"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Just to note it was written in the days of slower subspace communication. Everytime it was threatened the General Order is on the captain's authority on the spot versus an order from Starfleet Command or the Federation Council.
Captains weren't just life or death for their crews in the old nautical way, but potentially life or death for multitudes.
Fate - protects fools, small children, and ships named Enterprise Will Riker
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I highly doubt the Federation would do exterminatus type operations, they don't have the backbone to do what is needed to eliminate threats to life.
Take the Borg for example, the Federation would not destroy an assimilated world even if it became a direct threat. Now compare that to the Terran Empire (Imperial General Order 4, any advanced species that is a threat to the Terran supremacy are to be exterminated without question).
You might want to check your facts on that: in "Descent", Admiral Nechayeva gave Picard a direct order that he was to do exactly that to the Borg if the opportunity presented itself.
Nechayev was not armed with all the facts, thankfully Picard never carried the order
Yeah, uh, actually, she was at that point privy to all the same facts that Picard was. Even he admitted afterwards that while declining to use Hugh as a Typhoid Mary may have been the moral choice, it may not have been the right one. (It did turn out afterwards that this specific version was moot--in these pre-Voyager days, the Borg are actually pretty smart about dealing with cyberattacks, simply severing affected drones and ships from the Collective the same way a non-Hollywood IT guy can defeat a hack by simply unplugging the computer--but neither of them knew that at the time.)
It's one of the reasons I loathe "Scorpion": Janeway had a golden opportunity to deliver a deathblow to the Federation's greatest enemy in accordance with aforementioned standing orders, an enemy that inherently cannot be anything other than an enemy, and what does she do? She betrays her country and her entire civilization and sides with that enemy, thereby not only ensuring it will remain an existential threat to every thinking creature on every world spinning, but making a new enemy as well.
Pretty sure Vega Colony post Borg Invasion would qualify for a glassing.
That's pretty much what happened when I wrote up Eleya's backstory in one of the LC's: they rescued whoever they could from the surface (about 9,000 people) and then razed the site with torpedoes from orbit before fighting their way out.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
> @rattler2 said: > I also blame Wey-Yu for the Sephora as well, if anyone is familiar with Aliens: Colonial Marines. Mediocre game, but at least it retconned Hicks' death. > > Hell... Wey-Yu is responsible for the Nostromo as well. And they've gotten away with it for a LOOOOOOONG time.
They've done worse. Remeber> @starswordc said: > Thing to remember: for Starfleet, being a "defense" organization isn't a euphemism, it's their actual philosophy. They're not in the business of conquest or regime change, and they also have general orders such as Directive 010 saying that you must exhaust all peaceful means of resolving a confrontation before using force. > > But, and it's a big "but", at the end of the day Starfleet IS the Federation's war-fighting organization, and there is conceivably a limited set of circumstances where glassing the planet is the preferable option. > > What I find more disturbing isn't that GO24 exists, but rather that, based on "A Taste of Armageddon", it can apparently be enacted or at the very least threatened on the sole authority of a mere captain of a ship, without needing authorization from the civilian government. Something like that very nearly started World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_B-59 > > > @theraven2378 said: > > I highly doubt the Federation would do exterminatus type operations, they don't have the backbone to do what is needed to eliminate threats to life. > > > > Take the Borg for example, the Federation would not destroy an assimilated world even if it became a direct threat. Now compare that to the Terran Empire (Imperial General Order 4, any advanced species that is a threat to the Terran supremacy are to be exterminated without question). > > You might want to check your facts on that: in "Descent", Admiral Nechayeva gave Picard a direct order that he was to do exactly that to the Borg if the opportunity presented itself.
This is one big point. It's like giving nuclear launch authority to an Ohio Ballistic Missile sub to the skipper in charge, not the President.
Why I asked why such a general order even exists.
Hell a case can be seriously made for Sisko using General Order 24 when he poisoned that planet to force Eddington to surrender to him.
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Back in the 23rd Century it was a lot harder to stay in contact with Starfleet Command, especially out on the frontier. Starfleet Captains had a degree of atonomy when it came to making tactical decisions. In many cases they literally could NOT call home for advice.
> @rattler2 said: > Back in the 23rd Century it was a lot harder to stay in contact with Starfleet Command, especially out on the frontier. Starfleet Captains had a degree of atonomy when it came to making tactical decisions. In many cases they literally could NOT call home for advice.
