Headscratchers / Star Trek: Alien Races and Societies

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Change in Borg Behavior

• The Borg are stated when they are introduced to only be interested in Technology and not people. After First Contact they are obsessed with assimilating people.
  • The Borg weren't 'changed' to assimilating people, it was simply clarified that they also assimilated people who got in their way. Q may have used the word 'technology' but the underlying point was that the Borg are after assets. For example, they're very interested in assimilated biologically fascinating/powerful species, even ones like 8472 which don't seem to have recognizable technology.
  • Note, however, that this observation was made by Q, who had just hurled the Enterprise far beyond the bounds of space humans were known to have explored. At that point in time, the Borg had already assimilated humans (the Hansen family as well as the inhabitants of several colonies). The Borg Queen would later observe that humans were biologically unremarkable as species go. However, the Borg did not know about Q, and the perception that the Enterprise might possess some new propulsion technology that the Borg were unaware of the Federation possessing would, in that particular encounter, make them more interested in the ship itself than in the human crew. It was later when the Federation proved to be so resistant to attack that the Borg became more interested in assimilating people as well as technology.

Klingon Bat'leth

• Why do the Klingon soldiers use Bat'leths in battle? Phasers and disruptors have a greater range and at close range the Mek'leth (weapon used by Worf to kill a drone in first contact) has better reach whilst being easier to store and can be used one handed. Parrying (the supposed advantage of Bat'leths) shouldn't be a major factor against an enemy that uses Phaser's or Disruptors such as in the battle of Deep Space Nine and it is hard to switch between a Bat'leth and Disruptor in fighting. A smaller more efficient Klingon weapon such as a Mek'leth would be a better option if blades were an absolute must for some reason as you can carry a Mek'leth and Disruptor at the same time or a Mek'leth would take up less space.
  • See WMG about Klingon soldiers. Maybe the intention was to give them a worse weapon or to use them to fight the Borg.
  • Probably a cultural throwback. Bat'leth means literally "sword of honor", and was probably designed for honor duels... Except the more conservative Klingon of TNG era decided to use them in actual combat too (contrast with the more pragmatic TOS-era Klingon carrying guns), with the bat'leth returning to her niche and get replaced in actual combat by guns and functional blades when they returned to fight wars with capable opponents. As for why Kahless (credited as the inventor of the weapon) designed such an ergonomically bad weapon... Probably he felt himself so superior to Molor that he needed an handicap to have an honorable duel with him, and then proceeded to prove he was that superior in combat by winning anyway.
  • Of course, calling it an ergonomically bad weapon is applying human reflexes, strength, spacial awareness and personality to it. Klingons could well be strong enough to make even the smallest jabs from the weapon fatal, and naturally agressive enough to need a weapon to function as both a sword and sheild simaltaneously. Their using of them over guns in actual combat though, just shows how arrogant they are.

Borg tactical maneuvering

• Why do Borg cubes travel facing flat side forwards? If they point a corner towards their target then they would be able to bring 3 sides worth of weapons to bear against an opponent instead of only one.
  • This is relevant in very few situations. If they're fighting an entire fleet, it's best to try to continuously hit as many opposing ships as possible at once.
  • Why should they? The only race the Borg ever had trouble with in a one on on fight was Species 8472. The Borg simply do not need to bring that much firepower to bear against a singular opponent. The best way to fight the Borg is with swarm tactics so the cube's orientation doesn't matter with enemies all around them.
    • Well, except that time that Enterprise-D obliterated 20% of a cube with it's main phasers. Noticeably, though, this was the only time Enterprise was able to inflict any appreciable damage on a Borg vessel—and I always assumed that they allowed this to learn about Starfleet weapons. We have seen a Borg Cube rotate in combat, presumably to utilize its weapons on each side of a cube and spread damage across a greater area of a cube's surface, but they only ever seem to use four of the six sides they do this. The tactic seems to be reserved for situations in which—if you'll forgive the use of extremely technical military jargon—shit gets real.
• When the Borg enter a ship they can walk through internal force fields by "matching phase" with them. This means that when they are doing this you know what phase the Borg drone is using for shielding. Why don't troops just adjust their weapons to counter this known phase, set up force fields and choke points to massacre any Borg boarding parties?
  • In fact, if you watch some of the later encounters with the Borg, Picard and the others do tell their subordinates to set their phasers on a "rotating modulation" in order to keep the Borg from automatically producing a force field that can block their shots. However, this is always a very temporary solution, with the Borg apparently being able to adapt their own modulation enough after just two or three of them get fried such that they can block the phasers' rotating modulations as well. Presumably, one could likewise rotate the shield phases to keep the Borg from adapting to them right away, but they would adapt themselves to match with a rotating shield phase just as quickly as they do to the phasers' modulation.
    • Isn't rotating phase to ensure that it is harder for the enemy to know what phase you are using so they can't counter it? I got the impression that each shielding phase had specific counter phase (hence the term match phase) allowing you to walk though or shoot through the shield. If the Borg want to get through a shield they need a counter phase in their own shield for it. Doing this makes the Borg shield take on a known phase (the counter phase) allowing the Federation troops to set their weapons to counter what the Borg is using. The Borg seem to adapt by changing their phase rapidly and predicting what phase you are going to use so you can't find their counter phase as well as finding what phase to set their weapons to so they can use your counter phase. If the Borg try to change their phase in this situation against an unchanging shield door the Borg shield simply won't match the doors counter phase and they won't get through or the Borg shield will change to a different phase when they are part way through and they will get wedged and stuck in the door.
    • It's more that the Borg can remember every phaser frequency used against them, so they can block it once they've adapted to that frequency. The problem is that the phasers can only remember a few frequencies at a time, so once the Borg have adapted to all the frequencies programmed into a certain phaser, there's not much else you can do.
• The Borg have a very high level approach to everything. They see and consider problems only on a grand scale, by virtue of their enormous size and collective thought processes. This is why they are so single-minded about everything; it's why, for example, they don't proactively engage intruders on their ships until they do something to get their attention (Dr. Crusher's proverbial mosquito). Although the Borg Collective is very efficient when it comes to decision-making (there's no chain of command to follow, no time spent deliberating), it also means that little details like battle tactics don't receive the same level of attention that they would in a hierarchical society where there are individuals at every level tasked with responsibilities of every size. To orient a single cube in such a way as to maximize fields of fire against an enemy formation is far too trivial a consideration for the collective to notice.

How did the Klingons ever develop into a space-faring race?

• More specifically, how could they possibly have kept their pervasive culture, which apparently consists of: being physically aggressive, demeaning non-physically imposing warriors, killing each other constantly (indeed several legal matters seem to be tied to trial by combat), a weak central government (like, "we don't like your clan so we're rebelling" weak). I am surprised this type of culture ever progressed to the industrial age, let alone beyond the atomic age. Perhaps all the clever, innovative, and thoughtful Klingons are simply not shown? It seems unlikely though.
  • This is covered in Star Trek: Enterprise. The Klingons used to have a more varied society with lawyers, scientists, etcetera being given respect and honor. The warrior class took over society only after the Klingons started making themselves into a galactic power (something lamented by the Klingon lawyer Archer speaks to). We also see a few non-warrior Klingons in chronologically later series, who are subject to Klingon Scientists Get No Respect and it's acknowledged as a problem in Klingon society.
  • That and they've suffered an alien invasion in the 14th century. Given what is known of Klingon history (Kahless had conquered all Klingon, one of his successors was famous for conquering a Klingon city and slaughtering all its inhabitants, and after the Hur'q invasion the Klingon were ruled by a Second Dynasty), the most probable theory is that: Kahless created a Klingon Empire that did develop an industrial society and used superior technology to conquer a large area (if not all) of Qo'noS (Kahless' conquests were amped up by propaganda); in the 14th century the Hur'q invaded and sacked Qo'noS, demolishing pretty much all societal structures); the Hur'q either left on their own because they were raiders or were driven out by a combination of La Résistance and local spacefaring nations (we can confirm the existence of spacefaring Orions, Vulcans and Vegan Tyranny at this point in time, with the Vegan Tyranny being a relatively large and powerful empire); for whatever reason they left, the Hur'q left behind technology (either damaged ships they didn't care to repair and other forgotten tools if they were raiders or a whole industrial infrastructure if they were planning to colonize the world), technology that a rump state recognizing itself in the former Klingon Empire reverse engineered faster than other rump states and used to conquer the planet and expand in space; this new Klingon Empire needs its success to scientists and captured enemy technology, but propaganda needs make the empire bury that and inflate the role of the warrior caste in repelling the invaders (that would be considered as having planned to enslave or exterminate the Klingon, and would have been told to have been repelled with no alien help whatsoever); by the time of Enterprise, the pro-Warriors propaganda has transformed the Klingon in Space Vikings.
  • War is one of the, if no THE, main motors of scientific and technical development. Human society always has broad jumps in science and technology after every major war in fact. There are whole documentaries on the subject, is amazing to see how much science and tech advenced after the Hundred Years War, the Franco-Prussian War and the two world wars for example. If anything, Klingon war-like culture would make them more technologically and scientifically sawvy than other cultures. Besides, the Klingon are not that different from other real life warrior cultures like the Spartans, Vikings, Mongols and both Samurai-era and Meiji-era Japanese, and in fact all of them are good examples of warrior societies that were outstanding navigators, enginers, etc., thanks to their war-based cultures.
    • The point of the question isn't that they're war-like (you'll notice this question is rarely asked of the Romulans or Cardassians), the point is that they seem wholly uninterested in the neccescary intellectual pursuits or the political structures required to make such advances.
  • To paraphrase one Quora User:

They did all that before they degenerated into a bunch of drunken brawlers.Klingon scientists are undervalued, not nonexistent. - Klingons demonstrated over and over that they had a very robust scientific establishment, particularly in the realm of life sciences.In “Broken Bow", they're able to encode covert messages into the DNA of an operative with no ill effects. They’ve surgically altered Klingons to appear human, and they developed a working cloaking device independently of the Romulans despite having no functioning central government at the time.The problem is stated in an ENT episode: Klingon society is becoming increasingly stratified along caste lines. Reduced social mobility is never healthy for a society. In this case, it's the warriors who started to be elevated over everybody else. - All that stuff about the Klingons stealing warp drive from the Hur'q? That's from the Klingon Academy video game, which is not canon. The only thing the Hur'q did in canon was fight with the Klingons. We don't know when, what form it took, or what Klingon society looked like at the time. Even if it was canon, we also know for a fact that Klingon tales of their own history are sometimes altered or exaggerated to make the incumbents look good. And besides, if you gave a medieval monk a cell phone, do you really think he'd be able to duplicate it? Hell, if you gave one to an engineer in 1914, do you think they could duplicate it? You can't reverse-engineer something unless you already have a broadly similar technology level yourself; to have gotten warp drive from the Hur'q, the Klingons had to have been pretty close to developing it themselves. So yeah, the Klingons may have stolen some tech from other powers, but their own efforts were necessarily quite impressive and effective enough. Finally, there’s the simple reality that if a warp-capable society attacked medieval Klingons as the tale says, the Klingons would have lost, just as surely as the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas lost their defensive wars against European imperial powers and their guns and industry.

Borg Packin' Heat

• Why don't Borg ever run or carry personal weapons? You'd think creatures so obsessed with perfection and efficiency would try to be a bit more efficient when it came to survival? The same goes for ignoring people not considered threats: you'd think by First Contact, the Enterprise crew would have been considered a threat - as would anyone whose ship you happen to be invading.
  • Well, I think the writers do this to emphasize that to the Borg, the individual humanoid components are of no consequence. The Borg are a hive organism and care no more for individual humanoid portions of themselves than we do about individual cells. Which does not strike me as much better or more logical, come to think of it. Then again, I gave up on Trek years ago and haven't watched much of it since around 1990.
  • Borg drones may be highly expendable in the sight of the collective, but they still cost something in finite resources to produce (if nothing else, the time, effort, and availability of victims are finite resources) and thus should not be thrown away unless the benefit of doing so outweighs the cost of assets expended. Or, to put it in plain English — toilet paper might be so cheap and disposable that you feel free to wipe your ass with it, but you still don't throw all your TP rolls into the fireplace every day just for laughs, do you? Of course not. It might be cheap but it still ain't free, and if you waste all your toilet paper then you're stuck in a very uncomfortable situation until and unless you can go buy some more.
    • But the Borg actually benefit from allowing a few drones to be killed — it's how they learn about and adapt to your weaponry. Your fancy phaser rifle might take out three or four drones, sure, but as each one goes down it's transmitting information about what killed it to the Collective, and within minutes they've worked out a solution. Then when your ship tries to fire a really big version of that phaser rifle at the Borg cube, they already know the score. They may even allow boarding parties to wander around their ships unmolested precisely because they know their unarmed, lumbering drones make for tempting targets.
    • Given that their policy of letting intruders wander around their ships unmolested ("Best of Both Worlds") is the direct cause of their failure to take over the Federation, its really hard to argue that policy had any good results. Likewise, finding out about their new phaser rifles did absolutely nothing to help them prepare against the anti-starship weapons specifically invented for use on the Borg, notably the Defiant's pulse-phasers and the quantum torpedo.
    • Neither of those weapons were shown to be of much use against the Borg in the long term.
  • For that matter, why did the Federation never get the bright idea to go around the Borg rotating shields by using bullets? It's even worse considering that First Contacts proves their usefulness.
    • The idea of just using bullets to kill the Borg was something this Troper thought of the first time he saw Best of Both Worlds pt. 1 at age 9. However, upon reflection, it probably wouldn't work. Most of the dialog about why the Borg are nigh invincible states that they adapt to whatever energy is directed at them (the first few times they shot them with phasers, it did kill them, then the Borg figured out a defense). It seems logical that after the first dozen or so Borg that got gunned down by solid slugs they could easily adapt their shielding to deflect physical projectiles as well, so Starfleet probably didn't bother, especially since they'd have to retrain their people to use old-style firearms.
    • Except that the Borg have never demonstrated any ability to shield against physical attack, even after getting punched, kicked, or slashed with bladed weapons over and over again.
    • This troper swears there was a TNG episode where a Borg forcefield blocked a blade that Worf was swinging... But either way, it is worth pointing out that the tommy gun sequence in First Contact wasn't using actual physical bullets. Those were holographic bullets, which are some configuration of forcefields and photons. So really, it was just a case of a novel energy weapon that the Borg hadn't adapted to yet. We still have no idea what real bullets would do.
    • Given how easy it is to protect ships from incidental collisions with space matter at interstellar speeds, I imagine protecting against something as superficial as bullets is very easy.
    • Knives would be even more easy then, wouldn't you think? And yet, it doesn't work that way with the Borg.
    • There was a projectile weapon developed by Starfleet, actually. It was used in one of the less necessary Deep Space Nine episodes; naturally, it wasn't just a gun, it had to incorporate a transporter to "shoot through walls" (turning a physical bullet into energy? Doesn't that kinds miss the point?). Gotta have the latest, shiniest and high-techiest toys to justify that research budget, after all. Just like like the US space program can't be seen using cheap mass-produced boosters, we have to use the finicky and massively expensive but visually impressive Space Shuttle.
    • The "TR-116" rifle? While it may never have been shown to be much use on screen, it fares much better in the books. According to them it didn't get mass produced until the end of the Dominion war, but was used repeatedly in the Tezwa conflict, and a combined force of Starfleet troops from the Enterprise, Aventine, and Titan boarded and captured a Borg ship in the "Destiny" trilogy by using said weapon and energy dampeners to clear the ship of Borg.
    • Actually, the projectile weapon was developed by Starfleet without the teleportation thing, then they gave up on it entirely because it still didn't work very well. The crazed Vulcan added the micro-transporter to the rifle in order to safely shoot anyone on the station from the comfort of his quarters.
    • Either that, or the rifle was originally fitted with a transporter for use by Section 31 as an assassination weapon, and the story about it not being designed to shoot through walls is just a cover story.
    • It could be that Borg shielding works like Dune, or Stargate. Only projectiles/energy weapons moving above a certain speed threshold are blocked.
    • Actually, it's physically impossible for the Borg shield implants to deflect bullets, because the momentum is transferred to the implant, which would then be moving at near-sonic speeds inside the Borg. Also, did you know they apparently have lasers on their arms? They seem to use them in one episode.
    • Er, no. The deflector shields in ST don't work that way. Energy is countered and dispersed, not transferred into the shield generators. At least not in TV canon; some EU stories may have different rules. As for the lasers, yes, they did use them in the very first Borg appearance in "Q Who?" to kill a Redshirt. But since most drones are not dedicated combat units, they rarely fight back. No, it's not efficient; but then, the Borg aren't and never have been efficient, they just like to tell themselves (and everyone in earshot) that they are.
    • An easy resolution for the above debate as to why the Borg would not be able to adapt to bullets: the fact that they haven't already done so. Think about it: what are the odds that, in all the millennia the Borg have been conquering planets, they've never encountered a species that uses bullets or some other form of projectile weapon?
    • As for why the Federation doesn't seem to be smart enough to use projectile weapons against them (aside from phasers being cooler than kinetic weapons): they've fallen victim to the problem plaguing the Asgard in their war with the Replicators over in the Stargate-verse. Namely, they've become used to searching for technological solutions to their military problems (read: technobabble) rather than innovating tactically with what they already have, and being unwilling to make strategic sacrifices a la Carter's bait-and-switch with the O'Neill in "Small Victories". Teal'c's assessment of the Tollans in "Pretense" is applicable as well: "The Tollans [Federation] have not been at war for many years. They do not think strategically." Picard's "We're explorers, not soldiers" mindset is the heart of the matter: At the beginning of TNG, Starfleet doesn't see itself as a military organization, so when forced by circumstance into that role, they do a uniformly terrible job until the mindset changes. In that respect, the Dominion War and the various conflicts with the Borg are healthy for the Federation in the long run, inasmuch as they've given them a good swift kick in the pants. The effects of that kick can be seen as early as Star Trek: Nemesis (three or four Earth years post-war), where for the first time we have an armed ground vehicle that can be used for scouting. It was probably developed as a counter to a similar Jem'Hadar vehicle during the Dominion War.
  • The video game Elite Force has Borg that develop a ranged attack. However, those were "isolated from the collective for a long time," which somehow suddenly made that a pressing need.
    • That would be consistent with the Borg we see in the Descent two-parter, which also have been separated from the collective (and from each other) and who started using energy weapons. (Lore, Data's predecessor who found those disoriented former drones and turned them into his mooks, might have had something to do with that as well.)
  • The complete inability of the drones to defend themselves individually could be either a holdover from an era when the Collective was not yet fully established (ie. gun control), or perhaps allowing even the thought of individual self-defense is dangerous to the Collective.
  • I'm still wondering why they never display any knowledge of unarmed combat techniques, and individual drones are often at least temporarily neutralized by hand-to-hand combat. The lack of subterfuge skills is equally puzzling, in a race that contains all the skills, knowledge and abilities of every member individual or databank it has ever absorbed.
    • Well I think hauling attackers across the room and/or giving them broken noses is quite a good unarmed combat technique...
    • And don't get me started on the fact that the Borg, entirely counter to all logic, become progressively weaker as the series went on, until Voyager reduced them to a complete mockery of their original status as the universe's ultimate boogeymen.
    • Subterfuge may be something that an assimilative hive mind, by its very nature, has difficulty with. If the Borg were to trick a numerous race into getting assimilated, then the false belief they'd foisted off on their recruits might potentially establish itself in the Collective, because no one Borg's thoughts or beliefs have priority over any other Borg's. Majority rules, so if a cube of a few thousand assimilates a planet of millions, the lies told to those millions would supplant the truth in the cube's own awareness (e.g. if they'd been told that the Borg are peaceful explorers, those particular Borg really would begin acting like peaceful explorers). Such aberrations in belief could potentially disrupt Borg civilization, much as Lore's or Hue's introduced deviations did; better to be completely honest and open about their own nature and intentions, because Resistance Is Futile and they're positive they'll win even if their prey are forewarned.
    • They have deemed standard star trek fighting techniques futile. Can't say I blame them actually. On a more serious note: the Borg are shown to pretty much need to mentally conference every time they do anything. Martial artists, that does not make.
  • A meta-explanation would be that the Borg seem to be modeled after the Living Dead of the eponymous films. Their menace was the intelligent behavior without apparent intelligence. Ignoring threads, the lack of emotion or urgency when attacking. Their attacks had a somewhat inevitable quality.
    • In-universe, it doesn't make any sense. They've existed long enough to have encountered formidable resistance before. And if entities from a ship you're about to assimilate transport onto your own vessel, you should take that as a thread. Especially since it was proven time and again that blowing up a Borg cube from the inside was not that difficult.
  • One theory of why the Borg only send a minimal attack force against Starfleet (two canon one-cube assaults and one two-cube assault in Star Trek:Borg) is that the Borg don't want to immediately assimilate the Federation. They want to present a challenge to evaluate the assimilation benefit of the Federation and give Starfleet something to challenge. After Wolf 359, Starfleet created new weapons, armor, the Defiant, and all that innovation would be a sweeter target for ultimate assimilation. Perhaps the Borg use a similar philosophy for personal defense - don't be invulnerable, just be really difficult to attack, force their opponent to innovate new attacks. Then, when the Borg tire of the game, they send in overwhelming force and crush the enemy.

