What Hard SF Universe Could Beat the Federation?

[Adrian Laguna]

Then again, most civilizations who've built sizable nukes can make a nice big dent in Star Trek.

With modern Earth technology we can mount 15 MT weapons on missiles. Consider the ridiculously large number of missiles and atomic weapons that have been made over the past 50 years. I think it stands to reason that given several more decades of advancement, a united Earth could put-up a defence system in orbit amounting to hundreds, maybe even thousands, of missiles. The highest theoretical limit for photorp yield is 64 MT. However, given that in the vacuum of space getting the anti-matter to react with matter instead of being blow away in all directions is hideously difficult, we can conclude that actual yields are considerably lower. In which case this missile defence system will, while not make impregnable by a long-shot, at the very least makes us powerful enough for the Federation think twice about attacking us.

[kinnison]

Any civilisation with near-c relativistic drives (probably ramscoop) can make a horrible mess of the Federation.

Large masses at large fractions of the speed of light are essentially unstoppable. Fire a thousand-ton ramship at Earth. Assume that Starfleet sees the thing in time to do something about it. What the hell do you use to shoot it down? Photon torps are too slow; the targeting for phasers is probably inadequate, and even if it isn't, the projectile is travelling almost as fast as the beams.

And if you vapourise it? Well, then you have a thousand tons, more or less, of radioactive plasma still on its way to Earth. Still with its multiple-petaton KE to deliver into Earth's atmosphere.

Relativistic kinetic-kills are not good things to throw around inside a solar system, at least if you are planning to use it afterwards.

[Starglider]

In which case this missile defence system will, while not make impregnable by a long-shot, at the very least makes us powerful enough for the Federation think twice about attacking us.

Chemically propelled missiles have fairly lousy sustained acceleration and delta-v. Capability to even change orbit will be quite limited. Meanwhile Federation ships are zipping around at tens to hundreds of G (linear) and able to warp away if necessary. They should be able to track the missiles with unjammable-by-Earth FTL sensors and trivially shoot them down with phasers as well, though I'm not as confident about that given how many examples of Federation tactical incompetence we've seen. And there's still not much we can do if the Federation ships start towing asteroids into earth-intercept trajectories - even a small task group can toss rocks faster and harder than we can use nukes to deflect them. Of course since it's the Federation they may well rule out such tactics on the basis that the civillian casualties will be horrendous. The next part comes down to 'are transporters and starship ortillery enough to make up for the Federation's laughable incompetence at any sort of ground combat', but that's kinda OT for 'who can take the Federation'.

[Adrian Laguna]

I have never seen photon torpedoes moving particularly faster than what can be accomplished with modern rocketry. I do not believe there is any example of photorps being shot down, and there are few examples of Trek ships dodging them. I figure our defences would be a threat to a dozen capital ships at most, a larger fleet and we'll get pwnt easily. The point is that the Federation would at least be given pause at the thought of whether a pre-warp planet is really worth losing several warships.

[Teleros]

What the hell do you use to shoot it down? Photon torps are too slow; the targeting for phasers is probably inadequate, and even if it isn't, the projectile is travelling almost as fast as the beams.

Stick something in its path perhaps ? If they can intercept it far away enough most of the debris will miss the Earth, because even a tiny deviation from the course will add up to a hell of a lot in time.

[speaker-to-trolls]

^What he said. Relativistic kinetic kill missiles are unbeatable as strategic weapons in a relativisitic environment, but when your enemy can see them coming from lightyears off and move far faster than them they suddenly stop being so scary.

On the purely defensive side of things, how well would Federation sensors and maneuvarability serve them against Known Space style Huge Laser Batteries of Doom (vast areas of Mercuries surface are covered in solar panels to power a giant laser for driving sailships, also comes in handy for cutting up invaders). Pretending for a minute that lasers can make it through their navigational deflectors, of course

[Starglider]

I have never seen photon torpedoes moving particularly faster than what can be accomplished with modern rocketry. I do not believe there is any example of photorps being shot down, and there are few examples of Trek ships dodging them.