But this is the kind of action that can get the entire federation into a major war. Not something you put in the hands of a captain out on the fringe.
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The same could be said of Captains duing the age of sail. Yet they had quite a bit of atonomy as well by necessity because they couldn't just call home for advice.
Back in the 23rd Century it was a lot harder to stay in contact with Starfleet Command, especially out on the frontier. Starfleet Captains had a degree of atonomy when it came to making tactical decisions. In many cases they literally could NOT call home for advice.
But this is the kind of action that can get the entire federation into a major war. Not something you put in the hands of a captain out on the fringe.
This; it's why I brought up the B-59 incident.
Essentially, what happened there is a case in point of why there are currently so many safeguards against the use of nuclear weapons by NATO countries (as @jonsills pointed out when I brought it up fairly recently). B-59 was equipped with nuclear-tipped torpedoes (a tactical nuke good for obliterating a flotilla of surface ships, such as, ooh, I dunno, a US Navy carrier group) and Premier Khrushchev had delegated launch authority to the local commanders, something we thought a Soviet head of state would never do in a gazillion years. And of course Soviet submarines are designed for the cold waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic and Pacific, but this flotilla gets sent down to Cuba.
And then B-59's air conditioner failed in the middle of the freaking Caribbean.
So, crew's getting heat exhaustion, and the US Navy blockade has found them and is blowing depth charges off their position trying to get them to surface. They're overheated and scared out of their minds and about ready to actually use that torpedo, which under the circumstances would have set off the Post-Atomic Horror a good century early: NATO's plan at the time was to bury the Soviet Union in nukes, and the ash and dust kicked up from Russia's burning cities would have probably killed most life on Earth just from starvation, never mind fallout effects. It was everyone's good fortune that Vasily Archipov, the commander of the sub flotilla, had previously lived through a major reactor accident on K-19 and wouldn't wish death by radiation poisoning on anybody; he refused to give permission to launch and ordered his flag captain to surface the sub so they could get some fresh air in there.
And we see in canon something similar: the other canonical threatened use of GO24 was by Garth of Izar, who was clearly a few cards short of a deck when we met him.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Back in the 23rd Century it was a lot harder to stay in contact with Starfleet Command, especially out on the frontier. Starfleet Captains had a degree of atonomy when it came to making tactical decisions. In many cases they literally could NOT call home for advice.
As often noted, Horatio Hornblower is one of the big inspirations- as Captain, you could be the chief representative of your sovereign for hundreds of miles, and have to conduct high-level diplomacy with foreign powers.
Also, with some of the stuff they were running into unexplored space, glassing a planet may be a good idea (vampiric clouds, extragalactic amoebas, doomsday machines...)
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A viral plague that even quarantine can't handle and shows a high possible escape from the planet would be a use for 24.
Mainly if the virus uses the higher lifeforms to build ships. Remember the Space Bogey's that attacked Spock and the colony?
Also..................WORSE ALIENS EVER!
They were going to do that, if it hadn't been that they had a bright idea (haha, pun unintentional) in the nick of time - the episode is called "Operation: Annihilate".
Back in the 23rd Century it was a lot harder to stay in contact with Starfleet Command, especially out on the frontier. Starfleet Captains had a degree of atonomy when it came to making tactical decisions. In many cases they literally could NOT call home for advice.
As often noted, Horatio Hornblower is one of the big inspirations- as Captain, you could be the chief representative of your sovereign for hundreds of miles, and have to conduct high-level diplomacy with foreign powers.
Also, with some of the stuff they were running into unexplored space, glassing a planet may be a good idea (vampiric clouds, extragalactic amoebas, doomsday machines...)
That bit at the end of - was it "Balance of Terror"? Some episode involving the Romulan Neutral Zone, anyway - where they'd sent a signal to Starfleet Command telling them the situation, and then things blew up and they were fighting the Romulan ship all over the place all through the episode, and then at the very end of the episode, a signal arrived from Starfleet Command saying "Message received you are authorised to use any force necessary". And Kirk just looks at it deadpan and says "Well, that's lucky".
Which honestly doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The difference between Star Trek and Horatio Hornblower is that Age of Sail navies didn't have ANY kind of beyond-visual-range communication other than couriers. But since even in TOS subspace radio can apparently still WORK over long distances, just at slower speeds than TNG+, there's an easy solution called a forward operating base. Put an admiral on a base close enough to possible trouble spots he can respond in real time.
