The really curious thing there is the reference to tech overall - it's not as if the gear brought along by the MACO team we saw would have been more advanced than the gear Archer's own soldiers carried. The MACO rifles don't appear to have a stun setting (they have the separate stun baton), nor do the rifles cut or vaporize like Archer's phasers. It's as if the Military still went with trusted plasma tech because they need their guns to work, while the daredevils of Starfleet are already installing phase overbarrels to their plasma rifles. Which is what we observe elsewhere in Trek, and thus preferable. Why, it looks as if in the mid-23rd century, terminology more apt for the 1960s is again in vogue! It's not a fictional phenomenon, either: outdated military terminology keeps making odd comebacks ITRW as well. We thought sloops, frigates and the like were gone by the 20th century, but then the Royal Navy decided to resurrect the names out of the blue. And she appears to be the only exploration vessel in UESF strength. We hear references to "surveyors" (there's that whole Neptune class of them at least) but "exploration" appears to rest solely on the nacelles of NX-01. The phasers of NX-01 may not be on par with those of NCC-1701, but they are at most one order of magnitude weaker judging by the commented firefight in "In a Mirror, Darkly". NCC-1701 can destroy all life on a planet - it just takes a lot of time. NX-01 would require ten times the number of days, but she would get there. After all, a starship's phaser can't run out of ammo... But it did happen, and warp three ships might already be common. We don't know if the Franklin ever really was associated with the MACO, but conversely we can't be absolutely sure the Military didn't operate large troop transports capable of warp 3.82 or whatnot. Timo Saloniemi
Could the Photonic Torpedoes brought onboard Enterprise have been from the MACO? I would think the Enterprise's phase cannons would give out long before they could systematically wipe out all life on a planet's surface. If not from using too much power, from over exerting the barrels and/or whatever it was they kept replacing on the likes of USS Defiant during the Dominion War. The phase cannons do not appear to have a wide spread mode like the Constitution-class phasers do in the 23rd century. Thus they'd have to drag the beams across every square meter of the planet's surface, rather than cover several square city blocks in a single shot. How long did it take Enterprise to reach the Expanse, cross into it far enough to start their mission? How fast were they moving to get there from Earth? For rounding, let us assume Enterprise was able to maintain a speed of roughly 90 times the speed of light, or the equivalent needed to reach the Expanse. If we go with the idea above for a MACO ship, it can possible reach a speed roughly equal to 55 times the speed of light, though honestly I don't see them being able to hold more than 45 times the speed of light for long distances. If the later is the case, the MACO ship is half as fast as Enterprise at a sustained warp speed. It will take twice as long to reach the Expanse at minimum. The speeds might not be absolute, but they should be relative to each other. If they are limited to Warp Two or Three even, that's even longer.
Perhaps. Or from Wal-Mart, for all we know. But the very technology seemed alien to Archer's team in "Sleeping Dogs", so it's not as if the Military would have had a 3-4-year lead in that field. Unless they kept big secrets from Starfleet, which might make Admiral Forrest less likely to worry whether Archer approves of a MACO team aboard, and more likely to worry whether Starfleet can mow down all the MACO at arrival and blow up their headquarters before they deploy their evil photonic torpedoes. We have seen them in prolonged firefights where there's little time to cool down or perform maintenance, then sail on to the next episode without a dock layover. Spread that out across a month or two and there ought to be no problem. It's not as if we've seen a spread mode in TOS, either. Or in TNG. Except for the stun setting, which was completely ineffective against not just buildings but life as well: nobody died. Dragging narrow beams across the surface ought to do the trick just fine if they release subsurface magma, and we see this sort of capacity in TNG. In TAS, phasers can be used to control earthquakes. Also, beam weapons in DS9 are seen to create massive hypersonic blast waves at impact, reputedly achieving the destruction of the entire planetary surface in a matter of hours at most (with 20+ ships firing, half of them lobbing what looks like torpedoes). Of course, conventional weapons would be unnecessary if Archer or Kirk or Picard simply poisons the planet, taking cues from Sisko. That capacity was demonstrated by Kirk's ship in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" at least. And then there are other dirty tricks, like the Klingon one of torching the atmosphere in "The Chase" - possibly a pain to set up, but if our scenario assumes lack of resistance in any case, that's not a problem. Three months to the ultimate destination. Seven weeks to the Expanse at sustained warp five. Possibly a bit longer than seven weeks overall, though. Seven weeks at warp five, no indication of the distance covered. But one day at less than warp five gets you