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Defeating the Iconian Threat
flash525
Member Posts: 5,441 Arc User
I touched upon this briefly in a recent post elsewhere (can't remember where now) but I feel the question needs to be asked more precisely. How is the Galaxy going to defeat the Iconian threat? Their quest for dominance seemingly doesn't just mean the Alpha/Beta Quadrants; they've information on the Dominion (re: Sphere of Influence) and they were seemingly involved in retrofitting the Vaudwaar Fleet - so we know that Iconian interest lies in the Delta and Gamma sectors too.
All current factions are at a similar technological level (even though they kind of shouldn't be) - the Voth for example were shown (in VOY) to far surpass us by technological standards, yet we're seemingly able to equal their technology now, same with the Tholians (in the sense that they've always appeared that little-bit more of a threat than we'd like). Then you've got the Borg, who by very definition, should be the biggest threat the Galaxy has known, but we can pretty much take them out with ease (shame on your Cryptic) :P
The Iconian though, they truly are the bigger threat. A single Iconian [female?] can (with a wave of her hand) vaporize six Klingon soldiers. How many Klingon Warriors can a single Iconian take out if they were battle-ready? How about a regiment of Iconian soldiers? How much damage can an Iconian ship to do a fleet? How about a fleet of Iconian ships?
Our Alliance (Federation, Klingon and Romulan) should not be anywhere near capable of taking the fight to the Iconian; not with the power they have. We shouldn't even make a dent. Even with the Voth, Undine, Borg and Dominion aiding us, we shouldn't be able to make a difference. Sure, we might win a battle here and there, but it would (or should) be at great cost to ourselves, and then there's still a war to win.
This leads me to believe that we're going to get help from someone; likely another ancient species. It's the only logical conclusion that would make any sort of sense. The question though, is who? I hardly think the Vorlons are going to drop by on this one.
All current factions are at a similar technological level (even though they kind of shouldn't be) - the Voth for example were shown (in VOY) to far surpass us by technological standards, yet we're seemingly able to equal their technology now, same with the Tholians (in the sense that they've always appeared that little-bit more of a threat than we'd like). Then you've got the Borg, who by very definition, should be the biggest threat the Galaxy has known, but we can pretty much take them out with ease (shame on your Cryptic) :P
The Iconian though, they truly are the bigger threat. A single Iconian [female?] can (with a wave of her hand) vaporize six Klingon soldiers. How many Klingon Warriors can a single Iconian take out if they were battle-ready? How about a regiment of Iconian soldiers? How much damage can an Iconian ship to do a fleet? How about a fleet of Iconian ships?
Our Alliance (Federation, Klingon and Romulan) should not be anywhere near capable of taking the fight to the Iconian; not with the power they have. We shouldn't even make a dent. Even with the Voth, Undine, Borg and Dominion aiding us, we shouldn't be able to make a difference. Sure, we might win a battle here and there, but it would (or should) be at great cost to ourselves, and then there's still a war to win.
This leads me to believe that we're going to get help from someone; likely another ancient species. It's the only logical conclusion that would make any sort of sense. The question though, is who? I hardly think the Vorlons are going to drop by on this one.
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At this time, you see that all of your forces are falling, and the enemy is coming for you.
When they get there, you are all on the bridge, and your ship is about to be destroyed. You order "full ramming speed!"
Right as your ship makes contact with another one, Q pops in and say how is is not impressed, and that he expected more from you, and your race. Then asks how you expect your race to advance when you are always ramming your ships into others, or you self destruct anytime your ship is boarded?
Finally, he says this game is no fun any longer, and resets the servers back to where they were at launch. The game will be F2P though. During this time, it will give the developers time to redo everything, and not make the same mistakes again.
All of the rep systems will be gone, the CapSpec system will be gone, and all power creep that was sold will be gone. Romulan faction, and their missions..poof.
And, Q's final words will be, "Well, lets see what you can make of yourselves this time.
