We don't have any on our planet at any rate...
What is the real power of the Dominion?
- Thread starter Inactive-Shapeshifter
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We don't have any on our planet at any rate...
Strength goes beyond ship specs. Here are a few of the Dominion's assets:
-Shapeshifters infiltrate the government and military at-will
-Suicide troops ram capital vessels
-Jem'Hadar have nigh-impervious morale
-Personal cloaks
-Anti-coagulant weapons mean glancing blows are almost always deadly
-Neutronium ground facilities
-Invasive transporters
-Uncanny diplomatic accumen
-Incredible intelligence, to the point of having full psych profiles of military officers
-Shapeshifters infiltrate the government and military at-will
-Suicide troops ram capital vessels
-Jem'Hadar have nigh-impervious morale
-Personal cloaks
-Anti-coagulant weapons mean glancing blows are almost always deadly
-Neutronium ground facilities
-Invasive transporters
-Uncanny diplomatic accumen
-Incredible intelligence, to the point of having full psych profiles of military officers
if you look at the timeline, When the Jem Hadar attacked the Odyssey, they kicked the Galaxy Class Ship handily. Shields were next to worthless, And Phasers didn't exactly penetrate the Bug Fighter's shields. Then Starfleet adapted. by the time they Assaulted DS9, The Vorta was amazed that the Stations defenses were holding. In Fact, he said just that.
The Dominion did in fact have Shipyards going in the Alpha Quadrant, mostly in Cardassian Space. Sisko stated as he left DS9 at the War's outbreak, that DS9 was left to fend for itself cause a Combined Federation/Klingon strike force had attacked a shipyard. Plus Worf and Martok Attacked another Shipyard to Get Jadzia into Sto vo kor.
The shrunken Runabout Episode established they were breading Alpha Quadrant Jem Hadar, called Alphas. Insurrection, and later background dialog showed that the Son'a were making Ketralsel White for the Dominion.
Klingon Ships, unlike Federation Ships are Warships. Even with Federation and Klingon Engineers advancing weapons and Shields, there was still a gap to bridge.
The advantage the Dominion never lost, even as it lost the war, was it was able to breed soldiers a lot faster then Starfleet and the Klingons could replace their troops.
The Dominion did in fact have Shipyards going in the Alpha Quadrant, mostly in Cardassian Space. Sisko stated as he left DS9 at the War's outbreak, that DS9 was left to fend for itself cause a Combined Federation/Klingon strike force had attacked a shipyard. Plus Worf and Martok Attacked another Shipyard to Get Jadzia into Sto vo kor.
The shrunken Runabout Episode established they were breading Alpha Quadrant Jem Hadar, called Alphas. Insurrection, and later background dialog showed that the Son'a were making Ketralsel White for the Dominion.
Klingon Ships, unlike Federation Ships are Warships. Even with Federation and Klingon Engineers advancing weapons and Shields, there was still a gap to bridge.
The advantage the Dominion never lost, even as it lost the war, was it was able to breed soldiers a lot faster then Starfleet and the Klingons could replace their troops.
The Vorta and Jem'Hadar seem a little like the ubervamps in the last season of "Buffy." The first time we see one, it's impressed on us just how dangerous the new villain is by having a slayer just barely manage to defeat one in one-on-one combat. But that level of power isn't sustainable for the plot, so in the end, a dozen or so slayers are able to kill a whole bunch of them before a magic doodad blows them all to hell.
The writers wanted us to take the Jem'Hadar seriously, and the way to do that was to show them taking out a ship that looked like the Enterprise-D. Then they had to dial it back.
The writers wanted us to take the Jem'Hadar seriously, and the way to do that was to show them taking out a ship that looked like the Enterprise-D. Then they had to dial it back.
They didn't, really, which was why they did the kamikaze. We can never know if the Bug Ships with their weapons alone could have destroyed the Odysey. It was limping away but it was limping away and it had plenty of unfired torpedoes.
The current debate is, if the Dominion's true power was in the number of ships, where did they get the resources for the ships during the prolonged conflict. If they brought it with them, by the time Starfleet retook DS9, they were falling back. Yet, later, the Federation was losing the war. Cardassia couldn't supply the Dominion anything because they had to occupy Bajor for the ships they had currently. It makes more sense that the Dominion's true power was in their tactics, namely infiltration, covertly ordering fleets to patrol useless positions, luring ships and convoys into ambushes, or simply having a single Founder board a flag ship as an engineer to blow up its warp core.
