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The Corps is everything.....

But in truth, a battleship may be able to halt a war without even firing a shot. Why not use it for everything it can do.

This ship is the prime of the fleet. Makes sense that these will be sent to any hot zones and those often come with ambassadors and politics. A big CIC bridge with a hundred Marines plus crew on the single most powerful ship in the AQ would be a great tool to give people the "Play nice or I'M GOING TO F*** YOU UP TO NO END! Any questions..."

The problem is shoe horning them into the ship.

I suppose you could set up bunks in the laundry room or even in Torpedo storage.

Their Marines. I could fit all of them in a space the size of Ten Forward.

true.

Then can we bring the Marines? So long as no one complains about having troops aboard a warship.

I personally dont see a problem. this ship is gonna be a prime target for boarding parties, and what better to take them on.

I wouldnt bother with them, the ship has its securirt officers like any other. they only have to fight off a boarding party or the occasional away mission.

Its not the job of a battleship to land troops which is the only think you do with marines.

I don't think space is an issue, people don't seem to appreciate that the volume of a Galaxy class ship is huge, and another 50 or 100 marines wouldn't even take up a non-neligible percentage - with a volume of about 30 million cubic metres, some sleeping and living space for marines would maybe take up about 0.02% (50 x 50 x 2 m).

Space isn't an issue, though whether they're actually needed might be. I don't think generic marines are needed, but definitely some special forces would be nice - SAS style. Besides the 200+ security complement, maybe 16 SAS style spec forces troops - with according equipment and technology - would be good for away missions, protecting ambassadors, etc. I think this would be especially good for when (ridiculous Nemesis style) the entire senior staff of a ship beams to somewhere unsafe.

A group of 1 or 2 dozen is fine. As Thorin said they would take up any room, but I dont think there is need to hold a brigade or platoon or whatever of marines. Its not the roll of this ship to land troops.

Captain Seafort wrote:

GrahamKennedy wrote:But we're back to the question of how a door is going to resist phaser fire. If phasers can blast through significant thickness of rock in seconds, then no feasible door is going to slow an enemy down. You want to go to the expense and weight of putting in hundreds, even thousands of big thick metal doors, so that an enemy has to spend two seconds at a time burning through each one? I think the cost/benefit analysis looks a little iffy on that one myself.

'Fraid I can't remember the exact episode, but there was one time on DS9 when Sisko and Kira were stymied by a door - it was lined with some kind of alloy, so they had to get specialised cutting equipment to get through.

Or in Nemesis--the Reman shuttle bay door seemed to be capable of holding off the Remans indefinitely. Although their weapons seemed set to yield sufficient only to kill a person (didn't even disintegrate anyone) and they apparently didn't think to or couldn't increase the firepower.

People do realise that there are materials which are pretty weapon resistant, right? Starship hulls (duranium/tritanium) are only marginally damaged when torpedos of several megatons and phasers of several petawatts hit them. I'm sure that making big blast doors of that material would have no problem with hand held phasers.

Though I'd still go with forcefields - they're more powerful and versatile than blast doors. In the event of a power failure there's still the option of beaming the bad guys into space. It's not like these forcefields are expected to run all the time - only for a few minutes at most to contain the boarding parties. I'm sure back up power could hold them for that long.

With regards to the door V forcefield thing on the last page, while we've seen phasers chew up rock very nicely, we've never seen phasers blow through a metal door. Or even a metal object at all. Small metal crates are routinely used as impenetrable cover during vicious firefights.

As to the marines, I agree that we don't need to house an invasion force. I like Thorin's idea - sec forces for actual security duty, and a handful (no more than a company, maybe) of spec-ops.

40 Special Ops "commandos". No more. One platoon, with a few support vehicles could be helpful in certain situations. Anything more than that would be just to much. They could even pull shifts AS shipboard security officers, beefing up my department, so they actually have something to do during regular ops. Because if we need more, we can always do the reverse and suppliment their numbers with my better security personel.

Rochey wrote:With regards to the door V forcefield thing on the last page, while we've seen phasers chew up rock very nicely, we've never seen phasers blow through a metal door. Or even a metal object at all. Small metal crates are routinely used as impenetrable cover during vicious firefights.

There's a fair amount of difference between rock and a metal alloy. As Mikey pointed out, some of the doors on DS9 are phaser resistant. There's no reason why you can't have a phaser resistant door with a shield either reinforcing it or actually seperate on either side of the door, redundancy is no bad thing.

As for the Marines:

1. SF doesn't have them

2. There's no point in creating a new branch within the Fleet when they already have Security troops. Simply train them to a higher standard and supply them with better weapons.