across a dozen lightyears in the pilot episode already, so 500 ly might be a good guess. We can easily postulate a ship half as fast as Archer's. This shouldn't exist yet before the launch of the Warp Five Engine project, or the difference wouldn't justify Cochrane's boasts about increased reach. But it could easily exist at the time of "The Expanse". Should such a ship (be it MACO or Starfleet or perhaps United Earth Coast Guard) be deployed to follow on Archer's footsteps? It would still reach the Expanse faster than the unfinished Columbia. It could still perform the same mission of independent armed recce, without jeopardizing Archer's sortie much, and perhaps doubling Earth's chances. Do we know such a ship wasn't sent? Not really. Might be Earth sent a dozen, and most were lost before they even reached the Expanse. Does this tell us something about the capabilities of MACO? Not really. Might be they have it, might be they don't. It just wouldn't make a difference, or even an appearance, not here. But if the capacity did exist, it might make a difference or at least an appearance in several other storylines. At shorter ranges, what excuse would Earth have for not sending help to Archer, even if it took a few days or weeks longer to arrive than NX-01? Since we do know there are other ships, such as the Intrepid, we probably are best off pleading low numbers and speeds such as postulated above, rather than absurdly low speed. Timo Saloniemi
I've always taken the idea of wiping out all life on a planet with a starship's phasers to mean they can deliver sufficient energy into the the ecosphere to disrupt it, perhaps by heating the atmosphere sufficiently to alter established weather patterns beyond the point where they could support life, rather than literally destroying the surface of the planet. (Although McCoy's "we have the firepower to destroy continents" line does bring this into question - what exactly does "destroy mean in this context? Annihilate? Vaporise? Simply ruin as far as human perceptions go?). But for now assuming my model, would reducing the power of the weapon by an order of magnitude really simply mean multiplying the time to destruction by ten? You are better qualified I think to theorise than I am but it seems to me extending the period of exposure by virtue of slower energy input would also allow greater opportunity for that energy to dissipate in the form of heat radiated into space or conducted safely into the inner reaches of the planet. It strikes me that there may actually be a threshold power level so to speak that energy weapons must reach in order to stand a viable chance of achieving such a feat (at least operating singly)
It's interesting that General Order 24 is being interpreted as wiping out all life on a planet without allowing room for hyperbole. Kirk's Enterprise could target and destroy all major cities. I can see calling this wiping out "all life" while literally not rendering the planet 100% lifeless or no longer capable of supporting life.
Scotty did intend to start out with point targets only: If the first sentence is supposed to be synonymous to the latter, we learn that "entire inhabited surface" means those square meters currently inhabited by Eminians but not one square meter more... But the second sentence might be different from the first, in that at T+1:45, Scotty will commence with the destruction of the entire crust of the planet, even if starting out with the people there. After all, we see in DS9 "The Die is Cast" that this is physically quite possible, at least if you have dozens of starships. Might it require more total effort if a single ship toiled at it, with "cool-off" periods and other complications? Possibly. But any single hit in "The Die is Cast" seemed to create enough visual impact that it might be difficult for anything beneath to recover in any time shorter than decades - and OTOH, the fleet there did actually "destroy the crust" rather than just burn cities, and indeed declared as their aim the eventual destruction of the "mantle" as well. Would Archer's guns be significantly weaker? When they first get fired on that overcharge mode in "Silent Enemy", they take out a mountaintop, that is, remove a slice of the crust. Alas, we don't learn the true scale of the achievement there. But it's "global", for the local value of globe. And it's not a completely insignificant piece of rock, as its gravity makes the blast effect curve along the surface... If that's what the guns do on an airless world, I'd say Archer would stand a pretty good chance of sterilizing a planet in a matter of hours. Melting the mantle might take a fleet, perhaps, but as a deterrent, those phase guns ought to work fine. Timo Saloniemi
Would a Starfleet crew (or any crew) have the stomach for such a disgusting thing? It's one thing to target cities and installations and since these are military para-military de-facto military soldiers, then they may view defeating the enemy as part of the job (such as shelling a city or firing nuclear missiles in today's thinking). But to render the entire surface a wasteland? I can see a lot of good soldiers refusing to go that far. Scorched earth policy? Salt the ground? Some things are just too far.
Destroying a mountain top(let's say on earth) compared to destroying the entire (land) surface on earth, would be like destroying a beach, one grain of sand at a time.
