinking of a single solar system. If you think of more then each one is effectively isolated and can be picked off at will! It's a military planner's wet dream!

This thread is disgusting. Random numbers pulled out of ass from nowhere like 0.1% and 1% to add pseudo-credibility to total bullshit. I might be wrong about the AI, but at least Starglider agrees the HSF is fucked. But he's still stupid in calling it a "failure of imagination" that I can't imagine a society within his parameters. Yeah right, like Mike's having a "failure of imagination" when he can't imagine an entire civilization devoted to a single shot from the sun. The rebuttal "failure of imagination" misses the whole damn point.

It's almost as if people forget that the Federation was once a militaristic, jingoistic human-centric paranoid expansionist empire. Sure it isn't in the current time period, but let that HSF have its way with a planet or two, especially a core world, and revolution would quickly overthrow weak governments especially if the Federation faces high number of mounting casualties from warp missiles coming from one pissant star system.

Mobility always wins open war: deal with it wankers. As long as the Federation can field starships capable of shooting down HSF's ships, they can pick the time and place of their choosing to engage and concentrate superior force. If the only rebuttal is the Federation is too stupid to do this well, TOS was only a hundred years away. As long as the Federation fields ships powerful enough to destroy the HSF's vessels, at best the HSF has parity with Federation ships and in practise far worse because of Lanchester's laws and economic determinism. But I'm sure the wankers will claim that these are in the HSF's favor too.

[Sikon]

To add to my previous post, here's a more specifically quantitative discussion:

From planets to the Oort cloud, the total amount of non-gaseous suitable material for processing by self-replicating factories in a star system like the solar system is roughly on the order of 1E24 metric tons, a trillion trillion tons. (The total mass of the solar system is about 2E27 metric tons, three orders of magnitude more, dominated by the mass of the sun itself, but the preceding is looking at accessible material which is neither in the sun nor gaseous).

Consider a civilization approaching the limit of such natural resources and having 1% or more of the preceding in the form of warships and other military hardware, under the assumptions described in my previous post.

Then the hard sci-fi civilization has on the order of 1E22 tons of military bases, warships, etc. per star system. For perspective, considering the limits of Federation industrial capability, the Federation does not appear to have more than around 1E9 to 1E10 tons of ships at most. This is literally a difference factor of around a trillion times between the amount of Federation military hardware and the amount in each star system of such a hard sci-fi civilization.

Technically, the opening post scenario doesn't limit the hard sci-fi civilization to a single star system, so one could even consider a hard sci-fi civilization which was over a non-trivial percentage of the 0.4 trillion star systems in the galaxy, in which case the Federation could have to waste time trying to destroy billions of trillions of times Starfleet's mass in military hardware in a reasonable period of time. (Different star systems previously colonized by STL expansion can not directly help each other during the timeframe of a war, as long as they have no FTL, but they mean more targets for the Federation to have to destroy before any one obtains FTL from a non-Federation ship visiting).

In my previous post, I mentioned how there will tend not to be a quick Federation victory when the Federation does not have trillions of megatons of firepower, but this shows it in more detail.

Federation ships can be literally outnumbered a trillion to one even if their whole fleet is sent into a single star system at a time, and the limits of their capabilities mean that Federation offense will tend to be a slow victory, if such does occur.

Ironically, in some ways, this actually reminds me of Harry Potter (wizards) versus the modern world scenarios.

Of course, it is not a perfect analogy, but let's look at how an analogy can be made:

One side of the conflict is a small group with greater abilities, ideally able to attack at will anywhere while their homes are inaccessible from any counterattack, but they have such orders of magnitude fewer numbers that they lack the demonstrated ability to do enough fast enough to fully win the war in anything short of a long period of time.

In the Harry Potter versus scenario, the situation can be a small number (like dozens) of Death Eaters with the demonstrated ability to kill not many times more than their number per day, instantly teleporting anywhere through apparation. That's questionably effective when the world has a population of 6 billion with a natural death rate and replacement rate upwards of a hundred thousand people a day. People can imagine the Death Eaters using innovative and vastly different techniques to nevertheless quickly win the war (e.g. true brilliance controlling and manipulating governments against each other), but such predictions are uncertain. They canonically have not shown such effectiveness in the past (failing at the task of finding and eliminating one child), rather frequently demonstrating tactical incompetence.