Vulcans Behaving Badly

• Vulcans are taught to actively try to suppress, purge, or otherwise ignore their emotions. While it does make a certain amount of sense, after a fashion (since their emotions are many times stronger than most species), why is it that they insist on perpetuating this slavish devotion to bad logic? It's been shown repeatedly that a Vulcan with his self-control broken (T'Pol, Spock, Tuvok) is infinitely more dangerous than the handful of Vulcans who nurture their emotions to keep them in check (such as T'Pol in the, oh, three good episodes of Enterprise). It would seem more logical to break with tradition and focus on safeguards for dealing with the emotions they can control than just hope it never reaches the point when they can't.
  • Plenty of humans still haven't grasped that concept.
    • Mind you, traditions are rarely followed because they make sense. They're followed because they have always been followed.
  • And moreover, Vulcan privacy issues are pretty illogical as well.
  • Tuvok stated more than once that Vulcans don't "purge" their emotions or ignore them. The emotions still exist, they just work very hard to control them and keep them in check. Part of that process is acknowledging their existence.
    • This. I consider the Voyager episode "Gravity" to be the episode anyone who wants to write a Vulcan to watch because it explores this deeper than any other episode in the franchise. (I know, high praise for a Voyager episode! I'm weirded out a little too ;) ))
    • The Enterprise episodes set mostly on Vulcan deal with this issue. Surak's teachings were about the control of emotions through logic, not the elimination of emotions. The same episodes largely tried to retcon a bit of their portrayal of Vulcans circa ST: Enterprise with the suggestion that the Vulcans had drifted from Surak's teachings down the path of elimination, and that this marked the beginning of a revival of Surak's original teachings.
  • Because logic was what saved them from wiping themselves out, and those who protested it became amoral Proud Warrior Race Guy Strawman Emotionals, I guess you can't really blame 'em for wanting to stick with the tried-and-true. Also, when you run down the list of illogical (and often emotional) cognitive biases that can distort our thinking, you almost empathize with them. And as for the danger of a Vulcan who's had their control broken, maybe they realize it's fetish appeal. (Okay, that last point was kinda a joke).
  • Logical behavior is an ideal they aspire to, not necessarily a state all Vulcans have actually reached. Also, in TOS, the way Spock tends to talk about logic could make one think that the use of the word 'logic' is actually just an approximate translation for Surak's teachings, and incorporates certain elements of behavior (like the whole privacy thing) which humans would consider illogical.
    • Holy crap. That makes sense. Vulcans are illogical... according to the definition of logic understood by Western Earth cultures. It's a bad translation, because some thoughts just don't translate very well between languages and cultures.
    • Diane Duane posited that a more accurate translation of what Vulcan's mean when they say "logic" is "reality-truth."
  • I disagree with the claim that Vulcans embracing their emotions is self-evidently better than suppressing them. I agree that there are successful examples, but we've also seen that there's an ugly side to it ("Fusion" is the best example that comes to mind). Clearly, neither approach is a perfect solution (nor would it be reasonable to expect one). Can we really claim to know enough about Vulcan history and society to say for certain that one is better?

Ferengi Speech Impediment?

• Why do the Ferengi consistently mispronounce "human"? They always overstress the second syllable, like "hugh-MAHn". They never have any trouble saying Bajoran or Cardassian or Klingon. In fact why are there pronunciation difficulties at all?
  • Possibly they're saying it in such a way that it's a subtle insult to humans—the term could be a reference to Ferengi anatomy or bodily functions. On the other hand, it could be that the word "human" itself is the bad word, and Ferengi pronounce it differently to differentiate from the Ferengi word for "scrotum" or whatever.
  • On occasion, there has been a usage of 'human' instead of 'hew-MON.' Nog and Rom seemed to both use the mispronunciation less and less as the series went on. Likely it is just a Ferengi insult - Humans in Star Trek have given up the pursuit of monetary wealth, which is the basic foundation of Ferengi society.
  • Probably for the same reason that universal translators don't translate DRAMATIC Klingon words into English - racial affectation.
  • The Ferengi probably have words for the other species which the Universal Translators render into English (or Federation Standard Speech or whatever it's called.) When they say "hew-MON," they're actually sounding out the English word, which the Universal Translator doesn't or can't overdub.
    • Fridge Brilliance! Have we ever actually heard Ferengi language? Maybe for some reason the word for "human" is more closely from English (or Federation Standard), while other race names have assimilated better or had more time to assimilate. "Human" may be an incredibly foreign sound in the Ferengi tongue, so they take extra care with it. ^note Though my money's on the slur.
    • We hear the Ferengi language for a bit in Little Green Men. It definitely sounds like "hew-MON" might be how the word would sound with a Ferengi accent. That still doesn't rule out it being a slur of some kind. Maybe the act of sounding it out so it doesn't go through the translator is a slight against the listening? Like "I'm going to show you that your language is simple and primitive by deliberately speaking without my translator when I say your species name, Hew-MON" That would be consistent with the times we hear Ferengi over-pronouncing the word as opposed to the times they say it without affectation.
  • Could just be a racial slur. Notice that Rom and Nog slow down their usage of it as they start to become friends with humans, but Quark keeps it up as hew-MONS are always interfering with his profits (in his mind, at least).
• More support for the "slur" theory comes from our own language. The most racially insulting term there is for a black person in English comes from accumulated distortions to the Spanish term for "black" which is negro. For all we know, "hew-mons" may even be a politer term than some that the Ferengi have for us (the way "negroes" is not entirely an offensive term, though it does raise eyebrows if you use it these days).

