Blackstar wrote:I thought that the Dominion was close to earth a few times during the war, and they would've moved ships to defend Earth.
Yes, and? When the Dominion
wasn't close to Earth, they would have moved ships away from Earth to the front lines. Given that the attack on Earth was a complete surprise, we can assume that the Dominion fleet was not close enough to Earth for it to be considered at risk.
Not to mention their shipyards would be pumping new ships out at a higher rate and I'm sure that if it has guns and engines(and other bare essentials) they'll probably launch to defend earth.
How many ships can the yards produce? Who's to say that the ships there were anywhere near completed? Heck, even if they were a week away from launching, there probably wouldn't even be any crew on them.
And in peacetime there would be little reason to defend Earth
True, but there'd still be more ships around it.
1) There's no war, so forces protecting rear areas don't have to be redeployed to the front lines.
2) Pure military ships would be poorly utilised on science missions, so would likely remain on defensive duty.
3) The shipyards are vital areas that would merit a defence force even during peacetime.
4) Earth is the capital, so would merit a defence force even during peacetime.
5) To reasure civilians of the unbeatable might of their military, which can be quite important for a government.
That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's other reasons.
We can no more assume that then we can assume the device can be fired under cloak.
Actualy, we can.
1) The
Scimitar needed to deploy 'targeting wings' to aim the device at the
Enterprise. Why would you need to aim a weapon that can't be foccused in one area?
2) Shinzon didn't plan on killing himself. When the device fired it would have killed all aboard the
Scimitar unless it was unidirectional.
From that, we can conclude that the device can be focused.
They probably had test versions of this weapon or at least proof of concept versions that would give them some idea on how to control the bomb's reaction. When playing with something that dangerous you'd want to test it on a small scale.
And why would Shinzon give these things to the Romulan military? You do also reaslise that there's a lot of diference between a prototype and the eventual version?
The civilians would never support a leader who personally led an attack that killed innocent civilians.
Funny. Populations throughout history have followed their tyranical overlords, even when there are massive casulaties that reach into the millions among their own population. What makes you think that the Romulans are suddenly going to have a revolution just because one or two other people died?
The Romulans have a supiriority complex and tend to look down on other species so xenocide would've been relativly minor to a few hundred innocent deaths
Superiority complex =/= willing to commit xenocide. By all means, show me where the Romulans ever happily wiped out an entire race without so much as having second thoughts.
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