Headscratchers / Star Trek Military And Politics

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Join the Redshirt Army Today!

• Wouldn't the Star Fleet security department start to, er, run into recruiting problems after a while? (James Alan Gardner memorably skewers this point in his Expendable series.)
  • The mass production of Replacement Redshirt clones is the Federation's largest growth industry.
    • WWI fighter pilots had a life expectancy slightly shorter than that of ice cream left out in the sun on a warm day, but they still recruited plenty of people. Plus, security officers probably aren't the brightest recruits out of the Academy - anyone with real talent gets pushed to command, all the geniuses go into science, and the gear heads go into Engineering. Security officers result from people who still want to go into space, but have no talent in any of the high-profile areas.
    • OK, but getting into Starfleet is no easy task (going off by TNG, I would even say that the exam is the same for everyone, except possibly medics) and they pick the brightest people for every single division. Redshirts would not be as smart as blue shirts or even yellow shirts, but they hardly would lack talent. Jokes aside, the biggest/most important security defenses on a ship would be the weapons system which means every red shirt should know them inside out - Malcolm Reed probably had more instances of tinkering with and upgrading the weapon systems than Trip working on the warp drive (probably). And has army recruits ever been a problem in the real world, let alone the future where all those people are actually exploring space? And another thing I've noticed is unlike the flagships, other USS vessels we see rarely have more dead red shirts; I can even recall a few instances when they were like 5-6 yellow and blue shirts dead and only one red (shown at the very least).
  • Star Trek Critics have No Sense Of Scale. Starfleet is a large organization, granted, however it's staffing levels pale into insignificance compared to the population base it can draw on. Take Earth, population around the 4 Billion mark in the Trek Era that is one single planet. The Federation has 150 member planets, plus countless colonies and allies. Now, of those 150 the population probably bobs around a bit but for most will be in the billions (most likely between 2 and 10 billion). That is a huge population pool to draw from. Even if only a tiny fraction of a percent of the population want to be in Starfleet then Starfleet will still have more applicants than they can handle. We've seen how difficult it is to get accepted to the fleet, only the best of the best, of the best, of the best and Harry Kim even get to the entry test. And most of those who take the entry test fail. In the unlikely event of there being a shortage all Starfleet needs to do is lower the standards a tiny little bit and they are back to having more than they can handle. Plus even with the conflicts like the Dominion War you are still unlikely to die or be killed. After all, even in WW1 most soldiers who marched off to war marched home again no worse for wear, we just notice deaths more than survivals, so the people bright enough to look at the numbers (which is the group Starfleet wants anyway) will not be put off applying. And as I said they've got a population pool upwards of 300 Billion to recruit from.

