By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Monday, November 28, 2005 - 04:21 pm: Edit

What's wrong with having all Seltorians galaxy-wide initiate a surprise attack at the same time? Target the strong points first, only where you know you can achieve victory, and the rest of the war is mop-up. Given that the Seltorians are probably used as boarding parties on every base smaller then a sphere it wouldn't take long to capture the bulk of the Tholian infrastructure.
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There isnt' anything wrong with the timing of it.

The problem is Tos, that tacticlly it's nearly impossable to do in the victory sense. Web breakers are not a signifigant advantage when facing a web thousands of web points. Even vs cast web it's not that useful since you have to use more web breakers to bring down a web than the Tholians have to use casters.

The basic problem is that the Seltorians have their butt's handed to them in battles vs the Neo tholians ships. The ironic excpetion is vs Arachno ships. Vs the Arachno ships they do reasonably well due to the lack of many web casters.

And there in lies the problem. The Home Galaxy doesn't have the production restrictions of the Alphas. They regularly field squadrens with more web casters than an entire fleet of Arachno's is allowed.

Heck, a full fleet of Neo's has around 23 casters or more. That is sufficent to create a maze across the entire standard SFB map or destroy ships at range via fist mode.

Any base defended by a fleet has been pretty much invulnerable to the bugs in my/our experiance.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 01:30 am: Edit

For the initial attack, it's an inside job. It's not hard to capture the bridge if you are guarding the bridge while the crew is on shore leave. Half the battle is won without a signle particle cannon being charged. Sure the Selt ships are inferior, but if the Selts can capture half of Tholian military assets in the first 24 hours it's going to be tough sailing for the Tholians.

Given the tactical impossibility of the Selts winning that you outline I would think its safe to assume that a Selt captured NDN would not be considered 'foreign' technology and could therefore be turned against its masters.

We assume in Tholian duels that web operates on different frequencies and opponents cannot pass through each other's webs; but do we have any solid intelligence supporting this theory? How effective will that Tholian base with wedding cake be if attacked not by a Selt fleet, but by a Selt controlled Tholian fleet? That the Selts didn't send Tholian ships on their scouting mission of our galaxy does not prove that the next wave might not be full of Tholian ships sent to crush the sphere.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 03:19 am: Edit

Tos;

I don't know what Loren has come up with, but to me your explanation seems implausible. It is apparently relying on the Tholians using Seltorians like marines - on Tholian ships - the way Klingons use Slirdarians. But Klingons and Slirdarians can live in the same environmental conditions; temperature, gravity, atmospheric composition and pressure, et cetera.

The Tholians require an extremely hot environment. According to Gurps PD4E, the Homeworld has a mean temperature of 400 degrees F. The PD4E entry on the Seltorians says that conditions on their homeworld are "unknown" but that there ships have a mean temperature of 65 degrees.

Given the Tholian technology in the home galaxy, I suppose it's possible that they employed mixed crews, but it strikes me as very unlikely. It would be an enormous hassle dealing with such radically different environmental needs, and what would the Tholians have to gain by doing so? It seems to me much more likely that Tholian ships had no non-Tholian crew and while Selt ships might have had crew members from other non-Selt subject races, they wouldn't have had Tholian crew members.

It's also possible that they had help from some disaffected Tholians, from whom they concealed their ultimate intent (i.e. genocide). (Hmmm... does that sound like a possible plot for a Science Fiction TV show?) But that help would last only while the Selts maintained the fiction that they were seeking some lesser goal. I believe it would be impossible for the Selts to do this for long. Given the scale of the military operations they were undertaking it would be obvious almost immediately that the Selts were seeking, not some reordering of the power structure, but the complete overthrow of the Tholian Will. Even without the genocide aspect, is it likely that there were sufficiently disaffected Tholians that they would have cooperated in that?

Given the environmental difficulties, I simply don't beleive Tholian ships could have been crewed by non-Tholians. (Actually, for similar reasons I always thought the TK5 was pretty implausible.) And Tholian crews would not cooperate with the Selts once their intent became plain. Your suggestion doesn't seem to work, at least to me.

P.S. (directed more to Daniel Knudtson Thompson than to Tos): Where did you get your information that the revolt only lasted one year? PD4E says "The entire Seltorian revolution lasted only a few years..." in the write-up on the Selts.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 10:04 am: Edit

A valid point on environment that I hadn't considered. Still, it seems to me that somehow the Selts gained control of a significant number of Tholian warships or their revolt would not have been successful. Perhaps half of the Tholian fleet is in port or mothballs at any given time? Could liberating a mothballed fleet alone be sufficient to sack every base they come across?

