Nick Lancaster wrote:Is that the 'Marching Through Georgia' series?
Yes, it is.
Yet the Federation has never demonstrated this, partly because of the trend to develop technological deus-ex solutions. Whether faced with the Borg or the Dominion, time and again, the Federation chooses military conflict and holding actions over going all-in.
I don't think we've ever seen them with their backs to the wall in quite the same way they would be in case of an Imperial invasion, with the exception of the Borg invasion in
Best of Both Worlds, in then of course they didn't
have any weapons that would stop the Borg, even in theory.
Perhaps deploying a superweapon is sensible for you or I, just as the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima was sensible for Truman ... but the Federation (more than the military commanders who would see the necessity) simply won't buy into this suicide-or-survival pact.
Why not? If it comes down to using a superweapon against the Empire or having stormtroopers marching through the streets of Paris you actually think they're going to be so inflexible in their principles they'll never even consider using the weapon? My prediction is they'll go down the Sisko road: a ten hour debate followed by firing the damn weapon already followed by another ten hours of them bemoaning the horrors of war.
We're not talking about me. We're talking about the Federation, which has been depicted as packed with reluctant warriors.
Reluctant is one thing, suicidal is another.
Section 31 came up with the mutagenic plague. What did someone else in the Federation do? He developed a cure and gave it to Odo, who gave it to the Great Link. Oooooh, the Prime Founder gets all warm and fuzzy and repents her evil ways. Where is this 'swallow your objections and do what must be done'?
I never saw that episode. Was this during the actual Dominion War or after? Just how desperate was the war situation at the time? Also, I would point out that IIRC Section 31 was planning genocide of an entire sapient species, which could at least be argued to be more morally objectionable than destroying critical Imperial shipbuilding worlds.
No, and I never said you did. I classified it as such because it discards established Federation history and what we've seen in the series/films.
See my above point about how aside from BOBW the Federation has never been in such a desperate position as an Imperial invasion. And remember when Sisko used a virus bomb on the Maqui colony (fellow humans, albeit rebels!)? Remember genocide against the Borg had the official support of the Federation government? The Federation is not incapable of being nasty.
It even contradicts our own real-world history, which parallels the Federation's up through the 1960's.
Which one, the part about not being willing to use WMDs or the part about the Romulans, Cardassians, and Federation cooperating to build this shining work of wanktech?
I'm arguing the absence of capability because we have seen such situations, and there's none of this band-of-brothers/good-day-to-die heroics that Rihannsu suggested.
When? The only example of the Federation being in a situation as desperate as it would be in our scenario was BOBW. The Dominion War doesn't count. The Dominion could be resisted by conventional Federation military doctrine, even if they were a dramatically superior opponent.
Neither of which would necessarily make a significant impact.
I'd think destroying Coruscant, Kuat, and Correlia should at least put a dent in the Empire's naval production capability, not to mention possibly throwing it into civil war by killing Palpatine.
And here's another dimension to the problem - knowledge of the Empire presumes there has already been contact/conflict with the Empire.
True, trying to kill Palpatine presumed the Federation known enough about the Empire to know that the way its government is designed it'll crumble without him. Of course, a basic knowledge of what the Empire is like wouldn't be too difficult to glean, all they'd have to do is capture a couple of stray TIE fighter pilots or stormtroopers. But strategically valuable information would be more difficult.
In the meantime, the Empire is gobbling up worlds - not just destroying them outright, but establishing garrisons and military rule, draining further resources and issuing propaganda. The folks on the ground aren't going to buck up and say, "That's all right, the Federation is gonna come and kick your Imperial Arse!"
I don't get what you're saying, that the populations of captured worlds will start to like the Empire? I more tend to think they're going to be resentful of being conquered and probably there are going to be a lot of partisans, geurillas, and terrorists springing up (funny how this aspect of the war never seems to enter vs. debates).
Coruscant? Where's that? Where did this information come from?
The existence of Coruscant could be learned from the first stormie they capture. Of course, getting their hands on coordinates they'd need to have a warp 10 firing solution on Coruscant... that would be quite a bit harder.
The Federation hasn't done anything similar. Probes won't go that far; even if there's a convenient wormhole and we grant that it exits a suitable distance away from each galaxy's core worlds, the Federation probe is hopelessly lost at sea - it may not even be able to process holonet transmissions.
True. My guess would be the best bet would probably be resistance sleeper cells left behind on Federation planets occupied by the Empire. They'd have the easiest time getting their hands on Imperial star charts and such (if naught else they could try to sneak into the local Impie HQ and make off with some maps). And depending on how common subspace radio is it might not be too difficult to get a transmission out to what's left of the free Federation.
Your estimation of civil war in the wake of the Emperor's demise is metaknowledge - this is what happened in fiction after said event.
It wouldn't take a very in depth look at the Empire's government to tell Palps designed it to be unstable without him. But of course it's a gamble whether killing him would stop the invasion.
Hiding the jumbo-sized model (1000% more antimatter, free!) would be
like keeping an elephant in your backyard. Someone's going to notice, cloak or no cloak.
If you think that you've got no clue just how big space actually is. Just stash the thing in some random uninhabitable red dwarf system. Or if you're really paranoid leave it orbiting some rogue planet in deep interstellar space. The odds of anyone finding it accidentally would be astronomically tiny. Hell, in a galaxy of two hundred billion stars, most of them undoubtedly uninhabited, it wouldn't be much of a challenge to hide the Death Star MKII. Making sure nobody knows about it while it's being built, however, would be somewhat more difficult.
I never proposed surrender, only that the Federation isn't going to discard their values at the drop of a hat to become as bad as their pending new landlords. Listen to what you're saying, and show me how it is supported in the Trek paradigm.
I didn't say they were going to do that. I have no doubt Picard and his ilk would spent many hours with their heads in their hands thinking about the morality of using a superweapon. I think they'll delay doing so as long as they can. But in the end, when truly with their backs against the wall facing a pack of wolves, they'll do what is necessary to ensure their survival.
I thought we'd agreed RSO's weapon design was a joke, not 'potentially useful'.
Since we were debating the morality of using it I was going from the assumption that it would work. Realistically discussing the morality of using the warp 10 missile is mute, because it will almost certainly not work.
You'd be much better off amping up your ship designs - steal Borg magic-repair capabilities, changing tactics (which include forming a guerilla resistance).
Amping up your ships to Imperial power levels would be impossible for the Federation. Realistically guerilla tactics are the only thing that would be much good against the Empire. Most of the trouble the Empire will have wouldn't be occupying Federation planets, it would be dealing with the partisans and resistance cells that would undoubtedly spring up on those worlds.
If you have to lose a world through occupation, isn't that better than chanelling the shade of Atilla the Hun?
The Federation isn't face with loosing
a world, they're faced with loosing all their worlds and becoming subjects of the Empire.