Those Meddling Feddies

• Gene Roddenberry was completely convinced for some reason or another that human beings are basically good, and that given enough time we'll eventually evolve to become even better. That said, doesn't the whole concept of the Federation seem kind of really, really racist? I mean, they don't interfere with species that aren't capable of warp, for better or for worse, but they'll willingly interfere with anyone else. That seems kind of... White Man's Burden-y to me. Prime Directive aside.
  • Hngh... it's hard to place, I'll admit, but think there's a line somewhere between "White Man's Burden" and "hey, we like to poke our noses into your problems."
    • They never willingly interfered with someone else. It was always either to save a life of a Starfleet or Federation citizen, or by accident. Granted, most of the situations were still easily avoidable in the first place, but they didn't just throw darts at a starmap and say "today I'm going to radically alter this society".
    • Yeah. "White Man's Burden" is what you get when the 'advanced' empire takes it upon itself to 'civilize' all those poor primitive natives who obviously don't know how to live because they don't have cool technology like steam engines and top hats. Starfleet has an actual policy against doing that. It isn't perfectly consistent, and it gets bent a lot by the people out on the sharp end, but the policy is there.
    • Kirk still did things like that all the time, with good examples being "Return of the Archons," "The Apple," and "The Omega Glory," the latter after he'd chewed out another captain for doing it.
    • Whether or not the federation "interferes" with other cultures usually has absolutely nothing to do with that culture's species. And at least they often go out of their way to keep other cultures happy in the interest's of diplomacy.
    • A big point is that they also don't want species who have just discovered warp drive (and per First Contact, are much more likely to show up on sensors) to blunder into the middle of a situation they're woefully unprepared for.
    • Granted, but Federation culture is almost always painted as fairly ideal. Even Deep Space Nine painted a fairly hopeful look at humanity, despite the darker undertones. Other cultures aren't painted as wrong, per se, but misguided, and if you would just do things a little more humany, you'd be set. Klingons are savage and preach honor but practice dishonor. Worf, on the other hand, was raised by humans, acquired a human morality in addition to his Klingon honor, and because of that, he's the best Klingon ever. Nog and Rom joined Starfleet and the Bajoran militia, respectively, and they're painted in a much more sympathetic light than their older, more typical Ferengi characterizations. It just seems like the Federation (and provisional member worlds) make everything better.
    • The conspiracy theory that most Klingon are dishonorable and that Worf “tries to hard” to be a good Klingon had spread all over TV Tropes like butter in bread and appears everywhere. And the funny thing is that is presented as a fact and is not. Is speculation. A hypothesis at best and very thinly supported I must add. Most arguments in favor of the “Except for Worf all Klingon are dishonorable beasts that do not follow their codes” are based on cherry picking and circumstantial evidence. In any case, if you rest the often cherry picked examples of dishonorable Klingons and do the same the other way around with all the Klingon in camera that do follow their code, yes, post-TNG Klingon culture as presented in Star Trek is pretty idealized. Maybe more than the Federation.
  • The undertones of "white man's burden" is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to racist undertones in Star Trek. See this essay.
    • The essay is not a particularly good one. It's full of false comparisons. Alien cultures aren't supposed to stand in for different races, they're supposed to stand in for different cultures, and the reality is that it would be acceptable to chastise a child for acting disgusted because a French friend enjoyed escargot or whatever. And the "torn between two cultures" thing is something that really does affect people of mixed descent. It's oversimplified, yes, and not always handled as well as it might be, but it's legitimate. Honestly, I find the essay more racist than the arguments: "There's a clear allegory for the differences between people. All these people look different, therefore it must be a race based allegory! It couldn't possibly be cultural, otherwise they would look the same."
    • "Alien cultures aren't supposed to stand in for different races, they're supposed to stand in for different cultures" That's precisely the problem. In Star Trek, aspects of culture are treated as immutable characteristics, a classic form of racism. The escargot example isn't applicable because this wasn't just an example of differing food preferences. This was an example of behavior. Nog was behaving like a chauvinistic jerk. When Jake Sisko complained about it, his father basically told him "well son, Ferengi are just like that". If a black child did something mean to your son or daughter and they ran home crying, would you tell them "well, black people are just like that"? "And the "torn between two cultures" thing is something that really does affect people of mixed descent." Spoken like someone who is not mixed race and has never met someone who is mixed race. Mixed race children are not "torn between two cultures". As a teacher, I've had several mixed race students in my classes. NONE of them were ever "torn between two cultures". Yet ALL of the mixed race characters in Star Trek are routinely described as "torn" between their human and non-human (because it's always human and non-human) sides. In real life, children of mixed race marriages grow up identifying with one side of their ancestry or the other, or some combination of both. They don't grow up "torn" between the dueling cultures of their parents. One wonders how such a marriage could even function if there was so much culture clash that children were routinely "torn" between two backgrounds.
    • I'm glad you've never met any mixed-race children who had to deal with that sort of issue, but that hasn't always been the case. Cultural acceptance of mixed-race children has improved of late, but don't you dare sit there and tell me that the experiences my family has had are illegitimate because you've never seen it happen. Moreover, Sisko wasn't saying "All Ferengi are like that," he was saying, "His behavior is acceptable in his culture." And in Sisko's culture, which is the Federation, he's expected to be tolerant of other social mores even if he himself disagrees with them.
    • Another point to raise is that perhaps Sisko was indeed being a bit racist with respect to Nog — Quark calls him out on something similar in "The Jem'Hadar." Nog earns Sisko's respect in the fullness of time, though the point remains that he does so by what could seem like an assimilationist move — going to Starfleet Academy.
    • We're not talking about "cultural acceptance" of mixed race children. We're talking about the nature of mixed race children. In Star Trek, every child of a mixed-species union is inevitably described as "torn" between two fundamentally conflicting natures. Human/Klingon hybrids have to struggle to control their fiery Klingon tempers. Human/Vulcan hybrids struggle to reconcile the human desire to emote with the Vulcan desire to suppress emotion. They suffer physical and psychological stress trying to reconcile their mixed-species heritage. This does not happen in real life. Only in the world of Star Trek (and apparently in the mind of Gene Roddenberry) does this happen. "Moreover, Sisko wasn't saying "All Ferengi are like that," he was saying, "His behavior is acceptable in his culture."" Wrong. Sisko's exact words were: "Sounds like he's acting like a Ferengi to me. You can't blame him for that." I defy you to explain to me how that is not racist.
    • It's only racist if you're assuming that aliens in Star Trek are no more different from humans than human races are from each other. And that's not true. Other alien races in Trek have talked time and again about how their cultures all have a single defining trait, and how weird humans are for jumping wildly from one extreme to the other (in Star Trek: Enterprise, the Vulcan ambassador Soval admits that the Vulcans are deeply worried about what humans might do to the galaxy, because they're so unpredictable compared to everyone else). So, armed with the knowledge that diverse personalities are considered humanity's hat by everyone else, it makes perfect sense that the Ferengi would seem to be mostly alike from a human's perspective, and there's no reason why Sisko wouldn't point that out to Jake, just as Soval, Quark and others have pointed out that humans seem emotionally schizophrenic to them. That's not racism, that's just plain old Humans Are Special.