We almost always see phototorps fired at close (visual) range, and it takes seconds at most for them to hit the target. It's true that the observed acceleration of phototorps is usually quite lousy, but that's irrelevant.

The best example for your chemically propelled missiles is not PTs but rather Soran's probe in Star Trek : Generations. It was a small ground launched missile that could reach the system's star in eleven seconds; probably via a very-high-g climbout of the atmosphere followed by a warp jump. The Enterprise-D is in low orbit and Riker claims that it would take between eight and fifteen seconds to shoot down the probe (presumably with phasers).

Your missiles will be bigger, easier to track and much, much slower. As I noted it takes half an hour plus for them just to make a moderate orbit change, it will take hours to reach targets in GEO. If the Ent-D can shoot down a tiny surprise-launched extremely fast missile in fifteen seconds, it can trivially swat hordes of slow ungainly earth missiles that take half an hour plus to close. Having the missiles sit inert and hoping a Fed ship comes close enough to their position that you can hit it in under ten seconds won't work either; Trek sensors are good enough to detect even inert and camoflauged objects at much greater ranges.

The fact that the Trek powers don't seem to have effective PD against PTs is irrelevant because you'll never be able to close to typical (i.e. visual) Trek engagement ranges anyway, and it has been confirmed that they do have a very effective capability to track and shoot down chemically propelled missiles at very long range.

[Ender]

Most of them.

I don't think so. An awful lot of hard sci-fi worlds are near future. With technology not much better than ours, and often no more than Earth for resources

Well, I was limiting my discussion to that of hard space opera or that with a significant space presence. If you are talking cyberpunk as part of that, then yes, the Federation has a cakewalk.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe not. A lot of cyberpunk deviates into a much more fractured and splintered future EG Snow Crash's uber-libertarian polities. In those cases, yeah the Federation can show up overhead and say "surrender or we will bomb you from orbit", but who is going to surrender to them? There isn't a world government or even major players to deal with. The UFP can't lose, but giventhe parameters, they can't win either.

If you are talking space opera but limited only to the solar system, there I disagree. The UFP may cast a wide net for territory, but they are absurd abou exploiting it. In a volume 8000 ly across there should be 15.6 million earth like worlds, and even more that are like primordial earth, and even more that are in the same kind of terraforming situation as mars. But they only have 150 worlds. We see very little orbital infrastructure (shipyards, military bases, science outposts and trade centers only), no asteroid mining (the cardassians hauled it up from Bajor and then sent it off) no gas giant harvesting, no asimov arrays, no Oort colonies, no payload accelerators, no orbitals, nothing. The total population of the Federation is about 2 trillion (2*10^12) people. Estimates for Sol, alone, is that the inner system could support 10^16 people. Do away with gravity for your space stations and factor in the resources you can get from throwing Oort bodies inward and estimates put it at 10^18.

Properly exploited, a single star system could beat the fuck out of most soft space opera.

Then again, most civilizations who've built sizable nukes can make a nice big dent in Star Trek.

Aren't Federation starships capable of something like 1000 G accelerations, according to DW's own website?

Anybody limited to realistic engines and power generation and without some kind of ubertech would probably be totally fucked in space. Good luck accelerating something the size of the E-D to 10 G with halfway realistic power generation, let alone 100 times that. A Fed starship would have good odds of being able to outrun the missiles of a relatively hard SF civilization, let alone being able to absolutely fly rings around the spaceships.

You think in such... small terms.

Yeah, rocket accelerations will be slow. But that doesn't matter. Firstly, that 1000G acceleration isn't going to help you against lasers, particle beams, or RKVs that make up most hard scifi weaponry. Secondly, while the initial acceleration will be slow, those missiles will be launched by a starship, which will definately NOT be moving slow. When the initial velocity is .92 C, the fact that the engine can only accelerate at .2 G is pretty much irrelevent. Thirdly, you are assuming that most missiles will be moving under their own power. Most scenarios I read propose large linear accelerators for throwing and catching payloads around the solar system. With the abundance of solar energy, antimatter, and He-3 that a significant space civilization has access to, building a 50,000 km long payload accelerator that pushes the object along at 100 Gs it trivial. (really, it is.) Build it double barreled shotgun style so that you can catch there and slow it down while recouping spent energy, and then use attitude control jets to swing them around in concert when you need to toss things. At 300 km/s what you need will get there pretty swiftly. Now aim it at the approaching USS Voyager.

