Just watched the Visitor again...

[Sisko4Life]

....and the alternate timeline got me thinking... what if the Federation and Klingons really did get to a full scale war??? Would it be like TNG, were the Klingons cause the Federation to surrender after 20 years of bloodshed?

Personally, I think the Federation beats the Klingons this time. Gowron was too overconfident, and that alternate timeline in "Yesterday's Enterprise" didn't have the Borg invasion, which directly caused Federation tactical upgrades such as the Defiant, Sovereign, Akira, and Prometheus vessels, all designed with defense in mind...

 

[Jono]

The YE timeline had 20 years of war so Starfleet was more militaristic in that timeline then in the normal timeline.

The Klingons and Fed had a year in 2372-73. The Klingons were kicking butt to start with but then the Feds started to slow them down. Changeling Martok also said that the Feds would rally and kick the Klingons out with heavy losses to the KDF. So if he was telling the truth then that would suggest the Klingons would lose a war with the Federation during the 2370s. Also the Weyoun considered the Romulans and Klingons were not a threat if the Federation didn't stand with them, which could be read as him saying Starfleet has the largest military might of the three and significantly so. Also Odo convinced the Female Changeling that the Federation would stop the Klingons and Romulans from taking the war into the Gamma Quadrant to wipe out the Founders, again suggested significant military strength.

Sisko convinced Martok to stop his attack on DS9 on the basis that if he continued and the Federation went to war with the Klingons he would win the battle but lose the empire. Given that the Cardassian military at that time was pretty smashed and Gowron backed down he obviously had serious doubts about the empire's ability to take on the Federation at that time. His mind changed a year later for sure but Gowron was almost schizophrenic in his behaviour at times.

 

[JNG]

....and the alternate timeline got me thinking... what if the Federation and Klingons really did get to a full scale war??? Would it be like TNG, were the Klingons cause the Federation to surrender after 20 years of bloodshed?

That was the implication of "Yesterday's Enterprise" for sure.

I don't know how Federation citizens would deal with decades of continuous, heavy war. It may be that the Federation itself would eventually begin to fall apart under such a burden, with worlds seceding and so forth.

The Klingons appear to live for this stuff, and while it can't be as easy for them as some might think, I am not surprised that the hardliners would keep it going.

The Federation is a peaceful power. In the franchise, any ideas of long-term war for it appear in nightmarish "what if?" scenarios. Considering this, I don't have any problem with saying that, in such a scenario, the Federation could indeed lose a war to the Klingon Empire.

 

[Phily B]

Depends on when the war took place, it seems after The Borg attack and their ass kicking the Federation started to look more into war ships.

 

[Augustus]

Yeah, the one year "war" between the klingons and the federation was more of a few ships skirmishing as far as I understood it. I don't think massive fleets or even smaller groups of ships were all that involved, with the exception of Way of the Warrior.

 

[JNG]

Depends on when the war took place, it seems after The Borg attack and their ass kicking the Federation started to look more into war ships.

What do you think they looked into after, say, 15 years of war in the "Yesterday's Enterprise" timeline? The fact that a recognizable Enterprise-D was still a frontline ship in that conflict is telling.

By the way, we know about exactly one "warship" Starfleet built as a result of the Borg encounter, and it failed to meet Starfleet specifications and was mothballed until Sisko requisitioned it. Though it appears they slapped together some more of them as an emergency measure to fight the Dominion, it hardly seems to have been a successful direction for them (which, with warships being not-very-Treklike, was probably the point).