In writing this analysis, the Templin Institute must have overlooked one of the founding principles of the Federation charter: "Once a Starfleet Captain is promoted to Admiral, they must always act as if their IQ has lowered by 50 points or more"
Not to mention, Shelby especially should have had red flags and sirens blaring in her mind with 'Fleet Formation' and 'entire fleet in one place.' It's part of her character you would think based on Best of Both Worlds. She was supposed to be some hotshot, up-and-coming officer in the Anti-Borg taskforce. Officers like that, aren't supposed to be stupid.
@@ealan3694 More than that, it's counter to the entire philosophy of the UFP and operational history of Starfleet. IDIC has been a war winner for Starfleet since it got Vulcan sensors and Andorian phasers on the same ship to the point where it was able to ally with the Klingons and Romulans (and frankly anyone who occupies Betazed just deserves to have all their operational secrets published on Twitter). Having the relatively smaller, but much more numerous member defense fleets come to the aid of Starfleet would have been a nice counterpoint (particularly if it was a strategic anti-assimilation decision to keep them separate by Shelby), but I can always dream.
Locke's Corollary To Marc's First Law: "No alternate universe's military command structure is smarter, more cognizant of history, more forward-thinking, or more genre-savvy, than that alternate universe's writers."
Corollary to the Corollary: "Even smart, history-cognizant, forward thinking, and/or genre-savvy writers will bow to the allure of a 'cool action set piece.'"
@@ttd0000 and I eat it up every time. And tbf, if we’re talking about sci fi warfare and space combat, no one alive has any idea how it will actually work or it it’s actually possible in any way we recognize nowadays
@@ianharrison5758 I'm always slightly annoyed when a know-it-all comments on any given scifi space battle setting with their middle school level understanding of newtonian physics, pointing out that the Enterprises engines are not aligned with its center of mass, or pointing out that space fighters shouldn't bank in turns. The conceit of many of these settings is that the technology they use doesn't rely on basic newtonian physics, the Enterprise doesn't thrust its way to a thousand times the speed of light, gravity manipulation and control over intersecting dimensions of space may allow reality itself to behave as a medium for those fighters to fly through. If you are hung up on newtonian physics then you can just call it quits at the setting existing at all, as said physics mean these ships couldn't even be where they are supposed to be in the first place.
You could also modify this to say that fictional militaries cannot be any more competent than real world militaries that they parallel. This is especially important if you're portraying an evil empire. Don't want to give the impression that evil is efficient for ethical reasons, especially when real world evil regimes had laughable inefficiency too. Hitler's Megaprojects are a prime example of pointless resource pits that have little real world use. The Death Star is a perfect fictional example for analogy if Thrawn is right.
The rule for writing should be: if the conspiracy of inflitrators would have to replace close to 100% of staff at the institution they are infiltrating then no further steps in the plan are necessary. If you control everything you don't then need a further plan to take control, you already have it.
You'd maybe have to replace one...or two. Have you SEEN how bad the Intelligence community of every nation on this planet is? They're clearly not any better in the future, because those groups were written by people alive today. People who also still don't know anything about sociology, economics, or literally anything to do with how space works.
Coups only happen when the coup planner has subsumed control over the actual positions of power and is in a position to take over the government. It's often recognized that the success of the infiltration phase means the coup has already succeeded, merely that no one knows about it yet. Infiltration can only go so far and you'd eventually have to violently overthrow the government you can rule without compromise and disguise.
True. If you have full control over the whole command structure, why not use it to your benefit instead of destroying this useful tool you have in your hands now. Like from the perspective of the Dominion, let them fight the Klingons, Romulans, Tzenkethi, Voth, Tholians or whoever else might be a threat to your power in the future
Like Hydra taking over Shield and the trying to… what? Shoot everyone not in Hydra from helicarriers? It’s like, dude, you won already. Don’t get greedy
If you centralized your fleet, the better strategy is to attack literally everywhere else at once. Your massive fleet now has no safe harbors or logistics, and you have to claw for every inch of ground with losses that can't be replaced.
@@EisIzo In theory this would work with other forms of contrived narrative devices that magically limit interstellar travel to a specific subset of the 360 by 360 degree freedom objects in space should have to move. Hyperlane type travel where a system can only be accessed from adjacent systems that happen to have this hyperlane connection could work too. A chokepoint system which represents the sole connection to a system the enemy has access to could work like that. So basically if your galaxy's FTL looks like Stellaris for some reason it could make sense provided the enemy hasn't figured out how to do FTL properly in all degrees of freedom yet, once they discover jump drives, warp drives, or any other form of FTL that doesn't require corridors with some magical properties good luck with that though.
@@seraphina985 Even with that you still have the issue of travel time. You have to come and get me from one single point. You have a predicable point of origin, a fleet that was once supplied by an empire now is supported by one world, which if your capital is anything like Coruscant or Trantor then it too is a net consumer and dependent on the interstellar trade. Any fortresses you constructed can be ignored and isolated as they're cut off from the fleet and are static. Say that you did use full freedom of movement and ignore the "front", you have a longer time in transit with a longer supply line, reinforcements take that much longer to show up, and if you retreat you have to go back across the "front" and we know your destination, there's only one place you can go. Meanwhile because defense in depth is a thing, when your attack does suddenly get here, reaction fleets from every nearby system respond, and relatively quickly. Bonus points if there's intelligence on your home system and projected targets, now you have prepared defenses to contend with.
Starfleet DOES have a similar policy to the one mentioned by the German army, but only in Beta canon. In Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (video game), you can fail the second simulator mission and get kicked out if you follow a specific order given by your teacher to the letter, instead of doing what you're supposed to do. Blindly following orders is enough to get you booted from the Academy in Beta Canon, long before you ever see command of a real ship.
The Fleetweek Attack Corollary: If the enemy has gathered their entire fleet (or a critical mass thereof) in one location, one may attack everywhere they aren't and win one's objectives without the need for a decisive battle and the risks contained.
This is probably even the greater damage you can deal: Attack logistics hubs, undefended colonies and pillage trade routes. By the time any reinforcements get anywhere, the attackers are either gone or dug in deep enough to be a serious problem.
Yep no irl army is dumb enough to not keep even small groups to defends out posts and besides if you have something to destroy the entire fleet in one swap the attack would just face massive fleets of your enemy
That sounds like a much better plot: a small outpost where some of the staff got a little too into the celebrations and backup is unavailable because a large amount of the fleet is away getting attacked by a massive enemy force.
Presumably this specific Frontier Day was especially special as the 250th anniversary of the launch of the NX-01. But the same issues arise of Warp travel time and the truly enormous size of the Federation, even if the Klingons and Romulans can be expected to respect the borders, there must be many other threats the Fed still faces. One solution would be slipstream tech but where is it in this era? Don't think the super fast jellyfish ship Spock had in ST 2009 had it. But if it did exist that would help with the travel logistics and would help explain this mysterious loss of ability to track ships at warp in this season...ie why is cloaking such a big deal if ships can't be tracked at warp anyways in contradiction to all previous Trek? Or heck the Romulan Star Empire is basically defunct, just give Fed ships cloaks and like all the weirdness of this season regarding not being able to track the Titan is resolved. Where is really ANY of the stated or observed tech that should exist in some form in this era from the half dozen times we've glimpsed it in past Trek? 3D panels mentioned in DS9's "The Visitor", obviously all the doodads on the Galaxy-X of "All Good Things", any number of techs Voyager depicted in their various sojourns?
"The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
What would be an interesting and more believable inversion of this trope is to launch an attack on a garrison which has been weakened by some kind of event, be it "fleet week", or even just a "changing of the guard" where the currently deployed fleet is being pulled back for repairs and refit while the replacement fleet is on the way, but not quite in the AO yet.
@@Kitkat-986 The changing of the guard idea doesn't fly either, though. In the US Marine Corps for example, there's a set of standing orders for those on guard duty that cannot be superceded by other orders. Been a while since I had to recite them, but if memory serves #4 states that a guard on duty must stay on duty until properly relieved. It's not a stretch of the imagination that this common sense principle would translate to naval activities as well. So in the above example, there should be no reason why a picket ship would leave its post until the relief arrives. As an aside, if you ever had to plan an assault on a well-defended enemy position, the best time to initiate the attack is actually shortly *before* the end of a guard shift, preferably before dawn. Guards tend to be less observant over time, but if you time it right the relief force is still unprepared to respond immediately. Waiting until the moment of guard changeover would mean dealing with twice the number of enemy combatants.
Man, being a space pirate in the Star Trek universe would be so easy 1. Wait for Frontier Day 2. Attack the most valuable ships in your area on Frontier Day 3. Go to Romulan space or something to wait out any investigation of the incident 4. Repeat every Frontier Day
You forgot the critical flaw in your plan: "Get wrecked by member worlds' own sovereign fleets' ships" Canon fact: most member worlds have their own security forces and full on fleets. Even if Starfleet was entirely deployed to Sector 001, which it couldn't be, there would still be all those other fleets out there. We saw what life was like onboard one such ship in the Lower Deck's episode "wej Duj", the Vulcan cruiser Sh'vhal, operating under the authority of the Vulcan High Command. Sh'vhal was shown to be more than a match for a rogue Klingon Bird of Prey and several Pakled clump ships.
I think the reason why it always works in fiction is this: eliminating a whole fleet in one push is more convenient for the writer than eliminating that same fleet stretched out over several repetitive chapters and coming to the same result.
...it's not that hard to show multiple losses even in a short space, like...montages and the like exist? Halo Wars does this excellently in a few minutes for goodness sakes.
I thought the real point was to gain control of the fleet due to the ships being networked. There was a warning sent out as it was happening that all ships should steer clear of the Sol System due to this. The writer is using this as a cautionary tale because our world is so interconnected, and we in our time don't recognize the danger. This video is simplistic in its analysis.
@@waltherchemnitz Smart. But of course! All stories have a narrative point they're trying to make, so I'm hoping videos like this are solely about the actual sense doing this kind of thing makes when you're real, and NOT a character in the story of an author that's trying to make a point where certain things absolutely must fail to get that point across. In real life we try to AVOID making certain exciting stories- and pretty much *all drama* play out.
@@BologneyT That wasn't the impression I got. What I sensed was the video is calling out the writers for using a "tired" trope, but in this case I don't think it's justified.
If you've got enough infiltrators in the proper places to convince the Federation fleet to gather all in one place, you have no need to destroy the fleet at all. You already own it.
"It's possible to drastically increase the number of deployed ships, but this is what's known as a "surge" and is not sustainable in the long run" [me having a flashback to when I bankrupted my Stellaris empire just by undocking my fleet]
Specifically why I have a Corvette Fleet with a Gale Speed and Logistical in every run. I need some sort of response that ain't gonna cripple my economy.
I actually love the idea of fleet week being a smaller, local festival held above every federation member world. The only ship that absolutely HAS to be there, no matter what, is the flagship: The USS Enterprise.
and that could be done as well.... look at Mass Effect, in ME2 they say in the news if you save the council that the Destiny ascension is making a tour of all the council member worlds which I'd think is a gesture of gratitude to Earth but also celebrating life and a way to meet and greet planetary leaders directly, big PR event really
Yep it could be day that show historical ships, new models and be place to show that ships are manned by people of all member planets but never all the ships just small ships to act has parade in independence day of the federation
The weird thing about Enterprise is that enterprise isn't a thing in post scarcity federation world. It's like if the UK flagship was HMS Scrimshaw or HMS Cottage Weaving Industry
@@sumoking3002 it still mostly works because by then the word 'enterprise' is associated with the vessel (cv6, cvn65, cvn80, ncc-1701 or whatever it is) that bore the name and gave it a legacy. I mean, how many people today hear the word enterprise and first think of the business concept? I know my mind goes to the carriers first and then enterprise rent-a-car (which iirc was named after cv-6, funnily enough)
That's how fleet week is actually done in real life you have the most famous one in New York, you Have San Diego, New Orleans, Florida. If you count RIMPAC you have another global one in Hawaii every even year. I work at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam RIMPAC the first week is all PR and diplomatic events.
Let's gather all our ships together in one place. Except the one new experimental ship commanded by a junior loose cannon captain. Wouldn't want him to mess up the parade
Sensible strategy actually. The law of narrative states that when the inevitable attack occours, that one left out captain will show up at the last moment to save the day. Quite an effective insurance policy.
@@ProjectEkerTest33 Terry Pratchett disc world makes fun of tropes all the time and has characters repeatedly acknowledge the existence and validity of said tropes
@@lordgod9958 Ey a fellow Pratchett fan! I always loved in Interesting Times when everyone thinks the good guys will win "because it's so improbable for them to win that means they have to win"
Can you imagine how many ships it would actually take to control the entire federation? Yet only maybe a couple hundred are even there? LOLOL. It was hilarious..........some would take months just to get there! Space is vast. In DS9 they had more ships at a single battle with the dominion lol. That type of frontier day would be impossible to pull off.
@@MrBottlecapBill Dad was in the Navy & I remember him saying that covering one distant, i.e. frontier, location required 3 ships, 1 there on station, 1 in transit to or from station, 1 in maintenance and training.
I mean the Japanese tried this in real life at Pearl Harbor and failed. We should've learned this isn't a good idea when writing stories as it shouldn't work.
I'm from one of the many powers that border the Federation, which is so large it can take weeks even for transmissions to go from one part of the Federation to another. Frankly I'm thrilled that the Federation decided to take its entire defensive force deep into its own territory, luckily my military would be happy to help in the defence of any colonies close to our border. In fact we are so eager to we may never want to leave!
Very well put, but luckily for the federation, out of the other major powers; Klingons are still allies, Cardassians have only just finished recovering from destruction of the dominion war and Romulans after the Hobrus disiaster is not as much of a threat it once was and much more friendlier to the federation and borg are all but extinct, so get away with it.
@@wedgeantillies66 You don't need to be a major power when the entire Federation fleet is in the heart of their territory and you aren't the only minor power with this same idea.
@@RRW359 True, however, having a quarter or third or whatever percentage of the overall fleet is gathered in the sol season it does significantly weaken defences across the board. That some smaller powers could grab contested border regions and a larger one make a grab for massive territorial expansion. All. I will say that it is good for the federation, that the typhon pact alliance didn't exist in this cannon verse as if it had they would have certainly have tried something during this crisis..
@@wedgeantillies66 - i bet the Orions had a field day. No starships really puts a dampener on the effectiveness of starfleet intelligence's anti-piracy efforts. Never mind calling it Frontier Day, the Orions and Ferengi are calling it The Day the Latinum Rained from the Heavens. Plus the Gorn can kidnap a few dozen undefended colony populations and have an old school breeding frenzy while no one is watching. And they're all fairly central minor powers when it comes to Federation worlds. Out on the real rim where it'll take starships pulled back to Sol a few months to get back to their patrol zones, the Tholians, Breen and possibly Hirogen were probably having the time of the century...
The New Republic doesn't have a real standing army. There would be no "fleet week" because they wouldn't be able to pull it off. They have a decent police force at best. The First Order blew up their central political authority, which pretty much prevents the New Republic from building an army. In other words, this is like if the Separatists invaded Coruscant before the Clone Army was made. Considering the only reason the Republic had a Clone Army was because of Count Dooku, leader of the Separatists, that's far more likely than you might think.
@@wolfgod6443 Yeh, with the negligible opposing fleet and the sheer scale of the First Order's secret doom fleet, Starkiller base money would have been better spent sending everyone on a couple of years vacation to a sequestered report planet until the doom fleet was operational. Apparently it's possible to build a galactic hyperpower worth of fleet in secret at the same time you build a super-duper weapon in substantial secrecy.
What do you mean? This is exactly what Disney did, they retconned that the entire New Republic military was on Hosnian Prime when Starkiller destroyed it.
@@Seriona1 well no they didn't say the whole fleet was there because of fleet week they just said that the whole fleet was there and didn't bother giving a reason
the logistical challenge of even assembling a navy like starfleet in one location would be impossibly difficult. like, aren't there literally thousands of ships? that's like every large ship on earth coming into one harbor
more like tens of thousands, if not over a hundred thousand by the time of star trek picard. But more to the point the travel time of war drive, it taking months just to cross the federation, would really make this impossible, and even though many federation member worlds do have their own local self defense forces, there is no way they can take over all of starfleet duties for the amount of time that starfleet will be off.
Even in the show, there are multiple types of ships that were not even showcased. I'm sure it's for budgetary reasons, but I mean there's absolutely no reason to actually pull ships from the neutral zone or other front-line. I mean federation space is huge, so some ships potentially be years away from earth. Were they really ordered to come all the way back and participate in what was originally just some parade?
@@ssj2_snake I didn't get that either, or why the fleet networking system was line of sight. Seems like a pretty bad oversight, do they have to fight in like nebula something now half the fleet can't communicate.
Also, based on the distances in canonical maps and Voyager, it probably takes a couple decades to cross a significant portion of the Federation. So presumably Starfleet has been absent from the actual frontiers all that time, as multiple generations of crew on their ships make the long trip to Earth for Frontier Day.
The only way I can rationalise Starfleet's plans for Frontier day is that when they say "the entire fleet," they're using it in the sense of "battlegroup" rather than "everything we have down to the last shuttle," as in "the third fleet" "the sixth fleet" etc. Also, your mention of disobedience of questionable orders actually reminded me of a Star Trek role playing game I once took part in. A not-too-stable officer ordered me to kill a bunch of Gorn by teleporting them off their ship's bridge into space. I didn't think that was a very "Starfleet" order, so my character surreptitiously teleported them into a secure cargo compartment on their ship instead. We ended up role-playing out the entire disciplinary hearing. It was brilliant. The officer got demoted and my character got a slap on the wrist for insubordination and a commendation for their moral fibre.
Heheh. I do miss my days of Star Trek tabletop roleplaying. Reminds me of a very self-consciously 60s' themed TOS campaign I was in, where our Captain wasn't like crazy or evil or anything, just ...really bad at quick command decisions and fluid tactics. (I think he may have been into like strategy games where you can see the whole board and plan everything, really tended to freeze up in the kind of sub-hunt engagements with the Romulans etc. ) So, without any particular drama, the junior officers basically fought the ship for him almost like he wasn't there, and, you know, we didn't embarrass him in reports or anything about it and he eventually learned on the job and got his confidence. :)
@Joey Hext The Federation lost 39 ships at the Battle of Wolf 359 and that was a huge blow to their total strength and every ship they had near Earth. Is the fleet far larger now than it was then?
@@GC13 To put it this way... In DS9, the force that went to retake DS9 had over 600 ships in it. That was parts of two different fleets, with no indications that it was a significant portion of either fleet. There's at least 10 fleets during the Dominion War (with 10th Fleet being the people that oops'd the Betazed system into Dominion hands by going off and doing training instead of guarding the system). I'd expect Starfleet to be 10k to 30k ships large, at least in war time. Also, the 39 ships lost at Wolf 359 only took something like a year to replace. It was the worst loss Starfleet had suffered in a very long time (until the Dominion War completely eclipsed it, including the battle where 97 ships were lost).
