If it had been made 10 years earlier, it would have starred Geordi you could have just gone with "look, they were doing a lot of coke back then."
As it stands, I'm not sure there is any explanation.
Also keep in mind that the colonists in question had no contact with the federation since the early days of warp travel and themselves have lost a lot of technology and have been living in a Fallout esque society since the crash. They barely understand what a phaser is or what a modern spaceship can do with weapons.
Maquis on the other hand do know what these weapons can do and how to avoid scanners and how to use guerrilla tactics to fight an invading force, these dopes would just stand there with sticks and get nuked from orbit.
As for Data, I think he logically values human lives over regulations. Also, who cares that he blew up an aqueduct? The entire place will be a smoldering crater in a week or two.
Those tricks worked great until the Cardassians actually went to hot war, and then they nuked the Maquis from orbit and killed all of them (at least, the ones on the ground, the ones in ships merely got to hear that their families were murdered)
They all died because the people that know better, like Eddington, convinced them they could win
Extremist take but I believe the Federation would have been entirely ethical to forcibly remove any children from those colonies as soon as tensions started getting hot, they all ended up dying for their parents' libertarian self sufficiency hardons
It wasn't the Cardassians that did the Maquis in, it was the Dominion.
Precisely. The Maquis were holding their own against the Cardassians, and by some accounts even gaining ground. The Cardassians couldn't send out their full military might and wipe out the colonists from orbit because that would break the demilitarized-zone treaty with the Federation and plunge them into a war they couldn't win. So the Maquis could use guerrilla tactics to chip away at the Cardassians, until holding on to the colonies became too expensive for the Cardassians compared to what it was worth. Basically the same thing Bajor successfully did. All that changed when the Dominion took over the Cardassians. Suddenly the Maquis were facing an enemy that was a lot more powerful, didn't care about the Federation treaty, and had no issues with sending a massive military force to wipe them all out. And that was the end of them.
Also keep in mind that the colonists in question had no contact with the federation since the early days of warp travel and themselves have lost a lot of technology and have been living in a Fallout esque society since the crash. They barely understand what a phaser is or what a modern spaceship can do with weapons.
Maquis on the other hand do know what these weapons can do and how to avoid scanners and how to use guerrilla tactics to fight an invading force, these dopes would just stand there with sticks and get nuked from orbit.
As for Data, I think he logically values human lives over regulations. Also, who cares that he blew up an aqueduct? The entire place will be a smoldering crater in a week or two.
Those tricks worked great until the Cardassians actually went to hot war, and then they nuked the Maquis from orbit and killed all of them (at least, the ones on the ground, the ones in ships merely got to hear that their families were murdered)
They all died because the people that know better, like Eddington, convinced them they could win
Extremist take but I believe the Federation would have been entirely ethical to forcibly remove any children from those colonies as soon as tensions started getting hot, they all ended up dying for their parents' libertarian self sufficiency hardons
It wasn't the Cardassians that did the Maquis in, it was the Dominion.
Precisely. The Maquis were holding their own against the Cardassians, and by some accounts even gaining ground. The Cardassians couldn't send out their full military might and wipe out the colonists from orbit because that would break the demilitarized-zone treaty with the Federation and plunge them into a war they couldn't win. So the Maquis could use guerrilla tactics to chip away at the Cardassians, until holding on to the colonies became too expensive for the Cardassians compared to what it was worth. Basically the same thing Bajor successfully did. All that changed when the Dominion took over the Cardassians. Suddenly the Maquis were facing an enemy that was a lot more powerful, didn't care about the Federation treaty, and had no issues with sending a massive military force to wipe them all out. And that was the end of them.
Kinda funny that the Maquis were so hostile toward the Federation when their strategy only worked when Cardassia had reason to fear Starfleet.
FrauCron is watching Voyager for the first time, and while i'm keeping my distance and my thoughts to myself, she watched Threshold yesterday. It's still as batshit as I remembered, but I'd forgotten how early in the show's run it was - it's mid-season 2. I'd assumed it was much later, just because the spectacular spider-barclay was in season 7 of TNG
FrauCron on the other hand, simply has so many questions about it afterwards, and any answer just begets further questions.
It's gonna be a long seven seasons.
Just point her to the forums and let her know that there are people here who will write for pages in response to any questions she may have about the physics of warp 10+ travel and the polymorphing into a lizard as a result.
Also keep in mind that the colonists in question had no contact with the federation since the early days of warp travel and themselves have lost a lot of technology and have been living in a Fallout esque society since the crash. They barely understand what a phaser is or what a modern spaceship can do with weapons.
Maquis on the other hand do know what these weapons can do and how to avoid scanners and how to use guerrilla tactics to fight an invading force, these dopes would just stand there with sticks and get nuked from orbit.
As for Data, I think he logically values human lives over regulations. Also, who cares that he blew up an aqueduct? The entire place will be a smoldering crater in a week or two.
Those tricks worked great until the Cardassians actually went to hot war, and then they nuked the Maquis from orbit and killed all of them (at least, the ones on the ground, the ones in ships merely got to hear that their families were murdered)
They all died because the people that know better, like Eddington, convinced them they could win
Extremist take but I believe the Federation would have been entirely ethical to forcibly remove any children from those colonies as soon as tensions started getting hot, they all ended up dying for their parents' libertarian self sufficiency hardons
It wasn't the Cardassians that did the Maquis in, it was the Dominion.
Precisely. The Maquis were holding their own against the Cardassians, and by some accounts even gaining ground. The Cardassians couldn't send out their full military might and wipe out the colonists from orbit because that would break the demilitarized-zone treaty with the Federation and plunge them into a war they couldn't win. So the Maquis could use guerrilla tactics to chip away at the Cardassians, until holding on to the colonies became too expensive for the Cardassians compared to what it was worth. Basically the same thing Bajor successfully did. All that changed when the Dominion took over the Cardassians. Suddenly the Maquis were facing an enemy that was a lot more powerful, didn't care about the Federation treaty, and had no issues with sending a massive military force to wipe them all out. And that was the end of them.
Kinda funny that the Maquis were so hostile toward the Federation when their strategy only worked when Cardassia had reason to fear Starfleet.
Almost like they are an analogy for many of the groups we've supported over the last several decades against their own governments or other larger powers.
+5
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The Maquis weren't winning against the Cardassians, they were holding their own in a shadow war where neither side was willing to be up-front that it existed for a long time. Even when the Maquis became openly known, the Cardassians still treated the situation as little more than a nuisance to twist for political benefit. The Maquis were only a problem for the local commanders; once the Cardassians were free to act openly against the Maquis because of Dominion backing, they wiped them all out in short order.
The Cardassians could've always wiped out the Maquis easily, it was just never in their unified political interest to do so.