And seriously, it's not like defending outposts against attack would require high command permission: that's the whole point of a chain of command. Launching reprisals? That could plausibly need approval from the President and Federation Council, but simply taking out a force that's committing acts of war is self-defense.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Which honestly doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The difference between Star Trek and Horatio Hornblower is that Age of Sail navies didn't have ANY kind of beyond-visual-range communication other than couriers. But since even in TOS subspace radio can apparently still WORK over long distances, just at slower speeds than TNG+, there's an easy solution called a forward operating base. Put an admiral on a base close enough to possible trouble spots he can respond in real time.
And seriously, it's not like defending outposts against attack would require high command permission: that's the whole point of a chain of command. Launching reprisals? That could plausibly need approval from the President and Federation Council, but simply taking out a force that's committing acts of war is self-defense.
And these are the exact reasons why I question allowing a CAPTAIN the authority to use GO 24.
There is zero reason even in Kirk's time to be that far out of communication. And if you're on a deep space mission way the hell away from the Federation, that kind of option should NOT be allowed to a captain.
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Every organization tasked with keeping the peace/protecting people in space or elsewhere needs an extreme option for the occasional extreme situation. Starfleet and General Order 24 are no different. I don't know why this is even a debate.
Should it be used if not absolutely neccesary? Of course not. but it exists for a reason. Same way a captain could do anything to destroy an omega particle -anything- I'm pretty sure because of the threat it poses.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
Depends on the threat really, take the HurQ for example. They eat everything in their path, if a world has been overrun by them and there is nothing that can be done to save the population, I would implement GO 24 as a mercy kill and take out as many HurQ as possible.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Honestly, Vega Colony is the only world I can think of right now that qualifies for GO 24. Its DEEP in Federation space and fully assimilated by the Borg. Frankly that is too big of a risk to allow to exist so close to Earth.
Glass the planet.
If Starfleet came across something like the Flood from Halo, that would most likely also qualify as a reason to enact GO 24. A Flood infestation is a galactic threat. Better to glass from orbit. Only way to be sure.
Honestly, Vega Colony is the only world I can think of right now that qualifies for GO 24. Its DEEP in Federation space and fully assimilated by the Borg. Frankly that is too big of a risk to allow to exist so close to Earth.
Glass the planet.
If Starfleet came across something like the Flood from Halo, that would most likely also qualify as a reason to enact GO 24. A Flood infestation is a galactic threat. Better to glass from orbit. Only way to be sure.
Chances are there are no survivors who hid from the Borg attack left. I'd scan the planet just to be sure before glassing it
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Over the years we have seen many examples of the Federation making claims that aren't backed up by the reality on the ground. For example Nimbus III (from ST5) had on screen advertisements showing it as a thriving garden paradise but was in reality a failed wasteland shanty town. Tasha Yar's entire backstory pretty much spits in the face of the Federation's claims of being a post scarcity utopia.
I've never seen ANY reason to beleive the entire Federation was a utopia... just the core worlds.
Ripley: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. [everybody looks at her] It's the only way to be sure."
FWIW, when Ripley said that, she was quoting the advice she'd gotten earlier from the one Colonial Marine who survived the mission (I can't recall the name right now - I want to say Hicks? - but on the other hand I don't care enough to go look it up). So it's still a military-type decision.
(It was also the correct one. If it had been implemented when first suggested, the movie would have been over quickly and much of the squad would still be alive.)
I'm not so sure. would a nuke have safely destroyed the ship? I'm not sure how durable the armor was, and there's the possibility that it would trigger a secondary explosion that'd make the nuke seem like a firecracker.
Ripley: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. [everybody looks at her] It's the only way to be sure."
FWIW, when Ripley said that, she was quoting the advice she'd gotten earlier from the one Colonial Marine who survived the mission (I can't recall the name right now - I want to say Hicks? - but on the other hand I don't care enough to go look it up). So it's still a military-type decision.
(It was also the correct one. If it had been implemented when first suggested, the movie would have been over quickly and much of the squad would still be alive.)
I'm not so sure. would a nuke have safely destroyed the ship? I'm not sure how durable the armor was, and there's the possibility that it would trigger a secondary explosion that'd make the nuke seem like a firecracker.
