How extensively did the Dominion build up the Cardassian Empire?

[FaxModem1]

Following the smacking down that the Klingon Empire and the Maquis did to the Cardassian Union in season 4 of DS9, the Cardassians needed a lot of help rebuilding, especially as the Industrial Replicators that were to go to them went to the Maquis thanks to Eddington. Dukat made a secret deal and negotiated membership into the Dominion in exchange for getting rid of their enemies and installing Dukat as leader.

So, just how much help did the Cardassians receive from the Dominion? We know that this was in the form of convoys that went through the wormhole. So how much of this was transported, and how much was made by local manufacturing?

This is probably not possible to answer, but one of the key things of the Dominion war was that for a majority of the war, the Dominion were out-manufacturing the Federation in war materials.

Discuss

[Eternal_Freedom]

They must have brought in a lot of equipment that they then used to build infrastructure in the Cardassian Empire - as you pointed out, they were severely beaten by the Klingons but in, what, six months, they managed to build up enough to seriously hurt the Klingons and the Federation.

My geuss is the convoys brought in anything specialised, like industrial replicators, parts for same, anything they wouldn't be able to immediately build in situ. The Cardassians have the raw material ready to go. I think the initial convoys would be stuff for resource extraction and processing, then shipbuilding and so forth.

[Q99]

I figure they got've build up some shipyards, probably a bunch of Industrial Replicators, way more than the Federation gave (dozens, perhaps)- this is a huge proxy war safely away from the Dominion's doorstep, heavily funding it makes a lot of sense.

[Gandalf]

I imagine that one of the most important things the Dominion brought in was administration. The Cardassian Union seemed to be crazy corrupt, like a stereotype of an Eastern European kleptocracy. Every Gul is political and gets his cut of local activities.

With a reconstruction effort headed by the Vorta and presumably using a combination of Jem' Hadar and perhaps automation, this ceases to be a problem. Cardassia's military industrial complex can be revitalised, and put a space chicken in every pot and a hover car in every garage. Meanwhile, the Dominion builds what I assume are modular ships in a pattern they've presumably been doing for millennia. The Dominion is ten thousand years old and the Jem' Hadar have been at their front line for two thousand years, so they've had a lot of time to perfect the war machine.

[Captain Seafort]

They must have brought in a lot of equipment that they then used to build infrastructure in the Cardassian Empire - as you pointed out, they were severely beaten by the Klingons but in, what, six months, they managed to build up enough to seriously hurt the Klingons and the Federation.

They also managed to build up Cardassia itself (whether just Prime and its orbit or the entire system) into an industrial base strong enough to pose a long-term threat to the entire quadrant - hence the allies pushing on to assault it directly instead of just establishing a blockade in WYLB.

[Shroom Man 777]

Man imagine huge Dominion troop transports with those Jem'Hadars crammed in the corridors and barracks... AND atomized in the transporter buffers of whatever, so the first wave would be of these troops who were just suspended in a disassembled state for who knows how long! Before the non-disassembled-storage troops are deployed!

[Sea Skimmer]

That sounds like an excellent plan, but the transporters seem to consume considerable power, so they should also be towing a battery barge to power them even when the life support system on the ship is cranked up for all those troops. That means the barge can hold more banks of transporter pattern buffers too. Sure 20% of them will decay past use in transit, but you wouldn't have had the other 80% of the troops at all otherwise!

I suspect the threat of Cardassia had less to do with its absolute strength then with the fact that none of the Gamma Quadrant powers really seems to be prepared for any kind of long war as doctrine, and they were badly hoping to win this one quickly before they were forced into really large scale mobilizations. As in they were trying to win with the fleets they had, and not literally need to build new ones. The ability of Cardassia Prime to build anything at all is a disproportionate threat of the alliance's losses were exceeding production as soon as the war began. Something I would assume is true, or else they would have just launched a Starship Troopers win blitz on Cardassia out of hand. The Breen raid on Earth also would have been a factor in all planning, and thus the vulnerability of Federation shipyards to total nuke it space to space destruction. As long as the Dominion could repair warp capable spacecraft this threat remains, no matter the balance of ship to ship power.

