Prozac the Robert wrote:Darth Wong wrote:
Net result: millions of Betazed civilians are stunned into unconsciousness in the streets, while millions more see the event from inside buildings. Mass panic ensues. Enemy losses during this operation are minimal since they kept out of sight, expecting orbital bombardment. Since stun beams cause low-level neurological damage and the beam afflicts both young and old, sick and healthy, expect thousands or tens of thousands of civilian casualties from this operation.
If the SS Prozac sees that the enemy are hiding in buildings, they can warn the population before stunning everybody. Then no mass panic. They may even persuade more of the population to go outside.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but are you seriously claiming that an orbiting warfleet could convince the civilian population to LEAVE their shelters in order to be fired upon? Are you smoking crack?
By the way, what possible good will mass-stunning be if regular civilian buildings provide enough shelter to block their effects and you've warned the enemy the attack is coming? Do you think the enemy soldiers are going to stand out in the street carrying big cardboard bullseyes over their heads for your convenience? The only living things that will be outside to be stunned will be the pigeons.
Also, I don't recall stun beams killing anybody. If my memory is deffective I'm sure you'll feel free to correct me.
The conspirators in ST6 on board
Enterprise were killed by a phaser on stun at close range.
Now for Prozac's step 2: beam out all the civilians into some remote wilderness area. Based on the figures from "Descent Part 2", this will take approximately 6 months, during which most of the civilians will no doubt starve to death unless the ship has the facilities to beam down foodstuffs for millions of displaced civilians.
I was thinking of doing that, yes. Also ship designed for carrying troops will probably have more transporters, and there will hopefully be more than one of them.
Number of dedicated troop ships seen in Star Trek: 0. Even in the alternate timeline in "Yesterday's Enterprise", the Federation moved troops on warships.
Number of times transporters have been used for mass evacuations: 0.
Time for Prozac's step 3: bombard anything that can inhibit transporters. Naturally, the defenders put all such equipment inside buildings. Net result of this operation: most of Betazed's capital city is destroyed. Most of the buildings are blown apart with orbital bombardment, and the city is in ruins. Those defenders who found natural ores or dense-metal structures or deposits to protect themselves are still immune to transport.
Since the defenders cannot leave their buildings without being stunned, It should be quite possible to destroy these things with shuttles rather than orbital strikes if the ships phasers cannot be fired at lower than normal power levels. Only the buildings with enemy forces in them will be hit, and possibly only the floors with them on if the buildings are big enough.
We've seen how small active transport inhibitors are. Mike's point, which flew so far over your head it needed a parachute to land safely, is that they'll have thousands of those inhibitors all over the city. And unless they conveniently leave them by open windows, you're going to have to smash the entire building to take them out--a building packed full of civilians, since nobody can venture out onto the street.
Unless you're seriously arguing that Federation sensors are so good, their targeting so precise, and their firing platforms so stable, that they can pinpoint the inhibitor and fire a narrow phaser beam through the wall and destroy the device while leaving the building intact, in which case I recommend you take a break before you start to chafe.
And now for Prozac's step 4: beam men down now that the transport inhibitors have been destroyed. Of course, what they don't realize is that not all transport countermeasures are always-on inhibitors. The first wave is caught by a tractor beam (see "Attached") and redirected into the vacuum of space. First wave suffers 100% casualties.
That trick cannot be widley used, else no one would ever risk transporting as often as we have seen the federation do. Assuming it works, and that it can cover the entire city then a lot of men would be lost.
They obviously have the hoppers for some reason, and to my knowledge we've never seen a mass troop insertion into a combat zone via transporter. But you've conceeded that the tractor beam trick could kill a lot of men, so let's move on.
Step 4 redux: they destroy the site from which the tractor beam originated and repeat the operation. A different site does the same thing. Second wave suffers 100% casualties. Given the dense presence of technology on the planet's surface, it is impossible to locate and destroy everything which might be a transporter, and defenders have naturally gravitated to regions which are difficult to penetrate with sensors.
I don't think I'd be that stupid. If nothing else I could send down a few cargo boxes and then some men in space suits. If they survive I could send some more men down.
This is assuming they bother beaming your men into a stable orbit, rather than just letting them materialize in the upper stratosphere.
Also, you have to remember that unless the enemy are really well dug in their chain of command and their sensors and comunications will now be somewhat messed up. They might not be able to pull off such a tactic.
You don't need central command and control to operate a tractor beam and a set of passive sensors to detect incoming transporter beams.
Step 5: change of plan. They go down in "hoppers" to avoid lethal transport countermeasures. Due to their total lack of a conventional ground army (which Prozac deems unnecessary) they suffer horrible casualties. For every defender they kill, they lose many men of their own. But they eventually prevail.
Assuming that I can't locate all of the enemy devies by beaming junk down to the planet,
How long do you think it will take them to catch on to that trick? How much time are you willing to waste trying to locate and destroy the transporter countermeasures? Even if you do take down all the tractor beams, what's to stop them from just scattering piles of materials known to inhibit transporters around the city? Or generating local electromagnetic fields to disrupt transporter beams? Or just firing mortars onto your men as soon as the location of the beamdown has been triangulated?
and assuming I don't decide that the losses so far and the probably losses of a cityfight outweighs the deaths of civilians who refused to leave their homes and start bombarding with photon torpedos,
Congratulations, you've just leveled a city full of Federation citizens because your lack of an effective ground army left you no other option. What in the hell makes you think the enemy would even let the civilians leave and make your strategic decisions easier?
and assuming that my shuttles cant kill enough of the enemy to make them surrender,
No army in the history of warfare has surrendered because the enemy's air attack was too intense for them. If waves of B-52s couldn't do it to the NVA, shuttlecraft sure as fuck aren't going to do it to the Jem Hadar.
then this is the likely outcome. But my main point is that it may well never have come to this point in the entire life of the federation.
Wishful thinking and an astounding lack of knowledge about real-life military operations do not make for a valid point. Essentially, your argument is: "If the enemy does exactly as I predict and makes no adjustments to counter my tactics, and my ships have capabilities never demonstrated anywhere in canon, and I have all the time in the world without having to worry about a counterattack or the opportunity cost of keeping ships in orbit to hunt and peck at transport inhibitors, and the civilians behave exactly the opposite of how civilians in a war zone have in every war in history, then my plan is foolproof and the Federation doesn't need a real ground army."
