Warp 10 + Cardassian Dreadnaught Missile = Pwnage?

[Praxis]

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.

During the war. As the invasion was nearing its climax Section 31 got the founders infected, they were all about to die and just hours before the death of the head founder, Odo cures her, and goes to cure the rest of the founders, so she surrenders all the Dominion forces to the Federation.

[Praxis]

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.

Are you joking? Warp speed, travelling from Coruscant to Kaut to Corellia would take YEARS. Decades, even.

And how are you gonna get through the shields?

[Nick Lancaster]

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.

So the Dominion, with their Jem'Hadar military and shape-shifting ability, comes through the wormhole, and somehow, this is seen as less than a dire threat? Did you think they were infiltrating Earth because they liked Papa Sisko's gumbo?

What is different with the Empire? You're talking about destroying planets and enslaving populations. Isn't this exactly the Dominion line? That the solids are too stupid to self-govern, and they need direction?

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?

JFC and Mary. Helloooooo, we're NOT talking about Junghali's View of the Federation, or even Nick's View of the Federation.

You have them committing to this course of action because you see no other alternative. NOT because it is what the character would do; it is what you think YOU would do in their shoes. Why are these characters viewing the Empire as not only the ultimate kick-ass force and suddenly surrendering every shred of technical savvy and plain ol' human determination to go nuclear, as it were?

And I am not saying 'don't use the weapon,' I am saying that this decision MUST come with thought, not this idiotic, 'Shit! We're all gonna die! BUILD A MEGA BOMB!' that you keep hammering.

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.

Ah, so there's debate all of a sudden, and not this drone-like assent to build and deploy wankatrons?

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.

So, what changes under the Empire? You have a superior economic model in the Federation, one where people apparently 'don't have to work,' where leisure activities abound. Surely, this would appeal to the privleged among the Imperial populace?

"We're all gonna die," means every last man jack in the Federation is going to pick up a weapon and fight the invaders, requiring violent pacification of the populace. It means that 'our way of life' is going to go away and be replaced with something else - suddenly, there will be Hutt Gangsters dealing spice on our block. We know this simply isn't true or realistic in any sense.

You've elevated the threat and convinced yourself not only of a specific agenda for the Empire, but a single alternative for yourself.

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.

Episode? It was a continued arc over several episodes. Odo gets all sweaty and slimy, then turns moldy/crusty. And it took a small, covert organization to 'do what must be done.' Everyone else was wringing their hands over poor Odo, poor Odo, save Odo, he's a really nice guy.

Are you really defending your actions by saying, "Well, gee, Section 31 did something worse than that"? By that logic, I can do anything to a populace as long as I don't throw 'em in camps and gas 'em to death, because Hitler did that, so at least I'm not as bad as Hitler.

This is what I mean when you have to ask tough, moral questions of your characters in this story arc. They shouldn't be building superweapons just because you want them to, it has to be something THEY want to do. There's a difference.

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.

Again. We have the Borg. We have the Dominion. Why the difference in response?

Sisko is not the Federation.

Section 31 is not the Federation.

The Federation, as a whole, does not demonstrate they are capable of shelving centuries of peace and prosperity to become a lean, mean fighting machine.

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?

Both. Truman made the decision to drop the bomb, and here we are, closing on 60 years later - and there are STILL people who say we shouldn't have done it. (I am not one of them.)

After 9/11, there was an outpouring of sentiment for America. Suddenly, when we changed the focus from Osama to Saddam, we met opposition, even though the invasion of Iraq was painted as the next step, the central battleground in the War on Terrorism. Not too many people are buying it.

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.
[/quote]

But you haven't even assessed the Imperial military forces. They're dramatically superior, but somehow you're stuck on this, 'WE GOTTA KILL 'EM ALL!' mantra, bomb or no bomb.

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.
[/quote]

Where are these planets again? How did you get this information? How do you propose to do what the Rebel Alliance could not? Oh, the mega-wankaphasic-missile, that's right.

Get a weapon that works before you start counting victories.

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.

Why do you presume a stormtrooper has any useful information about the Empire outside of his immediate role? Odds are, he's heard about the Emperor, maybe even been one of hundreds of troopers passing in review ... but about the Emperor, about the way Palpatine handles business on a daily basis, he knows nothing.

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).

Nope. No guerillas. We're all gonna band together and build wankatrons, remember?

Take a look at modern, present-day society. Pass something like USA PATRIOT, and do we see mass protests? No. Why? Because to the average citizen, they don't see how it affects them. Cameras in public places for security purposes? 'I'm not doing anything wrong, I don't have to worry,' they rationalize.

Why would this mentality change dramatically in the Federation?

The Empire arrives and annexes your planet. There's a garrison posted in your neighborhood, and these stormtrooper guys take 75% of your household income to supply themselves. They shut off your replicators and make you come to an Imperial Distribution Center. You only get the channels they approve of, no news from offworld.

At what point does the citizen become a guerilla? The moment Imperial troops land? The moment there's no hot water for a shower? The moment they're eating a bowl of runny snot for breakfast instead of bacon and eggs?

Citzen A resists. The Imperials shoot Citizen A's wife and infant son, kick his dog, burn down his house. Citizen A manages to escape and swears swift and terrible vengeance. A day later, Citizen A talks to Citizen B. Citizen B is so eager to have his wife and son murdered, have his dog kicked, have his house burned down, that he immediately joins Citizen A.

Right.

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 existence of Coruscant is a long way from knowing its exact coordinates and having strike capability.

You have no intelligence on the target. You don't know where the target is, or how to get there. And somehow, the multi-wankaphasic-missile is going to solve all your problems?

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.

You're assuming Imperial communications technology is compatible with Federation subspace relays.

You're assuming untrained civilian resistance forces are going to get into an Imperial garrison, overwhelm the troops and automated defenses, defeat computer security, and magically produce a star chart that has the precise coordinates they need to make a counter attack. What you're more likely to find are maps of adjacent Federation territories and projected expansions, not postcards from back home.

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.
[/quote]

Gee, since we've already decided to flush our morals down the toilet, what's wrong with assassinating a foreign leader? But, hey, at least we're not as bad as Hitler.

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.

If you hide it that well, you have no way of using it. Do you think no one's going to notice ships travelling off to nowhere, communications beamed off to nowhere ...? Are you going to leave this thing cloaked all the time?

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.

Eliminate those worlds which are not readily accessible to resource points or suitable as deployment areas. Basic logic will narrow your search parameters greatly. They're not looking via door-to-door cover search, after all.

Making sure nobody knows about it while it's being built, however, would be somewhat more difficult.

You keep using that phrase, '... it would be somewhat more difficult,' as if it makes anything lesser than that a walk in the park.

That's like saying my hitting a home run against the Dodgers is tough, but beating Barry Bonds' record would be somewhat more difficult. It glosses over the fact that I'm not a Major League ballplayer and the odds of hitting a home run, period, are pretty remote.

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.

Sigh. Still insisting on this flushable morality construct of yours.

In the end? What end? When the Federation is on the verge of collapse? When do you abandon your ideals and morals and start executing random mystery strikes in Imperial space?

Even to get to that point, the character has to believe this is the only alternative, that doing so will actually stop the Empire. One hundred multi-wankaphasic torpedos, one thousand multi-wankaphasic torpedos ... net impact on the Empire's annexation of Federation space: NIL.

Destroy an ISD. The Empire BDZ's one of your worlds. I'm sure the dead will thank you for doing what had to be done.

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.
[/quote]

Then we're done. Concession accepted.

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.
[/quote]

Guerilla tactics? Conventional military force? What happened to the big All-Star Alliance? The uber-multi-wankaphasic missiles?

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.

[/quote]

See above. What's the motivation? ("That's the problem, Jason. You never took the art seriously.") Why is Citizen P on Planet 55 going to be concerned about Citizen Q on Planet 96?

[Junghalli]

So the Dominion, with their Jem'Hadar military and shape-shifting ability, comes through the wormhole, and somehow, this is seen as less than a dire threat? Did you think they were infiltrating Earth because they liked Papa Sisko's gumbo?

Dominion vs. Federation=modern US vs. modern France.
Empire vs. Federation=modern US vs. 20 man African tribe.
It's a crude analogy, but you can see how the Dominion situation wasn't as hopeless as an Imperial invasion scenario.

JFC and Mary. Helloooooo, we're NOT talking about Junghali's View of the Federation, or even Nick's View of the Federation.

Well fuck if we go down that road they could do anything. I propose what I think would be a rational course of action and you say "yeah, that would be a smart thing to do, but they won't do it because they're not you." So we're down to assuming stupidity and incompetence at every turn.

And I am not saying 'don't use the weapon,' I am saying that this decision MUST come with thought, not this idiotic, 'Shit! We're all gonna die! BUILD A MEGA BOMB!' that you keep hammering.

Certainly. A lot depends on the situation. If you only have a couple of those weapons it would probably be a bad idea to use them against random Empire planets. It would just make them mad, and make the occupation that much harder.

Ah, so there's debate all of a sudden, and not this drone-like assent to build and deploy wankatrons?

Naturally. Contrary to your strawman I'm not saying OMG teh hAve teh ub4r wep0n letz uze it!!!111. I'm saying that if that had a weapon capable of destroying Imperial vessels or planet and if that weapon was reliable and existed in large quantity then they'd be idiots to just dismiss the possibility of using it out of hand on principle.

So, what changes under the Empire?

Knowing the Empire I doubt things would be very pleasant under their occupation.

"We're all gonna die," means every last man jack in the Federation is going to pick up a weapon and fight the invaders, requiring violent pacification of the populace.

Boy you really know how to turn out them strawmen! When did I imply that?

It means that 'our way of life' is going to go away and be replaced with something else - suddenly, there will be Hutt Gangsters dealing spice on our block. We know this simply isn't true or realistic in any sense.

Assuming the Federation is a democracy their way of life would very much change under the Empire, and for the worse. How much respect do you the Empire is going to have for people's basic human rights and dignities? Have you forgotten that they are a totaliterian dictatorship? Explain to me how it "simply isn't true or realistic in any sense" that the Empire will be a more opressive system of government than the Federation.

You've elevated the threat and convinced yourself not only of a specific agenda for the Empire, but a single alternative for yourself.

I did nothing of the sort. If conventional war doesn't work against the Empire there's guerilla war (which is probably the best bet anyway). If nothing else historically liberal democracies do have a certain tendencies to conquer the conquerors. Freedom is inherently enticing, even to those who have never known it.

Episode? It was a continued arc over several episodes.

<Shrug> my neighborhood video store has a limited selection of DS9 episodes, so my knowledge of it is less than complete.

Are you really defending your actions by saying, "Well, gee, Section 31 did something worse than that"? By that logic, I can do anything to a populace as long as I don't throw 'em in camps and gas 'em to death, because Hitler did that, so at least I'm not as bad as Hitler.

No, I'm saying that if you have the means to hurt the Empire it's stupid to just take it off the table because it offends your fine principles, and I don't believe the Federation government and military is entirely made up of hippie retards.

The Federation, as a whole, does not demonstrate they are capable of shelving centuries of peace and prosperity to become a lean, mean fighting machine.

This is a teh Fedzorz is teh st00pid argument! Do you actually think they're going to take a potentially useful weapon off the table arbitrarily because it's against their principles to kill civilians? Yes, I think they won't use if possible and yes, they only should use it if it would actually help them, but they shouldn't and won't just go "the Federation doesn't bomb planets, put it in the garbage can."

