Star Wars Peer Power

[Batman]

By all means tell me where, given 4 figure ship numbers of any class were a big deal during the Dominion War.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Indeed. Even if Mike did estimate that, his website is hardly a canon source. In the Dominion War battles, we never see more than ten of so Galaxys at once, even for major do-or-die battles like retaking DS9.

IIRC Mike estimated the Federation might have somewhere between 5,000 and maybe ten thousand ships of all classes. Galaxys making up 20-40% of the entire fleet is frankly laughable. Now Excelsiors or Mirandas being that common, that I could see. But not Galaxys, since by the Dominion War they had only been in production for perhaps ten years. If the Feds could build 200 Galaxys a year then it taking Starfleet a year to recover from losing 39 ships at Wolf 359 would make zero sense.

[Formless]

I thought that Mike Wong had estimated that on his website

BWUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Its been a while since you've read Mike's site, hasn't it? Assuming that you've ever read it, I mean. His estimate was that it takes 2 years to make a Galaxy Class Starship, at best, possibly twice that much time since it took 13 years to build the first 3. And the DS9 technical manual said that the many GSC's that were expedited for the Dominion War were fielded with over 30% of their internal volume unfinished (probably all those holodecks, science facilities, and other civilian crap that wasn't relevant to a battleship). 2000 GSC's is the kind of gross overestimation that Mike would take one look at and mock you for suggesting. That's not even a joke. By his estimates, 2000 ships could represent up to half or more of all Starfleet vessels, if not the entire fleet depending on how generous he was feeling at a given moment; and they certainly aren't all going to be Galaxy class since that's one of the largest and most expensive ship classes in the Federation.

Feel free do disagree with him; but I suggest you don't quote Mike on anything where you can't find the source, because there are those of us who know exactly where to look. Every time.

[Rhadamantus]

Yes, nevermind that is way too high.

[Rhadamantus]

The Cardassian Union produces approximately 80 capital ships per year", 80 Galors= 1 ISD, so the Cardassians has 20 ISD equivalents. The whole Alpha Sector should have a hundred or so.

[Formless]

Keep in mind, though, that we don't know the exact service lifetime of a Galor (Mike assumed 20 years, but that's not canon, just an assumption). And keep in mind also that it is canon that Cardassian vessels are technologically inferior to Federation ones (for instance, they famously have that one forward firing phaser as their primary weapon compared to a Federation vessel's many strips that can target multiple ships at a time); so "equivalent to a Star Destroyer" is only relative to their volume and presumably mass. An Intrepid like Voyager or the Bellerophon is just slightly longer than a Galor, but probably could consistently win a one on one engagement against a Galor due to the technological disparity. The Cardassians are a threat because of their militarism and design philosophy and willingness to make ships that are supposed to be warships, after all, but when the Federation does make a purpose built warship you get the Defiant: a gunboat that takes on ships three times her size and wins.

[Rhadamantus]

Yes, but that if anything increases the Feddies realitive strength.

[Formless]

Not really, no. The logic of that statement doesn't flow properly from its assumptions. The Federation is what it is, and it just happens to be more powerful than the Cardassians. Its a lot more powerful than a lot of factions, both in its own universe and other franchises like, say, Battletech. It's a statement of how weak the Cardassians are in relation to the Federation, no more or less. The Bajorans were weaker than either during the occupation of Bajor. But remember that a war with the Cardassians was still costly enough for the Federation that they were still willing to throw the Maquis colonies under a bus in an attempt to avoid a future war (which failed once the Dominion allied with the Cardies). Their fleets still number in the low thousands, their ships are still primarily built for exploration and defense rather than war, the Defiant class is still new and uses an uncommon phaser variant in the fleet, and the Federation still hates going to war even if the alternatives hurt their own citizens (again, see the Maquis situation). The fact that Starfleet ships find Galor class ships threatening at all shows that despite the technological advantages of the Federation, they aren't using their technology to its full potential in military applications; and that is explained completely by the philosophy and culture of the Federation.

