Ship of the week: Dominion Bug Fighter

[Teaos]

The only down side to that is its a bit wasteful. But they might not care about that.

[Mikey]

I'm sure the Dominion doesn't care about the waste too much - they can hatch new Jem'Hadar at will, and I would guess that they have the capability to construct new fighters almost as easily.

[Captain Seafort]

I'd say it's because over time, they've become the dominant power in their quadrant - what need is there for defence, when no one would even dare try it? At their point, they've either enslaved or destroyed anyone who could pose a credible threat.

Arrogant, yes. Practically (as far as they're concerned), what's the point in having super duper energy shields when the most the enemy can come up with is rocks and spears? (Rhetorical). Arrogance.

Arrogance was the Dominion's greatest downfall in the Alpah Quadrant.

I wouldn't say it's due to arrogance, so much as the fact that their territory is huge. To cover that much territory they need a huge number of ships, and the only way to increase output is to simplify the design. They're also not that weak. While the Defiant blew them apart on a regular basis, calling something weaker the Defiant is hardly an insult. Three of them also stood up to fire from a GCS for quite a while, and though the things may be badly designed, they're still powerful ships. The only example of truly poor shielding on a bug I can think of was "Treachery, Faith and the Great River", when a Danube took one out. That did, however, have the advantage of having the Alpha Quadrent's senior Vorta on hand to offer advice, so it can likely be put down to pinpoint weaknesses in the shields, similar to the one the E-D's shields demonstrated in "Preemptive Strike".

[Teaos]

But would they really need a large amount of ships to hold their territory?

Once they are in control there would not be a great need to keep ships around.

[Captain Seafort]

Pirates, smugglers, the occassional flyby to remind the locals who's in charge. In our Galaxy star systems are, I believe, about 10 yl apart, on average - an area of 1000 cubic ly per star. If the Dominion is a box 10,000 ly on a side, by 1000 ly for the depth of the disk, that gives a total volume of 100 billion cubic light years, or around 100 million stars. Even if there was only one bug for every thousand stars, that's still a fleet of 100,000 ships - huge by Trek standards, when the combined Dominion-Cardassian-Breen Fleet mustered only 30,000 ships. While these numbers are plucked out of thin air, and probably too high, the knowledge that the Dominion has greater resources than the Federation (itself 8000 ly across, and probably non-continuous), and the likelyhood that the one fighter per 1000 systems number is probably far too low, I expect the 100k number is at least within an order of magnitude of the true figure.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

I think the reason Jem'Hadar fighter's weapons were super effective against Odyssey is because of the 'phased' part of the phased poloron beams. In a TNG episode, when Geordi an Ro were shifted out of phase they were able to walk through walls. I think the poloron beams were phase shifted enough to pass through sheilds but not enough to go though the hull so that it could damage the ship. That's why they needed to work harder to adapt sheilds to Dominion weapons.

[Mikey]

Well, I think that's the standard adopted take on the phased polaron weapon. With the expendability of the Jem'Hadar, I think Dominion design strategy for the "bug" was just to keep it alive long enopugh to do some heavy damage - which wouldn't need to be very long while Fed shields were vulnerable to their polaron weapons.

[Captain Peabody]

Yeah; I'd agree with Mikey that the entire 'design strategy' for the Bugs is just to pack as big a weapon as possible onto the thing and hope it holds together. So while it may not be tough enough to survive an extended battle, while its alive it can dish out damage far out of proportion to its size.

As for the amount of these ships the Dominion has, everything we've seen of the Dominion seems to indicate they've got a pretty impressive manufacturing base... if they'd had access it during the Dominion War, there is no question that they would have easily wiped the board with the Alpha Quadrant allies... so there ought to be quite a few of these ships out there. Even 100,000 seems pretty low if you consider engineering feats like the Dominion Battleship, or most especially the huge and quasi-canonical Dreadnaught (which I'm going to assume came from the Gamma Quadrant rather than from the Cardassian manufacturing base).

[Teaos]

These ships are also small enough that they could be carried by the Dreadnought class as fighters.

[Granitehewer]

have we seen that in DS9?

[Sionnach Glic]

I don't think we've seen them being carried by larger ships, but there's really nothing against it.

[Mikey]

Nothing for it, either. Rochey was in fact one of the people who argued agaisnt me in a different thread that if we haven't seen it onscreen, then we should assume that it doesn't happen.

The "bugs" appear to be fully warp-capable; why would they need to be ship-borne?

[Teaos]

Long distance travel. Fleet actions. Scare the enemy when they are swarmed with them.

[Mikey]

They seem to be able to do that already.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

I think using the Battleships as carriers was suggested by the Star Trek Encylcipedia. It was in one of the size charts I think. However I haven't seen any canon evidence of this.