Humans New and Busted, Vulcans Old Hotness?

• The Vulcans have been flying around in space for hundreds of years, and their ships in Enterprise are a lot faster, a lot more powerful and just generally better in pretty much every conceivable way. Yeah, it seems clear that Starfleet follows the presumably inferior design of the NX-01 style ships. Given that Starfleet is part of the Federation and Vulcans are pretty much the first people to sign up with the humans, you'd think it would have been smart to go with the Vulcan awesomeness.
  • It was likely a compromise issue. Each of the inaugural species of the Federation all had issues with one another, except for the "common thread" that they were all friends (or on friendly terms) with Earth. Likely the biggest reason Vulcan tech wasn't primarily used was because the Andorians would pitch a major fit. Ditto for some of the other species that joined initially. But, since everyone was cool with Earth, use their design, and incorporate the tech from each civilization into the design. Silly, but sometimes a must in diplomacy. It's also the biggest reason why the Federation capital is on Earth and not on another planet too.
  • Possibly Warp Five was as far as the Vulcans, Tellarites, and Andorians had gotten as well. The Vulcans were better than humans because they already had Warp Five ships while we were still fumbling with warp. Further FTL research was done under the heading of the Federation rather than the respective governments of Earth, Vulcan, Andoria, or Tellar, and given that there's a marked aesthetic change from the early Earth Starfleet ships to the Federation ships of the future, one assumes that other races had a hand in the design.
    • In Season One a Vulcan ship showed up and its captain came aboard the NX-01 as a show of support for the alliance, or something. Since he was an ENT Vulcan, and Archer was Archer, it quickly devolved into a pissing match. Before it did the Vulcan captain mentioned that his ship could push Warp 7. Shran's ship had a similar maximum speed, and in "Proving Ground" Tucker's mourning for his dead little sister proved enough of a Tear Jerker that Shran ordered his engineer to give Tucker one of the Treknobabbles that let them break Warp 5.
    • And in the finale they said they routinely exceeded Warp 6 and that the next class of starship that the NX's were being phased out in favor of could break Warp 7.
  • In The Forge Soval gave an awesome speech in which he basically states that the Vulcans noticed the fast progress the humans have made regarding space travel (from first space flight to warp 5 in ca. 200 years, whereas the Vulcans needed much more centuries for all this), and are impressed, but above all frightened by this. Perhaps the humans indeed did technologically draw level with the other Federation founders within the decades after Enterprise, or even surpassed them. In this regard, consider the episode In a Mirror, Darkly, in which a time-travelled TOS-era Federation ship is able to wreak havoc because it is indeed more advanced than the big 22nd century Vulcan and Andorian ships! (Although granted, mirror-universe ships may not be at exactly the same technology-level as their prime-universe counterparts.)
  • It might also be that, much as [[Hatedom some Trekkies among us]] like to mock Archer's leadership, Starfleet had the best reputation of all the Federation members' services. The one little ship had beaten not just the Xindi but the super beings from another dimension who had backed them (making them the only pre-Federation power that can claim to have won a major war in living memory). It also led the international force that prevented a major Romulan incursion into what would soon become Federation space. It figured out how to stop the Romulans and only requested assistance from the others because it needed a lot of ships. Two ships turned back an entire Klingon fleet intent on destroying the Klingons' own colony. Et cetera.
  • By contrast, the Vulcan High Command didn't do one damned impressive thing in the entire series. The Andorian Guard only had one badass, and they fired him. Combine that with the fact that by the 2160s Starfleet's ships were able to keep up with the top speeds of their Vulcan and Andorian counterparts and they're looking more and more worthy of taking the lead in the new government's military.

Watch me pull a new race out of my hat

• Trek has a tendency to pull new "old" species out of its hat... like why didn't we hear of the Cardassians before "The Wounded" if they supposedly fought a war with the Federation? It would be easy to reuse old species, especially since most aliens in Star Trek have only been named and not seen. The writers could have taken the name of a group already mentioned.
  • A lot of these aliens really just weren't that memorable. They would introduce new alien species as needed. Those who really captured the audience's imagination (Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Bajorans, Founders/Vorta/Jem'Hadar, Borg) got called back for increasingly prominent roles. Those who were all right but uninteresting (Nausicaans, Breen, Vidiians) were used sparingly in supporting roles. Those whom the audience disliked (Kazon) or just didn't get (Suliban) were quietly written out after a few tries at rehabilitating their image (except the Ferengi; they went from an unpopular antagonist to an even more unpopular attempt at comic relief, then finally they let the species's two most respectable specimens, Quark and Nog, do most of the talking, and we stopped minding the others quite so much.) The dozens of one-off aliens were very often quickly realized to be bad ideas. Do you really think "The Wounded," and for that matter all of Deep Space Nine, would have been better if, rather than invent the Cardassians, they had reused those catatonic fish people from "Manhunt"?
  • Some of the one-off aliens were used to tell very good stories, either in bottle episodes (Tamarians in "Darmok," Devore in "Counterpoint") or in metastories, like the Xindi; but were more or less written to be one-trick ponies.
  • My complaint was more about why don't they just reuse a set number of random species names instead of making up fifteen in a single episode, and why don't they also reuse random alien names when they need to introduce a new one-trick pony race. That would be a lot more plausible. After all, after Starbases started getting incredibly high numbers, Gene Roddenberry himself stated they shouldn't go above a certain number.
    • They started doing that in Enterprise, though more with place names than with species. On the rationale that it is possible to have more than one thing happen in the same system or nebula over the centuries, they would retcon unrelated events into the same location. For instance, after Soong steals the augment embryos, he plans to hide out with them in a nebula that was the setting of Insurrection AND whose Klingon name is also the name of some offscreen battle from their history that someone mentioned once. It all felt rather cheap to me, especially given how ENT kept having to deal with accusations of kicking canon to the curb.
    • While that is true for season 4, Enterprise extremely guilty of this in their first three seasons. As for the question itself, the big reason is probably that for a huge chunk of the fandom, seeing new kinds of aliens every week is significant part of the appeal. "To seek out new life and new civilizations" and all. People to this day still joke about DS9's stationary setting and Kelvin Timeline received complaints about not having any new aliens (before Beyond).
  • Note that they did just what you're asking with the Breen (first in "Indiscretion" — mentioned a long time before they were actually seen). Likewise with the Talarians in "Suddenly Human," earlier referenced in "Heart of Glory" (and with a callback to "merculite rockets" to boot).
  • I do agree with the broad point here. I remember when "The Adversary" was first aired, thinking, "Really? Suddenly there's another notable power that the Federation had a war with in recent history and they've never been mentioned till now? That was a tad forced with the Cardassians, let alone now!" And why conjure up the Tzenkethi rather than, say, framing the plot around the Gorn or the Talarians or something? Especially if you're never planning on showing them.
  • I'm also amused by the opposite tendency, where all but forgotten species occasionally get out of the blue name drops. Like in "A Call to Arms," when it's established that the Dominion has signed non-aggression pacts with not only the Romulans but also the (perennially mentioned-but-not-seen) Tholians and... drumroll please... the Miradorn! You know, from "Vortex"! Terrifying prospect that the Miradorn are off the table as potential allies against the Dominion!
  • I read somewhere that Roddenberry was opposed to bringing back old TOS races, preferring instead to create new ones. That's why we never see any Andorians or Tellarites in TNG and its spinoffs (and instead got Bolians as a stand-in for the former, if the rumor is to be believed), despite being founding members of the UFP.