    • Keep in mind that different species in Star Trek are not a perfect allegory for different races among humans. Among human races, there is no biological hardwiring that makes races act certain ways; behavior is all taught through culture. A black child raised by white parents will not have a tendency to "act black" because there is no such thing as "acting black". But in Star Trek, the Vulcans and Klingons and Ferengi are not different races, they are different SPECIES. They evolved completely independently of humans and as such their brains probably don't function exactly the same. So to say someone is "acting Klingon" may actually be a legitimate statement, even if it is wrong to say someone in the real world is "acting Asian". And this means that a human-Klingon hybrid having to tone back her fiery temper may be legitimate too, because who knows what psychological, emotional, and hormonal effects Klingon biochemistry would impart on a hybrid child.
    • What about Worf's son Alexander (as he is in TNG)? He's got an excellent sense of himself and his identity as an individual from a very early age — not in terms of his heritage on either side. He is himself, and he'll decide who and what he wants to be. Worf keeps pestering him about it, and he does send himself back through time to encourage his younger self to be a warrior, because he blames himself for Worf's death, but in the end Worf realizes Alexander must be what he is.
    • "But in Star Trek, the Vulcans and Klingons and Ferengi are not different races, they are different SPECIES." If they were different species they wouldn't be able to successfully breed together. They can produce fertile offspring with each other, therefore they are different races, not different species. QED.
    • Different species CAN interbreed, right here on Earth even. No doubt you've heard of mules? A donkey and a horse are not the same species. Even species that aren't even from the same genera interbreed sometimes. Now (as with mules), such hybrids are usually sterile - but They Have The Technology to fix that...
    • Being able to interbreed is not sufficient to tell whether two specimens are one species or two: they must produce fertile offspring: their children must be able to have children as well. So: a horse and a donkey don't produce fertile offspring because mules can't breed, so horses and donkeys are different species. A Klingon and a human produce fertile offspring because their children can have children as well, so Klingons and humans are the same species. QED.
    • Actually its stated in various series that hybrid like Spock and B'lanna only exist because of technological assistance. Klingons, Vulcans and humans all evolved on different planets and have very different internal biology of course they are different species.
    • See: K'ehlyr and B'elanna Torres. Both were human/Klingon hybrids who produced children with no apparent medical intervention. Ergo, Star Trek humans can be classified as Homo sapiens terra and Klingons as Homo sapiens kronos (excuse my terrible Linnean taxonomy).
    • Actually the different aliens in Star Trek are not just different species, or different genuses, or different taxonomical families, or different orders, they are all different domains. As they come from different planets they should have a whole different biochemistry. Of course this is overlooked in the Star Trek lore.
    • Only male mules are invariably infertile, females are sometimes fertile. This doesn't merge Equus asinus and Equus caballus into a single species. (Producing fertile offspring could made the hybrids a legitimate species in its own right, but it would not merge the parent species into one - e.g. Beefalos are hybrid of domestic cattle and bisons - which are still separate species.) Klingons evolved outside Earth - they would be not even classified as belonging to genus Homo, let alone species Homo sapiens.
    • B'Elanna Torres had to underwent some form of genetic manipulation (which she attempted to modify even further on her own, so the child would not have Klingon cranial ridges) which made her pregnancy possible - because nothing is mentioned in K'ehlyr's instance (perhaps due to the Law of Conservation of Detail), it does not mean that otherwise is unassisted pregnancy feasible.
    • About two centuries before K'ehlyr or B'lanna were born, augmented human DNA was introduced into the Klingon genome (ENT-"Affliction", "Divergence"), which resulted in the appearance of the smooth-headed Klingons seen in TOS. It is plausible that this enabled the existence of Klingon/human hybrids.
    • It might be worth noting that essay is from a site that is dedicated solely to unfavorably comparing Star Trek to Star Wars, so bias is heavy here. In the example of respecting Ferengi cultural values being a racist statement, cultures DO have different values. Any sane person will tell you that. It's just that when people say, "He's acting like a Ferengi" it's because the species has a dominant mainstream culture that is then synonymous with the people. You could read it that Sisko meant Nog is biologically hardwired to be chauvinist, but I'd argue you read it wrong. Unless people freak out and cry racism any time someone calls Monty Python "British humor" implying there is one monolithic British people who all find Monty Python equally funny, then saying Nog is acting like a Ferengi isn't racist.
    • This troper never got the impression that the different species in Star Trek were actually supposed to stand in for different cultures so much as they were supposed to stand in for different philosophies. Hence the hats everybody is always wearing.
    • I never saw an episode with Deanna Troi "conflicted" over her mixed origin, nor Alexander as mentioned before. Saying that every character of mixed origin is "conflicted" is cherry picking, and is also cherry picking to say that that doesn't happen in real life, because it does. On the other hand on the argument that Sisko's expression about the Ferengi is racist it should be remembered that they are not different race, they are different species, and yes the fact that due to budgetary reasons they are all Humanoid Aliens may cause us to overlook that, however the issue here is that they are not only different for culture, they are 'biologically different, which is a problem we don't have unless you count our relationship with other animals. Except for some marginal pseudoscientific groups mostly ideologically motivated (ehum, white supremacists, ehum) is the scientific consensus today that races are cultural in nature, not biological, and thus there's nothing really organic that causes racial differences being race a social or cultural construct. That does not apply to aliens. Aliens are biologically differnet, thus Sisko's words about the Ferengi are not analogical to refering to "a black kid", saying "Sounds like he's acting like a Ferengi to me. You can't blame him for that." sounds bad if you change Ferengi for African-American, but not if you change Ferengi for cat.
• I think Azetbur in ST:VI said it best: "'Inalien'. If only you could hear yourselves. 'Human rights'. Why the very name is racist. The Federation is no more than a Homo-sapiens-only club."
  • This is a pretty thin argument on her part. Neither "alien" nor "human" are terms specifically connected to species in 21st-century usage (i.e. Homo sapiens is one of several known species of human; illegal aliens of the species H. sapiens are often pursued by immigration authorities). It would have made more sense to assume that by the 23rd century, "human" also includes Klingons, Vulcans, etc., and... there's no logical connection whatsoever between the word "inalienable" and any species.
    • "Human" includes Klingon? Isn't that a bit like saying "Mankind includes women"? It may be linguistically accurate, but that doesn't mean people won't take offense when alternative words exist (Sentients in former case, People in the latter).
    • There is no canonical basis for the argument that the word "human" refers to any other species besides actual people descended from those on Earth. Quite the opposite in fact. Even Human Aliens are invariably referred to by their home world or species name and never as "humans". Even Half-Human Hybrid individuals like Spock and Troi are specifically identified as Vulcan and Betazoid respectively, as those are the planets they come from despite their human ancestry. To take it a step further, "the Federation" and "Starfleet" invariably carry a connotation of "human". In "Encounter At Farpoint" for example, Deanna explains that she is only half-Betazoid and that her father was "a Starfleet officer". It was an interesting bit of phrasing, because she did not feel the need to specify that he was a human Starfleet officer. That was inferred. It was her Betazoid lineage that was being called out, ironically by a Bandi, a Human Alien species native to Deneb IV who are never referred to as "human" in the episode.
• So the Prime Directive avoids or lessens the chance of Imperialism, but is racist in other ways? Does that mean there is no way to win? A show should have things like that in their premise, but can also point out flaws. Trek as a whole has dealt with those things, and reflected the times in which part of the franchise was spawned.