Now, the Empire on the other hand is quite militaristic just like the Cardassians, so even if we have Q flatten out the power output advantage and other technological edges the Empire has over the Federation (i.e. hyperdrive speeds), the Empire is still at a huge advantage in readiness: larger dedicated military industrial capacity; more dedicated warships (since they have no need for explorers and prefer probe droids for survey and scouting purposes); an emphasis on making the fullest use of their technology for military endeavors (compare with the Borg, who are the only power who uses tractor beams as a main weapon for taking down shields and breaking enemy ships in half: the Federation would see no need to develop their tractor beam technology in that direction even if they could, but the Empire is constantly developing new weapons technology like cloaking devices, ion canons, and superweapons); better automation (whereas Data was unique, the CIS fought an entire war using droids roughly as sophisticated as him); an actual surface military with experience in full scale invasions, an advantage which both the Dominion and the Klingons had over the Federation throughout DS9; a willingness to use cloned soldiers to reinforce their ranks (the Federation has similar technology, yet Riker once gunned down his own nearly completed clone without hesitation in disgust that it was created without his permission, which says a lot about Starfleet attitudes towards cloning); and a competent military culture with tons of tactical experience in war. Remember that Trek's own characters repeatedly emphasized the importance of experienced and talented commanders, always with the implication that there is a shortage of competent command officers and captains in Starfleet, particularly after the Borg assimilated or killed lots of their personnel at Wolf 359 (but even before then they were saying this).

So if we assume that the Empire is brought down to rough parity with the Federation on power output and speed, we know the most likely outcome because DS9 spelled it out for us. The Dominion was that same kind of threat, and the show made a big deal out of making sure the Wormhole was closed off to the Dominion first with the minefield and then later with the intervention of the Prophets. Without that, the Dominion didn't have its full industrial capacity including, I should add, what was presumably a much larger cloning operation for Jem-Hadar soldiers and Vorta staff than what they were able to set up in Cardassian space on short notice. That was the one reason that the war could be won by the Federation, and even then the Federation needed the Romulans-- an enemy of the Federation most of the time-- and the Klingons-- an always unreliable ally, shown in basically any Klingon episode but particularly when Chancellor Gowron took over his fleets and promptly started deliberately wasting ships and troops just to dishonor Martok (prompting Worf to eventually kill Gowron in a duel to the death just to end the sheer dangerous idiocy of it all). They weren't facing the Dominon on the Dominion's preferred terms, and just to prove that the difficulty in defeating them had nothing to do with their Cardassian allies remember that the Dominion eventually allied with the technologically superior Breen out of dissatisfaction with the Cardies. It took many circumstantial factors for the Federation to win, and those factors cannot be relied upon because Starfleet never seems to rely upon them when it comes to the Borg. They know better. We know better. Strategic advantages are much harder to overcome than tactical advantages.

[SilverDragonRed]

Is the Globular Empire still able to traverse its own territory in a day?

[Rhadamantus]

Yes.

[Esquire]

Then for any reasonably-equivalent territory they're much, much faster than Federation ships, with the crushing strategic superiority that implies. Alternatively, if they're not that fast, the whole rationale behind massive Imperial undermilitarization falls apart and we can expect more Star Destroyers by the same ratio as they're slower with respect to their own territory than they are in canon. Either way, decisive Imperial victory.

[Rhadamantus]

If the Globular cluster is 40ish ly across, then they'd have FTL of 15,000 c

[Eternal_Freedom]

Which is still 3-5 times faster than we see from ST vessels, so they will definitely still have a decisive speed advantage at FTL.

There is also the fact that ST ships seem to be a lot more vulnerable to having their warp drives knocked off-line by battle damage, something I can only recall happening once in SW (the Royal Yacht in TPM, and then it was only damaged, not outright disabled).