[Darth Wong]

I just want to say that it's pretty sad to see some people in this thread describing near-c relativistic vehicles as "hard sci-fi". Yeah sure, if we just handwave away the First Law of Thermodynamics, any vehicle can just travel at close to the speed of light, right? And we call it "hard sci-fi"!

[Darth Wong]

Properly exploited, a single star system could beat the fuck out of most soft space opera.

In terms of population, perhaps. But it would take months or years for a hard sci-fi civilization to even make trips from one planet to another, within that same system. This empire would be more like Ancient China than any modern nation.

Yeah, rocket accelerations will be slow. But that doesn't matter. Firstly, that 1000G acceleration isn't going to help you against lasers, particle beams, or RKVs that make up most hard scifi weaponry.

Lasers and particle beams are limited by structure. You can't just make arbitrarily powerful lasers if you stick with hard sci-fi, because of the need to reflect the beam. You could theoretically make enormous particle beam weapons, but they would be massive and correspondingly difficult to accurately aim or swiftly re-orient. Drones would have to operate off limited fuel supplies and defend orbital installations which are essentially defenseless against long-range attack.

Secondly, while the initial acceleration will be slow, those missiles will be launched by a starship, which will definately NOT be moving slow. When the initial velocity is .92 C, the fact that the engine can only accelerate at .2 G is pretty much irrelevent.

"0.92c" and "hard sci-fi" do not belong in the same post.

Thirdly, you are assuming that most missiles will be moving under their own power. Most scenarios I read propose large linear accelerators for throwing and catching payloads around the solar system. With the abundance of solar energy, antimatter, and He-3 that a significant space civilization has access to, building a 50,000 km long payload accelerator that pushes the object along at 100 Gs it trivial. (really, it is.) Build it double barreled shotgun style so that you can catch there and slow it down while recouping spent energy, and then use attitude control jets to swing them around in concert when you need to toss things. At 300 km/s what you need will get there pretty swiftly. Now aim it at the approaching USS Voyager.

Earth's orbit is 1 AU. Mars' orbit is ~1.5 AU. At 300 km/s, it would take three days for a projectile to reach Mars' orbit. Meanwhile, your average soft sci-fi ship makes that trip in minutes, and it's a full-functioning ship, not a missile. If we ignore the fact that it's not really possible and just look at tactical balance, soft sci-fi kicks the shit out of hard sci-fi. Accept it.

PS. You can't be serious about simply "aiming" a 50,000km long payload accelerator at a moving target with attitude control jets.

[Ariphaos]

I just want to say that it's pretty sad to see some people in this thread describing near-c relativistic vehicles as "hard sci-fi". Yeah sure, if we just handwave away the First Law of Thermodynamics, any vehicle can just travel at close to the speed of light, right? And we call it "hard sci-fi"! :roll:

...

"0.92c" and "hard sci-fi" do not belong in the same post.

While this isn't relevant for targeting a ship with, is there something that actually prevents an AU-long mass driver powered by a solar array? The Sun puts out plenty of energy for such tasks.

You'd probably skip the bit about using a projectile when trying to target soft sci-fi ships anyway. Given the stupidity of Star Trek I wouldn't put it past a sufficiently industrialized hard sci-fi system to mount a defense. One laser may not overcome them but a few quintillion? At some point you can have a civilization building weapons and infrastructure faster than Trek can destroy it.

[Darth Wong]

While this isn't relevant for targeting a ship with, is there something that actually prevents an AU-long mass driver powered by a solar array? The Sun puts out plenty of energy for such tasks.