That would be one of the biggest troll job to a playerbase in gaming history. I actually wouldn't mind seeing something like that just for the epic amount of rage and comedy that would ensue. Don't reset the game to as launch, just shoot a STO2 flash screen and scroll ending credits. :P
I personally hope for all that is Trek that this season isn't a wrap up of the story and the people at STO keep things going pushin further and further until we have all out war and have to take the fight to the new icon home world to end it there, just like the end of dominon war in "what you leave behind"
What about the fact that the Iconians have multiple species that work for them? They don't just play chess with other powerful species, they fully control other species as well. If that doesn't make 'powerful' the right word to describe the Iconians, I don't know what does.
The fact that they control these species and can do whatever they want with them, makes them probably as powerful as the Founders.
Though I have to agree; there certainly must be a limit to their power or they wouldn't need to play chess.
Oh and the Voth threat? There is no Voth threat if you ask me. Just an annoying Alliance of species that think they know things better than the much more advanced Voth.
The Voth after all know perfectly well the power of Omega particles and the devastation it can cause, they want to use it to protect themselves. Who are we to determine that they don't have the right to destroy subspace around their own territory? They may have already succeeded in fact, since they didn't show up to defend the Turei the second time the Vaadwaur attacked.
Taking the fight to them is one thing but having to defend key worlds at the same time means less ships on the front line.
As we know, the Iconians could land on any planet before the defenders have realised what has happened and they can do that at will with their gate network.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
We dont even know if they can project shields with their telekinetic abilities, so we might just be able to punch through their conventional stuff with our conventional stuff.
We can use special shielding to conflict with their gates.
We can jam their frequencies, so gate traveling wont work.
We can infect their network with a virus.
The Iconian threat is only this big a threat because we only see the soldiers perspective, not the engineering corps or scientific branches one. They might already work at countermeasures.
Remember when the Dominion thought they could steamroll DS9? Unfortunately for them Starfleet already had enough time and information to modify its shields, thus negating the single technological advantage the Dominion had (shield bypassing phased polaron pulses), making this battle a very costly one. Not to mention that the station was evacuated pretty much mid-battle, with DS9 still capable of inflicting heavy damage to the dominion fleet.
Indeed. The Iconians, assuming they have the manpower, could endlessly perform hit-and-run attacks.
It made me think of this quote by Ho Chi Minh:
"It is the fight between tiger and elephant. If the tiger stands his ground, the elephant will crush him with its mass. But, if he conserves his mobility, he will finally vanquish the elephant, who bleeds from a multitude of cuts."
The Iconians could fight a guerillla war, hitting outlying colonies first. Attacking a lonely ship that's assigned to defend some space station, somewhere we never thought they would attack. They could take entire worlds and destroy so many isolated ships that the Alliance may slowly be bleeding to death, while only being able to defend a few core worlds by placing entire fleets there, 24 hours a day.
As soon as the major powers have been reduced to just a handful of worlds, and morale at an all-time low, they could launch a final assault.
A virus might work. But any other technological fix aimed at disrupting their gates or blocking their exits, would mean you'd have to place that technology everywhere. And since the Iconians control entire species, one being a scientist race, who's to say our countermeasures may last long enough?
The Undine were able to replace ambassadors, which means they had to show up out of nowhere, quickly kill the ambassador and take his place. It took months for us to find out E'genn was an Undine. And we still don't know how they did it in the first place.
We were only able to stop the Undines first serious attack when ESD was already reduced to a pile of debris and Earth's defences were completely destroyed.
Edit: and that fleet approaced from a 'gate' we knew of. We were barely able to save both Earth and the Klingon's homeworld, and probably only because we already had a fleet assembled.
So far the only countermeasure we've heard of, is some special ships that can keep a gateway open. And we have to believe these ships are 'seeded througout the galaxy'. Which is stupid and makes me think of a quote by Roddenberry: "Space is a big place. Don't treat it like your backyard."
So even the only countermeasure we know of isn't very realistic and probably would have never made it if it were up to Gene Roddenberry, but that's of course an entirely different discussion.
Q might be why we haven't been wiped out yet.
