The Breen attacked Earth, is it that important to have a debate of the flight path of the Breen fleet? If the official canon has to get so nick picking to settle every single issue it would not be a popular sci-fi show it would be C-SPAN doing SCI-FI.
Yo, calm down a bit, we're not nitpicking we're just trying to ascertain if it was mentioned in the episode that the Breen used Romulan space to attack or not. If we cant discuss little things like this whats the point in discussing anything on this board? we're here to talk about Star Trek and thats what we're doing. This may be where Ive got mixed up.
If I am right, the path of the Breen attack is non canon and therefore just debating what if this and what if that. It is just a debate that will never be settled, as everyone will say what they feel is right.
To understand the Breen's attack on Earth, you must understand their role in the Dominion... at the time of the attack, nobody but the Dominion knew that the Breen were joined with the Dominion. The attack was meant to do two things... One, it was an initiation, of sorts, for the Breen... they were able to launch a surprise assault on the very heart of the Federation itself... and not in terms of ships or military, either... the assualt on San Francisco was an attack on the very homes of Federation citizens... hitting them where they felt the absolute safest. Which leads to the second point... The Female Shapeshifter had ALWAYS had a penchant for "emotional" warfare... using the factors of fear, intimidation, and demoralization, to win wars, and hit the enemy hard. She wanted to use the Breen as intruments of this kind of warfare... to show the Federation that they were not, and never would be safe... to make us cower in fear, and never be able to sleep easy. Even during the battle of Chin'Tokka, when Weyoun asked the Founder if she wanted the Defiant's escape pods destroyed, she said no... those pods contain wounded and demoralized Federation troops, and she wanted them to reach home, to tell the tale of what had taken place in the battle. However, to answer another point... the very fact that Weyoun asked the Founder about firing on escape pods, hints to the fact that there is NO convention in the Dominion for "clean" warfare... in the modern world, it is not "clean" to fire on a pilot who has ejected in a parachute, so we don't do it... by the same token, you don't fire on an escape pod. The Dominion evidently does not follow such rules. The fact that the Breen were the first people to directly launch such an assualt on Earth also pushed home the fact that the Dominion and her allies had balls... big, fat, balls... the federation was no longer dealing with the "lightweights" that were the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Cardassians... this was the Dominion, boys and girls... and they were here to fight, fight hard, and fight to win.
The "not firing on lifeboats" rule is far from a hard and fast one in the modern world. Several American submarine skippers were infamous for the habit in WWII, a theoretically "clean" war for the United States in many other ways. It's not a division to barbarians and gentlemen out there - it isn't unusual for the armed forces of a nation to abide very strictly to some rules of war and to pay no heed to others. Typically, rules of war only apply if there are witnesses anyway. If the permission had been given at Chin'toka to fire at the lifepods, there would have been nobody left to tell the story... Timo Saloniemi
Yes thats one thing that seemed FAR too convenient as far as i'm concerned.... not firing on the lifeboats? why would it matter that theres nobody to go back and tell the story, if you wipe out all those lifeboats you're wiping out thousands of experienced officers and captains and admirals who can just come back again to kick your ass, just wiping out Sisko would have been a positive thing to do.
If I was the BREEN and was going to have a suicide attack on EArth, why not take a few ships and ram the Earth with the ship at high warp like Warp 9.9 and let the impact do so much damage.
Well technically the ship isnt travelling faster than light when at warp and is infact stationary so a Breen ship ramming another ship at warp speed wouldnt add anything to the destructive power, they'd be better off just ramming using the impulse engines.
Well if we are going to talk about ramming something into the Earth, why not go out into the asteroid belt or the kipper belt and grab some large asteroid or a comet and just use a tractor beam on the object with a direct course towards Earth. Think of the impact of an asteroid or comet going say twenty times the natural speed it would without being in a director course and without being in a tractor beam. Having Earth being rammed with a few dozen comets in one day would be a bad day indeed.
Of course but in the Trek universe no doubt the Fed ships would be able to tractor them onto different courses away from Earth or blast them with phasers and Quantum torpedos until they nothing but dust.
except that the orbiting spacedock and planetary defenses would have eliminated the asteroid threat from a (minimum) safe distance of 300 000 km ... not to mention any starships in system
they should have destroyed earth. it would have crippled Starfleet and put fear in the hearts of the other members of the federation.
...OTOH, that wouldn't have been good for the series. And the technobabble precedent from that series gives us ample excuse as to why the Breen would fail to destroy Earth. I'm sure they tried the best they could... Whether they knew their best wouldn't be enough to destroy Earth is a different matter. The Doolittle bomber crews knew they wouldn't achieve anything material. The Breen crews might have been briefed that they could at best obliterate Earth, but would even at worst achieve the psychological goals - and in no case would return alive, not even if shirking back from the goal of total destruction. Timo Saloniemi
i've always thought it was the Breen showing the Dominion what they could do and how useful they could be, and wasn't that big a raid... after all if they had gone in harder and lost most of their fleet it would have been a bit pointless if the Dominion turned around and said, "Thanks a lot, no we don't want anymore allies but thanks for your help anyway!"
That makes great sense. Give some hors d'oveurs only, do not risk the majority of your fleet, do not reveal all your cards. Certainly do not reveal your ace in the sleeve, the energy damping weapon! I wonder whether they even told Weoyun in advance. Perhaps they went all Mussolini on him, confronting the Dominion with a done deal. Good thing for them that the Dominion approved... Timo Saloniemi
What i'd like to know is what would have happened if the Breen had decided to join the Fed etc Alliance instead of the Dominion? would the Dominion have had its balls handed to it with the Breen dampening weapon. My answer: Damn straight. :thumbsup:
I think what makes the Breen attack so powerful and so amazing is that we didn't see it but we saw the aftermath of it. I personally love the story in Tales of the Dominion War of Scotty and McCoy at a mining station when the attacks happen. There is so much speculation it makes it more frightening story. Then the aliens reconsider helping the Federation because "Earth has been destroyed". It's a great story.