15 million dead over the course of 50 years

The Klingons probably killed far more people during their expansionist phase.

Sci-fi writers have no sense of scale, and trek writers are some of the worst at it.

I get the impression from Star Trek that most "interstellar civilizations" have fairly small off-world colonies.

This.

Soft Sci-fi sure. Star Trek is the opposite of Star Wars when it comes to numbers. Star Wars tends to be a few orders of magnitude too high and Star Trek is a few orders of magnitude low.

>REMEMBER THE BATTLE OF Q'RL'KQ'LG'R'T'AR WHERE T E N T H O U S A N D VALIANT DEFENDERS WERE SLAIN?
>OR THE GREAT MASSACRE OF QQ'K'R'M'NI'QQ'QQ'A, THE SECOND WORST GENOCIDE IN HISTORY WHERE F I V E MILLION R'BER-F'OR'HEDIANS WERE KILLED?
>SUCH TALES ARE A CAUTION FOR EVERY CIVILIZED RACE TO CONTROL THEIR WARLIKE URGEST LEST THEY WILL BE AS BLOOD CRAZED AS THE KLINGONS.

Well there are still folks who think that Rhodesia was a bad thing even though less people died yearly of violence by government back then than started dying once Mugabe took over and the country was renamed.

DUKAT DID NOTHING WRONG

The Spanish Flu killed five times as many in just three years

>Galactic Civilization Status
>Approximately 1/3 as impactful and influenza.

Well, they did use mass murder as a matter of policy during occupations.

youtube.com/watch?v=hJjrnDfZSnI

How can there be war crimes if there wasn't a war?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

>outdone by random human bois with swords and bows

Fucking newfags, get on our level.

...

Star Wars and Star Trek are space fantasy so it’s forgivable. (what with the force and Greek gods with giant spectral space hands)

Don’t forget Space Abraham Lincoln on his space throne.

As much as I love Babylon 5 it's even worse at this. The Earth-Minbari war was supposedly an attempt by the Minbari, one of the oldest and most technologically advanced space faring races in the setting, to genocide humanity. It's one of the most important events in human, if not galactic, history that made them reconsider their place in the universe and was the catalyst to humanity becoming the lynch pin that would hold together the greatest alliance in history.

The Minbari killed 250,000 people.

Now you can make the argument that humanity hadn't expanded that much yet and the Minbari neutralised rather than destroyed most colonies (with the intent of wiping them out later once earth was gone) and also that most humans probably still lived on Earth, Mars, and Proxima, which were never actually attacked, but it's still a pitifully small number. Even if the figure is only supposed to be military personnel and the civilian casualties are unknown it's still tiny for such a supposedly cataclysmic and world changing event.

>Star Wars tends to be a few orders of magnitude too high

A galaxy spanning empire supposedly only had 25,000 mile long capital ships, yet could somehow build not one but two battle stations the size of a small moon (which where crewed by a few hundred thousand people). Star Wars is too small, it's just not as bad as Star Trek

>I'm not sure this is something that would totally define your entire culture and planet.
Did it? One of the parts I liked about DS9 was how little remorse most of the Cardies showed.

>I get the impression from Star Trek that most "interstellar civilizations" have fairly small off-world colonies.
I mean, even most of the human colonies we see are jackoff hick worlds in need of a delivery to stave off some horrible plague or famine of some kind. There's some obvious sample bias going on there, but even in conversation we hear about homeworlds (Earth, Vulcan, Cardassia) all the time and colonies pretty much never.

Also this. Bajorans are shit.

Don't forget how the war apparently lasted years, the Minbari blew through the Human defenses like a hot knife through butter, but almost all of the "colonies" named in the Minbari war are in the Solar System. So it apparently took them years to get from Jupiter to Mars.

Americans still have a bug up their ass about 9/11 and that was only 3000 people

People lose their minds over smaller body counts

WH40K? The planet that is MADE of guardsmen?

That they eyeballed the diameter of a planet shrinks by 3% after tyranids eat all the biosphere and leave?

Tell me captain, if the Federation is so good, why are there no good Star Trek RPG systems?

It's not just about the dead, but the fact that Cardassians ENSLAVED THE ENTIRE PLANET OF BAJOR

>That episode where Dukat just offhandedly goes "Wait a minute, I just remembered. Pretty sure I fucked your mom at some point, Kira."
>And Kira is instantly so bootyblasted she grabs the fucking holy Orb of Time just to temporally cockblock Dukat
>Also it apparently took Dukat literally years to remember Kira's Mom in the parade of Bajoran ass he was swimming in during the Occupation
Daily reminder that Dukat's Scaly Dong was singlehandedly oppressing the Bajorans harder than the actual purges.

