Salvation War in the United Federation of Planets

[Junghalli]

I think the liberation of Hell might be the stage where they have more problems because the nature of the bubble worlds might make it impossible to use orbital assets and all the particulates in Hell's atmosphere might interfere with their sensors and transporters.

Of course they can still send shuttles through, and shuttles would probably be basically functionally invulnerable to anything Hell might throw at them, so if we assume they have functioning brains at all they should still be able to devestate Hell pretty effectively. Actual occupation might be where they have the most difficulties, but I don't see why they couldn't suborn compliant factions of Hell inhabitants like TSW humans did.

Come to think of it, has it ever been established how high the "ceilings" of Hell and Heaven are? Depending on the answer and the geometries of the gravity field there might well be an empty vacuum free-fall zone in the middle of the bubble where you could send starships. Of course they'd need a very big portal, or they might be able to disassemble it and send it through in pieces (hey, it's not like the Baldricks would have any space assets that might shoot at you while you're doing it).

Yes, silly me I forgot how effective the Federation was at lending orbital support to its pathetic ground forces, not to mention the fact that more than likely the Baldricks will smash their way into a city, where there's civilians.

Do the math: civilians in city+occupying forces preventing ANY accurate positioning data= long and bloody Stalingrad style urban combat.

That would indeed be one of the best tactics they could use, but it requires them showing more intelligence/knowledge than they did in canon, where as far as I can remember they never did anything more than commando raids into cities. Maybe they couldn't make a suitably big portal because all their portal specialists were taken up by Belial's sky volcano project. If they follow canon tactics and strategy they'll drop a huge army into an empty desert.

[bilateralrope]

Yes, silly me I forgot how effective the Federation was at lending orbital support to its pathetic ground forces, not to mention the fact that more than likely the Baldricks will smash their way into a city, where there's civilians.

Do the math: civilians in city+occupying forces preventing ANY accurate positioning data= long and bloody Stalingrad style urban combat.

What prevents the beaming out of civilians ?

[Night_stalker]

Nothing, save the fact that if the Baldrick blitz their way into the city, it's going to get very difficult to pick out human lifesigns, plus we might not even know what kinda of electrical interference summoning in portals could create, which would make transporting people unsafe.

[Ghost Rider]

Nothing, save the fact that if the Baldrick blitz their way into the city, it's going to get very difficult to pick out human lifesigns, plus we might not even know what kinda of electrical interference summoning in portals could create, which would make transporting people unsafe.

So...any demonstration as such for

- Making it hard for ST sensors to tell the difference

- Their electrical power on par to make interference possible.

This also comes into the fact, someone should provide at what speeds this will happen, because this thread is looking like a bunch of fanwhores going "Hurf hurf ST SUX!!!".

[Shroom Man 777]

Nothing, save the fact that if the Baldrick blitz their way into the city, it's going to get very difficult to pick out human lifesigns, plus we might not even know what kinda of electrical interference summoning in portals could create, which would make transporting people unsafe.

Says who?

The Baldricks portalled in through a middle of nowhere fucking desert in Bakalakadakistan. How'll that affect the transpoter signals in some city many miles away? And transporters can pick out human lifesigns if the humans have comm-badges or whatever designators that shouldn't be too uncommon around Trek Earth.

Yes, silly me I forgot how effective the Federation was at lending orbital support to its pathetic ground forces, not to mention the fact that more than likely the Baldricks will smash their way into a city, where there's civilians.

Do the math: civilians in city+occupying forces preventing ANY accurate positioning data= long and bloody Stalingrad style urban combat.

Hahahaha. Yes, silly you, you forgot how slow the Baldricks are going to be at walking across a fuckoff desert while riding their shitty hippolobsters while numbering in the thousands/millions, to be seen by Starfleet from high above and get their asses strafed by shuttles going pew-pew at them and smearing harpies in their windshields?

Do the math: a fuckload of baldricks slogging through the desert get seen from orbit, shuttles come in and shoot them up = Starfleet Captain Curtis LeMay sheds a tear of approval. STARFLEET AIR COMMAND! SAC DOES NOT SHROOM BACK!

unless the Federation has a Robert Space McNamara who'll fuck things up lol but i heard he's chained in the 25th circle of hell, a special level reserved for traitors, child molesters and people who talk in movies

EDIT:

Also, man. Star Trek transporters, in the latest movies, were shown to be accurate enough to beam people off even though THEIR PLANET IS BEING EATEN BY A BLACK HOLE RED MATTER (Vulcan).