@@nekophht I'm not really into new trek at all, but yeah DS9 certainly hinted that Starfleet was quite big. I think 10k to 30k ships sounds like too much though, unless you maybe count runabouts and shuttles. As I understood, tng, ds9 and voyager, starfleets problem was being spread out over a vast area and solving many different problems for the federation. Kind of like the army corps of engineers regarding dams and rivers, in addition to patrolling borders, transporting dignitaries, diverting asteroids, transporting medicine etc. Which is not entirely unheard of as eg. the US navy / marines sometimes aids in times of natural disaster and deliver emergency supplies.
What gets me is in so many of the scenarios, the enemy can easily annihilate the combined might of the entire navy and have full knowledge of the entire navy's movements, but at the same time can't defeat that navy in a series of much smaller engagements
Fun fact, we almost called this video "Why I Parade My Flotilla, NOT My Fleet". In any case, I retroactively dedicate it to you, in appreciation for the Bolognese recipe I tell everyone is my own.
I would actually like to see this in another series, and then it turns into a complete and horrific massacre of the attacking forces. And afterwards, everyone is like; "Why would they think attacking such a concentration of our strongest forces would be a good idea?"
I assume, that it being Fleet week / frontier day, that Starfleet wouldn't be excepting such an event to happen. The majority of the ships wouldn't be at combat readyness due to crews being on Shore leave. And the way the fleet is deployed in a formation that primary for show rather than defense would insure that it would be a 'Turkey Shoot' for the attacking force.
I have another idea. The attacked faction in question not only fights off the attack on the stationed but as it turns out, the enemy fleet was 3 to 4 orders of magnitude larger than they could ever dream in their nightmares.
Granted, most of the time I see this happen, the aggressor at least is smart enough not to attack with conventional forces, but instead just uses nukes, or something stronger if they have that. Just because the enemy's dumber than a box of rocks doesn't mean you have to be.
Admiral Hara Tadaichi summed up the Japanese result of the Attack on Pear Harbor by saying, "We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war."
It's notable to point out that the US Carriers weren't there and the Japanese didn't prioritize attacks on the Submarine Pens at Pearl Harbor too - so two crucial arms of the fleet were spared.
@@arandomcommenter412 Short version: The only winning move for the IJN was not to play. By attacking Pearl Harbor, they brought the USA into the war, and thus made it unwinnable. Longer version: Japan is a dinky little island nation with a dinky little island economy and population (and crappy iron), while the USA is a major world power with massive natural resources, population, and industry - there are multiple US states that could win a war (or at least fund a winning war) with Japan on their own. The only timelines where Japan has a snowball's chance in hell of winning a shooting war with the USA are ones where the Americas were never colonized in the first place. Japan wanted to be a world naval power, as part of the whole "empire" thing it had going. However, expanding through the Pacific would eventually bump them into the USA, which as established could absolutely win any naval arms race. Since the USA has two coasts, the US Navy had to be split between 2 oceans, while the IJN would be concentrated in the Pacific, which meant Japan could theoretically get a numbers advantage without actually out-building the USA. On the other hand, this meant Japan would have to win two decisive battles instead of one - first against the USN Pacific Fleet, which they would have to win by enough of a margin that their surviving fleet could still beat the USN Atlantic Fleet in the second fight. Pre-WWI, the IJN crunched some numbers, and decided that they would need a 140% numbers advantage in the first fight. So the Japanese plan for going to war with the USA involved having a fleet ~70% the size of the total US Navy. Then the Washington Naval Conference happened, and the USA pulled a pro-gamer move by breaking the Japanese diplomatic cipher, reading their mail to figure out the bare minimum fleet size Japan would agree to, and capping the IJN at _60%_ of the USN. Japan was not happy. So Plan A (which was already based on the known fact that Japan _could not win_ against the USA's full strength, and relied on some dubiously optimistic performance expectations beyond that) was a wash, and the government had to come up with a new one. They got their experts together (here portrayed collectively by Isoroku Yamamoto), and the conversation went something like this: (The government of the Japanese Empire, here portrayed by Emperor Hirohito): "hey, come up with a way to win a war with the USA if we only have a fleet 60% as big as the USN." The correct answer to this was: "that is completely impossible and also stupid, you maniac." Unfortunately, this kind of candid explanation is not something you're allowed to say to your social superiors in Japanese culture. Instead, Yamamoto said something like this: Yamamoto: "We would have to dictate terms in the White House." (Note: the White House is an ocean and a continent away from Japan. Most of the ocean is subject to a sizeable USN presence, and the continent is populated by people who have wet dreams about getting to be armed insurgents.) Emperor Hirohito: "Sounds great." Yamamoto, perhaps realizing he had overestimated his boss's intelligence with no way out, came up with Plan B. Step 1: knock out the USN Pacific Fleet in a decisive blow using air power. Step 2: -A miracle occurs- the US surrenders immediately. Step 3: victory. All branches of Plan B had basically the same action loop: win a victory so massive and crushing that it scared the USA - the Americans, after all, were soft, pampered merchant Westerners, not the *mighty Nipponese warrior race* - into surrendering. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, the USA did the one thing that completely ruined Plan B and doomed the Japanese Empire, which was: _not_ surrender. And there was no Plan C. So Japan lost WWII as a direct result of their massive tactical victory at Pearl Harbor.
@@dylandarnell3657 While I agree overall with what you said I do take exception with your point here; " Step 1: knock out the USN Pacific Fleet in a decisive blow using air power. Step 2: A miracle occurs the US surrenders immediately. Step 3: victory." specifically step 2. The japanese actually did have precedent for Striking a concentration of a European power's naval force and quickly winning the war. This of course being the Russo-Japnese war of 1904-05, in which the Japanese destroyed several prominent ships with a surprise torpedo boat attack then invaded and took the port and subsequently defeated the reinforcing fleet. This was a huge deal at the time as an Asian power had not ever defeated a Major European power before and certainly not so quickly. The Japanese were meticulous planners to a fault, (seriously operations like midway were overplanned and ridgid) however they planned around this for months-years and was nowhere near as haphazard as ????? PROFIT! The plan was very methodical, Strike the US pacific fleet and cripple it to the best of their abilities giving them time to invade the Phillipines, Guam, Saipan, Wake, etc while simultaniously taking the other European power's territory like Borneo, Malaya, New Guinea, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong etc. Then, with an established defensive island chain, decicively defeat the remainder of the American Pacific fleet (before they can mobilize and rebuild the losses/ramp up industrially) which will force the Americans to sue for peace as the russians did not long ago. It was no secret that the Americans didn't want anything to do with far off wars in the first place, with their fleet in ruins and the japanese already in control of their objectives they would have to come to terms (at least with japan). of course this plan is silly in hindsight, and is steeped in the Bushido code as you mentioned and filled with a decadent view of Americans which to be fair, given the 20's and general feeling of isolationism a fair, if misguided, assumtion to make lol. while the effectivness of the pearl harbor strike can be debated, the "blitz of the east" was a pretty incredible success for the japanese, island, after island fell in very quick succession with embarassing defeats for the European power's and by America on the Phillipines. There was absolutely an air of defeatism immediately following pearl and the loss of the far east islands, the rules everyone thought they understood about naval warfare had just been shattered at pearl, the mighty symbols of what once was naval power lay burning heaps at their anchors and the US had Dangerously fallen behind it's adversary. The japanese were an undefeated force that had the experience of years of warfare with many of their ships being more modern than the Pacific fleet counterparts and all the US had left was a few outnumbered, untested carriers to try and just hold the line. The western world was wholly unprepared for Imperial Japan, America actually got insanely lucky several times throughout the pacfic war, had a few things not gone just right the war may have gone in a very different direction and while I wouldn't doubt the final outcome the number of bodies on both sides could have been astronomically worse.
Here's an interesting question: If the Changelings could infiltrate Star Fleet so seamlessly and effectively to pull something like that off, why would they need to destroy Star Fleet in one fell swoop in the first place?
They didn't want to destroy it, they wanted to use it. If they simply wanted to destroy the fleet they would have had every ship turn on each other, but they didn't. They attack their main threat, the space station, and then would go on to destroy Earth. After that they would have moved on to other worlds.
@@ukmediawarrior still assembling the fleet made absolutely no sense, the "take over" signal was obviously having some very long reach anyways and would take over any reinforcements coming into range. Then on top of that there was the fleet formation remote control, which required "line of sight" LOL. So even if they only had the totally senseless fleet formation remote control, then it still made no sense to initiate a fleet assembly to get the fleet quickly, again they would be able to catch any incoming reinforcements and force them into remote control formation. And they never clearyfied who actually had control of the fleet once they got into remote fleet formation control, it obviously wasn't the ships nor the space station. By the way, why wasn't the space station also mind controlled? Why did it only work on young people? Plotarmor? Why does Earth have it's defenses like shield emitters not safely on Earth BEHIND the shield with some unlimitted planetary powersupply but instead on a puny and vulnerable space station?
@@phelanwolf6747 Some very good points, obviously the writers missed them all, lol. Yes, as the Borg take over virus infected anyone who used the transporters then yes, the space station would also have some of those borg'ified young people. I suppose you could argue that because its so massive the number of people on board under 25 wouldn't be able to outnumber those older than them. But I made the same argument for crews on ships. The vast majority of crew would be over 25 and so should easily be able to fight off the borg'ified younger people. They did explain that it only worked on those under 25 because up to the age of 25 your brain is still forming, or something like that. But as people don't graduate from Starfleet Academy until they are around 22-23 the amount of crew under 25 on a starship would be negligible. A stupid plan by the Borg and a stupid plot choice by writers who know nothing of Trek lore.
@@ukmediawarrior yeah, the logic was that the genetically encoded technology would only be able to grow and integrate the transmitter into your brain while it was still developing, without you realizing. My biggest issue with that was something completely different, though: why on earth did the Borg even bother planning anything at all? We know that earth (and a few other planets at least) use transporters for planetary movement. You walk through and get teleported somewhere else. If they could implement that tech on literal research space ships, then why not on the civilian infrastructure that would be used by every young person in the Federation when they go to school, see friends or have a date? Every single person under 25yo should have been borgified and it shouldn't have mattered that they never stepped foot on a star fleet ship. No need to take anything over. Apparently nobody was able to spot the modification at all, so just wait a few decades and eventually you'll get them all. At one point, you wouldn't even need to manipulate people anymore, because they would have already inherited the manipulated DNA from their parents. BUT if they're able to rewrite the genome of every single cell in your body to that degree, then every single scene where someone was shot or stabbed or parasite-infected or plasma-leaked to death makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, because if you're at that level of control, you can put somebody into the transporter buffer, copy-paste a few tissues around and you could perfectly recreate the person in a healthy state. It wouldn't even have to be perfect, because the body would reorganize itself, it just takes time while not dying. And you could absolutely do that with that technique.
@@phelanwolf6747 - the worst part is this same plot of taking over the fleet to destroy the Federation from within was used in Prodigy with even more disastrous consequences. And in the timeline that happened years *before* Frontier Day. So the fleet implemented this remote control feature *after* almost being destroyed by an invasive viral ai program that took control of all their ships within hailing distance. Does starfleet ever learn from its own history?
I think the writers missed an opportunity here. The Borg and the Changlings carry out their Fleet Day attack, but it fizzles because for the very reasons you've outlined, all of Starfleet isn't there. Yes, there are plenty of ships, but except for a couple of "hero ships" like the Enterprise or the Titan, the rest are auxiliaries. Their presence there won't impact Starfleet's many duties. Due to their cultures which demand obedience, it doesn't occur to the Borg or Changlings that some in Starfleet might fight the crazy Fleet Week plan.
Agreed. That would show of the real strengths of the Federation, intellect, wisdom, and picking the third option. Having the Borg and Changelings defeated by their own inability to understand their opponents would be so poetic; they can collect data, they can take people's places, but they don't learn.
@@IAmEvilTree Exactly. Or commanders in sectors might comply--yet not quite comply--with the order. They send ships that aren't really needed, need overhaul, due for decommissioning. etc. In some cases, ships aren't available because gosh darn it, they're out on patrol or there's a problem with their warp drive, etc.
As a life-long Trekkie, I have a lot of experience in coming up with ad-hoc explanations / justifications for the franchise's alarmingly-frequent poorly-thought-out scripts. (And the inconsistent depictions of the speed of warp drive and the scale of the galaxy is one of my biggest pet peeves in the entire franchise). In this case, my head-canon says that everyone who said "the whole fleet" is absolutely employing a degree of hyperbole. At most, they are talking about "all the ships in the fleet that are available to participate in Frontier Day". After all, I think the Dominion War in DS9 established that Starfleet consists of *thousands* of starships, and while I wasn't able to pause the episode and count every ship on screen, I'm pretty sure it was well less than thousands. Maybe a few hundred? It's possible that Starfleet has reduced its size since the end of the Dominion War, but I doubt it would be by an order of magnitude. In addition, many of Starfleet's ships are on deep space assignments at any given time, and would require literal *years* to return to Earth, even at sustained maximum warp. This is especially true of older ships that do not have a max sustainable cruising velocity of warp 9.99, as was the case for the Titan. So I assume that those ships are still out doing their jobs, due to the simple fact that it is logistically impossible for them to return.
Agreed as alone during the dominion war, Starfleet fielded at least 10 fleets made up of anywhere from 100 to at least several hundred star ships, which even during peace time would still, be kept up to decent size as threats can appear and attack from any direction, meaning borders and key planets would still be defended. Which combined with the distances involved, despite warp speed capabilities and ships on deep space assignment, cannot see more than a quarter to a third of starfleet being available to take part in frontier day.
@@radoslawskalski4036 sounds a logical explanation, probably no more than two - three fleets involved max, those charged with protecting sector001; Terran system and sector 002-5; core territories of founding members like Vulcan, Tellar and Andor and alpha centuria.
@@esecallum That around about the individual size of the two federation fleets that took part in operation return during the dominion war, 30 years before. So for me, would bank on it only being the fleet covering Sector 001 and other core territories that make up the founding members of the federation; Vulcan, Teller, Andor and Alpha Centari. As after all the trials and tribulations, that starfleet had gone through even in peacetime, cannot see them letting their guard down.
I would love to see an episode of a tv show where a fleet week (with a believable amount of ships) occurs that repeatedly and obviously sets up that an attack is going to occur e.g. look at our completely un-hackable automated anti capital ship guns; and then when everyone expects a huge enemy fleet to jump in, something far more plausible happens, like an assassination attempt or the like.
Shout out to that one Lovecraft story where a guy is threatened by a wizard and spends to the entire story worried about what kind of magic spell will be put on him, only for the wizard to come to his house and shoot him with a gun.
Or have the entire fleet be decoys full of gasoline to make the explosions look real, and when it gets attacked, the REAL fleet teleports behind them. "Nothing personal, Admiral."
I was surprised by how few ships "the entire fleet" consisted of in the show (150?) considering _a single fleet_ during the Dominion war was anything from 100-500 federation ships. Hell, even Wolf 359 was odd fifty ships which they threw together in a moment's notice
This is why I don't believe it was the entirety of Starfleet. It operates thousands of ships, both big and small, across thousands of systems, and the number shown onscreen is nowhere near that. "The entire fleet" is just hyperbole that everyone keeps repeating. They're probably the largest most important ships-of-the-line or prestige ships, but it's NOT all of Starfleet, and I wish people would stop it with this critique. Characters are allowed to be hyperbolic or to have imperfect information, not everything said is 100% true.
@@allengilbert7463 Or its just all of say starfleets 1st fleet or whatever passes for home fleet, and the vast majority of the rest of starfleet is still out there doing their day to day operations.
@@dparky1627 Even in the worst of starfleets complacency periods during the 2350's and 60's, the whole of starfleet still easily numbered in the tens of thousands.
A lot of sci-fi stories get military scale wrong. It’s why you don’t often see armies of hundreds of billions of soldiers or galaxy spanning fleets off hundreds of thousands to millions of ships. I think it’s because the numbers get so high that it becomes difficult for the audience to really grasp and makes the individual characters seem a hell of a lot less important to any story without serious author shenanigans
Nice to see this channel return after that month long hiatus. Hope you all are feeling better. But yeah, putting all your ships in 1 location for any reason other than a defensive last stand or just having very few ships is dumb. It should have been something like "half the active fleet" and one could still get that plot point across without it being ridiculous. A way to phrase Marc's 1st law could be: _"The believable feasibility of an idea is inversely proportional to the stupidity of that idea."_
This reflects one of my biggest problems with Star Trek: Into Darkness. "We've recalled all ship captains and their respective vessels to earth due to X happening. and then we will gather all those captains in one room."
Normally, gathering all in the moment available ships and captains to discuss measures and mount an investigation is a good idea. The problem here was that the attack was orchestrated by an insider, who knew Starfleets response to the letter.
@@JoacinoDaGona It's actually NOT a good idea, as Russia learned not too long ago when they were cheap and flew a bunch of admirals on the same plane that just happened to 'crash'. You really, really don't want all your ships in one spot, and you sure as heck don't want all your captains in one spot. The amount of generational knowledge you could lose is massive. Even so though, for *most* modern navies it wouldn't be an end game. All those ships have XOs that will step up, ready or not, while the fleet sorts itself out. The fleet movements may not be quite as on point, but they absolutely wouldn't dissolve into chaos as is so often depicted.
@@JoacinoDaGona Why would you assume that having piles of people who know nothing about the situation in one room is actually conducive to an investigation? Have you never been in a business meeting before?
@@stevenschnepp576 To coordinate a system-wide manhunt, to discuss wider implications and clean-up. There is a lot to talk about after someone blows up the roof of your of-the-books spy facility.
@@manicmarauder You are right, it is better to discuss sensitive matters like a coordinating a manhunt, and clean-up of a super-secret spy facility over potentially compromised communication lines.
this is basically the first episode of the original Battlestar Galactica, when they summoned the entire fleet of Battlestars (enormous starships like floating cities) to one place for a treaty with the Cylons who then destroyed them all, except the Galactica whose captain figured out what was happening and left.
I'm not sure about the older version of BSG. But the newer one it's heavily implied that a combination of generally being caught by surprise (from a sense of decades old complacency), an exploitation of critical system's security design flaw, and a massive coordinated strike at every human colony world all at once (which also took decades to build up the forces to do that)... is what brough down the Colonial Fleet. It wasn't a "special day of celebration" that made them vulnerable. If the Cylons waited another day or struck a day sooner, the outcome would have been the same.
@@SirMattomaton Yeah, the cylons had a backdoor hack into the colonial defense network, and they were able to literally "turn off" their ships, leaving them vulnerable and easy pickings while they tried to figure out what the hell was happening. They also attacked everywhere at the same time, so there was no time to realize what was happening and fix the issue. The reason it didn't work on the Galactica was because it was an outdated ship that didn't have all the high tech stuff that had been developed since the last war. They couldn't be hacked, because their network didn't connect to the updated defense network, so the backdoor couldn't shut them down.
If you're so invested in having this as an event your military holds, there's one simple change you could make that would probably make it *far* safer than what we see; conduct your fleet week celebration with only one of your fleets. Most of the nations we see doing this are large enough that their navies are typically divided into several different fleets and sub-divisions. So, all you need to do is establish some sort of rotating schedule with those forces. You conduct Fleet Week this year with the ships and personnel of the 2nd fleet, and next year it's the boys and girls from the 4th who will be carrying out the maneuvers. You get the benefit of whatever public and political capital you're trying to raise with such a celebration, and you're not *completely gutting* your defenses and ability to respond to threats in the process.
Heh, fun fact, that's what actual Fleet Weeks do! I don't know about the cycling, but most militaries never put the whole fleet in one place for exactly that reason.
@@scorpio7232 Too bad that didn't seem to fully make it to the Federation, or any of the other nations that decided compromising their security across their entire territory was worth a few days of public spectacle.
Taking this a step further, each fleet should send a representative squadron, rather than completely abandoning their area of operation. And the ships that get sent from a fleet are rotated for each event, so everyone gets a chance over time.
@@justcallmeSheriff This would also allow the higher ups at home to look at how well maintained and run those ships of far flung fleets are without the local fleet commanders being able to lie in reports, throw in a few combat exercises and you may just have the start of a nice annual check on fleet readiness. Just need another check that they aren't robbing Peter to pay Paul and stripping other ships to make the sample squadron look good.
I think another thing to mention is that if you can defeat the combined might of an entire nation's navy in one strike, especially if you are using convention warships (and not phoning it in by inventing some random superweapon that never gets mentioned again [hello Mandator IV dreadnought]) , then theoretically you could also defeat them in individual battles, getting rid of the need for such a strike. All you're going to do is put all your eggs in one basket.
Well, that depends on A) the enemy knowing they're under attack, B) assuming the enemy won't get better at dealing with whatever combat force you've developed, and C) you're assuming your enemy doesn't have superior strategic mobility, such that it's normally easier for them to get their forces where they need to be.
i think gundam is the best example of doing this right, even the whole "parade thing" was both, explained to also be part of an internal conspiracy that allowed it to happen to gain more power internally, and the fact it wasnt "all the ships", just enough ships to cripple their political adversaries.
In all fairness, if there's any organization in the multiverse that's genuinely stupid enough to gather its entire fleet in one place for a fleet week event, it would be the Federation from Star Trek.
too be fair, i dont think the whole fleet was there. remember the COPY/PASTE federation class of ship we saw? there was literal thousands of them, against Romulans trying to blow up the Synth planet. None of them were at the event. and there is no way all those ships were decomissioned so quickly after being built. (especially if the class was the latest and greatest in federation tech)
@@gownerjones Because the Federation is one of the most blatantly idiotic factions in all of sci-fi? The Original Series incarnation wasn't too bad, but everything we've been shown since? Yeah, pretty fucking stupid all around. Don't get me wrong, I like the universe and a lot of the characters, but as an organization the Federation as a whole (and humanity in particular) appear to have surgically removed all traces of logic, common sense, and historical understanding from their own collective psyche.
@@dustinherk8124 While this is a fair and logical point, I think Picard's writers missed that memo when they repeatedly had characters insist that the ENTIRE fleet was there.
This is one of the major issues with the third season of Picard and it resulted out of Matalas wanting to pay major tribute to the three favourite TOS movies within this love letter season to 90s Trek. The first four episodes were very much reminicent of Wrath of Khan, episode six brings back the HMS Bounty and its cloaking device, and the finale was TNG's version of The Undiscovered Country. Matalas even had stated that he wanted to give the TNG crew their Star Trek VI moment. And that does not just mean, the Enterprise-D gets to fly towards the sunrise along side the newer Titan-A similarly to how the Enterprise-A did next to the Excelsior in that film. Just as in that film, you had these two ships alone saving the day. Only in the film it was one cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey they had to take down and here it was the entirty of Starfleet plus a giant Borg Cube. It was ridiculous but Matalas wanted to bring back the Borg to put a final bow on Picard's story with them all while giving an excuse why they had to be back on the Enterprise-D. And at the same time, he wanted to set up his pet project of Star Trek Legacy. There was a lot that worked in this season, especially the characters and because of them the emotional beats for the most part all hit the way they were intended to. Sometimes the nostalgia bait was too much but overall it still worked. And the basic story itself was good and the pacing was a clear improvement over the previous two seasons. But in the end it still suffered from Matalas' need to do all the aforementioned things: Give the TNG crew their Undiscovered Country moment, set-up Star Trek Legacy, and finish off the Borg. Truth be told, if he had done the show since the beginning and had been able to tick off these things from his bucket list season by season, it probably would have worked out better. I still like the season because of the characters and basic story but the execution in the end was a bit lacking, which is why I can't join into the singing of praises it has gotten since the finale. Btw, here's an idea that could have worked to bring back the Enterprise-D. On Frontier Day there were big celebrations, as said by Marc, have several ones in major systems and the biggest one can be in the Sol system because that's the capital one. Then have the Borg take over the young, but don't act as if that alone would cripple the fleet. Set up previously that Shelby is the Commander in Chief and that she worked her way up through starship development, where she pushed for the implementation of reverse engineered Borg technology collected by Voyager within all newer ship classes. Then have only very few older ships like the Akira and Sovereign classes we've seen on screen during the celebration this season still be able to operate independently because the Borg manage to take over the systems of all these ships. The Titan would also be comrpomised and this results in Geordi taking the crew back to the Fleet Museum to get onto the restored Enterprise-D to help the out-numbered other older ships. You can then still have that awesome Star Wars VI moment with Data flying the Enterprise into the cube and all of that. It wouldn't even have taken much of a rewrite but I guess Matalas wanted to do another TOS favourite: The Enterprise being the only ship available at all.
Concerning Frontier Day in Picard Season 3: They talk about "the whole fleet" beeing present. But from Deep Space Nine we know, that there are multiple fleets. I definitely recall them talking about fleet 7, consisting of many hundreds of ships in DS9. Additionally: Again thanks to DS9 we know, that Starfleet has thousands of ships. In Picard we see less than a hundred. So definitely not every Starfleet-ship.
I have a lot of time for New Trek, and still enjoy watching it, but this bugs me more than I can express. There is a shrinking of scale across the whole narrative and the world building feels so much more compressed and small than the expansive universe I remember feeling part of in TNG, VOY and DS9.
@@eloscuro7 This is I think a function of everything costing more and being shorter...TNG-Voy were each 7 years of 22-24 1 hour (45 min without adverts) long episodes that's a good long time to flesh out characters and worldbuilding Pic and basically all of new trek is 10 episodes a year or less, and this has really been a trend in ALL of TV since streaming became a thing, but they're trying to cram as much narrative and development into those 10 episodes as they did previously into 20+ I even read somewhere that the showrunner of Strange New Worlds is advocating for LONGER seasons precisely because he recognizes that this is a problematic way of doing things that produces sub par stories, and SNW is absolutely one of my favorite of the new Treks. I dunno what it would take but in my opinion we need to get back to 22-26 episode shows and you'd see a lot of your concerns resolve.
Whats even more ridiculous, is that "Our massive gathering of ships was a ploy (by a changling) to get us all in one place, and annihilate us" was already something that happened to the Federation. There should be some rule in place to prevent this sort of dumb idea to begin with! For those that did not watch it, in Star Trek DS9, season 5 episode 14/15 (its a two part-er, highly recommend it), the exact same plan was made by a changling trying to destroy the joint Federation-Klingon-Romulan Fleet at a build up point next the Wormhole. The thing is, the fleet buildup there is like guarding a canal, so this plan actually made sense. It was a way better executed plan. But the Federation should have learned their lesson! This literal exact same plan already happened!
There's also one other problem of attacking Fleet Week when the enemy's entire Navy is gathered there. ... *You're attacking the entirety of the enemy's navy at the same time when they are out there and strutting their stuff.* You're taking insane risks because they can and most definitely do have full combat loads and crews ready and at their stations. Sure ambushes are powerful, but you've gotta be confident in your own guys to pull something like that off.
Sun Tzu: “So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.” If your enemy is nice enough to put all their ships in one place you strike somewhere else. If possible everywhere else.
The Federation is so large that I could easily see it being difficult to even pull ships back from the frontier in time for an event like this unless it was planned years in advance. And even then fuckin RIP everyone and everything in the frontier for the weeks or months they are without Starfleet operations.
“Star Fleet, help! We are under attack by pirates! Where is our system’s defenders?!?” “Ooh, sorry, they’re kinda busy with a pointless military parade. Don’t worry, they’ll be back soon. Two or so weeks once they’ve reached the top of the queue for being resupplied.” “We’re literally being murdered and taken as slaves!” “Don’t worry, try talking to them, I’m sure they’re really nice and reasonable people. Anyways, I have to go, I have nearly a thousand other distress calls coming in every minute.”
@@anthonyramirez9925 well ship speeds where never actualy consistent anyways. like in the beginning of First Contact the Enterprise E was near the Romulan neutral zone but made it back to earth in no time. realistically that would have been a multi-year trip.
Planetary defenses apparently got an upgrade since you need the entirety of Starfleet to take out planetary shields in a timely matter. And yeah according to season 1 even planets on the fringes of Federation space can have decent defenses.
@@Hartzilla2007 Yeah... that's the part of Star Trek I'm not going to discuss. Sometimes they go too close to Science Fantasy. BTW, that still leaves everything outside of the planetary shields open for raiding. From civilian ships to known, but untapped resources like Dilithium. I also see that this is something that will be forgotten by the creators the next time they need a colony in trouble. Not that I expect to see a colony in trouble anytime soon as the stakes are usually up from saving the Federation, to the Universe and even the Multiverse. What stakes can there be with a measly colony being in trouble, that shouldn't be in trouble because of those shields. While it would be nice to see such a colonization effort on screen compared to the one we saw in TNG that didn't even have replicators yet, I'm afraid we won't get to see that.
@@TheJarric That was the prequel-era Republic. It was pretty dumb that that didn't have a standing army either. What, no threats from Hutt space or anything?
Another good example is Admiral Yi Sun Shin using his invention, the turtle ship, to quite literally annihilate the Japanese navy, without losing a single ship from his fleet
I just want to thank you for leaving this comment, I'm now learning about Admiral Yi and I'm amazed by how cool and dramatic and emotional his story is. For those curious, I highly recommend the channel Extra History and their 5 part series (don't worry, each video is less than 10 minutes). Thanks for educating me💜
The reason it works again and again in fiction is because it is cinematic. It looks cool and provides a convenient solution or scenario where otherwise there might not be one.
The "decentralized command structure" is also known as "Mission Command." The German and American armies in WW2 had a habit of ignoring, or reinterpreting orders if they had a better idea.
During the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Mitcher launched his bombers and told them to orbit away from the carriers. This was to clear the decks of highly flammable and explosive aircraft. He couldn't launch an attack since he didn't know where the Japanese force actually was. The Bomber crews got board waiting for something to do and bombed Guam.
@@Rocketsong During the Battle off Samar, a US carrier pilot landed his plane at a recently captured airstrip on Leyte to refuel & rearm. When the army officer in charge told him the bombs and fuel were reserved for AAF planes being shipped in, the pilot held him at gunpoint, took over the airstrip, and started calling in more carrier planes to rearm there.
Mission Command doesn't promote reinterpreting or ignoring orders though. Mission Command states that the mission be a clear outcome or intent so that the actual plans to do so can be devised by the troops on ground who have a better view of the situation. Command and control is dictating how to assault the objective, while mission command may state by no later than xx xxx xxxx secure and hold objective so and so.
If, for some reason, the enemy fleet gathered in one place, you have a new problem. That's a lot of concentrated firepower and manpower. Trying to overcome that isn't going to be easy. It's also likely in the heart of enemy surveillance and defense networks, which will give them a massive advantage. As other posters have said, at that point, you're better off striking everywhere, but fleet week.
The idea is that the fleet isn't battle ready because the ships are doing outreach, so there are civilians in the way and distracting the crew. This, of course, is also silly. Sure, you can have civvies touring the main bridge... but you should still damn well be running a watch from auxiliary control/battle bridge/whatever as appropriate.
@@boobah5643 Plus, getting the drop on your enemies in such a situation to do any meaningful damage is gonna require a conspicuously large force that _should_ be easily detectable.
it worked in gundam because it was also crippled from the inside as one political side of the army used allowed it to happen so they could eliminate their political rivals and create the perfect situation to declare a crisis. of course, as its always the case in gundam, that ended up biting them in the ass, and while they did manage to gain that power they wanted, it also came at a heavy cost for them.
Well in some universes there are "nuclear" options such as Andromeda Nova Bomb (bomb that disrupts gravity of star, turning it into super nova), something like that can take down whole fleet....assuming they will not outrun it.
@@belisarian6429 That's another of those "it shouldn't always work but does". Stationary targets would be toast, but ships should be able to detect the shockwave and FTL away.
9:45. In addition to deterance, the US fleet was moved to Pearl Harbor so it could execute War Plan Orange if war were to break out with Japan. That was the plan to move the surface fleet, along with several Army divisions, to the Philippines so they could interdict Japanese fleet movements.
Eventually thay might have been the case that was proposed but not solidified just yet because the idea was to find a way to to deter further aggressive action ironically.
I think the decisive strike on Fleet Week during Infinite Warfare was a pretty good example. The SDF spent quite a while infiltrating the UNSA's AATIS staff, and waited for the most opportune moment. At most during the Geneva Fleet Week there was probably 2 dozen vessels including the Ret and Tigris. The strike at Geneva was an impressive display of the SDF's capabilities. Even then, roughly 8 or so vessels survived to engage the remaining SDF ships that weren't destroyed when the AATIS batteries were recaptured. Only the entry of the Mons into battle finally delivered the final blow, at the cost of much of the Mon's weapons batteries and serious damage to one side of the ship. The dumbest part of the strike however is how we're lead to believe that was the entire UNSA fleet. The zone of believability is crossed because of this singular inference. If it was a chunk, even a sizable one, of the UNSA fleet, it'd make a whole lot more sense. But those 2-3 dozen vessels are what we're lead to believe is the entire UNSA fleet.
I don't know about Star Fleet, but what I have experienced IRL is that once a former coworker has ascended to an executive level, they stop listening to their former coworkers in spite of what history, consultants, studies and good business sense instruct them to do. I have seen them pass on good solutions for bad solutions, or no solutions, and then give reasons to their staff that the staff can't help but laughing out loud at.
I mean, several offensives were carried out by both sides as decisive battles, just to name a few; Atollon, Lothal, Scarif, Yavin, Hoth, Endor, Naboo, Jakku
@@dparky1627 they didnt loose the entire fleet, but all of their chain of command, both the emperor (who centralized the empire on him) and his second-in-command, Lord Vader died in endor
it's funny, because logistically, getting that fleet across was actually quite an achievement. The idiocy lies in trying to do that in the first place.
I would think that withdrawing all ships to the Solar System probably breaks some Federation-brokered treaties as well that required a continual Starfleet presence to maintain peace between warring factions (monitoring the Neutral Zone would be one case). That would have made the action illegal and call for disobeying it by those captains posted in those areas.
Yeah, this drove me nuts. The IRL reason is of course that the writers didn't have the skill to incorporate their story into something the size of the Federation. I.e., make the story work in the universe they intentionally decided to write for.
My IRL reason is that the writers didn't have enough time to write it in a believable way because they were running out of episodes, and this is the last season (I heard). It's like what happened to Game of Thrones where the directors wanted to end it and did so haphazardly, so they can work on Star Wars.
@@cashewnuttel9054 I dunno, ten hours is a long time for a relatively straightforward revenge conspiracy plot. And didn't have to be the whole fleet ("oh god, this has been taking place across the federation for months, it's everywhere" - see easy). Complaining is easier than writing of course, but I get the sense there was never a 2nd draft of the plot.
"Make the story work in the universe they intentionally decided to write for" You can't say this is a new problem, at least. How many times had the Enterprise-D been in a rush for a far-off colony world to deliver some MacGuffin that they should've been able to replicate on-site?
@@Lemon_Inspector might be splitting hairs but I'd say there's a difference between backdrop to an episode and the entire foundation of your 10hours homage to TNG
@@getnohappy I mean, replicators kind of break most Star Trek plots. And a lot of times it's the main plotline, not a sideplot. Star Trek is definitely not post scarcity anymore, and nothing really makes sense if it is. All in all, every Trek has just about the same issues. Sometimes it takes weeks for ships to get from one point to another, other times it's a week or a few days, or several hours. Scale has never been a strongpoint of Trek.
In 4x games like Stellaris or Masters of Orion, it's really normal to mass your entire fleet in one place. Often, this is absolutely necessary to win battles. Such a gathering is no "fleet week" though, it's a war-fleet ready for action.
Then the Antarens come in and kick your shit in. They have a nasty tendency to target star systems where you have the largest concentration of ships and usually have more and better armed/armoured than you.
@@dparky1627 I tend to have the opposite problem... my fleets are generally good enough to kill the Antarens, my issue is *intercepting* them before they cause damage to undefended world(s).
I understood it was a dumb idea thanks to Gundam 0083, where most, or at least a significant portion, of the Federation fleet was blown up by one Zeon zealot with a nuke. Whenever I hear about these celebrations in media, I automatically go to "well they're about to die".
They usually do them in relatively peaceful times. There is no way they would do this if they were A: in contested territory, or at all close to a possible hostile territory which could launch a strike against the fleet B: Fighting an active war
@@arandomcommenter412 as stated in the video, they usually DON'T do it because there is no sense in doing it and there are too many down sides and no up sides.
Although, keep in mind that it was actually a plan by Jamtiov to both prove at the federation needed his special unit the Titans, and a plot to reduce the federation military to the point that they couldn't stand against him if they ever got the idea too, and most of the ships that were not hit by the attack, were kept out specifically because they would be loyal to the Titans when they rose. Makes a lot more sense if you realize the people pulling the strings were intending for that outcome
Imagine explaining to a prosecutor or a magistrate or to the controllership, both in the civil government and in Starfleet, that you want to move the entire fleet to a single point, even more so if it is a Vulcan, the No, you would already have it, you would just take it a freebie investigation
The thing that struck me was 'wait, that's the ENTIRETY of Starfleet?' Operation Return was around 600 Federation ships, Chin'toka seemed to be a similar number. Now granted (especially during Operation Return) the Federation was throwing anything that could fight into battle but they still couldn't put EVERY ship into the operation. If anything after the Dominion War Starfleet would have got bigger.
Weird how, despite having already infiltrated the higher echelons of Starfleet and therefore won, the changelings allowed the Federation to develop the technology that ousts them. So the escalated threat of undetectable changelings got turned back into nope they are detectable again. And also when two humanoids grab them by the arm, they definitely don't turn into spikes and murder them all, or at the very least turn to goo and run away.
That's part of the problem. In the past, you had writer's like DC Fontana, Diane Duane, David Gerrold, etc, actual proven writers. Today, the writers seem to be less capable (not just for trek, but TV and Movie writers period). Heck, the Orville seems more Trek than Discovery, or Picard. Haven't seen Strange New Worlds, but don't have any real desire to do so...
@@BenjaminSchollnick To be clear, I think Picard Season 3 is excellent, except for the final episode which totally and completely blows. I think you would really enjoy Strange New Worlds. The only problem with it is that you kinda have to watch Season 2 of Discovery, which to be fair is the best season, mainly because of Pike
I think another example of this occurring more due to idiocy and or bravado would be the Naval review in Gundam 0083, the Earth federation navy put the majority of it's fleet on review as a sign of renwed strength in the aftermath of the One year war and to show to any remnants of the principality that continued fighting was futile, low and behold zeon remnants attack the fleet review with a stolen EFF Nuke, destroy a good chunk of the Konpeito asteroid base and nearly 60% of the EFF fleet including their newest flagship, then use the chaos to hijack a space colony and drop it on north America before being annihilated by the Earth orbital fleet and the Lunar fleet.
I was waiting for him to include a clip of that. My only real complaint about that scene was that the nuke shouldn't have been powerful enough to take out such a huge area in the vacuum of space.
Though to be fair, there were elements within the EFF that were trying to make all that succeed in a bid for power, eventually leading to the creation of the Titans.
Technically, the fleet review in this case was intended as bait to spur the enemy Zeon remnant fleet to attack them so the Federation fleet could subsequently destroy them. The Federation fleet commander - charmingly named Green Wyatt - was expecting to get internal information on the Zeon remnant's plans from the traitor Cima Garahau, but for story reasons that didn't pan out and yet Wyatt decided to go forward with it anyways largely out of sheer arrogance. The bigger irony here was the fleet sucked regardless. They were still designing ships for anti-battleship combat despite Mobile Suits being the new paradigm for warfare.
You are right in that the writers said 'the entire fleet' is there, and that might be true. Luckily in the past were more...logistical writers, who made us aware that Star Fleet has MANY fleets, all responsible for different sectors of the Federation, and each fleet can have well over 100 ships. The Federations Tenth fleet is referenced as having at least 112 ships. Another episode has 2 partially spent fleets, totalling ~627 ships. So if the Federation only had 10 fleets (it very likely has many more) And each fleet had at least 313 ships (ala the 2 partially spent fleets) Then the Federation at very very minimum has 3130 ships. But more likely has many many times this number, likely in the low tens of thousands. (Federation Day is still dumb though)
The one example I can think of that makes sense is in Gundam 0083, and thats mainly because the Federations command used it as bait for an attack they knew would come, so that there was an easier target than their actual HQ (plus some internal espionage). And ofc naturally it wasnt the whole fleet.
The thinking was that at the time when FDR ordered the bulk of the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii it was basically telling the Japanese that they're ready to counter any attack they attempt on the Philippines where the USN's Asiatic fleet was stationed around the same time. Of course, the Asiatic Fleet was mostly light combatants, with only one heavy cruiser and one light cruiser at the time and the bulk of the remaining combatant ships were submarines.
An Admiral full on resigned over the order to move the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, because US Fleet Problems (massive naval exercises) had shown that a Fleet in Pearl Harbor would be vulnerable to attack, as participants in the Fleet Problem attacked and did great (simulated) damaged to the Fleet stationed there. Also there was the Royal Navy attack on Taranto, which was the proof of an aerial attack on a port in actual practice.
@@gokbay3057 the officers in the fleet more or less did know this and the weekend of december 7th was supposed to be the very last time the battle line squadrons were to be in the same place at the same time for "R&R"
A true adversary would lure the majority of a fleet to one location such as "Earth is under attack! All ships report to Earth ASAP!" or create a hidden virus that re-routes a fleet's navigation systems to a single destination where an ambush is waiting.
Irl we do have countries that does showings of their military equipment in parade (my country had it for first couple decades before it was stopped for being to militaristic and we are very pro military service nation so it’s funny that pacifist state like the federation didn’t have objections to show of militarism like that) but it never all the military just showing of what they have
'Mobile Suit Gundam: 0083 -Stardust Memory' is essentially based on this premise, but it's done in a way that makes a lot more sense, I think. For one, Zeon's attack on the Federation's Fleet Review just destroys a bunch of ships, not ALL the ships. Besides, the attack is more intended to reveal (and use) a treaty-violating nuclear weapon developed in secret by the Federation, which a Zeon pilot managed to steal, so there's a propaganda element, as well. Also, the Earth Federation top brass are DEFINITELY dumb enough to let this sort of thing happen, that's kind of one of the recurring themes of the franchise, people in positions of authority being either corrupt, inept, or both.
exactly. i would only argue that, the top brass wasnt "dumb enough" to allow it to happen, but that they WANTED it to happen, so they could gain political control(which they did).
And, as last two episodes show, the whole thing was merely an attempt to keep the federation far enough away, that this colony drop couldn't be diverted the same way the first one was. Except the federation knew that was coming, and so much that I hurt this county drop just like the first one
The main Solar System faction in my personal setting actually has a MASSIVE naval review every decade or two. I will point out that rather than assembling all the ships in one place, it's an enormous multimedia event where many of the "participating" ships might be on the 400-day transit to the largest major facility in the Scattered Disc.
something Yamato 2199 got right. Even when Zoellik gathered the fleet for his review at Balun, the fleet was too widespread and too many ships engaged in other duties - there were large numbers of ships that did not attend. Also, Zoellik was not nearly as smart as he thought he was. He got a huge number of ships and packed them in - but even Goer (not that bright himself) points out that the ships are packed too tight for safety. The Yamato does all that damage because of Zoellik's poor planning and Okita figuring out how to use the Wave Motion Gun to use what Zoellik made available to him.
I was waiting for a garmillas fleet review comment. Very cool for sby to get some more attention considering it has some really cool battles and sequences that youtubers like this just don't seem to talk about
Funny that you say fleet week prioritizes spectacle over security to a Star Citizen fleet week ad, where famously no more than 5 capital ships are in system at a time. :)
China might try a similar stunt on like a carrier fleet just moving through international waters, though to the Chinese government, their waters. We may not be at our best now, but like Pearl Harbor, the dragon is awoken.
@Bunny Cop *Most* of the ships were refloated. Like only The Arizona (Magazine Detonation) and the Oklahoma (Completely Rolled Over) were written off. ... Almost everything else was back at sea in around 6 months ...
If they changed it to some of star fleet’s ships would be over populated world doing parade or something. It would make a lot more sense and rise the stakes as well, borgifed fleet would be bombing half of the quadrant, (just handwave the subspace lag like always)
See also: The Law of Conspiracies, which states that the more complex and the more personnel must be involved in a conspiracy, the less likely it is to succeed, or even to be attempted. Five men were arrested at Watergate and 40 government officials were jailed or convicted. That really did happen and it was already too complex and resulted in catastrophic mission failure. Popular 9/11 conspiracy theories would implicate closer to 40,000 involved, which is obviously too outlandish for anyone to even attempt
If you look into 'Fleet Week' in Star Citizen, you'll notice it's only 1-3 capital ships, and 2-3 subcapitals, in a vast navy. They actually do take it very seriously, and that fleet rotates through the star systems.
One issue I had with the Frontier Day plot in Picard is that is a very small number of ships. 200 or so. We saw more during the Dominion War for a single fleet, granted that was war time, but 200 ships for the entire Federation is too little to even defend their own territory let alone go do science and explore strange new worlds. Even in season one, that entire fleet of Inquiry class that Riker commanded is half the size of this Frontier Day fleet. If I can rewrite that plot is to include the other three Federation founding worlds in the celebration and states the best and newest ships are gathered on display for the celebration. The Borg takeover scheme is expanded to all four founding planets, making the stake even higher. States that older ships still on duty are stationed too far away to help or too underpower to help. Show some local non-Starfleet ships and a few old Starfleet ships getting swapped out of the sky by the highjacked synchronized fleet.
Maybe its a knee jerk reaction to how they got slammed for having hundreds of copy and paste ships turn up with Riker at the end of Picard season 1, lol :)
@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 my thoughts exactly, my head cannon justification was it was the fleet that was based out of ESD and that the other fleets would have had festivities at their Bases of operation. I reduce the threat level as ESD and Earth are still seats of government for the federation and the offices of Starfleet command.
Yeah, it just takes a few changed lines. Instead of the entire Federation fleet, it should have been all available ships, or a large number of ships. That would sidestep the piracy or planet defense issue.
@@ukmediawarrior Well, the kneejerk solution to that would be to just have variety in your copypasta fleet. The better solution to this problem is to just NOT REFER TO IT AS THE ENTIRE FLEET in the first place. People coping by saying it was just hyperbole need to remember that the characters made a big deal out of it like it wasn't hyperbole.
I have noticed my own effect that I call thr "Ender's Game" effect. Summarized, no author can correctly write a character smarter than they are without making all other characters stupid enough to fall for their plans. Notably, in Ender's Game, all thr children were picked for battle school for their brilliance, yet they constantly make stupid mistakes until Ender comes along. Ender first wins at the fleet game. Then he's the first person in a school about 3d space combat to ignore the traditional concept of up and down in combat with the phrase "The enemy's gate is down." Yet these things are obvious and not even all that great in terms of conceptual leaps. The result of Ender's Game is that Ender is surrounded by fools except the fools are the smartest people in the world.
I can see at most 90% of a fleet being called to a location, namely during a major invasion if the federation by a force like the borg or cardashions, a force that has displayed an ability to threaten the entire federation attempting a D-Day level invasion.
I mean, considering that the Federation has holodeck technology, it's surprising that those wouldn't be incorporated somehow. You could put together an official Frontier Day holoprogram featuring all the ships in the Federation (including past ones) and broadcast that across the entire Federation with perhaps each member world having their own live events featuring prominent ships in each system. It wouldn't be the same as seeing them in person (actually, it might be easier considering it's the holodeck) but it would let more people see the event at the same time.
I am not entirely sure about how far holotech has advanced at the time of the show, but in STO's 2409+ time, you could use a few ships to create a holoprojection of other vessels - they are even capable of assisting you in a fight.
The Indomitus Crusades gathered every available fleet to Terra, undoubtedly leaving hundreds of systems near defenceless. However, this allowed Robute Guilliman to micromanage the entire crusade, which (Ignoring fleet Quartus, RIP) has given the Imperium a so far good-to-okay chance of achieving a good-to-okay gain in security and power, thanks to Guillimans strategic genius. And then, the Fire Nati-- Hive Fleet Leviathan happened. Oops.
yep but this was more of lets not have 1000 undermanned fleets fight losing battle after losing battle whit a few rare victories instead consolidate them so that we can have a accurate count on what we actually have in number of ships. (remember the Imperium still think it have several 1000 fleet of 100 ships each that does not exist because they are completely destroyed).
It wasn't just Terra, there were multiple muster points throughout the sol system and in nearby star systems, Fleet Septimus is special for both it's secrecy and the fact it was mustered far away from the solar sector
This couldn't have been all of Starfleet's ships. In the Dominion War we saw fleets of this size in individual battles. We were also told there were multiple fleets of this size on multiple fronts during that war.
The EFSF did the same thing in gundam 0083. Assembled most of the fleet even though a prototype nuclear equipped 1 off mobile suit that was stolen by the nightmare of Solomon.
One of the keys to the US victory in WW2 was that commanders where not required to follow out orders if the conditions of battle rendered those orders useless. When General Theodore Roosevelt Jr landed on the wrong beach on D-Day, he did not go looking for the right spot, he issued his famous statement of "We are starting the war from right here." And ordered everyone to follow him.
I like the idea that this fleet week was a local thing. The size of the entire federation fleet or else is laughable. I'm quite sure that we don't see more than a few hundred ships, yet we have ship registry's in the several thousands. Where did all those ships gone? Anyway thanks for making this video, everyone really liked this big twist while I was like "this would never work", now I have a video to deliver my point better than I ever could.
I think the point of that is to be compassionate when you clearly have the advantage (or at least think you do). Giving your enemies the possibility to surrender, avoiding unnecessary casualties and the potential destruction of the ship, is something that I would value if there is no other option.
There are plenty of reasons a ship might submit to demands like that. Most of which revolve around the ideas that either you would definitely lose if you tried to fight and would rather be taken prisoner, or you just don't expect the situation to turn hostile (like a cargo inspection or something)
Nice to see even a couple seconds of video from The Admiral: Roaring Currents (Myeong-ryang). Though I guess Battle of Myeongnyang, the name itself, makes people nope right out of including actually talking about it. Here in the west, Yi Sun-sin (alternatively Sun-shin) doesn't get nearly the recognition he deserves. People sometimes call him 'Korea's Nelson', but given he lived two centuries earlier, the reverse is more accurate. Nelson is the UK's Yi.
What I don’t get is how any faction can get a strong enough attack force to directly take on an opponent's entire fleet. Directly attacking an entire fleet gathered in one place is only effective if you have a force equal to or greater than the fleet in question. Having the element of surprise is of no use if you're attacking only with a small task force with a couple hundred munitions and a couple of fighter wings. It's comparable to attacking a fortress with a 10th of your cavalry; the opponent may not see it coming, but they'll still cream you.
There's a series with a 3 episode arc where in the last episode, stowaways on a captured cruiser is on course for a massive gathering of fleets around a single starbase and its up to them to stop the ship by any means before it can be used as an improved space nuke. It further exemplifies the hidden genius of the tactic despite it being a easily thought of one.
I'm not from Germany but from the Netherlands and we have a similar military system. You may always question orders and while there is a sertain hierarchy you have the ability to refuse orders if they are idiotic and stupid. This aplies to every type of boss relations, you can always suggest things and question methods. Bosses are there to make sure there is order, not to give you commands.
The implication about the German army is actually not true. German soldiers have to follow orders but they are encouraged to formerly protest against illegal and/or immoral orders. Also officers are encouraged to only give orders they would follow themselves.
I think having characters say that Starfleet is gathering two to three fleet formations over Earth gives them some flexibility to make it more believable, instead of asking us to believe that all of Starfleet was deployed to one location.
i agree, it being a horrorist attack on a sizeable fleet makes far more sense and its still something worth trying to stop. even if its a single ship or a handfull of political figures. there's no need to try and make it this "all or nothing".
And its fairly easy to fix too. Instead of "all ships" make it a lot of ships. It can still be a great win/loss (depending on what side you´re on) but it immediately gets a lot more believable and can be followed up with more victories that make the plan seem better as it involves more steps.
My question with Frontier Day is this. When did Starfleet become so small? Picard showed us the "entire" fleet is a couple hundred ships. During the Domination War, Starfleet lost that many ships in a single battle. I get that it was wartime but still.
Defeat in detail is far more entertaining than one single massive fleet battle. You have a smaller fleet which defeats enemies by overwhelming them in separate encounters. You may write an action scene with boarding operation, which is just a successful raid on the enemy docks where their ships are stationed. The harassed enemies may gather much of their fleet in desparation, but they're already the losing side and with denied logistics, their fleet gets destroyed in a one-sides battle. And this doesn't fully end the war but breaks the enemy in some way.
Overwhelming economy of force could be seen as a strategic move if you are on the offense and want to destroy opposition that is spread out. You only do this when on attack though and it leaves your territory almost defenseless
the other obvious problem, if you can destroy the combined might of your enemies *entire* navy in one massive battle... then you can just as easily beat them all split up and in dozens of smaller attacks launched at the same time
There’s also something similar in Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. The Delaz Fleet destroyed the majority of the Federation during its naval review.
In writing this analysis, the Templin Institute must have overlooked one of the founding principles of the Federation charter: "Once a Starfleet Captain is promoted to Admiral, they must always act as if their IQ has lowered by 50 points or more"
shit, I knew I forgot something.
Don't forget that they're required to become jerks as well as morons.
Not to mention, Shelby especially should have had red flags and sirens blaring in her mind with 'Fleet Formation' and 'entire fleet in one place.' It's part of her character you would think based on Best of Both Worlds. She was supposed to be some hotshot, up-and-coming officer in the Anti-Borg taskforce. Officers like that, aren't supposed to be stupid.
@@ealan3694 More than that, it's counter to the entire philosophy of the UFP and operational history of Starfleet. IDIC has been a war winner for Starfleet since it got Vulcan sensors and Andorian phasers on the same ship to the point where it was able to ally with the Klingons and Romulans (and frankly anyone who occupies Betazed just deserves to have all their operational secrets published on Twitter). Having the relatively smaller, but much more numerous member defense fleets come to the aid of Starfleet would have been a nice counterpoint (particularly if it was a strategic anti-assimilation decision to keep them separate by Shelby), but I can always dream.
@@TemplinInstitute Perfectly understandable Admiral
Locke's Corollary To Marc's First Law: "No alternate universe's military command structure is smarter, more cognizant of history, more forward-thinking, or more genre-savvy, than that alternate universe's writers."
Intelligent characters can only ever be as intelligent as the person(s) writing them
Corollary to the Corollary: "Even smart, history-cognizant, forward thinking, and/or genre-savvy writers will bow to the allure of a 'cool action set piece.'"
@@ttd0000 and I eat it up every time. And tbf, if we’re talking about sci fi warfare and space combat, no one alive has any idea how it will actually work or it it’s actually possible in any way we recognize nowadays
@@ianharrison5758 I'm always slightly annoyed when a know-it-all comments on any given scifi space battle setting with their middle school level understanding of newtonian physics, pointing out that the Enterprises engines are not aligned with its center of mass, or pointing out that space fighters shouldn't bank in turns.
The conceit of many of these settings is that the technology they use doesn't rely on basic newtonian physics, the Enterprise doesn't thrust its way to a thousand times the speed of light, gravity manipulation and control over intersecting dimensions of space may allow reality itself to behave as a medium for those fighters to fly through.
If you are hung up on newtonian physics then you can just call it quits at the setting existing at all, as said physics mean these ships couldn't even be where they are supposed to be in the first place.
You could also modify this to say that fictional militaries cannot be any more competent than real world militaries that they parallel. This is especially important if you're portraying an evil empire. Don't want to give the impression that evil is efficient for ethical reasons, especially when real world evil regimes had laughable inefficiency too. Hitler's Megaprojects are a prime example of pointless resource pits that have little real world use. The Death Star is a perfect fictional example for analogy if Thrawn is right.
The rule for writing should be: if the conspiracy of inflitrators would have to replace close to 100% of staff at the institution they are infiltrating then no further steps in the plan are necessary. If you control everything you don't then need a further plan to take control, you already have it.
We've taken over the Federation from within and exiled those still loyal to it!
Now; Time to blow up the Federation!
You'd maybe have to replace one...or two. Have you SEEN how bad the Intelligence community of every nation on this planet is? They're clearly not any better in the future, because those groups were written by people alive today. People who also still don't know anything about sociology, economics, or literally anything to do with how space works.
Coups only happen when the coup planner has subsumed control over the actual positions of power and is in a position to take over the government. It's often recognized that the success of the infiltration phase means the coup has already succeeded, merely that no one knows about it yet. Infiltration can only go so far and you'd eventually have to violently overthrow the government you can rule without compromise and disguise.
True. If you have full control over the whole command structure, why not use it to your benefit instead of destroying this useful tool you have in your hands now. Like from the perspective of the Dominion, let them fight the Klingons, Romulans, Tzenkethi, Voth, Tholians or whoever else might be a threat to your power in the future
Like Hydra taking over Shield and the trying to… what? Shoot everyone not in Hydra from helicarriers? It’s like, dude, you won already. Don’t get greedy
If you centralized your fleet, the better strategy is to attack literally everywhere else at once. Your massive fleet now has no safe harbors or logistics, and you have to claw for every inch of ground with losses that can't be replaced.
Which comes with a corollary: you can only justify centralizing your fleet's location if you move them all to the only location you need to defend.
@@absalomdraconis Yup, a bottle neck like a Stargate or Wormhole would be the ideal scenario for that, but it would have to be contrived.