Vulcans and Romulans

Romulans are the descendants of Vulcans who left Vulcan about 2000 years before Kirk's time and yet they're treated as separate species who are sometimes genetically incompatible with one another. In the past, human populations have been reproductively isolated from one another for 2000 years (mostly) yet we're all the same species and far more genetically compatible with one another than, say, a bonobo. Passionate Vulcans are regarded as an oddity in the Trek universe, but that's basically what Romulans are. Of course, that also suggests that Romulans can mind-meld but just like the "evil" Vulcans of Enterprise they don't pursue this potential. It also serves to cast the Vulcan aversion to emotions in a new light: they believe that allowing themselves to feel emotions will result in their being consumed by them and become violent and destructive (see any episode where a Vulcan loses control) but if Romulans are just passionate Vulcans then they're not so different from humans. Sarek's teachings seem less like the only means his species could survive and more like a flawed, Equilibrium-type of dogmatic belief.

• Vulcans and Romulans can't interbreed? Since when? Since they're genetically close enough to pass all but the most rigorous genetic testing, that makes no sense—especially since we know that both are able to cross-breed with humans and Romulans can cross-breed with Klingons. That would be like telling this white male troper that he can't have a child with a black woman but he can have a child with a turtle. And weren't there Vulcan-Romulan hybrids? Supposedly they were going to work that into T'Pol's backstory in the mythic Enterprise Season 5.
  • I never said they can't interbreed, I said they're sometimes genetically incompatible. I should have been more clear since the specific example I was thinking of was in the TNG episode "The Enemy" where a Romulan needs some sort of transfusion and the only compatible donor is Worf. They even mention that the Vulcans onboard are not suitable donors. So even though they ought to be the same species, a Klingon is the best match. Obviously Romulans and Vulcans can mate, as Saavik and T'Pol are part Romulan, but this seems to follow the more whimsical connection of alien hybrids rather than what we might call "interracial coupling."
    • Blood types and genetic markers. All humans aren't compatible with all humans for transfusions either. Those specific Vulcans weren't compatible with him. It doesn't mean they never are. This does bring up the question of why a Klingon and Romulan would have compatible types and markers, but this is a universe where species who evolved on different planets (and in the case of humans and Vulcans even have completely different processes for circulating oxygen through the blood) can mate, so it's probably not worth thinking about.
• As for the rest, I always thought perhaps Vulcans weren't able to access their latent telepathic abilities until they'd fully embraced the teachings of Surak. I guess there would be no stopping the Tal Shiar from infiltrating an agent into a monastery to spend years and years learning all the secrets of Vulcan mental discipline until he was able to access those things himself, but there's a high risk that the agent would either be discovered or flip in such a rigorous setting. I guess that part's kind of weak.
  • We know that pre-Surakian Vulcans could manifest telepathic abilities as they were developing psionic weapons requiring being a telepath to control (the Stone of Gol). It is still possible that Surak's teachings made it easier to develop telepathic abilities, so where pretty much every Vulcan is able to mind-meld only a small fraction of particularly naturally talented Romulans might reach the level of telepathic ability Vulcans take for granted. Alternatively, Romulans might have their own methods of channelling their passions to avoid the extremes of Vulcanoid emotion without suppressing them like their Vulcan cousins, but that leaves their telepathic abilities underdeveloped.
• I always wondered if they go through Pon Farr, myself.
  • I assumed that Pon Farr was a side-effect of repressing all emotions rather than something that any Vulcan/Romulan went through biologically. How would an overpowering urge to mate only every seven years evolve on a planet as hostile as Vulcan?
    • I was thinking about this recently myself, and considered that possibility. However, if pon farr has a strong mental element like that, why would it happen every seven years like a clockwork? Shouldn't there be clear variations in the timing and intensity of pon farr due to individual psychological differences?
  • I figure that maybe they do have something like Pon Farr, but it's just not as noticeable since they're rather openly emotional all the time. When a Romulan goes into Pon Farr, all it means is that for the next week or so, his wife is going to be having even more fun in bed with him than usual.
  • Romulans very likely just have sex whenever they're in the mood, whereas Vulcans try to repress sexual desire like all other emotions. In order to ensure that their species' birth rate doesn't nose dive, the Vulcans would need some kind of biological alarm clock to remind them to mate. Hence this primitive trait is more prominent in them than in Romulans. Much like a human female's menstrual cycle, the timing is not exact. Vulcan men know approximately when they are due for Pon Farr, but since the time between "periods" is so wide, there is probably months worth of wiggle room as to when exactly it will hit. Although, it is rather interesting that Vulcans and Betazoids, both telepathic species, have hard-wired reproductive impulses built into their life cycles (in the Betazoids it's the female Phase).
• My WMG: Romulans have no telepathic ability, and were the victims of some kind of race-war with the pre-Surak Vulcans. They ran away and set up an ultra-paranoid state out of fear that the Vulcans would come looking for them. WMG part 2: Vulcans are broadcasting on a "background frequency" all the time (as in Sarek, or another interpretation of Sybok's ability), and the suppression of emotion means they don't incite each other to violence and were able to move on as a society; Romulans don't need to do this.

Why so human, Borg?

Why do all the Borg always look like humans? While there are admittedly a pretty large amount of ridiculously humanoid aliens (back from the TOS budget), but most have at least forehead ridges. Yet all the Borg we ever see have flat foreheads and otherwise human features.

• In First Contact, the design teams actually went out of their way to show Romulans, Klingons etc. among the drones. We can probably assume most of them look the same because most of them will be biologically descended from the original Borg species... which was introduced during the early period full of Human Aliens.
  • But that's when it would make the most amount of sense to have human-Borg, as the Borg would be assimilating from mainly human stock.
• Related question: just how many humans have the Borg assimilated? It's hard to imagine the number is all that high. When Picard famously says "They assimilate entire worlds... and we fall back." Does he mean Federation worlds? If so, when did this happen? Not in "The Best of Both Worlds," and while there's an quick reference in First Contact to the colony on Ivor Prime being "destroyed" (which may or may not coincide with assimilation), it's hard to fit large-scale assimilation campaigns close to home into the timeline. Even Wolf 359 is inconsistent in this regard: "Emissary" certainly does not seem to show the Borg stopping to assimilate, just destroying, yet in the Voyagers episode "Unity" and "Unimatrix One" there are Borg who claim to have been assimilated at Wolf 359. Other times, especially on Voyager, it is heavily implied that a huge number of humans have been assimilated by the Borg. At one point the Doctor points out to Seven that she represents hope for those whose relatives have been assimilated. "Unimatrix Zero" shows at least one human other than Seven the titular matrix, while simultaneously claiming that only one in a million Borg manifests there, so unless humans are really statistically irregular, there should be at least a million assimilated humans. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Borg have assimilated Federation citizens en mass on other occasions, forcing one to wonder why? When? How were they stopped?
  • There's also the matter of why Borg assimilated at Wolf 359 are still around at all, considering that that particular cube blew up not long afterwards. Yet twice Voyager went back to that well... why not say that they were assimilated at Jouret IV or one of the missing Neutral Zone outposts, which would make a lot more sense (if you can buy that the Borg both scooped up entire colonies and assimilated their inhabitants)? The presence of a number of Romulans in "Unity" suggests the writers haven't entirely forgotten about that detail.
    • I never understood why it's so hard for people to accept that some drones assimilated at Wolf 359 would survive. The Borg Queen says, "You think in such three dimensional terms" which in the context of a time travel movie suggests they used time travel to send the queen and some drones back in time somehow. They could have easily folded space with some kind of transwarp escape pod and gotten out that way.
    • The Borg Queen says "You think it such three dimensional terms" to explain why she was still alive, when Picard (suddenly!) remembers having seen her on the cube of old. She could well be chiding Picard for not considering that they were in contact through the link, rather than meeting in the flesh (for what it's worth, that's always how I took it). The line is ambiguous. I don't think that playing the time travel card to explain everything away makes sense. If the Borg had time travel at their disposal during "The Best of Both Worlds," they could have easily prevented their defeat and destruction, not just swept in to pick up a few measly drones.
  • It's not implausible given the size of the Federation that there could be small colonies of several million. The Borg could have scooped up highly populated cities and easily gotten a million humans that way. As for why? It's what they do. When? Just before the events of "The Neutral Zone" would be the likely timeframe. And how were they stopped? They weren't. The Borg got what they wanted and after the cube was destroyed over Earth via cyber-warfare the Borg decided we weren't really interesting enough to attack again for another few years. Of course, the real question is if the colonies that were scooped up had a combined population of at least one million, why did Starfleet seem mildly apprehensive about these abductions and not freaking out about the disappearance of millions of Federation and Romulan citizens?
    • It's also noteworthy just how early bad continuity sets in with the Borg. In "Q Who," there is an overt reference back to "The Neutral Zone," but it ends with Picard saying "So they will be coming?" and Guinan answering "You can bet on it." Um... they've already been at your door, so "coming" is probably a bit too generous. From then on, everyone forgets all about "The Neutral Zone" and follows the party line that Q introduced the Federation to the Borg.
    • There's a difference between a long-range scouting mission and actual attack. (Going into WMG territory here) When the Borg first encountered the Enterprise, they assimilated part of the crew, they had to have realized that this was a species from the other end of the Galaxy and the Borg were witness to Q throwing the Enterprise back to the Alpha quadrant. That would suggest a high level of technological sophistication - what sort of engine did the Enterprise have? The tactical systems were unable to resist them, thus Starfleet should be easy pickings. There's also the idea that the Borg were concerned that Starfleet would now be aware of the Borg and work on creating new weapons that would render the scouting information out of date. Yes, the Borg visited the Neutral Zone about a year prior to Q's interaction, but Q revealed them and allowed the Enterprise to gain intelligence. Another theory goes that the Borg were already on their way to Sector 001 and Q just helped alert starfleet to what was coming.
• Maybe they're not human. They might be Human Aliens - the first person that already knows about the Borg in TNG is Guinan, so perhaps they're El-Aurians. (In fact, they missed an interesting idea if Hugh the Borg is, biologically, an El-Aurian, given her initially antipathy to him.)