To be fair, it was an occupation, not a purge. The Cardassian didn't want to exterminate the Bajorans, just use them as labor. So the death toll is naturally much lower.

The new Star Trek Adventures is pretty good.

And in doing so removed Bjoran on Bjoran slavery and the caste system that supported it and ended the 15,000 year technological stagnation.

Without the Occupation Bjor would be a shitty little hole of fanatics with a society based on the caste system supported slavery sailing around the immediate are in low-warp tachyon sail boats.

At some point the Wormhole would be discovered at one end or the other and the Dominion would come and they would die or be subjugated by the Dominion and that occupation would not be over thrown so easily.

And there are 300,000,000+ Americans, and 50,000+ die every year in car accidents. Yet we've spent the last twenty years raging over the murder of a mere 3,000 on 9/11.

People tend to find violent murder by outsiders much more objectable than natural or accidental deaths.

Does halo sound better, with 23 billion dying over the course of 28 years?

...

thank you

I think the Minbari were thinking on their own caste lense. First go after the warrior caste, then after the rest.

Moon-sized space stations are a joke for a genuine galactic empire. The galaxy ought to contain trillions of worlds. Few to none works of scifi gets even close to have the population of a fully colonized star system. They underestimate the size of the galaxy, the size of the solar system, the amount of resources, and their own power sources.

That's what I like about Legend of Galactic Heroes. Battles truly feel big with millions of casualties on each side. It feels like they are truly using the resources of a being space civilizations with multiple star systems.

Scifi writers not having a sense of scale is a well known fact. A single world with light militarization should have hundreds of millions of soldiers and thousands of ships. Invading a world without turning it to slag should involve at the very least billions of soldiers.

Also, galactic governments would be sorely limited by their ability to communicate. If you have FTL comms fine but if it takes years for a messenger ship to reach your colonies, you're probably not going to have anything but a loose alliance likely trade based in nature.

Yes the minbari were specifically targeting military installations so they could wipe out humanity at a leisurely pace. It's why they bypassed most of the human colonies as well. Earth held 99% of the human race at the time.

>LoGH
>True battle
No, sweetie.

FATE is more or less perfect for it.
The TV show (love it though I do) runs on plot convenience so simulating the reality is nonsense. Violence is usually discouraged if you're in the Fed (and too expensive to film) so having strongly gamist crunchy combat is out. That leaves narrative storytelling/pacing systems.
The real question is, Gul, how you managed to fuck up your life so badly that in a universe with no afterlife you STILL got banished to an eternal hell?

>A single world with light militarization should have hundreds of millions of soldiers and thousands of ships
>Invading a world without turning it to slag should involve at the very least billions of soldiers.
Your sense of scale is just as bad, but in the opposite way.

Oh really? A world with a population of 10 billion would have 100 million military personnel assuming 1% enrollment. That's not even counting reservist. Ships are slightly more difficult. However, if you look at how many navy ships there are in the world and extrapolate that number upward for a well developed solar system, you get several thousand, mostly escorts. Since these ships need bases, there'd probably many orbital stations as well. Another source of ships would be armed civilian ships pressed into service.

To take out these defenders without orbital bombardment, you're going to need to outnumber them and/or have better technology. Then you're going to need to occupy the world which also takes lots of soldiers even with a puppet government in place.

So yes, invading planets is likely serious and expensive business. Reducing planets to worthless slag is easier but habitable planets are probably a rare commodity.

There are an estimated 64,000,000 soldiers (which includes reserve and paramilitary forces) among 171 countries of the world today, accounting for about 0.8% of the world's population. 1% of the population is not "light" militarization, especially when you consider future tech that would naturally reduce the amount of enlisted soldiers needed in a military. Additionally, saying "a single world" means basically nothing since a world can be any size. If we assume it's an Earth-like planet in size and sustainability, then 10 billion is a number closing in on a planet's estimated carrying capacity and represents the uppermost range of a population. "Ships" is also another meaningless term because it could mean any sort of (presumably space) vessel. There were approximately 85 serving battleships in the world during WW2 when the world population was about 2 billion. At that same ratio, a 10 billion populace planet would have about 425 major spaceships.