Hey, I have a great idea! What if Starfleet just uses a tractor beam and drops an asteroid into that portal to Hell? That asteroid will fall through the portal and fall into hell, and the asteroid can just smash Satan's face! Haha!

The demons, and angels, can't beat this. If nobody can refute this point by posting screencaps of demons/angels vaporizing asteroids, or Satan's deflector shields withstanding an asteroid field impact, then CONCESSION ACCEPTED!

[Junghalli]

I just remembered: in TSW they were able to make portals big enough for oceangoing ships to pass through, so if Hell has a space-like freefall vacuum region they should be make a roughly starship-sized portal. It probably wouldn't even be that hard to get a sensitive to the location: just send one through a smaller portal in a shuttle and have it climb to the "center" of Hell, where the gravity of the surrounding rock mass should pull on everything equally.

Well, there are some complicating factors. Oceangoing ships are narrower than most Trek ships appear to be. And we don't know the gravitational dynamics of Hell, so climbing to the free-fall region from near the surface might be quite a high-energy proposition. And of course we don't even know that there is such a region.

Nothing, save the fact that if the Baldrick blitz their way into the city, it's going to get very difficult to pick out human lifesigns

One possibility that comes to mind is setting up confining forcefields around the recieving transporter pads (there's at least one TNG episode I can remember offhand where we've seen them set up just such a forcefield on the bridge at a moment's notice). Any Baldricks beamed up find themselves restrained in a forcefield, and then are quickly rerouted to a holding area somewhere.

[Shroom Man 777]

Or the shuttles just pew-pew the Baldricks and fuck them up while they're hundreds of miles (or whatever) away from civilization in the middle of the desert. Oh no.

EDIT:

Maybe Belial will use demon telepathy and will start torturing the denizens of Hell. Maybe one of the Hell denizens was a Trekkie, and now the legions of Satan will gain valuable information on Trek Earth by interrogating Trekkies in hell! If Gene Roddenberry is in hell, oh no!

[Mobius IO]

...not to mention the fact that more than likely the Baldricks will smash their way into a city, where there's civilians.

Do the math: civilians in city+occupying forces preventing ANY accurate positioning data= long and bloody Stalingrad style urban combat.

Again they move at a rate of miles per day and portal into the heart of a desert. The Federation will have days to react before they have the chance to smash their way into anything...

[Shroom Man 777]

Unless the Baldricks, through torturing Trekkies in Hell (because we hate Trekkies so they must go to Hell), learn the weaknesses of the Federation and so Satan commands all his Baldrick legions to haul lumps of technobabble rocks with them to render them invisible to Trek sensors and invincible to Trek transporters! Then with +10 Boots of Speed and increased AGI, they will blitz through the heart of the Federation, through the Urals and into the bosom of the Motherland! Operation SHROOMDESSA! Mein Fuhrer I can moonwalk!

EDIT:

Muhahaha! My army of illiterate bronze-age spear-carrying morons will defeat an advanced sci-fi civilization that has spaceships, teleportation, rayguns, shields and nuclear-yield weaponry! Because... hurr! Treks! Hahahahaha!

[Cecelia5578]

Yes, silly me I forgot how effective the Federation was at lending orbital support to its pathetic ground forces, not to mention the fact that more than likely the Baldricks will smash their way into a city, where there's civilians.

Do the math: civilians in city+occupying forces preventing ANY accurate positioning data= long and bloody Stalingrad style urban combat.

Um, you do know that in DS9, when it looked like the Federation was going to lose the war against the Dominion, that Section 47 launched a genocidal biowarfare campaign against the Founders? I think the Federation (or Starfleet, whatever) is more than capable of doing nasty stuff if need be. In this case, with the capital of the Federation at stake, as well as obviously being of great sentimental importance to humanity, I don't think the Feddies would be so hesitant. If the alternatives are to allow a large number of humans and non-humans to be captured by the baldricks and sent to hell and Earth occupied by hostile forces, or start nuking cities from orbit, I don't think they'd hesitate. Besides, having your capital planet overrun looks bad to the other Star Trek powers, and Starfleet at least would have to take that into consideration.