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 11:01 am: Edit

Tos;

I suppose to be fair, I should also point out that the Q'naabians (spelling?) have radically different environmental needs from the other ISC races and they seem to serve aboard ISC ships in their own sealed living/work areas.

But while this supports the idea that Seltorians on Tholian ships would be possible, I don't think it supports the idea that it would be likely.

The racial description for the Q'naabians, both background text and specific racial advantages, suggests that there would be very few Q'naabian marines. They would almost all be employed in roles emphasizing the collection, processing, and sharing of information. Science Officer would be a typical Q'naabian role. For dealing with other races, a Q'naabian with particular expertise in cultural or political matters might be invaluable. And Q'naabians might be employed as intelligence officers, not as spies but as analysts.

All these roles are ones that, for the most part, would not require Q'naabians to exit their environmentally controlled areas, or the other ISC races to enter it. Occasionally a Science Officer might beam down in an environmental suit as part of the exploration team, or a cultural attache might meet with representatives of some other race. But by and large, days or even weeks might routinely pass between such instances.

Seltorian marines on the other hand would need routine access to every habitable portion of the ship. Personnel would be transiting between the Selt section of the ship and the Tholian section many times a day. This greatly increases the practical difficulties of radically different environments, and also the risk of accidents.

Ther might be very rare occasions when the increased hassle would be worth it. But I still believe that Tholian ships having non-Tholian crew memebers, or Tholians serving aboard non-Tholian ships, would be extraordinarilly rare.

Well, eventually Loren's stuff will be published. And then we'll know what really happened.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 01:19 pm: Edit

Tholian ships are multi-hulled like Klingon ships. It is possible to assume, like the Klingons, that Seltorians stayed in the rear hull while the Tholians stayed in the command module. I too look forward to what Loren has to say on the subject and look forward to the Chapter: Day of the Bug.

By Daniel Knudtson Thompson (Brezgonne) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 07:20 pm: Edit

Tos: Actually there is a much simpler solution to what your suggesting. Just bring a seltorian ship with.

Realisticly, if there were mixed crews (which I doubt given Tholian enviomental and paranoid status) there wouldn't be a need for the Seltorians to have ships at all in the same sense that the Klingons don't permit their subject races to opperate them.

The much simpler solution is to just bring a Seltorian ship along with the troops. This is in fact supported in the pre-revolt scenerios as I recall, since you will see a Seltorian ship tagging along with 2-3 Tholians.

Alan:

"P.S. (directed more to Daniel Knudtson Thompson than to Tos): Where did you get your information that the revolt only lasted one year? PD4E says "The entire Seltorian revolution lasted only a few years..." in the write-up on the Selts. "

I got it from ealier conversations on the subject. If it's been lenghtened to several years, than it's somewhat more plausable in the overall logistical sense, though the tactical battles are still a problem.

By Daniel Knudtson Thompson (Brezgonne) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 07:35 pm: Edit

Tos:

"Given the tactical impossibility of the Selts winning that you outline I would think its safe to assume that a Selt captured NDN would not be considered 'foreign' technology and could therefore be turned against its masters. "

Not a valid option to me since there is no way in hell the Tholians would let any other race learn how to use web. And capturing the ship just gives you a hull to work from (which isn't a bad thing but not the same).

The other side of that coin though, is even if you can't use the weapons, you can take the ship back to dock and retrofit your own weapons into there. THAT I can see the Bugs trying to do every chance they get.

I mean, if you get the NDN your going to have a ship that is better than your own DN in most respects without having to do more than pay to repair it.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 08:33 pm: Edit

I’m not disagreeing that some of this is implausible, I’m saying that something implausible must have happened to overcome the impossibility of a Selt fleet defeating a Tholian fleet in open revolt.

Assuming a clean day-one capture of an intact NDN. The ship would have a big red button even a bug could read that said "disable web-pass". The phasers would be pre-tuned to fire through web, no button needed. Even if the Selts couldn't operate a WC on an intact NDN, which I don't particularly accept, the web-pass ability and a death wish is all you need to sink bases.

It’s also possible that the Tholians didn't defend their bases the way the Galactic powers do. We already know they didn’t augment with fighters or PFs. As Masters of the Universe there is little reason to upgrade to anything more deadly then a Base Station. In times of trouble they simply activate the wedding cake and await the fleet.

Even if Tholian ships did not support multiple environments, bases and sphere's would and would be prone to day one capture, along with every ship docked at the time. This would require the coordination and secrecy that only a hive mind could successfully coordinate.

