Actually, I'm pretty sure that the fleet was STATED as being twenty-something in number.
Our DS9 heroes called it an "entire fleet"; the Cardassians or the Romulans never specified a number. Admiral Toddman later said that Tain commanded "a fleet of twenty ships manned by combat veterans"; we just have to decide whether this means a fleet of twenty ships total, or a fleet that matches the number of singularities on Dax' screen, and includes twenty ships under Tain's command with veteran crews, plus some more with different attributes.
I wouldn't assume that, since starfleet's traditional enemies didn't use puny cannonfodder vessels whose primary utility was as lightly armed fast attack craft.
I meant one would assume that Starfleet's opponents would have roughly the same numbers as
Starfleet. After all, unlike Dominion, the other villains tend to operate ships in the same size spectrum as Starfleet. If there was a marked imbalance in numbers, those "conventional" enemies wouldn't be threatening enough, for the dramatic purposes of the show. Drama is probably best served if the Klingons and Romulans put together will badly outnumber the UFP, but either one operating separately is a slight underdog...
Why would an increase in production result in an increase in diversity?
I was really hoping for the opposite: that if there was significant new production, then new types would come to predominate and we'd finally get rid of 23rd century hardware. However, there is no decrease in diversity, so there's probably little in the way of production.
To put that another way: if tomorrow a wormhole opened up in Canada the United States suddenly found itself in full scale war against an alien invader flying fighter planes in gigantic numbers, you would suddenly see an explosive rush to mass produce F/A-18 Hornets and massive upgrades to the F-16 Falcons (and even returning the old F-16s to the production line). You would NOT suddenly see eight new versions of the F-22, speedier introduction of the F-35, and three new stealth fighters based on a drawing board hybrid design.
The thing is, though, there'd be no F/A-18s - the tooling for those is gone, and none could be manufactured any longer. There would be some F/A-18E/F types, which are a different aircraft altogether.
Similarly, one wouldn't assume any further
Excelsiors let alone
Mirandas to be built, so the numbers of those would dwindle - and rapidly, in the case of the latter type which is shown to suffer quite a bit of attrition. A bit like how most of the prewar destroyers quickly disappeared from Royal Navy inventory during the first two years of the war, and types of the most modern standards (more expensive than the old ones, but also more cost-effective) replaced them.
Starfleet
is shown to be very diversely equipped, so perhaps it maintains the full ability to support ancient ship types. Perhaps it even maintains the ability to build those types. But if so, it then by definition also maintains the ability to build new types, which it should, given that they are likely to be more effective.
I know this is going to sound like a lightbulb joke, but many warbirds does it take to invade the Federation? Obviously, few enough that a half dozen starships constitutes THE first line of defense if something weird should happen in the neutral zone (see "Angel One").
I'd argue that defending the borders is hopeless to begin with, regardless of whether you have 80 ships or 80,000 or perhaps eight million. Space is too vast for that type of "first line" defense; the forces at the border won't be defensive ones, but reverse-offensive ones. Defenses will be mounted deep within star systems, relying heavily on fixed fortifications - or at least this would best explain how a single starship can be a planet-boiling strategic weapon but a thousand is barely enough to attack a defended star system.
There were no first-line defenses in the Dominion war, even though the warring sides were fairly "conventional". Cloaks, or fast or invincible penetrators such as Borg Cubes or Whale Probes or ancient probes running amok, apparently make it more sensible to invest in point defenses and point ambushes...
Actually, in Defiant we have indications from Tom Riker that the fleet had been under construction for a considerable amount of time. And only half of them were Cardassian; the other half were Romulan, probably the Tal'Shiar's already-built vessels.
True. Although I'd assume the Tal'Shiar simply commandeered regular Romulan military vessels, as this organization did have the capability while the Obsidian Order explicitly did not. And I might contest an exact fifty-fifty mix...
On the issue of Dax' tetryon signature screen with dozens upon dozens of dots on it, it would seem logical to assume the Obsidian Order ships also had quantum singularities aboard, presumably because those and the cloaks were donated by Romulus, either in a longterm, ongoing plan of cooperation, or then in a crash program. Tain and the fake Lovok were in cahoots over the anti-Dominion raid for an unknown length of time, but Tain said his fleet had been under construction for "months". But I guess it's plausible that the OO had already been building secret ships for other nefarious purposes - and that the Romulans and Cardassians had been cooperating long before the Dominion crisis, perhaps in the name of anti-Klingon cooperation. Remember how Dax found Romulan tech on Terok Nor in the teaser for "Dax"?
Although, my greater point is that both organizations could be wiped out with only a few dozen starships worth of them being destroyed.
I'd think loss of face would be the crucial thing. It's not as if either organization explicitly pulled in its field agents or analysts for this operation; the Romulans at least may have used regular soldiers. Most of the traditional intelligence assets would remain in place even after loss of the fleets (and the ships, which never were part of the organizations originally, so supposedly their loss would merely be a return to status quo).