Besides, occupying cities really isn't the demons specialty, as per TSW, and while I can live with stuff like not beaming photon torpedos into baldrick formations, your other limitations of Feddie transporter use is just plain artificial and does nothing except provide gratuitous Trek bashing.

[Werrf]

In all honesty, it frankly does not matter how poor the Federation ground troops are in the series. They're good enough to at least not immediately get destroyed by enemies with weapons on a similar level to their own, so they have at least a modicum of skill, no matter how poorly they're written. The baldricks, as written in TSW canon, portaled into a desert, and marched forward in phalanxes with no attempt to take cover. A single redshirt with a hand phaser can vapourise all of them. We have seen phasers being used as welding tools, used to make rocks red-hot, and have never seen any kind of range limit on them. One with a decent field of view would be able to vape every single baldrick he can see. They'd never get as far as the cities.

I can just about, possibly, maybe, perhaps begin to see some problems if Hell manages to keep it together long enough to think of portalling their troops into cities - a tactic which never began to occur to anyone in the canon, but what the heck, let's cut the baldricks every break imaginable. Somehow, they manage to think of portaling into a city and overrunning it. At which point...the civilians retreat into their houses, raise forcefields (which are depicted as being as ubiquitous on Federation Earth as glass is to us), then sit around and wait patiently while they're beamed out or the baldricks are wiped out from orbit, from strafing shuttles or, for no readily apparent reason, by infantry who are able to be evacuated by beaming as soon as their position starts looking dicey.

Sorry, no...the baldricks vs the UFP is just a non-starter, any attempt to say otherwise is just plain imbecilic.

[Night_stalker]

Fine, I cede the war in favor of the Federation.

On the ground, without air support, or any form of orbital support they're probably screwed. With support, they'll win easily, then they'll try and find a way to make portals into Hell large enough to fit ships through so they can cover all of Hell with several Galaxy-class vessels from orbit.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Fine, I cede the war in favor of the Federation.

On the ground, without air support, or any form of orbital support they're probably screwed. With support, they'll win easily, then they'll try and find a way to make portals into Hell large enough to fit ships through so they can cover all of Hell with several Galaxy-class vessels from orbit.

They don't really need Galaxies. In the OP's timeframe, they have Intrepids, which can land. Ships like, you know, the starship Voyager.

[Phantasee]

Who says the Middle East is still a desert in the future? I would think that part of the world would have been greened out and made perfectly habitable a long time ago.

Assuming it wasn't nuked until it was below sea level.

[Cecelia5578]

Who says the Middle East is still a desert in the future? I would think that part of the world would have been greened out and made perfectly habitable a long time ago.

Assuming it wasn't nuked until it was below sea level.

Well, the TMP novel (its on a thread from the early days of SDN) mentions that Gibraltar has been dammed, and the Med has dried up sufficiently enough that ancient ruins are being excavated that were under the sea, so its possible...

[Rossum]

Question: In this crossover, is the question of transporters killing people answered?

In the Salvation War, it was learned that embryos of aborted or miscarried babies went to Hell. In this crossover, would it be found that transporters kill the person being transported and create a copy on the other side?

If that is the case, then Hell would probably be up to its armpits in Starfleet personnel before the battle even starts.


Joe Redshirt: Honey, I'm heading off to work now.

Martha Redshirt: Goodbye dear, have fun at the academy. Oh, on the way back could you pick up a gallon of milk? I'm thinking of baking cookies!

Joe Redshirt: Do I have to? Can't you just use the replicator we have in the house? It took... um... alot of whatever it is we use to get stuff to get that thing.

Martha Redshirt: But I'm baking cookies! I mean I could just replicate the cookies themselves but I want to bake them. If I replicated the ingrediants then it defeats the whole purpose...

Joe Redshirt: Oops, gotta go! Computer, transport me to work!

*Joe Redshirt is Transported to work*

[Meanwhile in Hell]

*The big gateway from which all the souls of the dead pour forth in their new bodies is out of control! Earths population of billions are all living longer and having kids, but are also being teleported from place to place resulting in their souls going to Hell but themselves not dying. A constant neverending flood of naked humans is pouring out of the gate and teams of Baldricks are grabbing them and trying to hurl them off to their eternal punishment*

Baldrick Steve: For the love of crap! They're everywhere.

Baldrick Stan: Shut up and keep shoveling!