By Daniel Knudtson Thompson (Brezgonne) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 08:48 pm: Edit

Tos:

It's been stated other places that, you need to have/be Tholians for the web pass, phasers, ect to work. Dunno why exactly (given their nature it's not hard to think it's partly a biological requirement) but even to the Seltorians, the Tholian tech is offlimits.

At best they could get the same situation as the pirates. IE; can fire the casters but can't move or shoot through them (may even be restriced to fist only).

Web defenses are actually rather easy to power up if you have a few ships around. In terms of the base size, it's not, or at least hasnt' so far, been very relevent since most of the battles I have played involve a BS or a BATS. A starbase would just make it even more lopsided.

Going with the idea of a suprise attack though, I can see a number of inital bases being taken out before the web is brought up to combat strenght, but not over the course of years. Once the first attacks are done, the bugs have serious problems because the Tholians KNOW they are coming.

Even taking half the Tholian fleet isn't going to help to much since those ships will be out of action for quite some time and not usable to either side since they have to be refitted to be useable.

EDIT:

And lets not forget the Tholians have something of a size advantage over the Seltotians. Multiple NBB's and numerous NDN's (probably operating in a BCH type role) is a rather scary thought.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 08:56 pm: Edit

It seems more implausible to me that a fair revolt could have overcome the paranoid Tholians then it seems that the Seltorians leaned how to use Tholian ships and technology.

By Daniel Knudtson Thompson (Brezgonne) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 09:02 pm: Edit

how so?

EDIT:

Thought; what would be a easy way to destroy or serioulsy damage critical bases at the very start of the revolt that would leave little or no time to warn other locations and could potentially look like an accedent?

Selfdestruct inside a base or while docked to it. Consider how fanatical the Seltorians are. Suicide attacks are not outside the realm of options for them.

It may not kill the base but it will hurt it enough that a follow up attack could have a better chance of working.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 09:24 pm: Edit

It seems implausible to me that the pre-revolt Seltorian fleet grossly outnumbered the Tholian fleet. It seems impossible to me that Seltorians would win a fair fleet battle against an equal BPV of Tholians. Therefore something happened to change the balance.

The two options I have are:
The Seltorians managed to capture and use Tholian technology (which opens up some interesting scenario opportunities).

The Seltorians secretly and simultaneously destroyed the Tholian infrastructure, perhaps by causing each sphere sun’s to go nova or go cold and sabotaging, capturing or self-destructing bases. With nowhere (or not-enough-where) for the Tholian fleet to regroup, repair and resupply the Selts win in a war of attrition.

If you disagree with either of my assumptions or have a third method of the Selts tipping the balance please share.

By Daniel Knudtson Thompson (Brezgonne) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 10:05 pm: Edit

Tos:

I think the first option (Selt's using Tholian tech) is basicly impossable since even the first starbase assault of the revolt couldn't do that and if you had the ability, attacking a starbase would be the place to use it.

I think the possabiltiy of the Seltorians being even allowed near a sphere are practicly zero. Planets yeah, but not a Sphere. The spheres, as I understand it, are the Tholian equivlent's of their garden planets.

That being said, they are not a huge part of the support network. They basicly are the capital hex of each sector and not much more. Attacking all the other places except the spheres seems much more practical (particuarly given the defenses on a sphere).

Same basic tactic as in F&E. Knock out the bases and the ability of the defender to launch a counter attack drops rapidly even though they still have the capital hex.

A third option is just a varient of the 2nd. The Seltorians run a suicide ship with a skeleton crew of workers up to a target(s) with a fleet in hiding nearby. Ship goes off and damages/destroys the base and the fleet mops up.

Baring a suicide ship, something simularly destrictive would work.

Hell, for all I know the bugs found a huge anchient ship/artifact and used that to beat the crude out of the Tholians....hehe... sort of a musing thought.... Bugs with a 5X ship all swarming around it while it kills tholians lol

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 11:13 pm: Edit

The answer is very simple but you guys lack vital information to find it. I cannot tell you what it is but I would dare say these have been very interesting posts here. You guys have been helpful in helping me to make sure all the questions will be answered and will fit in. I must admit there have been a few details I didn't give much thought to and that should be addressed (the answer is self evident to me but it wouldn't be good to leave such things unmentioned).

No, there's no huge ancient artifact that allowed the Seltorians to win. Early in my study of fiction writing I was taught that it was a cheep plot device to use a magic or super device that fixes everything. No, the story is far more complex than that… I promise.