>extrapolate that number upward for a well developed solar system
You said a single world. Not a solar system.
>To take out these defenders without orbital bombardment, you're going to need to outnumber them and/or have better technology.
That's a very ignorant view of warfare, not to mention the lack of overall context. There are highly effective, passive forms of warfare such as sieges and cutting off supply chains until the enemy can longer maintain their forces. Strategic assaults would also prove much more effects for disabling an enemy's force, such as pinpoint bombing operations to targets centers of production. Point being, your statement is dubious.
>So yes, invading planets is likely serious and expensive business.
That was never a point of contention. Why did you write that?

>There are an estimated 64,000,000 soldiers (which includes reserve and paramilitary forces) among 171 countries of the world today, accounting for about 0.8% of the world's population. 1% of the population is not "light" militarization,
Right now, we aren't living in militarized world. There are no large ongoing global military conflicts. The world is more peaceful now than it has been in a long time. Governments around the world are downsizing not expanding their militaries.
>There were approximately 85 serving battleships in the world during WW2 when the world population was about 2 billion. At that same ratio, a 10 billion populace planet would have about 425 major spaceships.
You don't patrol with just battleships. These battleships need escorts. You need more escorts for minor patrols and other work. You need transports and specialist ships. Duh.
>You said a single world. Not a solar system.
I'd assume any world that has easy space travel is going to exploit system around it wouldn't you?
>That's a very ignorant view of warfare, not to mention the lack of overall context. There are highly effective, passive forms of warfare such as sieges and cutting off supply chains until the enemy can longer maintain their forces. Strategic assaults would also prove much more effects for disabling an enemy's force, such as pinpoint bombing operations to targets centers of production.
You're not going to starve out a planet unless it is overpopulated. And there is not guarantee that you're going to be able to do your strategic strikes. The enemy can dig in. They can shoot your ships and missiles out of the sky. They have a whole planet of resources and heatsinks while you're limited to what you bring with you.
>That was never a point of contention. Why did you write that?
Because, if it isn't already apparent to you, you seem to be suggesting that it will be easy.

...

I don’t like how everyone turns into an idiot when one main character is around.

Senario:

What if United Earth and the other major powers did not agree to form the Federation but managed to form a powerful military alliance on the likes of NATO? Would we be seeing the USS Enterprise conducting joint operations with Andorian and Vulcan fleets.

>USS Enterprise and Lexington arrives at a far flung star system to conduct joint ops with an recently commissioned Andorian battleship.

...

But muh racism.

So Bajor is Space India and the Cardassians are the Space East India Company?

>Right now, we aren't living in militarized world
Yes, we are. The Earth is most definitely than "lightly" militarized.
>You don't
Read what I posted.
>I'd assume
I can only respond to what you've said. You said a single world.
>You're not
I already mentioned bombardment to stop production.
>And there is not guarantee
There's no guarantee of anything, but with you given scenario it is the most likely result.
>The enemy can dig in
That's why it's a siege, duh.
>They can shoot your ships and missiles out of the sky
That's just a baseless "I win" scenario you're creating in order to fallaciously undermine my comment.
>They have a whole planet of resources and heatsinks while you're limited to what you bring with you.
Supply lines are a thing. You have so many unknown variables in your frankly horribly thought scenario that you're literally just saying "X is like this, so you wouldn't be able to do Y because I say so!". There's no content to what you're writing.
>Because, if it isn't already apparent to you, you seem to be suggesting that it will be easy.
I never once suggested that. But I do suggest that you learn how to read and think

My understanding is that the canonical answer is that the colonial populations were miniscule. You can't just pick up six billion people and drop them all over the galaxy. Source: This one B5 star system guidebook I used to have for the d20 RPG of it. It's out there somewhere.

Anyways, I think the heat comes from the idea that everyone thought the Minbari fleet bearing down on Earth was going to kill literally everyone.

The E-M War was such a huge event in human history because basically the Minbari basically advanced unopposed, dunked on Earthforce at the Line and then just suddenly stopped and went home and opened up diplomacy. Compare that to Earth's past experience in space war (bitchslapping the Dilgar). And remember, the Minbari lost a grand total of one capital ship in the entire war, and only because Sheridan is a nuclear lunatic.

Isn't this the general premise of the mirror universe minus the evil mustaches?

To be fair, that was kinda what the Federation was, considering nobody trusted Starfleet with complete power because half their admirals go insane and try to start wars.