@@EisIzo In theory this would work with other forms of contrived narrative devices that magically limit interstellar travel to a specific subset of the 360 by 360 degree freedom objects in space should have to move. Hyperlane type travel where a system can only be accessed from adjacent systems that happen to have this hyperlane connection could work too. A chokepoint system which represents the sole connection to a system the enemy has access to could work like that. So basically if your galaxy's FTL looks like Stellaris for some reason it could make sense provided the enemy hasn't figured out how to do FTL properly in all degrees of freedom yet, once they discover jump drives, warp drives, or any other form of FTL that doesn't require corridors with some magical properties good luck with that though.
@@seraphina985 Even with that you still have the issue of travel time. You have to come and get me from one single point. You have a predicable point of origin, a fleet that was once supplied by an empire now is supported by one world, which if your capital is anything like Coruscant or Trantor then it too is a net consumer and dependent on the interstellar trade. Any fortresses you constructed can be ignored and isolated as they're cut off from the fleet and are static.
Say that you did use full freedom of movement and ignore the "front", you have a longer time in transit with a longer supply line, reinforcements take that much longer to show up, and if you retreat you have to go back across the "front" and we know your destination, there's only one place you can go. Meanwhile because defense in depth is a thing, when your attack does suddenly get here, reaction fleets from every nearby system respond, and relatively quickly. Bonus points if there's intelligence on your home system and projected targets, now you have prepared defenses to contend with.
Or do both...after all, it's not like your fleet is doing anything.
Starfleet DOES have a similar policy to the one mentioned by the German army, but only in Beta canon. In Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (video game), you can fail the second simulator mission and get kicked out if you follow a specific order given by your teacher to the letter, instead of doing what you're supposed to do.
Blindly following orders is enough to get you booted from the Academy in Beta Canon, long before you ever see command of a real ship.
The Fleetweek Attack Corollary: If the enemy has gathered their entire fleet (or a critical mass thereof) in one location, one may attack everywhere they aren't and win one's objectives without the need for a decisive battle and the risks contained.
This is probably even the greater damage you can deal: Attack logistics hubs, undefended colonies and pillage trade routes. By the time any reinforcements get anywhere, the attackers are either gone or dug in deep enough to be a serious problem.
Yep no irl army is dumb enough to not keep even small groups to defends out posts and besides if you have something to destroy the entire fleet in one swap the attack would just face massive fleets of your enemy
That sounds like a much better plot: a small outpost where some of the staff got a little too into the celebrations and backup is unavailable because a large amount of the fleet is away getting attacked by a massive enemy force.
Such as industrial and logistic hubs that are crucial to maintain and supply the fleet.
Presumably this specific Frontier Day was especially special as the 250th anniversary of the launch of the NX-01. But the same issues arise of Warp travel time and the truly enormous size of the Federation, even if the Klingons and Romulans can be expected to respect the borders, there must be many other threats the Fed still faces. One solution would be slipstream tech but where is it in this era? Don't think the super fast jellyfish ship Spock had in ST 2009 had it. But if it did exist that would help with the travel logistics and would help explain this mysterious loss of ability to track ships at warp in this season...ie why is cloaking such a big deal if ships can't be tracked at warp anyways in contradiction to all previous Trek? Or heck the Romulan Star Empire is basically defunct, just give Fed ships cloaks and like all the weirdness of this season regarding not being able to track the Titan is resolved. Where is really ANY of the stated or observed tech that should exist in some form in this era from the half dozen times we've glimpsed it in past Trek? 3D panels mentioned in DS9's "The Visitor", obviously all the doodads on the Galaxy-X of "All Good Things", any number of techs Voyager depicted in their various sojourns?
"The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"Mostly Harmless"
Yeah right
@@cookiedudegaming Humans are mostly harmless.
Small dogs, on the other hand...
@@cookiedudegaming A snake is mostly harmless. It's only the venom that's dangerous, and only if it gets in your blood... or eyes.
What would be an interesting and more believable inversion of this trope is to launch an attack on a garrison which has been weakened by some kind of event, be it "fleet week", or even just a "changing of the guard" where the currently deployed fleet is being pulled back for repairs and refit while the replacement fleet is on the way, but not quite in the AO yet.
@@Kitkat-986 The changing of the guard idea doesn't fly either, though. In the US Marine Corps for example, there's a set of standing orders for those on guard duty that cannot be superceded by other orders. Been a while since I had to recite them, but if memory serves #4 states that a guard on duty must stay on duty until properly relieved. It's not a stretch of the imagination that this common sense principle would translate to naval activities as well. So in the above example, there should be no reason why a picket ship would leave its post until the relief arrives.
As an aside, if you ever had to plan an assault on a well-defended enemy position, the best time to initiate the attack is actually shortly *before* the end of a guard shift, preferably before dawn. Guards tend to be less observant over time, but if you time it right the relief force is still unprepared to respond immediately. Waiting until the moment of guard changeover would mean dealing with twice the number of enemy combatants.
Man, being a space pirate in the Star Trek universe would be so easy
1. Wait for Frontier Day
2. Attack the most valuable ships in your area on Frontier Day
3. Go to Romulan space or something to wait out any investigation of the incident
4. Repeat every Frontier Day
space stacions got upgrade during dominion war but it still leaves futher out places
You forgot the critical flaw in your plan:
"Get wrecked by member worlds' own sovereign fleets' ships"
Canon fact: most member worlds have their own security forces and full on fleets. Even if Starfleet was entirely deployed to Sector 001, which it couldn't be, there would still be all those other fleets out there. We saw what life was like onboard one such ship in the Lower Deck's episode "wej Duj", the Vulcan cruiser Sh'vhal, operating under the authority of the Vulcan High Command. Sh'vhal was shown to be more than a match for a rogue Klingon Bird of Prey and several Pakled clump ships.
Ngl, I'd love to see a series that made from the perspective of a pirate or criminal in the Star Trek Universe
@@TobiNightcore Orion "slave" girl boss would make an interesting series.
@@richardarriaga6271 A what?
I think the reason why it always works in fiction is this: eliminating a whole fleet in one push is more convenient for the writer than eliminating that same fleet stretched out over several repetitive chapters and coming to the same result.
...it's not that hard to show multiple losses even in a short space, like...montages and the like exist? Halo Wars does this excellently in a few minutes for goodness sakes.
I thought the real point was to gain control of the fleet due to the ships being networked. There was a warning sent out as it was happening that all ships should steer clear of the Sol System due to this. The writer is using this as a cautionary tale because our world is so interconnected, and we in our time don't recognize the danger.
This video is simplistic in its analysis.
@@waltherchemnitz Smart. But of course! All stories have a narrative point they're trying to make, so I'm hoping videos like this are solely about the actual sense doing this kind of thing makes when you're real, and NOT a character in the story of an author that's trying to make a point where certain things absolutely must fail to get that point across. In real life we try to AVOID making certain exciting stories- and pretty much *all drama* play out.
@@BologneyT That wasn't the impression I got. What I sensed was the video is calling out the writers for using a "tired" trope, but in this case I don't think it's justified.
@@noway8259yeah, but having the climax of your story be a montage robs it of suspense.
If you've got enough infiltrators in the proper places to convince the Federation fleet to gather all in one place, you have no need to destroy the fleet at all. You already own it.
"It's possible to drastically increase the number of deployed ships, but this is what's known as a "surge" and is not sustainable in the long run"
[me having a flashback to when I bankrupted my Stellaris empire just by undocking my fleet]
Been there, done that.
"We all commit mistakes in the heat of passion, Jimbo"
Normally you will only do it if you are in war time and budget isn’t concerned because if you don’t have more ships you will be dead
Specifically why I have a Corvette Fleet with a Gale Speed and Logistical in every run. I need some sort of response that ain't gonna cripple my economy.
Japan looking at its completely empty reserves at the start of WWII
I actually love the idea of fleet week being a smaller, local festival held above every federation member world. The only ship that absolutely HAS to be there, no matter what, is the flagship:
The USS Enterprise.
and that could be done as well....
look at Mass Effect, in ME2 they say in the news if you save the council that the Destiny ascension is making a tour of all the council member worlds which I'd think is a gesture of gratitude to Earth but also celebrating life and a way to meet and greet planetary leaders directly, big PR event really
Yep it could be day that show historical ships, new models and be place to show that ships are manned by people of all member planets but never all the ships just small ships to act has parade in independence day of the federation
The weird thing about Enterprise is that enterprise isn't a thing in post scarcity federation world. It's like if the UK flagship was HMS Scrimshaw or HMS Cottage Weaving Industry
@@sumoking3002 it still mostly works because by then the word 'enterprise' is associated with the vessel (cv6, cvn65, cvn80, ncc-1701 or whatever it is) that bore the name and gave it a legacy.
I mean, how many people today hear the word enterprise and first think of the business concept? I know my mind goes to the carriers first and then enterprise rent-a-car (which iirc was named after cv-6, funnily enough)
That's how fleet week is actually done in real life you have the most famous one in New York, you Have San Diego, New Orleans, Florida. If you count RIMPAC you have another global one in Hawaii every even year. I work at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam RIMPAC the first week is all PR and diplomatic events.
Let's gather all our ships together in one place. Except the one new experimental ship commanded by a junior loose cannon captain. Wouldn't want him to mess up the parade
Sensible strategy actually. The law of narrative states that when the inevitable attack occours, that one left out captain will show up at the last moment to save the day. Quite an effective insurance policy.
@@owenstockwood5040 I love the idea of a military that bases its plans on narrative tropes
@@ProjectEkerTest33 Terry Pratchett disc world makes fun of tropes all the time and has characters repeatedly acknowledge the existence and validity of said tropes
@@lordgod9958 Ey a fellow Pratchett fan! I always loved in Interesting Times when everyone thinks the good guys will win "because it's so improbable for them to win that means they have to win"
@@ProjectEkerTest33 "The odds are a million to one! That's why it's gunna work!"
The instant you knew Frontier Day was not being held on the frontier you knew it was a ludicrous plot contrivance.
Can you imagine how many ships it would actually take to control the entire federation? Yet only maybe a couple hundred are even there? LOLOL. It was hilarious..........some would take months just to get there! Space is vast. In DS9 they had more ships at a single battle with the dominion lol. That type of frontier day would be impossible to pull off.
@@MrBottlecapBill Dad was in the Navy & I remember him saying that covering one distant, i.e. frontier, location required 3 ships, 1 there on station, 1 in transit to or from station, 1 in maintenance and training.
Why would they hold Frontier Day on the frontier? Every day is frontier day when you're on the frontier.
It's in Space, which is the Final Frontier.
I mean the Japanese tried this in real life at Pearl Harbor and failed. We should've learned this isn't a good idea when writing stories as it shouldn't work.
I'm from one of the many powers that border the Federation, which is so large it can take weeks even for transmissions to go from one part of the Federation to another. Frankly I'm thrilled that the Federation decided to take its entire defensive force deep into its own territory, luckily my military would be happy to help in the defence of any colonies close to our border. In fact we are so eager to we may never want to leave!
What was once the Gorns' is the Gorns' again.
Very well put, but luckily for the federation, out of the other major powers; Klingons are still allies, Cardassians have only just finished recovering from destruction of the dominion war and Romulans after the Hobrus disiaster is not as much of a threat it once was and much more friendlier to the federation and borg are all but extinct, so get away with it.
@@wedgeantillies66 You don't need to be a major power when the entire Federation fleet is in the heart of their territory and you aren't the only minor power with this same idea.
@@RRW359 True, however, having a quarter or third or whatever percentage of the overall fleet is gathered in the sol season it does significantly weaken defences across the board. That some smaller powers could grab contested border regions and a larger one make a grab for massive territorial expansion. All. I will say that it is good for the federation, that the typhon pact alliance didn't exist in this cannon verse as if it had they would have certainly have tried something during this crisis..
@@wedgeantillies66 - i bet the Orions had a field day. No starships really puts a dampener on the effectiveness of starfleet intelligence's anti-piracy efforts. Never mind calling it Frontier Day, the Orions and Ferengi are calling it The Day the Latinum Rained from the Heavens.
Plus the Gorn can kidnap a few dozen undefended colony populations and have an old school breeding frenzy while no one is watching.
And they're all fairly central minor powers when it comes to Federation worlds. Out on the real rim where it'll take starships pulled back to Sol a few months to get back to their patrol zones, the Tholians, Breen and possibly Hirogen were probably having the time of the century...
I'm surprised Disney never tried to use this one to explain how the first order destroyed the entire new Republic by blowing up a single star system
Bad/lazy writing.
The New Republic doesn't have a real standing army. There would be no "fleet week" because they wouldn't be able to pull it off. They have a decent police force at best. The First Order blew up their central political authority, which pretty much prevents the New Republic from building an army.
In other words, this is like if the Separatists invaded Coruscant before the Clone Army was made. Considering the only reason the Republic had a Clone Army was because of Count Dooku, leader of the Separatists, that's far more likely than you might think.
@@wolfgod6443 Yeh, with the negligible opposing fleet and the sheer scale of the First Order's secret doom fleet, Starkiller base money would have been better spent sending everyone on a couple of years vacation to a sequestered report planet until the doom fleet was operational. Apparently it's possible to build a galactic hyperpower worth of fleet in secret at the same time you build a super-duper weapon in substantial secrecy.
What do you mean? This is exactly what Disney did, they retconned that the entire New Republic military was on Hosnian Prime when Starkiller destroyed it.
@@Seriona1 well no they didn't say the whole fleet was there because of fleet week they just said that the whole fleet was there and didn't bother giving a reason
the logistical challenge of even assembling a navy like starfleet in one location would be impossibly difficult. like, aren't there literally thousands of ships? that's like every large ship on earth coming into one harbor
more like tens of thousands, if not over a hundred thousand by the time of star trek picard. But more to the point the travel time of war drive, it taking months just to cross the federation, would really make this impossible, and even though many federation member worlds do have their own local self defense forces, there is no way they can take over all of starfleet duties for the amount of time that starfleet will be off.
Even in the show, there are multiple types of ships that were not even showcased. I'm sure it's for budgetary reasons, but I mean there's absolutely no reason to actually pull ships from the neutral zone or other front-line.
I mean federation space is huge, so some ships potentially be years away from earth. Were they really ordered to come all the way back and participate in what was originally just some parade?
And yet, despite speaking in one voice, the entire synchronized fleet was unable to destroy the Titan
@@ssj2_snake I didn't get that either, or why the fleet networking system was line of sight. Seems like a pretty bad oversight, do they have to fight in like nebula something now half the fleet can't communicate.
Also, based on the distances in canonical maps and Voyager, it probably takes a couple decades to cross a significant portion of the Federation. So presumably Starfleet has been absent from the actual frontiers all that time, as multiple generations of crew on their ships make the long trip to Earth for Frontier Day.
The only way I can rationalise Starfleet's plans for Frontier day is that when they say "the entire fleet," they're using it in the sense of "battlegroup" rather than "everything we have down to the last shuttle," as in "the third fleet" "the sixth fleet" etc.
Also, your mention of disobedience of questionable orders actually reminded me of a Star Trek role playing game I once took part in. A not-too-stable officer ordered me to kill a bunch of Gorn by teleporting them off their ship's bridge into space. I didn't think that was a very "Starfleet" order, so my character surreptitiously teleported them into a secure cargo compartment on their ship instead. We ended up role-playing out the entire disciplinary hearing. It was brilliant. The officer got demoted and my character got a slap on the wrist for insubordination and a commendation for their moral fibre.
hey hey, tell us more about the role playing game. what is it?
Heheh. I do miss my days of Star Trek tabletop roleplaying. Reminds me of a very self-consciously 60s' themed TOS campaign I was in, where our Captain wasn't like crazy or evil or anything, just ...really bad at quick command decisions and fluid tactics. (I think he may have been into like strategy games where you can see the whole board and plan everything, really tended to freeze up in the kind of sub-hunt engagements with the Romulans etc. ) So, without any particular drama, the junior officers basically fought the ship for him almost like he wasn't there, and, you know, we didn't embarrass him in reports or anything about it and he eventually learned on the job and got his confidence. :)
@Joey Hext The Federation lost 39 ships at the Battle of Wolf 359 and that was a huge blow to their total strength and every ship they had near Earth. Is the fleet far larger now than it was then?
@@GC13 To put it this way... In DS9, the force that went to retake DS9 had over 600 ships in it. That was parts of two different fleets, with no indications that it was a significant portion of either fleet. There's at least 10 fleets during the Dominion War (with 10th Fleet being the people that oops'd the Betazed system into Dominion hands by going off and doing training instead of guarding the system). I'd expect Starfleet to be 10k to 30k ships large, at least in war time.
Also, the 39 ships lost at Wolf 359 only took something like a year to replace. It was the worst loss Starfleet had suffered in a very long time (until the Dominion War completely eclipsed it, including the battle where 97 ships were lost).
@@nekophht I'm not really into new trek at all, but yeah DS9 certainly hinted that Starfleet was quite big.
I think 10k to 30k ships sounds like too much though, unless you maybe count runabouts and shuttles.
As I understood, tng, ds9 and voyager, starfleets problem was being spread out over a vast area and solving many different problems for the federation.
Kind of like the army corps of engineers regarding dams and rivers, in addition to patrolling borders, transporting dignitaries, diverting asteroids, transporting medicine etc.
Which is not entirely unheard of as eg. the US navy / marines sometimes aids in times of natural disaster and deliver emergency supplies.
What gets me is in so many of the scenarios, the enemy can easily annihilate the combined might of the entire navy and have full knowledge of the entire navy's movements, but at the same time can't defeat that navy in a series of much smaller engagements
This was an entertaining and well-argued little essay that in no way diminished my enjoyment of the show.
Fun fact, we almost called this video "Why I Parade My Flotilla, NOT My Fleet". In any case, I retroactively dedicate it to you, in appreciation for the Bolognese recipe I tell everyone is my own.
how is THE adam regusea only have 12 likes????
Omg I didn't realize it was him until you said something. Hi Adam and Templin. Thanks for your content, both of you.
Adam, you're one of us!
wow!
i have been watching your cooking videos for years now. I didn't know you're a sci-fi fan, too.
@The Templin Institute, seriously, I made that sauce watching Adam's video for a house party.
Biggest hit!
thanks Chef!
I would actually like to see this in another series, and then it turns into a complete and horrific massacre of the attacking forces. And afterwards, everyone is like; "Why would they think attacking such a concentration of our strongest forces would be a good idea?"
I assume, that it being Fleet week / frontier day, that Starfleet wouldn't be excepting such an event to happen. The majority of the ships wouldn't be at combat readyness due to crews being on Shore leave. And the way the fleet is deployed in a formation that primary for show rather than defense would insure that it would be a 'Turkey Shoot' for the attacking force.
When you start a war in a strategy game and send your doom stack to attack, only to discover an enemy doomstack at your target...
happened twise in babylon 5
I have another idea.
The attacked faction in question not only fights off the attack on the stationed but as it turns out, the enemy fleet was 3 to 4 orders of magnitude larger than they could ever dream in their nightmares.
Granted, most of the time I see this happen, the aggressor at least is smart enough not to attack with conventional forces, but instead just uses nukes, or something stronger if they have that. Just because the enemy's dumber than a box of rocks doesn't mean you have to be.