That explains the soldiers, not the ships.
Precisely
When the war was going well for the Dominion we can imagine that the Cardassian space was pretty big and that translates to thousands or more likely hundreds of thousands of planets with mining possibilities. That's more than enough to supply material to build thousands of ships. I don't think the Dominion was ever in danger of running out of raw material.
^If resources were that abundant, Cardassia wouldn't have occupied Bajor and the Klingons wouldn't have signed the Kitomer Accords (see history). True, there are a lot of planets out there, but there's nothing that indicates that there are a lot of planets with resources to build ships. It seems more like the lack of rare resources like dilithium causes occupations and marauding, things we've seen more than once in trek's run.
That's where ST definitely parts ways with reality as astrophysics teaches us that the universe is roughly homogeneous and that the same elements must be found in comparable proportions pretty much every where. if you will, there is only a limited number of types of celestial bodies and two bodies of the same type have roughly the same composition.
Then again, maybe there wouldn't be much of a story if there weren't rare resources to fight over.
Trek is pretty explicit about some natural resources being rare enough that even widespread and well-networked galactic empires like the UFP may have to consider going to a war over them.
As for the idea of a homogeneous universe, that's just a wild guess without much chance of obtaining proof either way. That the laws of nature would be the same everywhere is an intellectually pleasing idea, but based on nothing much - and indeed we already know that the part claiming that everything from small to large follows the same laws is utterly false in every practical respect. We really shouldn't expect to know what lies beyond the next impermeable nebula even in our own Milky Way, not until high resolution spectroscopy and the like has had time to obtain about a million times more results than we have so far.
Timo Saloniemi
As for the idea of a homogeneous universe, that's just a wild guess without much chance of obtaining proof either way. That the laws of nature would be the same everywhere is an intellectually pleasing idea, but based on nothing much - and indeed we already know that the part claiming that everything from small to large follows the same laws is utterly false in every practical respect. We really shouldn't expect to know what lies beyond the next impermeable nebula even in our own Milky Way, not until high resolution spectroscopy and the like has had time to obtain about a million times more results than we have so far.
Timo Saloniemi
I am sorry but this is so wrong and deceptively distorted that it would take hours to set things straight and I don't have that kind of time on my hands. The only thing I would advise you to do is to base your certainties on facts and not on rumors that I can't begin to guess the origin of, definitely not peer reviewed scientific works though.
Clearly, materials like dilithium, latinum, and the unstable galaxy changing substances like the omega molecule and Red matter are scarce in the Star Trek universe or they wouldn't be so valuable or hard to find. Wormholes and Nexes' aren't homogeneous either. We're dealing with sci-fi too so their rules are a bit bendy.
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So, before season 6 the Defiant had several encounters with the dominion, and was able to so some damn good damage and destroy several ships.
In "Call to arms" Martok's ship destroyed one fighter with just few disruptions shoots.
Few moths later, in season 6, the federation AND the klingon empire are losing the war, the Dominion is damn powerful and it seems that 3 of the fighters could destroy the Centaur... 3 ships of the same kind that a old bird of prey just destroyed with a few shoots....
Am i missing something?
TV shows are wildly inconsistent?
The "in-universe" answer is that the Dominion gets its power from its centralized command structure, massive resources, completely loyal administrators and soldiers, and its massive fleets.
As a bonus, the Founders are masters of infiltration and disguise, and have no qualms when it comes to disrupting civilizations they consider to be a threat.
It is completely within the realm of possibility: technological advantages shift with improvements, inventions and new strategic realities. See: First World War and Second World War.
Some resources maybe more abundant than others, and even if they are abundant how evenly are they distrubuted?. For example here on Earth how evenly is a resource like Oil distbruted? Do all countries have it or is it more common in some parts than others. Bear in mind as well that Bajor isn't that far from Cardassia Prime, so it's not like they may have passed a dozen solar systems with a resource that they need.
But as you say it's these rare resources that can be the issue.