I have gathered all the information available and extrapolated from that. I asked my self many questions about why might these things happen, what might have caused them to happen. I journeyed down a path in which I acknowledged universal truths such as the universal laws of Cause and Affect. I asked where did the Tholians come from, who are they?” and what does an average Tholian think about during the day? The Tholians, like any other, are a race of individuals but they are also as alien as you can get.

Honestly, I don't know who is more anxious to see PDT in print, you guys, or myself. Sometimes I'm just bursting at the seams! But I won't tell. I can't, it would ruin everything.

By Daniel Knudtson Thompson (Brezgonne) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 11:18 pm: Edit

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No, there's no huge ancient artifact that allowed the Seltorians to win. Early in my study of fiction writing I was taught that it was a cheep plot device to use a magic or super device that fixes everything. No, the story is far more complex than that… I promise.

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By Loren Knight (Loren) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 11:49 pm: Edit

I know but I thought I'd comment anyway. Just to let you know I didn't try to pull a whammy. Beside I'm sure SVC would have not reacted well to such a thing.

By Daniel Knudtson Thompson (Brezgonne) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 11:50 pm: Edit

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I journeyed down a path in which I acknowledged universal truths such as the universal laws of Cause and Affect.

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I asked where did the Tholians come from, who are they?”

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what does an average Tholian think about during the day?

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The Tholians, like any other, are a race of individuals but they are also as alien as you can get.

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By Daniel Knudtson Thompson (Brezgonne) on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 11:52 pm: Edit

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I know but I thought I'd comment anyway. Just to let you know I didn't try to pull a whammy. Beside I'm sure SVC would have not reacted well to such a thing.

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By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 01:07 am: Edit

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You guys have been helpful in helping me to make sure all the questions will be answered and will fit in. I must admit there have been a few details I didn't give much thought to and that should be addressed (the answer is self evident to me but it wouldn't be good to leave such things unmentioned).

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By Jim Cummins (Jimcummins) on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 11:12 am: Edit

I'll give a stab at guessing Loren's Tholian/ Seltorian history.

The Seltorian's want to revolt, but the Tholians are too powerful, and have more and bigger ships. So Seltorian arrange for a third race to revolt, and on joint missions with the Tholians, they wait for the opportune moment and destroy the Tholians ships leaving the Seltorians to run home reporting the superiority of the third race's ships.

Getting the paranoid Tholians to huddle closer with their Most Trusted race to resist the revolt. Which just let the Seltorians get inside their defenses, and co-ordinate attacks from inside overwhelmed the Tholians. Once the Tholians were removed the third race was crushed. and Seltorians rule supreme. taa daa

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 01:28 pm: Edit

Back to X2 Tholians. IIRC Tholians were presumed to have X-tech ships available in their home galaxy. I think it’s interesting that Homeworld Tholians have technology well beyond Alpha races but, after conquering their galaxy, have determined that operating GW style ships is more efficient then operating X1 or X2 era ships, at least from a warp output and strategic speed perspective.

By Mike Raper (Raperm) on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 01:55 pm: Edit

I don't know that it's so much that they determined operating GW type ships was more efficient...I think it's more a question of that's what they had to work with. There are a few different factors at work here.

One, when they arrive the Tholians do basically have X-ships. They have the phaser 1, for example, and web tech. However, they don't have much of an infrastructure to build and design new stuff...indeed, the rules make this clear in stating that they can only build PC hulls.

Two, they are not as quick to advance as everyone else, and are quickly caught up with. So, what they had that was once X-tech is not for very long. And, the other races continue to advance at a quick, war-driven pace. The Tholians do not (though they do some modest upgrades resulting in their "X1" ships). It isn't until the 312th arrives that they really have some new toys to play with, and a fresh influx of ideas.

Three, they don't have much time for R&D. They are sandwiched between to large, hostile and aggressive neighbors. Getting ships on line quickly is of huge importance...R&D into re-discovering how to build other hull types is not. Survive first, expand later.

I think these factors combine to make GW tech not just an efficient option, but the ONLY option. One they must take if they want to survive.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 02:12 pm: Edit

Mike: I wasn't referring to the Holdfast Tholians so much of your post was off point. I'm saying Home Tholians developed X1+ tech (warp power curve, strategic speed) sometime in the last few millennia but for some reason chose not to widely deploy them once they had secured their galaxy. Why?

Loren, what's the story on X1, X2 and X3 ships in pre-revolt Tholian Space? You can share this much without spoiling your story.

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 03:15 pm: Edit

Peace dividend?