If some other wizards make a deal with the orders-of-magnitude more populous and massive muggle civilization, in exchange for a variety of possible motives and material benefits, the small group's capabilities can become no longer unique. At that time, the small group may end up in trouble.

In this versus scenario, the situation can be a proportionally small number of FTL warships with only the demonstrated number of megatons firepower each to destroy not many orders of magnitude more than their own number per mission. That's questionably effective when the hard sci-fi civilization can have billions of trillions of tons of military hardware per star system, slowing the progress of the Federation assault force due to outnumbering them literally by a factor of around a trillion. People can imagine the Federation using innovative and vastly different techniques to nevertheless quickly win the war (e.g. supernova warp missile barrages), but such predictions are uncertain. The Federation does not appear to have canonically used those tactics in the past (losing to the Klingons in the alternate timeframe, etc), and it frequently demonstrates military incompetence.

If ever some other warp-capable groups make a deal with the many-orders-of-magnitude more massive HSF civilization, in exchange for a variety of possible motives and astronomical material benefits, the Federation's access to FTL could become no longer unique. At that time, the HSF civilization might indirectly have a chance.

In mass terms, there's a greater potential difference between an advanced HSF civilization compared to modern earth's civilization than between modern earth civilization and a stone-age tribe. In raw mass terms, a civilization thousands, millions, or billions of years beyond today's civilization could theoretically be more beyond us than modern civilization is beyond the largest tribe of 10000 years ago. Given sufficient time, self-replicating technology can allow a HSF civilization to utilize on the order of a septillion tons of suitable material per star system.

Yet the Federation is a civilization that instead is one of the main powers in a galaxy of ~ 400,000,000,000 stars while nevertheless having a total of 150 member worlds. The Federation instead has a mass of structures and equipment produced closer to modern earth's civilization in raw tonnage terms (albeit far more technologically advanced than modern earth, of course). The Federation is more at the billion-ton level than at the trillion trillion ton level. The Federation has the industrial capability to build on the order of 100 ships per year or less, not billions of ships, not trillions.

Despite the preceding analogy, if the Federation is smart and ruthless, they could win this scenario. Such a Federation manufactures and deploys supernova warp missiles.

Meanwhile, they promptly blockade space around the HSF civilization to prevent any non-Federation starships from investigating the intriguing massive new civilization that has appeared in the galaxy. Assume the Federation is fully successful in such. That's both to prevent any starships from risk of being captured and to prevent any from making a deal under superintelligent persuasion. After all, the Federation doesn't want a situation where any powers unfriendly to the Federation act like the U.S. did when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan by supplying nonindigenous technology to weaken a common enemy, nor Ferengi looking for profit, nor other complications.

Assuming the HSF civilization's emergency assets aren't spread over an excessive volume of interstellar space for full destruction and assuming the Federation manages complete genocide without excessive hesitation, the Federation wins. If all goes to plan, the HSF civilization never has a chance, never getting any access to FTL before full destruction, being a sitting duck.

But I'm not convinced that's how the Federation deals with hostile interstellar powers, and, as a result, I suspect that a HSF civilization so many orders of magnitude more massive than the Federation may have a chance.

[brianeyci]

Since when the hell do economic and industrial factors favor the HSF? What the fuck is this? Without FTL communications an interstellar empire is impossible.

Who needs an interstellar empire? There is enough material in the solar system to support a civilization of trillions of people.

A fully developed HSF civ would at the very least match the Federation on actual useful size and output.

I made that same point a few pages ago with the riches beyond imagination point for total exploitation of a solar system.