+4
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
They were actually winning in the sense that if the status quo had remained, the both Cardassia and the Federation would've been forced to recognize them as an independent power. Over the long term it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't have carved out their own niche and made it even more painful to ever conquer. Sisko notwithstanding, the Federation was never going to forcibly oust them - at worst they would be left to their own devices, which is what led to the Maquis forming in the first place. Cardassia was weakened by the war with the Federation and were in such a bad state that there was enough political will to work out a peace treaty with Bajor and pay war reparations. All their bloviating aside, without the sheer force of the Dominion behind them, Cardassia was in no shape to subjugate the Maquis and would've been bled dry by any attempt to win an actual war.
"So kill them."
"What?"
"Destroy them. That's what you solids are good at, isn't it?"
"It's... really not that simple."
"I think you will find it is, now that you are part of the Dominion."
People who think the Cardassians (pre-Dominion) could just waltz in and wipe out the Maquis by force also overestimate the strength of the Cardassians. Which is easy to do because they were hidden behind wall after wall of secrecy - interstellar politics secrecy, demilitarized zone secrecy, central command secrecy, military secrecy, obsidian order secrecy, etc., - so we just see a vague threatening powerful block. When in reality they were dealing with social turmoil and protests so intense that their government literally collapsed from internal pressures alone over the run of DS9. (Again, like they're a metaphor for something in the real world.) We tend to gloss over that fact because the Cardassian Civilian Government lasted all of five minutes before the Klingons swooped in and set it ablaze and then Dukat sold off the pieces to the Dominion, but it's a major thing that happened. And getting back to the point, even without the Federation treaty holding them back, the Cardassians were in no shape to commit a massive military force to the Maquis when they had such major issues to deal with at home.
The ease with which the Klingons smashed their fleet once they decided they wanted to have a war suggests as much. I doubt even with the Obsidian Order giving them advanced warning, it wouldn't have done much. Cardassians always seemed to be more sneak attacks and tricks, not stand up fights.
Compared to the Romulans, who are much the same, but have the weapons to back it up.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
It's also important to remember that the war between the Cardassians and the Federation was still going on during at least season 1 of TNG. The Enterprise was not involved with it and it was not topic of discussion on the bridge, and when the Enterprise did end up on that side of the Federation, everyone involved was shocked at the conditions on Bajor, the state of the border colonies, the attitudes of the war veterans. The Federation just wasn't committed to the war the way the Cardassians were. The Cardassians weren't big enough to justify top tier starships with elite captains and crews.
Every story or glimpse of Cardassia Prime was a shit hole of starvation and desperation. Based on the taspar egg story from the guy in Chain of Command, this long predated the war, but following the war Cardassia went through five governments in four years and at least two of them were bloody transitions.
All things being equal, Cardassia is one of those trivial minor powers that the Federation or Klingons had an off-screen conflict with and who show up by reference more often than appearance. They became an A list faction because of the Maquis rebellion and the Bajoran wormhole. And even then, DS9 wasn't properly refitted to defend it's position until the Dominion started going kamikaze on Galaxy-class ships.
It's also important to remember that the war between the Cardassians and the Federation was still going on during at least season 1 of TNG. The Enterprise was not involved with it and it was not topic of discussion on the bridge, and when the Enterprise did end up on that side of the Federation, everyone involved was shocked at the conditions on Bajor, the state of the border colonies, the attitudes of the war veterans. The Federation just wasn't committed to the war the way the Cardassians were. The Cardassians weren't big enough to justify top tier starships with elite captains and crews.
Also also important to remember that the Federation only settled the war and agreed to the DMZ after the Battle of Wolf 359, when the Borg wiped out a major chunk of Starfleet.
So in retrospect it seems the Federation was so much more powerful than the Cardassians that they were content to spend the war committing the minimal resources needed to hold the line and wait it out while the Cardassians exhausted themselves futilely throwing everything they can at it. Then once the Cardassians were out of steam and the Federation still had most of its resources intact and unused, they'd be in a very strong position to either force an advantageous peace treaty on the Cardassians or, if they refused, wipe them out militarily with minimal effort. Except then the Borg showed up and wiped out Starfleet, and suddenly the Federation no longer had the power to pull off its plan or possibly even to hold the line anymore, and they were forced to negotiate with a much weaker hand than they expected and settle on much worse terms than they had planned.
Compared to the Romulans, who are much the same, but have the weapons to back it up.
It's too often glossed over in the shows - the Romulan D'deridex Warbird is twice the size of a Galaxy-class starship and has a black hole as a power source, and we frequently see them out in pairs or even trios on missions. The Romulan Empire had one hell of a fleet.
Which just makes what the movies did to them all that more shitty and stupid.
Richy on
+4
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
DS9 really dropped the ball when they got rid of their Romulan liaison officer after only two episodes. Didn't even make much sense settingwise. The Romulans give the Federation their prized strategic asset, the Feds install it into a pure warship with the caveat that it won't be used in the Alpha quadrant and that there will be a Romulan along to keep tabs on things, then... poof. I can only think that Berman harassed the actress off the show in record time.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
DS9 really dropped the ball when they got rid of their Romulan liaison officer after only two episodes. Didn't even make much sense settingwise. The Romulans give the Federation their prized strategic asset, the Feds install it into a pure warship with the caveat that it won't be used in the Alpha quadrant and that there will be a Romulan along to keep tabs on things, then... poof. I can only think that Berman harassed the actress off the show in record time.
While that is certainly a possibility, I think they were just out of stories to tell with her. She had a clear role to play in the first episode we saw her in, but then she had nothing to do story-wise. The DS9 character cast already included several alien characters with well-fleshed-out personalities and backstories and relationships, so she was redundant in that niche. The Dominion War already had players from the Federation, Bajorans, Klingons, Cardassians, Founders, Vorta, and Jem'Hadar, so placing yet another power in the spotlight would make it too crowded (hell, even bringing in the Breen was a major game-changer in the story and yet we don't have a single named Breen character). All that was left for her was to stand in the background on the Defiant and occasionally talk about the cloak. So they decided to just drop her.
I guess it could have been a nice touch to have an extra dress up in pointy ears and a Romulan uniform in the background of the Defiant, but ultimately it might just have been distracting.
0
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
DS9 really dropped the ball when they got rid of their Romulan liaison officer after only two episodes. Didn't even make much sense settingwise. The Romulans give the Federation their prized strategic asset, the Feds install it into a pure warship with the caveat that it won't be used in the Alpha quadrant and that there will be a Romulan along to keep tabs on things, then... poof. I can only think that Berman harassed the actress off the show in record time.
While that is certainly a possibility, I think they were just out of stories to tell with her. She had a clear role to play in the first episode we saw her in, but then she had nothing to do story-wise. The DS9 character cast already included several alien characters with well-fleshed-out personalities and backstories and relationships, so she was redundant in that niche. The Dominion War already had players from the Federation, Bajorans, Klingons, Cardassians, Founders, Vorta, and Jem'Hadar, so placing yet another power in the spotlight would make it too crowded (hell, even bringing in the Breen was a major game-changer in the story and yet we don't have a single named Breen character). All that was left for her was to stand in the background on the Defiant and occasionally talk about the cloak. So they decided to just drop her.