But you haven't even assessed the Imperial military forces. They're dramatically superior, but somehow you're stuck on this, 'WE GOTTA KILL 'EM ALL!' mantra, bomb or no bomb.

I'd like to hear some alternatives if you're going to spout this mantra on how we have to find some other way than military force to deal with them. I already mentioned geurilla warfare, but again it's stupid to take a potentially useful weapon arbitrarily off the table. I'm not saying they would or should use it necessarily, I'm saying they would and should consider it.

Nope. No guerillas. We're all gonna band together and build wankatrons, remember?

Who says they have to be mutually exclusive?

Take a look at modern, present-day society. Pass something like USA PATRIOT, and do we see mass protests? No. Why? Because to the average citizen, they don't see how it affects them. Cameras in public places for security purposes? 'I'm not doing anything wrong, I don't have to worry,' they rationalize.

Fine, let's continue this.
Tomorrow the US gets taken over by a foreign power (if you're not American substitute whatever country your from in place of US). They announce that our country is dead and we must now do whatever their Great Leader tells us to do. They deploy troops all over the US. They start rounding up people who they consider to be dangerous/subversive. People who do or say anything against them start getting arrested, or maybe just "disappear". This is what's going to be happening on planets that get taken over by the Empire. Oh of course, how silly of me, naturally an occupation by an opressive foreign power isn't going to cause the slightest degree of resentment.

The Empire arrives and annexes your planet. There's a garrison posted in your neighborhood, and these stormtrooper guys take 75% of your household income to supply themselves.They shut off your replicators and make you come to an Imperial Distribution Center. You only get the channels they approve of, no news from offworld.

As Machiavelli observed, nothing quite generates resentment among the population better than taking away their property. Sure, this isn't going to turn everybody into some kind of romantic resistance fighter lobbing molatov cocktails at the AT-ATs, but it is going to make for a good breeding ground for terrorists and rebels, as well as engender sympathy for any pre-existing partisan forces left behind by the Feds.

At what point does the citizen become a guerilla? The moment Imperial troops land? The moment there's no hot water for a shower? The moment they're eating a bowl of runny snot for breakfast instead of bacon and eggs?

Are you actually arguing that an opressive foreign power can just roll into a Federation planet and there'll be no trouble? Sure, most people won't actively do anything, I'm not arguing that. In WWII most of the French population didn't have anything to do with the French Resistance. In Iraq most of the population isn't part of the insurgency. But they still made trouble for the conquerors. I don't see why it should be any different in this case.

Citzen A resists. The Imperials shoot Citizen A's wife and infant son, kick his dog, burn down his house. Citizen A manages to escape and swears swift and terrible vengeance. A day later, Citizen A talks to Citizen B. Citizen B is so eager to have his wife and son murdered, have his dog kicked, have his house burned down, that he immediately joins Citizen A.
Right.

You realize that by your logic the French shouldn't have resisted the Nazis and colonial populations should never have resisted their European occupiers?

Gee, since we've already decided to flush our morals down the toilet, what's wrong with assassinating a foreign leader? But, hey, at least we're not as bad as Hitler.

Oh for Gods sake, are you seriously getting goody two-shoes on me over killing Palpatine?

Do you think no one's going to notice ships travelling off to nowhere, communications beamed off to nowhere ...?

The missiles would have to be launched before the Empire conquered the bulk of the Federation. If the Federation is already conquered it would probably be counterproductive to use them, as it would only make the Empire come down really hard on the populations of the former Federation territories.

Eliminate those worlds which are not readily accessible to resource points or suitable as deployment areas. Basic logic will narrow your search parameters greatly. They're not looking via door-to-door cover search, after all.

Actually, if you keep the missiles in some random red dwarf system you are conducting a more-or-less system-by-system search, of every solar system within 8,000 ly of Earth. Considering that there are 15000 stars within a mere 100 ly of Earth... that's a lot of stars.

You keep using that phrase, '... it would be somewhat more difficult,' as if it makes anything lesser than that a walk in the park.

As I have already explained hiding a missile, or even a stash of thousands of missiles, would be trivially easy when you have an entire quarter of the galaxy as your potential hidey-hole. The only way someone else could find it this side of a million years would be by getting some sort intelligence on its location.

Sigh. Still insisting on this flushable morality construct of yours.
In the end? What end? When the Federation is on the verge of collapse? When do you abandon your ideals and morals and start executing random mystery strikes in Imperial space?

If it comes down to random mystery strikes never, unless you have several billion missiles (one for every potentially inhabitabed system in the Wars galaxy ).

Even to get to that point, the character has to believe this is the only alternative, that doing so will actually stop the Empire. One hundred multi-wankaphasic torpedos, one thousand multi-wankaphasic torpedos ... net impact on the Empire's annexation of Federation space: NIL.

If the weapon will really have no effect on the Imperial invasion then yes, it's pointless to use them. In fact, it's worse than pointless, because it will make the hand of the Empire that much harder. In that case you go back to what is the Federation's best hope in most vs. scenarios: guerilla resistance on conquered planets.

Then we're done. Concession accepted.

Very well, we're done. I never said the missiles would work, I said if they worked.

Guerilla tactics? Conventional military force? What happened to the big All-Star Alliance? The uber-multi-wankaphasic missiles?

(A) They don't work.
(B) Even if they did work they may not be very useful.
(C) If they do work and are useful there's no reason they'd be mutually exclusive with geurilla resistance. Why put all your eggs in one basket?

[Nick Lancaster]

So the Dominion, with their Jem'Hadar military and shape-shifting ability, comes through the wormhole, and somehow, this is seen as less than a dire threat? Did you think they were infiltrating Earth because they liked Papa Sisko's gumbo?

Dominion vs. Federation=modern US vs. modern France.
Empire vs. Federation=modern US vs. 20 man African tribe.
It's a crude analogy, but you can see how the Dominion situation wasn't as hopeless as an Imperial invasion scenario.

So you're admitting the Federation is hopelessly backwards and utterly outclassed (if they're the semantic equivalent of a 20-man African tribe) by the Empire?

Where are you getting these figures?

JFC and Mary. Helloooooo, we're NOT talking about Junghali's View of the Federation, or even Nick's View of the Federation.

Well fuck if we go down that road they could do anything. I propose what I think would be a rational course of action and you say "yeah, that would be a smart thing to do, but they won't do it because they're not you." So we're down to assuming stupidity and incompetence at every turn.

No, you are continuing to insist that fictional characters must follow your dictums because that is how you would solve the problem, that there is no alternative, that we must do THIS or DIE. Do you even understand the difference between what YOU think and what, for example, Commodore Eric Pressman thinks?

Therefore, if you cannot think of a valid alternative, clearly, Eric Pressman or any other Starfleet officer is going to be equally stumped?

And I am not saying 'don't use the weapon,' I am saying that this decision MUST come with thought, not this idiotic, 'Shit! We're all gonna die! BUILD A MEGA BOMB!' that you keep hammering.

Certainly. A lot depends on the situation. If you only have a couple of those weapons it would probably be a bad idea to use them against random Empire planets. It would just make them mad, and make the occupation that much harder.

GAH! There's that idiotic line, 'make x that much harder.' You've been taken out of your homes, deprived of the luxuries you took for granted under Federation rule. You're living off preprocessed sludge instead of replicated gourmet meals. You've been forced to work at manual labor.

How much more difficult do you want it to be?

You are still arguing the use of a weapon that you admit is a flawed and impractical design. There's nothing situational about it! It doesn't fucking work, and it's not going to 'work better' depending on the situation.

Gosh, do you think DOES IT WORK might be a consideration in any discussion of whether or not to try it?

Ah, so there's debate all of a sudden, and not this drone-like assent to build and deploy wankatrons?

Naturally. Contrary to your strawman I'm not saying OMG teh hAve teh ub4r wep0n letz uze it!!!111. I'm saying that if that had a weapon capable of destroying Imperial vessels or planet and if that weapon was reliable and existed in large quantity then they'd be idiots to just dismiss the possibility of using it out of hand on principle.

Wrong. You insist that the Federation will cast aside any and all objections, bite the bullet and DO WHAT MUST BE DONE. You've said it repeatedly. Doing anything else is suicidal, stupid, cowardly, you gotta break eggs to make an omelet.

And again, IF the weapon existed. It doesn't. You have already conceded it is useless.

So, what changes under the Empire?

Knowing the Empire I doubt things would be very pleasant under their occupation.
[/quote]

Assumptions on your part. Are you saying you wouldn't perform manual labor, even if the penalty for refusal was to kill everyone else in your family while you watched, THEN sentence you to hard labor in a mine?

What did the majority of France do when occupied by Germany? They shut their mouths and minded their own business.

What do the Israelis and Palestinians do? They yell at each other, and a handful of them like to don semtex tuxedos and go paint the town red, as it were. Where are the legions of offended persons, rising up to defy the abuses of human rights and dignities? Oh, yeah, it's ONE GIRL who stood in front of a bulldozer. (By the way, note that she held her principles so well, she got run over. Survival instinct, which you insist would kick in to make us build multi-wankaphasic missiles and deploy them, somehow never jumped the correct synaptic gap.)

What's likely to happen on an occupied (formerly Federation) world? People are going to shut their mouths and mind their own business. They may hope 'someone' from the Federation will rescue them, but survival will be 'staying alive,' and that will consist of compliance with the occupation forces.

Resistance is not standing in the street yelling, 'Come get me, you Imperial Mofos! RAR!' For someone who insists the Federation council and military aren't raving idiots, you aren't impressing me with your abilities at planning a resistance.

"We're all gonna die," means every last man jack in the Federation is going to pick up a weapon and fight the invaders, requiring violent pacification of the populace.

Boy you really know how to turn out them strawmen! When did I imply that?

The moment you agreed with Rihannsu that the Romulans and everyone else would band together to fight the evil Imperials. You keep insisting values and logic and morals go out the window, 'cause you gotta do what you have to do. Therefore, under your model, everyone has to pick up a weapon and fight.

Are you now saying that's not true, that not everyone is going to or will have to/want to fight?

It means that 'our way of life' is going to go away and be replaced with something else - suddenly, there will be Hutt Gangsters dealing spice on our block. We know this simply isn't true or realistic in any sense.

Assuming the Federation is a democracy their way of life would very much change under the Empire, and for the worse. How much respect do you the Empire is going to have for people's basic human rights and dignities? Have you forgotten that they are a totaliterian dictatorship? Explain to me how it "simply isn't true or realistic in any sense" that the Empire will be a more opressive system of government than the Federation.
[/quote]

Assumption on your part. Clearly, the Federation has a level of affluence/standard of living that is far beyond what the average Imperial citizen has. Why are you assuming the Imperials will tear it all down in favor of crap?

Don't forget, Federation Historian John Gill lauded Nazi Germany as the most efficient state Earth has ever known. He admired it so much, he imposed the model on another planet in defiance of the Prime Directive.

And you're back to 'we're all going to band together and resist the evil Imperials, 'cause, like, they're bad, y'know'.

You've elevated the threat and convinced yourself not only of a specific agenda for the Empire, but a single alternative for yourself.

I did nothing of the sort. If conventional war doesn't work against the Empire there's guerilla war (which is probably the best bet anyway). If nothing else historically liberal democracies do have a certain tendencies to conquer the conquerors. Freedom is inherently enticing, even to those who have never known it.
[/quote]

Then stop blathering about this 'do what must be done, you're an idiot if you don't'.

Please cite examples of liberal democracies conquering anything. Did you know that the Islamic Empire once stretched from China (yes, the Mongol Hordes began converting) to Spain?