>Yes, we are. The Earth is most definitely than "lightly" militarized.
Historically we really aren't. I'd say we were lightly militarized throughout the Cold War and highly militarized during the World Wars.
>I can only respond to what you've said. You said a single world.
And I elaborated.
>Supply lines are a thing.
A well developed planet cannot be starved out. It isn't a city or a fortress. It's a planet. Short of destroying the infrastructure (i.e. slagging the planet), the defenders will have everything they need. And unlike the attackers, they don't have to move there stuff across space. There's nothing stopping them from building one orbital defense laser stations other than economics.
>I never once suggested that. But I do suggest that you learn how to read and think
Maybe you should think on the implications of your suggestions. If every planetary invasion can be won with a quick strategic bombing and you don't need many soldiers to hold it afterwords, then YES it is easy. Maybe you should look at historical invasions and actually see how much manpower it takes to take and hold hostile territory.
>That's just a baseless "I win" scenario you're creating in order to fallaciously undermine my comment.
The same could be said of you. Only I don't see this as an argument but more as a discussion of scifi warfare. Sadly, however, I realize now that you're probably the type of shitposter who frequents versus threads. If so, I'll give you the necessary psychological impetus to move on. "You win."

Didn't a dreadnaught ram a Minbari warcruiser?

youtube.com/watch?v=zRR1Lw5NW0o

>Historically we really aren't
>I'd say we were highly militarized during the World Wars.
There's only about 0.2% difference between now and WW2. If you think WW2 is highly militarized, then we are most definitely at least lightly militarized right now.
>A well developed planet cannot be starved out
You're an idiot, frankly.
>If every planetary invasion can be won with a quick strategic bombing
I never said it was quick nor did I say that "every planetary invansion can be won with a strategic bombing". You're lying about what I said just for the sake of argument.
>The same could be said of you.
No, it couldn't. I simply responded to your claims by pointing out that other strategies besides literally bumrushing a fortified position with all your troops exist. I'll give you the necessary psychological impetus to get mad (but it's still true): You're a fucking retard.

There's too much emphasis on planets. In all likelihood, the supermajority of the population will be living in space stations simply because they don't take thousands of years to terraform.

Boots on the ground doesn't matter if the strategic bombing goes nuclear or greater. We don't have experience in that category. I'd say the EA had a reasonable fear of being besieged and bombed with no way out given how it seems surface-to-space defenses don't seem to work in B5verse.

re: industrial capabiltiies of a space faring nation, pic related
Also you could fit 1 trillion people on earth in extreme comfort with little impact on the environment, its called building tall arcologies.

Counterpoint: In ST travel is easy and cheap, and planets are abundant. It's much easier to send survey teams to find new Class Ms than to construct large stations. Also, those survey teams might unearth or develop tech to keep you ahead of your rivals. Works for the Federation.

Why do universes like star trek fight over planets? With technolohies and resources at their dispossal, they could make ring stations and ringworlds.

I dont think antimatter will ever be cheap.

For trek specifically, war is usually ideological on some level. The Breen, Romulans, Klingons, and Cardassians are all supremacist races to some extent. It's not enough that they should prosper: others should fail.
The Borg consume other cultures as human individuals eat food.
The Dominion (or at least the Founders) are subjugating those they see as existential threats.
The planets are useful, especially once they have an industrial base useful to a war effort, but they aren't the casus belli.

Star Trek's a lot less resourceful than that. The cities look just like really nice versions of modern cities whenever they show San Francisco, or the capital cities on Romulus or Q'Nos.
The only Arcology-type buildings are those zany distant structures in 2009 Star Trek, It's also suggested that only homeworlds remotely look like this. The human population's probably only a few dozen billion total by TNG.
Also, you vastly underestimate how difficult it'd be to build a 'real' 1 AU ringworld. It'd take more planet mass than a thousand star systems for one, harvested and transported and processed.

Mind you, this ignores the fact that a fucking DYSON SPHERE exists in the alpha quadrant, but it's ignored and unexplored because Scotty was guest star that episode of TNG.

Joke's on you then.
Antimatter is produced on board ST ships. Almost all ships (shuttles not included) seen gather their own reactor materials in the form of hydrogen and mined (or constantly recrystallised) dilithium.
The fuel endurance of most ships eclipses their expected time-before-space-accident.

>It'd take more planet mass than a thousand star systems for one, harvested and transported and processed.

As a single static structure, yes, but they have gravitic and other techs that allows you to get away with less mass with the help of active support.

Its the opposite end of this retardation. No space ship would need more than a 100 crew.

Is that guy taking into account the falling population growth due to better living conditions?

Doubt it.

>100% growth rate sustained over a century
He's not taking anything into account, user. Unless the seed makes every part of the next seed from surrounding dirt, it can't possibly maintain that forever.