We know the Royal Navy exists in the 2140s due to Reed. So perhaps a founding charter of the UE would be that they can't have an independent military (a la the UN), and Starfleet has to operate under a legal fiction (at first) as an exploratory, and experimental test-bed agency. Perhaps the Kzinti Wars in, let's say the 2070s (and let's say just a small battle with some pirate ships) caused a backlash that led to increased Vulcan oversight where they had a vested interest to keep Earth from becoming too militarized. MACO doesn't really fit as a large organization then (they're just an Assault Operations branch of something larger). The Royal Navy and other subnational branches are where these Admirals and combat veteran captains are coming from. There are ships with odd prefixes (HMS, VK) that point to their existence in the 22nd century. MACO doesn't have a fleet, because they are, perhaps, a collection of largely unorganized squads, meant to assist the various fleets belonging to the many navies and armies and space corps of the Earth countries. The Xindi Crisis is the first chance of deployment on a large Starfleet vessel.
How's it disgusting? They just press a button (perhaps several times, but still) and a planet dies. It's simple and sterile. And it's not as if planets were valuable things in Star Trek. Everybody and his idiot cousin Gaila has one. Life is not preciously rare, or even preciously diverse. It gathers in the corners like so much dust. If a broom can be used as a weapon of peace (that is, the thing where there is no fighting back and thy will be done), our heroes probably value it over bloodier weapons. The mountain destroyed by NX-01 represented something like 1% of the entire surface of that little planet. And the destruction was still spreading after the phase guns had stopped singing; had that planetoid possessed an atmosphere, all life might have been extinguished by that single shot already. And if not that one, then the next ten. A Class M world might have ten times the surface area, or even a hundred. But where's the hurry? Not exactly. We know it existed back in the working days of Reed Senior, but his career exploits were not timestamped. Malcolm never worked for the Royal Navy, and it's far from said that it would have been possible for him to do so even if he overcame his fear of water. All we know is that he didn't get to work on oceans; perhaps the organization he should have joined, according to his dad, would have been the United Earth Ocean Guard that had recently swallowed up the Royal Navies of Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden and the Empire of France? Sounds possible... Perhaps even probable. But if that's what leaves the Military as the Military, then did the MACO formally work for somebody else than the UE? Another good possibility. A mighty army all bottled up at Sol, a mighty navy forbidden from arming its vessels? This just didn't come up at any point of ENT, the show that featured the heavily armed hero ship and its heavily armed crew of soldiers. Did something equally drastic happen to that Vulcan oversight to reverse the trend, and nobody likes to talk about it and jinx it? On the other hand, if the Royal Navy is dead and buried, such terminology is free for the taking - intrepid space explorers would love to give fancy names and titles to their ships and themselves. Again something that doesn't actually get explicated. Has the Military cooperated with Starfleet before? We only know it hasn't cooperated with Jonathan Archer. But Archer is special anyway, the first and perhaps only explorer-skipper in the organization. Perhaps his ship used to be the only one in Starfleet safe from a MACO infestation, until the Xindi forced Forrest's hand. Timo Saloniemi
There's also the notion to consider that the term "Royal Navy" does not explicitly refer to Britain. It could refer to any Earth naval force that serves a monarchical type of government. Heck, Stuart Reed's only on-screen appearance has him living in Malaysia, so if the Royal Navy of the 22nd Century is supposed to be Anglo-centric, he can't be too upset at his son not serving Queen/King and country. Alternatively, we do know that the European Hegemony had been established as early as 2123 and was explicitly stated to have been a forerunner of the United Earth government. So it's possible that the European Hegemony had some type of monarchical system of government which had superseded most, if not all, governments of Europe by the 22nd century, and that its naval force was referred to as the Royal Navy in English.
Is there any reason to assume the MACOs have a fleet? No. The serve the same government as Starfleet. Starfleet IS the star fleet. None of the MACOs we see do any of the onboard functions of spaceship. They don't pilot shuttle pods. They don't navigate. They don't even help out in Engineering when SHTF. They don't even man the weapons systems! They won't even clean the latrines. They have snipers, combat engineers, and so on, but nothing to indicate they have their own Vessels.
But since Malcolm Reed is from Britain, which is canonical fact, Occam's Razor tells us that anytime Reed or his family talk about the Royal Navy, they mean the British one.
He has an English background for sure, but do we know for a fact that was born and raised in Britain? His father's only appearance has his family at the time living in Malaysia, and Reed also said that he was an Eagle Scout growing up, which is only unique to the Boy Scouts of America.
Only unique to the BSA as of the 21st Century. Who knows what happens between now and when Reed was a boy.
Malaysia is a Constitutional Monarchy. They also have a Navy, and oddly enough it's called "The Royal Navy." I suppose it's possible. On Memory Alpha, it says his parents just moved to Malaysia, and that it's like the Florida of the 22nd century, where old folks go to retire