The Armada
Original join date: Feb 5, 2010
Twitter: @davejl_99, & @STO_BBArmada
Scimitar-cloaking tech (currently undetectable) and normal unmanned observation-plattforms could do the trick. Combine that with an singularity like the romulans or hirogen, and it can keep going for eternity.
Already tech we know of.
Doesnt really mean anything. They were at war, their homeworld being bombarded, and if they were as conceited as the ancients, they didnt have a alpha-site or a plan B. For all we know of, most of them could have them obliterated (alike to the ancients from the tria, who were destroyed by the asurans even though they had superior tech (Atlantis vs. an Asuran ship)), or most records could have been lost on how to operate things, along with the scientists who build them.
Its like the dark ages after the end of rome, in which humankind regressed rapidly. Such he thing could have happened, and given the advanced tech they had, to redevelope that level might have taken some time, especially with low manpower.
And we dont know their rate of development. Are they progressive (like the humans) or do they take things more slowly. Again the history analogy: Europe vs. africa pre-imperialistic and europe vs. south america (Inka, Maya). Europe advanced far faster (due to several reasons) than other continents, even though Africa housed humankind the longest time.
Suppose an alien race would wipe our planet right now, only leaving a small city intact, do you really think that city could hold the current technological advancement stable? No, humankind of regress to a state numerous centuries ago.
Avenger 2.0
Earth may fall, but the Klingon Empire will never.
This would be so much better than what I wrote. lol.
If they did the STO2 flash screen at the end of the war, or in the middle of it, I would not be surprised.
Preservers.
Breen arc doesn't tie in. Yet.
We still don't know what the Iconians are after. Why all of this? Is it revenge, they want to finish the job they failed before, or they just want to be rulers?
Time will tell.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
I mean they orchestrated the destruction of the Romulan and Reman homeworlds and plunging the RSE into chaos, then used the Elachi to further damage the broken Romulan peoiple. Then they turned the Federation and the Klingon Empire against each other, the only two major players left in the alpha quadrant after the fall of the Romulans. Then they turned the Undine against the alpha quadrant and destabilized the delta quadrant via the vaadwaur.
It is a lot of effort to try and weaken us for nothing if they are truly as powerful as they say.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
The Iconians disappeared 200,000 years ago, but the Preservers were far more recent from 38,000 BC to 18,000 BC. The difference is the Iconians were conquerors seeking to enslave the galaxy (until everyone else revolted), while the Preservers were all about starting new species and civilizations, and doing everything they could to protect their development from folks like the Iconians.
My theory is we'll all but fail to thwart the Iconian threat, so the Preservers will have some detection grid or other tech wake them up to save the day. And in the end, we all get reprimanded and told we still have a long way to go until we're adequately advanced to interact normally with these 'higher' species.
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Memory Alpha stats otherwise.
The ancient humanoids were one of the oldest sentient species and possibly the first humanoid species to evolve in the Milky Way Galaxy. They flourished some 4.5 billion years ago and explored the galaxy, but found no other lifeforms like themselves.
Covertly, the away team takes readings of the lichen, and find their tricorder reconfigured to display a holographic image of a humanoid, explaining that her civilization existed in the galaxy alone, thousands of lonely years before any of the others developed. As such, they spread their genetic material to other planets, in the hopes of creating a rich ecosystem of Humanoids who could fulfill the joys of finding and integrating with alien cultures that these first beings never had. Most parties seem disgusted at the thought of a common progenitor.
This could say they predate the Iconians. To which this is what I think. Then again they both could have faced each other. Since she was talking about the humanoids. So it could be the Iconians are not, but from some other type of being.
Video of the event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-j69iVReEU
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
Good analysis, If I was in charge of Starfleet I would need more ground assets for world defence which means conscription of able bodied men and women who are not in key war industries like ship building.
Give them infantry training to MACO standard and issue them with a rifle and side arm and create planetary defence forces, if the Iconians try invading with their gate network, they'll have to fight their way through the planet's garrison which would slow them down long enough for a relief force to get to the planet's aid.
If a world is invaded, the garrison would be ordered to fight to the last soldier, no surrender and no retreat.
In real life, my hobby is the study of military history with more emphasis on tactics and strategy.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius