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Lt. Staplic wrote:how, the fed has a standing fleet of 8,000, i believe, plus the klingon, and romulan fleet.
ther's no way 2,600 Dominion ships could take them on and do as well as they did.

Huh? The 2800 in SoA were reinforcements - the Dominion fleet was 30,000 strong, even late in the war.

srry, the guy must have deleted his post, somebody posted that they thought the Dominion only brought 2800 through the wormhole.

Lt. Staplic wrote:srry, the guy must have deleted his post, somebody posted that they thought the Dominion only brought 2800 through the wormhole.

They did (or tried to), in "Sacrifice of Angels". That was in addition to the forces already in teh Alpha Quadrant.

I'd suggest that the Cardassians fleet was larger then the Federations, and possibly equal to the Dominions.

It would explain how the Cardassians fought a war 10 years prior with a technically superior race, and why 2800 superior Dominion ships would have made such a difference.

I always thought that the immediate threat of the initial Dominion fleet was that the station would be impossible to retake, and the wormhole open. The first wave of ships coming through was just to reinforce DS9 and the immediate area. I never game much thought as to what prevented more ships coming through the wormhole after the station was taken - was another minefield erected?

Possibly, its also possible that the Wormhole Aliens shut down that entry into the Wormhole or maybe the Dominion thought it too risky to send more ships through...

I wouldnt mind the Cardassians having a large fleet, we know there ships are weaker so they can have lots of them, we also know a large part of their GDP goes to the military. To be considered a threat to the Federation they must have quite a few ships.

Given the "wolf-pack" mentality of ship usage, I'd say it made sense that the Cardies had a numerically strong fleet.

Also, if they have existing shipyards, and if the Dominion was using Cardassia to fight and die for them, its possible the Dominion increased the Cardassians ship outputs, and propped up their economy.

I'd say not just possible, but probable.

To a certain degree I agree the Dominion would help them but at the same time they are likely wanting to produce as many of their own ships as possible. IIRC almost all encounters with 'Axis' (for lack of a better term) forces were with Dominion Bugs, we only really see the Cardies playing a role in the large scale actions, and even then this just seems to be in filling out the Fleet & Cannon fodder than any really meaningful contribution. To me this could signal that they don't have the ability to project force on their own and rely on Dominion help in combat. It could also point to more resources being put towards Dominion rather than Cardassian ships since we see them so rarely on their own.

Given the Founders distrust of solids, they probably would try to only produce Dominion ships, so they could be certain to contain a Cardassian uprising if there was one. They use the Cardies when they need cannon fodder, but they make sure that there are always more of their ships to maintain the upper hand. Might have worked out, seeing how they took out Damar's resistance, if Weyoun didn't transmit to every Cardie that they destroyed a city in the middle of the most decisive battle of the war.

i could see the cardassian fleet being larger, but not by much.

I also could see the dominion helping to produce carie ships so long as they know their fleet could crush them if the need arose.

I could see the Cardie fleet being larger than the Fed fleet. Their mentality seemed to favour quantity over quality.

Yeah but they were resource poor and had to rely on slave labour...

But their ships were also a lot smaller then many of the newer SF designs out there. The CU also didn't spend reasources on massive Starbases like the UFP did. There are a large number of unknowns in this.