Challenge: Find a universe

[Jedi Master Spock]

Wanted: A well developed science fiction universe, the primary factions of which meet the following seven criteria:

• Loses to the Empire of Star Wars in individual space vessel combat.
• Loses to Empire in strategic space warfare overall.
• Is able to provide technological and tactical surprises for the Empire - in space.
• Can handily defeat the Clone Army of the Republic in a battle of even numbers of troops (assuming normal order of battle [TO&E] for respective factions) in which no space assets are involved.
• At least one primary faction is able to field more than 3 million combat troops in a war.
• Worth the while of the Empire to attempt conquering upon discovery in a shared galaxy.
• Has serious (and sophisticated) political operators of the frequently troublesome variety.

Bonus points for the best entry. I'll run a poll after a little while if there's no apparent consensus.

[GStone]

I was thinking of Space: Above and Beyond till I got further down the list. Then, I was gonna say IoM from Warhammer. So...what, Babylon 5? I could say the Care Bears, but that'd be overly silly.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Maybe some Dune forces.

We're basically looking at forces which have large ground armies, but spaceships that moderately suck, though they be able to pull some kind of super massive one shot technobabble device out of their *** to win one or two main battles.

Necromongers, maybe? In space, they don't seem to be that crazy - well, we don't see much in that domain, really - but on the ground, it looks like their huge motherships can unpack legions of soldiers, coupled to a large amount of aircrafts. Plus they have that massive weird WMD, though they're ground bound, so it's a no-no here. They fail on politics, since it's more about an empire, with internal bids for power.

Heinlein's SST Federation? I don't know much about it, but if it's a boosted movie version, I suppose that though the spaceships would still loose (in the movie they're destroyed by slow moving plasma farts), in the books they could really rock the place.

Maybe we could think about some aliens, or even beasts, though this going to be tough when it comes to politics and dogmatic sabotage.

Yuuzhan Vong? If you consider them when they started to loose. :)
Most of their tech was based on tech surprises.

The Rebel Alliance. In Space, I've never seen them able to present a single ship able to match an ISD one on one, but they had powerful political leaders and many cells all over the galaxy. Though it's more a resistance and a guerilla movement than anything else.
However, they don't have any technological surprise.

I'd have cited the new Cylons. Their basestars are unlikely to match an ISD one on one. But they have a FTL tech that seems way faster and much more accurate, and above all able to work within the atmosphere of planets.
They have ground troops, Centurions, able to carry rocket launchers, and the raiders provided the air cover.
Their resurrection technology is another surprise.
Their humanoid agents are probably the top of the cream you could hope to get. Some of them, like the Leoben model, seem to be more religion inspired. The priests seem to be space nazis, perfect fascists with troubling words, others play on the sex appeal, the black dude model is move versed in the sciences apparently. Obviously able to become the most insidious political leaders if possible.
They may really be short on the troop numbers though, even if they attacked and occupied twelve colonies at once, which could really argue for large unseen numbers.

Maybe we could dig the Vorkosigan universe?

I know niatch about Starcraft, Halo, Warhammer 40K, Honnor Harrington, Bolo this and Spaghetti that.

In Stargate, there's nothing to find. The ships can either easily handle an ISD, or the troop numbers aren't sufficient, or exist but can't be moved nor deployed. Plus most of them really lack the political part of the deal, though there's an incredible amount of one shot technological wonders to find.

There are probably other games to look at. I don't know... Total Anihilation? Or that full 3D RTS series about your multi purpose spaceship...

[sonofccn]

I'm curious on why you are looking for a universe. Maybe your looking for a summer home? :-)

Anyway for my first attempt I suggest the Terran confederacy from starcraft.

Loses to the Empire of Star Wars in individual space vessel combat.

Since thier battlecruisers are vunerable to low yield nukes I figure in an one on one battle between an ISD will end in a slagged battlecruiser. The ISD also carries more, if less useful, fighter complement.

Loses to Empire in strategic space warfare overall.

The confedercy only held like a dozen worlds compared to the Empire's million. The Empire can throw a lot more forces into the mix. Added to this the terrans only have experiance fighitng local wars, the Empire does atleast have( if old) experiance fighitng a galatic war thanks to the Clone wars. So in a all out slug match the empire will win.

Is able to provide technological and tactical surprises for the Empire - in space.

Defantily. Thanks to thier science stations they can rapidly short electronic thanks to thier EMP missiles and almost instantly generate protective shielding on just about any vessel. they can also generate a horrible radiation field , but that would be useless against the metal hulls of the Empire. Thier are also cloaks on the fighter scale which ,atleast in the higher canon, the Empire just doesn't have.