[Formless]

Moreover, the Federation has issues with sustaining high warp. We see this most prominently in Best of Both Worlds where the Enterprise could only sustain speeds of warp 9 and higher for a matter of a few hours before their engines overheated and burned out, something which was portrayed as potentially dangerous for the ship and her crew. Thus, even though the Borg cube was traveling just under the Enterprise's top speed, in both that episode and Q Who? they were consistently able to outrun the Enterprise in every engagement even without engaging transwarp because their engines had far superior endurance. So speed isn't the only limitation keeping Federation ships from crossing from one end of their own space to another. Face it, in Star Trek any civilization that has transwarp or otherwise superior FTL is depicted as having a major strategic advantage over any civilization that doesn't have it. The Borg can afford to be minimalist and patient in their attacks on the Federation because there is no way for Starfleet to launch a counterattack of any kind. Likewise the Voth could casually go out and pick up Voyager despite being half a quadrant away because their gigantic city-ship (which dwarfed Borg cubes) was transwarp capable. There is a reason that the Federation studied transwarp even before Voyager got stuck in the Delta Quadrant and began studying Quantum Slipstream drive (a tech that they could almost reverse engineer if it weren't for safety issues) and stealing Borg Transwarp coils. Screw cloaking technology, if Starfleet ever wanted to really get an edge over the Romulans they would know that speed would be the most decisive advantage they could get if only they could master the technology. After all, the Romulans were based in the Beta quadrant despite being considered an Alpha quadrant power. That's almost certainly why they were experimenting with Transwarp tech in the Kirk-era movies.

[Simon_Jester]

Not that I disagree at all, but could you remind me where we see Romulans experimenting with transwarp in the Kirk-era movies? Except, maybe, for Star Trek V, I can't remember seeing the Romulans at all...

[Elheru Aran]

Not that I disagree at all, but could you remind me where we see Romulans experimenting with transwarp in the Kirk-era movies? Except, maybe, for Star Trek V, I can't remember seeing the Romulans at all...

I think by 'they' he means Starfleet. See the Excelsior, specifically.

[Batman]

That's how I read it too.

[Formless]

Yes, I was talking about the Excelsior. Sorry about that-- there should have been an antecedent for "they," for those who haven't seen the original six Trek films recently.

[FedRebel]

As a hypothetical, since the actual Empire vs AQ outcome is obvious, what would happen if the Empire was a peer power to the Feddies?
If you turn their galaxy into a globular cluster (such as Omega Centauri), then they'd have about 10 million stars against the AQ's 12 million, and a roughly comparable population if you downsize the ecumenopoli. If we make it so hyperdrive can cross the 40ly radius in a couple days, FTL speeds are around 5000c, which is pretty similar. If we downsize the firepower and power generation specs by 5 or 6 orders of magnitudes, a GCS can pose a challenge to a ISD. This setting wouldn't change the Imperial strategic calculus, and so they'd basically be the Empire of the Thrawn Trilogy. If we take this mini-Empire and connect it to the Federation, what would the more equal fight look like

Still a win for the Empire, only difference being that temporary alliances would be more marketable to the Empire in order to prevent another Grand Alliance like the Dominion War.

Thing is though, an Imperator is a (Star) "Destroyer" in the classic Naval sense, the Galaxy is The Federation's..."Battleship" (for lack of better term.) More or less, an Imperator in this scenario would be comparable to a Borg Cube, and we all know the universal assessment that 2 Cubes would wipe the floor with all of Starfleet.

Let's say that the Federation rallies the Grand Alliance together to fight the Empire, typical engagements would be Imperial victories because of volume of fire from 60 anti ship batteries per Imperator (same firepower as a phaser.) It'd take a Fleet to match a Star Destroyer Squadron in volume of fire.

Only shot would be the Klingons and Romulans to use ambush cloaking tactics against lone Imperial vessels or smaller ships, engaging only when they have the advantage.

