Border World's Situation

frostytheplebe

frostytheplebe

Seventh Part of the Seal
Throughout Wing Commander 4, we see that Confed is preparing for war against the Border Worlds. The entire time Blair, Maniac, and others keep saying that this war will be a slaughter for the Border Worlds... I'm not 100% convinced it would be a total massacre.

Would they lose? Probably, but I think they could put up more of a fight then anyone gave them credit. The Border Worlds were not alone in this crisis, they had allies in Landreich, who I'm guessing was supplying them with ships, and what ever support they could, the Kilrathi whom had provided them with intel, and possibly could have provided military assistance, and even elements within Confed itself, otherwise Eisen would not have been able to get the St. Helen's.

Also, there may have been other worlds that saw through Tolwyn's ploy as well. Not to mention that it seemed about 20% of the Confederation's delegates didn't want to go to war as was shown in the loosing ending of WC4.

This may have triggered a small uprising in Confed itself. So in the end, the odds were that the BWs would still have lost thier war, but I think they'dve done much more damage then anyone gives them credit.
 
I would think the UBW would be almost entirely on the defense. The Kilrathi they worked with had nothing larger than a corvette. Twenty percent (wasn't it 10%?) disagreeing with going to war is nothing. 10% disagree on every decision to go to war. That doesn't mean they pick up arms and start fighting the other 90%. The biggest damage that'd be done would be from the Black Lance who'd be needed to continue to stir up the fight.
 
Well, wouldn't the Confed have outnumbered them to a fairly sizable degree?

Also, consider the deficiency in quality when comparing UBW to Confed. Their flagship was a hull considered obsolete during the Vega Campaign. IIRC, the most recent fighters they are seen with prior to taking the Princeton are "early-model" Arrows. Most of their forces were of 2667-era or earlier ships. While not at all poor designs, they weren't up to the task of besting the finest Confed fighters. I'd guess Confed had the better pilots, too.

I'd figure most of the battles in such a war would be akin to what we saw in the Tyr raid at the beginning of The Price of Freedom.
 
Confed's rookie pilots would be better trained then the UBW's rookie pilots, but the Border World's also had access to it's own pool of Kilrathi War veterns and the pilots who had started in the system defense forces would be used to using older craft. And being an older model isn't always a bad thing, look at the 2269 Point-Defense/ Interceptor Arrow V's from the Victory and the 2273 Point-Defense/Interceptor Arrow V's from the Lexington. Everything is the same except that the older model carries double the missiles.
 
The UBW wouldn't have produced its own rookie pilots during WC4. The UBW was literally days old during WC4. Most of their pilots were veterans, along with some younger pilots who may have defected as well.
 
I don't think there's any contest -- the division between the two groups wasn't remotely equal. The Confederation had hundreds to thousands of star systems compared to less than fifty in the Border Worlds' Union... and the 'quality' of the systems don't even match. The Confederation has the breadbasket, the galactic infrastructure -- R&D, heavy industries, agriculture, mining, etc... the Border Worlds has battlefield systems entirely scarred by thirty years of fighting the Kilrathi (some of which were liberated only recently.)

Many people look at the Civil War and claim that the result was inevitable for the same reason -- the north contained all the country's industry, a majority of the population and so on and so forth. Imagine the same situation except there are twenty times as many northern states...

The Border Worlds would have (and, in fact, did - at Masa and Speradon) got some sucker punches in early... but they would have been crushed had the incident spawned a conventional war which saw the Confederation mobilized (and, of course, let us note that that was not Tolwyn's entire play - he would have used his Project forces to destroy Confederation worlds and keep the conflict going.)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Many people look at the Civil War and claim that the result was inevitable for the same reason -- the north contained all the country's industry, a majority of the population and so on and so forth. Imagine the same situation except there are twenty times as many northern states...
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While I happen to agree with your post, I feel it's worthwhile to note that this situation bears a similar resemblence to the War of 1812 as well, with the Border Worlds playing the role of the Underdog America against the Confederation playing the role of the British.