The problem is that's only at the start. The Federation has vast untapped potential that in a total war scenario will be utilized. People like painting the Federation as pussies but the rank and file Federation citizen, even if he's a wimp, has nothing to do with the Admiralty who will fight to the death to preserve their power. If the HSF can support trillions then the Federation can potentially support hundreds of trillions and in the timescale we're talking about they have infinite resources to waste on whatever the hell they want. As mentioned before they can literally throw entire armadas away and still make another one.

This war will not be over in a year or two like the Dominion war, and not just because of the lack of FTL. The tactics people are proposing will make them seem like an evil empire to the Federation who will not negotiate with a civilization that launches warp missiles to kill millions of civilians or burns off an entire planet. They will be considered a mortal threat just like the Borg were, especially an AI empire.

In my previous post, I mentioned how there will tend not to be a quick Federation victory when the Federation does not have trillions of megatons of firepower, but this shows it in more detail.

People seem to be working under the premise that a long conflict favors the HSF. It does not. The longer the conflict goes on the more allies the Federation can obtain and the more time it has to turn its society into more TOS-esque military expansionism, with wonder weapons HSF can't even dream of like phasing cloaks, planet busters, time travel (yes even fucking time travel) holographic soldiers and everything else they don't use but could with a total revolution of their society which has happened many times in human history and in Star Trek itself.

[Junghalli]

And assuming the initial barrage fails - well, the HSF civilisation diverts 0.01% of its industrial capacity and maybe 1% of its scientific minds to solving the problem. And, within days to weeks, they solve it. In another month, the warp missiles get returned in kind - except this time there are millions of them. And the Feds have less targets to shoot at.

Right, because reverse-engineering a device that works on physics you didn't even know existed until now is going to be a snap. Especially when you have no actual samples of the technology to study, because the missiles will all conveniently vaporize themselves when they blow up their targets. Enough with the obnoxious superintelligence wanking already.

[Sikon]

In my previous post, I mentioned how there will tend not to be a quick Federation victory when the Federation does not have trillions of megatons of firepower, but this shows it in more detail.

People seem to be working under the premise that a long conflict favors the HSF. It does not. The longer the conflict goes on the more allies the Federation can obtain and the more time it has to turn its society into more TOS-esque military expansionism, with wonder weapons HSF can't even dream of like phasing cloaks, planet busters, time travel (yes even fucking time travel) holographic soldiers and everything else they don't use but could with a total revolution of their society which has happened many times in human history and in Star Trek itself.

One side is around a trillion-plus times more than the other in industrial capability, if the HSF civilization has had self-replicating factories long enough to use the ~ 1E24 tons of available resources per star system. As suggested by the Federation not having more than ~ 1E10 tons of ships and spacestations at most, the Federation is a civilization based off using a relatively tiny portion of the crust of a few planets, like specks of dust in the vastness of the resources of space.

If the struggle is prolonged beyond a quick Federation victory, the chance of the HSF civilization obtaining FTL increases, such as by capturing a visiting ship or by successfully negotiating with one.

For perspective, if the HSF civilization had unlimited deployment of warp drive at the start of the conflict, the Federation would be curbstomped millions of times over. It would be like an insect fighting a giant.

Being the only side with warp vessels is precisely primarily what gives a billion-ton-level civilization like the Federation its potential for victory against a septillion-ton-level HSF civilization.

If the Federation did lose that advantage before the end of the war and if events start occurring like Federation redshirts fighting HSF ground forces on some colony worlds and then on earth, things could be not good for the Federation, and the war could be over before wonder weapons like time travel are deployed if ever.

Incidentally, in ST vs. SW debates, time travel is usually considered a copout with the ship sent through going to an alternate timeline and abandoning its home civilization, which is why it isn't concluded that the Federation's time travel technology would negate the orders-of-magnitude difference between it and the Galactic Empire.