Can handily defeat the Clone Army of the Republic in a battle of even numbers of troops (assuming normal order of battle [TO&E] for respective factions) in which no space assets are involved.

On the whole? Definatly. The Terrans have weapons of war equal to or greater then anything the Imperials have been shown fielding.

At least one primary faction is able to field more than 3 million combat troops in a war.

I honestly don't know how many people the Terrans can field, but they fought against the Zerg which I believe has atleast millions under it's command. Considering they have spread to a dozen worlds I'm sure they can scroung up three million if pressed.

Worth the while of the Empire to attempt conquering upon discovery in a shared galaxy.

Well thier are a few neato technolagy they might want, and the capability to launch plantary scorching nukes coupled with the aggressive and unstable nature of the Terrans make it so the Empire can't really afford not to conqure them. Otherwise they risk damage and destruction to thier border worlds and general nusiance thereoff.

Has serious (and sophisticated) political operators of the frequently troublesome variety.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you mean real politics with speeches and stuff you won't find much in starcraft. However thier are countless revolutions, insurgents, and rebels popluating the Confedercy with varios politcal agendas. The sons of Koral being the most important/famous so if you just meant the changing of the guard well the Terran confedercy has that in spades.

[Jedi Master Spock]

I was thinking of Space: Above and Beyond till I got further down the list. Then, I was gonna say IoM from Warhammer. So...what, Babylon 5? I could say the Care Bears, but that'd be overly silly.

Since I don't really know B5, your guess is as good as mine.

IMO, the IoM is not a clear loser in the space war, although it's not necessarily a clear winner either.

Mr. Oragahn, many of those sound nice. Would you pick one and develop it in more detail re: the seven particulars?

[CrippledVulture]

I think B5 would qualify for some of this. Although their ships seem to be packing quite a bit of firepower (I say this only because instead of having holes blasted into them, they are often sliced in half by their co-universians in combat), their lack of shielding would put them at a serious disadvantage.

However, the tactical uses of their own brand of hyperspace technology would leave the Imperials a bit confused.

Not a lot of land battles occur in B5, mostly guerrilla operations (Narn, Mars). But, I can't think of a better way to beat the well-organized but straighforward clones. Not a lot of information here, though. Feel free to disqualify B5 on this count.

I don't think it would be a problem for any of them to field 3 million, but fully a third of the Minbari population could be called upon to fight, and they are the oldest faction (ancients excluded, of course). I am presuming they are also a large faction, but there's not a lot of evidence either way. In "In the Beginning," Earth's expanding influence begins to rub up against Minbari space, so we know that they have territory, we just don't know how much or how densely populated their worlds are.

Worthwhile? Telepaths, crazy bio-technology, a hyperspace system that doesn't carry with it the risk of crashing into stuff, and the remnants of an ancient civilization in which everybody had their own planet-killer. I think they'd find something they like.

The Alliance, the Mars revolutionaries, the Narn. Troublesome? Oh yeah.

[Mike DiCenso]

Since the discussion at hand doesn't appear to limit the use of animated series, I would also include the following:


1.) The Principality of Zeon, as well as the Earth Federation from the main Mobile Suit Gundam stories. Neither of these powers has anything in the form of space military assets which can match the Galactic Empire's starfleet for firepower on a one-to-one basis. They certainly lack FTL drives and they lack force-field and shield technology.

On the other hand, they do have some reasonable ground-based assets that could, against a similar number of Imperial ground forces, give as good as they get for the most part, especially with the use of the various kinds of mobile suits, such as the RX-78-2 Gundam and the MS-05 Zaku I, which can be used to even the odds against the AT-ATs and AT-STs. On top of that, SW Force users can be countered to some effect by Newtype abilities, and Psycommu/Psycoframe technology.

Overall, though, the Empire wins with far superior space forces, and sheer weight of numbers since neither the Earth Federation, nor Zeon have expanded their domains much outside the Earth-Moon system.

What do such relatively unadvanced empires offer? Newtypes (very similar to Force users), and the aforementioned Psycommu and Psycoframe technologies, which might be adaptable for use by Force users to enhance their abilities.


2.) For a bit of a a better match up, the Empire could also take on the Paranoids and Solnoids from the Gall Force franchise. Although either power possesses FTL, has at least some level of shielding technology, and have (or rather had) infrastructres capable of creating planet killers and star killers that outsize even a 900 km Death Star! Unfortunately, however, they are both suffering from having been fighting each other for many centuries, and both sides have lost many planets, including their homeworlds to each other and are on the verge of extinction, thus allowing a Galactic Empire at it's height in ANH and TESB to waltz in and take advantage of the situation to defeat them.