I am saying that the Dominion shouldn't have much trouble finding the material to make ships as long as they have a zone big enough where they can mine their ore.
The galaxy contains four hundred billion of solar systems, our quadrant a hundred billion, so Cardassian space should encompass, millions of these stars, most of which would have several planets.
IOW, our galaxy is big, very big.
^Yeah, there's lots of planets out there (understatement), but that doesn't mean it's not possible that one in a billion solar systems contain a dilithium moon with the rare fictional resource generally needed for space travel. There aren't that many space faring species in the Alpha Quadrant, though that could be because they were conquered by the Klingons or something.
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If Dilithiun ware so easy to find, why did Voyager had those mission for seeking Dilithiun that lasted weeks? They even traded for Dilithiun some times.
The Dominion had expanded its dimplomatic ties across the Alpha Quadrant before the war started. They might have made much more favorable trade deals than the Cardassians every did. Also the Dominion might have had better technological means of exploiting worlds Cardassia already had allowing for increased ship production (both Dominion and Cardassian vessels seems to be being built, but more of the Jem'Hadar ships as they can make lots of crews for those while the Cardassians can only train and draft at a much lesser rate.
The Klingons and Federation were not able to block in the Dominion, that would be almost impossible given the number of ships that would require to cover all their space for 720 degrees.
The Dominion fleets are full of tiny Jem'Hadar fighters which seem to be able to go one on one with starships like the Centaur (Sisko was trying not to destroy USS Centaur, a Vorta captain would not care). A Klingon Bird of Prey seems to be able to handle those fighters just fine, but the modern Bird of Prey seems to be more or less about half as destructive as USS Defiant in firepower if not nearly as powerful as Defiant in terms of firepower. They cannot take the punishment of USS Defiant, as the Federation seems to have really good shielding, when it works.
A basic problem Starfleet and the Klingon Empire have is that they are using old ships for the most part. Lots of Miranda-class, Excelsior-class, and old Klingon Battlecruisers are operating during this war and the previous wars that lead into it. Both Starfleet and the Klingon Empire lost a bunch of ships in the two years leading up to the war. The Klingons lost ships figting both the Cardassians and the Federation, while Starfleet lost ships fighting the Klingons and the Borg (a lot of ships were lost in the running battle to Earth). Add to this the heavy losses in the first three months of the Dominion War when Starfleet shields may or may not be accurately tuned to counter the Dominion weapons and easily outnumbered by lots of smaller Jem'Hadar fighters, and we have hundreds of starships lost just two years before Operation Return.
The Klingons and Federation were not able to block in the Dominion, that would be almost impossible given the number of ships that would require to cover all their space for 720 degrees.
The Dominion fleets are full of tiny Jem'Hadar fighters which seem to be able to go one on one with starships like the Centaur (Sisko was trying not to destroy USS Centaur, a Vorta captain would not care). A Klingon Bird of Prey seems to be able to handle those fighters just fine, but the modern Bird of Prey seems to be more or less about half as destructive as USS Defiant in firepower if not nearly as powerful as Defiant in terms of firepower. They cannot take the punishment of USS Defiant, as the Federation seems to have really good shielding, when it works.
A basic problem Starfleet and the Klingon Empire have is that they are using old ships for the most part. Lots of Miranda-class, Excelsior-class, and old Klingon Battlecruisers are operating during this war and the previous wars that lead into it. Both Starfleet and the Klingon Empire lost a bunch of ships in the two years leading up to the war. The Klingons lost ships figting both the Cardassians and the Federation, while Starfleet lost ships fighting the Klingons and the Borg (a lot of ships were lost in the running battle to Earth). Add to this the heavy losses in the first three months of the Dominion War when Starfleet shields may or may not be accurately tuned to counter the Dominion weapons and easily outnumbered by lots of smaller Jem'Hadar fighters, and we have hundreds of starships lost just two years before Operation Return.
I wonder why they survey a planet on foot as they did in the ship. It's seems like a very inefficient way of getting information, not to mention, risky.
For example, if they need soil samples can't they beam them from the surface? They did it back in the days of Archer then why not then?
The same reason all starships aren't unmanned probes. The destination is the journey... unless your an expendable redshirt.
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