And what is this bullshit about, 'freedom is enticing, even to those who know nothing about it'? Have you been listening to the Karl Rove Mind Control Station again? 'Freedom is on the march!' 'Democracy is God's gift to people!'

Have you LOOKED at the dog's breakfast we're stewarding in Iraq? People were interested in voting to get the liberal democracy the hell out of their country. They damn near elected a Shi'ite majority, which would have given way to a theocracy.

In Afghanistan, when they're not trying to assassinate Hamid Kharzai, they're growing opium again. Just like they did under the Taliban.

Populations trend towards stability. You deny you're talking about everyone picking up a weapon to fight the good fight, but then insist that there will be this horrendous outcry when human rights and dignities are shredded. What's far more likely to happen is that FEAR will keep the majority of people from insisting on FREEDOM. Works all the time, whether it's Nazi Germany or the Ashcroftian fantasies of the current Administration. Shit, we have an AG who thinks torture is acceptable, and folks want him to be a Supreme Court Justice!

The noble animal you're discussing doesn't exist.

Episode? It was a continued arc over several episodes.

<Shrug> my neighborhood video store has a limited selection of DS9 episodes, so my knowledge of it is less than complete.

Are you really defending your actions by saying, "Well, gee, Section 31 did something worse than that"? By that logic, I can do anything to a populace as long as I don't throw 'em in camps and gas 'em to death, because Hitler did that, so at least I'm not as bad as Hitler.

No, I'm saying that if you have the means to hurt the Empire it's stupid to just take it off the table because it offends your fine principles, and I don't believe the Federation government and military is entirely made up of hippie retards.

I feel like I'm debating a Tickle-Me Elmo. There's a limited number of responses, and they keep coming up, even when refuted.

You don't have the means. Now what? Let's build a death machine anyway? RAR, IT'S A GLORIOUS DAY TO DIE! RAR!

Consider that if your morals and principles are known to be disposable when you're in a crunch, nobody's going to trust you worth a damn.

The Federation, as a whole, does not demonstrate they are capable of shelving centuries of peace and prosperity to become a lean, mean fighting machine.

This is a teh Fedzorz is teh st00pid argument! Do you actually think they're going to take a potentially useful weapon off the table arbitrarily because it's against their principles to kill civilians? Yes, I think they won't use if possible and yes, they only should use it if it would actually help them, but they shouldn't and won't just go "the Federation doesn't bomb planets, put it in the garbage can."

Demonstrate this. Show me the majority of characters, the heroes of the Trek saga, will do this.

Consider the amount of planets you would have to bomb to effectively cripple the Empire. Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Oh, right, we're gonna flush our morals down the toilet, it doesn't matter, we'd be idiots not to kill BILLIONS OF PEOPLE to save our own asses.

But you haven't even assessed the Imperial military forces. They're dramatically superior, but somehow you're stuck on this, 'WE GOTTA KILL 'EM ALL!' mantra, bomb or no bomb.

I'd like to hear some alternatives if you're going to spout this mantra on how we have to find some other way than military force to deal with them. I already mentioned geurilla warfare, but again it's stupid to take a potentially useful weapon arbitrarily off the table. I'm not saying they would or should use it necessarily, I'm saying they would and should consider it.

I gave you alternatives. You went right back to build the bomb, kill 'em all. Your solutions, even when it comes to guerilla resistance, seems to be built on this 'all or nothing' thought process. We're ALL gonna buckle up and do what must be done. We're ALL gonna band together and fight for our lost freedoms.

I give you the United States of America. Everyone's fighting for freedom, but you'll note everyone's got a different idea of what that entails. And nobody (unless there's some closet Fundie sect planning for the Rapture Bus' arrival) is compromising their principles to gear up for Fimbulwinter.

Nope. No guerillas. We're all gonna band together and build wankatrons, remember?

Who says they have to be mutually exclusive?
[/quote]

You did. It took repeated bashings of your toilet-based moral code before you even considered guerilla forces, and even there, you're convinced EVERYONE will rise up to throw off the yoke of the oppressors.

What did the majority of Bajorans do? They shut their mouths and kept their heads down.

Take a look at modern, present-day society. Pass something like USA PATRIOT, and do we see mass protests? No. Why? Because to the average citizen, they don't see how it affects them. Cameras in public places for security purposes? 'I'm not doing anything wrong, I don't have to worry,' they rationalize.

Fine, let's continue this.
Tomorrow the US gets taken over by a foreign power (if you're not American substitute whatever country your from in place of US). They announce that our country is dead and we must now do whatever their Great Leader tells us to do. They deploy troops all over the US. They start rounding up people who they consider to be dangerous/subversive. People who do or say anything against them start getting arrested, or maybe just "disappear". This is what's going to be happening on planets that get taken over by the Empire. Oh of course, how silly of me, naturally an occupation by an opressive foreign power isn't going to cause the slightest degree of resentment.

If you look at USA PATRIOT, we can do that all on our own, no foreign power required.

Resentment ain't gonna win battles, champ. You'd better have a plan, an organization, and something other than RAR! FIGHT THE EVIL EMPIRE! going for you. You'll need arms. You'll need a rallying point. You'll need secure communications. You'll need mobility. You ain't got time for resentment. Resentment will turn you into a dead guerilla and Imperial propaganda.

The Empire arrives and annexes your planet. There's a garrison posted in your neighborhood, and these stormtrooper guys take 75% of your household income to supply themselves.They shut off your replicators and make you come to an Imperial Distribution Center. You only get the channels they approve of, no news from offworld.

As Machiavelli observed, nothing quite generates resentment among the population better than taking away their property. Sure, this isn't going to turn everybody into some kind of romantic resistance fighter lobbing molatov cocktails at the AT-ATs, but it is going to make for a good breeding ground for terrorists and rebels, as well as engender sympathy for any pre-existing partisan forces left behind by the Feds.

Ah, so you admit there has to be a motivation for the average person to rise up against the invader?

Machiavelli also suggests sending in a brutal, horrible commander who shows no reluctance to oppress and torture the populace. In comes the Imperial Governor, who expresses shock and amazement that this man would do such things. He's tried publicly and executed. You now have a complliant population sans the majority of its vocal troublemakers.

Pre-existing partisan forces? What bullcrockery is this? You'd need the intelligence and foresight to make this happen; such people would have to be long-term residents with unimpeachable credentials. There's not going to be any pre-existing partisan forces.

At what point does the citizen become a guerilla? The moment Imperial troops land? The moment there's no hot water for a shower? The moment they're eating a bowl of runny snot for breakfast instead of bacon and eggs?

Are you actually arguing that an opressive foreign power can just roll into a Federation planet and there'll be no trouble? Sure, most people won't actively do anything, I'm not arguing that. In WWII most of the French population didn't have anything to do with the French Resistance. In Iraq most of the population isn't part of the insurgency. But they still made trouble for the conquerors. I don't see why it should be any different in this case.

Oh, gee, suddenly it's occurred to you that most people won't give a shit about who's in charge as long as basic needs are met?

The Iraqi insurgency is a problem because we didn't THINK about what we were doing before hand. Oh, right, that's largely Turkey's fault for not allowing us to stage there so we could advance on two fronts.

Does the Pentagon's prediction of 'cheering throngs rising up to throw off the yoke of Saddam's oppressive rule' sound familiar to you at all? Like, perhaps it's the same bullshit you've been shoveling?

Citzen A resists. The Imperials shoot Citizen A's wife and infant son, kick his dog, burn down his house. Citizen A manages to escape and swears swift and terrible vengeance. A day later, Citizen A talks to Citizen B. Citizen B is so eager to have his wife and son murdered, have his dog kicked, have his house burned down, that he immediately joins Citizen A.
Right.

You realize that by your logic the French shouldn't have resisted the Nazis and colonial populations should never have resisted their European occupiers?
[/quote]

No. By my logic, no one would get within a thousand kilometers of your idiotic plans to rise up and throw off the yoke of the Imperial oppressors. You'd get us all killed.

Gee, since we've already decided to flush our morals down the toilet, what's wrong with assassinating a foreign leader? But, hey, at least we're not as bad as Hitler.

Oh for Gods sake, are you seriously getting goody two-shoes on me over killing Palpatine?

Are you saying the real-world law against assassinating foreign heads of state is stupid? Are we back to 'rar! gotta do what we gotta do!'?

Why do you presume things will be better without Palpatine? Would you really like Grand Admiral Thrawn to be directing the assault on Federation Space?

Seriously. There's a reason we didn't assassinate Saddam, and it's because he had two sons. We didn't off Kim Il-Jung's daddy, either, because junior was waiting in the wings.

Do you think no one's going to notice ships travelling off to nowhere, communications beamed off to nowhere ...?

The missiles would have to be launched before the Empire conquered the bulk of the Federation. If the Federation is already conquered it would probably be counterproductive to use them, as it would only make the Empire come down really hard on the populations of the former Federation territories.

JFC! Again, we're right back to these weapons that we both agree don't work! GET OVER IT!

If they don't work, and won't ever work (far too many flaws in the design to be corrected), why are you still factoring them into your strategies?

Eliminate those worlds which are not readily accessible to resource points or suitable as deployment areas. Basic logic will narrow your search parameters greatly. They're not looking via door-to-door cover search, after all.

Actually, if you keep the missiles in some random red dwarf system you are conducting a more-or-less system-by-system search, of every solar system within 8,000 ly of Earth. Considering that there are 15000 stars within a mere 100 ly of Earth... that's a lot of stars.

And if you consider which of those systems are suitable for construction/resource delivery/target vector?

And despite the 8,000 LY area of the Federation, there are only 150 member worlds. Gee, maybe we'll start looking within those star systems or at adjacent ones.

You keep using that phrase, '... it would be somewhat more difficult,' as if it makes anything lesser than that a walk in the park.

As I have already explained hiding a missile, or even a stash of thousands of missiles, would be trivially easy when you have an entire quarter of the galaxy as your potential hidey-hole. The only way someone else could find it this side of a million years would be by getting some sort intelligence on its location.

And I just reduced my search area to 150 worlds for starters. You really going to hide 1000+ missiles so far away that you have to make a major expedition to get to them?

Who has the launch codes? One ship, one captain? Multiple ships, multiple captains? Where is your security? Have you considered the Empire acquiring even one of your multi-wankaphasic missiles and using it on you?

"They'll never find it in a million years," usually means it'll get found inside of a week.

Sigh. Still insisting on this flushable morality construct of yours.
In the end? What end? When the Federation is on the verge of collapse? When do you abandon your ideals and morals and start executing random mystery strikes in Imperial space?

If it comes down to random mystery strikes never, unless you have several billion missiles (one for every potentially inhabitabed system in the Wars galaxy ).

Hmmm. But don't you have to do what you have to do and launch the mofotastic missiles anyway?

Even to get to that point, the character has to believe this is the only alternative, that doing so will actually stop the Empire. One hundred multi-wankaphasic torpedos, one thousand multi-wankaphasic torpedos ... net impact on the Empire's annexation of Federation space: NIL.

If the weapon will really have no effect on the Imperial invasion then yes, it's pointless to use them. In fact, it's worse than pointless, because it will make the hand of the Empire that much harder. In that case you go back to what is the Federation's best hope in most vs. scenarios: guerilla resistance on conquered planets.
[/quote]

You see? It wasn't that difficult to figure out, was it?

Then we're done. Concession accepted.

Very well, we're done. I never said the missiles would work, I said if they worked.
[/quote]

'If they worked ...' wasn't even a likelihood, the design was too flawed from the start.

Guerilla tactics? Conventional military force? What happened to the big All-Star Alliance? The uber-multi-wankaphasic missiles?