Why So Military?

• In Star Trek, almost everything that happens revolves around military officers. Military officers doubling as explorers, but military officers all the same. An unintended consequence of this is creating the (almost certainly unintentional) impression that the supposedly utopian Federation is a military society. For example, in the Deep Space Nine episode "Paradise Lost," there is an attempted military coup, which has no trouble with civilian resistance, but instead is only opposed by the good military officers. Why don't more people inside the Trek-verse notice this?
  • Because they don't watch the show. They actually get to see all the behind-the-scenes civilian stuff that's not onscreen.
    • That said, this Troper was rather stunned when Star Trek VI actually showed the (civilian) Federation President.
  • Massive glorification of the military is a common theme in communist regimes. And the Federation is, by any definition, a communist regime.
    • "By any definition"? An odd statement, considering there are several definitions by which it doesn't fit.
    • The fact that it has a president definitely excludes it from some definitions right there!
    • The Federation might be socialist, but not communist. Communism is a stateless stage with no government, more or less what Anarchism proposes. The difference between socialists and anarchists is that while the later believe that the statelessness can be achieve right away just by dismantelling the state over night the socialist believe that several generations of planned economy and socialism is needed before.
  • Also, as said, the military officers double as explorers - so it might be safe to say that the Federations IS a military regime (just like the Klingon and Romulan Empires) but with a substantially different philosophical and social view of what that means.
• It should be noted that Star Trek is focused on Star Fleet; the arm of the Federation that has explicitly military responsibilities, over and above the peaceful roles of exploration and diplomacy. Asking Star Trek "Why So Military" is like asking of Law & Order "Why So Police-ey?".
  • The level of militancy in Starfleet is directly proportional to the level of combat expected by its members. For example, the Enterprise and its crew in TOS was focused on exploration and were Mildly Military; the Kirk-era movies were explicitly taking place during a war against the Klingons, so operations were pretty much entirely military in nature (that time-trip to get some whales notwithstanding); TNG introduced an Enterprise where combat was considered so unlikely that the ship carried a sizable civilian population but still wasn't considered a Civilian ship; Deep Space Nine became progressively more military because, well, there was a war on; Voyager is a bad example because it operates in a vacuum and is notoriously inconsistent from episode to episode, but still follows the pseudo-military organization of Starfleet.
  • Gene Roddenberry's original vision of the future is that the people in Star Trek are 'scientists first' and 'military second'. Star Fleet was never meant to be a 'Might Makes Right' organization.
    • Which is interesting, considering the starring vessels of the show are armed to the teeth. For example, when the meeting with Chancellor Gorkon goes wrong, "We will have to count each torpedo, visually." "That could take HOURS!" Good lord, Scotty, how many antiship antimatter bombs do you HAVE onboard?
    • They are arguably in denial, but Starfleet's self-image is that they aren't a military organization. There are several instances of characters saying as much, particularly in TNG. Notably there were objections to the Enterprise engaging in war games that basically came down to "that's not what we do." The explanation for their firepower is that it's not wise to plunge into the unknown unarmed. The Defiant is considered Starfleet's first actual warship, and it was built in response to the Borg almost assimilating Earth.
    • Even in Kirk's era, the Enterprise was designated a "Heavy Cruiser" - yes a somewhat military name but the Klingon D7 (essentially the Constitution class Enterprise's opposite number) was designated a "Battle Cruiser" and the Romulans flew "Warbirds" - much more military and aggressive names. The Defiant is officially designated as an "Escort Cruiser" despite it's design and actual role/abilities.
    • Of course Starfleet ships are armed to the teeth. That's the "military second" part. Starfleet doesn't brand itself as a military organization, but that is one of its roles, and to fulfill that role, they need enough weapons to pose a credible threat to potentially antagonistic powers. Surely this isn't a surprise. Especially since Starfleet ships are also bristling with just as many sensors, probes, and other scientific apparati. That's the "scientists first" part. In conclusion, Starfleet ships are equipped exactly how they need to be to fulfill their mandate.
• That was the franchise premise, focused on the selected segment of the Federation society. We can equally say that in e.g. "In JAG almost everything that happens revolves around military officers. Military officers doubling as lawyers, but military officers all the same..."
• Starfleet is the quintessential Mildly Military organization, basically being the only agency of the Federation for the outer space we get to see. This also includes military responsibility, but it seems that the military part is being taken only reluctantly, and when necessarily needed - e.g. after the Wolf 359 and during the Dominion War, and purely military capabilities being rapidly reduced or lost in peacetime (e.g. Riker - or Picard? - claiming in an early NG episode that combat skills are just not much important for a starship captain or disappearance of MACOs between STE and TOS). It seems to be modeled more after the Coast Guard and/or the NOAA Corps - uniformed service organized along military lines, but with more substantial responsibilities in areas of exploration, rescue and law enforcement, and geared more towards the 'military' part only when needed, not a classical Space Navy. After all this is the organization which disposed of Space Marine-like MACOs and replaced them with the original Red Shirts.
• That said, it seems that TNG and DS9 writers gradually repurposed the Starfleet to being in charge of basically everything in space, (while in TOS era Captain Kirk was sometimes involved in Inter-Service Rivalry with members of other Federation agencies/departments) and later seasons of DS9, during the Dominion war, had definitely the "military is running everything" vibe.
• Starfleet is not a military, in the sense that their primary reason to exist is to protect their sponsoring nation (the Federation) from aggression by its enemies, or to engage in aggression against it's sponsoring nation's enemies. That is a role they are called upon to fill when necessary, but Starfleet's primary mission is exploration, science, expanding the boundaries of knowledge and understanding. They need a hierarchy to fulfill their missions efficiently, and humans have a lot of practice with military-type hierarchies, so that system was ready to go. But really, Starfleet doesn't exist to fight wars, and they'd really rather not if they don't have to. The various iterations of Enterprise may, indeed, be "the most heavily armed fishing scows ever made," but that just proves the Federation isn't run by imbeciles. . . . just because you're only interested in peaceful exploration doesn't mean the other guy is, too. Never start a fight, but always finish it.
• it could be interesting to explore areas outside of Star Fleet, but would it be Star Trek?