Ground forces: Both the Solnoids and Paranoids have considerable ability to deliver troops to the ground or even to board enemy spacecraft via fightercraft delivery, and both sides have very agile and advanced mobile suit technology, in addition to well-equipped and capable conventional infantry. Very likely able to defeat Storm Troopers and Walkers.

Getting ahold of the Paranoid and Solnoid infrastructures, as well as their apparently numerable planet and star killing technologies make the effort in defeating the two powers worthwhile.

-Mike

[GStone]

I was thinking of Space: Above and Beyond till I got further down the list. Then, I was gonna say IoM from Warhammer. So...what, Babylon 5? I could say the Care Bears, but that'd be overly silly.

IMO, the IoM is not a clear loser in the space war, although it's not necessarily a clear winner either.

Yeah, it's massive weapon pounding with very slow manueverability vs low weapon strength and mostly nimble vessles.

Since I don't really know B5, your guess is as good as mine.

When I did watch it, I never really looked at it for the tech stuff, but I'll what I can remember.

=Loses to the Empire of Star Wars in individual space vessel combat.

If we're talking Earth vessels, the Starfurries do have 2 more weapons ports for 4 simultaneous shots, but they seem to be about as durable as TIEs. Much of the not Shadow-enhanced Earth cap ships seem similar in the way the Empie cap ships, though there are less weapons, if I remember right. I remember a couple at the front and I think a few along the sides, but not at the concentration of a Emp cap ship, so it often looked like they were cutting straight through.

With the Mimbari and their fish shaped ships, I can't remember the exacr number, but the fighters have either 2 or 3 weapon ports in the front and they seem about equal in maneuverability. I don't remember if the Earth cap ships had 'em, but Minbari cap ships have tractor beam like things that I think used a blue light. The Minbari were the ones that stopped the war because they realized that their souls were being born in human bodies, so they stopped. If they kept going, Earthers would have been wiped out or brought down very low.

=Loses to Empire in strategic space warfare overall.

When they did flashbacks to the Earth-Minbari war, there were large group fleets, but I don't think they were as densely portrayed as ep 3 was.

=Is able to provide technological and tactical surprises for the Empire - in space.

Opening energy vortexes to and from an actual parallel reality is big in surprise attacks and exits, though the jump engines to take a bit of time to be able to be reused again. Earth also has the PsiCorp that can have some of the more powerful ones mind control people on other ships.

=Can handily defeat the Clone Army of the Republic in a battle of even numbers of troops

Earth-Empire have their men wear armor and carry plasma/charged gas firing weapons. Earth has the PsiCorp and Minbari have their own telepaths (used to mentally fight against he powerful psychics that were used to run the larger Shadow vessels, interfaced with organic technology), as well as a specific warrior caste who have used both energy and a variety of melee weapons, if I recall. Many of the Minbari warrior caste were used filing the ranks of the Rangers, which was a group of peace keepers that consisted mostly of humans and minbari, but there were a few from other races, but their total number was much smaller. The Rangers were often thought of in similar lines in combat ability, as Jedi are in SW. They're the best of the best.

=At least one primary faction is able to field more than 3 million combat troops in a war.

There was the Mars rebellion and I think Earth was sending massive numbers of soldiers to Mars, so it might have been close to 3 million, but don't quote me. I don't know how many the Minbari could field.

=Worth the while of the Empire to attempt conquering upon discovery in a shared galaxy.

Jump gates, onboard jump engines (so you didn't need a gate, which are Minbari in origin, I think), tachyonic communications, the biological weapon knowledge, specifically the info on how to create a killer for psicops.

=Has serious (and sophisticated) political operators of the frequently troublesome variety.

Do ex-soldiers that are thrust into political positions count? It happens several times, but I'm not sure if they'd fit the bill. Santiago was kill by what's his name, but he was more a lackey for the Shadows than not. Molarri was often troublesome, was sometimes machievellian, as was G'Kar before he became a religious guy.

That's the best I can come up with.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Sheridan, no? Wouldn't he count as a good political leader?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Mr. Oragahn, many of those sound nice. Would you pick one and develop it in more detail re: the seven particulars?

I'd go for the Cylons, bt only if they had enough troop numbers.

I'm not sure they can deploy 3 million toasters on a world. It would require an important number of basestars, and they never looked like they had many hundreds of them.
Not saying they couldn't. They're machines, and thus easier to produce.

It all depends. SEe, if the Cylons decided to attack, and thus started to build an army, almost from scratch, when the armistice line was violated one year before the destruction of the twelve colonies, then we're looking at a very good industry.