Considering the Sulacco was way up in orbit by a good 50 miles or so, I doubt the ship would be hurt. Hell a good 20 megaton detonation only has about a 10 mile blast radius. So even the dropship when running away since it got to the altitude it did was just fine.
Because we have up to 50 megaton warheads in the US Armory today that can be air dropped by a B52 in total safety.
Just to let you know.
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I'm not so sure. would a nuke have safely destroyed the ship? I'm not sure how durable the armor was, and there's the possibility that it would trigger a secondary explosion that'd make the nuke seem like a firecracker.
Well... could also soften up the target with an orbital strike from the Sulaco's main guns before hitting it with a nuke.
Ripley: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. [everybody looks at her] It's the only way to be sure."
FWIW, when Ripley said that, she was quoting the advice she'd gotten earlier from the one Colonial Marine who survived the mission (I can't recall the name right now - I want to say Hicks? - but on the other hand I don't care enough to go look it up). So it's still a military-type decision.
(It was also the correct one. If it had been implemented when first suggested, the movie would have been over quickly and much of the squad would still be alive.)
I'm not so sure. would a nuke have safely destroyed the ship? I'm not sure how durable the armor was, and there's the possibility that it would trigger a secondary explosion that'd make the nuke seem like a firecracker.
Considering the Sulacco was way up in orbit by a good 50 miles or so, I doubt the ship would be hurt. Hell a good 20 megaton detonation only has about a 10 mile blast radius. So even the dropship when running away since it got to the altitude it did was just fine.
Because we have up to 50 megaton warheads in the US Armory today that can be air dropped by a B52 in total safety.
Just to let you know.
50<200.... I mean really what size do you think Sullaco had?
Over the years we have seen many examples of the Federation making claims that aren't backed up by the reality on the ground. For example Nimbus III (from ST5) had on screen advertisements showing it as a thriving garden paradise but was in reality a failed wasteland shanty town. Tasha Yar's entire backstory pretty much spits in the face of the Federation's claims of being a post scarcity utopia.
I've never seen ANY reason to beleive the entire Federation was a utopia... just the core worlds.
Sisko went on a rant about just this subject to Kira in one of the maquis episodes.
If pessimistic dystopian fiction wasn't such a fad right now, it would actually be pretty interesting to deconstruct how something like the Federation would actually function if properly fleshed out.
> @markhawkman said: > talonxv wrote: » > > markhawkman wrote: » > > jonsills wrote: » > > psiameese wrote: » > > > * Ripley: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. [everybody looks at her] It's the only way to be sure." > > > > > > FWIW, when Ripley said that, she was quoting the advice she'd gotten earlier from the one Colonial Marine who survived the mission (I can't recall the name right now - I want to say Hicks? - but on the other hand I don't care enough to go look it up). So it's still a military-type decision. > > (It was also the correct one. If it had been implemented when first suggested, the movie would have been over quickly and much of the squad would still be alive.) > > > > I'm not so sure. would a nuke have safely destroyed the ship? I'm not sure how durable the armor was, and there's the possibility that it would trigger a secondary explosion that'd make the nuke seem like a firecracker. > > > > > Considering the Sulacco was way up in orbit by a good 50 miles or so, I doubt the ship would be hurt. Hell a good 20 megaton detonation only has about a 10 mile blast radius. So even the dropship when running away since it got to the altitude it did was just fine. > > Because we have up to 50 megaton warheads in the US Armory today that can be air dropped by a B52 in total safety. > > Just to let you know. > > > > 50<200.... I mean really what size do you think Sullaco had?
A 200 megaton warhead is not going to go clear into orbit.
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Ripley: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. [everybody looks at her] It's the only way to be sure."
FWIW, when Ripley said that, she was quoting the advice she'd gotten earlier from the one Colonial Marine who survived the mission (I can't recall the name right now - I want to say Hicks? - but on the other hand I don't care enough to go look it up). So it's still a military-type decision.
(It was also the correct one. If it had been implemented when first suggested, the movie would have been over quickly and much of the squad would still be alive.)
I'm not so sure. would a nuke have safely destroyed the ship? I'm not sure how durable the armor was, and there's the possibility that it would trigger a secondary explosion that'd make the nuke seem like a firecracker.