Admiral Hara Tadaichi summed up the Japanese result of the Attack on Pear Harbor by saying, "We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war."
It's notable to point out that the US Carriers weren't there and the Japanese didn't prioritize attacks on the Submarine Pens at Pearl Harbor too - so two crucial arms of the fleet were spared.
Could you further explain?
@@arandomcommenter412 Short version: The only winning move for the IJN was not to play. By attacking Pearl Harbor, they brought the USA into the war, and thus made it unwinnable.
Longer version: Japan is a dinky little island nation with a dinky little island economy and population (and crappy iron), while the USA is a major world power with massive natural resources, population, and industry - there are multiple US states that could win a war (or at least fund a winning war) with Japan on their own. The only timelines where Japan has a snowball's chance in hell of winning a shooting war with the USA are ones where the Americas were never colonized in the first place.
Japan wanted to be a world naval power, as part of the whole "empire" thing it had going. However, expanding through the Pacific would eventually bump them into the USA, which as established could absolutely win any naval arms race. Since the USA has two coasts, the US Navy had to be split between 2 oceans, while the IJN would be concentrated in the Pacific, which meant Japan could theoretically get a numbers advantage without actually out-building the USA. On the other hand, this meant Japan would have to win two decisive battles instead of one - first against the USN Pacific Fleet, which they would have to win by enough of a margin that their surviving fleet could still beat the USN Atlantic Fleet in the second fight. Pre-WWI, the IJN crunched some numbers, and decided that they would need a 140% numbers advantage in the first fight. So the Japanese plan for going to war with the USA involved having a fleet ~70% the size of the total US Navy.
Then the Washington Naval Conference happened, and the USA pulled a pro-gamer move by breaking the Japanese diplomatic cipher, reading their mail to figure out the bare minimum fleet size Japan would agree to, and capping the IJN at _60%_ of the USN. Japan was not happy.
So Plan A (which was already based on the known fact that Japan _could not win_ against the USA's full strength, and relied on some dubiously optimistic performance expectations beyond that) was a wash, and the government had to come up with a new one. They got their experts together (here portrayed collectively by Isoroku Yamamoto), and the conversation went something like this:
(The government of the Japanese Empire, here portrayed by Emperor Hirohito): "hey, come up with a way to win a war with the USA if we only have a fleet 60% as big as the USN."
The correct answer to this was: "that is completely impossible and also stupid, you maniac." Unfortunately, this kind of candid explanation is not something you're allowed to say to your social superiors in Japanese culture. Instead, Yamamoto said something like this:
Yamamoto: "We would have to dictate terms in the White House." (Note: the White House is an ocean and a continent away from Japan. Most of the ocean is subject to a sizeable USN presence, and the continent is populated by people who have wet dreams about getting to be armed insurgents.)
Emperor Hirohito: "Sounds great."
Yamamoto, perhaps realizing he had overestimated his boss's intelligence with no way out, came up with Plan B. Step 1: knock out the USN Pacific Fleet in a decisive blow using air power. Step 2: -A miracle occurs- the US surrenders immediately. Step 3: victory.
All branches of Plan B had basically the same action loop: win a victory so massive and crushing that it scared the USA - the Americans, after all, were soft, pampered merchant Westerners, not the *mighty Nipponese warrior race* - into surrendering.
Following the Pearl Harbor attack, the USA did the one thing that completely ruined Plan B and doomed the Japanese Empire, which was: _not_ surrender. And there was no Plan C. So Japan lost WWII as a direct result of their massive tactical victory at Pearl Harbor.
@@dylandarnell3657 While I agree overall with what you said I do take exception with your point here; " Step 1: knock out the USN Pacific Fleet in a decisive blow using air power. Step 2: A miracle occurs the US surrenders immediately. Step 3: victory." specifically step 2.
The japanese actually did have precedent for Striking a concentration of a European power's naval force and quickly winning the war. This of course being the Russo-Japnese war of 1904-05, in which the Japanese destroyed several prominent ships with a surprise torpedo boat attack then invaded and took the port and subsequently defeated the reinforcing fleet. This was a huge deal at the time as an Asian power had not ever defeated a Major European power before and certainly not so quickly. The Japanese were meticulous planners to a fault, (seriously operations like midway were overplanned and ridgid) however they planned around this for months-years and was nowhere near as haphazard as ????? PROFIT!
The plan was very methodical, Strike the US pacific fleet and cripple it to the best of their abilities giving them time to invade the Phillipines, Guam, Saipan, Wake, etc while simultaniously taking the other European power's territory like Borneo, Malaya, New Guinea, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong etc. Then, with an established defensive island chain, decicively defeat the remainder of the American Pacific fleet (before they can mobilize and rebuild the losses/ramp up industrially) which will force the Americans to sue for peace as the russians did not long ago. It was no secret that the Americans didn't want anything to do with far off wars in the first place, with their fleet in ruins and the japanese already in control of their objectives they would have to come to terms (at least with japan). of course this plan is silly in hindsight, and is steeped in the Bushido code as you mentioned and filled with a decadent view of Americans which to be fair, given the 20's and general feeling of isolationism a fair, if misguided, assumtion to make lol.
while the effectivness of the pearl harbor strike can be debated, the "blitz of the east" was a pretty incredible success for the japanese, island, after island fell in very quick succession with embarassing defeats for the European power's and by America on the Phillipines. There was absolutely an air of defeatism immediately following pearl and the loss of the far east islands, the rules everyone thought they understood about naval warfare had just been shattered at pearl, the mighty symbols of what once was naval power lay burning heaps at their anchors and the US had Dangerously fallen behind it's adversary. The japanese were an undefeated force that had the experience of years of warfare with many of their ships being more modern than the Pacific fleet counterparts and all the US had left was a few outnumbered, untested carriers to try and just hold the line. The western world was wholly unprepared for Imperial Japan, America actually got insanely lucky several times throughout the pacfic war, had a few things not gone just right the war may have gone in a very different direction and while I wouldn't doubt the final outcome the number of bodies on both sides could have been astronomically worse.
@@numb3rc That's because we knew about the attack ahead of time.
Here's an interesting question: If the Changelings could infiltrate Star Fleet so seamlessly and effectively to pull something like that off, why would they need to destroy Star Fleet in one fell swoop in the first place?
They didn't want to destroy it, they wanted to use it. If they simply wanted to destroy the fleet they would have had every ship turn on each other, but they didn't. They attack their main threat, the space station, and then would go on to destroy Earth. After that they would have moved on to other worlds.
@@ukmediawarrior still assembling the fleet made absolutely no sense, the "take over" signal was obviously having some very long reach anyways and would take over any reinforcements coming into range. Then on top of that there was the fleet formation remote control, which required "line of sight" LOL. So even if they only had the totally senseless fleet formation remote control, then it still made no sense to initiate a fleet assembly to get the fleet quickly, again they would be able to catch any incoming reinforcements and force them into remote control formation. And they never clearyfied who actually had control of the fleet once they got into remote fleet formation control, it obviously wasn't the ships nor the space station. By the way, why wasn't the space station also mind controlled? Why did it only work on young people? Plotarmor? Why does Earth have it's defenses like shield emitters not safely on Earth BEHIND the shield with some unlimitted planetary powersupply but instead on a puny and vulnerable space station?
@@phelanwolf6747 Some very good points, obviously the writers missed them all, lol. Yes, as the Borg take over virus infected anyone who used the transporters then yes, the space station would also have some of those borg'ified young people. I suppose you could argue that because its so massive the number of people on board under 25 wouldn't be able to outnumber those older than them. But I made the same argument for crews on ships. The vast majority of crew would be over 25 and so should easily be able to fight off the borg'ified younger people.
They did explain that it only worked on those under 25 because up to the age of 25 your brain is still forming, or something like that. But as people don't graduate from Starfleet Academy until they are around 22-23 the amount of crew under 25 on a starship would be negligible. A stupid plan by the Borg and a stupid plot choice by writers who know nothing of Trek lore.
@@ukmediawarrior yeah, the logic was that the genetically encoded technology would only be able to grow and integrate the transmitter into your brain while it was still developing, without you realizing. My biggest issue with that was something completely different, though: why on earth did the Borg even bother planning anything at all? We know that earth (and a few other planets at least) use transporters for planetary movement. You walk through and get teleported somewhere else.
If they could implement that tech on literal research space ships, then why not on the civilian infrastructure that would be used by every young person in the Federation when they go to school, see friends or have a date? Every single person under 25yo should have been borgified and it shouldn't have mattered that they never stepped foot on a star fleet ship. No need to take anything over. Apparently nobody was able to spot the modification at all, so just wait a few decades and eventually you'll get them all. At one point, you wouldn't even need to manipulate people anymore, because they would have already inherited the manipulated DNA from their parents.
BUT if they're able to rewrite the genome of every single cell in your body to that degree, then every single scene where someone was shot or stabbed or parasite-infected or plasma-leaked to death makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, because if you're at that level of control, you can put somebody into the transporter buffer, copy-paste a few tissues around and you could perfectly recreate the person in a healthy state. It wouldn't even have to be perfect, because the body would reorganize itself, it just takes time while not dying. And you could absolutely do that with that technique.
@@phelanwolf6747 - the worst part is this same plot of taking over the fleet to destroy the Federation from within was used in Prodigy with even more disastrous consequences.
And in the timeline that happened years *before* Frontier Day. So the fleet implemented this remote control feature *after* almost being destroyed by an invasive viral ai program that took control of all their ships within hailing distance.
Does starfleet ever learn from its own history?
I think the writers missed an opportunity here. The Borg and the Changlings carry out their Fleet Day attack, but it fizzles because for the very reasons you've outlined, all of Starfleet isn't there. Yes, there are plenty of ships, but except for a couple of "hero ships" like the Enterprise or the Titan, the rest are auxiliaries. Their presence there won't impact Starfleet's many duties. Due to their cultures which demand obedience, it doesn't occur to the Borg or Changlings that some in Starfleet might fight the crazy Fleet Week plan.
Agreed. That would show of the real strengths of the Federation, intellect, wisdom, and picking the third option. Having the Borg and Changelings defeated by their own inability to understand their opponents would be so poetic; they can collect data, they can take people's places, but they don't learn.
@@IAmEvilTree Exactly. Or commanders in sectors might comply--yet not quite comply--with the order. They send ships that aren't really needed, need overhaul, due for decommissioning. etc. In some cases, ships aren't available because gosh darn it, they're out on patrol or there's a problem with their warp drive, etc.
As a life-long Trekkie, I have a lot of experience in coming up with ad-hoc explanations / justifications for the franchise's alarmingly-frequent poorly-thought-out scripts. (And the inconsistent depictions of the speed of warp drive and the scale of the galaxy is one of my biggest pet peeves in the entire franchise). In this case, my head-canon says that everyone who said "the whole fleet" is absolutely employing a degree of hyperbole. At most, they are talking about "all the ships in the fleet that are available to participate in Frontier Day". After all, I think the Dominion War in DS9 established that Starfleet consists of *thousands* of starships, and while I wasn't able to pause the episode and count every ship on screen, I'm pretty sure it was well less than thousands. Maybe a few hundred? It's possible that Starfleet has reduced its size since the end of the Dominion War, but I doubt it would be by an order of magnitude.
In addition, many of Starfleet's ships are on deep space assignments at any given time, and would require literal *years* to return to Earth, even at sustained maximum warp. This is especially true of older ships that do not have a max sustainable cruising velocity of warp 9.99, as was the case for the Titan. So I assume that those ships are still out doing their jobs, due to the simple fact that it is logistically impossible for them to return.
Agreed as alone during the dominion war, Starfleet fielded at least 10 fleets made up of anywhere from 100 to at least several hundred star ships, which even during peace time would still, be kept up to decent size as threats can appear and attack from any direction, meaning borders and key planets would still be defended. Which combined with the distances involved, despite warp speed capabilities and ships on deep space assignment, cannot see more than a quarter to a third of starfleet being available to take part in frontier day.
@@wedgeantillies66 I just assumed it was whatever fleet was assigned to secure sector 001 and the surrounding systems.
@@radoslawskalski4036 sounds a logical explanation, probably no more than two - three fleets involved max, those charged with protecting sector001; Terran system and sector 002-5; core territories of founding members like Vulcan, Tellar and Andor and alpha centuria.
339. someone actually counted them all and also identified every single one. i have the graphic
@@esecallum That around about the individual size of the two federation fleets that took part in operation return during the dominion war, 30 years before. So for me, would bank on it only being the fleet covering Sector 001 and other core territories that make up the founding members of the federation; Vulcan, Teller, Andor and Alpha Centari. As after all the trials and tribulations, that starfleet had gone through even in peacetime, cannot see them letting their guard down.
I would love to see an episode of a tv show where a fleet week (with a believable amount of ships) occurs that repeatedly and obviously sets up that an attack is going to occur e.g. look at our completely un-hackable automated anti capital ship guns; and then when everyone expects a huge enemy fleet to jump in, something far more plausible happens, like an assassination attempt or the like.
Didnt thag happen in CoD ?
Shout out to that one Lovecraft story where a guy is threatened by a wizard and spends to the entire story worried about what kind of magic spell will be put on him, only for the wizard to come to his house and shoot him with a gun.
@@nefanyo5788 A version of that yes
Or have the entire fleet be decoys full of gasoline to make the explosions look real, and when it gets attacked, the REAL fleet teleports behind them. "Nothing personal, Admiral."
Wasn't that basically the newish Battlestar Galactica, new caprenna was the name I think?
I was surprised by how few ships "the entire fleet" consisted of in the show (150?) considering _a single fleet_ during the Dominion war was anything from 100-500 federation ships.
Hell, even Wolf 359 was odd fifty ships which they threw together in a moment's notice
I’d imagine that post-Dominion War Starfleet was downsized to become a peacetime navy.
This is why I don't believe it was the entirety of Starfleet. It operates thousands of ships, both big and small, across thousands of systems, and the number shown onscreen is nowhere near that. "The entire fleet" is just hyperbole that everyone keeps repeating. They're probably the largest most important ships-of-the-line or prestige ships, but it's NOT all of Starfleet, and I wish people would stop it with this critique. Characters are allowed to be hyperbolic or to have imperfect information, not everything said is 100% true.
@@allengilbert7463 Or its just all of say starfleets 1st fleet or whatever passes for home fleet, and the vast majority of the rest of starfleet is still out there doing their day to day operations.
@@dparky1627 Even in the worst of starfleets complacency periods during the 2350's and 60's, the whole of starfleet still easily numbered in the tens of thousands.
A lot of sci-fi stories get military scale wrong. It’s why you don’t often see armies of hundreds of billions of soldiers or galaxy spanning fleets off hundreds of thousands to millions of ships.
I think it’s because the numbers get so high that it becomes difficult for the audience to really grasp and makes the individual characters seem a hell of a lot less important to any story without serious author shenanigans
Nice to see this channel return after that month long hiatus. Hope you all are feeling better.
But yeah, putting all your ships in 1 location for any reason other than a defensive last stand or just having very few ships is dumb.
It should have been something like "half the active fleet" and one could still get that plot point across without it being ridiculous.
A way to phrase Marc's 1st law could be: _"The believable feasibility of an idea is inversely proportional to the stupidity of that idea."_
thank god somebody knows how to phrase my own law cause I sure didn't
@@TemplinInstitute I'm not an expert, but isn't that just another way to describe verisimilitude?
This reflects one of my biggest problems with Star Trek: Into Darkness. "We've recalled all ship captains and their respective vessels to earth due to X happening. and then we will gather all those captains in one room."
Normally, gathering all in the moment available ships and captains to discuss measures and mount an investigation is a good idea. The problem here was that the attack was orchestrated by an insider, who knew Starfleets response to the letter.
@@JoacinoDaGona It's actually NOT a good idea, as Russia learned not too long ago when they were cheap and flew a bunch of admirals on the same plane that just happened to 'crash'. You really, really don't want all your ships in one spot, and you sure as heck don't want all your captains in one spot. The amount of generational knowledge you could lose is massive. Even so though, for *most* modern navies it wouldn't be an end game. All those ships have XOs that will step up, ready or not, while the fleet sorts itself out. The fleet movements may not be quite as on point, but they absolutely wouldn't dissolve into chaos as is so often depicted.
@@JoacinoDaGona Why would you assume that having piles of people who know nothing about the situation in one room is actually conducive to an investigation?
Have you never been in a business meeting before?
@@stevenschnepp576 To coordinate a system-wide manhunt, to discuss wider implications and clean-up.
There is a lot to talk about after someone blows up the roof of your of-the-books spy facility.
@@manicmarauder You are right, it is better to discuss sensitive matters like a coordinating a manhunt, and clean-up of a super-secret spy facility over potentially compromised communication lines.
this is basically the first episode of the original Battlestar Galactica, when they summoned the entire fleet of Battlestars (enormous starships like floating cities) to one place for a treaty with the Cylons who then destroyed them all, except the Galactica whose captain figured out what was happening and left.
I'm not sure about the older version of BSG. But the newer one it's heavily implied that a combination of generally being caught by surprise (from a sense of decades old complacency), an exploitation of critical system's security design flaw, and a massive coordinated strike at every human colony world all at once (which also took decades to build up the forces to do that)... is what brough down the Colonial Fleet. It wasn't a "special day of celebration" that made them vulnerable. If the Cylons waited another day or struck a day sooner, the outcome would have been the same.
@@SirMattomaton Yeah, the cylons had a backdoor hack into the colonial defense network, and they were able to literally "turn off" their ships, leaving them vulnerable and easy pickings while they tried to figure out what the hell was happening. They also attacked everywhere at the same time, so there was no time to realize what was happening and fix the issue. The reason it didn't work on the Galactica was because it was an outdated ship that didn't have all the high tech stuff that had been developed since the last war. They couldn't be hacked, because their network didn't connect to the updated defense network, so the backdoor couldn't shut them down.
@@kedolan4992 Not only was it an older ship, it was about to be decommissioned on the day of the attack.
"Everyone please stand on the big red X on the ground."
@@kedolan4992 never seen the newer version, I gather it's better thought out than the older one
If you're so invested in having this as an event your military holds, there's one simple change you could make that would probably make it *far* safer than what we see; conduct your fleet week celebration with only one of your fleets.
Most of the nations we see doing this are large enough that their navies are typically divided into several different fleets and sub-divisions. So, all you need to do is establish some sort of rotating schedule with those forces. You conduct Fleet Week this year with the ships and personnel of the 2nd fleet, and next year it's the boys and girls from the 4th who will be carrying out the maneuvers. You get the benefit of whatever public and political capital you're trying to raise with such a celebration, and you're not *completely gutting* your defenses and ability to respond to threats in the process.
Heh, fun fact, that's what actual Fleet Weeks do! I don't know about the cycling, but most militaries never put the whole fleet in one place for exactly that reason.
@@scorpio7232 Too bad that didn't seem to fully make it to the Federation, or any of the other nations that decided compromising their security across their entire territory was worth a few days of public spectacle.
@@palladin1337 Probably why they had Changeling Infiltration to shut out the critics.
Taking this a step further, each fleet should send a representative squadron, rather than completely abandoning their area of operation. And the ships that get sent from a fleet are rotated for each event, so everyone gets a chance over time.