Baldrick Fred: Hey guys, Lord Segfogolus promoted me to damnation assignment. Where do I...

Baldrick Stan: Shut the #*&% up and shovel, dammit! This is damnation assignment! Humans, shovel, towards the dragon, MOVE!

Joe Redshirt: Ow my head... where am I? What the?! AHHH! *Redshirt Joe gets shoveled off towards a seven headed dragon that thows him off into one of the circles of Hell for eternal punishment. He lands on a giant mountain of naked human, a mountain that includes thousands of copies of himself... one for each time he transports to and from work each day!*

Baldrick Fred: What is this? I thought I was going to assign humans to their eternal torment?

Baldrick Steve: A few centuries ago, sure. It was just a slow managable trickle then. But it sped up a while back and now its #*&%ing crazy! It never stops! I swear all these humans look the same to me, I keep seeing the exact same faces over and over and OVER!

Baldrick Stan: Screw the humans! Lazy lucky bastards. They get to sit and burn in the lava pits and scorpion nests. I have to spend every miserable second of my life shoveling them out of here before this whole plateu gets covered in them. Do the Lords or Dukes care? NOO! They sit around drinking and partying while I'm stuck here keeping all of Hell from getting swamped with their...

*An ominous rumbling is heard*

Baldrick Steve: Hit the decks! Its rush hour!

*The stream of humans quadruples in output, several other Baldricks are covered in an avalanch of humans that threatens to cover the entire area.*

Baldrick Stan: Pete and Extricendos are down! Where the #*&% are those extra workers I asked for?!

[Meanwhile on Earth]

*Joe Redshirt is sitting at a table in the Cafeteria with his Vulcan coworker*

Joe Redshirt: Hey Vok, I've been thinking. Transporters can scan a person, disassemble them, then rebuild them exactly right on the other side without any errors or change. But everyone knows that replicated coffee isn't as good as the real stuff because of bit errors and stuff and that they were put together from nothing. Its just... I know I'm the same guy I was this morning but this coffee here is fake because it was put together out of nothing just a few seconds ago. I mean... if a replicator was able to make a person out of nothing then would everyone say they were fake?

Vok: Logic dictates that you should drink your coffee before thinking too hard.

[NecronLord]

True, I guess it depends on how you would use transporters as weapons.

I was thinking more along the lines of shuttlecraft/starships beaming demons away and simply not re materializing them. Also, if the federation has some kind of transporter network on Earth they could do the same thing without starships. The beaming of photon torpedoes and the like is also using transporters as a weapon. Beaming away teams is still ok.

They have a transporter network on Earth. Also, they can beam the Demons up, without their tridents (there is a strip-weapons-from-victim setting in transporters) and then simply transport to prison camps.

And frankly, if you dismiss that as 'using as weapons' I counter that this is a normal everyday tactic in trek, seen whenever they want to beam up enemy soldiers (which is rare).


As for what happens to Feddies when they die, that should probably be dismissed as a notion. If billions of Feds popped out of the portal per day, the Baldricks simply would already be exterminated. They could not breed fast enough to keep them down.

[Rossum]

As for what happens to Feddies when they die, that should probably be dismissed as a notion. If billions of Feds popped out of the portal per day, the Baldricks simply would already be exterminated. They could not breed fast enough to keep them down.

If the Federation learned that their transporters results in the creation of soul-copies in "this alternate universe that resembles the Hell of old Earth legends" and that this was having a negative impact on Hells inhabitants (not to mention how their soul-copies must feel) then how would that affect their view of the war.

Its one thing to know that all your dead loved ones and a chunk of all the dead from all of human history were being enslaved and tortured by demons in Hell or just being dumped in lava pits, it could be quite another when the inhabitants of some alternate universe who look big and scary are being flooded with copies of yourself as a direct result of the Federations casual use of transporter technology.

I'm not 100% sure that the Baldricks would be wiped out completly in a human flood scenario. The increase in the number of humans going to Hell would increase gradually as Earth can support more people, but once Transporter become in common use then that would explode to a point where the Baldricks simply couldn't ignore what was going on. They might try dumping all the newcomers into the lava as they did before but it would get increasingly difficult until they have to start double-killing people to prevent Hell from being flooded.