They weren't destroying a ship, they were destroying the human colony on LV-426. Given the nature of Weyland-Yutani's operations on that world, I'd be terribly surprised if they hadn't already pretty thoroughly dismantled the ship, both in recovering as many of the eggs as possible and in order to try to reverse-engineer the ship's systems.
Besides, in order to cause damage to a ship in orbit (and Sulacco was fairly clearly designed as a space-only ship, never to enter an atmosphere), you'd need an explosion big enough to have a fair chance of cracking the entire planet. That didn't happen when the alien craft crashed; it seems unlikely that a nearby explosion, even one the size of a Tsar Bomba, would do it either.
> @gradii said: > Every organization tasked with keeping the peace/protecting people in space or elsewhere needs an extreme option for the occasional extreme situation. Starfleet and General Order 24 are no different. I don't know why this is even a debate. > > Should it be used if not absolutely neccesary? Of course not. but it exists for a reason. Same way a captain could do anything to destroy an omega particle -anything- I'm pretty sure because of the threat it poses.
Well, like I said, my objection isn't to its existence, just to the apparent lack of oversight on its use. Tactical orbital bombardment is one thing, but glassing an inhabited world is emphatically not something that should be left to the discretion of local commanders.
> @jonsills said: > They weren't destroying a ship, they were destroying the human colony on LV-426. Given the nature of Weyland-Yutani's operations on that world, I'd be terribly surprised if they hadn't already pretty thoroughly dismantled the ship, both in recovering as many of the eggs as possible and in order to try to reverse-engineer the ship's systems. > > Besides, in order to cause damage to a ship in orbit (and Sulacco was fairly clearly designed as a space-only ship, never to enter an atmosphere), you'd need an explosion big enough to have a fair chance of cracking the entire planet. That didn't happen when the alien craft crashed; it seems unlikely that a nearby explosion, even one the size of a Tsar Bomba, would do it either.
There's a scene in the second Ciaphas Cain novel, Caves of Ice, where the heroes turn a promethium refinery into a giant fuel-air bomb to deal with a necron tomb. The shockwave actually buffets their troopship in orbit. Somebody on StarDestroyer.net calculated that blast into the multi-gigaton-range.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Comments
Raven, we will have to use GO24 to eliminate Hurq infestations.
"Simba, you have forgotten me. You have forgotten who you are … you are my son and the one true king." (Mufasa)
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
"Simba, you have forgotten me. You have forgotten who you are … you are my son and the one true king." (Mufasa)
Captains weren't just life or death for their crews in the old nautical way, but potentially life or death for multitudes.
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Yeah, uh, actually, she was at that point privy to all the same facts that Picard was. Even he admitted afterwards that while declining to use Hugh as a Typhoid Mary may have been the moral choice, it may not have been the right one. (It did turn out afterwards that this specific version was moot--in these pre-Voyager days, the Borg are actually pretty smart about dealing with cyberattacks, simply severing affected drones and ships from the Collective the same way a non-Hollywood IT guy can defeat a hack by simply unplugging the computer--but neither of them knew that at the time.)
It's one of the reasons I loathe "Scorpion": Janeway had a golden opportunity to deliver a deathblow to the Federation's greatest enemy in accordance with aforementioned standing orders, an enemy that inherently cannot be anything other than an enemy, and what does she do? She betrays her country and her entire civilization and sides with that enemy, thereby not only ensuring it will remain an existential threat to every thinking creature on every world spinning, but making a new enemy as well.
That's pretty much what happened when I wrote up Eleya's backstory in one of the LC's: they rescued whoever they could from the surface (about 9,000 people) and then razed the site with torpedoes from orbit before fighting their way out.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
> I also blame Wey-Yu for the Sephora as well, if anyone is familiar with Aliens: Colonial Marines. Mediocre game, but at least it retconned Hicks' death.
>
> Hell... Wey-Yu is responsible for the Nostromo as well. And they've gotten away with it for a LOOOOOOONG time.
They've done worse. Remeber> @starswordc said:
> Thing to remember: for Starfleet, being a "defense" organization isn't a euphemism, it's their actual philosophy. They're not in the business of conquest or regime change, and they also have general orders such as Directive 010 saying that you must exhaust all peaceful means of resolving a confrontation before using force.
>
> But, and it's a big "but", at the end of the day Starfleet IS the Federation's war-fighting organization, and there is conceivably a limited set of circumstances where glassing the planet is the preferable option.