@@justcallmeSheriff This would also allow the higher ups at home to look at how well maintained and run those ships of far flung fleets are without the local fleet commanders being able to lie in reports, throw in a few combat exercises and you may just have the start of a nice annual check on fleet readiness.
Just need another check that they aren't robbing Peter to pay Paul and stripping other ships to make the sample squadron look good.
I think another thing to mention is that if you can defeat the combined might of an entire nation's navy in one strike, especially if you are using convention warships (and not phoning it in by inventing some random superweapon that never gets mentioned again [hello Mandator IV dreadnought]) , then theoretically you could also defeat them in individual battles, getting rid of the need for such a strike. All you're going to do is put all your eggs in one basket.
Well, that depends on A) the enemy knowing they're under attack, B) assuming the enemy won't get better at dealing with whatever combat force you've developed, and C) you're assuming your enemy doesn't have superior strategic mobility, such that it's normally easier for them to get their forces where they need to be.
And, much as the Imperial Japanese found out, unless you can cripple their manufacturing base, then they will drown you in ships.
i think gundam is the best example of doing this right, even the whole "parade thing" was both, explained to also be part of an internal conspiracy that allowed it to happen to gain more power internally, and the fact it wasnt "all the ships", just enough ships to cripple their political adversaries.
In all fairness, if there's any organization in the multiverse that's genuinely stupid enough to gather its entire fleet in one place for a fleet week event, it would be the Federation from Star Trek.
Their hubris ALONE...
too be fair, i dont think the whole fleet was there. remember the COPY/PASTE federation class of ship we saw? there was literal thousands of them, against Romulans trying to blow up the Synth planet. None of them were at the event. and there is no way all those ships were decomissioned so quickly after being built. (especially if the class was the latest and greatest in federation tech)
Why?
@@gownerjones Because the Federation is one of the most blatantly idiotic factions in all of sci-fi? The Original Series incarnation wasn't too bad, but everything we've been shown since? Yeah, pretty fucking stupid all around.
Don't get me wrong, I like the universe and a lot of the characters, but as an organization the Federation as a whole (and humanity in particular) appear to have surgically removed all traces of logic, common sense, and historical understanding from their own collective psyche.
@@dustinherk8124 While this is a fair and logical point, I think Picard's writers missed that memo when they repeatedly had characters insist that the ENTIRE fleet was there.
This is one of the major issues with the third season of Picard and it resulted out of Matalas wanting to pay major tribute to the three favourite TOS movies within this love letter season to 90s Trek. The first four episodes were very much reminicent of Wrath of Khan, episode six brings back the HMS Bounty and its cloaking device, and the finale was TNG's version of The Undiscovered Country. Matalas even had stated that he wanted to give the TNG crew their Star Trek VI moment. And that does not just mean, the Enterprise-D gets to fly towards the sunrise along side the newer Titan-A similarly to how the Enterprise-A did next to the Excelsior in that film. Just as in that film, you had these two ships alone saving the day. Only in the film it was one cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey they had to take down and here it was the entirty of Starfleet plus a giant Borg Cube. It was ridiculous but Matalas wanted to bring back the Borg to put a final bow on Picard's story with them all while giving an excuse why they had to be back on the Enterprise-D. And at the same time, he wanted to set up his pet project of Star Trek Legacy.
There was a lot that worked in this season, especially the characters and because of them the emotional beats for the most part all hit the way they were intended to. Sometimes the nostalgia bait was too much but overall it still worked. And the basic story itself was good and the pacing was a clear improvement over the previous two seasons. But in the end it still suffered from Matalas' need to do all the aforementioned things: Give the TNG crew their Undiscovered Country moment, set-up Star Trek Legacy, and finish off the Borg. Truth be told, if he had done the show since the beginning and had been able to tick off these things from his bucket list season by season, it probably would have worked out better. I still like the season because of the characters and basic story but the execution in the end was a bit lacking, which is why I can't join into the singing of praises it has gotten since the finale.
Btw, here's an idea that could have worked to bring back the Enterprise-D. On Frontier Day there were big celebrations, as said by Marc, have several ones in major systems and the biggest one can be in the Sol system because that's the capital one. Then have the Borg take over the young, but don't act as if that alone would cripple the fleet. Set up previously that Shelby is the Commander in Chief and that she worked her way up through starship development, where she pushed for the implementation of reverse engineered Borg technology collected by Voyager within all newer ship classes. Then have only very few older ships like the Akira and Sovereign classes we've seen on screen during the celebration this season still be able to operate independently because the Borg manage to take over the systems of all these ships. The Titan would also be comrpomised and this results in Geordi taking the crew back to the Fleet Museum to get onto the restored Enterprise-D to help the out-numbered other older ships. You can then still have that awesome Star Wars VI moment with Data flying the Enterprise into the cube and all of that. It wouldn't even have taken much of a rewrite but I guess Matalas wanted to do another TOS favourite: The Enterprise being the only ship available at all.
Concerning Frontier Day in Picard Season 3: They talk about "the whole fleet" beeing present. But from Deep Space Nine we know, that there are multiple fleets. I definitely recall them talking about fleet 7, consisting of many hundreds of ships in DS9. Additionally: Again thanks to DS9 we know, that Starfleet has thousands of ships. In Picard we see less than a hundred. So definitely not every Starfleet-ship.
Looks more like a representation of all those fleets...
I have a lot of time for New Trek, and still enjoy watching it, but this bugs me more than I can express. There is a shrinking of scale across the whole narrative and the world building feels so much more compressed and small than the expansive universe I remember feeling part of in TNG, VOY and DS9.
@@eloscuro7 Hire bad writers, get badly written stories. What can I say?
@@eloscuro7 This is I think a function of everything costing more and being shorter...TNG-Voy were each 7 years of 22-24 1 hour (45 min without adverts) long episodes that's a good long time to flesh out characters and worldbuilding Pic and basically all of new trek is 10 episodes a year or less, and this has really been a trend in ALL of TV since streaming became a thing, but they're trying to cram as much narrative and development into those 10 episodes as they did previously into 20+ I even read somewhere that the showrunner of Strange New Worlds is advocating for LONGER seasons precisely because he recognizes that this is a problematic way of doing things that produces sub par stories, and SNW is absolutely one of my favorite of the new Treks. I dunno what it would take but in my opinion we need to get back to 22-26 episode shows and you'd see a lot of your concerns resolve.
Whats even more ridiculous, is that "Our massive gathering of ships was a ploy (by a changling) to get us all in one place, and annihilate us" was already something that happened to the Federation. There should be some rule in place to prevent this sort of dumb idea to begin with!
For those that did not watch it, in Star Trek DS9, season 5 episode 14/15 (its a two part-er, highly recommend it), the exact same plan was made by a changling trying to destroy the joint Federation-Klingon-Romulan Fleet at a build up point next the Wormhole. The thing is, the fleet buildup there is like guarding a canal, so this plan actually made sense. It was a way better executed plan.
But the Federation should have learned their lesson! This literal exact same plan already happened!
There's also one other problem of attacking Fleet Week when the enemy's entire Navy is gathered there.
...
*You're attacking the entirety of the enemy's navy at the same time when they are out there and strutting their stuff.*
You're taking insane risks because they can and most definitely do have full combat loads and crews ready and at their stations.
Sure ambushes are powerful, but you've gotta be confident in your own guys to pull something like that off.
Seriously. Also why not just attack every other defenseless ship in the cosmos?
@H9092 well technically if _everyone_ is there, the coordination might suffer. "Too many cooks spoil the broth."
Sun Tzu: “So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.”
If your enemy is nice enough to put all their ships in one place you strike somewhere else. If possible everywhere else.
The Federation is so large that I could easily see it being difficult to even pull ships back from the frontier in time for an event like this unless it was planned years in advance. And even then fuckin RIP everyone and everything in the frontier for the weeks or months they are without Starfleet operations.
“Star Fleet, help! We are under attack by pirates! Where is our system’s defenders?!?”
“Ooh, sorry, they’re kinda busy with a pointless military parade. Don’t worry, they’ll be back soon. Two or so weeks once they’ve reached the top of the queue for being resupplied.”
“We’re literally being murdered and taken as slaves!”
“Don’t worry, try talking to them, I’m sure they’re really nice and reasonable people. Anyways, I have to go, I have nearly a thousand other distress calls coming in every minute.”
That was before they found out that if they stick a frickin proto star of all things to a warp drive it can go insanly fast.
In one episode of deep space nine they mention a colony so far out that it takes 2 weeks just to get a subspace message there
@@anthonyramirez9925 well ship speeds where never actualy consistent anyways. like in the beginning of First Contact the Enterprise E was near the Romulan neutral zone but made it back to earth in no time. realistically that would have been a multi-year trip.
Orions/Ferengi/other Pirates: "Frontier Day? Raiding Day! So many Federation Member worlds and colonies without any or much of a defence."
Planetary defenses apparently got an upgrade since you need the entirety of Starfleet to take out planetary shields in a timely matter. And yeah according to season 1 even planets on the fringes of Federation space can have decent defenses.
@@Hartzilla2007 Yeah... that's the part of Star Trek I'm not going to discuss. Sometimes they go too close to Science Fantasy.
BTW, that still leaves everything outside of the planetary shields open for raiding. From civilian ships to known, but untapped resources like Dilithium.
I also see that this is something that will be forgotten by the creators the next time they need a colony in trouble.
Not that I expect to see a colony in trouble anytime soon as the stakes are usually up from saving the Federation, to the Universe and even the Multiverse.
What stakes can there be with a measly colony being in trouble, that shouldn't be in trouble because of those shields.
While it would be nice to see such a colonization effort on screen compared to the one we saw in TNG that didn't even have replicators yet, I'm afraid we won't get to see that.
Same with the entire Republic fleet being around Hosnian Prime for some reason.
@@akl2k7 absese of fleets in outer rim created separatist
@@TheJarric That was the prequel-era Republic. It was pretty dumb that that didn't have a standing army either. What, no threats from Hutt space or anything?
Another good example is Admiral Yi Sun Shin using his invention, the turtle ship, to quite literally annihilate the Japanese navy, without losing a single ship from his fleet
And then he was recalled for being _too_ successful and making his peers look bad. Political machinations ruin everything.
I just want to thank you for leaving this comment, I'm now learning about Admiral Yi and I'm amazed by how cool and dramatic and emotional his story is.
For those curious, I highly recommend the channel Extra History and their 5 part series (don't worry, each video is less than 10 minutes).
Thanks for educating me💜
The reason it works again and again in fiction is because it is cinematic. It looks cool and provides a convenient solution or scenario where otherwise there might not be one.
The "decentralized command structure" is also known as "Mission Command." The German and American armies in WW2 had a habit of ignoring, or reinterpreting orders if they had a better idea.
During the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Mitcher launched his bombers and told them to orbit away from the carriers. This was to clear the decks of highly flammable and explosive aircraft. He couldn't launch an attack since he didn't know where the Japanese force actually was. The Bomber crews got board waiting for something to do and bombed Guam.
@@Rocketsong During the Battle off Samar, a US carrier pilot landed his plane at a recently captured airstrip on Leyte to refuel & rearm. When the army officer in charge told him the bombs and fuel were reserved for AAF planes being shipped in, the pilot held him at gunpoint, took over the airstrip, and started calling in more carrier planes to rearm there.
Mission Command doesn't promote reinterpreting or ignoring orders though. Mission Command states that the mission be a clear outcome or intent so that the actual plans to do so can be devised by the troops on ground who have a better view of the situation. Command and control is dictating how to assault the objective, while mission command may state by no later than xx xxx xxxx secure and hold objective so and so.
If, for some reason, the enemy fleet gathered in one place, you have a new problem. That's a lot of concentrated firepower and manpower. Trying to overcome that isn't going to be easy. It's also likely in the heart of enemy surveillance and defense networks, which will give them a massive advantage. As other posters have said, at that point, you're better off striking everywhere, but fleet week.
The idea is that the fleet isn't battle ready because the ships are doing outreach, so there are civilians in the way and distracting the crew. This, of course, is also silly. Sure, you can have civvies touring the main bridge... but you should still damn well be running a watch from auxiliary control/battle bridge/whatever as appropriate.
@@boobah5643 Plus, getting the drop on your enemies in such a situation to do any meaningful damage is gonna require a conspicuously large force that _should_ be easily detectable.
it worked in gundam because it was also crippled from the inside as one political side of the army used allowed it to happen so they could eliminate their political rivals and create the perfect situation to declare a crisis. of course, as its always the case in gundam, that ended up biting them in the ass, and while they did manage to gain that power they wanted, it also came at a heavy cost for them.
Well in some universes there are "nuclear" options such as Andromeda Nova Bomb (bomb that disrupts gravity of star, turning it into super nova), something like that can take down whole fleet....assuming they will not outrun it.
@@belisarian6429 That's another of those "it shouldn't always work but does". Stationary targets would be toast, but ships should be able to detect the shockwave and FTL away.
9:45. In addition to deterance, the US fleet was moved to Pearl Harbor so it could execute War Plan Orange if war were to break out with Japan. That was the plan to move the surface fleet, along with several Army divisions, to the Philippines so they could interdict Japanese fleet movements.
Eventually thay might have been the case that was proposed but not solidified just yet because the idea was to find a way to to deter further aggressive action ironically.
War Plan Orange had been superceded by that point by the Rainbow plans, which included the island hopping strategy that was actually used.
I think the decisive strike on Fleet Week during Infinite Warfare was a pretty good example. The SDF spent quite a while infiltrating the UNSA's AATIS staff, and waited for the most opportune moment. At most during the Geneva Fleet Week there was probably 2 dozen vessels including the Ret and Tigris. The strike at Geneva was an impressive display of the SDF's capabilities. Even then, roughly 8 or so vessels survived to engage the remaining SDF ships that weren't destroyed when the AATIS batteries were recaptured. Only the entry of the Mons into battle finally delivered the final blow, at the cost of much of the Mon's weapons batteries and serious damage to one side of the ship.
The dumbest part of the strike however is how we're lead to believe that was the entire UNSA fleet. The zone of believability is crossed because of this singular inference. If it was a chunk, even a sizable one, of the UNSA fleet, it'd make a whole lot more sense. But those 2-3 dozen vessels are what we're lead to believe is the entire UNSA fleet.
I don't know about Star Fleet, but what I have experienced IRL is that once a former coworker has ascended to an executive level, they stop listening to their former coworkers in spite of what history, consultants, studies and good business sense instruct them to do. I have seen them pass on good solutions for bad solutions, or no solutions, and then give reasons to their staff that the staff can't help but laughing out loud at.
Star Wars fans: Oh no
You mean the strategic conference above Carida?
I mean, several offensives were carried out by both sides as decisive battles, just to name a few; Atollon, Lothal, Scarif, Yavin, Hoth, Endor, Naboo, Jakku
@@freddman0135, Endor didn’t even have all of the Imperial Navy present. Yet somehow post-Endor it all went into the crapper for the Galactic Empire.
@@dparky1627 they didnt loose the entire fleet, but all of their chain of command, both the emperor (who centralized the empire on him) and his second-in-command, Lord Vader died in endor
I've got a bad feeling about this...
I feel that fleet week in Picard was a way to make up for S1's absolute abysmal ship variety in Starfleet ships
"Your enemy isn't stupid"
Unless your enemy is the Russian Baltic Fleet and it's 1905.
it's funny, because logistically, getting that fleet across was actually quite an achievement. The idiocy lies in trying to do that in the first place.
"Your enemy isn't stupid. However, he's the Only Sane Man in charge of a fleet composed mostly of Comic Relief."
Or the Russian military and its the 2020s.
@@Hartzilla2007 "tHeY'lL wElCoMe Us As LiBeRaTorS!"
They had improved to a surprising degree by the time they had made it to Tsushima. Admiral Rozhestvensky is not a man to be underestimated.
I would think that withdrawing all ships to the Solar System probably breaks some Federation-brokered treaties as well that required a continual Starfleet presence to maintain peace between warring factions (monitoring the Neutral Zone would be one case). That would have made the action illegal and call for disobeying it by those captains posted in those areas.
as a spaniard, i can sat that gathering all of our fleet in one place wasnt a good idea
Yeah, this drove me nuts. The IRL reason is of course that the writers didn't have the skill to incorporate their story into something the size of the Federation. I.e., make the story work in the universe they intentionally decided to write for.
My IRL reason is that the writers didn't have enough time to write it in a believable way because they were running out of episodes, and this is the last season (I heard).
It's like what happened to Game of Thrones where the directors wanted to end it and did so haphazardly, so they can work on Star Wars.
@@cashewnuttel9054 I dunno, ten hours is a long time for a relatively straightforward revenge conspiracy plot. And didn't have to be the whole fleet ("oh god, this has been taking place across the federation for months, it's everywhere" - see easy). Complaining is easier than writing of course, but I get the sense there was never a 2nd draft of the plot.
"Make the story work in the universe they intentionally decided to write for"
You can't say this is a new problem, at least. How many times had the Enterprise-D been in a rush for a far-off colony world to deliver some MacGuffin that they should've been able to replicate on-site?
@@Lemon_Inspector might be splitting hairs but I'd say there's a difference between backdrop to an episode and the entire foundation of your 10hours homage to TNG
@@getnohappy I mean, replicators kind of break most Star Trek plots. And a lot of times it's the main plotline, not a sideplot. Star Trek is definitely not post scarcity anymore, and nothing really makes sense if it is. All in all, every Trek has just about the same issues. Sometimes it takes weeks for ships to get from one point to another, other times it's a week or a few days, or several hours. Scale has never been a strongpoint of Trek.
In 4x games like Stellaris or Masters of Orion, it's really normal to mass your entire fleet in one place. Often, this is absolutely necessary to win battles. Such a gathering is no "fleet week" though, it's a war-fleet ready for action.
Then the Antarens come in and kick your shit in. They have a nasty tendency to target star systems where you have the largest concentration of ships and usually have more and better armed/armoured than you.
Of course, this only applies if you use fleets rather than Nicole Dyson Beams as your main method of defending your territory
@@dparky1627 I tend to have the opposite problem... my fleets are generally good enough to kill the Antarens, my issue is *intercepting* them before they cause damage to undefended world(s).
@@Madwand99, agreed. It can be easy to be completely caught out of position by them.
this is more like a decisive battle tbh
I understood it was a dumb idea thanks to Gundam 0083, where most, or at least a significant portion, of the Federation fleet was blown up by one Zeon zealot with a nuke. Whenever I hear about these celebrations in media, I automatically go to "well they're about to die".
Same here. As soon as the fleet week/fleet review concept was mentioned, my first thought was of Gato and the Gundam Physalis.
They usually do them in relatively peaceful times. There is no way they would do this if they were
A: in contested territory, or at all close to a possible hostile territory which could launch a strike against the fleet
B: Fighting an active war
@@arandomcommenter412 as stated in the video, they usually DON'T do it because there is no sense in doing it and there are too many down sides and no up sides.