Aside from that, withdraw everything to Sector 001, bait the Empire with human history, gamble on their curiosity to pursue evidence of the species origins (and call the Dominion.) Kilingons and Romulans would be cloaked, when the main Imperial Navy engages the Federation/Cardassian/everybody in the AQ fleet, the cloaks strike from behind.

Massive attrition on all sides, Imperial forces having (at parity) volume of fire and armor advantages. By the time Federation lines start to break the Dominion arrives, Super Battleships ram Executor's and swamp the remaining elements of the Imperial Navy.

All sides are devastated militarily, the war ends in a draw.

.....BUT....That's only provided that the Federation and Empire sees themselves as enemies, provided a scenario of technological parity. The upper echelons of Starfleet are...sympathetic to a more 'military' mindset, Section 31 and elements of the Federation Council do have moral compass' that are comparable to the Empire's. And given how close Leyton came to exercising a coup without external support...The Empire could install a friendly regime quite expeditiously.

We could see the Federation become a client state that the Empire shapes into a mirror image of itself (enough "evil Admirals" to fill Moff ranks, etc.) Publicly it'd be seen as a 'special relationship', Starfleet starts equipping with KDY and Sienar products, while Utopia Planetia takes the luxury liner market by storm (but finer print sees Genesis and Starbase 324 research carted off to The Maw.)

Given that the UFP and the Romulans apparently returned to their Cold War after the Dominion War, engineering a war would be easy. As things progress we'd be looking at a Federation-Imperial alliance carving up the AQ. In the short-term, extensive "peacekeeping" zones would define acquired territory, in the long-term the Federation becomes an indistinguishable extension of the Empire and the whole quadrant is only mapped as "imperial Space" with Earth being the 'Constantinople' to Coruscant's 'Roma'.

^Again tech is all at parity, Imperial warships merit "Volume of Fire" and metalic armor over their Alpha Quadrant equivalents.

[The Romulan Republic]

Still a win for the Empire, only difference being that temporary alliances would be more marketable to the Empire in order to prevent another Grand Alliance like the Dominion War.

Thing is though, an Imperator is a (Star) "Destroyer" in the classic Naval sense, the Galaxy is The Federation's..."Battleship" (for lack of better term.) More or less, an Imperator in this scenario would be comparable to a Borg Cube, and we all know the universal assessment that 2 Cubes would wipe the floor with all of Starfleet.

Hmmm...

I don't know that two Borg Cubes would cut it if Star Fleet's forces were at more Dominion War levels, or if it would be enough under any circumstances in the Voyager era or after. I think the Federation was catching up to the Borg, tech.-wise (stupid or not, look at how much better Voyager performed in canon against Borg ships than the fleet at Wolf 359 or the Battle of Sector 001).

Also, I know its a tired old debate and unlikely to be resolved any time soon, but I don't buy the destroyer classification for ISDs. Sure, they're called destroyers, but by that measure, turbolasers are actually lasers, and try saying that in a vs. debate. I tend to favour ISDs as cruisers myself (though definitely not battleships), at least insofar as you can even apply old Earth naval terminology to a space fleet.

Finally, the OP seems to presuppose that an ISD is comparable to a Galaxy class ship in this scenario, in which case, no, one of them could not wipe out a substantial Federation fleet. It might still favour the Empire, since the Galaxy class is the Federation's biggest ship, as I recall, while an ISD is definitely not the Empire's biggest ship (though would the mini-Empire have the bigger ships in this scenario?). However, it would not be as lop-sided as you say in this scenario.

Let's say that the Federation rallies the Grand Alliance together to fight the Empire, typical engagements would be Imperial victories because of volume of fire from 60 anti ship batteries per Imperator (same firepower as a phaser.) It'd take a Fleet to match a Star Destroyer Squadron in volume of fire.

See above.

Only shot would be the Klingons and Romulans to use ambush cloaking tactics against lone Imperial vessels or smaller ships, engaging only when they have the advantage.

This is a potentially valid approach. Another option would be behind the lines raiding, forcing the Empire to play defence while their infrastructure is crippled (the Alliance made good use of such raiding tactics in the Dominion War).