>
> What I find more disturbing isn't that GO24 exists, but rather that, based on "A Taste of Armageddon", it can apparently be enacted or at the very least threatened on the sole authority of a mere captain of a ship, without needing authorization from the civilian government. Something like that very nearly started World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_B-59
>
> > @theraven2378 said:
> > I highly doubt the Federation would do exterminatus type operations, they don't have the backbone to do what is needed to eliminate threats to life.
> >
> > Take the Borg for example, the Federation would not destroy an assimilated world even if it became a direct threat. Now compare that to the Terran Empire (Imperial General Order 4, any advanced species that is a threat to the Terran supremacy are to be exterminated without question).
>
> You might want to check your facts on that: in "Descent", Admiral Nechayeva gave Picard a direct order that he was to do exactly that to the Borg if the opportunity presented itself.
This is one big point. It's like giving nuclear launch authority to an Ohio Ballistic Missile sub to the skipper in charge, not the President.
Why I asked why such a general order even exists.
Hell a case can be seriously made for Sisko using General Order 24 when he poisoned that planet to force Eddington to surrender to him.
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http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
> Back in the 23rd Century it was a lot harder to stay in contact with Starfleet Command, especially out on the frontier. Starfleet Captains had a degree of atonomy when it came to making tactical decisions. In many cases they literally could NOT call home for advice.
But this is the kind of action that can get the entire federation into a major war. Not something you put in the hands of a captain out on the fringe.
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http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
This; it's why I brought up the B-59 incident.
Essentially, what happened there is a case in point of why there are currently so many safeguards against the use of nuclear weapons by NATO countries (as @jonsills pointed out when I brought it up fairly recently). B-59 was equipped with nuclear-tipped torpedoes (a tactical nuke good for obliterating a flotilla of surface ships, such as, ooh, I dunno, a US Navy carrier group) and Premier Khrushchev had delegated launch authority to the local commanders, something we thought a Soviet head of state would never do in a gazillion years. And of course Soviet submarines are designed for the cold waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic and Pacific, but this flotilla gets sent down to Cuba.
And then B-59's air conditioner failed in the middle of the freaking Caribbean.
So, crew's getting heat exhaustion, and the US Navy blockade has found them and is blowing depth charges off their position trying to get them to surface. They're overheated and scared out of their minds and about ready to actually use that torpedo, which under the circumstances would have set off the Post-Atomic Horror a good century early: NATO's plan at the time was to bury the Soviet Union in nukes, and the ash and dust kicked up from Russia's burning cities would have probably killed most life on Earth just from starvation, never mind fallout effects. It was everyone's good fortune that Vasily Archipov, the commander of the sub flotilla, had previously lived through a major reactor accident on K-19 and wouldn't wish death by radiation poisoning on anybody; he refused to give permission to launch and ordered his flag captain to surface the sub so they could get some fresh air in there.
And we see in canon something similar: the other canonical threatened use of GO24 was by Garth of Izar, who was clearly a few cards short of a deck when we met him.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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As often noted, Horatio Hornblower is one of the big inspirations- as Captain, you could be the chief representative of your sovereign for hundreds of miles, and have to conduct high-level diplomacy with foreign powers.
Also, with some of the stuff they were running into unexplored space, glassing a planet may be a good idea (vampiric clouds, extragalactic amoebas, doomsday machines...)
Member Access Denied Armada!
My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
They were going to do that, if it hadn't been that they had a bright idea (haha, pun unintentional) in the nick of time - the episode is called "Operation: Annihilate".
That bit at the end of - was it "Balance of Terror"? Some episode involving the Romulan Neutral Zone, anyway - where they'd sent a signal to Starfleet Command telling them the situation, and then things blew up and they were fighting the Romulan ship all over the place all through the episode, and then at the very end of the episode, a signal arrived from Starfleet Command saying "Message received you are authorised to use any force necessary". And Kirk just looks at it deadpan and says "Well, that's lucky".
And seriously, it's not like defending outposts against attack would require high command permission: that's the whole point of a chain of command. Launching reprisals? That could plausibly need approval from the President and Federation Council, but simply taking out a force that's committing acts of war is self-defense.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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And these are the exact reasons why I question allowing a CAPTAIN the authority to use GO 24.