Theoretically speaking, I suppose you could concoct such an idea and call it "hard sci-fi". But Ender was talking about launching a missile from a starship traveling at 0.92c.

You'd probably skip the bit about using a projectile when trying to target soft sci-fi ships anyway. Given the stupidity of Star Trek I wouldn't put it past a sufficiently industrialized hard sci-fi system to mount a defense. One laser may not overcome them but a few quintillion? At some point you can have a civilization building weapons and infrastructure faster than Trek can destroy it.

All the weapons in the world don't do shit for you if you can't see your enemy coming. Simply warp-jump into a selected spot at least a few hundred thousand kilometres away from any of their weapon platforms, unload all of the ordnance you want for a few seconds, and then jump out of there before they can hit you with anything, even lasers (hell, they won't even see you for a while). Even early warning stations won't help, because they can't transmit data faster than light.

The fact is that the Trek civilization would have a huge advantage: they can pick and chose the time and place of engagement. They have an essentially "safe" marshalling area (anywhere sufficiently far from the target system). Their infrastructure is immune to counter-attack. Strategically, it's a no-brainer.

[Ariphaos]

Theoretically speaking, I suppose you could concoct such an idea and call it "hard sci-fi". But Ender was talking about launching a missile from a starship traveling at 0.92c.

Yes I know. There should be a way to calculate the minimum length of such a device given magnetic saturation at ~1.6 Teslas for iron. I've been trying to work it out but it's been too long since I did magnetics in physics :-/

All the weapons in the world don't do shit for you if you can't see your enemy coming. Simply warp-jump into a selected spot at least a few hundred thousand kilometres away from any of their weapon platforms, unload all of the ordnance you want for a few seconds, and then jump out of there before they can hit you with anything, even lasers. Even early warning stations won't help, because they can't transmit data faster than light.

Is there a situation where a standard Trek power has engaged at more than ~5k kilometers? Trek's in-space tactics are nearly as idiotic as their surface tactics.

The fact is that the Trek civilization would have a huge advantage: they can pick and chose the time and place of engagement. They have an essentially "safe" marshalling area (anywhere sufficiently far from the target system). Their infrastructure is immune to counter-attack. Strategically, it's a no-brainer.

If we put this hard-sci-fi system in between Sol and Epsilon Eridani, such a civilization can do quite a number against the Federation's infrastructure. Just build a large enough lens, point a fair bit of the star at Earth, Vulcan, Mars, etc. Continuous yottawatt-scale beams will overwhelm anything those planets have for defense, the only solution is moving them out of the way.

[Darth Wong]

Yes I know. There should be a way to calculate the minimum length of such a device given magnetic saturation at ~1.6 Teslas for iron. I've been trying to work it out but it's been too long since I did magnetics in physics :-/

"Hard sci-fi" doesn't really mean that we have to know how to build the thing; it only means it should not urinate all over physics. Which most sci-fi does on a regular basis, especially with respect to speed.

Is there a situation where a standard Trek power has engaged at more than ~5k kilometers? Trek's in-space tactics are nearly as idiotic as their surface tactics.

Against a planet or similarly stationary object? Sure. You're assuming they would engage force-on-force. Why would they have to do that?

The fact is that the Trek civilization would have a huge advantage: they can pick and chose the time and place of engagement. They have an essentially "safe" marshalling area (anywhere sufficiently far from the target system). Their infrastructure is immune to counter-attack. Strategically, it's a no-brainer.

If we put this hard-sci-fi system in between Sol and Epsilon Eridani, such a civilization can do quite a number against the Federation's infrastructure. Just build a large enough lens, point a fair bit of the star at Earth, Vulcan, Mars, etc. Continuous yottawatt-scale beams will overwhelm anything those planets have for defense, the only solution is moving them out of the way.

Nonsense. First, they need to know where the attacks are coming from. How are they going to know that, when it stretches optical resolution simply to determine that a star system has planets? Second, it would take time to build a huge lens, and the Federation can easily disrupt construction whenever it pleases. Third, you seem to be engaging Trekkie one-sided attack mode, where group A tries all kinds of crazy-ass tricks and group B just sits there taking it. In this case, for years at a time, without deploying their nastiest toys. That's just retarded.