(A) They don't work.
(B) Even if they did work they may not be very useful.
(C) If they do work and are useful there's no reason they'd be mutually exclusive with geurilla resistance. Why put all your eggs in one basket?

See above. "If they work ..." is not a valid proposition given the original weapons design.

====

(You know, I have to praise your persistence. On another board, I was being called 'mean,' denounced because other posters 'just wanted to have fun,' and that I was somehow being elitist for using resources like the TNG Technical Manual, Star Trek Encyclopedia, and Star Trek Chronology. Thank you for an interesting, albeit frustrating at times, discussion.)

[Junghalli]

So you're admitting the Federation is hopelessly backwards and utterly outclassed (if they're the semantic equivalent of a 20-man African tribe) by the Empire?

That's just the facts. It's pointless to not accept them (allthough try telling that to a creationist ).

Where are you getting these figures?

Just read over the main site, it spells out pretty well just how obscenely the Federation outclasses the Empire.

GAH! There's that idiotic line, 'make x that much harder.' You've been taken out of your homes, deprived of the luxuries you took for granted under Federation rule. You're living off preprocessed sludge instead of replicated gourmet meals. You've been forced to work at manual labor.
How much more difficult do you want it to be?

Hmm, oh, let's say a "demonstration" of the Death Star on a major former Federation world...

You are still arguing the use of a weapon that you admit is a flawed and impractical design. There's nothing situational about it! It doesn't fucking work, and it's not going to 'work better' depending on the situation.

Fine, I'm not arguing with you there. I never was. This argument started as I recall over an assertion that the Federation wouldn't use these weapons on principle even if they did work.

Assumptions on your part. Are you saying you wouldn't perform manual labor, even if the penalty for refusal was to kill everyone else in your family while you watched, THEN sentence you to hard labor in a mine?

I'd really like to know where you got this idea that I'm saying every random Joe Blow on the occupied planets will become a resistance member.

What did the majority of France do when occupied by Germany? They shut their mouths and minded their own business.

Was I ever arguing that things would happen any differently on the conquered Federation worlds, or do you just love the smell of straw?

Are you now saying that's not true, that not everyone is going to or will have to/want to fight?

Of course every Federation citizen isn't going to fight to the death. Most of them will do exactly as you say they would: grit their teeth and bear it. But I'm also not of the opinion that the Empire can just walz in there with no trouble whatsoever.

Then stop blathering about this 'do what must be done, you're an idiot if you don't'.

Goddamn, do you actually not understand the difference between keeping an option available and actually implementing it?

And what is this bullshit about, 'freedom is enticing, even to those who know nothing about it'? Have you been listening to the Karl Rove Mind Control Station again? 'Freedom is on the march!' 'Democracy is God's gift to people!'

Again, by your logic nobody would ever resist tyranny. Revolutions would never happen. Once a country invades and takes over another country there would be no trouble whatsoever controlling the conquered populations.

Have you LOOKED at the dog's breakfast we're stewarding in Iraq?

That supports my argument. The Iraqis are resisting an occupation by a foreign power, sort of like... oh yeah, sort of like the Federation worlds would resist an occupation by a foreign power. Of course, according to you nobody has a problem with occupations and everybody will just shut up and do what they're told by their new masters. To by your logic the neocons should have been absolutely right.

Populations trend towards stability. You deny you're talking about everyone picking up a weapon to fight the good fight, but then insist that there will be this horrendous outcry when human rights and dignities are shredded.

See above, Iraq. We're a much more lenient conqueror than the Empire ever would be, but they still don't like us being in control of their country and enough of them are willing to do something about to make a real pain in the ass for us. Why would the situation be any different on a Federation world that got conquered by the Empire?

I gave you alternatives.

WHEN? I sure can't remember

Your solutions, even when it comes to guerilla resistance, seems to be built on this 'all or nothing' thought process. We're ALL gonna buckle up and do what must be done. We're ALL gonna band together and fight for our lost freedoms.

You keep repeating this strawman over and over like a broken record! I see the situation being like Iraq or France under the Nazis. Most people won't do anything, but enough people will be motivated to do something to give the Empire a pain in the ass. That "enough" doesn't have to be a lot of people-the numbers of active Iraqi insurgents is estimated in the thousands out of a country of twenty million.

What did the majority of Bajorans do? They shut their mouths and kept their heads down.

And those few that did do something were such royal pains in the ass to the Cardassians that they eventually decided they were better off just abandoning the planet. Tell me again how this supports your argument that geurilla resistance won't happen and will be utterly futile?

Resentment ain't gonna win battles, champ.

No, but it's a good recruiting sargeant.

You'd better have a plan, an organization, and something other than RAR! FIGHT THE EVIL EMPIRE! going for you. You'll need arms. You'll need a rallying point. You'll need secure communications. You'll need mobility.

OK, how about this, very quickly on the fly, so this is gonna be real crude.
Have the Federation military dissolve back into the general population. They'll be organized into sleeper resistance cells, preferably under a Section 31 operative (they'll likely have the most experience with this). Weapons will be stored in isolated safehouses which only the leader of each cell knowns about.

Ah, so you admit there has to be a motivation for the average person to rise up against the invader?

I never suggested otherwise, except maybe in your strawman.

Pre-existing partisan forces? What bullcrockery is this?

See above plan for sleeper resistance cells under Section 31 command. I know its probably full of holes, but I gotta get to class in five minutes I don't have time to think up anything better for now.

And if you consider which of those systems are suitable for construction/resource delivery/target vector?
And despite the 8,000 LY area of the Federation, there are only 150 member worlds. Gee, maybe we'll start looking within those star systems or at adjacent ones.

OK, let's say we restrict our search to stars within 30 ly of a major Federation member world. There are something like a thousand stars within the distance from Earth. Multiply that by 150 major Federation colonies and you've got 150,000 systems to search.

Hmmm. But don't you have to do what you have to do and launch the mofotastic missiles anyway?

These strawmen are really starting to annoy me.

[SirNitram]

You know, bringing up Iraq is pretty stupid. No one in Iraq is assembling nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching the United States, which is exactly what you claim the Federation will manage.

[Jaepheth]

question: is there a reason the missle needs to carry as much matter as it does antimatter? Wouldn't the target provide enough matter?

Or is there a most "efficient" way of combining matter/antimatter so as to create a larger or more destructive explosion as opposed to just chucking antimatter at a target?

[Batman]

question: is there a reason the missle needs to carry as much matter as it does antimatter? Wouldn't the target provide enough matter?

Which makes the weapon completely useless against shielded targets.
Like, you know, warships.
Not that this weapon isn't useless to begin with.

[Nick Lancaster]

So you're admitting the Federation is hopelessly backwards and utterly outclassed (if they're the semantic equivalent of a 20-man African tribe) by the Empire?

That's just the facts. It's pointless to not accept them (allthough try telling that to a creationist ).

So if you're that outclassed, what makes you think you can build ANY weapon that can be used in the manner we've been discussing?

GAH! There's that idiotic line, 'make x that much harder.' You've been taken out of your homes, deprived of the luxuries you took for granted under Federation rule. You're living off preprocessed sludge instead of replicated gourmet meals. You've been forced to work at manual labor.
How much more difficult do you want it to be?

Hmm, oh, let's say a "demonstration" of the Death Star on a major former Federation world...

Why are you assuming the Empire would just move in and vaporize a planet at random?

Alderaan was chosen because it had been a thorn in Palpatine's side for 20 years, among other things.

It's time to discard your own strawman, this ridiculous, 'it'll make things that much harder.' You've got to make up your mind - either the Federation has a completely disposable morality, or there are factors that would moderate their decision.

Every time I point this out, you move the goalposts. Suddenly, you're not talking all-or-nothing, you're just putting it on the table. Suddenly, this idea of guerilla forces sprouts up.

Why? Because you have not, and cannot defend your original proposition.

You are still arguing the use of a weapon that you admit is a flawed and impractical design. There's nothing situational about it! It doesn't fucking work, and it's not going to 'work better' depending on the situation.

Fine, I'm not arguing with you there. I never was. This argument started as I recall over an assertion that the Federation wouldn't use these weapons on principle even if they did work.

Ahem. You've been the one who can't support the 'do what must be done' assertion. Pressman, Jellico, Section 31 are the exceptions. They're shown as villains, in most cases.

Assumptions on your part. Are you saying you wouldn't perform manual labor, even if the penalty for refusal was to kill everyone else in your family while you watched, THEN sentence you to hard labor in a mine?

I'd really like to know where you got this idea that I'm saying every random Joe Blow on the occupied planets will become a resistance member.

From your unfounded and simplistic, 'we'll all do what must be done' parade. From your 'OMG! Dey gonna destroy our way of life!' nonsense.

What did the majority of France do when occupied by Germany? They shut their mouths and minded their own business.

Was I ever arguing that things would happen any differently on the conquered Federation worlds, or do you just love the smell of straw?

Again, you've insisted throughout that there's going to be this massive uprising to throw off the yoke of the Imperial oppressors. Everyone's going to join your grand rebellion, 'cause they have to do what is necessary.

Only as you've been hammered have you admitted there would be discussion and objections. Only as you've been hammered have you turned away from this mega-weapon idiocy and considered guerilla resistance, when in fact, this is what would have been done from the very start.

Trying to pin your idiocy on a strawman is ridiculous.

Are you now saying that's not true, that not everyone is going to or will have to/want to fight?

Of course every Federation citizen isn't going to fight to the death. Most of them will do exactly as you say they would: grit their teeth and bear it. But I'm also not of the opinion that the Empire can just walz in there with no trouble whatsoever.

So you admit I'm right, yet I'm still using a strawman? How innovative.

If the majority of the populace is compliant, trouble is relative.

Then stop blathering about this 'do what must be done, you're an idiot if you don't'.

Goddamn, do you actually not understand the difference between keeping an option available and actually implementing it?

Do you actually not understand the concept of principles and morals?

Is your moral code (or that of the characters you might be writing for) that disposable?

Do you realize we've got this same argument going on in the Pentagon, that there are people who believe a nuclear deterrent must be used to be effective? (What, Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't impressive enough?) That instead of disarmament, we need tactical nuclear weapons that can root out Saddams and Osamas and al-Zarqawi's?

And what is this bullshit about, 'freedom is enticing, even to those who know nothing about it'? Have you been listening to the Karl Rove Mind Control Station again? 'Freedom is on the march!' 'Democracy is God's gift to people!'

Again, by your logic nobody would ever resist tyranny. Revolutions would never happen. Once a country invades and takes over another country there would be no trouble whatsoever controlling the conquered populations.

Thanks for the strawman. You posited that freedom is enticing, even to those who know nothing about it. I countered with examples that show people who have no concept of freedom aren't suddenly going to be dancing in the streets. They've been beaten down too often, promised relief that never materializes, fingered by snitches, had relatives tortured or killed for speaking out.

That's not the same as 'no resistance' or 'no trouble'. And, clearly, an occupied world already knows about freedom, so you're not even talking about the same population sample.

Got it? The dancing in the streets expected by the Pentagon once we toppled Saddam never happened. People voted in some areas so we would go away. And, gosh, a country with a Shi'ite majority almost elected a Shi'ite majority in their assembly, which would have established a constitution based on shari'a, Islamic law, theocratic rule.

Go back to Colonial America. For all that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, et al were arguing for independency, there were those - including elected representatives - arguing to support the Crown. Freedom came over the course of years, and for the average person, nothing changed. They still had to get up, go to work, raise the kids, buy goods, pay bills.