Prime Directive, Who Needs It?

• The Prime Directive doesn't make any sense at all. What would be so horrible about a species that hasn't developed warp drives to find out about species that do? It's not any more shocking than experimenting with warp drives and have the Federation and a bunch of aliens showing up. Something about the warp drive seems to magically make it easier, and it makes no sense.
  • Pre-warp versus post-warp makes a convenient dividing line for Starfleet. It probably wouldn't do that much harm if they made first contact with a species that already has stuff like the Internet and orbital spacecraft but no warp drive. But it could do a lot of harm if some Starfleet captain decided to bend the rules and make first contact with some culture that's still in the Bronze Age. So they just define Technology Levels with warp drive as the dividing line. It's arbitrary, but at least it protects the kind of society that would mistake Captain Kirk for a legendary demigod. Or it would, if Kirk followed the rules.
    • It's easy to tell if a civilization has warp drive or not, whereas it might be hard to tell if they're advanced enough to make contact by other standards. For example, one popular science fiction standard for dividing 'advanced' from 'primitive' civilizations is the use of atomic power. But a civilization might simply not bother to invent nuclear weapons or nuclear reactors if they didn't have to fight a big war right around the time nuclear fission was discovered.
    • On Enterprise some crew members were captured by a pre-warp society, believing them to be spies form another country. Reed suggested the idea of just telling the civilization the truth, reasoning how much contact with the Vulcans helped Earth. Archer specifically rejected the idea because this society hadn't split the atom yet. When Earth achieved warp travel right after WWIII, society was in a much more reasonable state. There is no absolute perfect strategy, and some bronze age people might be more ready then the microchip age, but the Federation wants to eliminate the gray area that's open to reinterpretation.
    • It's a pretty safe bet that any culture advanced enough to build warp drives is mature and technically sophisticated enough that the arrival of aliens in CoolShips won't devastate or confuse them too badly. They've probably at least considered the possibility of running into aliens once they start exploring the galaxy, and they'll be familiar enough with machines to recognize that the visitors are not gods, but instead are just people with better machines than theirs.
    • More importantly, there's the fact that once they develop warp drive, it's just a matter of time before they meet you or another alien species (Probably a generation or so as they perfect the drive and ships). If they can meet you, you can meet them. That's what makes it the convenient dividing point. Once they develop warp, the Federation drops in and says hi, before the newly space-traveling species ends up running into Romulan space.
    • Exactly. To wit, from the TNG Episode "First Contact", Picard saying "We prefer meeting like this rather than a random confrontation in deep space." Basically a combination of the fact that a civilization that is warp-capable is hopefully mature enough (though not necessarily; see the Ferengi, Malcorians, and maybe others), but also because they are basically forcing the issue at that point.
    • The EU implies there are other qualifications besides 'warp drive' they can hit, species just tend to hit warp drive first. It's not stated what they are, but interstellar subspace communication would logically be one of them, as that also would also quickly have them interacting with other civilizations. And we know contact with other space-faring species counts, once they are in contact with one group of aliens, contact with another group can't hurt them too badly.
    • Cynically, if you wait for them to develop warp, they may come up with something better than you have— and if you beam down just after they figured out the can maybe meet other cultures, you've got the whole awe thing that SHOULD keep them from challenging you, and might get them to join your space club.
  • But why worry so much about introducing yourself to a "primitive" and warp-less society? Really, what's the worst that could happen?
    • You end up getting mistaken for gods and people start trying to sacrifice people for you, etc.
    • That any jerk with a relatively cheap set of modern supplies could turn a whole planet full of sentient beings into his slaves?
    • A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. Enough said.
    • That very example was discredited in "Time's Arrow."
    • Enterprise makes the point that by waiting until the civilization has invented Warp technology, then 'cultural contamination' would be lessened. I suppose they want the alien culture to be itself, rather than just a mimic / parrot of the race that gave them possibly the most important technology on a galactic scale. Promotes diversity, that sort of thing.
    • More to the point of a matter-when the Federation DID try a pre-Warp first contact, it ended up with the primitive culture wiping out itself. Warp tech brings a level of understanding about the universe as well as the fact that most cultures that do it have started to do away with War, Poverty, Prejudice, etc. thus are * mature* enough to handle interstellar relationships. Hell, Babylon 5 shows what happens with primitive races getting FTL tech rather well.
  • And all this is simplified, anyway. The Federation doesn't meddle in the international affairs of any (other) civilization at all, all the way up to their allies the Klingons. From the top to the bottom, the Federation stays out of the affairs of non-members. That is the 'Prime Directive', it's not 'Don't talk to pre-warp people'. (In other words, Sisko's tricking the Romulans into the war was a Prime Directive violation.) The Federation just consider informing civilizations that don't know about aliens (and aren't about to find out about them via their new warp drive) about aliens to automatically be 'meddling'. I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually a 'court decision' interpretation of the PD instead of actual written policy.
  • It's an arbitrary metric designed to make the Prime Directive enforceable, it doesn't have to make sense. Without some kind of concrete standard the only thing a Starfleet captain has to rely on is his/her own individual judgment. And if the number of times Picard and Janeway have foolishly plunged their ships into unknown spacial anomalies is any indication, common sense and good judgment is not a required skill for a Starfleet captain.
  • The scope of the Prime Directive seems to vastly increase between TOS and far surpass the mere notion of non-interference with pre-warp civilization. The best example is when Picard flat out refuses to help Gowron (the lawful leader of the Klingon Empire - who were their ALLIES) against an attempt to overthrow him because it's apparently a violation of the Prime Directive. Not only that, Picard at another point openly admits that the Prime Directive has prevented them from helping races be EXTERMINATED. Not wanting to interfere with the development of a less advanced civilization is one thing but they seem to treat the Prime Directive like some infallible all knowing oracle. It's hard to say whether that's crazy or just plain stupid.
    • A rather effective demonstration of the increase in scope and dogmatification of the Prime Directive is in comparing the TOS and TNG reactions to finding a doomed world that the Enterprise can save without revealing to the world that aliens interfered - TOS had The Paradise Syndrome, in which the reaction is "Starfleet rules mandates that we save this civilization, if it can be done without revealing ourselves" while TNG had Pen Pals, in which the reaction is "Unless we can find a loophole, the Prime Directive forbids us from saving this civilization". From the perspective of a modern-day observer, it does look as if Starfleet forgot that the original purpose of the Prime Directive was to protect primitive cultures.
    • It's been a while since I saw that episode, but I got the impression that Picard didn't want to interfere, and was using the Prime Directive as a convenient excuse for diplomacy's sake. "Oh, gee, Gowron, I'd love to get Starfleet involved in your civil war, but that darned Prime Directive says I can't."
  • It's merely a matter of self-protection: Any civilization capable of FTL travel is technically capable of building a spacecraft designed to crash into the Star Fleet HQ at relativistic speed, turning a good chunk of Earth into molten rock. So they figured it would be better for them to introduce themselves before things get awkward.
  • Its one thing to forbid contact or trade. Perhaps that's pretty reasonable as allowing societies to develop and become reasonable enough to deal with. Where it gets stupid is stuff like not taking out a comet before it kills of a world full of people because they are too primitive. Or allowing a world that's sophisticated enough to send distress messages into space if not travel far die because of plague or natural disaster.
    • To play devil's advocate, the Federation's reasoning is probably that they can't possibly save everyone, and would wipe themselves out trying to rush around the galaxy and rescue every primitive society that faces extinction. And if they can't save everyone, then it's the height of arrogance to start picking winners and losers, choosing which planet should be saved from a purely natural disaster based on convenience, shared ideals or any other criteria. For that reason, as well as all the potential unintended consequences, the Federation's decided that it doesn't step in unless a society reaches out and asks for help. That's the rule Picard cited as justifying saving Data's pen pal; in that case, he was deliberately stretching the definition of a "call for help", but that the rule exists at all shows that the Federation isn't so much heartless as merely practical.
    • We have a trope for this line of reasoning.
    • Except the Federation has a partial solution. It helps anyone it's allowed to have contact with, and judging by all the vaccine deliveries, comet impacts to avert and other planetary-scale disasters of the week that send the Enterprise-D running ragged every other episode, that keeps them plenty busy as it is. Starfleet even saved the Klingons from extinction, and tried to save the Romulans too. Barring infinite resources, the line for delivering aid always has to be drawn somewhere, and the people on the other side of that line will always complain that it's not fair (and it's not, but it's also unavoidable).
    • "Anyone it's allowed to have contact with"...'allowed' by whom, exactly? The Federation came up with the Prime Directive all on its own; it wasn't handed down by some nebulous higher authority. Thus, the above statement basically reduces to "The Federation helps whoever it damn well feels like", again. (The 'limited resources' argument is something of a Strawman here; nobody, I think, is seriously arguing that the Federation should actually try to take on all the galaxy's woes all by its lonesome, especially not those it's not even aware of yet. What's being questioned is the merit of a priori denying potential aid — as slippery a slope as that may sometimes be — to a sizable chunk of the galaxy's intelligent population based on nothing more than their technology level.)