I guess it could have been a nice touch to have an extra dress up in pointy ears and a Romulan uniform in the background of the Defiant, but ultimately it might just have been distracting.
I absolutely disagree that they were out of stories to tell with her. Worf's parents were killed by Romulans. Romulan society hadn't been fleshed out at all at that point, they were a generically sneaky Empire with a Senate and some weird Roman action going on, at least in TOS. She was a military, and likely intelligence, asset of a closed off and antagonistic society stationed on the most important station in the Alpha quadrant. They could have had a Vulcan officer visit for an episode and do something there. There's absolutely heaps of stories that could be told. I do agree that it would have been pretty damn crowded though. DS9 built up the Ferengi, Bajorans, and Cardassians up from basically scratch; throwing the Romulans into the mix might have been just too much to handle. Lord knows that Nemesis, Trek '09 and Picard haven't exactly done the species any favors though.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
The Romulan story was pretty much: Evil Vulcans with emotions.
There may have been individual stories to tell like Sela, but as a species they had really run their course compared to the Cardassians and Klingons.
Picard actually did a lot to make them interesting again, with a warrior Nun society that always told the truth in a society of liars. Their entire life being so based around deception that their houses always had a maze(metaphorical or real) around them. Their paranoia about synthetic life so bad that they would allow the death of a huge chunk of their population to eradicate research into it.
Which is probably why the Zath vash did it, the one time they could discredit synthetic life research across the Alpha Quadrant without being blamed. The Destruction of Mars was a brilliant masterstroke, the only miscalculation was the Fed deciding to give up saving Romulans as well.
We know where the Romulans are going to end, Unification I&II laid the ground work and III showed it succeeding, but Picard actual gave them some depth. And a trio of fun Romulan Characters.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
+3
MsAnthropyThe Lady of Pain Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the RhythmThe City of FlowersRegistered Userregular
The Romulan story was pretty much: Evil Vulcans with emotions.
There may have been individual stories to tell like Sela, but as a species they had really run their course compared to the Cardassians and Klingons.
Picard actually did a lot to make them interesting again, with a warrior Nun society that always told the truth in a society of liars. Their entire life being so based around deception that their houses always had a maze(metaphorical or real) around them. Their paranoia about synthetic life so bad that they would allow the death of a huge chunk of their population to eradicate research into it.
Which is probably why the Zath vash did it, the one time they could discredit synthetic life research across the Alpha Quadrant without being blamed. The Destruction of Mars was a brilliant masterstroke, the only miscalculation was the Fed deciding to give up saving Romulans as well.
We know where the Romulans are going to end, Unification I&II laid the ground work and III showed it succeeding, but Picard actual gave them some depth. And a trio of fun Romulan Characters.
Boy does this remind me that I pretty much hate everything done with the Romulans post-DS9.
It's also important to remember that the war between the Cardassians and the Federation was still going on during at least season 1 of TNG. The Enterprise was not involved with it and it was not topic of discussion on the bridge, and when the Enterprise did end up on that side of the Federation, everyone involved was shocked at the conditions on Bajor, the state of the border colonies, the attitudes of the war veterans. The Federation just wasn't committed to the war the way the Cardassians were. The Cardassians weren't big enough to justify top tier starships with elite captains and crews.
Also also important to remember that the Federation only settled the war and agreed to the DMZ after the Battle of Wolf 359, when the Borg wiped out a major chunk of Starfleet.
So in retrospect it seems the Federation was so much more powerful than the Cardassians that they were content to spend the war committing the minimal resources needed to hold the line and wait it out while the Cardassians exhausted themselves futilely throwing everything they can at it. Then once the Cardassians were out of steam and the Federation still had most of its resources intact and unused, they'd be in a very strong position to either force an advantageous peace treaty on the Cardassians or, if they refused, wipe them out militarily with minimal effort. Except then the Borg showed up and wiped out Starfleet, and suddenly the Federation no longer had the power to pull off its plan or possibly even to hold the line anymore, and they were forced to negotiate with a much weaker hand than they expected and settle on much worse terms than they had planned.
I think the Federation still had the power to hold the line against the Cardassians - a rogue captain was more than they could deal with. But the Borg did change the math a lot - there was no telling how many more cubes could show up or when, and even one more and any bets were off.
+1
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Boy does this remind me I that I pretty much hate everything done with the Romulans post-DS9.
Hey c’mon, the part where (DISCO s3 spoiler if you haven’t seen it yet)
Michael Burnham’s mom travels a thousand years or whatever into the future and then gets accepted into, trained up fully in, and promoted into a public-facing leadership role within a secretive order of warrior monks of an alien species who usually train from childhood to master their (literally) superhuman strength and reflexes, not to mention their telepathic abilities, all in perhaps a handful of years, and just in time to arrive at Michael’s side
That was ...that... that was... sorry, I think I might have had a transient ischemic attack just now? Or I’m blocking out some kind of trauma? Was I saying something?
Unrelated: due to an unfortunate confluence of birth timing and the vagaries of public library inventory in Ronald Reagan’s America, Diane Duane’s Rihannsu will forever be My Romulans. May the Great Bird of the Galaxy have mercy upon my soul.
People who think the Cardassians (pre-Dominion) could just waltz in and wipe out the Maquis by force also overestimate the strength of the Cardassians. Which is easy to do because they were hidden behind wall after wall of secrecy - interstellar politics secrecy, demilitarized zone secrecy, central command secrecy, military secrecy, obsidian order secrecy, etc., - so we just see a vague threatening powerful block. When in reality they were dealing with social turmoil and protests so intense that their government literally collapsed from internal pressures alone over the run of DS9. (Again, like they're a metaphor for something in the real world.) We tend to gloss over that fact because the Cardassian Civilian Government lasted all of five minutes before the Klingons swooped in and set it ablaze and then Dukat sold off the pieces to the Dominion, but it's a major thing that happened. And getting back to the point, even without the Federation treaty holding them back, the Cardassians were in no shape to commit a massive military force to the Maquis when they had such major issues to deal with at home.