[Shroom Man 777]

That sounds like an excellent plan, but the transporters seem to consume considerable power, so they should also be towing a battery barge to power them even when the life support system on the ship is cranked up for all those troops. That means the barge can hold more banks of transporter pattern buffers too. Sure 20% of them will decay past use in transit, but you wouldn't have had the other 80% of the troops at all otherwise!

The huge troopship could itself be unshielded or low-shielded and tugged by a vessel that has the Warp drive. So the troopship just has sublight maneuvering and landing-optimized stuffs. And bays for parasite craft...

The non-buffered troops... let's hope Jem'Hadar reptilian physiologies also mean that they have lesser nutritional and even atmospheric needs when in dormant phases? Their white drug-juices might also be useful for jump-starting them for combat! In transit they can be in dormant near-hibernation mode, perhaps pumped with sedatives even! Then when they're about to be dropped, they can get roided up!

[FedRebel]

So, just how much help did the Cardassians receive from the Dominion? We know that this was in the form of convoys that went through the wormhole. So how much of this was transported, and how much was made by local manufacturing?

Majority was to serve the Dominion, the Cardassians likely got aided up to pre Federation-Cardassian war standards in terms of infrastructure and humanitarian aid (infrastructure was really to serve Dominion interests, humanitarian aid was only adequate to foster stability of Dukat's regime.)

This is probably not possible to answer, but one of the key things of the Dominion war was that for a majority of the war, the Dominion were out-manufacturing the Federation in war materials.

Because the Dominion put themselves first, the Cardassians were just rubes. The Dominion required a beachhead in the AQ, the wormhole was a bottle neck so they required a local industrial base and infrastructure to co-op.

As Damar came to realize, the Dominion was only using Cardassia, not uplifting it....and the Cardassians were quickly outliving their usefulness.

Overall the end of the war rendered any aid...beyond moot, as the Cardassians were nearly massacred into extinction by the Jem'Hadar

[Lord Revan]

I imagine that one of the most important things the Dominion brought in was administration. The Cardassian Union seemed to be crazy corrupt, like a stereotype of an Eastern European kleptocracy. Every Gul is political and gets his cut of local activities.

The thing is that "Gul" is the cardassian version of "captain/colonel" that Dukat chose to use out of sentimential reasons, "Legate" seems to the cardie version of "admiral/general", it seems like the major problem with Cardassian Union is that it's (ironically?) not very united and that pretty much every (senior) cardassian officer is more conserned about their own political status and maintaining that status by what ever means they can so the govermental hierarchy of the Cardassian Union is like some unholy bastard child of the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star Empire, with constant internal conflict from the klingons and the backstabbing and paranoia from the Romulans, it wouldn't surprice me at all if the Obsidian Order was the only thing keeping the Cardassian Union from collapsing on itself due to the infighting. So I'd say a good deal of Cardassia's problems were self-inflicted due to their govermental officials trying to set a new record for how inefficient and corrupt their goverment can be while still technically working.

[Q99]

I'm guessing the Cardassians might've been more unified/smoother pre-war with the Federation, but when things went south, a lot of their better (or at least more patriotic) officers likely died and there was more every-cardassian-for-themselves mentality.

My bet is they were in an upswing and basically thought they were stronger than they were due to some lucky windfalls and the up and comers at that point were more focused on riding that to power than noticing how fragile they really were, til they broke it against the Federation.

[Lord Revan]

I'm guessing the Cardassians might've been more unified/smoother pre-war with the Federation, but when things went south, a lot of their better (or at least more patriotic) officers likely died and there was more every-cardassian-for-themselves mentality.

My bet is they were in an upswing and basically thought they were stronger than they were due to some lucky windfalls and the up and comers at that point were more focused on riding that to power than noticing how fragile they really were, til they broke it against the Federation.

Possibly though it was implied that Cardassian expansion and the war with the Federation that resulted at least partly from Cardassian Union having some major logistical issues.