At the end of the day, the Federation has virtually unlimited ability to fuck up here. Even if it sends entire fleets with totally retarded tactics and loses them all, it can just do it again, because it is safely isolated from counter-attack.

[NecronLord]

The tragic thing is, people are missing the point that to completely destroy or conquer the UFP, unless you somehow get hold of thier ships and manage to use them (and given the shittyness of LCARS for readability, you're likely to blow yourself up before you manage to make them go...) you're talking over eight thousand years. And that's optimisitic. That's more time than even the wanktastic twenty ninth century UFP is supposedly going to require to develop.

By the time you're able to point your uber-laser at them, they'll probably be able to phase-cloak their home system, move it out of the way (See Trelane) or something even more rediculous, in the mould of TOS uber-races.

Of course, if you're putting your civilisation right in the middle of the UFP, this is reduced somewhat, though by that standard, any vaguely competant modern army could rapidly seize Earth if it just happens to be deposited in San Francisco.

Dealing with RKVs is trivial, so long as the UFP knows they're coming (and as long as both sides are aware of each other it will, see Atomic Rocket's 'gun in central park at night' analogy) it simply has to use a warp capable ship - it doesn't even need a warship - to tow an asteroid into its path, and watch the pretty explosion. That's ignoring that a tractor beam should be quite able to divert a dumb RKV that's at any significant distance from the target onto a harmless vector.

And all this assumes that the UFP, over the next dozen centuries, doesn't at any stage have a shift back to the Kirk era's more militaristic attitude, and take steps to chastise this culture that's determined to destroy them.

[Patrick Degan]

If we put this hard-sci-fi system in between Sol and Epsilon Eridani, such a civilization can do quite a number against the Federation's infrastructure. Just build a large enough lens, point a fair bit of the star at Earth, Vulcan, Mars, etc. Continuous yottawatt-scale beams will overwhelm anything those planets have for defense, the only solution is moving them out of the way.

And what stops Starfleet from sending a ship to blast that lens into debris?

[Ariphaos]

Against a planet or similarly stationary object? Sure. You're assuming they would engage force-on-force. Why would they have to do that?

To transmit the better part of a star's power across a system, the difference between force on force and force on industry gets significantly blurred, a bit like the Kzinti Lesson. Any interesting level and complexity of power distribution is also a weapon.

They can attack the nodes, of course, but any interesting arrangement of them (ie, providing a percentage of the sun's power) is going to involve so many mirrors, lenses, collectors and whatnot that no typical Trek power has enough ships to make a significant impact, short of destroying the star.

Nonsense. First, they need to know where the attacks are coming from. How are they going to know that, when it stretches optical resolution simply to determine that a star system has planets?

This is probably the most difficult of the assumptions, granted.

Second, it would take time to build a huge lens, and the Federation can easily disrupt construction whenever it pleases.

Alternatively, the standard collectors can just be pointed towards the target star system. Diffusion would be rather large but enough to boil oceans.

Third, you seem to be engaging Trekkie one-sided attack mode, where group A tries all kinds of crazy-ass tricks and group B just sits there taking it. In this case, for years at a time, without deploying their nastiest toys. That's just retarded.

Well, my point with that (barring system-destroying antics occasionally displayed) is the raw patheticness of industry in Star Trek. Several thousand ships is a major fleet, sponsored by the industry of over a hundred worlds. A Hard Sci-fi civilization that is harnessing a significant power of its parent star isn't going to be significantly hurt by the loss of a quadrillion elements. If each Trek ship is destroying a thousand a second, it's going to take decades for Trek to 'win'.

It's not so much that Trek is just sitting there and taking it, it's that the scale of industry on the part of the HSF civilization is so far beyond them that they can't really stop the HSF civilization from directing energy, any more than the HSF civilization can outmaneuver them.