I disagree, they are small colonies on tiny worlds
The Cardassians lost quickly to the Klingons because of a massive gap in technology and the klingons being a much larger empire. The Cardassians are Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They aren't at parity with any of the major powers, but they are a REGIONAL power
ONE of their keldon class warships could have obliterated the colonies, the Maquis only had small federation fighters, fit for attacking Cardassian patrol craft or luring larger ships into traps in the badlands, not capable of a stand up fight against an actual military vessel
The Federation is at parity with the Klingons militarily, the issue is that unless its an existential threat, the Federation won't actually commit to a war. They send task forces to deal with the Cardassians, they don't call in all of their vessels and send 2000 starships, which they'd have to do to win like the Klingons did, because the Federation doesn't have a dedicated war fleet
The Federation going to for-real war disrupts the lives of millions (billions?) of people across the Federation in some way, and every ship has to pause its exploration, scientific, or diplomatic missions. From TNG and TOS we know that these missions aren't all just for-fun, a lot of them have real stakes with lives attached to them
The Klingons going to war is something their fleet is sitting around waiting to do at basically all times
override367 on
+3
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
People who think the Cardassians (pre-Dominion) could just waltz in and wipe out the Maquis by force also overestimate the strength of the Cardassians. Which is easy to do because they were hidden behind wall after wall of secrecy - interstellar politics secrecy, demilitarized zone secrecy, central command secrecy, military secrecy, obsidian order secrecy, etc., - so we just see a vague threatening powerful block. When in reality they were dealing with social turmoil and protests so intense that their government literally collapsed from internal pressures alone over the run of DS9. (Again, like they're a metaphor for something in the real world.) We tend to gloss over that fact because the Cardassian Civilian Government lasted all of five minutes before the Klingons swooped in and set it ablaze and then Dukat sold off the pieces to the Dominion, but it's a major thing that happened. And getting back to the point, even without the Federation treaty holding them back, the Cardassians were in no shape to commit a massive military force to the Maquis when they had such major issues to deal with at home.
I disagree, they are small colonies on tiny worlds
The Cardassians lost quickly to the Klingons because of a massive gap in technology and the klingons being a much larger empire. The Cardassians are Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They aren't at parity with any of the major powers, but they are a REGIONAL power
ONE of their keldon class warships could have obliterated the colonies, the Maquis only had small federation fighters, fit for attacking Cardassian patrol craft or luring larger ships into traps in the badlands, not capable of a stand up fight against an actual military vessel
The Federation is at parity with the Klingons militarily, the issue is that unless its an existential threat, the Federation won't actually commit to a war. They send task forces to deal with the Cardassians, they don't call in all of their vessels and send 2000 starships, which they'd have to do to win like the Klingons did, because the Federation doesn't have a dedicated war fleet
The Federation going to for-real war disrupts the lives of millions (billions?) of people across the Federation in some way, and every ship has to pause its exploration, scientific, or diplomatic missions. From TNG and TOS we know that these missions aren't all just for-fun, a lot of them have real stakes with lives attached to them
The Klingons going to war is something their fleet is sitting around waiting to do at basically all times
The Maquis didn't have to win an all-out war. They just had to bleed Cardassia dry.
While it's true that if Cardassia brought their full might to bear they could've held onto the worlds along the DMZ, even if they had the leeway to militarize that region of space, they would've had to expend so many resources that it would not have been worth it. Logical consistency aside, canonically Cardassia shared borders with or were near enough to be threatened by, at minimum: the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans. They also had Bajor and, likely, a number of other independent/rebellious systems to contend with.
The idea that you can just blow everything up and win should have been weaned out of us as a species by the last 50 years, if not the last 3,000 years, of history.
People who think the Cardassians (pre-Dominion) could just waltz in and wipe out the Maquis by force also overestimate the strength of the Cardassians. Which is easy to do because they were hidden behind wall after wall of secrecy - interstellar politics secrecy, demilitarized zone secrecy, central command secrecy, military secrecy, obsidian order secrecy, etc., - so we just see a vague threatening powerful block. When in reality they were dealing with social turmoil and protests so intense that their government literally collapsed from internal pressures alone over the run of DS9. (Again, like they're a metaphor for something in the real world.) We tend to gloss over that fact because the Cardassian Civilian Government lasted all of five minutes before the Klingons swooped in and set it ablaze and then Dukat sold off the pieces to the Dominion, but it's a major thing that happened. And getting back to the point, even without the Federation treaty holding them back, the Cardassians were in no shape to commit a massive military force to the Maquis when they had such major issues to deal with at home.
I disagree, they are small colonies on tiny worlds
The Cardassians lost quickly to the Klingons because of a massive gap in technology and the klingons being a much larger empire. The Cardassians are Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They aren't at parity with any of the major powers, but they are a REGIONAL power
ONE of their keldon class warships could have obliterated the colonies, the Maquis only had small federation fighters, fit for attacking Cardassian patrol craft or luring larger ships into traps in the badlands, not capable of a stand up fight against an actual military vessel
The Federation is at parity with the Klingons militarily, the issue is that unless its an existential threat, the Federation won't actually commit to a war. They send task forces to deal with the Cardassians, they don't call in all of their vessels and send 2000 starships, which they'd have to do to win like the Klingons did, because the Federation doesn't have a dedicated war fleet
The Federation going to for-real war disrupts the lives of millions (billions?) of people across the Federation in some way, and every ship has to pause its exploration, scientific, or diplomatic missions. From TNG and TOS we know that these missions aren't all just for-fun, a lot of them have real stakes with lives attached to them
The Klingons going to war is something their fleet is sitting around waiting to do at basically all times
The Maquis didn't have to win an all-out war. They just had to bleed Cardassia dry.
While it's true that if Cardassia brought their full might to bear they could've held onto the worlds along the DMZ, even if they had the leeway to militarize that region of space, they would've had to expend so many resources that it would not have been worth it. Logical consistency aside, canonically Cardassia shared borders with or were near enough to be threatened by, at minimum: the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans. They also had Bajor and, likely, a number of other independent/rebellious systems to contend with.
The idea that you can just blow everything up and win should have been weaned out of us as a species by the last 50 years, if not the last 3,000 years, of history.
But they can just blow up everything and win, they have space ships with anti-matter weapons
You have to care about either the human cost, or care about retaliation to not be able to just "blow everything up"
As a demonstrative I will point out that the fictional people we're talking about in the fictional universe were, in fact, blown up from space. A handful of them ended up surviving in an uncharted underground base for a while in deplorable conditions, but all of their families were mostly eradicated because Eddington sold them on the idea that they COULD win something that was ultimately unwinnable (it was a political war, as soon as it became a total war, they lost literally that day)
I think you're vastly overestimating the scale of the human colonial presence in relation to the Cardassian Empire, this isn't Vietnam vs America, this is the Maldives vs The Entire Earth
People who think the Cardassians (pre-Dominion) could just waltz in and wipe out the Maquis by force also overestimate the strength of the Cardassians. Which is easy to do because they were hidden behind wall after wall of secrecy - interstellar politics secrecy, demilitarized zone secrecy, central command secrecy, military secrecy, obsidian order secrecy, etc., - so we just see a vague threatening powerful block. When in reality they were dealing with social turmoil and protests so intense that their government literally collapsed from internal pressures alone over the run of DS9. (Again, like they're a metaphor for something in the real world.) We tend to gloss over that fact because the Cardassian Civilian Government lasted all of five minutes before the Klingons swooped in and set it ablaze and then Dukat sold off the pieces to the Dominion, but it's a major thing that happened. And getting back to the point, even without the Federation treaty holding them back, the Cardassians were in no shape to commit a massive military force to the Maquis when they had such major issues to deal with at home.