There is zero reason even in Kirk's time to be that far out of communication. And if you're on a deep space mission way the hell away from the Federation, that kind of option should NOT be allowed to a captain.
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Should it be used if not absolutely neccesary? Of course not. but it exists for a reason. Same way a captain could do anything to destroy an omega particle -anything- I'm pretty sure because of the threat it poses.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Glass the planet.
If Starfleet came across something like the Flood from Halo, that would most likely also qualify as a reason to enact GO 24. A Flood infestation is a galactic threat. Better to glass from orbit. Only way to be sure.
Chances are there are no survivors who hid from the Borg attack left. I'd scan the planet just to be sure before glassing it
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
Considering the Sulacco was way up in orbit by a good 50 miles or so, I doubt the ship would be hurt. Hell a good 20 megaton detonation only has about a 10 mile blast radius. So even the dropship when running away since it got to the altitude it did was just fine.
Because we have up to 50 megaton warheads in the US Armory today that can be air dropped by a B52 in total safety.
Just to let you know.
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Well... could also soften up the target with an orbital strike from the Sulaco's main guns before hitting it with a nuke.
My character Tsin'xing
Sisko went on a rant about just this subject to Kira in one of the maquis episodes.
If pessimistic dystopian fiction wasn't such a fad right now, it would actually be pretty interesting to deconstruct how something like the Federation would actually function if properly fleshed out.
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> * Ripley: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. [everybody looks at her] It's the only way to be sure."
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> FWIW, when Ripley said that, she was quoting the advice she'd gotten earlier from the one Colonial Marine who survived the mission (I can't recall the name right now - I want to say Hicks? - but on the other hand I don't care enough to go look it up). So it's still a military-type decision.
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> (It was also the correct one. If it had been implemented when first suggested, the movie would have been over quickly and much of the squad would still be alive.)
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> I'm not so sure. would a nuke have safely destroyed the ship? I'm not sure how durable the armor was, and there's the possibility that it would trigger a secondary explosion that'd make the nuke seem like a firecracker.
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> Considering the Sulacco was way up in orbit by a good 50 miles or so, I doubt the ship would be hurt. Hell a good 20 megaton detonation only has about a 10 mile blast radius. So even the dropship when running away since it got to the altitude it did was just fine.
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> Because we have up to 50 megaton warheads in the US Armory today that can be air dropped by a B52 in total safety.
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> Just to let you know.
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> 50<200....
A 200 megaton warhead is not going to go clear into orbit.
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My character Tsin'xing
Besides, in order to cause damage to a ship in orbit (and Sulacco was fairly clearly designed as a space-only ship, never to enter an atmosphere), you'd need an explosion big enough to have a fair chance of cracking the entire planet. That didn't happen when the alien craft crashed; it seems unlikely that a nearby explosion, even one the size of a Tsar Bomba, would do it either.
> Every organization tasked with keeping the peace/protecting people in space or elsewhere needs an extreme option for the occasional extreme situation. Starfleet and General Order 24 are no different. I don't know why this is even a debate.
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> Should it be used if not absolutely neccesary? Of course not. but it exists for a reason. Same way a captain could do anything to destroy an omega particle -anything- I'm pretty sure because of the threat it poses.
Well, like I said, my objection isn't to its existence, just to the apparent lack of oversight on its use. Tactical orbital bombardment is one thing, but glassing an inhabited world is emphatically not something that should be left to the discretion of local commanders.
> @jonsills said:
> They weren't destroying a ship, they were destroying the human colony on LV-426. Given the nature of Weyland-Yutani's operations on that world, I'd be terribly surprised if they hadn't already pretty thoroughly dismantled the ship, both in recovering as many of the eggs as possible and in order to try to reverse-engineer the ship's systems.
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> Besides, in order to cause damage to a ship in orbit (and Sulacco was fairly clearly designed as a space-only ship, never to enter an atmosphere), you'd need an explosion big enough to have a fair chance of cracking the entire planet. That didn't happen when the alien craft crashed; it seems unlikely that a nearby explosion, even one the size of a Tsar Bomba, would do it either.
There's a scene in the second Ciaphas Cain novel, Caves of Ice, where the heroes turn a promethium refinery into a giant fuel-air bomb to deal with a necron tomb. The shockwave actually buffets their troopship in orbit. Somebody on StarDestroyer.net calculated that blast into the multi-gigaton-range.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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