Klingon blood

• Between blood screenings and battles, we see Klingon blood several times over the course of all the series. But it looks just like human blood. Didn't The Undiscovered Country establish that Klingon blood is a bright pink color?
  • When was the first time we saw Klingon blood? Even before The Undiscovered Country was made, Klingon blood was red (see "Redemption," for instance), and it always has been since, too.
    • The real reason is that Undiscovered Country might have gotten a PG-13 or even R rating if the floating blobs of Klingon blood hadn't been a Pepto-Bismol pink. Best to see it as a way to avoid the hammer of the censors for that particular movie, and ignore it for all other instances.
    • Agreed, although that would sit a bit better if the film didn't make a minor plot point about it ("This is not Klingon blood!").
    • Colonel Worf said "This is not Klingon Blood" after he stuck his fingers into a pool of blood and ran it across his fingers. He never said it was the wrong color. A man belonging to a culture that has so many blood-drawing rituals should realize fairly quickly when the texture or temperature of fresh blood feels way off, similar to how a human might realize that red Kool-Aid isn't human blood.
    • Does this change the fact that it's the wrong colour? I'm not sure what this prior comment is meant to contribute.
    • The explanation here is that the "minor plot point" only exists because since the pink blood was such a purely censor-based dodge that the people making the movie literally forgot about it when they shot the scene where the assassin was killed. I'm not kidding, they didn't catch it until test screenings, at which point it was actually easier to slip in a scene using just Michael Dorn and one other guy to explain why the blood was different than it was to do anything else.
    • Just out of curiosity, what's your source for this anecdote?
• It's possible that turning off the artificial gravity before the attack messed with the concentration of dissolved gasses in the blood of the Klingons onboard. Just as human blood without oxygen is magenta rather than crimson, Klingon blood with a different concentration of gasses is pink.

Divergent Romulan evolution

• According to backstory, the Romulans split from Vulcans in the 4th century AD. So, roughly two thousand years before the various Trek series take place. How did they develop such clear differences in physiology in such a short time? For instance, the V-shaped forehead ridges on Romulans, and apparently they do not undergo pon farr. You could consider their divergent evolution similar to different human "races" all around the world. However, that has taken longer than two thousand years, and also Romulans would have possessed the technology to shield themselves from their surroundings much better than early humans, so environmental conditions would affect their genetic heritage much less. In all likelihood they also had much larger gene pools to begin with than early humans who spread around the world. Now, one way you could explain this is that the group which left the Vulcans to become the Romulans already possessed genetic differences. Then the question becomes, why is that? Was there a strict two-caste system in place which limited interbreeding between the proto-Romulans and main Vulcan population? Deliberate genetic engineering is another possible answer. However, some of the differences are purely cosmetic, and in some aspects, the Romulan physiology is less hardy than Vulcan. You wouldn't want to tinker with your genes to make them worse! And if we factor in the Remans from Nemesis, this issue gains a whole new level of confusion.
  • This problem grows even worse when you consider the Debrune, the "ancient offshoot" of the Romulans discussed in "Gambit." Two thousand years is simply not enough time for all this to happen. Then there are the technological oddities... a good discussion can be found here.
    • That is interesting reading. It offers the suggestion that Romulans interbred with another compatible humanoid species who were indigenous to their new home world. That would explain the differences in physiology rather neatly. Two thousand years could be enough time for the new genetic material to become spread out roughly homogeneously, and to the point where the original inhabitants would cease to exist as a genetically distinct population.
    • The Debrune aren't really a problem — we never saw any Debrune, two thousand years is more than enough space that even a later split can be called "ancient", and it is entirely possible that the Debrune status as an offshoot was political and cultural. Say, for example, that the Debrune-to-be were part of the exodus of those who would become Romulans from Vulcan, but left the exodus fleet and settled down on another would while the rest continued on to Romulus. That would make them a distinct culture with a distinct state that could reasonably be called a "Romulan offshoot" (especially as the Debrune are by all indications long since gone to contest it) without saying anything about what physiological changes may or may not have been happening for the Romulans on Romulus.
  • Why do you assume it was the Romulans that tinkered with their genetics? Romulans could be the "true" unmodified Vulcans, and the ones who stayed augmented themselves to be less emotional/paranoid/aggressive, which makes more sense as Vulcan's are always treated as it is within their biology not just culture to be unemotional. It kinda paints the Romulan exodus in a new light, a minority fleeing a faction of the race hell bent on overwriting all members of the race's genes.
  • Every question is easily answered. The ridges: most likely a morphological characteristic that just happened to be more diffuse among the exiles than those who stayed back on Vulcan (similar to some forms of nose being more diffused among a determinate human population), confirmed by TOS-era Romulans not having the ridges. Pon-farr: given that a pon-farr happens roughly every seven years and Vulcans get back home to their mates when they know it's coming, we simply never saw a Romulan having it because when it came the time they did the same.
  • In Diane Duane's expanded universe Rihannsu novels, one of the little historical tidbits is that the Romulans started warring against themselves almost as soon as they landed on their new worlds, nearly reduced their population below viable levels, and only some very aggressive breeding programs and a little cloning allowed the race to survive. So perhaps there has been some accelerated tampering with Romulan genes that starts to manifest itself in TNG. Of course, the real reason is that TNG's makeup artist thought "just" pointy ears were boring and wanted to make the new Romulans as "cool" as the Klingons had been since The Motion Picture, never mind that it makes no sense that two human generations (not even a full Romulan generation) could have such a dramatic effect on a species' outward appearance.

Vulcans and the Federation

• Are the Vulcans part of the Federation or just a Federation aligned but independent planet? If they are part of the Federation, why do they have an ambassador to the Federation? In the TNG episode Unification, there was a comment about how the Federation would react to a Vulcan/Romulan alliance. If the Vulcans are part of the Federation, how can they make alliances independent of the Federation? Or is the Federation really just an alliance between independent planets instead of a government, closer to the United Nations or European Union than the United States.
  • The closest we have in the real world to the Federation is the European Union or the United Nations. Independent countries joined together for mutual benefit. Nothing is stopping Great Britain for example allying itself with an enemy of the majority of the EU any more than there is anything stopping Vulcan allying itself with an enemy of the majority of the Federation.
  • Also consider the case of Tasha Yar's home planet Turkana IV, which apparently seceded from the Federation without repercussions (y'know, other than the whole collapse into social anarchy thing). To make it even more glaring, Turkana IV was just a human colony world, not the home to a unique species. This implies that the Federation is more like the European Union than the United States of America. Member worlds can apparently leave the Federation if they choose. Which would be a major issue in the case of Vulcan however, as it is near the center of Federation territory and if they suddenly welcomed the Romulans with open arms it would be a very serious strategic threat. The Federation would be forced to reconsider its policy regarding planetary sovereignty, which could cause the whole thing to collapse. Probably why the Romulans were so into the idea, since they hardly need just one more planet for their already sprawling space empire.
    • Someone should write a fanfic about how controversial or not Turkanexit was.
  • Problem with all Star Trek is that as it is so old and so large with so many series, writers obviously will contradict each other. Depending on the Writer the Federation is sometimes a diplomatic alliance more akin to the UN and some other times a single unified federal government similar to the US. In one episode Picard mentions the “Constitution” but in others is mentioned that the Federation only have a founding Charter like the UN. In any case, what we can extrapolate from these are two possibilities:
    a)The Federation is a very sui generis institution, similar to the European Union, which is very sui generis in Real Life; it has its own President, a supranational Parliament, commons laws, common coin and a common foreign policy (in fact, lots of countries have embassies of the UE without losing the embassies of UE member countries). b)The Federation is indeed a single federal state like the US or Russia, and the title of “Vulcan ambassador to Earth” is merely symbolic, a mistranslation or an office that was kept out of tradition but does not really holds any meaning as much as having a Hawaiian ambassador in Alabama would.