That said it doesn't really counterdict that they were in a temporary upswing and thought they could do quick "smash and grab" of Federation systems near the border forgetting that "peace" doesn't mean "weak" or "timid" and when UFP response to the Cardassian aggression was not "not the face!" but rather "Lock phasers on target and fire!" the Cardassian logistical network buckled as it wasn't really meant for a war against a power that was a rough equal (let alone a superior one like the Federation) and only because the Federation was distracted elsewhere did Cardassians get at all favorble terms at end and I suspect that Guls and Legates that were talented military leaders and/or administrators but weren't as good in the political arena got the blame for the Cardassian defeat and got demoted to irrelevance or worse after the war with the Federation making the logistical issues they all ready had that much worse as the people in charge weren't there because of their talents of fixing the logistical issues but rather their talents of playing the game of thrones.

[Q99]

Here's a thought- I bet there was a strong patronage system and the Cardassians gave out new high positions like Guls as a way to satisfy their ambitious people and reward supporters, but they needed new territory for those titles to mean anything, so it pushed them to expand.

[Lord Revan]

It's possible it really depends on how Cardassian military ranks and govermental positions were granted which is something that was not really explained in any detail IIRC in canon sources. That said it was strongly implied if not outright stated that Cardassian expansion was at least partly due to resource shortages.

[Tribble]

Wasn't the Cardassian military takeover relatively recent? IIRC Madred grew up during the period when the old government was unable to adequately feed its citizens (for reasons which were never fully explained).

[Lord Revan]

Wasn't the Cardassian military takeover relatively recent? IIRC Madred grew up during the period when the old government was unable to adequately feed its citizens (for reasons which were never fully explained).

True but "recent" is a relative term, 20 years could be considered "recent" depending on your point of view and that's more then enough for Cardassia to expand outward and IIRC the military takeover wasn't so much replacing a pre-existing goverment rather reducing the importance of civilian portion of the goverment to practical irrelevance.

Also it doesn't mean the pre-military takeover Cardassia was a insular pacifist paradise, they still could have been (if fact probably were) a militaristic and expansionist state with massive miss-management issues (implied with resource shortages).

[FireNexus]

That sounds like an excellent plan, but the transporters seem to consume considerable power, so they should also be towing a battery barge to power them even when the life support system on the ship is cranked up for all those troops. That means the barge can hold more banks of transporter pattern buffers too. Sure 20% of them will decay past use in transit, but you wouldn't have had the other 80% of the troops at all otherwise!

The huge troopship could itself be unshielded or low-shielded and tugged by a vessel that has the Warp drive. So the troopship just has sublight maneuvering and landing-optimized stuffs. And bays for parasite craft...

The non-buffered troops... let's hope Jem'Hadar reptilian physiologies also mean that they have lesser nutritional and even atmospheric needs when in dormant phases? Their white drug-juices might also be useful for jump-starting them for combat! In transit they can be in dormant near-hibernation mode, perhaps pumped with sedatives even! Then when they're about to be dropped, they can get roided up!

I mean, they have engines which explicitly work by warping space, and at least one technology has a failure mode which involves freezing time in the vicinity with no excess energy consumption. It's only a minor engineering challenge at that point to build a frozen-time suspended animation transport. Roid them up, stuff them to bursting into a transporter, fill every available millimeter with Jem Hadar and minimal life support, send them aT your enemies, unfreeze local time right as they enter transporter range then lizard spam the fuck out of your opponents.

Star Trek warfare should be way cooler than it actually is.

[Shroom Man 777]

and at least one technology has a failure mode which involves freezing time in the vicinity with no excess energy consumption

What?

Man, so we can have ALL of these, cryo-frozen lizards, transporter-buffered lizards, time-frozen lizards AND lizards that are just in lizard-hibernation... and ALL of them are juiced to the gills!

[FireNexus]

and at least one technology has a failure mode which involves freezing time in the vicinity with no excess energy consumption

What?

Man, so we can have ALL of these, cryo-frozen lizards, transporter-buffered lizards, time-frozen lizards AND lizards that are just in lizard-hibernation... and ALL of them are juiced to the gills!

Hell fucking yeah. Romulan singularity warp drives can fail into time-freeze mode. And they can freeze at least a nearby starship, possibly but not definitely with a synchronized warp field. That weird singularity parasite instigated it, but they never specified that it was necessary for the effect.

That's get some high as shit lizards and invade the fuck out of some space hippies.