Have you LOOKED at the dog's breakfast we're stewarding in Iraq?

That supports my argument. The Iraqis are resisting an occupation by a foreign power, sort of like... oh yeah, sort of like the Federation worlds would resist an occupation by a foreign power. Of course, according to you nobody has a problem with occupations and everybody will just shut up and do what they're told by their new masters. To by your logic the neocons should have been absolutely right.

It's the neocons who thought everyone would suddenly dance to the tune of Democracy. The insurgents are fighting in support of a theocratic rule, or to prop up the remnants of the Ba'athist minority, Saddam's party.

They're not fighting for freedom. They're not fighting to throw off the yoke of oppression (please show me where we're oppressing them, other than returning fire). They're fighting for a system of government that is wholly inconsistent with the ideals of freedom and rife with oppression.

Populations trend towards stability. You deny you're talking about everyone picking up a weapon to fight the good fight, but then insist that there will be this horrendous outcry when human rights and dignities are shredded.

See above, Iraq. We're a much more lenient conqueror than the Empire ever would be, but they still don't like us being in control of their country and enough of them are willing to do something about to make a real pain in the ass for us. Why would the situation be any different on a Federation world that got conquered by the Empire?

We went to Iraq as a conquering force? News to me.

The insurgents aren't fighting for freedom other than the freedom to choose an oppressive form of government.

I gave you alternatives.

WHEN? I sure can't remember

Oh, back when I proposed improving ship designs rather than chasing our tails with the wankatron. More recently, when I pointed out the elements you've been overlooking in your talk of guerilla resistance.

Your solutions, even when it comes to guerilla resistance, seems to be built on this 'all or nothing' thought process. We're ALL gonna buckle up and do what must be done. We're ALL gonna band together and fight for our lost freedoms.

You keep repeating this strawman over and over like a broken record! I see the situation being like Iraq or France under the Nazis. Most people won't do anything, but enough people will be motivated to do something to give the Empire a pain in the ass. That "enough" doesn't have to be a lot of people-the numbers of active Iraqi insurgents is estimated in the thousands out of a country of twenty million.

Nice. You take the examples I used to counter your arguments, then claim I'm using a strawman?

You are also assuming the motivations of Iraqi insurgents are the same as the motivations of the populace on an Imperial-occupied planet. As I pointed out above, it's not the same thing at all.

What did the majority of Bajorans do? They shut their mouths and kept their heads down.

And those few that did do something were such royal pains in the ass to the Cardassians that they eventually decided they were better off just abandoning the planet. Tell me again how this supports your argument that geurilla resistance won't happen and will be utterly futile?

Another strawman on your part. I only said that it wouldn't be this mass uprising that you have fixated on. Also, the Cardassians are not the Empire. Bajor is not another planet.

Those Bajorans who did form a resistance had all the items I mentioned in a previous post - organization, communications, goals. All you had was 'resentment' and a platitude about freedom.

Resentment ain't gonna win battles, champ.

No, but it's a good recruiting sargeant.

It is if you want a cadre of vengeance-seeking idiots who are going to jeopardize the rest of the unit. Otherwise, it's useless.

You'd better have a plan, an organization, and something other than RAR! FIGHT THE EVIL EMPIRE! going for you. You'll need arms. You'll need a rallying point. You'll need secure communications. You'll need mobility.

OK, how about this, very quickly on the fly, so this is gonna be real crude.
Have the Federation military dissolve back into the general population. They'll be organized into sleeper resistance cells, preferably under a Section 31 operative (they'll likely have the most experience with this). Weapons will be stored in isolated safehouses which only the leader of each cell knowns about.

It's not perfect, but that's a lot more coherent than hoping people are resentful enough to take action.

Ah, so you admit there has to be a motivation for the average person to rise up against the invader?

I never suggested otherwise, except maybe in your strawman.

Sorry, I gave examples of people refusing to stand up, put it on the level of the average citizen, and you only countered with, "They're threatening our way of life! We'll do anything to prevent that! RAR!" That somehow, the populace would resent not having hot showers or holodeck entertainment, and this would be sufficient cause.

Pre-existing partisan forces? What bullcrockery is this?

See above plan for sleeper resistance cells under Section 31 command. I know its probably full of holes, but I gotta get to class in five minutes I don't have time to think up anything better for now.

As I pointed out, a sleeper cell must have a long-term cover. Years of residency, people who work with them, neighbors who gush over how nice Mr. Sloan is and how good he is with the kids.

So your concept of pre-existing forces must be built on the notion that a conquering force is eventually going to show up. You'll also have to pick strategic planets (making assumptions on what an enemy would find valuable), cities and locations to stage in/from.

And if you consider which of those systems are suitable for construction/resource delivery/target vector?
And despite the 8,000 LY area of the Federation, there are only 150 member worlds. Gee, maybe we'll start looking within those star systems or at adjacent ones.

OK, let's say we restrict our search to stars within 30 ly of a major Federation member world. There are something like a thousand stars within the distance from Earth. Multiply that by 150 major Federation colonies and you've got 150,000 systems to search.

Nope, you're still trying to justify this with inflated numbers.

That there are 1,000 stars within 30LY from Earth does not mean there are an equal or greater number of stars within all 150 member worlds, or even that this is representative of an average figure.

You still have to address access to resources and suitability for launch/targeting. We're not looking for a specific grain of sand on a beach, or even a needle in a haystack (an aside being that the Empire would gladly tear apart the haystack) - we're looking for a very large object with a specific payload.

Hmmm. But don't you have to do what you have to do and launch the mofotastic missiles anyway?

These strawmen are really starting to annoy me.[/quote]

Sorry, it's not a strawman when you keep using the argument.

At no point have you discounted your 'launch or die' theory. You've added exceptions - 'it'd be idiotic/suicidal to not consider it,' 'I was only talking about a situation where such a weapon existed' - but again, you've only budged from that stance after repeated hammering.

[Nick Lancaster]

question: is there a reason the missle needs to carry as much matter as it does antimatter? Wouldn't the target provide enough matter?

Or is there a most "efficient" way of combining matter/antimatter so as to create a larger or more destructive explosion as opposed to just chucking antimatter at a target?

IIRC, M/AM reactions require identical particles, that is a particle of matter collides with its anti-matter twin.

So you include the reactant mass in your payload, rather than count on finding it at the target.

[Junghalli]

It's time to discard your own strawman, this ridiculous, 'it'll make things that much harder.' You've got to make up your mind - either the Federation has a completely disposable morality, or there are factors that would moderate their decision.

There are factors that would moderate their decision.

From your unfounded and simplistic, 'we'll all do what must be done' parade. From your 'OMG! Dey gonna destroy our way of life!' nonsense.

GAH! First, I'd like you to tell me how the Empire won't destroy the Federation's way of life. Second, when I was talking about how "we'll all do what must be done" I was talking about the Federation government launching a hypothetical WMD at Imperial planets. Somehow you've made the bizzare connection that this means I also think every Federation citizen will fight to the death against the Empire and you will not let go of it no matter how many times I remind you that I NEVER FUCKING SAID THAT!

Again, you've insisted throughout that there's going to be this massive uprising to throw off the yoke of the Imperial oppressors. Everyone's going to join your grand rebellion, 'cause they have to do what is necessary.

I'm sick of this. I'd like a quote. Give me a quote of myself saying "there's going to be a huge rebellion against the Empire and every man is going to fight to the death!" If you can't then this is a strawman.

Trying to pin your idiocy on a strawman is ridiculous.

See above. Show me a quote of myself saying this and I'll instantly concede. But you're not going to find one, because you've been shoving straw in my face for at least the past three posts.

So you admit I'm right, yet I'm still using a strawman? How innovative.

You know, debating you is starting to sound like this.
ME: I think the Terminator could survive getting run over by a truck
YOU: The wheels would crush his limbs
ME: Yeah, but he'd probably survive.
YOU: See, you just admitted you were wrong!
ME: I never said he wouldn't be damaged, just that he'd survive.
YOU: no, you're wrong, and you keep moving the goalposts because you don't want to admit you're wrong!

If the majority of the populace is compliant, trouble is relative.

Right, just like there are only a few thousand Iraqi insurgents and they don't cause us any trouble at all. Yeah, right.

Do you actually not understand the concept of principles and morals?
Is your moral code (or that of the characters you might be writing for) that disposable?

We're back to the missile argument again, even though we already agreed they don't work, but OK. In a war it is generally considered acceptable that there is collateral damage in destroying important enemy targets. If I'm immoral than so is virtually every general who ever lived. By that standard I think I can live with you considering me immoral.

They're not fighting for freedom. They're not fighting to throw off the yoke of oppression (please show me where we're oppressing them, other than returning fire). They're fighting for a system of government that is wholly inconsistent with the ideals of freedom and rife with oppression.

But they are fighting to throw of what they percieve to be a foreign invader who has taken over their country which is, oh jee, the exact same thing that's going to happen to the Federation if it gets conquered by the Empire. You actually don't see the parallel there at all?

We went to Iraq as a conquering force? News to me.

That all depends on who you listen to.

The insurgents aren't fighting for freedom other than the freedom to choose an oppressive form of government.

They're fighting to get rid of what they percieve as a foreign occupier. Again, why is it you don't expect the same thing to happen on Federation planets that get conquered by the Empire?

Oh, back when I proposed improving ship designs rather than chasing our tails with the wankatron.

An utterly useless proposal as the most uber Federation starship possible would get its ass kicked by a Lancer.

More recently, when I pointed out the elements you've been overlooking in your talk of guerilla resistance.

An infrastructure of resistance already in place, yes. More on that later.

Another strawman on your part. I only said that it wouldn't be this mass uprising that you have fixated on.

This is getting frustrating. I DEMAND YOU QUOTE ME SAYING THERE'S GOING TO BE A MASS UPRISING OR GIVE UP THIS STRAWMAN!

those Bajorans who did form a resistance had all the items I mentioned in a previous post - organization, communications, goals. All you had was 'resentment' and a platitude about freedom.

It would be up to the Federation military (and paramilitary organizations like Section 31) to set that up.

It is if you want a cadre of vengeance-seeking idiots who are going to jeopardize the rest of the unit. Otherwise, it's useless.

You do realize that a lot of the success of a resistance organization depends to a certain extent on the passive support of the populace at large? Will that guy who saw you sneaking into the Imperial headquarters before it blew up tell anyone about it, stuff like that. Also, it'll be a lot easier for the resistance if they can recruit from the civilian population. Especially, to put it rather unpleasantly, expendable cannon-fodder types like the guy whose mom and dad got killed by stormies so some Section agent can give him a vest full of dynamite and convince him to walk up to a checkpoint and blow himself up, stuff like that.

As I pointed out, a sleeper cell must have a long-term cover. Years of residency, people who work with them, neighbors who gush over how nice Mr. Sloan is and how good he is with the kids.

Yes, there is a downside to this in that it uses military veterans who will undoubtedly be already suspect to the Empire by a certain degree. It would be better if they could recruit people from the population at large (see, this is where the factor of the Empire being unpopular comes in ). Or, the Federation may already have a lot of deep cover Section 31 agents already in place among the civilian population (knowing the way the Section works). These would form the ideal nucleus for the resistance forces.

So your concept of pre-existing forces must be built on the notion that a conquering force is eventually going to show up. You'll also have to pick strategic planets (making assumptions on what an enemy would find valuable), cities and locations to stage in/from.

True, the more warning the Federation has the more organized the partisans are going to be when Stormtroopers start marching into town. I don't know about them being able to coordinate on an interplanetary scale, it'd be nice but I'm not sure how hard it would be to covertly communicate over interstellar distances.