Fighting The Borg Using Common Sense

• It's common knowledge after the Best of Both Worlds that the Borg will ignore anyone trespassing on board their ship that they do not consider to be a threat and we see this right up until Voyager and Enterprise. So instead of fighting the Borg ship-to-ship where you know for a fact that you will lose; why not just beam on board with a case full of anti-matter? And no, don't give me the excuse that the Borg will recognize that you are carrying a bomb and suddenly consider you a threat, because they let Away Team's board their ships armed with phaser weapons that we have seen can tunnel through the side of a cliff and can themselves be turned into bombs if you set them to overload.
  • Voyager did this with a torpedo and they recognized on the spot it was a bomb. It's a matter of scale. If a group of humans run around the ship with phasers, they can at best cause minor damage before they get turned into drones. It's worth the tradeoff if they never get to use that tactic again. Beam a bomb or enough antimatter to blow up a ship and the Borg will recognize it as an overwhelming threat.
  • There are two problems with the premise of this question:

  1) it anthropomorphizes the Borg's priorities too much. A hand phaser really isn't a threat for the most part. What can it do? Carve a hole a couple of hundred meters across and kill a few thousand drones. Who cares? The ship will heal the injury in minutes.

  2) it severely underestimates their intelligence and responsiveness. Set that phaser to overload next to a power line, or point it at an engine block and convince the Borg that you intend to fire - something they arguably should be able to tell better than you would yourself (think Clever Hans magnified a trillion times), and they'll suddenly do something about it. "Not a priority" != "invisible". (idiot ball notwithstanding)

  i.e. most of the times the Borg have ignored away teams as "not a threat", it's because they genuinely haven't been a threat. They're hundreds of millions of times more intelligent than you and practically omniscient within their own domain; barring the intervention of plot!, they should know exactly what you are and aren't going to do next by inference alone. Humans are lucky if they can provoke more than the Eldritch Abomination equivalent of "yeah I should probably see a doctor about that sometime".

Humans, the Most Beautiful Race

• It seems humans and aliens that resemble humans are considered to be attractive by pretty much all the other humanoid races. Just to name a few examples, in The Next Generation a Ferengi captain kidnaps Deanna and Lwxana with the intention of using them as sex slaves, in Deep Space Nine Quark is lusting after both Kira and Jadzia, and a customer of Quark's (who's of unspecified race, but he looks very different from humans and Bajorans) is so attracted to Kira that he promises to pay Quark anything if he can build him a holo-simulation of her. However, it's made clear that in general humans or Bajorans or Betazoids don't, for example, find the Ferengi attractive. So why isn't the opposite true? Biologically, wouldn't it make much more sense if the Ferengi (and other races who don't much resemble humans) were mostly attracted to humanoids that look like themselves, and would find human-like aliens ugly, just like human-like aliens find the Ferengi ugly?
  • It's not just appearance, it's personality. Ferengi are misogynist and generally hold attitudes that conflict with the Federation-style beliefs. This is why Leeta and Rom became an item — he doesn't share that attitude.
  • Leeta is a special case, though. When she tells the others she likes Rom, they're quite surprised, even though they too know Rom is not like the other Ferengi. So it certainly seems to be the case that being attracted to Ferengi is out of the ordinary for human-looking humanoids.

Native Americans, the Maquis and Amerind

• The whole point of the Maquis was that the Federation had to cede some planets to the Cardassians in order to end a war. A number of these planets had been colonized, and the colonists stubbornly refused to relocate. This was first established in the TNG episode "Journey's End", where Native American revivalists that had settled on Dorvan V refused to be removed from the planet. In the end they managed to successfully stay where they were. Unfortunately, the Cardassians proved to be bad landlords and before long the Maquis were the result. But this brings up an interesting point, in the TOS episode "The Paradise Syndrome", a planet (unofficially dubbed "Amerind") occupied by Native Americans transplanted there by benevolent aliens (who did not have something as stupid as the Prime Directive) was discovered. This raises a number of questions:
  • Why did the later Native American revivalists colonize a world along the Cardassian border, instead of settling on Amerind instead?
    • Neither planet was heavily populated. While Trek does tend to have a bad habit of treating any planet with more than a few dozen people on it as "full" (e.g. ENT "Terra Nova"), given the size of the original transplant population and the amount of time they had lived on Amerind, it is simply implausible that they had spread out to inhabit the entire planet. There should have been plenty of room for new Native American colonists. After all, their ancestors had all managed to fit on the North American continent just fine.
    • This would further seem reasonable since the Dorvan V colonists were few enough in number that Picard was prepared to forcibly relocate them, something he could not have possibly done if there had been more than a couple thousand of them.
    • The Prime Directive would not apply, since the inhabitants of Amerind are descendants of humans from Earth. In any case, new colonists could be settled hundreds, even thousands of miles from the existing population. It could easily be hundreds, even thousands, of years before they might meet and interact.
    • Did Starfleet classify Amerind's existence for some reason?
    • It seems likely. It would seem in keeping with the Prime Directive (even if doesn't strictly apply in this case) to allow the people there to continue on unnoticed by the rest of the galaxy.
  • This makes the Maquis seem even more irrational and stupid, and has Unfortunate Implications especially about Native American members like Chakotay. They'll fight an impossible guerrilla war against a major space power to try to hold onto planets they haven't even lived on for very long, and will not consider relocating, even to a planet where the only other inhabitants just happen to also be people living traditional Native American lifestyles? Again, since we are talking about a planet here, cultural contamination is not a significant issue. Indeed, they might have found it beneficial to share a world with people whose cultural history was connected to their own.
    • Only if you consider being in the same hemisphere as having a connected cultural history. Remember, Chakotay's ancestors were native to South America, and the preserved Natives on Amerind were Navajo, Mohican, and Delaware. Possibly the Native settlers on Dorvan V had wanted to keep their culture distinctly South American.
    • Quick note: conflicting details suggest that Chakotay does not hail from Dorvan V, despite the writers' initial intentions. We know this because it's a plot point in "Journey's End" that Dorvan V was settled only 20 years earlier (though the group had left Earth 200 years earlier) and "Tattoo" establishes that Chakotay's colony had been in place for centuries. So there are two Native American colonies in the vicinity of the Cardassian border? So it seems (and if the idea was that he was from Dorvan V, would it have been so hard to say as much at some point?). If one needs additional evidence, there's the fact that the characters in "Journey's End" are specified as "North American Indians" (though this is hardly specific), while Chakotay's people are Central American.
  • The "Amerind" Natives maintained a society free from post-Columbian technologies. It's very likely that the Dorvan V colonists didn't want to intrude upon a population that was content to live by primitive means, given that they, themselves, had no intention of giving up their Federation-level tech. Indeed, their own historical self-awareness would argue against it: they'd know plenty of historical New World tribes were decimated by neighboring Native cultures that'd gotten their hands on imported firearms, long before any actual Europeans had arrived in their territories.
  • I think it was DS9 the one that most succesfully, for me, show me the perspective of the Maquis on all these and how they work very hard to make their colonies prosper that they really felt it was unfair to just leave them to the Cardassian. It is, after all, a different culture, very similar to us but still a futuristic interstellar culture that would have different values and probably feel closer and having more roots with the place they help developed than the place they were born. For me the real question is why didn’t they just split the planets into different races. THEY’RE PLANETS. Give a continent to the Cardassians and another to the Federation and their citizens nor even had to see each other. Think about it, imagine a depopulated Earth with two alien governments coming here to colonize and they are enemies, if one alien government colonizes the Americas and Africa and the other colonizes Eurasia and Oceania they both have more than enough space and resources to live and nor even be aware of the other if they don’t want. Even more if you don’t want to give them whole continents, fine, you can still give them whole islands, countries, cities etc. in a similar way how we have exclaves and enclaves in real life. Make “this system belong to the Cardassian Union but the city X, the islands of X and this area here in this continent are part federal territory” and vice versa. The whole reason with have complicated situations with ethnic struggles in places like former Yugoslavia, Israel-Palestine and Northern Ireland is because they can’t move, you can’t really move whole neighborhoods, they’re essentially stuck with each other and this is how the planets of the DMZ are shown to be, with Cardassians and Federals co-existing in small, walled cities. They nor even have the same tastes in environment, Cardassians need high temperature areas they probably would be happy to keep the cold regions of their worlds uninhabited, quite the opposite of humans who prefer cold and template climates and apart from some very specific ethnies desserts and too hot tropical areas are not colonized. Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale indeed.