During that battle the British had more then 140 ships of the line to call on to blockade American and the American Coast, and a much better established economy to rely on - they had colonies all over the world sending them resources to convert into new products.

America, in the mean time, was just getting it's legs under itself. It had no real established Navy and no new markets feeding it raw materials to convert into goods. I don't think there were more then two dozen active ships in the American Navy for the whole of war.

Yet, the inability of the British to quash the Rebellious nature of the Americans meant that no amount of fighting was ever going to secure America as a territory for Britain ever again, despite the fact that they could blockade the coast and lay siege to any part of the country they wanted at any time.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Many people look at the Civil War and claim that the result was inevitable for the same reason -- the north contained all the country's industry, a majority of the population and so on and so forth. Imagine the same situation except there are twenty times as many northern states...
Click to expand...

I just checked the map and Confed only has around 400 systems, at least 3 would be cut off from Confed territory in the event of a Confed/UBW war, and several others were rendered uninhabitable or had the bulk of their industrial capacity destroyed during Fleet Action. the UBW has around 50 systems, and Landreich had 14. The UBW would be clearly outnumbered but not insurmontably so.

And the results of the Civil War weren't inevitable. There were too many casses where a single battle or decision could have turned the tide for it too have been inevitable.
 
I just checked the map and Confed only has around 400 systems, at least 3 would be cut off from Confed territory in the event of a Confed/UBW war, and several others were rendered uninhabitable or had the bulk of their industrial capacity destroyed during Fleet Action. the UBW has around 50 systems, and Landreich had 14. The UBW would be clearly outnumbered but not insurmontably so.
Click to expand...

There are plenty of systems which aren't on the map - the thousands number comes from Action Stations (you can see eleven more sectors worth of systems taken from Armada in our maps section at https://www.wcnews.com/maps)

And the results of the Civil War weren't inevitable. There were too many casses where a single battle or decision could have turned the tide for it too have been inevitable.
Click to expand...

There are many different ways of looking at history -- this one is decidedly the least professional.
 
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Sorry, missed the good post. There are several problems with the analogy... not the least of which being that the United States didn't fair especially well in the War of 1812. It was a conflict that ended with the grandaddy of all face-saving maneuvers... but it was a complete failure in terms of all the reasons the country went to war. More importantly, though, a naval blockade of a country that doesn't have any ships in the first place didn't especially matter -- it was a United States which was minutes away from Jefferson's dream of agrarian self-sufficiency, not the world power we know today.

The Border Worlds weren't that, at all - they were already begging Kruger for the simplest supplies necessary (OXYGEN!) to keep their forces in the field *before the war had even started*... and they had made clear that they intended to fight the war on the Confederation's terms (warships, main battle tanks, etc.) rather than with some sort of guerilla insurgency.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
There are many different ways of looking at history -- this one is decidedly the least professional.
Click to expand...

Would you mind sharing your philosophy on this? I enjoy history very much and am curious where my views and understanding of it fits into this "ladder."

In other words, if you had to 'rate' the three or four most popular ways of looking at history in order of merit, how would you do it?
 
Oh, I simply meant that the idea that there's one single point upon which the polar outcome of incredibly complex sociopolitical situations are based isn't something that professional historians really entertain -- it's the stuff of alternate history novels.
 
Jason_Ryock said:
While I happen to agree with your post, I feel it's worthwhile to note that this situation bears a similar resemblence to the War of 1812 as well, with the Border Worlds playing the role of the Underdog America against the Confederation playing the role of the British.

During that battle the British had more then 140 ships of the line to call on to blockade American and the American Coast, and a much better established economy to rely on - they had colonies all over the world sending them resources to convert into new products.

America, in the mean time, was just getting it's legs under itself. It had no real established Navy and no new markets feeding it raw materials to convert into goods. I don't think there were more then two dozen active ships in the American Navy for the whole of war.