Nope, you're still trying to justify this with inflated numbers.
That there are 1,000 stars within 30LY from Earth does not mean there are an equal or greater number of stars within all 150 member worlds, or even that this is representative of an average figure.

It's highly unlikely to my knowledge that Sol is in a remarkably dense cluster of stars. And for the numbers of systems involved to be anything less than astronomically daunting the average density of stars around most Federation worlds would have to be several orders of magnitude less than it is around Sol. I KNOW that's impossible, unless for some bizarre reason a lot of their major colonies are in the galactic halo or the interarm voids.

We're not looking for a specific grain of sand on a beach, or even a needle in a haystack (an aside being that the Empire would gladly tear apart the haystack) - we're looking for a very large object with a specific payload.

Thank you for proving once and for all that you truly have no idea about just how big the galaxy really is. Do you really think YOU could find a kilometer long object that could be anywhere in tens of thousands of star systems? Unless you intercept some shipment or transmission to the site you're highly unlikely to find it within a human lifespan, unless you use half the Imperial fleet or are phenomenally lucky.
Anyway, it's a mute point because as we've both agreed the wankaphasic missiles won't work.

[Nick Lancaster]

It's time to discard your own strawman, this ridiculous, 'it'll make things that much harder.' You've got to make up your mind - either the Federation has a completely disposable morality, or there are factors that would moderate their decision.

There are factors that would moderate their decision.

And I only had to ask you how many times?

From your unfounded and simplistic, 'we'll all do what must be done' parade. From your 'OMG! Dey gonna destroy our way of life!' nonsense.

GAH! First, I'd like you to tell me how the Empire won't destroy the Federation's way of life. Second, when I was talking about how "we'll all do what must be done" I was talking about the Federation government launching a hypothetical WMD at Imperial planets. Somehow you've made the bizzare connection that this means I also think every Federation citizen will fight to the death against the Empire and you will not let go of it no matter how many times I remind you that I NEVER FUCKING SAID THAT!

Unfounded speculation. The Federation, with its de-emphasis on personal wealth, has a model which allows the average citizen a high standard of living. Yet you are presuming that this means the Empire will completely destroy this model and force everyone to live in hovels or something.

I'm not 'letting go of it,' because your implication has always been clear - flush the morality down the toilet, do what must be done, even if that means sacrificing deeply-held principles. Only now, in this most recent post, have you acknowledged that there are considerations that would support my views, that people would look for alternatives other than launch-or-die.

Combine your simplistic 'Aaaaaa! They're gonna destroy our way of life!' with 'Gotta scrap our morals and launch the megawankatron!' - the implication of 'we all fight, or we all die' has been clear from the start. If you can't understand your own posts, that's just too bad.

Again, you've insisted throughout that there's going to be this massive uprising to throw off the yoke of the Imperial oppressors. Everyone's going to join your grand rebellion, 'cause they have to do what is necessary.

I'm sick of this. I'd like a quote. Give me a quote of myself saying "there's going to be a huge rebellion against the Empire and every man is going to fight to the death!" If you can't then this is a strawman.

The message is implied. Every time I countered your 'do or die' mentality, you responded the Federation/Starfleet would be stupid/idiotic to do anything but launch the wankatron.

That Caine never admitted that he killed Abel doesn't mean he didn't do it. He didn't have to say anything, and the absence of his confession does not mean Abel was run over by an invisible time-traveling bus.

Trying to pin your idiocy on a strawman is ridiculous.

See above. Show me a quote of myself saying this and I'll instantly concede. But you're not going to find one, because you've been shoving straw in my face for at least the past three posts.

Show me where you introduced guerilla resistance before I mentioned it. Prior to that, you dismissed all alternatives and began arguing 'launch or die,' regardless of how many lives it would cost.

Show me where you considered alternatives before I drummed you over the head about disposable morality, looking at it from a character viewpoint, even justifying it through established episodes. You couldn't explain it, you only reiterated your 'launch or die' mantra.

Perhaps you never said it outright, but the implication is easily drawn from your statements, easily confirmed by your continued insistence on 'fight or die'. Complaining that this is a strawman because you never said it explicitly is a cop-out.

So you admit I'm right, yet I'm still using a strawman? How innovative.

You know, debating you is starting to sound like this.
ME: I think the Terminator could survive getting run over by a truck
YOU: The wheels would crush his limbs
ME: Yeah, but he'd probably survive.
YOU: See, you just admitted you were wrong!
ME: I never said he wouldn't be damaged, just that he'd survive.
YOU: no, you're wrong, and you keep moving the goalposts because you don't want to admit you're wrong!
[/quote]

Moving the goalposts again. The two situations are irrelevant. The only reason you didn't use the actual argument is that it's insupportable and you'd have to highlight the fact that you continually insisted on disposable morality, repeatedly returned to 'it's stupid!' when I suggested principles might dictate other courses of action, and NOW, finally, you have admitted there would be circumstances that would dictate your decision. In other words, principles, morals, and things like strategy.

If the majority of the populace is compliant, trouble is relative.

Right, just like there are only a few thousand Iraqi insurgents and they don't cause us any trouble at all. Yeah, right.

There's a difference between a country the size of California and a planetary population.

The Empire also isn't playing by the same rules as American Forces.

It has also previously been established that the only freedom the insurgents are fighting for is the freedom to have an oppressive form of government which secures privleges for a select few, rather than the populace at large.

Do you actually not understand the concept of principles and morals?
Is your moral code (or that of the characters you might be writing for) that disposable?

We're back to the missile argument again, even though we already agreed they don't work, but OK. In a war it is generally considered acceptable that there is collateral damage in destroying important enemy targets. If I'm immoral than so is virtually every general who ever lived. By that standard I think I can live with you considering me immoral.

Sorry, what we're back to is your repeated insistence that gosh, we gotta consider the alternatives that compromise our founding principles and everything we've held dear, because we'll lose it anyway!

And you've already ruled out your collateral damage argument by insisting this is an all-or-nothing, imminent doom, can't fight them proposition. You've denied that the Dominion was an equivalent threat (even though the Dominion War ended with a typical warm-and-fuzzy Trek moment, a revelation/conversion on the part of the Prime Founder).

You're like the bozos in TOS: A Taste of Armageddon, rationalizing your war at all costs. Sorry, we determined we nuked your capital city, everybody go jump into a disintegration booth!

They're not fighting for freedom. They're not fighting to throw off the yoke of oppression (please show me where we're oppressing them, other than returning fire). They're fighting for a system of government that is wholly inconsistent with the ideals of freedom and rife with oppression.

But they are fighting to throw of what they percieve to be a foreign invader who has taken over their country which is, oh jee, the exact same thing that's going to happen to the Federation if it gets conquered by the Empire. You actually don't see the parallel there at all?

Irrelevant, as there is no correlation between American Forces and the Empire. The Empire would have levelled the Shrine of Ali in a heartbeat.

We went to Iraq as a conquering force? News to me.

That all depends on who you listen to.

Oh, tuning into the Karl Rove Mind Control Channel again?

The insurgents aren't fighting for freedom other than the freedom to choose an oppressive form of government.

They're fighting to get rid of what they percieve as a foreign occupier. Again, why is it you don't expect the same thing to happen on Federation planets that get conquered by the Empire?

Do you see the logical disconnect you've offered? Fighting for an oppressive system of government = fighting for freedom?

Oh, back when I proposed improving ship designs rather than chasing our tails with the wankatron.

An utterly useless proposal as the most uber Federation starship possible would get its ass kicked by a Lancer.

Because you're hell-bent on designing multi-uber-wankaphasic jerkoff toys instead of developing practical applications.

More recently, when I pointed out the elements you've been overlooking in your talk of guerilla resistance.

An infrastructure of resistance already in place, yes. More on that later.

When? How? Why? Unanswered questions. What did the Federation do, hire a Jedi Knight to predict the future?

Another strawman on your part. I only said that it wouldn't be this mass uprising that you have fixated on.

This is getting frustrating. I DEMAND YOU QUOTE ME SAYING THERE'S GOING TO BE A MASS UPRISING OR GIVE UP THIS STRAWMAN!

Ain't gonna happen. I explained why.

those Bajorans who did form a resistance had all the items I mentioned in a previous post - organization, communications, goals. All you had was 'resentment' and a platitude about freedom.

It would be up to the Federation military (and paramilitary organizations like Section 31) to set that up.

What, you're not gonna lead the charge? What happened to this driving resentment about your lost freedoms, the threat to your way of life?

Oh, suddenly, it's someone else's fight. Got it.

It is if you want a cadre of vengeance-seeking idiots who are going to jeopardize the rest of the unit. Otherwise, it's useless.

You do realize that a lot of the success of a resistance organization depends to a certain extent on the passive support of the populace at large? Will that guy who saw you sneaking into the Imperial headquarters before it blew up tell anyone about it, stuff like that. Also, it'll be a lot easier for the resistance if they can recruit from the civilian population. Especially, to put it rather unpleasantly, expendable cannon-fodder types like the guy whose mom and dad got killed by stormies so some Section agent can give him a vest full of dynamite and convince him to walk up to a checkpoint and blow himself up, stuff like that.

I would much prefer people who are going to be disciplined and smart. That way, I don't have to keep sending out resentful idiots (the very people I'm trying to save) with Semtex jacket liners. Someone who is that angry can go do that himself, anyway - I don't want those people anywhere near my resistance cell, because they're untrustworthy.

As I pointed out, a sleeper cell must have a long-term cover. Years of residency, people who work with them, neighbors who gush over how nice Mr. Sloan is and how good he is with the kids.

Yes, there is a downside to this in that it uses military veterans who will undoubtedly be already suspect to the Empire by a certain degree. It would be better if they could recruit people from the population at large (see, this is where the factor of the Empire being unpopular comes in ). Or, the Federation may already have a lot of deep cover Section 31 agents already in place among the civilian population (knowing the way the Section works). These would form the ideal nucleus for the resistance forces.

And what's to prevent your civilian recruits from being Imperial stooges? You can tell the difference between an Imperial human and a Federation human? What are you going to do, check for midichlorians?

Section 31 is small and covert, not planet-spanning.

So your concept of pre-existing forces must be built on the notion that a conquering force is eventually going to show up. You'll also have to pick strategic planets (making assumptions on what an enemy would find valuable), cities and locations to stage in/from.

True, the more warning the Federation has the more organized the partisans are going to be when Stormtroopers start marching into town. I don't know about them being able to coordinate on an interplanetary scale, it'd be nice but I'm not sure how hard it would be to covertly communicate over interstellar distances.

Unfortunately, much of your planning is going to be reactive - you need to see where they set up, how they operate, carry out patrols, resupply, etc. There's a limited amount of advance planning that can be done.

Nope, you're still trying to justify this with inflated numbers.
That there are 1,000 stars within 30LY from Earth does not mean there are an equal or greater number of stars within all 150 member worlds, or even that this is representative of an average figure.

It's highly unlikely to my knowledge that Sol is in a remarkably dense cluster of stars. And for the numbers of systems involved to be anything less than astronomically daunting the average density of stars around most Federation worlds would have to be several orders of magnitude less than it is around Sol. I KNOW that's impossible, unless for some bizarre reason a lot of their major colonies are in the galactic halo or the interarm voids.

So your numbers are meaningless.

We're not looking for a specific grain of sand on a beach, or even a needle in a haystack (an aside being that the Empire would gladly tear apart the haystack) - we're looking for a very large object with a specific payload.

