Federation superweapons?

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Patrick Degan
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Post by Patrick Degan »

DocHorror wrote:
All but one of the project scientists were killed. The test-station computers were wiped to prevent the design specs for the Genesis Device from falling into Khan Singh's hands.
Not all the scientists we're killed. The majority were on leave off the station, thats why so few where there to meet Khan.
The people who were on leave were the station and lab support personnel. The primary project scientists were the ones who were left on the station. Five will killed outright by Khan and his people. One got vapourised by the eel-controlled Capt. Terrell, and David Marcus, one of the two project leaders, died on Genesis at the hands of the Klingons.
According to the novel it was wiped (or downloaded I can't remember which) & replaced with a computer game.
Not that the novel counts as canon evidence, but in the book, they purged the liquid-memory tanks which contained the Genesis data into space. In the movie, there was nothing in the computer and the only system which did have the Genesis formula was in the device itself, which was lost.

And if we want to go with novelisation texts as evidence, nevermind that they do not count as canon, you also have to consider this passage from Vonda McIntyre's novelisation of STIII:

Genesis had taken six primary investigators plus a laboratory full of support personnel eighteen months of solid work and all their lifetimes of experience to create. Even if Saavik had been a member of the team, she would not be able to say, in a few simple words, how to recreate the project.

Further in the same book, in the scene where David Marcus is dying, Saavik pleas to the Klingons to help save him, stating outright "Don't you understand? You can never replicate Genesis without him".

If we could go with book evidence, these passages would indicate that without the project scientists, who were gone now, Genesis was irreproduceable. But as it is, only the movies and episodes count, and we still see that all but one of the project scientists were killed, the data was destroyed, and the prototype device was lost. And in the end, we have David's flat statement "Genesis doesn't work" from STIII. The project was a failure and absolutely nothing in subsequent canon demonstrates that any attempt to recreate Genesis was ever made.
Mind you, if it was downloaded it may have been transported down to Regula with Carol, David & that guy who got vapourised...
Sorry, but "may have been transported" does not count as evidence. Only supposition.
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Darth Wong
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Post by Darth Wong »

beyond hope wrote:
The biggest Fed problem with superweapons is the delivery system, ie- the ships. It's like using a rowboat to deliver a WMD to your enemy when he has ICBM's.
Two solutions to that occur to me. The first would be terror attacks using non-military ships. Of course, it will only be possible if the Empire allows continued civilian shipping into their occupied areas from the outside. The other option would be warp-capable missiles like the Cardassian juggernaut, and lots of them (forgoing new shipbuilding completely as the Federation wouldn't be taking back territory they lost to the Empire any time soon.) Depending on how expensive phase cloaks are, maybe have the things cloaked until just before they reach the target as well.
Warp-capable ships take decades to cover distances that hyperdrive-equipped vessels cover in hours. The SW civilization is so thinly dispersed over its galaxy that a ship would be lucky to encounter a civilized planet before running out of fuel. It doesn't matter whether the Empire allows civilian traffic in; a warp-driven ship is the rowboat in my analogy.
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DocHorror
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Post by DocHorror »

Quote:
Mind you, if it was downloaded it may have been transported down to Regula with Carol, David & that guy who got vapourised...


Sorry, but "may have been transported" does not count as evidence. Only supposition.
I wasn't proposing it as evidence, only as a possibility...
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beyond hope
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Post by beyond hope »

Darth Wong wrote:
beyond hope wrote:
The biggest Fed problem with superweapons is the delivery system, ie- the ships. It's like using a rowboat to deliver a WMD to your enemy when he has ICBM's.
Two solutions to that occur to me. The first would be terror attacks using non-military ships. Of course, it will only be possible if the Empire allows continued civilian shipping into their occupied areas from the outside. The other option would be warp-capable missiles like the Cardassian juggernaut, and lots of them (forgoing new shipbuilding completely as the Federation wouldn't be taking back territory they lost to the Empire any time soon.) Depending on how expensive phase cloaks are, maybe have the things cloaked until just before they reach the target as well.
Warp-capable ships take decades to cover distances that hyperdrive-equipped vessels cover in hours. The SW civilization is so thinly dispersed over its galaxy that a ship would be lucky to encounter a civilized planet before running out of fuel. It doesn't matter whether the Empire allows civilian traffic in; a warp-driven ship is the rowboat in my analogy.
I wasn't giving the Federation credit for being able to even reach the SW galaxy: the only way I can possibly see that happening is in a one-sided contest where the Feds know the Empire is there and where the wormhole/gate/whatever is and the Empire know neither. That would mean the only place that Starfleet would realistically be using weapons of mass destruction is on it's own turf: warp is still far inferior to hyperdrive in that event, but the travel times are more workable (weeks or months rather than years.) I can only see superweapons playing two roles for the Federation. One would be possibly slowing an Imperial advance long enough to get refugee ships out. The other would be destroying their own worlds behind them as the interstellar equivalent of poisoning the well before retreating.
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman
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Post by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman »

Sir Sirius wrote:The Enterprise had the schematics for the Genesis device in ST II and it survived.
IIRC the Enterprise only had the Genesis project proposal.
Sir Sirius wrote: Besides it propably got them from Starfleet in the first place and it would have been pretty weird for the Marcus's to work all that time on the Genesis device and never report anything of their work to the UFP or Starfleet, especially since Starfleet was involved in the project.
Even though we assume David Marcus reported to regularly to UFP, it doesn't mean he gave out all the tech readouts and schematics. The report could had been merely project updates, progress reports, etc.
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Post by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman »

Sorry, mistyped.

Sir Sirius wrote:The Enterprise had the schematics for the Genesis device in ST II and it survived.
IIRC the Enterprise only had the Genesis project proposal.
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