Any ship with teleport technology instantly wins. They can do the whole “transport the world leaders up and scare the shit out of them”. And if that doesn’t work, they can do the whole “transport people straight off the ground, and drop them from 200 feet in the air” and watch the world population riot itself into the stone age. You don’t need a ground assault when you can attack troops individually from orbit.
An easy weaponization of Trek-style teleporters is deliberately aborting the transport sequence mid-cycle, dematerializing your target and then dumping the image from your buffer. I’d bet it’s cheaper energy-wise, too.
Also, any ship with at least some industrial capacity and a sufficiently ruthless & intelligent leader could pretty easily find a few hundred thousand human soldiers to work for them and enforce the terms of the original surrender (feel free to name the downtrodden ethnic group of your choice here).
True, and the Enterprise D has a bunch of Cargo Only transporters that can’t handle complex biological systems. Beam people up with that and transport them back and you get leader X on national TV glowing for a second and dropping into a pile of oatmeal and bones. Do that to every single person that appears on TV or Radio talking about it and drive the world insane.
I think you’re wrong about cargo transporters not being able to handle living beings. As I recall, the only difference (for the E-D) was space and the personnel transporters being in a somewhat nicer part of the ship. A cargo transporter is basically a freight elevator.
That said, you don’t want to drive the world insane; you want to conquer them.
Anybody have a more detailed battle plan using one Galaxy or Sovereign class ship, armed for war?
Another thought: what timescale are we talking about? If the place needs to be conquered in a couple months, that’s very different than if you can spend a few years setting up an industrial complex on Mars or the moon or somewhere or engaging in British Empire in India-style divide-and-conquer politics.
The mothership from Footfall could; after all, it very nearly succeeded in universe.
The version of Earth from With Friends Like These could. I mean, it can move through space under its own power so technically it’s a spacecraft.
They already have something like that; there’s an episode where Picard slaps his communicator on a future superweapon called the Tox Utat, said “Transporter Code 14 this location!” and it was disintegrated.
In one DS9 episode an automatic Cardassian defense program was activated and it created little automated phasers in the replicators to shoot at people.
But then you lose any of the psychological warfare aspects of it. I suppose you could then transport several hundred reams of pamphlets telling everyone what you just did.
Speaking of which, what twisted use of the replicators could you come up with that would have the peoples of the world kneeling before you in terror? Slowly transform the ocean into a giant boiling cup of Earl Grey?
I’m not saying NOT to do that. I’m just offering another way.
In fact I can think of even more horrible uses for the transporter involving abandoning some of the usual safety protocols. Imagine the effect on enemy troops of making every second man’s head disappear.
That’s very energy wasteful, even if you’ve found a new dilithium source.
A Kzer-Ka Dreadnaught definitely could – I think they’re patterned after a classic BG Battlestar.
A Kohr-Ah Marauder, otoh, isn’t intended for conquest. I don’t know of any capability (or philosophy) among the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah to take over inhabited planets that include taking over the inhabitants.
IMO, the Rodger Young’s platoon of mobile infantry could do severe damage to contemporary Earth. For a true conquest effort I’d prefer one of her big sisters with six platoons (such as the ship carrying Blackies’ Blackguards) or larger.