[2046]

While I can't claim to remember a whole lot about it, nor do I have a vast amount of tech info, a feedback I received reminded me of the British show Blake's 7, an ep or two I saw back in the day.

In it, we follow the adventures of a group of rebels fighting against the totalitarian Terran Federation aboard an ultra-advanced alien starship, the captured "Deep Space Vehicle 2", known as the Liberator. Man has been in space for at least 700 years by this point, given the age of the possibly-sublight Earth vessel K47 ("Killer").

Here's some additional data from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake's_7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terran_Fed ... Blake's_7)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberator_(Blake's_7)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalac ... Blake's_7)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpio_(Blake's_7)

Let's look at your criteria, and my surmises and guesses about the Federation:

- Loses to the Empire of Star Wars in individual space vessel combat.

I'm not 100% certain of this, but it follows from various details I've found.

Liberator, for instance, featured rarely-used, power-intensive "force wall" shielding . . . her primary defense was a "herculanium" hull armor that was much more advanced than whatever the Federation's pursuing warships employed for armor. It's said the Liberator could withstand the assault of several warships, though she also ran like hell with heavy damage from twenty of them.

(As a rule of thumb, armor just isn't the way to go for primary defense, at least in the mindset of Trek and Wars. While one can ponder forms of armor based on exotic technobabble elements or exotic materials like neutronium, I'm unaware of anything of the sort in Blake's 7. Thus I imagine something along the lines of Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica sorts of armoring.)

Liberator and the Federation pursuit ships both featured plasma bolt weaponry, and so far as I know were limited to STL combat (with FTL drive being noted as a part of different escapes).

Liberator featured a powerful neutron blast cannon (requiring some sort of internal radiation shielding to be used when fired) not seen in use by Federation warships, and which was capable of destroying opponents utterly in a single hit. Assuming the opponents referred to were Federation ships (which would be the norm for the series), then we have a vague sense of what it takes to destroy them.

I'm not sure how a neutron beam is supposed to destroy a ship . . . as a rule, we would expect a neutron beam to be a people-killer leaving a ship intact . . . but whatever. It's possible either that the weapon is really doing something other than what its name suggests (i.e. photon torpedo, SW lasers), or that it detonates important things on the ship like power systems or nuclear weapons (if present).

- Loses to Empire in strategic space warfare overall.

While I don't know the FTL speeds of Blake's 7 . . . there are suggestions that they are truly galaxy-wide unlike SW, with their entire fleet reaching a point outside the galaxy within hours. However, prison transports like the London from the first episode would take months to go to another star at unspecified location. the Federation was able to only barely repulse an attack by some 600 starships from the Andromeda galaxy, which largely occurred off-screen between seasons 2 and 3.

The strength of the Andromedan ships is less than clear. They were clearly concerned with Federation defenses given the maneuvers they had to engage in to try to disable them, but at the same time the second season cliffhanger involved the Liberator, fighting alongside the Federation against extragalactic attack, being stuck trying to hold the line against a gap in Federation defenses for an hour before Federation reinforcements could arrive. The third season opener features the Liberator shown as heavily damaged, with the war having been won at the cost of 80% of the Federation military (or at least navy).

Assuming the Andromedans were not completely retarded, then their invasion force must've expected to at least manage to take and hold a beachhead in the Milky Way pending reinforcement. In other words, while the fleet might not've been able to conquer the galaxy's worlds itself, it at least had to be able to hold off the Federation. They had inside info thanks to anti-Federation, anti-humanity traitors, and thus we can assume they thought they had a realistic shot of it.

Similarly, the Liberator was hoped to hold the line for an hour. While this was more or less a suicide mission a la Kor in "Once More Unto the Breach", the notion that the Liberator could destroy even one Andromedan ship suggests that the Andromedan fleet wasn't composed of uber-assbeaters, but that there was something within an order of magnitude of technological parity. (Ah . . . having found transcripts, it appears that the defense gap that the Andromedans had to come through limited the number of ships that could come through at once in some way, so Liberator wasn't actually fighting 600 ships at once.)

If I were to guess, based on the fact that Liberator can withstand attacks from several Federation warships and that Liberator can also kill at least one Andromedan with damage, I would say that the Federation battlefleet was probably in the 3600 ship range (giving them 6-to-1 outnumbering of the Andromedans, albeit with near-parity of strength).

That's largely guesswork, and more research could provide more detail.

- Is able to provide technological and tactical surprises for the Empire - in space.