Yet a show of incompetence would negate the value of an intelligence agency. Competing agencies would emerge; Dukat seemed to have little faith in Central Command's intelligence services, but those did seem to exist, and might have taken the place of OO essentially overnight. Loss of charismatic leaders would also be felt the most keenly at the interface between the intel agency and the government. The agency might continue to exist, but it would lose its lobbyists and supporters and become irrelevant.
Tens of thousands of ships, tens of millions of personnel, thousands of starbases, countless manufacturing facilities, 150 member worlds, hundreds of billions of citizens...
One Starfleet Academy, San Francisco, Earth.
Something doesn't add up?
I never had a problem with this. San Francisco is a city with a population of millions today. Quite possibly it is a university campus with a population of millions tomorrow. There already exist universities with seven-digit student lists...
It would also be a good idea to force all the diverse military students from all the different planets to come to a single place to swear allegiance.
The only real probem I see is that year classes would probably be four digits in size. That makes Riker quite a superman for his eighth place; OTOH, it improves the odds of Riker meeting an old classmate of his! However, we must always consider that "class" can refer to year class or to the class attending a specific course (and also to a classroom if need be); perhaps Riker only excelled in a specific class of classes, so to say?
Of course, somebody always has to be the best, or the eighth...
But not sustainable, since everyone HATES the Tal'Shiar and they spend a huge amount of their time bullying people in the streets of Romulus.
I don't really believe this argument. If a few dozen ships decide to frag their politruks, so what? That's merely fifty thousand executions of sailors and their families, perhaps an increase in the number of daily lashes for the next few months ("and you know whose fault it is you get these - hating us will get you nowhere, so hate your fellow sailors instead"), and then matters return to normal. Tal'Shiar has a mandate, and it was in somebody's interest to give that mandate, and to sustain it. It's not as if Tal'Shiar is some sort of a flimsy military junta waiting to be overthrown. It's a well-organized terror machine that couldn't exist in the first place unless had assurances it could go on existing after minor rebellions.
this is a ship class normally used by the Cardassian military (probably as a troop transport)
Love that idea - the barracks on the back of the ship do look the part. Although I think most of the Cardassian ships are principally troop transports, monitors and bombs, as they have been built for the specific needs of an empire that invades militarily weak neighbors to get to their resources...
And "Way of the Warrior" interpreted those six ships as a respectable starfleet task force, otherwise the Klingons wouldn't have pulled out like they did.
One does have to consider the political aspect of this: the mere
gesture of not abandoning this distant and only partially Starfleetish outpost to its fate should tell Gowron that he was in more trouble than he had planned. Note that he didn't go to war with the UFP in "WotW" or its immediate aftermath. He only did that in "Apocalypse Rising". When his tentative little act of war was met with an official Starfleet response, he'd have withdrawn and collected his political victory (and ignored the associated defeats).
OTOH, it's very telling that Starfleet only keeps six starships within response range of what is--by WOTW--one of the most strategically valuable outposts in the entire sector.
I'd argue this is because it is incapable of doing anything else. Supposedly, Bajor is quite a distance away from the Federation's outer borders (SB375, presumably), and previously was a strategic backwater. It is still impossible as of "WotW" for Starfleet to expand in that direction and establish permanent bases: Bajor doesn't dare grant them, and everybody else there appears to be openly hostile to the UFP and sometimes also friends with the Cardassian Union.
This would be like the Governor of Hawaii mobilizing the National Guard and then watching sixty riflemen and a couple of clerks assemble on his lawn.
Heh. Then again, that's what one
would expect if the US Ambassador in East Berlin (or insert a comparable convoluted situation to match the DS9 political mess) mobilized his immediate forces...
You could even go so far as to speculate that the massacred "Seventh Fleet" was an all-Andorian unit using Andorian ships and designs (which might explain the lack of Andorian vessels in later actions).
That's a valid line of speculation as such - but it's remarkable that we never get any direct evidence of "nation-specific" military forces in the TNG era. Or the TOS era, for that matter. It smacks of implausible segregation if our human hero-ship only meets other human ships and never an Andorian or Tellarite vessel. And what about Vulcans using very human ships? Are Vulcans the odd men-analogues out, when everybody else has national forces with national ships?
The complete lack of references to national military fleets is too suggestive IMHO. Local fortifications may exist, yes. And local "policing" forces - but even there the Starfleet we see (the "human" one) seems to handle all police work, on the frontier, the human homeworld, or alien member planets alike.
Easily solved, Starfleet Academy isn't the ONLY place where officers come from. (Just like the US Navy doesn't have ALL it's officers graduate at Annapolis). It's just that for spots as prestigious as a 'Top Shelf' starship command, that little spot on the resume helps.
That'd work - but it's still a tad too convenient that we never meet a guy, gal or BEM who'd come from somewhere else. That is,
if we know somebody's place of graduation, it appears to be San Francisco.
Is there perhaps a really sharp divide there, so that
only nobodies like the people on that (dream-only!) roster in "Eye of the Beholder" graduate outside San Francisco?
Timo Saloniemi
That's just a gut feeling, though.