Set up all the Baldrick next to the gate and have then kill all the newcomers on sight and they should be able to hold off the tide as long as they need to. Even if the number of human dead coming through is absurdly huge, they would be completely naked, confused, and piled on top of eachother. The Baldricks have an army of stone cold killers with weapons... I'm sure they could set up a system in which they gut the newcomers like fish. Thats not assuming that one of the smarter or creative Baldricks can't set up a slide that immediately diverts all the newcomers into a lava pit.

If the flood of the dead gets out of hand, or Satan just decides to take over the Earth for other reasons, then he can send his armies to Earth to deal with the problem. The Federation might be more sympathetic towards the Baldricks if they find out that this whole scenario is resulting in damage to their civilization or whatnot. Of course, the whole 'billions of humans from all of history are burning forever in torment, torture, and rape at the hands of monsters in a hellworld after they die and we personally could very well end up either burning in Hell forever or having our souls gutted like fish after we die" thing could motivate them to take over Hell despite their Prime Directive.

Considering some of the morally ambiguous stuff that Starfleet personnel gets away with and their almost alien sense of justice and morality then I really don't know how starfleet would react to a "Our souls go to Hell when we die but our transporters copy our souls so the inhabitants of Hell are getting flooded with our numbers and are forced to double-kill us to avoid having their whole world crushed under our weight" problem.

[Stofsk]

What the hell is this 'transporters copy souls' bullshit?

[Cecelia5578]

What the hell is this 'transporters copy souls' bullshit?

Its one of the long, long standing issues dating from ASVS days. Like in the early SW vs ST fanfics, the Imperials are always depicted as being horrified at being cloned by Trek transporters. There's a strong belief among certain people that Trek transporters kill the person being transported and make a duplicate clone.

There's also a pretty strong backlash against it, with various sides quoting various eps, and diving into a bit of philosophy as well.

Given the amount of pixels devoted to it over the years, I'd say the consensus is very far from it being true.

[NecronLord]

It occurs to me that Salvation War once dead are a hella vague topic; we should not assume the SW mind transfer is able to soul snatch someone who's being taken apart atom by atom.

[Chris OFarrell]

What the hell is this 'transporters copy souls' bullshit?

It came out of the ollldd ASVS days.

From what I remember, it spawned from a thread where there was an argument going on about technological advancements one side had over the other side. Transporter technology was brought up for ST, then a number of the more rabid SW people started saying that SW wouldn't use such horrible and immoral technology, and it then made its way into several peoples fanfics with SW characters being utterly horrified when they see a transporter for the first time. And it sort of stuck from there...

Frankly I think its rather absurd petty crap, but there you go.


On topic, yeah its a rather stupid thing given that one bloody Shuttle could probably carve through the initial Iraqi invasion by itself, given time. Even more stupid when the Federation can probably just set up shield grids that contain the entire invasion in a 'bubble' as it were while they try to figure out what to do.

Honestly, this whole setup would barely qualify as a two parter before they use the main deflector to seal a barrier between the three dimensions or something.

[Samuel]

It depends entirely on how the transporter works. Given that people in Star Trek have souls and the transporter is perfectly capable of making exact duplicates (Second Chances)... well, it is best not to think about those two interact.

[Simon_Jester]

Question: In this crossover, is the question of transporters killing people answered?

In the Salvation War, it was learned that embryos of aborted or miscarried babies went to Hell. In this crossover, would it be found that transporters kill the person being transported and create a copy on the other side?

If that is the case, then Hell would probably be up to its armpits in Starfleet personnel before the battle even starts...

That was hilarious. Thanks.

I'm not even going to get into the plausibility issue, or the philosophical definition of death, or any of that. I just think it's funny. The image of the Federation winning by sheer numbers without even realizing they're fighting a war, just by swamping Hell with transporter-copies... that's got potential as a one-off, I think.

[thegreatpl]

ok, I have a point which might give the feds a problem in the war.

Now, first let me say I am not a ST fan. It came a bit too late for me to watch and i have never really watched more than maybe a dozen or so episodes. So most of what i know is from hearsay and the like.

But, I have to wander if that area would still be desert, as someone has pointed out before. Several hundred years have past since today, and who knows what terraforming measures have been done. Even if, as I seem to remember a mention on one of the episodes i watched, there had been a nuclear war, if Earth has the population to colonize other worlds then what is Earth's Population going to be like? How do we know that region has not been chosen as the location for a nice great big city?