"Detector shields" . . . a sort of stealth device rendering the ship invisible to sensors but viewable in short-range . . . was available to the Liberator, and the Federation made use of something similar later in the series when they tried to sneak up on and destroy the Liberator.

Given the weaknesses of SW sensor tech, it's entirely likely that such a system would hide Federation warships until they were within striking range.

Given a scene of the Liberator facing down the Andromedan fleet, however, I'd guess that Federation weapons range is no greater than Imperial weapons range . . . i.e. crap.

However, Liberator and the later ship Scorpio featured matter teleporter technology. In the case of Liberator this was of the alien design, but Scorpio's was apparently home-grown by a human scavenger dude, and completed by Avon with some sort of crystal thingy.

The Federation had been working on the technology to transport living material, though they had not yet perfected it by the time of Liberator's activities. However, given that a scavenger made an almost-complete one there's little reason to think the Federation wouldn't have it by the time of the end of the series.

In any event, the living material trans . . . er, teleporter . . . thing suggests that the Federation has dead-matter teleporters, meaning that transporter-wise they're on par with 2150-ish Earth . . . which is still way ahead of SW.

In short, then, the Federation could theoretically beam things onto or off of SW ships . . . even people if they didn't care how they arrived. ;)

- Can handily defeat the Clone Army of the Republic in a battle of even numbers of troops (assuming normal order of battle [TO&E] for respective factions) in which no space assets are involved.

We hear of "gunships" for Federation ground stuff, though capabilities are unknown. There's something about them putting down a massive rebellion on a planet, but details aren't clear. As with Trek pre-DS9, not much is known about their ground capability.

Some general info from http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7/SevenCyc/F.html:

"The population on Earth was shown to be dosed with suppressants, but such measures were not seen again until Commissioner Sleer initiated her Pacification Programme in the 4th Season. Various sanctioned atrocities were referred to: Hal Mellanby's supporters were wiped out after their surrender, half the population of Saurian Major was butchered, and the same fate may well have befallen the people of Agrava if a series of accidental explosions had not occurred. The dissidents at Bran Foster's meeting in The Way Back were massacred despite offering no resistance to the security forces, and dissidents from Blake's earlier revolutionary period were executed. Slavery was referred to a number of times, with Rashel being a "bond-slave", mention made of Maryatt's family becoming slaves after his "desertion" and Servalan's threat to send Travis to "the slave pits of Ursa Prime". Non-Terran peoples were used as slave labour on UP-Project Avalon and Horizon. Annexation of new colonies was shown to be by dubious means in Blake's description of the Lindor Strategy. Once annexed, planets could be retained by outright terrorism, as with the solium radiation device on Albian."

(That device was basically a big radiation bomb that would kill everyone on the planet if there were too many problems there.)

"The Federation's slogan appeared to be "From Strength to Unity""

At least one primary faction is able to field more than 3 million combat troops in a war.

Continuing the above, we know they have significant assets, but we also know that Federation populations are treated with mind-control drugs and whatnot, which would either:

A. Limit the troop counts required
or
B. Mean that they could have as many soldiers as they have people, within reason, and assuming they could arm them.

But, given the nature of the Federation, I rather doubt that they have but few troops. Federation soldiers are seen as black-clad, helmet-wearing, jack-booted blaster-toting stormtrooper-esque dudes.

Given the evolution from Earth norms, I feel confident that they could field enough soldiers, and would probably enjoy near-parity with Imperial stormtroopers.

Worth the while of the Empire to attempt conquering upon discovery in a shared galaxy.

I would say so.

Has serious (and sophisticated) political operators of the frequently troublesome variety.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servalan

. . . basically the Federation is run by Intendant Kira.

[GStone]

As a rule of thumb, armor just isn't the way to go for primary defense, at least in the mindset of Trek and Wars.

You're fogetting the batmobile armor.

Bum bum buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummm :-P[/quote]

[Jedi Master Spock]

So tell me more about these "basestars."

We hear of "gunships" for Federation ground stuff, though capabilities are unknown. There's something about them putting down a massive rebellion on a planet, but details aren't clear. As with Trek pre-DS9, not much is known about their ground capability.

Hm. That's a pity. Looks very interesting, though, never heard of the show before.

Any more good ones, folks? I might have one or two to throw out there.

[Mike DiCenso]

The Liberator's teleporter in action for the first time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBkyn_XN ... ed&search=


I love how Blake kind of drops a little after the teleport is finished.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

I love how Blake kind of drops a little after the teleport is finished.
-Mike

Adds some realism, that.

Should I stick in a universe or two myself, or can we critically shake down the current submissions a little more? I realize there's a lot we don't know in all of these cases...