>what is the law of diminishing returns
Gonna need some FTL if you're gonna make that work indefinitely

Population grow is slowing down because it's too expensive to have many children in the modern economy and limited space. Any species will grow so long it can do it comfortably.

The solar system should have a population of 100 quintillion people wih plenty of room to spare in a dyson swarm once we reach K2 civilization status in a few thousand years. We can go even highher without embracing bio or cyber engineering or brain uploading.

A well developed planet, by definition, has loads of people and industry that rely on complex infrastructure to sustain themselves. Despite their tremendous resources, well developed planets are in many ways especially vulnerable. Success or failure in planetary defense would hinge on the world's preparations against the invasion before it happens.

If the world loses control of its orbits (essentially a space-to-space engagement) it is in dire straits. Static transportation infrastructure, such as railways, would be cut with bombardment. The surface is subject to intense observation from orbit. Anything that moves is vulnerable to interception by strike craft or bombardment. Unless preparations were specifically made for it before hand, it seems doubtful a world would be able to re-establish a hold of its space unless the enemy force was weakened by outside factors.

All of this means the different regions of the planet will be indefinitely isolated from each other. This is probably already enough disruption to start the countdown to industrial collapse ticking. Various difficulties in production would start accumulating, and after several years industrial production will be quite difficult indeed.

Prior to the arrival of the enemy in orbit the defending troops could be moved around the globe in days. After their arrival even relatively short marches demand great care in planning and execution. The attacker might defeat the various planetary regions one after another, since any attempt by one region to support another exposes the supporting forces to considerable risk. How much of a possibility this is would depend heavily on the quality of defensive planning before orbital control was lost. Poorly distributed defenses might have serious weaknesses that the attacker could exploit for a relatively quick strategic victory. A poorly planned assault might conversely find itself trapped planet-side and face the choice of surrender or annihilation.

Planets and moons have one big advantage vs fleets:they are massive heat-sinks and have plenty of room for power stations. This makes them ideal platforms for massive defense installations.

Those installations do not come with only advantages. For one thing, they can not move and can thus be fired at from very long range. Another factor to consider is a planet's atmosphere (if it exists).

We don't know that about the Breen.

You could have guns that fire bubble bullet that would destroy or mess with the trajectory of kinetic weapons.

This also works againts lasers.

Shit, I might be mis-remembering the DS9 stuff. Didn't they want Earth for Earth's sake?

youtu.be/Mg8eJZ08_0Q

They launched a strike on Earth to fuck with us after the war had been on for some time. We don't know why they were at war with us.

Shit. Well, guess I'm wrong on that one. The main thrust of my post makes sense, though, right?

Weird I remember it was about 300 billion somewhere.

The goal of the Cardassian occupation was never genocide. While, as the occupation became more tenuous, mass killings became a form of population control, at no point did the High Command or Detapa Council put "turning Bajor into a graveyard, the likes of which the galaxy has never seen" on their agenda. Individual Guls and Prefects on the ground might have held those beliefs, depending on the severity of resistance in their region and those regions would likely then be the hotspots of mass execution.
To be sure, the Cardassian Government and military were okay with these violent purges, as they restored short-term order. However the main thrust of their occupation was resource gathering. This meant enslaving large portions of the Bajoran populace and working them to the bone, however a successful mining operation would have been nigh-on impossible to sustain if the Cardassians had killed off their entire working population.
There is no doubt that the Bajorans had a shitty time under Cardassian occupation, but Dukat is right when he says the occupation was good for Bajor, just not in the way he meant it. The Cardassians galvanised a Bajoran national identity that hadn't existed before the occupation. They forced the Bajorans to modernise and to learn how to fight a war.
Any attempt to occupy Bajor again would likely be 10 times as hard in the future because now the Bajorans are organised and united. And, more importantly, they have a cultural touchstone for why they must never be occupied again. Why resistance must be total and unwavering.

Star trek writers were very, very bad with numbers.
Many times during the shows there were ridiculous low populations on planets and shit.

Early star trek was fantasy, but that was more of a 60's-70's literal science retardation where they gulped lead encased cigarette water like it was hotcakes on a cold sunday.

You literally have to assume everything behind the 80's was made by a kid with downs or a conman with rickets.

That still doesn't mean the cardassians were doing them a favor.

A wildfire going trough sanfran might've changed their mostly weak wooden housing to superior stonework but that doesn't mean the hundreds that died should be laughed off and the fire thanked and prayed too.

>Also you could fit 1 trillion people on earth in extreme comfort with little impact on the environment

Just look at this idiot