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Normally, I would take this scenario as the HSF civilization being transplanted from an universe where physical laws absolutely didn't allow FTL to one where warp drive is easily, repeatedly independently developed by multiple civilizations: the Trek-verse. In that case, one would expect them to start research shortly after noticing different laws of physics. If they actually captured a Federation warp vessel, there's an excellent chance that the Federation's computer databanks are as encyclopedic as they appear (everything from minor details of earth history to starship operating instructions sufficient for a 20th century man, Khan Noonien Singh, to take over and operate the Enterprise). That could give a lot of data for the super-advanced civilization investigating the new physical laws to potentially manage what Cochrane accomplished with his 21st-century resources at an old missile base on earth, though actually the HSF civilization really ought to manage such rapidly in the preceding scenario even without capturing a ship. Such would also apply if the HSF civilization offered enormous wealth to a Ferengi visitor for widely known information on centuries-old basic technology, or other scenarios.

However, the peculiar terms of the OP does prohibit the preceding, which is the reason for my focus instead on the HSF civilization obtaining existing warp vessels (aside from perhaps eventually having Trek-verse trade partners, allies, or conquests do the manufacturing of warp drives and anything else which somehow magically can't be produced by the HSF civilization itself).

[Ghost Rider]

I still await through all this mess how an STL society is going to combat an FTL one.

The FTL society will determine when they enter combat. Having 3/4 of the galaxy is useless when the other side can cut off communications and hit you from anywhere they want, and from all appearence any TIME. Until someone can demonstrate that they are going to overcome a society that can go thousands of C, this is a joke. Note, not a few times the speed of light...the ability to cross light years in a matter of hours. Even Voyager's slow ass crawl across a quadrant would be unimaginable to a society that is limited by the speed light as the absolute unbreakable barrier.

As for the Federation being pussies. The Next Gen has shown a whole gamut of personailities, even if slightly nutso. Are they just going to lay there and take it up the ass? We've seen canonically no, they don't. They just aren't like the Imperium of Man or the New Order, but they will fight bitterly and use devices they have. They will just ask for a peaceful resolution after they have bombed you to dirt...like they did with the Dominion War.

And the warp missile is not some one shot deus ex machina. It's not a Genesis Device, Phase Cloak, Time Travel in a bottle, or Q. They demonstrated easily the capability of said weapon.

As for giving the HSF society different laws of physics. That's admitting that a Hard Science Fiction society cannot win. You ADMIT they need the Warp Drive, thus breaking the laws of physics, not that can even win with the resources at hand.

So yes this is becoming what ST vs SW is. With one side claiming another is going to sit there and do nothing in a war scenario, while the other side throws out everything but the fucking kitchen sink.

[MJ12 Commando]

See, this would be much easier if the HSF civilization had FTL-that way they wouldn't have causality.

The only way I can see them winning is if they were somehow fighting a genocidal war against humanity and had a whole swarm of relativistic weapons about three seconds away from impacting every planet the Feds held, as well as every potentially inhabitable planet, in Federation space.

Silly? Yes. Unlikely? Yes.

But that's about it for HSF civilizations that can win, whether Star Trek's incompetent or not.

[Sikon]

I still await through all this mess how an STL society is going to combat an FTL one.

Repeating previous posts would be mainly be unproductive, but the one and only suitable possibility is naturally through not remaining only a STL society.

They will just ask for a peaceful resolution after they have bombed you to dirt...like they did with the Dominion War.

And the warp missile is not some one shot deus ex machina. It's not a Genesis Device, Phase Cloak, Time Travel in a bottle, or Q. They demonstrated easily the capability of said weapon.

The Federation has not historically used weapons destroying any enemy with on the order of a trillion trillion tons of hardware. They've never had war against an enemy with the true potential of an advanced HSF civilization, self-replicating industry approaching the natural resource limit, around 1E24 tons of available resources in a star system, instead of around a trillionth as much or less.

The Federation has tended more towards megaton-level firepower than quintillion-ton level firepower.

The Federation is trying to destroy a civilization which can be up to trillions of times greater than the Federation.

Regular (antimatter-warhead) warp missiles alone don't win the war automatically. A few megatons or even a few gigatons of firepower delivered by warp missiles is like a handful of guys trying to destroy the whole U.S. military with a fraction of a pound of conventional explosives. It is against potentially 10+ quadrillion million-tons or more of warships, military bases, etc. (1E22 tons). Some kind of deus ex machina uber-weapon like the Federation developing and using supernova-inducing warheads on warp missiles is what the Federation needs to win the war in anything short of a really long time.