Aside from that, withdraw everything to Sector 001, bait the Empire with human history, gamble on their curiosity to pursue evidence of the species origins (and call the Dominion.) Kilingons and Romulans would be cloaked, when the main Imperial Navy engages the Federation/Cardassian/everybody in the AQ fleet, the cloaks strike from behind.

Catching the enemy in a pincer with cloaks could be an option, presuming the Imperial forces cannot detect cloaked ships.

Massive attrition on all sides, Imperial forces having (at parity) volume of fire and armor advantages. By the time Federation lines start to break the Dominion arrives, Super Battleships ram Executor's and swamp the remaining elements of the Imperial Navy.

All sides are devastated militarily, the war ends in a draw.

Or never occurs, because if this Empire is dealing with a lot of internal crime/rebels, like the canon Empire, they may not want to overextend themselves and lose a significant chunk of their fleet fighting an enemy who can at least seriously bloody them, even if they lose.

On the other hand, of course, the Empire might see a foreign war as a way to rally the populace and justify a bigger military build up and more oppression at home.

.....BUT....That's only provided that the Federation and Empire sees themselves as enemies, provided a scenario of technological parity. The upper echelons of Starfleet are...sympathetic to a more 'military' mindset, Section 31 and elements of the Federation Council do have moral compass' that are comparable to the Empire's. And given how close Leyton came to exercising a coup without external support...The Empire could install a friendly regime quite expeditiously.

Not really.

Their are some, some individuals in the higher levels of the Federation who have more militaristic and authoritarian mindsets, but we've also seen that their are prominent officers in Starfleet who will defy them (exactly why Leyton's coup failed).

At most, they could incite a Federation civil war and take advantage of that. Smoothly installing a puppet government? I don't think so.

Also, Section 31 may be brutal, but they are brutal in the name of the Federation. That does not mean they will be susceptible to serving a foreign authoritarian regime. Quite the opposite, I suspect.

We could see the Federation become a client state that the Empire shapes into a mirror image of itself (enough "evil Admirals" to fill Moff ranks, etc.) Publicly it'd be seen as a 'special relationship', Starfleet starts equipping with KDY and Sienar products, while Utopia Planetia takes the luxury liner market by storm (but finer print sees Genesis and Starbase 324 research carted off to The Maw.)

Not without fighting a Federation Civil War, I suspect.

Given that the UFP and the Romulans apparently returned to their Cold War after the Dominion War, engineering a war would be easy. As things progress we'd be looking at a Federation-Imperial alliance carving up the AQ. In the short-term, extensive "peacekeeping" zones would define acquired territory, in the long-term the Federation becomes an indistinguishable extension of the Empire and the whole quadrant is only mapped as "imperial Space" with Earth being the 'Constantinople' to Coruscant's 'Roma'.

^Again tech is all at parity, Imperial warships merit "Volume of Fire" and metalic armor over their Alpha Quadrant equivalents.

Maybe a brilliant Imperial leadership could pull this off under the right circumstances, but probably with much more difficulty than you seem to think.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Doesn't that all describe the Cardassians and Dominion too, at least as much as it describes the Empire?

To which the Federation would lose. They only won because they had the Klingons, the Romulans AND Cardasssians behind them. And the wormhole aliens vapourised a large fleet of reinforcements.

Federation vs Dominion Foothold is a very quick loss for the Federation.

[The Romulan Republic]

Straight Federation vs. Dominion would realistically be a rapid loss, yes.

Federation and Klingons vs. Dominion was a much closer fight, though they likely still would have lost eventually had not the Prophets intervened.

Once the Romulans and (at the very end), the Cardassians joined in, well, we know what happened.

In a war with a greater power, the Federation's greatest advantage may be its ability to build a coalition. The Federation vs. the Empire/mini-Empire looks very different depending on weather we assume the Federation is alone, or allow for the Federation's usual skills in the realm of diplomacy.