I disagree, they are small colonies on tiny worlds
The Cardassians lost quickly to the Klingons because of a massive gap in technology and the klingons being a much larger empire. The Cardassians are Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They aren't at parity with any of the major powers, but they are a REGIONAL power
ONE of their keldon class warships could have obliterated the colonies, the Maquis only had small federation fighters, fit for attacking Cardassian patrol craft or luring larger ships into traps in the badlands, not capable of a stand up fight against an actual military vessel
The Federation is at parity with the Klingons militarily, the issue is that unless its an existential threat, the Federation won't actually commit to a war. They send task forces to deal with the Cardassians, they don't call in all of their vessels and send 2000 starships, which they'd have to do to win like the Klingons did, because the Federation doesn't have a dedicated war fleet
The Federation going to for-real war disrupts the lives of millions (billions?) of people across the Federation in some way, and every ship has to pause its exploration, scientific, or diplomatic missions. From TNG and TOS we know that these missions aren't all just for-fun, a lot of them have real stakes with lives attached to them
The Klingons going to war is something their fleet is sitting around waiting to do at basically all times
The Maquis didn't have to win an all-out war. They just had to bleed Cardassia dry.
While it's true that if Cardassia brought their full might to bear they could've held onto the worlds along the DMZ, even if they had the leeway to militarize that region of space, they would've had to expend so many resources that it would not have been worth it. Logical consistency aside, canonically Cardassia shared borders with or were near enough to be threatened by, at minimum: the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans. They also had Bajor and, likely, a number of other independent/rebellious systems to contend with.
The idea that you can just blow everything up and win should have been weaned out of us as a species by the last 50 years, if not the last 3,000 years, of history.
yeah but in the year 40,000 humans learn to love it again... a bit too much
The idea that you can just blow everything up and win should have been weaned out of us as a species by the last 50 years, if not the last 3,000 years, of history.
I mean....the cold, harsh truth of mathematics means that if you completely annihilate your opponent and nothing is left....you win.
It may not be moral, but it's mathematically true.
People who think the Cardassians (pre-Dominion) could just waltz in and wipe out the Maquis by force also overestimate the strength of the Cardassians. Which is easy to do because they were hidden behind wall after wall of secrecy - interstellar politics secrecy, demilitarized zone secrecy, central command secrecy, military secrecy, obsidian order secrecy, etc., - so we just see a vague threatening powerful block. When in reality they were dealing with social turmoil and protests so intense that their government literally collapsed from internal pressures alone over the run of DS9. (Again, like they're a metaphor for something in the real world.) We tend to gloss over that fact because the Cardassian Civilian Government lasted all of five minutes before the Klingons swooped in and set it ablaze and then Dukat sold off the pieces to the Dominion, but it's a major thing that happened. And getting back to the point, even without the Federation treaty holding them back, the Cardassians were in no shape to commit a massive military force to the Maquis when they had such major issues to deal with at home.
I disagree, they are small colonies on tiny worlds
The Cardassians lost quickly to the Klingons because of a massive gap in technology and the klingons being a much larger empire. The Cardassians are Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They aren't at parity with any of the major powers, but they are a REGIONAL power
ONE of their keldon class warships could have obliterated the colonies, the Maquis only had small federation fighters, fit for attacking Cardassian patrol craft or luring larger ships into traps in the badlands, not capable of a stand up fight against an actual military vessel
The Federation is at parity with the Klingons militarily, the issue is that unless its an existential threat, the Federation won't actually commit to a war. They send task forces to deal with the Cardassians, they don't call in all of their vessels and send 2000 starships, which they'd have to do to win like the Klingons did, because the Federation doesn't have a dedicated war fleet
The Federation going to for-real war disrupts the lives of millions (billions?) of people across the Federation in some way, and every ship has to pause its exploration, scientific, or diplomatic missions. From TNG and TOS we know that these missions aren't all just for-fun, a lot of them have real stakes with lives attached to them
The Klingons going to war is something their fleet is sitting around waiting to do at basically all times
The Maquis didn't have to win an all-out war. They just had to bleed Cardassia dry.
While it's true that if Cardassia brought their full might to bear they could've held onto the worlds along the DMZ, even if they had the leeway to militarize that region of space, they would've had to expend so many resources that it would not have been worth it. Logical consistency aside, canonically Cardassia shared borders with or were near enough to be threatened by, at minimum: the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans. They also had Bajor and, likely, a number of other independent/rebellious systems to contend with.
The idea that you can just blow everything up and win should have been weaned out of us as a species by the last 50 years, if not the last 3,000 years, of history.
But they can just blow up everything and win, they have space ships with anti-matter weapons
You have to care about either the human cost, or care about retaliation to not be able to just "blow everything up"
As a demonstrative I will point out that the fictional people we're talking about in the fictional universe were, in fact, blown up from space. A handful of them ended up surviving in an uncharted underground base for a while in deplorable conditions, but all of their families were mostly eradicated because Eddington sold them on the idea that they COULD win something that was ultimately unwinnable (it was a political war, as soon as it became a total war, they lost literally that day)
I think you're vastly overestimating the scale of the human colonial presence in relation to the Cardassian Empire, this isn't Vietnam vs America, this is the Maldives vs The Entire Earth
There are costs besides human costs. There is resources costs. To blow everything up, you have to not only have the resources to blow everything up (which I think we all agree the Cardassians had) but also be able to spare them (i.e. not need them to do something else more urgent and important than blow everything up) and to expect the benefit from everything being blown up to outweigh the cost of blowing up everything.
We don't know the cost/benefit of pacifying the DMZ by blowing it all up, so we don't know if it would have been worth it for the Cardassians. But for in-universe reference, we do know it never was worth it to them to just blow Bajor up to hell and be done with the Resistance that way, and that was just one planet and not multiple worlds across a large span of space, so I'd lean on the "no".
We do know however that they did not have the resources to spare to do it because, as I pointed out earlier, they were facing internal turmoil so severe their government was on the verge of total collapse (again, as someone else pointed out). Central Command needed its resources close by to insure its survival, not out passifying a region of space so secondary to them they gave it up in negotiations a few years prior.
The Maquis realized that the Cardassians couldn't just blow them all up from orbit and win that way, because of political fallout as well as lack of resources, so they could fight and win. The war was winnable (and in fact they were winning it) so long as those rules didn't change. The Maquis only lost when the Dominion took over Cardassia and changed the rules. Which is not something you can really blame Eddington for not foreseeing.
Compared to the Romulans, who are much the same, but have the weapons to back it up.
It's too often glossed over in the shows - the Romulan D'deridex Warbird is twice the size of a Galaxy-class starship and has a black hole as a power source, and we frequently see them out in pairs or even trios on missions. The Romulan Empire had one hell of a fleet.
Which just makes what the movies did to them all that more shitty and stupid.
Except that most of that "internal" volume was actually external, in the form of a whopping big hole in the middle.