As for giving the HSF society different laws of physics. That's admitting that a Hard Science Fiction society cannot win. You ADMIT they need the Warp Drive, thus breaking the laws of physics, not that can even win with the resources at hand.

Obviously, as said from my very first post in this discussion, if the HSF civilization tries to advance across the Federation at STL speeds, with it taking thousands of years to cross the number of light-years involved, such would be absurd with victory impossible for a wide variety of reasons, even including that the Federation could be a multi-galactic society by then.

I've not wasted time discussing such a pointless versus scenario as that.

Hence, the interesting discussion has been if the HSF civilization may have a chance in indirect methods involving obtaining FTL from a visiting starship. Dependent upon being able to successfully implement such particular methods, victory for them is not automatic, but they can be potentially quite a dangerous foe if the Federation makes mistakes.

[Terralthra]

So, the only way you'll engage in the vs. argument is by throwing away the ground rules of the argument. Gotcha.

[Teleros]

Some kind of deus ex machina uber-weapon like the Federation developing and using supernova-inducing warheads on warp missiles is what the Federation needs to win the war in anything short of a really long time.

It'd probably only take a few years to build a trilithium missile and lob it at the star. Just got to be careful you don't get a supernova if it's close to another Fed system .

Hence, the interesting discussion has been if the HSF civilization may have a chance in indirect methods involving obtaining FTL from a visiting starship. Dependent upon being able to successfully implement such particular methods, victory for them is not automatic, but they can be potentially quite a dangerous foe if the Federation makes mistakes.

The problem is that they'd need to buy a hell of a lot of ships, and frankly they'd want at least some ST engineers for them in order to maintain them. More, once the Federation found out, they'd see about cutting off the supply PDQ...

[Stormin]

The problem is that they'd need to buy a hell of a lot of ships, and frankly they'd want at least some ST engineers for them in order to maintain them. More, once the Federation found out, they'd see about cutting off the supply PDQ...

If the HSF civ had the resources talked about above, they could do deals like a pound of valuable metals or resources per pound of starship/weapons and be able to easily buy several times the Federation's military ability.
It won't be easy to maintain a blockade when smugglers and arms dealers will have a deal like that as a goal once word gets out.

[Junghalli]

It's worth pointing out that, as Bryaneci said, when the hard SF supporters here talk about what a hard SF civilization will have they're really talking about the strongest plausible hard SF civilization.

Consider: Star Trek is basically near future SF. It takes place a couple of centuries from now. What's a hard SF humanity likely to be like in a couple of centuries? Well, it might be the pocket-OA the hard SF supporters here are talking about, with a dyson sphere of solar collectors powering billions of habitat nodes and everybody having long ago uploaded into computers and the whole thing run by poor man's Culture Minds. But it's just as likely to be like pre-Man Kzin Wars Known Space, with Earth still being the major population center, smaller colonies on the other planets, the asteroid belt being exploited for raw resources, maybe a few isolated tiny colonies in neighboring star systems, and most or all AIs being specialized expert systems that are very good at the tasks they're programmed for but still need meatbags to tell them what to do. Or it might be that once we all upload into computers we'll lose interest in expansion and the entire world population will live inside a city-size collection of computronium blocks, with infrastructure reduced to what is necessary to support said complex. After all, AIs only reproduce if they want to, so they have no particular need to expand much. The Federation could squish such civilizations with trivial ease if it wanted to.

Of course, the OP asked for any hard SF civilization that could defeat the Federation, but it's worth pointing out they've basically conceeded much of the debate by default from the beginning.

[Patrick Degan]

Patrick, you still haven't got it, have you?

Much more so than the HSF fanboys here committing a whole plethora of No-Limits Fallacies in the course of this increasingly silly thread.