    • Are you out of your mind? The Prime Directive's rule against making contact with pre-warp level civilizations isn't some arbitrary piece of bureaucracy. It's because the implications of first contact for pre-warp civilizations can be disruptive at best and devastating at worse. And I'm not talking about simply "primitive" societies. If aliens made contact with Earth tomorrow it would probably trigger World War III. Imagine it from the aliens' point of view? What country do they make contact with first? Do they go through the UN? Is there intelligence about us even good enough to understand what the UN is and what role it plays in international law? What if one nation, or a hand full of nations feel threatened by the arrival of the aliens. What if they declare war on any nation that opens diplomatic relations with the aliens? What about religious fundamentalists who view the very idea of extraterrestrial life as blasphemous? There are a million things that can go horribly wrong, resulting in untold deaths, and that's with our reality advanced global civilization. Only making contact with warp-level civilizations makes perfect sense, because with a warp-level civ, it's ready or not, here they come. Before that point, the risks far outweigh any ethical duty to intervene. A case maybe could be made that if a pre-warp civ faced total extinction it would be better to accept the risks than see them wiped out, but any thing short of that, it would be the height of irresponsibility to make first contact with a civ that wasn't ready for it (though this makes some of the times Kirk et el break the Prime Directive major wall-bangers).
    • Except that that entire argument was invalidated by Star Trek: First Contact. When the Vulcans made first contact there was no United Earth yet! In fact, the warring nations of Earth had only taken a breather and declared a ceasefire, not a peace treaty, from their nuclear World War III! This is why Lily Sloane assumed that the attacking Borg were really the Eastern Coalition resuming hostilities. The Vulcans did not even make first contract with a country, but with just the single, isolated, community from which the test flight of the Phoenix occurred! This was in 2063. As we had already seen in Encounter At Farpoint, barbarities would continue well after that until at least 2079. But the crew of the Enterprise-E is adamant that first contact with the Vulcans is what saved humanity from itself and caused them to pull together, which is why the Phoenix test flight had to happen on the specific day that the Vulcan survey ship would be in-system. If it happened so much as a day later, then humanity would still have warp drive, but might nonetheless plunge back into global war instead of heading to the stars! And then there would have been no Federation at all to push its Prime Directive gospel!
    • According to Star Trek: Enterprise, it's a Vulcan policy that was indeed handed down to Earth Starfleet as part of the alliance, which at the time wasn't on any sort of equal footing. The Federation probably wouldn't have been formed if Earth hadn't conceded the Prime Directive to its biggest and most important ally. Besides, the Federation does have limited resources. By the TNG era it had already spread itself way too thin trying to help everyone it has contact with, acting more like an interstellar UN/Red Cross than a defensive fleet. When the Dominion showed up, Starfleet spent the first half of the war paying a devastating price for its diplomatic and humanitarian focus. If "too primitive" seems to be a sucky cutoff point for intervention and aid, it's a lot better than "outside our borders", which is what just about every spacefaring society apart from the Federation has declared.
  • Ooh, ooh! Fridge Brilliance! Fridge Brilliance! Here's the reason for the seemingly "arbitrary" standard of warp capability: The Federation doesn't bother with non-warp species because non-warp species have no way of affecting the Federation in any way. Without warp travel, any given species is effectively limited to their own solar system. So why should the Federation bother with them? They're not a threat if they don't have interstellar travel. And if they're technologically advanced enough to build a warp drive but haven't yet, then they're obviously not interested in dealing with other races and are content to remain isolated.
  • I think it's unethical for the Federation not to make contact with primitive civilizations (in a controlled, respectful way). By not offering to share their medical advancements, the Federation is condemning countless beings all over the universe to preventable deaths.
    • The risk of disruption to the primitive civilization far out weighs any benefit they would gain. There's also a strong argument that by handing out technology to civilizations who had not developed to a sufficient degree that the federation would be
    • The risk of disruption to the primitive civilization far out weighs any benefit they would gain. There's also a strong argument that by handing out technology to civilizations who had not developed to a sufficient degree that the federation would be stunting the growth of that culture, and affecting it with untold unforeseen consequences. Ethically, the mere fact the Federation can prevent death is not the only factor to consider. Indeed, due to the dangers of contact with a culture unready for its implications, utilitarian calculus would dictate the ethical course of action is non-contact.
  • At the end of the day, speaking from the perspective of a pre-Warp civilization myself, the Prime Directive just comes across as rather patronizing. "We will not make contact with your planet because in our wisdom we already know, without so much as needing said contact to inform our decision, that there is just no way you primitive screwheads could possibly handle it." In other words, it's the Federation's excuse to act as Neglectful Precursors.
    • It's called a Bright Line Rule, and it's why it's illegal for a person one day away from their 21st birthday to buy beer, but legal for a person one day after his 21st birthday to do so. Warp capability makes perfect sense as a Bright Line test, since before that, the chances of the civilization is insular, but once it has warp drive it's only a matter of time before they make contact with an interstellar species, so let's make contact first before the Romulans beat us to it. Warp-capability doesn't seem to be the only standard for contact, if my memory serves, the civilization the Enterprise was observing in the episode "First Contact" was pre-warp, but the Federation was close to making first contact, so probably some sort of balancing test is also used, no doubt weighing factors like ethical advancement, political stability, lack of complicating factors like religious extremist sects or national factionalism etc. But warp-capability forces the issue of contact, because a warp-capable species just cruising around the galaxy with no knowledge of its other inhabitants is a recipe for trouble.
    • Isn't this the exact definition of what the ships and crews in Star Trek are doing?
• It was fair enough for Picard to refuse Gowron's plea for help. After all, Duras had not attacked the Federation so there was no reason to get involved. However, when dealing with warp-capable empires, the Federations does do the right thing by indirectly getting involved. They couldn't help the Bajorans directly because it was a "legal" client world of the Cardassian Empire. Only way they could have helped would have been to push deep into Cardassian space to liberate the Bajorans. They did manage to apply political pressure by averting a Cardassian invasion and having Picard released from prison at a time when most Cardassians were getting fed up with the occupation as well.
• I always looked at it like the Federation didn't want to interrupt the evolution of a culture. Personally I can see why it would get annoying if some random aliens landed on my planet and paraded around with their technology. I figured that was why the Vulcans waited until we achieved Warp drive. This way you don't get a bunch of planets which are basically Federation clones by imposing your technology.
• The Federation wants to maintain trade and diplomatic relations with other cultures as equals. Primitive cultures have little nothing to offer other than as subjects of study. Saving people from natural disasters is, obviously, different from getting involved in a civil war. That being said, it doesn't make sense to have an absolute "no getting involved" policy apply to advanced civilizations like the Klingons. It would make more sense to say, "no getting involved without permission from higher-ups". But there's plenty of precedent for the Federation to help peacefully resolve conflicts as long as they're invited. They had Riva, after all.
• There is more than a little hypocrisy in play though (or at least Early-Installment Weirdness). In the TNG episode Angel One, the titular planet supposedly has a 20th Century level of technology at the time the Enterprise-D shows up there, and apparently Starfleet had had prior contact with the planet 62 years earlier! This is either a massive case of Modern Stasis, or else the Federation happily made first contact with a pre-spaceflight civilization. Why? Well, one possibility is that the planet is conveniently close to the Romulan Neutral Zone, and it is explicitly stated that the Federation hopes to bring Angel One in as a member! This is especially appalling as it is not even clear from the episode that Angel One has spaceflight, much less being anywhere even close to warp drive! The most impressive technology they are shown to have is a device the size of a large piece of furniture that can apparently disintegrate a large vase or a person considerably less efficiently than a handheld Starfleet phaser — from Kirk's era! Apparently the Prime Directive can be waived in circumstances where the Federation feels like they would get some benefit out of ignoring it, such as acquiring a strategically valuable, if technologically and socially primitive, planet.
• I figure that the Federation is really big on galactic diversity. They want every culture to grow and mature on its own, without the homogenizing influence of outside powers. (After all, if starfaring species contacted a pre-warp species, the former would dominate in every way. Their technology would simply be too powerful for anyone to oppose them. Even if they tried to be polite, they might dominate the conversation by default.) Now, does this entirely make sense? No! Cultural diversity is great, but the Federation has gone too far with it. They should maintain a basic level of contact with many pre-warp societies. They should provide medicine, in particular. But it all works out if you just abandon the idea that the Federation is perfect. It's not perfect. It's got weird quirks, just like every other society that ever existed. One of those quirks is the obsession with the Prime Directive.
• Do you want to create a Planet of Nazis or a Planet of 1920's Gangsters? 'Cause that's what you're gonna get.
• The problem with "provide humanitarian aid to primitive worlds" is unintended consequences. Pop up and cure several diseases plaguing the world when they can't deal with them yet themselves, and now there's an overabundance of population that they don't have the technology to care for, resources are strained, wars start. How do you ensure your aid reaches all the people who need it fairly without cutting the local governments (who may not want to see help given to "Them Folks Over There") out of the loop completely? Benefit just one nation-state on a world, and suddenly they have an advantage over everyone else, wars start. The only way it would work is if the Federation basically takes all control over the planet in question, quashing its normal rate and direction of development and forcing it to grow as the Federation dictates. It may sound a bit The Social Darwinist, but in this case, it probably is the most ethical policy: let pre-warp civilizations advance or not, succeed or not, develop or not, in their own way in their own time. Anything else is arrogant presumption, that you know better how their world should be run than they do. As we in real life are a pre-warp civilization, it may seem cruel that some hypothetical Federation deems us too primitive to be worthy of contact, thus withholding all their awesome technology from us that could make life on Earth so much better. But just look at the problems we already have giving humanitarian aid to our own people, and picture what it would be like if the Federation were to swoop in an offer us all we could ever want, but only if we start living by their rules, since that's the only way they can ensure we won't blow ourselves up with their toys. That's a no-win scenario.
• My big question is why it's called General Order Number One/The Prime Directive. You'd think that would be better applied to something at least vaguelly connected with things any ship might do on a daily basis, rather than something a handful of ships will do infrequently.