I've had the image for some years now of the Romulan leadership, during their hermit-kingdom period, getting the first intel reports on the Galaxy class and telling the naval architects, "make something bigger.". And when the engineers protested, the higher-ups simply repeated, "bigger."
People who think the Cardassians (pre-Dominion) could just waltz in and wipe out the Maquis by force also overestimate the strength of the Cardassians. Which is easy to do because they were hidden behind wall after wall of secrecy - interstellar politics secrecy, demilitarized zone secrecy, central command secrecy, military secrecy, obsidian order secrecy, etc., - so we just see a vague threatening powerful block. When in reality they were dealing with social turmoil and protests so intense that their government literally collapsed from internal pressures alone over the run of DS9. (Again, like they're a metaphor for something in the real world.) We tend to gloss over that fact because the Cardassian Civilian Government lasted all of five minutes before the Klingons swooped in and set it ablaze and then Dukat sold off the pieces to the Dominion, but it's a major thing that happened. And getting back to the point, even without the Federation treaty holding them back, the Cardassians were in no shape to commit a massive military force to the Maquis when they had such major issues to deal with at home.
I disagree, they are small colonies on tiny worlds
The Cardassians lost quickly to the Klingons because of a massive gap in technology and the klingons being a much larger empire. The Cardassians are Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They aren't at parity with any of the major powers, but they are a REGIONAL power
ONE of their keldon class warships could have obliterated the colonies, the Maquis only had small federation fighters, fit for attacking Cardassian patrol craft or luring larger ships into traps in the badlands, not capable of a stand up fight against an actual military vessel
The Federation is at parity with the Klingons militarily, the issue is that unless its an existential threat, the Federation won't actually commit to a war. They send task forces to deal with the Cardassians, they don't call in all of their vessels and send 2000 starships, which they'd have to do to win like the Klingons did, because the Federation doesn't have a dedicated war fleet
The Federation going to for-real war disrupts the lives of millions (billions?) of people across the Federation in some way, and every ship has to pause its exploration, scientific, or diplomatic missions. From TNG and TOS we know that these missions aren't all just for-fun, a lot of them have real stakes with lives attached to them
The Klingons going to war is something their fleet is sitting around waiting to do at basically all times
The Maquis didn't have to win an all-out war. They just had to bleed Cardassia dry.
While it's true that if Cardassia brought their full might to bear they could've held onto the worlds along the DMZ, even if they had the leeway to militarize that region of space, they would've had to expend so many resources that it would not have been worth it. Logical consistency aside, canonically Cardassia shared borders with or were near enough to be threatened by, at minimum: the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans. They also had Bajor and, likely, a number of other independent/rebellious systems to contend with.
The idea that you can just blow everything up and win should have been weaned out of us as a species by the last 50 years, if not the last 3,000 years, of history.
But they can just blow up everything and win, they have space ships with anti-matter weapons
You have to care about either the human cost, or care about retaliation to not be able to just "blow everything up"
As a demonstrative I will point out that the fictional people we're talking about in the fictional universe were, in fact, blown up from space. A handful of them ended up surviving in an uncharted underground base for a while in deplorable conditions, but all of their families were mostly eradicated because Eddington sold them on the idea that they COULD win something that was ultimately unwinnable (it was a political war, as soon as it became a total war, they lost literally that day)
I think you're vastly overestimating the scale of the human colonial presence in relation to the Cardassian Empire, this isn't Vietnam vs America, this is the Maldives vs The Entire Earth
There are costs besides human costs. There is resources costs. To blow everything up, you have to not only have the resources to blow everything up (which I think we all agree the Cardassians had) but also be able to spare them (i.e. not need them to do something else more urgent and important than blow everything up) and to expect the benefit from everything being blown up to outweigh the cost of blowing up everything.
We don't know the cost/benefit of pacifying the DMZ by blowing it all up, so we don't know if it would have been worth it for the Cardassians. But for in-universe reference, we do know it never was worth it to them to just blow Bajor up to hell and be done with the Resistance that way, and that was just one planet and not multiple worlds across a large span of space, so I'd lean on the "no".
We do know however that they did not have the resources to spare to do it because, as I pointed out earlier, they were facing internal turmoil so severe their government was on the verge of total collapse (again, as someone else pointed out). Central Command needed its resources close by to insure its survival, not out passifying a region of space so secondary to them they gave it up in negotiations a few years prior.
The Maquis realized that the Cardassians couldn't just blow them all up from orbit and win that way, because of political fallout as well as lack of resources, so they could fight and win. The war was winnable (and in fact they were winning it) so long as those rules didn't change. The Maquis only lost when the Dominion took over Cardassia and changed the rules. Which is not something you can really blame Eddington for not foreseeing.
Don't forget, for Cardassians humanoids are also a resource, one they're not shy about exploiting.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
They also want those planets for themselves. Blowing stuff up just to blow it up is definitely something they can do, but it has long-term strategic and political costs.
+3
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
In rewatching A Mighty Wind I've learned that anything with Michael McKean in it immediately makes me want to go rewatch The Thaw.
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
Compared to the Romulans, who are much the same, but have the weapons to back it up.
It's too often glossed over in the shows - the Romulan D'deridex Warbird is twice the size of a Galaxy-class starship and has a black hole as a power source, and we frequently see them out in pairs or even trios on missions. The Romulan Empire had one hell of a fleet.
Which just makes what the movies did to them all that more shitty and stupid.
Except that most of that "internal" volume was actually external, in the form of a whopping big hole in the middle.
I've had the image for some years now of the Romulan leadership, during their hermit-kingdom period, getting the first intel reports on the Galaxy class and telling the naval architects, "make something bigger.". And when the engineers protested, the higher-ups simply repeated, "bigger."
Sure, a lot of that volume is in the void between the dorsal and ventral wings, but the thing is a huge ship, especially when compared to the Galaxy class (which also has a substantial amount of negative space in it's design).
Just the head of the D'deridex probably has a volume equal to the Enterprise-D.
I pulled this off a google search, no idea how accurate it is. But since Star Trek measurements for anything tend to vary according to the writer, it seems as fair a representation as anything.
Of course, the size of a ship is rather pointless when one side has Starfleet Engineers on board.
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's which dog the writers like best...
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
The Romulan story was pretty much: Evil Vulcans with emotions.
There may have been individual stories to tell like Sela, but as a species they had really run their course compared to the Cardassians and Klingons.
Picard actually did a lot to make them interesting again, with a warrior Nun society that always told the truth in a society of liars. Their entire life being so based around deception that their houses always had a maze(metaphorical or real) around them. Their paranoia about synthetic life so bad that they would allow the death of a huge chunk of their population to eradicate research into it.
Which is probably why the Zath vash did it, the one time they could discredit synthetic life research across the Alpha Quadrant without being blamed. The Destruction of Mars was a brilliant masterstroke, the only miscalculation was the Fed deciding to give up saving Romulans as well.
We know where the Romulans are going to end, Unification I&II laid the ground work and III showed it succeeding, but Picard actual gave them some depth. And a trio of fun Romulan Characters.