Thank you for proving once and for all that you truly have no idea about just how big the galaxy really is. Do you really think YOU could find a kilometer long object that could be anywhere in tens of thousands of star systems? Unless you intercept some shipment or transmission to the site you're highly unlikely to find it within a human lifespan, unless you use half the Imperial fleet or are phenomenally lucky.

Back to the strawman of star systems and hiding places too numerous to count. You still have to ferry resources for construction, or move the weapons from the construction point.

You have neglected that the weapons must be within a limited space to be effectively launched, not stranded across the galaxy because it's a good hiding place. If it's so well hidden, it's highly unlikely that you'll be able to get to it in time to use it.

Anyway, it's a mute point because as we've both agreed the wankaphasic missiles won't work.

Hmm. Have you noticed that RSO quietly ducked off stage while we've been heaving brickbats at each other?

[Connor MacLeod]

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.

No, it wouldn't. According to the Black Fleet crisis (IIRC), the Empire had generally at LEAST two shipyards active per sector, with each yard capable of building one ISD sized vessel (although it could accomdoate Executor-sized vessels as well.) Given that there are easily thousands of Sectors, the Empire could EASILY produce tens of thousands more Star Destroyers in about a year, even if they lost Kuat and Corellia (there's still Sluis Van, Fondor, Bilbringi, Rendili, Loronar, etc..)

And lets not forget that they could build something as large as the Death Star without any sort of shipyard infrastructure in place (like around Endor, for example?)

[Praxis]

According to the Black Fleet crisis (IIRC)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! MY BRAIN IS BLEEEEEEEDING JUST THINKING ABOUT IT!

, the Empire had generally at LEAST two shipyards active per sector, with each yard capable of building one ISD sized vessel (although it could accomdoate Executor-sized vessels as well.) Given that there are easily thousands of Sectors, the Empire could EASILY produce tens of thousands more Star Destroyers in about a year, even if they lost Kuat and Corellia (there's still Sluis Van, Fondor, Bilbringi, Rendili, Loronar, etc..)

Really? Wasn't this the same book where 200 ships constituted enough ships to conquer the galaxy?

[Connor MacLeod]

Really? Wasn't this the same book where 200 ships constituted enough ships to conquer the galaxy?

Only when you're an irrational alarmist like Tig Peramis. Otherwise its enough to invade a star system without planetary shields.

[Praxis]

Really? Wasn't this the same book where 200 ships constituted enough ships to conquer the galaxy?

Only when you're an irrational alarmist like Tig Peramis. Otherwise its enough to invade a star system without planetary shields.

I thought it was Han Solo who was believing that the Yevethans could conquer and destroy Coruscant?

[Junghalli]

Combine your simplistic 'Aaaaaa! They're gonna destroy our way of life!' with 'Gotta scrap our morals and launch the megawankatron!' - the implication of 'we all fight, or we all die' has been clear from the start. If you can't understand your own posts, that's just too bad.

Yes, of course, you know what I meant to say better than I did. So you're argument is that I never actually said every Federation citizen would fight to the death but I said things that could be very vaguely interpreted as implying it, therefore I might as well have said it? Jeez, I'd hate to imagine what our legal system would look like if such bizzarre convoluted Rube Golberg chains of logic were actually considered evidence. He said he didn't like the guy, and he also said that in some cases killing is justified, HE AS GOOD AS CONFESSED!

The message is implied. Every time I countered your 'do or die' mentality, you responded the Federation/Starfleet would be stupid/idiotic to do anything but launch the wankatron.

Apparently you're too dumb to realize that this premise always had the following conditions in it
(1) The wankatron actually works.
(2) The wankatron can seriously hurt the Empire enough that they may be forced to withdraw or at least deem the Federation not worth the cost of conquering it.
I didn't feel the need to actually say this because I just kind of assumed you would be smart enough to realize that nobody uses a useless or counterproductive weapon. Apparently I overestimated your intelligence, as you immediately took this as saying "they've got to launch the wankatron on principle, even if it doesn't do them any good!" and from that you went to your absurd strawman about how I implied every Federation citizen will fight to the death. I guess from now on when I'm debating you I'm going to have to tediously spell out every premise and assumption for your benefit.

Prior to that, you dismissed all alternatives and began arguing 'launch or die,' regardless of how many lives it would cost.

I said there were no other alternatives to prevent the Federation being conquered, which is true. Guerilla resistance means you have been conquered and you're hoping the guerillas will be annoying enough that eventually the conquerors will decide it's not worth the effort and spit you back out.

Perhaps you never said it outright, but the implication is easily drawn from your statements, easily confirmed by your continued insistence on 'fight or die'. Complaining that this is a strawman because you never said it explicitly is a cop-out.

No, I never made any such implication, you inferred their existence because you're apparently too stupid to comprehend the concept of an implied premise. Jesus, if I said people could concievably live on Mars would you say I implied they could breathe the Martian atmosphere?

There's a difference between a country the size of California and a planetary population.

Right, the population you're trying to control will get bigger, but the number of insurgents will magically stay the same. I stand in awe of genius.

The Empire also isn't playing by the same rules as American Forces.

Yeah, they'll be a lot worse.

It has also previously been established that the only freedom the insurgents are fighting for is the freedom to have an oppressive form of government which secures privleges for a select few, rather than the populace at large.

You still haven't bothered to answer why you think the Federation populace won't resist an opressive foreign power I see.

Sorry, what we're back to is your repeated insistence that gosh, we gotta consider the alternatives that compromise our founding principles and everything we've held dear, because we'll lose it anyway!

Since when is it a founding principle of the Federation that they may never inflict civilian casualties on the enemy? Do you have any evidence whatsoever that using the wankaphasic missiles would compromise their founding principles? I'd really like to know, as this is the place where you started your chain of argument that lead to you saying I'm implying every Federation citizen will fight to the death.

Because you're hell-bent on designing multi-uber-wankaphasic jerkoff toys instead of developing practical applications.

Oh yes, I'm sure that if I only put my mind to it I could find a way for the Federation to leapfrog over the 25,000+ year head start the Empire has in technological development. After all, in engineering motivation is 99% of the job, right?

When?

When it becomes obvious the Federation is going to loose, which knowing the technological disparity is going to be after the first fleet engagement.

How?

Have the military disperse back into the populations or have them hide in the wilderness from which they can conduct sneak raids of Imperial facilities. Create insurgent sleeper cells from people qualified and willing to continue the fight after the Empire rolls over the Federation. Basically the same of procedures most resistance movements use.

Why?

In hope that if the insurgents and partisans make enough trouble for the Empire they'll decide the Federation isn't worth the trouble of occupying.

What, you're not gonna lead the charge? What happened to this driving resentment about your lost freedoms, the threat to your way of life?
Oh, suddenly, it's someone else's fight. Got it.

As you yourself observed, resentment won't win battles. You've got to have an organization and a plan. A bunch of random riots are just going to be target practice for the stormtroopers.

And what's to prevent your civilian recruits from being Imperial stooges? You can tell the difference between an Imperial human and a Federation human? What are you going to do, check for midichlorians?

True.

Section 31 is small and covert, not planet-spanning.

So are most resistance organizations. The whole point of guerilla warfare is to inflict damage on the enemy out of all proportion to the numbers and resources you possess.

[Nick Lancaster]

Combine your simplistic 'Aaaaaa! They're gonna destroy our way of life!' with 'Gotta scrap our morals and launch the megawankatron!' - the implication of 'we all fight, or we all die' has been clear from the start. If you can't understand your own posts, that's just too bad.

Yes, of course, you know what I meant to say better than I did. So you're argument is that I never actually said every Federation citizen would fight to the death but I said things that could be very vaguely interpreted as implying it, therefore I might as well have said it? Jeez, I'd hate to imagine what our legal system would look like if such bizzarre convoluted Rube Golberg chains of logic were actually considered evidence. He said he didn't like the guy, and he also said that in some cases killing is justified, HE AS GOOD AS CONFESSED!

To wit:

Media: "You said imminent!"
Bush Administration: "No we didn't. We said, 'grave and growing.'"

Note, however, that during the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, at no point did the Bush Administration ever correct the misinterpretation, because 'imminent' was exactly what they wanted the American people to believe.

Similarly, you persisted with this 'gotta launch, no time for morals!' idiocy. Slowly, as you have been hammered over the head with it, you have changed your viewpoint to allow alternatives other than launching weapons of mass folly. Or am I also misrepresenting your statements there, as well? How is it that 'we have to jettison our morals, we all have to do what needs to be done,' and 'doing anything else would be stupid,' NOT translate into 'all people will rise up against the evil oppressors'?

How is it a strawman to arrive at a conclusion based on your statements? Is that not the basic premise of an argument? That A + B = C? I'm simply disputing A, B, and C.

Also, considering you've been inventing bullshit on my behalf, like saying that 'no one would every fight a conqueror,' (I've merely argued that resistance would not be universal, not its absence) would you now like to say, "You started it! Nyaaaahhhhh! Pfbbtbtbtbtbtbttt!"?

The message is implied. Every time I countered your 'do or die' mentality, you responded the Federation/Starfleet would be stupid/idiotic to do anything but launch the wankatron.

Apparently you're too dumb to realize that this premise always had the following conditions in it
(1) The wankatron actually works.
(2) The wankatron can seriously hurt the Empire enough that they may be forced to withdraw or at least deem the Federation not worth the cost of conquering it.

Oh, conditions! Right. You mean the conditions that you finally admitted after being slapped upside the head repeatedly? The conditions that run against your, 'damn our morals, full speed ahead!' philosophy?

I didn't feel the need to actually say this because I just kind of assumed you would be smart enough to realize that nobody uses a useless or counterproductive weapon. Apparently I overestimated your intelligence, as you immediately took this as saying "they've got to launch the wankatron on principle, even if it doesn't do them any good!" and from that you went to your absurd strawman about how I implied every Federation citizen will fight to the death. I guess from now on when I'm debating you I'm going to have to tediously spell out every premise and assumption for your benefit.

Sorry, there's no logical reason to go from 'non-functional, highly flawed design' to 'well, if it actually worked'. Apparently, you've got the IQ deficit going if you can make that jump.

But, given that, I can also see how you can't grasp that you implied total, unilateral resistance.

Prior to that, you dismissed all alternatives and began arguing 'launch or die,' regardless of how many lives it would cost.

I said there were no other alternatives to prevent the Federation being conquered, which is true. Guerilla resistance means you have been conquered and you're hoping the guerillas will be annoying enough that eventually the conquerors will decide it's not worth the effort and spit you back out.

You repeatedly said that doing anything else was stupid, idiotic, and cowardly. Suddenly, that doesn't include guerilla resistance efforts?

Perhaps you never said it outright, but the implication is easily drawn from your statements, easily confirmed by your continued insistence on 'fight or die'. Complaining that this is a strawman because you never said it explicitly is a cop-out.

No, I never made any such implication, you inferred their existence because you're apparently too stupid to comprehend the concept of an implied premise. Jesus, if I said people could concievably live on Mars would you say I implied they could breathe the Martian atmosphere?

Irrelevant comparison. You cannot compare a single assertion:

'People can conceivably live on Mars'

... to a pair of assertions:

'We must all do what must be done, regardless of our morals'
'To do anything else would be stupid, idiotic, suicidal, and cowardly.'

There's a difference between a country the size of California and a planetary population.

Right, the population you're trying to control will get bigger, but the number of insurgents will magically stay the same. I stand in awe of genius.