Yet, the inability of the British to quash the Rebellious nature of the Americans meant that no amount of fighting was ever going to secure America as a territory for Britain ever again, despite the fact that they could blockade the coast and lay siege to any part of the country they wanted at any time.
Click to expand...



Not really a good analogy, Britain was also at war with France during most of the war of 1812. They regarded the war with the US as an unwanted sideshow to the real war. It wasn't until after Napolean's defeat that the British sent a major army to America, by which time the British people were stongly against continuing the war. The British government only dragged out the peace talks because they thought their army could seize New Orleans before it ended.
 
ELTEE said:
Ahh, got it - thanks.
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It is one of the big theoretical debates among historians, to what level the outcome of things like wars are inevitable -- but it generally consists of a lot more analysis than simply "if only so and so hadn't charged that hill then everything would be the opposite of how it is now."
 
The American Revolution would be more accurate comparision then the war of 1812. And before you mention the French intervention they didn't intervene directly until the Americans had proven that they had a reasonable chance to win, and while the French did offer covert support to the Americans before entering the war directly, there were elements in Confed willing to offer support, both covert and overt, to the UBW, as proven by the seizure of the St. Helens.

And when did the UBW beg oxygen off of Kruger? I'm remeber them getting some fighters and escort carriers from Kruger but nothing states that they didn't have their own supplies of oxygen.

As for the idea that one event couldn't turn the tide of a war, it's called the ripple effect. Every decision made, and every batle won or lost sends out ripples. If the decision or battle is important enough it's ripples can turn the tide of the war, and even if the single battle doesn't generate a ripple that turrns the tide of the war, it can generate ripples which turn the tides of other and later battles which can build up annd turn the tide of the war.
 
RogueBanshee said:
As for the idea that one event couldn't turn the tide of a war, it's called the ripple effect. Every decision made, and every batle won or lost sends out ripples. If the decision or battle is important enough it's ripples can turn the tide of the war, and even if the single battle doesn't generate a ripple that turrns the tide of the war, it can generate ripples which turn the tides of other and later battles which can build up annd turn the tide of the war.
Click to expand...

The ripple effect is not something historians use in their analysis. It's something the History Channel uses to explain complex situations to dumb people.
 
The UBW would have been crushed if Confed went to war with them. Look at the fleet (loosing branch of wc4) compared to what the UBW had to offer. It was one of the reasons that Blair had to stop the Senate from voting on war. They KNEW that the UBW stood no chance in an all out slugging match with a major foe. As it was they could barley keep Black Lance raids at bay and those were limited engagments. During the game and in the novel they constantly state that if the Confed hammer did fall they were all as good as dead.
 
Blair also at one point thinks to himself that the Border Worlds have enough forces to be a legitimate threat they just don't have enough power projection capabilty to match Confed's. Power projection is IMO more important for an offensive war then a defensive war, and if numbers were everything in war then Confed never would have had a chance in the Kilrathi War. The Battle of Terra was a perfect example, Confed was completely out-numbered and completely out-gunned but they found a way to beat the odds.

And has anyone ever counted the ship numbers and types from the losing cutscene?
 
You don't win a war by fighting defense all the time... The Germans ended up doing that in WWI, and they were in a much better position

I know what Rogue is trying to say, but I think he's out of the mark...

Most of the damage done TO ConFed in a full war with the Union would have been done by the Black Lance...

There are some people in ConFed helping them, to the point where Eisen can take the St. Helens, but remember the Vesuvius won that fight... They would have lost the war even with Eisen's friends…



The US independence doesn’t strike me as the best analogy… It would be more like an independence war in the Pacific… Each planet as an island… You would need to go toe to toe with confed ships, as if the US were to face the Royal Navy on their independence war…

I mean, it would have been a “Navy” war… And the union didn’t have a very impressive one.
 
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