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I've only just found this thread...

Okay... The Dreadnought is, by my estimate, about 4800 m long.

Let's take a Nimitz class carrier as a base. Those are around 320 m long. The Dreadnought is 4800 m long, so 15 times the length. If the Dreadnought was Nimitz-shaped, it would be 3,375 times the volume. But in fact it's bigger than that by my eyeball - wider than the Nimitz is, probably taller too.

But let's be conservative and say it's only 1,000 times the volume. The Nimitz holds a crew of 6,000 or so - so by that reckoning the Dreadnought could hold 6,000,000.

And there's no water in arguments about "no room for anything else". The Nimitz has vast amounts of space devoted to fuel, weapons, engines, hangar, aircraft, maintanence facilities, and a dozen other things; and it's that we used as our scaling model. With a few million troops on board there would be PLENTY of room for other stuff.

It's a common thing for people to vastly underestimate just how much room there would be on a big ship. In sci fi we are so used to ships that are miles long but which are treated as if they are a couple of times bigger than present day ships. A mile long ship is HUGE. An aircraft carrier scaled up to one mile would be bigger than the entire current US fleet combined - it would be able to hold a crew of 750,000 people, and potentially up to 11,000 aircraft!

So yeah, the Dreadnought could easily carry that many.

Question two... is there a need? Well, depends. Yeah, we hear of things like 3,000 troops being enough to conquer Vulcan. But... well that's insane. Anybody who thinks that all you have to do to hold a conquered territory is take over a few government institutions hasn't been paying enough attention to the news for the last few years.

You may not need a lot to conquer, yeah, but to hold a foreign population of billions? Even if you were going to have one soldier per 10,000 locals that's a million or so... and that's a situation in where there will be thousands of small towns that almost never see an enemy soldier.

Frankly, holding a heavily populated enemy planet with a ratio of less than 100:1 is a fantasy. And for a planet like Earth or Vulcan, that's well into the tens of millions of troops.

This has to be a first for DITL. We've brought the thread back on-topic, by going off-topic from the actual discussion!

Congrats Graham!

I would just like to point out that Graham proved my point

What point?

Vulcans aren't pacifists in the sense they will never so violence. They want to avoid it if possible but will fight when needed... home world being taken over is one of the situations you would fight for.

This?

My point that the Vulcans would be likely to just sit back and relax until the Federation came still stands. It is the logical course of action, ergo they would do just that.

No my main point before this went off topic. That the amount of troops in the ship was realistic.

Ah, okay.

And proved my point that an entire planet cannot be conquered and held with 3000 troops.

Indeed, the thoughts of that happening is plain stupid.

I don't believe I ever argued that the initial wave could conquer the entire planet, simply that they'd be able to secure a beachhead and hold it until reinforcements arrived. My disagreement was with the argument that they'd be overrun in short order.

I doubt they'd be overrun in short order. Unless there was a garrison already on the planet (unlikely) then the only time they'd face resistance is when Starfleet sends the inevitable counter strike.
As I stated before, the Vulcans would just relax and wait for the humans to arrive. Its the logical thing to do.

Captain Seafort wrote:I don't believe I ever argued that the initial wave could conquer the entire planet, simply that they'd be able to secure a beachhead and hold it until reinforcements arrived. My disagreement was with the argument that they'd be overrun in short order.

My point was that reinforcements would not arrive, and they had just declared war - the Romulans didn't want war as much as the Federation. The entire concept is mind bogling and ridiculous.

As I stated before, the Vulcans would just relax and wait for the humans to arrive. Its the logical thing to do.

I'm not to sure about that. I can;t imagin any species just sitting back and waiting and hoping help will come.

The Vulcans survived Thousands of years with out humans and had to deal with a full scale war with the Romulans at some point.

I'm not to sure about that. I can;t imagin any species just sitting back and waiting and hoping help will come.

I answered this already;

I, earlier, wrote:Except they don't need to.
Think about it logically. An enemy force has taken your planet. Your entire civilian populace is completely unarmed, therefore any uprising would take massive casualties. However, in a few days a heavily armed strike force will get here and take out the enemy for you.
I think its safe to say which option the Vulcans would take. It is illogical to waste so many lives in a needless uprising.

The Vulcans survived Thousands of years with out humans and had to deal with a full scale war with the Romulans at some point.

Indeed they did. But now they are part of the Federation, they don't have to fight for themselves when there is an army being sent to retake the planet. As I said, it would be illogical and wastefull.

But a carrier is not a battleship and a battleship is not a carrier. The way that space works on those two types of ships is so different that if the were parked next to each other, being of the same mass the carrier would be three times the size of the battleship. An AA battery is nothing next to the size of only a single heavy bore 16 inch cannon. Everyone is trying to make things fit into two ships that have nothing in common. The Dominion battleship cannot be figured next to a modern day carrier. The dominion battleship is a BATTLESHIP! Heavy weapons all over. Munitions and spare parts. Crew and supplies, i take it none of you have ever served or been aboard a battleship, or even one of our own nuke cruisers. If you had you would feel somewhat imbarrassed at the thoughts i've heard in here. To think that the space in a carrier is in anyway close to that of a battleship is laughable at best. A battleship is a tightly pact grouping of heavy weapons so large that the ship that carries them can barely contain them. Every inch is marked for bulkheads and buttles. Hatch and seal. Every compartment is there for a reason, and that reason is not to remain empty until you fill it with troops. I understand the thoughts of space and the volume that is there for the troops but it would never happen. I'm sorry but it just wouldn't. It would waste some much time and energy to build such a ship then leave the inside hollow. Again please don't think of me as trying to be rude as i am not. If i have upset you in anyway let me know and i will apologize. But still it remains that if you build a ship twice the size of a galaxy, and she has three times the fire power then most of that space is going over to combat.

To all here who have never been aboard a warship, go and take a tour as i think it will help everyone better understand the uses of space in a vessel of combat.

We're not talking about leaving the ship hollow, but incorporating living quarters for assault troops into the design. While your point about modern warships being rabbit warrens inside with weapons packed onto every square centimetre of hull outside, it's highly questionable whether the Dominion ship is the same.

It's twice the size of the Galaxy, true, but judging by the size comparison to the Defiant-class Valiant, that actually means twice the length. This would make it at least eight times the volume of a Galaxy, and probably more given that it's a much more solid design. The Galaxy is hardly packed with weapons and equipment the way a modern warship is, with its wide corridors and huge living quarters, so it's nowhere near the most powerful it could be for its size. For a dedicated warship to be only three times as powerful as such a weak design, despite having more than eight times the volume, implies that it must have huge troop capacity.