Why does having warp drive make a species "civilized"?

• Narrowing the Prime Directive focus down to this one item: on what basis is it argued that possession of warp drive technology is a reasonable threshold for differentiating "primitive" from "advanced" civilizations?
  • As seen in Star Trek: First Contact, when Dr Zefram Cochrane conducted his test flight of the Phoenix in 2063, Earth had only just emerged from World War III, post-war problems plagued much of the planet and a unified world government with real authority would not solidify until the next century. So basically Earth was exactly the kind of planet that the Federation would normally avoid like the plague and it was largely a mistake on the part of the Vulcan's that they decided to make first contact with humans at that time.
  • However, ironically (and hypocritically), Troi gives a speech to Cochrane about how his warp drive flight and first contact with the Vulcans are what causes humanity to pull together and become unified in the coming decades! In other words, by basically violating the principles behind the Prime Directive and getting involved in shaping the development of a violent, factionalized species just come out of decades of world war produced a positive result that led to the unification of the human race, the push for interstellar exploration and ultimately the founding of the Federation itself! Essentially: by "interfering" in a primitive civilization's development, the Vulcans actually ended up ensuring the future of entire Alpha and Beta Quadrants!
  • But it still leaves the question of what made warp drive proof of sufficient progress as a civilization. Given that Earth was still divided into nations and post-war atrocities would continue for at least another couple of decades, all that this proved was that one human was a clever scientist. Otherwise, there was no indication that humanity was a truly civilized species. Indeed, the Vulcans of all people should have known that a species could have warp drive technology and still be barbaric and violent based on their own history! So why is this the key metric in the Prime Directive? Certainly pre-warp species that were much more civilized than 21st Century humanity have been shown (e.g. the Valakians).
  • There is also an ironic case in "VOY: The Omega Directive". In the episode, a pre-warp alien civilization has nonetheless managed to create, and at least partially contain, the so-called "Omega Molecule", an incredibly difficult to produce but "perfect" compound which represents an incredible threat to spacefaring civilizations because it can permanently destroy subspace, making FTL Travel impossible within the effected area. This is a scientific accomplishment exceeding similar experiments conducted by both the Federation and the Borg! In fact, the Federation failure caused a local destruction of subspace and modest loss of life. The Borg attempt cost 29 cubes and over 600,000 drones! Janeway, thanks to the emergency powers granted to her by the Federation's Omega Directive, can even summarily suspend the Prime Directive itself due to the threat to interstellar civilizations posed by Omega! The entire incident, however, illustrates how a "pre-warp civilization" can exceed the technological accomplishments of warp-capable ones, to the extent of necessitating disregard of the Prime Directive.
  • Civilizations that develop warp drive aren't exempt from the Prime Directive's protections/strictures because they're necessarily more "civilized" than others, they're exempt because they can go out themselves and contact other spacefaring races. The only realistic way to stop them from doing so would be to curtail their use of technology they'd independently discovered, which would be interference in itself. Hence, the Prime Directive vanishes in a Puff Of Logic Bomb.
  • Which raises an issue, because civilizations that are warp-capable are deemed inherently more valuable than ones that are not. The Federation actively tries to recruit such civilizations. They will also bend over backwards to try to save such civilizations from calamities (as seen in episodes such as "Deja Q" and "True Q", wherein the mission of the Enterprise was specifically to save planets from a natural catastrophe in the first instance, and a self-inflicted environmental disaster in the latter. Were either civilization pre-warp, they would have instead been having a raging internal debate over whether or not the Prime Directive allows them to prevent extinction events!
    • We actually have that debate in Real Life with the uncontacted peoples. There are still hundreds of very primitive isolated tribes, some of them have not discover fire yet. There's a debate whether is unethical to intervene and let them alone until they on their own contact others or if we should bring to them medicines, vaccines and modern technologies. But if there's a natural catastrophe, well if there's an Earthquake on a normal country no one would bath an eye in the need to give them humanitarian help whether is Iran or Japan or Buthan, but if there's a catastrophe affecting the uncontacted people, governments don't really know what to do (it happened with the Amazon fires in Brazil). In a way we apply the Prime Directive in real life.
  • Once a species invents the warp drive, they'll make contact with other species sooner or later, and will try to interact with them. (By scientifically studying them, diplomacy, trade, war...) From this point on, interferences and cultural contamination are inevitable at least to a certain degree. The Federation seems to be keen on establishing a friendly relationship with such newbie warp civilizations as early as possible (strategically speaking of course a smart thing to do), so they tend to do the first step. The intergalactic equivalent to paying your first visit to the new neighbor who just moved in, with a smile on your face and a bottle of wine in your hand.
  • As mentioned, once a planet has a warp engine, they're going to be out in the galaxy, sooner or later. You detect a warp drive from a place where one shouldn't be, you'd better investigate and see if this culture just made a massive leap forward, or if it was just something a local Tony Stark equivalent built in a cave with a box of scraps (pretty much the case with Zephram Cochrane). And remember what Cochrane's original plan for his warp drive was: prove it worked, then sell it to whoever on Earth wanted it for shitloads of money. So you'd likely have Earth carrying their wars off planet and embroiling others in them, unless someone stepped in to head off this budding catastrophe. Enter the Vulcans.

USS Stands for United States... Wait, What?

• Why the names of Federation starships start with "USS" (USS Enterprise, USS Voyager, etc.)? USS is the shortcut for: "United States Ship", right? But in the Star Trek universe the USA is only a part of the planet, which is only a small part of the Federation. Why not name them like: "UFPS Enterprise" (United Federation of Planets Starship Enterprise)?
  • I think it's been said somewhere U.S.S. stands for "United Space Ship" or "United Star Ship".
    • United Star Ship. The distinction between a "Starship" and a "Spaceship" is important in TOS (more so in the early EU. In Best Destiny, Enterprise is revealed to be the first starship. IIRC, spaceships bear names using just "S.S." instead of "U.S.S.". Also, the dedication plaque next to the bridge turbolift says that the Enterprise is "Starship Class". Of course, this got totally dropped in the TNG era.) What I want to know is: What does 'NCC' mean?
    • Naval Construction Code. In other words, it indicates a ship built for (and presumably by) Starfleet, as opposed to a ship built for some other purpose (like a cruise liner or a cargo carrier). The NX prefix used in a couple of ships that are first of their kind is Naval Experiment.
    • Just a guess but maybe the ships are registered in the same numbering series as Federation (or maybe Earth) civilian ships, "NCC" happened to be the next full 0000-9999 block of numbers available and the equivalent of the DMV found it easier to hand it over to Starfleet than register each new ship individually upon completion.
    • The Excelsior is NX-2000 when it's brand new and the Transwarp testbed, but when it's still in use 80 years later in various TNG episodes (and I think when Sulu commands it in Undiscovered Country) it's been reclassified NCC-2000.
  • Possibly they did: United Federation of Planets Star Ship.
  • Outside of the storyline, the naming mimics American ships— this troper served on the USS Essex, LHD-2, and is still impressed at how many folks can rattle off ALL of the Enterprises from the USN.
    • Third and fourth posters have it right. The rest of you don't.
  • Note that it's not mandatory to put the name of the country in a ship's designation—for example, the British use "HMS", which stands for "His (Her) Majesty's Ship" with no indication of which Majesty is being referred to. On the other hand, "United Space Ship" is actually a pretty odd term, unless they sometimes refer to The Federation as "(The) United". Bottom line, though, the real reason they used "USS" is almost certainly for the sake of familiarity to an American audience.
    • Maybe it is not the "United Space Ship", as in "Spaceship of the United", but rather "United Space Starship", meaning Starship of the United Space, which makes more sense for me.
  • United Starfleet Ship
    • This would actually make a lot of sense if you consider that the Starfleet of the early Federation was probably made up of a hodgepodge of ships from the star navies of the Federation’s founding worlds. Those ships would no longer be a part of individual Human, Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellarite fleets; they would be a single united Starfleet.
  • In "The Cage," the phrase is "United Space Ship Enterprise." In "Squire of Gothos" and "Court Martial," "United Starship" is used. Draw your own conclusions.
  • Any ship using the USS signifier is generally named after a ship that actually had that name at some point in the past. Calling it a "United Star Ship" is basically turning the USS into a backronym at that point. I'm fairly sure that there are at least a handful of ship names that aren't USS whatever in the fleet (among them Vulcan ships), and I vaguely recall at least a passing mention of one that used the HMS version instead. Of course this is probably largely Depending on the Writer since for the most part they're probably going to let writers of whatever episode or movie it is name whatever ships they want, and if the writer like most fans assumes every Starfleet ship is a USS, they'll name it the USS Queen Anne or whatever if they want.
    • For what it's worth, the USS Victory is explicitly named after the HMS Victory.
    • You might be thinking of the stolen bird-of-prey that McCoy named HMS Bounty as a joke. There was a computer readout listing the HMS Lord Nelson and the HMS New Zealand in "Up the Long Ladder" but both ships were launched in the mid 22^nd century, during which the Royal Navy still canonically existed in some form. It's possible that these ships actually did belong to the United Kingdom—which, come to think of it, might explain why one of those ships was filled to the brim with Irish stereotypes.