Whither the Gorn?

• Was there some embargo in TNG-era Trek about ever mentioning the Gorn? Unless I'm mistaken, Sisko's line in "Trials and Tribble-ations" about wanting to ask Kirk about fighting the Gorn on Cestus III is the lone exception. Compare the Tholians, another one-shot TOS foe — we never see them again till Enterprise, like the Gorn, but they were mentioned numerous times nonetheless.
  • One can say something similar of the Orions and the Tellarites (albeit slightly less dramatically), as opposed to the rarely depicted but frequently mentioned Andorians.
  • All shows after TNG tried hard to distance themselves as much as possible from TOS, only ENT and the new movies which were trying to catch heavily on nostalgia.
    • That's somewhat overstating the case, especially when TOS fans like Ron Moore are writing (note Kasidy Yates's lines about Tholians and punctuality in "For the Cause," an allusion to "The Tholian Web").
  • Suspiciously, John Logan's original screenplay for the film Nemesis has a line mentioning that there was a Gorn at Riker's bachelor party, but in the film — no such line.
  • I have heard (I unfortunately can't remember the source) that Roddenberry wanted to bring in new species as much as possible for TNG instead of bringing back old ones from TOS, which is why we got Bolians as a stand-in for the absent Andorians, for example. So, yes, in a sense there was an embargo on certain races during the second generation spinoffs.

What purpose do Andorian antennae serve?

• If Andorians have both noses and ears, what purpose do antennae serve for them? Are they vestigial or something? Or maybe they enhance their sense of smell/hearing?
  • Judging by the conversation in sickbay in "United," they must do something in terms of balance or some such. Shran says, "What good is a Guardsman without two antennae?" and Phlox answers, "You'll begin to compensate within a day or two." There's also a certain amount of pride invested in them (Shran says, "You should've cut off my head," although he acknowledges afterwards that Archer made the right call in cutting off his antenna), which suggests they may play into status as much as having a biological function.
  • This. Presumably Andorians' ears are used just for hearing, rather than being multifunctional hearing/equilibrium detectors. The jobs performed by the human ear's semicircular ducts and vestibule take place in their antennae instead.

Just how do Vulcan marriages and the pon farr work?

• To sum up the relevant bit of Amok Time for those who haven't seen it, Spock is in an arranged betrothal with T'Pring, but she's in love with Stonn, so she exploits Vulcan tradition to make Spock and Kirk fight to the death because all the possible outcomes will let her be with Stonn. But why? Can a betrothed couple not just call the marriage off? Why didn't T'Pring contact Spock and tell him she didn't want to marry him? Spock wouldn’t have forced her, and surely Vulcan society recognizes that if two people are incompatible, it would be illogical for them to marry? For that matter, was Stonn not betrothed to anyone? If not, the whole system of betrothing children to each other can't be a necessary method of handling the pon farr, so why couldn't T'Pring do the logical thing and call off the engagement to be with Stonn? And what happens if a Vulcan is single when they enter pon farr? What happens if the only people they’re attracted to/willing to sleep with don’t want to sleep with them? What if no one nearby has a compatible sexual orientation? If there is a solution to these problems, why keep the whole koon ut kal-if-fee tradition that involves fights to the death and the woman becoming the survivor's property? (For that matter, can a woman challenge the bride to win the groom?)
  • Well the issue here is that we are talking of not only a different culture, but a totally different alien species with different mind set and even biology, that does not responds to the same social standards. For example there is no indication that there are non-heterosexual Vulcans, probably because Vulcans see sex as something for reproduction and/or to appease the Pon Farr. In that regard, although the possibility exists that someone near is unwilling, most Vulcans will see the sex during another Vulcan's Pon Farr to be a duty (we see this in the movie Star Trek 3). As if a women can be the challenger for herself, yes we see that in an episode of Voyager.
  • Except this is Star Trek where aliens are basically just humans with certain personality traits exaggerated. Besides, that's not how sexual orientations work - a Vulcan might sleep with someone of the wrong gender out of duty but they'd still have an incompatible orientation.
  • Incompatible orientation or not, it doesn't matter. Assuming that Vulcans enjoy sex (something we still don't know for sure) and don't see it as just a mean for reproduction (thus non-heterosexual Vulcans do not exist, in fact the term "heterosexual" can't be applied either as there will be no sexual orientations in general, period) and we assume they do like sex outside of the pon farr, and indeed there are gay and lesbian Vulcans who only enjoy sex with the same gender, that wouldn't change that in the case someone near of the opposite gender is in PF and has no one else close enough they would still probably have sex with them. They might not enjoy it, but would see it as something logical to do. Again, we see this in Star Trek 3 with Saavik sleeping with teen Spock because he's having pon farrs and yet she doesn't seem to be in it for pleasure, just sees it as her duty to save Spock's life.
• Another curious aspect of that episode: T'Pring didn't seem to be experiencing any kind of mating fever - was her pon farr cycle out of sync with Spock's? This whole arranged marriage custom is looking less logical by the minute.
  • She's not experiencing anything because female pon farr was a retcon designed to allow us to see Jolene Blalock in her underwear. No women were ever mentioned as being on heat beforehand or was ever spoken of as being anything other than an all-male condition (Torres is more of an example of Mind Rape and even then, if we are willing to take this as evidence of female pon farr, it still came years after this episode).
    • Indeed, the idea of a species where both sexes have heats makes no biological sense, alien biology or others.

Why does female Klingon armor have such a fatal flaw?

• I realize the real world fanservice reason for the cleavage window built into their armor, but in-universe it doesn't make any sense at all that a warrior race infamous for their love of fighting with bladed weapons would be missing the chest piece. She might as well not be wearing any armor at all.
  • Klingon choices in uniforms and weapons make more sense if you think of the crew of a Klingon ship less as a crew of SWAT officers and more as a crew of Viking cosplayers. Klingon armor, while offering some protection, is likely more designed to pay homage to their warrior heritage than to be practical. Cleavage windows might have been a feature of traditional Klingon female armor that remained in style over the centuries. It's worth noting that this style of armor is seen almost exclusively on Lursa and B'tor, who are political opportunists who aren't afraid to throw in seduction in their schemes, and Ch'Rega, who grew up in a Klingon messiah cult that abandoned the Empire a century ago. Other Klingon female armor (such as the outfits worn by Kh'ehlyr or the female bridge officer from Soldiers of the Empire) seem to avoid this.

A Pon Farr with Rosie Palms?

• About the whole Pon Farr Mate or Die thing, why doesn't masturbating work?
  • It's probably not just a question of release. Consider when Tuvok went into pon farr. Tom Paris was able to rig up a hologram of his wife that allowed Tuvok to blow off steam, but the implication is that nothing else would have worked. It might be an emotional thing. There are multiple episodes that suggest that the Vulcan emotional suppression is not good for them. Pon farr could very easily be a consequence of that.
    • There was a prior Voyager episode where Ensign Vorik entered pon farr and the holoprogram failed to work for him.
    • Vorik had another option: B'Elana. Pon farr basically had him obsessed with her. Perhaps if Tom had thought to make a B'Elana hologram for Vorik to bang, he would have been able to pull a Tuvok.
  • In the first Star Trek: New Frontier novel, we see a pretty explicit Pon Farr between two Vulcans, where they mind meld in the middle of coitus. Presumably doing this (combined with the physical act) is what causes the Vulcan's internal sex clock to reset.
    • Hormones. Very specific ones, too-where you NEED the hormones produced by your matched partner. Also why The Oldest Profession doesn't work for them.
  • It probably is specifically something to do with the emotions. While a mind meld would help facilitate an emotional release, Tuvok and Vorik certainly couldn't have melded with holograms. The reason the hologram worked for Tuvok (once he was able to get it to stay online) is that he really did love his wife, and could express his love for her with this reminder of her. Vorik, on the other hand, only got temporary relief from T'Pera because she was a purely fictional holodeck character and he couldn't really fool himself into loving her the way he would love a real person. Each of the three known ways to resolve pon farr also show signs of being related to emotional release:
    • Mating is the most direct method of demonstrating one's love for another, of course.
    • Ritual combat for one's mate is somewhat less direct, but is much-romanticized in many cultures. Certainly, a man would have to love a woman quite a lot to be willing to fight for her, possibly to the death.
    • The intensive meditation, which did not prove effective for Vorik, probably focuses on one's intense love for an absent mate. As Vorik acknowledged, his betrothed had probably already given him up for lost. Tuvok, on the other hand, knew his wife was waiting for him at home, and he had the hologram to help remind him of that further. She presumably had some similar thoughts of him to comfort her through her own intensive meditation, knowing he was alive and on his way home.

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