At the end of TNG the Ferengi were greedy assholes with bad teeth, the Cardassians were the garbage people who had tortured Picard, and the Bajorans were... hell if I know, the ones with the noses and non-regulation earrings? The fact that the Romulans hadn't progressed much beyond being sneaky bastards doesn't mean that's their entire story, it just means that the TNG writers weren't willing/interested/able/whatever to flesh them out the same way they fleshed out the Klingons. Plus 50 points for the DS9 writers' room.
I liked Unification1/2 when it aired, but more recently I've soured on it because the idea that a bunch of Romulans are super excited about uniting, and we're talking something a lot more permanent than setting up an exchange student program, with their Vulcan kin to be highly weird. Overthrow their weird despotic government? Sure. Setup a Vulcanology department at the local university? Sounds good. Reunite politically and culturally (and to be frank, the cultural transference was all one way in the episodes, which... yeah, sign me up for a double helping of repressed emotions and logic classes) though? It's like if Quebec didn't just have an independence movement, it had an independence movement that wanted to become part of France. Except in the case of Vulcan and Romulus they've been separated for so long they can't even remember it happening and the only things they have in common are pointy ears and copper blood.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
A new Axanar video just dropped in my youtube recommendations, I thought that was dead and gone?
It looks a lot more amateurish than what they were making years ago. Strong porn acting vibes.
That's not necessarily a negative. The TNG porn movie is leagues better than any of the actual TNG movies.
Yes but if you watch the stuff from six years ago there were clearly professional actors involved, some from ENT even, this has much more of a "community theatre with a better set budget" feel to it.
A new Axanar video just dropped in my youtube recommendations, I thought that was dead and gone?
It looks a lot more amateurish than what they were making years ago. Strong porn acting vibes.
That's not necessarily a negative. The TNG porn movie is leagues better than any of the actual TNG movies.
Yes but if you watch the stuff from six years ago there were clearly professional actors involved, some from ENT even, this has much more of a "community theatre with a better set budget" feel to it.
I just watched it now.
Wow... to call this acting wooden is an understatement. The Shigir Idol is more lively than this.
Posts
As it stands, I'm not sure there is any explanation.
Poor Picard I still love you.
Precisely. The Maquis were holding their own against the Cardassians, and by some accounts even gaining ground. The Cardassians couldn't send out their full military might and wipe out the colonists from orbit because that would break the demilitarized-zone treaty with the Federation and plunge them into a war they couldn't win. So the Maquis could use guerrilla tactics to chip away at the Cardassians, until holding on to the colonies became too expensive for the Cardassians compared to what it was worth. Basically the same thing Bajor successfully did. All that changed when the Dominion took over the Cardassians. Suddenly the Maquis were facing an enemy that was a lot more powerful, didn't care about the Federation treaty, and had no issues with sending a massive military force to wipe them all out. And that was the end of them.
Kinda funny that the Maquis were so hostile toward the Federation when their strategy only worked when Cardassia had reason to fear Starfleet.
Just point her to the forums and let her know that there are people here who will write for pages in response to any questions she may have about the physics of warp 10+ travel and the polymorphing into a lizard as a result.
Almost like they are an analogy for many of the groups we've supported over the last several decades against their own governments or other larger powers.
The Cardassians could've always wiped out the Maquis easily, it was just never in their unified political interest to do so.
"What?"
"Destroy them. That's what you solids are good at, isn't it?"
"It's... really not that simple."
"I think you will find it is, now that you are part of the Dominion."
Compared to the Romulans, who are much the same, but have the weapons to back it up.
Every story or glimpse of Cardassia Prime was a shit hole of starvation and desperation. Based on the taspar egg story from the guy in Chain of Command, this long predated the war, but following the war Cardassia went through five governments in four years and at least two of them were bloody transitions.
All things being equal, Cardassia is one of those trivial minor powers that the Federation or Klingons had an off-screen conflict with and who show up by reference more often than appearance. They became an A list faction because of the Maquis rebellion and the Bajoran wormhole. And even then, DS9 wasn't properly refitted to defend it's position until the Dominion started going kamikaze on Galaxy-class ships.
So in retrospect it seems the Federation was so much more powerful than the Cardassians that they were content to spend the war committing the minimal resources needed to hold the line and wait it out while the Cardassians exhausted themselves futilely throwing everything they can at it. Then once the Cardassians were out of steam and the Federation still had most of its resources intact and unused, they'd be in a very strong position to either force an advantageous peace treaty on the Cardassians or, if they refused, wipe them out militarily with minimal effort. Except then the Borg showed up and wiped out Starfleet, and suddenly the Federation no longer had the power to pull off its plan or possibly even to hold the line anymore, and they were forced to negotiate with a much weaker hand than they expected and settle on much worse terms than they had planned.
It's too often glossed over in the shows - the Romulan D'deridex Warbird is twice the size of a Galaxy-class starship and has a black hole as a power source, and we frequently see them out in pairs or even trios on missions. The Romulan Empire had one hell of a fleet.
Which just makes what the movies did to them all that more shitty and stupid.
While that is certainly a possibility, I think they were just out of stories to tell with her. She had a clear role to play in the first episode we saw her in, but then she had nothing to do story-wise. The DS9 character cast already included several alien characters with well-fleshed-out personalities and backstories and relationships, so she was redundant in that niche. The Dominion War already had players from the Federation, Bajorans, Klingons, Cardassians, Founders, Vorta, and Jem'Hadar, so placing yet another power in the spotlight would make it too crowded (hell, even bringing in the Breen was a major game-changer in the story and yet we don't have a single named Breen character). All that was left for her was to stand in the background on the Defiant and occasionally talk about the cloak. So they decided to just drop her.
I guess it could have been a nice touch to have an extra dress up in pointy ears and a Romulan uniform in the background of the Defiant, but ultimately it might just have been distracting.
I absolutely disagree that they were out of stories to tell with her. Worf's parents were killed by Romulans. Romulan society hadn't been fleshed out at all at that point, they were a generically sneaky Empire with a Senate and some weird Roman action going on, at least in TOS. She was a military, and likely intelligence, asset of a closed off and antagonistic society stationed on the most important station in the Alpha quadrant. They could have had a Vulcan officer visit for an episode and do something there. There's absolutely heaps of stories that could be told. I do agree that it would have been pretty damn crowded though. DS9 built up the Ferengi, Bajorans, and Cardassians up from basically scratch; throwing the Romulans into the mix might have been just too much to handle. Lord knows that Nemesis, Trek '09 and Picard haven't exactly done the species any favors though.
There may have been individual stories to tell like Sela, but as a species they had really run their course compared to the Cardassians and Klingons.
Picard actually did a lot to make them interesting again, with a warrior Nun society that always told the truth in a society of liars. Their entire life being so based around deception that their houses always had a maze(metaphorical or real) around them. Their paranoia about synthetic life so bad that they would allow the death of a huge chunk of their population to eradicate research into it.