This is defeated by the various plot devices of course (the 'blow up the Sun' rocket they have...) but the Federation doesn't support such tactics.

By the time you're able to point your uber-laser at them, they'll probably be able to phase-cloak their home system, move it out of the way (See Trelane) or something even more rediculous, in the mould of TOS uber-races.

Of course, if you're putting your civilisation right in the middle of the UFP, this is reduced somewhat, though by that standard, any vaguely competant modern army could rapidly seize Earth if it just happens to be deposited in San Francisco.

I'm mostly focusing on defense and systems that are close enough. Attacking any such power more than several light-years away is completely infeasible, yes.

And the last part is just a reflection of my point - any vaguely competent civilization is going to have an industry on such a scale that it will take decades for the UFP to deal with short of using a superweapon.

[Ender]

I'm low on time, so I'll only cover this now.

"0.92c" and "hard sci-fi" do not belong in the same post.

I chose .92c for a reason. It is a plausible speed that doesn't require us to handwave. Meet the Valkyrie.

[NecronLord]

I'm mostly focusing on defense and systems that are close enough. Attacking any such power more than several light-years away is completely infeasible, yes.

One light year. The UFP can just park a monitoring post with a runabout two light months out, and scoot if anything comes near them, leaving an antimatter surprise. They'll then know if the STL civ tries any launches.

And the last part is just a reflection of my point - any vaguely competent civilization is going to have an industry on such a scale that it will take decades for the UFP to deal with short of using a superweapon.

Not really. Meet General Order 24. The UFP can cause the breakdown of civilisation, if it wants to. And just by implementing cloaking (which it has liscence for one ship, all it'll really need, from the Romulans), it can easily outmanouver and destroy any defence system it pleases. Especially if they're given time to think about it, and use the cloaked ship to just transport torpedos into or near to their targets.

It only gets worse if the UFP use a tactic that has been seen, and just decide to save UFP lives by stationing warp-missiles outside the system. This tactic has been used by the Cardassians, and been developed, though not used, by the Marquis. Given an enemy so effectively bottled up, the UFP could quite happily develop warp missiles - undetectable until they drop out - and deploy them against any hard sci-fi targets they please.

[Darth Wong]

I'm low on time, so I'll only cover this now.

"0.92c" and "hard sci-fi" do not belong in the same post.

I chose .92c for a reason. It is a plausible speed that doesn't require us to handwave. Meet the Valkyrie.

Puh-lease. Even assuming that's legitimate (and that website link gives me a 404 to the page that presumably gives more details on the concept), it's basically a bag of antimatter fuel with a wisp-like structure, traveling in a perfectly straight line. You're talking about a warship which can maneuver and launch torpedoes, for fuck's sake. Your argument centers around the ship using its 0.92c velocity to pre-accelerate a torpedo for use against Starfleet ships! How the fuck is this design even remotely usable for such a purpose?

[NecronLord]

Of course, they're lucky they're only dealing with the UFP, who are treaty resticted in their use of cloaking devices. It would be considerably harder to engage Romulans or Klingons, who basically can't be detected, and wouldn't skimp on transporting a few megaton bombs into cities until the hard sci-fi guys get the point.

[Darth Wong]

To transmit the better part of a star's power across a system, the difference between force on force and force on industry gets significantly blurred, a bit like the Kzinti Lesson. Any interesting level and complexity of power distribution is also a weapon.

They can attack the nodes, of course, but any interesting arrangement of them (ie, providing a percentage of the sun's power) is going to involve so many mirrors, lenses, collectors and whatnot that no typical Trek power has enough ships to make a significant impact, short of destroying the star.

This is like saying that you can't disrupt a modern power distribution network because there are so many transformers and wires. You don't need a number of ships equal to the number of targets; such enormously complex systems are generally quite metastable, and do not tolerate significant damage well.

Nonsense. First, they need to know where the attacks are coming from. How are they going to know that, when it stretches optical resolution simply to determine that a star system has planets?

This is probably the most difficult of the assumptions, granted.