No, what I'm pointing out is that the number of insurgents in Iraq bears no resemblance whatsoever to your projected planet-wide resistance. It's you who are making the unfounded assumption that you will have a similar percentage planetwide, based on what happened in Iraq.

Country != Planet

The Empire also isn't playing by the same rules as American Forces.

Yeah, they'll be a lot worse.

No, really? So why the hell are you insisting that what American forces do or do not do in Iraq a template for anything the Empire might do to a Federation planet?

America != Galactic Empire

It has also previously been established that the only freedom the insurgents are fighting for is the freedom to have an oppressive form of government which secures privleges for a select few, rather than the populace at large.

You still haven't bothered to answer why you think the Federation populace won't resist an opressive foreign power I see.

Because you keep using the insurgents in Iraq as an example, which either means the Federation is a theocracy, or the insurgents will fight against the Empire to establish their own version of same.

And I have repeatedly said that the MAJORITY of the populace will not resist, because the desire for stability will outweigh the desire for a blaster bolt to the head. If I've been misinterpreting your statements, you have to admit your insistence on most = all is equally, if not more mindbogglingly stupid.

Sorry, what we're back to is your repeated insistence that gosh, we gotta consider the alternatives that compromise our founding principles and everything we've held dear, because we'll lose it anyway!

Since when is it a founding principle of the Federation that they may never inflict civilian casualties on the enemy? Do you have any evidence whatsoever that using the wankaphasic missiles would compromise their founding principles? I'd really like to know, as this is the place where you started your chain of argument that lead to you saying I'm implying every Federation citizen will fight to the death.

Cough. Prime Directive. Non-interference, recognition of the value of sentient life.

Your base assertion was that no set of principles, no set of morals are worth dying for, that the Federation must use this weapon, because doing anything else would be stupid.

Wiping out an entire planet is more than 'civilian casualties in war'. That's what made the destruction of Alderaan so horrific.

As Sun Tzu would advise, victory goes to he who holds the moral law. Abandoning your principles to lay waste to multiple planetary populations ain't holding the moral law by any stretch. Strangely enough, when you argue the resistance would theoretically be so much of a hassle that the Empire would pull out, this is an expression of that same principle - you did not engage the enemy on the enemy's terms, you make them fight on yours.

Because you're hell-bent on designing multi-uber-wankaphasic jerkoff toys instead of developing practical applications.

Oh yes, I'm sure that if I only put my mind to it I could find a way for the Federation to leapfrog over the 25,000+ year head start the Empire has in technological development. After all, in engineering motivation is 99% of the job, right?

If you were a caveman with a lion's jawbone seeking supremacy over a Marine with a M-16 rifle, your assumption would hold.

On the other hand, the Federation already has the same basic principles and knowledge of physics as the Empire. The Federation understands propulsion, understands faster-than-light travel, understands beam and particle weaponry, even shielding. Perhaps the Empire has better superconductors or power sources, but you've failed to meet Clarke's Axiom of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.

The gap is not the same.

When?

When it becomes obvious the Federation is going to loose, which knowing the technological disparity is going to be after the first fleet engagement.

Likely to be insufficient. An effective sleeper cell must be in place long term, not established within the past couple of months or weeks.

How?

Have the military disperse back into the populations or have them hide in the wilderness from which they can conduct sneak raids of Imperial facilities. Create insurgent sleeper cells from people qualified and willing to continue the fight after the Empire rolls over the Federation. Basically the same of procedures most resistance movements use.

Better check your terminology. A sleeper cell is one that is entirely dormant, and does not act until given the proper code. Once active, it is usually for a single mission, and it is rare that it returns to sleeper status.

Why?

In hope that if the insurgents and partisans make enough trouble for the Empire they'll decide the Federation isn't worth the trouble of occupying.

I'll buy that. However, a small hint about writing mission statements, always make them active, always make them short and declarative.

"Our mission is to hobble every Imperial outpost on the planet!"

What, you're not gonna lead the charge? What happened to this driving resentment about your lost freedoms, the threat to your way of life?
Oh, suddenly, it's someone else's fight. Got it.

As you yourself observed, resentment won't win battles. You've got to have an organization and a plan. A bunch of random riots are just going to be target practice for the stormtroopers.
[/quote]

Nice of you to admit that, finally.

And what's to prevent your civilian recruits from being Imperial stooges? You can tell the difference between an Imperial human and a Federation human? What are you going to do, check for midichlorians?

True.

Of course, you could always ask them about the World Series ... that's how they always tripped up Nazi spies in the movies.

Section 31 is small and covert, not planet-spanning.

So are most resistance organizations. The whole point of guerilla warfare is to inflict damage on the enemy out of all proportion to the numbers and resources you possess.

The issue being that Section 31 likely does not have enough personnel to lead all of the cells you would establish. Additionally, not all Section 31 people are necessarily field operatives like Sloan; some of them may simply be analysts and technicians who have no qualms about reporting to someone other than their legal superior.

You might end up with only a handful of S31 people per planet; in systems with multiple habitable worlds, that's a big burden.

=====

At any rate, I'm going to let this one drop for a three-day weekend.

Besides, as I pointed out, RSO ran for the hills, so the issue is moot.

[Junghalli]

Similarly, you persisted with this 'gotta launch, no time for morals!' idiocy. Slowly, as you have been hammered over the head with it, you have changed your viewpoint to allow alternatives other than launching weapons of mass folly. Or am I also misrepresenting your statements there, as well? How is it that 'we have to jettison our morals, we all have to do what needs to be done,' and 'doing anything else would be stupid,' NOT translate into 'all people will rise up against the evil oppressors'?

That statement was applied to a specific situation. My original argument was as follows.
(A) The wankatrons actually work as advertised (which they don't)
(B) The Federation has them in sufficient number to do great damage to the Empire.
(C) The Federation are "nice guys" who aren't going to like the thought of killing billions of people, especially noncombatants.
(D) Aside from these wankatron torpedos the Federation has nothing that can scratch the Empire.
(E) The Empire is going to conquer the Federation.
Conclusion: it would be the height of idiocy not to use the wankatrons in this situation, as they are the only thing the Federation has that can hurt the Empire. I do not believe the Federation is stupid enough to arbitrarily deprive itself of its only effective weapon because it's squeamish about killing large numbers of its enemies.
You took what I said about this specific situation and generalized it to "the Federation and all its citizens will always do whatever it takes, and fuck morality or their personal safety." That is a grotesque misinterpretation of my original argument.

How is it a strawman to arrive at a conclusion based on your statements? Is that not the basic premise of an argument? That A + B = C? I'm simply disputing A, B, and C.

Because you took what I said about a certain, very specific situation and assumed it to be universally applicable.

Sorry, there's no logical reason to go from 'non-functional, highly flawed design' to 'well, if it actually worked'.

I was originally responding to a poster who said something to the effect of "wouldn't using a planet killing weapon be out of character for the Federation?" (those weren't his exact words, I can dig them up if you insist). So naturally when I replied I made the assumption that they had a planet-killer that could be used against Imperial worlds.

You repeatedly said that doing anything else was stupid, idiotic, and cowardly. Suddenly, that doesn't include guerilla resistance efforts?

No, I said that if the Federation had a working planet-killer missile that they could use against Imperial worlds, and sufficient numbers of these weapons that they could severely damage the Empire, it would be stupid and cowardly not to use them because they're too goody two-shoes.

Country != Planet

Assuming political and social unity (as most Federation worlds seem to have) then planet=really, really, really big country.

No, really? So why the hell are you insisting that what American forces do or do not do in Iraq a template for anything the Empire might do to a Federation planet?

They're both examples of a nation being invaded and occupied by a foreign power. They're different situation yes, but they're comparable.

And I have repeatedly said that the MAJORITY of the populace will not resist, because the desire for stability will outweigh the desire for a blaster bolt to the head.

And I never said the majority of the population would, except in that strawman you created by hideously overgeneralizing my original argument.

Cough. Prime Directive. Non-interference, recognition of the value of sentient life.

LOL! Please, I'm dying of laughter! Are you actually saying that the Prime Directive would apply to the Empire? The Prime Directive is meant to protect primitive civilizations from exploitation by humans. The Empire is not a primitive civilization (except perhaps to the Culture or the Xeelee). You realize that if they actually applied the Prime Directive this way they'd have to become complete isolationists and never have direct contact with any sapient species, anywhere, for fear of interfering with their development? Obviously this is not the case if you've ever watched the show.

Wiping out an entire planet is more than 'civilian casualties in war'. That's what made the destruction of Alderaan so horrific.

No, what made Alderaan so horrific was that it was unneccesary. The Empire didn't need to destroy it for its survival. They could just as easily have gone down, arrested a few people, and dealt with the rebel elements on Alderaan without the need for billions of casualties. The only reason all those people had to die was because Palpatine wanted to show off his new weapon. That is why it was an attrocity, not for the simple reason that lots of people died there.

On the other hand, the Federation already has the same basic principles and knowledge of physics as the Empire. The Federation understands propulsion, understands faster-than-light travel, understands beam and particle weaponry, even shielding. Perhaps the Empire has better superconductors or power sources, but you've failed to meet Clarke's Axiom of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.

For all practical purposes the gap is the same. The Federation may understand that hypermatter isn't magic, that doesn't mean they'll be able to duplicate it. The gap between the Empire and the Federation is simply too huge to be closed by tinkering with ship designs. Make a Federation ship as big and mean as an ISD and it'll still gets its ass kicked in five seconds because it doesn't have anything remotely equivalent to a hypermatter power source so its shielding and weapons are still orders of magnitude weaker.

Likely to be insufficient. An effective sleeper cell must be in place long term, not established within the past couple of months or weeks.

Yes, well, it'd be nice to have years to set the system up, unfortunately I doubt the Empire is going to be very obliging. Unless the Federation has some kind of prior warning before the Empire shows up they're not going to have more than a few months.

Better check your terminology. A sleeper cell is one that is entirely dormant, and does not act until given the proper code. Once active, it is usually for a single mission, and it is rare that it returns to sleeper status.

Correct. Sleeper cells hides in the local population until a prearranged signal. Resistance cell hides in the local population but carries out resistance without waiting to be activated. Partisans don't hide among the population; they go out into wilderness areas or places where they'll be difficult to find and conduct raids. All three of these would do more damage to the Empire than Starfleet ever would (see that quote you gave me from Sun Tzu).

I'll buy that. However, a small hint about writing mission statements, always make them active, always make them short and declarative.
"Our mission is to hobble every Imperial outpost on the planet!"

Yes, that does sound a lot more inspiring.

Of course, you could always ask them about the World Series ... that's how they always tripped up Nazi spies in the movies.

Presuming there still is a World Series by the 24th century. Well, I'm sure they could think of something that only someone intimately familiar with the culture would know. More worrysome is the possibility of double agents.

The issue being that Section 31 likely does not have enough personnel to lead all of the cells you would establish.

True, other qualified personnel would have to be found and brought in. Partisan units at least don't have this problem, they'd just be regular military.

[Darth Wong]

That statement was applied to a specific situation. My original argument was as follows.
(A) The wankatrons actually work as advertised (which they don't)
(B) The Federation has them in sufficient number to do great damage to the Empire.
(C) The Federation are "nice guys" who aren't going to like the thought of killing billions of people, especially noncombatants.
(D) Aside from these wankatron torpedos the Federation has nothing that can scratch the Empire.
(E) The Empire is going to conquer the Federation.
Conclusion: it would be the height of idiocy not to use the wankatrons in this situation,

Since the purpose of this thread to ask whether this is feasible, it is a complete hijack to ignore feasibility issues for the purpose of your argument.