Re: Some thoughts on Losing the Peace (spoilers for the book obviously
Bill,
I also want to congratulate you on a fine read.
Thank you.
My whole point in general is: I understand the premise of the book. The Borg attack was on such a scale that the whole Federation has been thrown into disorder. But it seems like the whole book makes everything the Federation is doing some ad hoc seat of the pants response one new trouble issue at a time. Even governments today have plans and resources available for civil emergencies and disasters on a large scale, and private agencies have resources as well. Doesn't the Federation or Starfleet?
Governments today have plans and resources for
predictable emergencies and disasters. And even plans for predictable events, like Hurricane Katrina, can to easily fall apart. The complete annihilation of
hundreds of planets, all in a period of
only six hours, is really not something that the Federation could have been expected to plan for -- all the Borg "incidents" up to that point had involved single cubes attacking one planet at a time. And if the Federation had planned for it, they surely would have anticipated using Starfleet, which is not in such great shape at the moment.
(And in fairness, you have Deneva, which had suffered a planetwide invasion a century earlier, and which did have its plan for an evacuation.)
1. At some time in the past, I thought Starfleet or the Federation had some kind of "colonial office"
Maybe in the TOS era, but we really didn't see a whole lot of new colonization in the TNG era.
I guess as I look at the Federation, it is taking up a lot of space, and even in Picard's time has all the Federation been mapped? In short, was there any thought about having a Federation solution to at least some of this chaos at least on some level that is "off the shelf."
Well, there was the plan to build atmospheric domes, which was underway at the beginning of
A Singular Destiny. But it takes more to build a colony than just real estate. Surely, there are other planets out there, but imagine how much worse off the iy'Dewra'ni camp would had been, planted on a deserted planet, light-years from anywhere, without even the grudging support of a native government.
2. On the same line, it is interesting that only at the end of the book does the Enterprise start looking for habitable colony worlds. Wouldn't this process have started by science vessels, or even older ships "de-mothballed" for the purpose?
Perhaps, but this wasn't a book about science vessels and what they were doing while the
Enterprise was busy, y'know, looking for survivors. Keep in mind, too, that the majority of the book takes place over only a few days, and there's about a two month jump to the epilogue, during which we don't know what the
Enterprise was doing, let alone any science vessels or other ships Starfleet might have had saved for a rainy day.
3. I am curious, one solution to the problems of overcrowded shipping might be for the Federation to collect some large number of merchant vessels, like passenger liners, for example, take them over and use them as people transport to balance out populations?
Might be, and is: I have civilian ships carrying refugees from Pacifica to Ingraham B, and one of the key plotlines of Keith's book was about a civilian Andorian ship, not to mention the opening vignette about another civilian freighter.