Which is probably why the Zath vash did it, the one time they could discredit synthetic life research across the Alpha Quadrant without being blamed. The Destruction of Mars was a brilliant masterstroke, the only miscalculation was the Fed deciding to give up saving Romulans as well.
We know where the Romulans are going to end, Unification I&II laid the ground work and III showed it succeeding, but Picard actual gave them some depth. And a trio of fun Romulan Characters.
Boy does this remind me that I pretty much hate everything done with the Romulans post-DS9.
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
I think the Federation still had the power to hold the line against the Cardassians - a rogue captain was more than they could deal with. But the Borg did change the math a lot - there was no telling how many more cubes could show up or when, and even one more and any bets were off.
Have him grow a beard.
Unrelated: due to an unfortunate confluence of birth timing and the vagaries of public library inventory in Ronald Reagan’s America, Diane Duane’s Rihannsu will forever be My Romulans. May the Great Bird of the Galaxy have mercy upon my soul.
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I disagree, they are small colonies on tiny worlds
The Cardassians lost quickly to the Klingons because of a massive gap in technology and the klingons being a much larger empire. The Cardassians are Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They aren't at parity with any of the major powers, but they are a REGIONAL power
ONE of their keldon class warships could have obliterated the colonies, the Maquis only had small federation fighters, fit for attacking Cardassian patrol craft or luring larger ships into traps in the badlands, not capable of a stand up fight against an actual military vessel
The Federation is at parity with the Klingons militarily, the issue is that unless its an existential threat, the Federation won't actually commit to a war. They send task forces to deal with the Cardassians, they don't call in all of their vessels and send 2000 starships, which they'd have to do to win like the Klingons did, because the Federation doesn't have a dedicated war fleet
The Federation going to for-real war disrupts the lives of millions (billions?) of people across the Federation in some way, and every ship has to pause its exploration, scientific, or diplomatic missions. From TNG and TOS we know that these missions aren't all just for-fun, a lot of them have real stakes with lives attached to them
The Klingons going to war is something their fleet is sitting around waiting to do at basically all times
The Maquis didn't have to win an all-out war. They just had to bleed Cardassia dry.
While it's true that if Cardassia brought their full might to bear they could've held onto the worlds along the DMZ, even if they had the leeway to militarize that region of space, they would've had to expend so many resources that it would not have been worth it. Logical consistency aside, canonically Cardassia shared borders with or were near enough to be threatened by, at minimum: the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans. They also had Bajor and, likely, a number of other independent/rebellious systems to contend with.
The idea that you can just blow everything up and win should have been weaned out of us as a species by the last 50 years, if not the last 3,000 years, of history.
But they can just blow up everything and win, they have space ships with anti-matter weapons
You have to care about either the human cost, or care about retaliation to not be able to just "blow everything up"
As a demonstrative I will point out that the fictional people we're talking about in the fictional universe were, in fact, blown up from space. A handful of them ended up surviving in an uncharted underground base for a while in deplorable conditions, but all of their families were mostly eradicated because Eddington sold them on the idea that they COULD win something that was ultimately unwinnable (it was a political war, as soon as it became a total war, they lost literally that day)
I think you're vastly overestimating the scale of the human colonial presence in relation to the Cardassian Empire, this isn't Vietnam vs America, this is the Maldives vs The Entire Earth
yeah but in the year 40,000 humans learn to love it again... a bit too much
It may not be moral, but it's mathematically true.
This....these are the only reasons not to annihilate your enemies completely. That and morals
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
There are costs besides human costs. There is resources costs. To blow everything up, you have to not only have the resources to blow everything up (which I think we all agree the Cardassians had) but also be able to spare them (i.e. not need them to do something else more urgent and important than blow everything up) and to expect the benefit from everything being blown up to outweigh the cost of blowing up everything.
We don't know the cost/benefit of pacifying the DMZ by blowing it all up, so we don't know if it would have been worth it for the Cardassians. But for in-universe reference, we do know it never was worth it to them to just blow Bajor up to hell and be done with the Resistance that way, and that was just one planet and not multiple worlds across a large span of space, so I'd lean on the "no".
We do know however that they did not have the resources to spare to do it because, as I pointed out earlier, they were facing internal turmoil so severe their government was on the verge of total collapse (again, as someone else pointed out). Central Command needed its resources close by to insure its survival, not out passifying a region of space so secondary to them they gave it up in negotiations a few years prior.
The Maquis realized that the Cardassians couldn't just blow them all up from orbit and win that way, because of political fallout as well as lack of resources, so they could fight and win. The war was winnable (and in fact they were winning it) so long as those rules didn't change. The Maquis only lost when the Dominion took over Cardassia and changed the rules. Which is not something you can really blame Eddington for not foreseeing.
Except that most of that "internal" volume was actually external, in the form of a whopping big hole in the middle.
I've had the image for some years now of the Romulan leadership, during their hermit-kingdom period, getting the first intel reports on the Galaxy class and telling the naval architects, "make something bigger.". And when the engineers protested, the higher-ups simply repeated, "bigger."
Just the head of the D'deridex probably has a volume equal to the Enterprise-D.
Of course, the size of a ship is rather pointless when one side has Starfleet Engineers on board.
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's which dog the writers like best...
At the end of TNG the Ferengi were greedy assholes with bad teeth, the Cardassians were the garbage people who had tortured Picard, and the Bajorans were... hell if I know, the ones with the noses and non-regulation earrings? The fact that the Romulans hadn't progressed much beyond being sneaky bastards doesn't mean that's their entire story, it just means that the TNG writers weren't willing/interested/able/whatever to flesh them out the same way they fleshed out the Klingons. Plus 50 points for the DS9 writers' room.
I liked Unification1/2 when it aired, but more recently I've soured on it because the idea that a bunch of Romulans are super excited about uniting, and we're talking something a lot more permanent than setting up an exchange student program, with their Vulcan kin to be highly weird. Overthrow their weird despotic government? Sure. Setup a Vulcanology department at the local university? Sounds good. Reunite politically and culturally (and to be frank, the cultural transference was all one way in the episodes, which... yeah, sign me up for a double helping of repressed emotions and logic classes) though? It's like if Quebec didn't just have an independence movement, it had an independence movement that wanted to become part of France. Except in the case of Vulcan and Romulus they've been separated for so long they can't even remember it happening and the only things they have in common are pointy ears and copper blood.
It looks a lot more amateurish than what they were making years ago. Strong porn acting vibes.
That's not necessarily a negative. The TNG porn movie is leagues better than any of the actual TNG movies.
Yes but if you watch the stuff from six years ago there were clearly professional actors involved, some from ENT even, this has much more of a "community theatre with a better set budget" feel to it.
I just watched it now.
Wow... to call this acting wooden is an understatement. The Shigir Idol is more lively than this.
Someone's about to get sued.
Unless there was some "fuck off forever" clause in the settlement with CBS.