It's not just "difficult"; it's nonsense.

Second, it would take time to build a huge lens, and the Federation can easily disrupt construction whenever it pleases.

Alternatively, the standard collectors can just be pointed towards the target star system. Diffusion would be rather large but enough to boil oceans.

Oh sure, a civilization entirely dependent upon this vast solar power network (probably constructed over a period of thousands of years) will just temporarily deprive itself of power in order to modify their entire power collection network so that it can convert its energy into lasers and fire it at a distant star system in the hopes that an enemy might be there. Yeah, that makes sense. And in the meantime, the Trek civilization would just ... watch them do this?

Well, my point with that (barring system-destroying antics occasionally displayed) is the raw patheticness of industry in Star Trek. Several thousand ships is a major fleet, sponsored by the industry of over a hundred worlds. A Hard Sci-fi civilization that is harnessing a significant power of its parent star isn't going to be significantly hurt by the loss of a quadrillion elements. If each Trek ship is destroying a thousand a second, it's going to take decades for Trek to 'win'.

Trek has decades to win. It has millennia, in fact. What do you not understand about the difficulties of overcoming such an enormous propulsion gap?

It's not so much that Trek is just sitting there and taking it, it's that the scale of industry on the part of the HSF civilization is so far beyond them that they can't really stop the HSF civilization from directing energy, any more than the HSF civilization can outmaneuver them.

The fact that a civilization is very large does not mean that it can indefinitely withstand attacks that it cannot defend against. You are still basing your argument upon an assumption of Trek passivity. Highly technological infrastructures are more easily disrupted, not less.

This is defeated by the various plot devices of course (the 'blow up the Sun' rocket they have...) but the Federation doesn't support such tactics.

If this half-assed scheme of yours worked and they exterminated the population of Earth, the Federation would quickly learn to support such tactics. This civilization could be exterminated completely, and unlike the Federation, it doesn't have a far-flung interstellar network to perpetuate its species.

And the last part is just a reflection of my point - any vaguely competent civilization is going to have an industry on such a scale that it will take decades for the UFP to deal with short of using a superweapon.

It HAS all the time it could possibly need. Why do you not grasp this?

[NecronLord]

Indeed, while the 'Federation are pussies' if they're actually subject to genocide on such a scale, I doubt they'll remain calm for long. Examples like 9/11 and Pearl Harbour show that surprise attacks rarely crush a culture's will to fight. While the Romulans or Dominion might have been able to exploit the loss of Earth with a follow up military campaign, a hard sci fi civilisation can't realistically do more than get the drop on them once before the UFP start shooting down their missiles and ships with impunity.

[Cycloneman]

For an example of what Ender's talking about, look at a book like The Mote In God's Eye. (Not the hardest of hard, but only two blatant bits of handwavium, so it's a decent starting point.)

Star Trek ships are seriously inconvenienced by getting near a sun for a short amount of time. The ships in Mote dive into suns without any serious problems. These people are scary scary folks.

This brings to mind the example of the civilization in The Mote In God's Eye that doesn't have/use the handwavium - the Moties themselves. Sure, they can't dive into suns, but they managed to fire a shuttle through interstellar space at a significant fraction of the speed of light (.3 c, I think). I would hate to see federation troops go up against the warrior caste.

[Starglider]

but they managed to fire a shuttle through interstellar space at a significant fraction of the speed of light (.3 c, I think).

Via a laser-powered solar sail that took decades to accelerate to that speed.
I don't recall the exact speed but a human warship had no trouble accelerating up to an appropriate speed to 'catch' it within a few days (at the most).

I would hate to see federation troops go up against the warrior caste.

Federation ground troops are regularly defeated by just about everyone - stormtroopers, modern military, even the monstrously incompetent Jem'hadar, Klingons and Ferengi. So Motie warriors would be overkill. But this is irrelevant, because the Federation could glass the Motie homeworld at will. The only way they're going to be a problem is if the Federation stands by for a couple of centures while they expand and bring their tech base up to Trek standards.