In a type II civilisation they have simply too many targets. There are likely to be millions or billions of habitats, thousands of dockyards (at the very least, and other industrial units can be diverted to this use), and trillions and up of SPS. Just how many warp missiles can the Feds fire? And assuming they fire some planet-smashers - there are maybe half a dozen targets for those.

It is you who is not "getting it": the HSF civilisation is not going to be able to repair damage at an appreciable enough rate to make up for continual barrages and collateral damage effects. How many days or even weeks will it take for them to get ships out to where damaged habitats or solar lenses are located to begin reconstruction, given how slow their ships are likely to be? What happens when more and more debris winds up in the orbital pathways of the other reflectors or habitats in the system and starts impacting them? Orbital shrapnel from the first destroyed units in the system ends up causing more collateral damage, which starts to degrade more and more of the lens/reflector network.

And assuming the initial barrage fails - well, the HSF civilisation diverts 0.01% of its industrial capacity and maybe 1% of its scientific minds to solving the problem. And, within days to weeks, they solve it. In another month, the warp missiles get returned in kind - except this time there are millions of them. And the Feds have less targets to shoot at.

No-Limits Fallacy. You don't have any reasonable basis for assuming this capacity on the part of the HSF, you simply pull this number out of thin air and add to it an unrealistic timeframe for its problem-solving capacity. The resort to assumed instant reverse-engineering on the part of the HSF (which braindead Trekkies constantly invoke in their Federation v. Galactic Empire scenarios) is especially pathetic.

The only thing that saves the Federation in this scenario is Act of Q - somehow the laws of physics are different for the two sides, as in the OP. Or perhaps they find a Tox Uthat.

In a word —bullshit. The HSF is dealing with something for which they don't even have a basis for first principles for forming a theoretical model. And the OP did not say the laws of physics were different for the two sides; only that the Trek power had something the HSF didn't even consider was possible in the first place. Indeed, it said:

who could beat Star Trek's Federation without violating the laws of physics?

The Federation can win this scenario and without resort to uberwank devices or the miracle rediscovery of lost technologies like Genesis or Act of Q.

[Darth Wong]

OK, let's get to the heart of the AI argument:

Of course it does. The distinction between 'millions of independent AIs' and 'one huge AI' is actually fairly academic for well designed AI systems. You simply have n processors of x capacity seperated by communication links of p latency and q bandwidth. The true boundary between AI systems is the goal system. Systems with the same goal system will automatically co-operate and effectively be subunits of a single large system. This is inherently more efficient than 'lots of seperate AIs' due to the lack of unnecessary redundancy, in effort undertaken and control systems, plus reduced communications overhead (though sufficiently well co-ordinated networks of person-like AIs can probably approach this efficiency quite closely). You are saying 'it doesn't make any sense' because it's counter-intuitive, but a lot of things about AGI are counter-intutive. You can't give an actual reason why a rational general AI (i.e. operating on expected utility and probability logic) with access to enough computing power can't replicate the efforts of an army of a million trained human scientists, because there isn't one. Of course /developing/ such a thing is a massive software engineering task beyond our current abilities, but then so is building any of the other infrastructure for a type I civilisation.

In other words, you are talking about an AI which was designed for scientific research. I have never denied that such a thing could be possible. What I said was that this society's AIs are probably designed for something other than that. If it is young and still developing, you might have a point but it would not have the scale that the HSF people are imagining. If it is ancient and vast, then it is almost certain that no real scientific development has occurred in a long time, and that its AIs are built for the huge task of managing such a vast infrastructure without the kind of techno-magical shortcuts that are common in soft sci-fi.

In other words, they would need to create an entire new infrastructure including new computing facilities and AI software for this kind of widespread research, and they probably haven't done research in a very long time so it would take quite a while to get anything going at all.

I don’t see why this should be true. The trend in research has been toward more complicated analysis and higher energies (as mentioned by others). The HSF civ may well be spending large amounts of its resources building equipment like a massive supercollider and/or computational facilities.

Did it ever occur to you that there is a limit to science? That beyond a certain point, there is simply no more physics to learn?