Although, keep in mind that it was actually a plan by Jamtiov to both prove at the federation needed his special unit the Titans, and a plot to reduce the federation military to the point that they couldn't stand against him if they ever got the idea too, and most of the ships that were not hit by the attack, were kept out specifically because they would be loyal to the Titans when they rose. Makes a lot more sense if you realize the people pulling the strings were intending for that outcome
Imagine explaining to a prosecutor or a magistrate or to the controllership, both in the civil government and in Starfleet, that you want to move the entire fleet to a single point, even more so if it is a Vulcan, the No, you would already have it, you would just take it a freebie investigation
The thing that struck me was 'wait, that's the ENTIRETY of Starfleet?' Operation Return was around 600 Federation ships, Chin'toka seemed to be a similar number. Now granted (especially during Operation Return) the Federation was throwing anything that could fight into battle but they still couldn't put EVERY ship into the operation. If anything after the Dominion War Starfleet would have got bigger.
Some of the best Templin videos happen when you can imagine Marc trying to record a script through a facepalm.
Weird how, despite having already infiltrated the higher echelons of Starfleet and therefore won, the changelings allowed the Federation to develop the technology that ousts them. So the escalated threat of undetectable changelings got turned back into nope they are detectable again. And also when two humanoids grab them by the arm, they definitely don't turn into spikes and murder them all, or at the very least turn to goo and run away.
I miss how powerful the DS9 changelings were.
That's part of the problem. In the past, you had writer's like DC Fontana, Diane Duane, David Gerrold, etc, actual proven writers. Today, the writers seem to be less capable (not just for trek, but TV and Movie writers period).
Heck, the Orville seems more Trek than Discovery, or Picard. Haven't seen Strange New Worlds, but don't have any real desire to do so...
@@BenjaminSchollnick To be clear, I think Picard Season 3 is excellent, except for the final episode which totally and completely blows. I think you would really enjoy Strange New Worlds. The only problem with it is that you kinda have to watch Season 2 of Discovery, which to be fair is the best season, mainly because of Pike
@@BenjaminSchollnick not just less theyre arrogant and often dismissive of source
@@TheJarric I agree, and they disregard established cannon, and often don't even try to use cannon.
I think another example of this occurring more due to idiocy and or bravado would be the Naval review in Gundam 0083, the Earth federation navy put the majority of it's fleet on review as a sign of renwed strength in the aftermath of the One year war and to show to any remnants of the principality that continued fighting was futile, low and behold zeon remnants attack the fleet review with a stolen EFF Nuke, destroy a good chunk of the Konpeito asteroid base and nearly 60% of the EFF fleet including their newest flagship, then use the chaos to hijack a space colony and drop it on north America before being annihilated by the Earth orbital fleet and the Lunar fleet.
I was waiting for him to include a clip of that. My only real complaint about that scene was that the nuke shouldn't have been powerful enough to take out such a huge area in the vacuum of space.
Though to be fair, there were elements within the EFF that were trying to make all that succeed in a bid for power, eventually leading to the creation of the Titans.
It ALL started with 0083.
@@darwinxavier3516 It's not exactly a nuke, but a cannon that used a nukes energy like a water hose
Technically, the fleet review in this case was intended as bait to spur the enemy Zeon remnant fleet to attack them so the Federation fleet could subsequently destroy them. The Federation fleet commander - charmingly named Green Wyatt - was expecting to get internal information on the Zeon remnant's plans from the traitor Cima Garahau, but for story reasons that didn't pan out and yet Wyatt decided to go forward with it anyways largely out of sheer arrogance.
The bigger irony here was the fleet sucked regardless. They were still designing ships for anti-battleship combat despite Mobile Suits being the new paradigm for warfare.
You are right in that the writers said 'the entire fleet' is there, and that might be true.
Luckily in the past were more...logistical writers, who made us aware that Star Fleet has MANY fleets,
all responsible for different sectors of the Federation, and each fleet can have well over 100 ships.
The Federations Tenth fleet is referenced as having at least 112 ships.
Another episode has 2 partially spent fleets, totalling ~627 ships.
So if the Federation only had 10 fleets (it very likely has many more)
And each fleet had at least 313 ships (ala the 2 partially spent fleets)
Then the Federation at very very minimum has 3130 ships.
But more likely has many many times this number, likely in the low tens of thousands.
(Federation Day is still dumb though)
The one example I can think of that makes sense is in Gundam 0083, and thats mainly because the Federations command used it as bait for an attack they knew would come, so that there was an easier target than their actual HQ (plus some internal espionage). And ofc naturally it wasnt the whole fleet.
I love the shout-out to the german Bundeswehr being completely aligned to Federation principles.
was the concept "auftragstaktik"?
The thinking was that at the time when FDR ordered the bulk of the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii it was basically telling the Japanese that they're ready to counter any attack they attempt on the Philippines where the USN's Asiatic fleet was stationed around the same time. Of course, the Asiatic Fleet was mostly light combatants, with only one heavy cruiser and one light cruiser at the time and the bulk of the remaining combatant ships were submarines.
An Admiral full on resigned over the order to move the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, because US Fleet Problems (massive naval exercises) had shown that a Fleet in Pearl Harbor would be vulnerable to attack, as participants in the Fleet Problem attacked and did great (simulated) damaged to the Fleet stationed there.
Also there was the Royal Navy attack on Taranto, which was the proof of an aerial attack on a port in actual practice.
@@gokbay3057 the officers in the fleet more or less did know this and the weekend of december 7th was supposed to be the very last time the battle line squadrons were to be in the same place at the same time for "R&R"
There's so many older Star Trek episodes where one of the Captains is telling an admiral to piss off over a stupid order or plan.
11:49 Innere Führung (inner-eh few-roong), or Inner Guidance. Easy to translate, easier to pronounce
A true adversary would lure the majority of a fleet to one location such as "Earth is under attack! All ships report to Earth ASAP!" or create a hidden virus that re-routes a fleet's navigation systems to a single destination where an ambush is waiting.
The Gamilas also did that at Balun which had about 5,000 warships present, well all that firepower didn't stop one single ship from going through.
Fleet parades are one of the most "awesome but stupid" things in sci-fi and I love them just for that
Not just sci fi, the brits and Americans did fleet tours
Irl we do have countries that does showings of their military equipment in parade (my country had it for first couple decades before it was stopped for being to militaristic and we are very pro military service nation so it’s funny that pacifist state like the federation didn’t have objections to show of militarism like that) but it never all the military just showing of what they have
but we have them in real life as well. For fleets, armies, and air forces. So it's not that crazy of an idea, although still stupid af.
@@unematrix yes, but I think that space ships make them a lot cooler, even if it 's just fiction
@@unematrix but it’s never the entire army
'Mobile Suit Gundam: 0083 -Stardust Memory' is essentially based on this premise, but it's done in a way that makes a lot more sense, I think. For one, Zeon's attack on the Federation's Fleet Review just destroys a bunch of ships, not ALL the ships. Besides, the attack is more intended to reveal (and use) a treaty-violating nuclear weapon developed in secret by the Federation, which a Zeon pilot managed to steal, so there's a propaganda element, as well. Also, the Earth Federation top brass are DEFINITELY dumb enough to let this sort of thing happen, that's kind of one of the recurring themes of the franchise, people in positions of authority being either corrupt, inept, or both.
exactly. i would only argue that, the top brass wasnt "dumb enough" to allow it to happen, but that they WANTED it to happen, so they could gain political control(which they did).
And, as last two episodes show, the whole thing was merely an attempt to keep the federation far enough away, that this colony drop couldn't be diverted the same way the first one was. Except the federation knew that was coming, and so much that I hurt this county drop just like the first one
The main Solar System faction in my personal setting actually has a MASSIVE naval review every decade or two. I will point out that rather than assembling all the ships in one place, it's an enormous multimedia event where many of the "participating" ships might be on the 400-day transit to the largest major facility in the Scattered Disc.
something Yamato 2199 got right. Even when Zoellik gathered the fleet for his review at Balun, the fleet was too widespread and too many ships engaged in other duties - there were large numbers of ships that did not attend. Also, Zoellik was not nearly as smart as he thought he was. He got a huge number of ships and packed them in - but even Goer (not that bright himself) points out that the ships are packed too tight for safety. The Yamato does all that damage because of Zoellik's poor planning and Okita figuring out how to use the Wave Motion Gun to use what Zoellik made available to him.
I was waiting for a garmillas fleet review comment. Very cool for sby to get some more attention considering it has some really cool battles and sequences that youtubers like this just don't seem to talk about
Funny that you say fleet week prioritizes spectacle over security to a Star Citizen fleet week ad, where famously no more than 5 capital ships are in system at a time. :)
One of which being the Warhammer, a ship that's usually in or around Stanton anyways.
@@FormerBunsenBurner What’s the next capital ship? The Halo? The Star Wars? 🤣🤣
@@sedeuphadude80 UEES Battlestar Galactica!
Japan: yeah we tried this, we just pissed the US off
China might try a similar stunt on like a carrier fleet just moving through international waters, though to the Chinese government, their waters. We may not be at our best now, but like Pearl Harbor, the dragon is awoken.
“We have woken a sleeping giant.”
The carriers were on maneuvers, and some of the ships they sank were even refloated. Big Oof.
@@dparky1627 the world: and its still didn’t go to sleep
@Bunny Cop *Most* of the ships were refloated. Like only The Arizona (Magazine Detonation) and the Oklahoma (Completely Rolled Over) were written off.
... Almost everything else was back at sea in around 6 months ...
If they changed it to some of star fleet’s ships would be over populated world doing parade or something. It would make a lot more sense and rise the stakes as well, borgifed fleet would be bombing half of the quadrant, (just handwave the subspace lag like always)
See also: The Law of Conspiracies, which states that the more complex and the more personnel must be involved in a conspiracy, the less likely it is to succeed, or even to be attempted. Five men were arrested at Watergate and 40 government officials were jailed or convicted. That really did happen and it was already too complex and resulted in catastrophic mission failure. Popular 9/11 conspiracy theories would implicate closer to 40,000 involved, which is obviously too outlandish for anyone to even attempt
If you look into 'Fleet Week' in Star Citizen, you'll notice it's only 1-3 capital ships, and 2-3 subcapitals, in a vast navy. They actually do take it very seriously, and that fleet rotates through the star systems.
One issue I had with the Frontier Day plot in Picard is that is a very small number of ships. 200 or so. We saw more during the Dominion War for a single fleet, granted that was war time, but 200 ships for the entire Federation is too little to even defend their own territory let alone go do science and explore strange new worlds. Even in season one, that entire fleet of Inquiry class that Riker commanded is half the size of this Frontier Day fleet.
If I can rewrite that plot is to include the other three Federation founding worlds in the celebration and states the best and newest ships are gathered on display for the celebration. The Borg takeover scheme is expanded to all four founding planets, making the stake even higher. States that older ships still on duty are stationed too far away to help or too underpower to help. Show some local non-Starfleet ships and a few old Starfleet ships getting swapped out of the sky by the highjacked synchronized fleet.
Thats why i dont buy it that its the entirety of starfleet. Maybe all of the federation 1st fleet, sure, but not every starfleet ship out there.
Maybe its a knee jerk reaction to how they got slammed for having hundreds of copy and paste ships turn up with Riker at the end of Picard season 1, lol :)
@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 my thoughts exactly, my head cannon justification was it was the fleet that was based out of ESD and that the other fleets would have had festivities at their Bases of operation. I reduce the threat level as ESD and Earth are still seats of government for the federation and the offices of Starfleet command.
Yeah, it just takes a few changed lines. Instead of the entire Federation fleet, it should have been all available ships, or a large number of ships. That would sidestep the piracy or planet defense issue.
@@ukmediawarrior Well, the kneejerk solution to that would be to just have variety in your copypasta fleet. The better solution to this problem is to just NOT REFER TO IT AS THE ENTIRE FLEET in the first place. People coping by saying it was just hyperbole need to remember that the characters made a big deal out of it like it wasn't hyperbole.
Picard S3 was lauded for being so much better, while in reality its just more Kurtzman nonsense. Great summary.
I have noticed my own effect that I call thr "Ender's Game" effect. Summarized, no author can correctly write a character smarter than they are without making all other characters stupid enough to fall for their plans. Notably, in Ender's Game, all thr children were picked for battle school for their brilliance, yet they constantly make stupid mistakes until Ender comes along. Ender first wins at the fleet game. Then he's the first person in a school about 3d space combat to ignore the traditional concept of up and down in combat with the phrase "The enemy's gate is down." Yet these things are obvious and not even all that great in terms of conceptual leaps. The result of Ender's Game is that Ender is surrounded by fools except the fools are the smartest people in the world.
The terminology 'Xyston Threshold' is brilliant, hilarious, and appropriate.
I can see at most 90% of a fleet being called to a location, namely during a major invasion if the federation by a force like the borg or cardashions, a force that has displayed an ability to threaten the entire federation attempting a D-Day level invasion.
I mean, considering that the Federation has holodeck technology, it's surprising that those wouldn't be incorporated somehow. You could put together an official Frontier Day holoprogram featuring all the ships in the Federation (including past ones) and broadcast that across the entire Federation with perhaps each member world having their own live events featuring prominent ships in each system.
It wouldn't be the same as seeing them in person (actually, it might be easier considering it's the holodeck) but it would let more people see the event at the same time.
I am not entirely sure about how far holotech has advanced at the time of the show, but in STO's 2409+ time, you could use a few ships to create a holoprojection of other vessels - they are even capable of assisting you in a fight.
The Indomitus Crusades gathered every available fleet to Terra, undoubtedly leaving hundreds of systems near defenceless. However, this allowed Robute Guilliman to micromanage the entire crusade, which (Ignoring fleet Quartus, RIP) has given the Imperium a so far good-to-okay chance of achieving a good-to-okay gain in security and power, thanks to Guillimans strategic genius. And then, the Fire Nati-- Hive Fleet Leviathan happened. Oops.
yep but this was more of lets not have 1000 undermanned fleets fight losing battle after losing battle whit a few rare victories instead consolidate them so that we can have a accurate count on what we actually have in number of ships.
(remember the Imperium still think it have several 1000 fleet of 100 ships each that does not exist because they are completely destroyed).
It wasn't just Terra, there were multiple muster points throughout the sol system and in nearby star systems, Fleet Septimus is special for both it's secrecy and the fact it was mustered far away from the solar sector
This couldn't have been all of Starfleet's ships. In the Dominion War we saw fleets of this size in individual battles. We were also told there were multiple fleets of this size on multiple fronts during that war.
The EFSF did the same thing in gundam 0083. Assembled most of the fleet even though a prototype nuclear equipped 1 off mobile suit that was stolen by the nightmare of Solomon.
One of the keys to the US victory in WW2 was that commanders where not required to follow out orders if the conditions of battle rendered those orders useless. When General Theodore Roosevelt Jr landed on the wrong beach on D-Day, he did not go looking for the right spot, he issued his famous statement of "We are starting the war from right here." And ordered everyone to follow him.
I like the idea that this fleet week was a local thing. The size of the entire federation fleet or else is laughable. I'm quite sure that we don't see more than a few hundred ships, yet we have ship registry's in the several thousands. Where did all those ships gone? Anyway thanks for making this video, everyone really liked this big twist while I was like "this would never work", now I have a video to deliver my point better than I ever could.
Another idiotic strategy: telling your enemy to lower their shields and prepare to be boarded!
Does that ever work?!
If your ship is ten times their size? Of course it will work.
I think the point of that is to be compassionate when you clearly have the advantage (or at least think you do). Giving your enemies the possibility to surrender, avoiding unnecessary casualties and the potential destruction of the ship, is something that I would value if there is no other option.
that ain't about strategy, baby. That's pure showmanship.
There are plenty of reasons a ship might submit to demands like that. Most of which revolve around the ideas that either you would definitely lose if you tried to fight and would rather be taken prisoner, or you just don't expect the situation to turn hostile (like a cargo inspection or something)
I figure its a hold over from wet navy coast guard call for a ship to stop and prepare to be searched.
Nice to see even a couple seconds of video from The Admiral: Roaring Currents (Myeong-ryang). Though I guess Battle of Myeongnyang, the name itself, makes people nope right out of including actually talking about it.
Here in the west, Yi Sun-sin (alternatively Sun-shin) doesn't get nearly the recognition he deserves. People sometimes call him 'Korea's Nelson', but given he lived two centuries earlier, the reverse is more accurate. Nelson is the UK's Yi.
What I don’t get is how any faction can get a strong enough attack force to directly take on an opponent's entire fleet.
Directly attacking an entire fleet gathered in one place is only effective if you have a force equal to or greater than the fleet in question. Having the element of surprise is of no use if you're attacking only with a small task force with a couple hundred munitions and a couple of fighter wings. It's comparable to attacking a fortress with a 10th of your cavalry; the opponent may not see it coming, but they'll still cream you.
There's a series with a 3 episode arc where in the last episode, stowaways on a captured cruiser is on course for a massive gathering of fleets around a single starbase and its up to them to stop the ship by any means before it can be used as an improved space nuke. It further exemplifies the hidden genius of the tactic despite it being a easily thought of one.
I'm not from Germany but from the Netherlands and we have a similar military system. You may always question orders and while there is a sertain hierarchy you have the ability to refuse orders if they are idiotic and stupid. This aplies to every type of boss relations, you can always suggest things and question methods. Bosses are there to make sure there is order, not to give you commands.
The implication about the German army is actually not true. German soldiers have to follow orders but they are encouraged to formerly protest against illegal and/or immoral orders. Also officers are encouraged to only give orders they would follow themselves.
@@phelanwolf6747 Germany has a particular history.
I think having characters say that Starfleet is gathering two to three fleet formations over Earth gives them some flexibility to make it more believable, instead of asking us to believe that all of Starfleet was deployed to one location.
i agree, it being a horrorist attack on a sizeable fleet makes far more sense and its still something worth trying to stop. even if its a single ship or a handfull of political figures. there's no need to try and make it this "all or nothing".
And its fairly easy to fix too. Instead of "all ships" make it a lot of ships. It can still be a great win/loss (depending on what side you´re on) but it immediately gets a lot more believable and can be followed up with more victories that make the plan seem better as it involves more steps.
My question with Frontier Day is this. When did Starfleet become so small? Picard showed us the "entire" fleet is a couple hundred ships. During the Domination War, Starfleet lost that many ships in a single battle. I get that it was wartime but still.
Defeat in detail is far more entertaining than one single massive fleet battle. You have a smaller fleet which defeats enemies by overwhelming them in separate encounters. You may write an action scene with boarding operation, which is just a successful raid on the enemy docks where their ships are stationed. The harassed enemies may gather much of their fleet in desparation, but they're already the losing side and with denied logistics, their fleet gets destroyed in a one-sides battle. And this doesn't fully end the war but breaks the enemy in some way.
It also looked like maybe a few hundred ships at maximum. Starfleet would have thousands at least. (We can remember numbers from DS9.)
Overwhelming economy of force could be seen as a strategic move if you are on the offense and want to destroy opposition that is spread out. You only do this when on attack though and it leaves your territory almost defenseless
I can't believe my boy Yi Sun-sin wasn't mentioned at 2:46
the other obvious problem, if you can destroy the combined might of your enemies *entire* navy in one massive battle... then you can just as easily beat them all split up and in dozens of smaller attacks launched at the same time
There’s also something similar in Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. The Delaz Fleet destroyed the majority of the Federation during its naval review.