In addition, its research abilities from previous eras (in terms of software) wouldn’t have simply evaporated like expertise that isn’t used in today's (human) society. Instead, those research abilities would be safely stored and ready for later use.

That's like saying we know how we landed on the Moon, so we should be able to instantly ramp up another Moon landing program. It's not that simple; there is no reason to assign instant anything to the HSF civilization, and any attempt to do so is more wankery than debating.

[Darth Wong]

There are tons of other powers in Trek. Do you really think they won't notice a conflict of this scale?

What "scale"? We're talking about a single star system, you stupid fuck.

Really? Care to mention why an HSF civ run by AGI would disolve into chaos and why said chaos (which you need to define) would cripple the strategies I've suggested?

Yet again you demonstrate your asinine stupidity. Any HSF civilization on the scale you describe is bounded together by an incredibly fragile slow-ass transport infrastructure which a soft sci-fi civilization could effortlessly disrupt. It has no conceivable way of responding to FTL attackers who can literally appear anywhere they wish, with no warning whatsoever. Repair teams will take months or years to reach facilities which have been attacked. Even if the Feds eschew mass destruction tactics, they could simply drop out of warp right next to critical targets and hit them with pinpoint strikes- a fairly common tactic for any soft sci-fi civilization with FTL capabilities from Star Trek to Star Wars, Babylon5, Stargate SG-1, and others.

And so the HSF fanboys simply adopt another Trektard tactic: this time, from Borg wankers, by saying that the HSF civilization's infrastructure must be so incredibly decentralized and ultra-redundant that you would have to destroy millions or billions of targets before their civilization would be seriously degraded, and they would repair them faster than you can destroy them.

The fact is that the distances involved will make everything slow. I don't give a fuck how many factories the HSF civilization has scattered across every planetoid in its lone system; it can't deliver fuck-all to where it's needed without its fragile, slow-ass transportation system. Disrupt that and the whole goddamned thing falls apart. And what do you think they're using their energy output and industrial output for right now? Just sitting there lighting up Christmas displays? They're USING it, and significant disruption will undoubtedly mean things like mass famines, social breakdowns, etc. Look at how quickly society broke down in New Orleans when modern infrastructure ceased; a civilization that is wholly dependent upon its power infrastructure cannot simply shrug off attacks on it; the social consequences will be quick and severe.

[Junghalli]

Look at how quickly society broke down in New Orleans when modern infrastructure ceased; a civilization that is wholly dependent upon its power infrastructure cannot simply shrug off attacks on it; the social consequences will be quick and severe.

Well, with transport being slow and energy-expensive a system-wide hard SF civilization might well have a Midaeval style economy where every settlement has to be pretty much self-sufficient and trade is mostly in expensive luxury goods. Such an economy would be a lot harder to disrupt than that of a modern industrial nation, since it would minimize disruption from trade interdiction or centralized knock-out blows of critical facilities.

Not that this is really what Nova Andromeda is talking about, and not that this will mean anything besides it taking a bit longer for the Feds to reduce them to surrender.

[Darth Wong]

Look at how quickly society broke down in New Orleans when modern infrastructure ceased; a civilization that is wholly dependent upon its power infrastructure cannot simply shrug off attacks on it; the social consequences will be quick and severe.

Well, with transport being slow and energy-expensive a system-wide hard SF civilization might well have a Midaeval style economy where every settlement has to be pretty much self-sufficient and trade is mostly in expensive luxury goods. Such an economy would be a lot harder to disrupt than that of a modern industrial nation, since it would minimize disruption from trade interdiction or centralized knock-out blows of critical facilities.

Such a civilization would be more accurately described as a collection of loosely associated planetary states rather than a single civilization, and it would not have any significant space-based military forces to speak of.

Not that this is really what Nova Andromeda is talking about, and not that this will mean anything besides it taking a bit longer for the Feds to reduce them to surrender.

Actually, it would simplify matters because you could take care of it one planet at a time, and in similar fashion: drop out and hit pinpoint targets, this time on the surface.