No Romulan Ale For You!

• Why is Romulan ale illegal?
  • Possibly an embargo against Romulan goods. Or because it's clearly not at all healthy: even the mighty Klingon can't really handle it that well.
    • It was explicitly stated in Deep Space Nine that it was an embargo, when they lifted it. And there are solid reasons for it. Crossing the Romulan Neutral Zone (if you're caught, which gives an unfortunate advantage to the Romulans with their cloaking devices) means an international incident, possibly full-scale war. The Federation has good reason to discourage its private traders from going there; sooner or later one would take the short way, instead of cutting through a third party's territory (especially when the most notable such party is the Klingons), and that's a very stupid way to start a war.
    • The Neutral Zone is only off-limits to the Federation and the Romulans ^note  Neutral Zones would be established by treaty, so if you are not part of the treaty then you are not bound the sane way, although there could still be consequences. (and often not them, either, it seems). Even the Jem'Hadar were allowed to use it before they found themselves at war with the Federation and the Romulans. So there should be neutral species at peace with both powers who can carry ale into the Federation. Of course, if the embargo is strict enough, a third-party middleman wouldn't be legal, either, as with Cuban products in the United States.
    • And it is, amusingly one of the most loosely enforced laws on the books. Every time they break out the Romulan Ale, someone remarks that it is illegal, yet it is given as gifts amongst officers, a Federation starship on a diplomatic mission has it in stock to serve to foreign dignitaries, and it is even brought up during Kirk and McCoy's trial on Q'Onos in Star Trek VI. Notably, it wasn't brought up to discredit them because it was illegal, but merely to bring up the possibility that McCoy was drunk. If there was a great time for anyone to use Romulan Ale's illegality against the heroes, that would have been it. So why didn't they? Even in a sham trial, nobody cared. Presumably both the Romulans and Federation turn a blind eye to traders carrying the stuff back and forth, because the humans like to drink it and the Romulans like to sell it. Hell, the traders might even double as low-profile spies and couriers, discretely carrying information (and booze) back and forth, giving both sides further reason to laxly enforce the embargo: If one side cracks down, their own information flow from the other side gets clamped off too.
  • Presumably it's a deliberate parallel to Cuban tobacco products being illegal in the US.
  • Because it should be (owwww).

United Federation of Nutcase Bureaucrats?

• On that note, why is it that everyone in Starfleet who isn't a main character is either an Obstructive Bureaucrat or a nut case just waiting for the opportunity to go rogue?
  • The same reason why holodecks malfunction almost every time we see them. It doesn't really happen all that much. It's just that the invisible cameraman who is us is always around when it does.
  • You're forgetting the redshirts and token love interests, too.

Emergency Redshirt Holograms

• Related to the above - why do unarmored, flesh-and-blood security officers respond to boarders, instead of hundreds of Emergency Security Holograms? The computer might only have enough power to manage one medical program at a time, but surely repelling boarders can't be much more demanding than what the holodeck gets up to every day.
  • Those might just be a slow-in-coming development. During TNG, getting a hologram to exist outside of the holodeck is something of a challenge. In Voyager, the EMH is confined to sickbay or the holodeck until he gets his mobile emitter. Once that technology spreads to the wider Federation, it seems more plausible that we'd see things like holographic security officers. In the meanwhile, they probably don't have them because they'd have to put holographic projectors all over the ship, and such officers would be useless for away missions and whatnot.
    • The Prometheus had holo-emitters on every deck, and while that was an experimental ship, Andy Dick seemed to be saying that that aspect at least had become standard. We never saw it on the Defiant (or the new Defiant after the original got destroyed at Chintoka) or the Enterprise E, but then we never really saw a situation where it would have come up. "Vic Fontaine to the bridge, please."
  • Starfleet learned its lesson from the "Ultimate Computer" incident and doesn't give deadly weapons to artificial intelligences any more. Except Data.
    • And the Emergency Command Hologram.
    • Holographic crew is a sizable part of your redshirt crew in Star Trek Online

Always Keep a Spare Bridge Crew in the Trunk

• Whenever the bridge crew assembles an away team, we see some of the main characters leave their stations while others walk in from the off and man the vacated stations. Are there special 'secondary crew lounges' right next to the bridge where the replacements sit, twiddling their thumbs, until a senior officer goes on an away mission?
  • Kind of like an On Call area, probably.
  • Possibly those stations just aren't ever supposed to be left unmanned unless there's no alternative, so the nearest qualified person takes them until the 'official' replacement shows up.
    • Yeah, I'd guess there are some stations more vital than others and the bridge crew has some cross-training on them, so if one's vacated they can just switch what they're doing to "autopilot" and run over to the other one, as well as summoning a replacement for their original station, if needed.

Omnidisciplinary security forces

• Why do the same people seem to be responsible for internal shipboard security, ground combat, and ship-to-ship combat? Admittedly there's probably a fair bit of overlap between security guards and marines, which explains part of it, but the really glaring issue is the choice to always make the chief of security also the main weapons officer - these roles don't overlap in any way besides letting Worf attempt to shoot more things with different weapons. Really "Starfleet security" ought to be at least three separate corps (as using unarmored security guards as ground troops is also just wanton cruelty to the common redshirt).
  • They've tried to deal with this on a few occasions, like Worf and Tasha Yar's dual roles during the first season of TNG, and then Worf and Odo in Deep Space Nine, and Malcolm Reed and the space marines in Season 3 Enterprise, but it usually results in the characters who are in charge of intraship security and combat stations butting heads. The creators are probably just trying to conserve characters by making one of them "the action guy". It's not realistic, but when they do split the roles up, one character often starts to seem redundant.

Rank Structure

Why do they even bother? I don't mean the insubordination; that's a separate issue. But they have actual procedures specifically devoted to working around rank structure. From "The Doomsday Machine," when Spock cites regulation that allows a captain to countermand a commodore if he uses his "personal authority," to "Harbinger," when Major Hayes said he didn't have a problem taking orders from Reed despite the fact that a major outranks a naval lieutenant—outranks everyone on that ship except Archer and Tucker. And in "Zero Hour" the same major says he wants a corporal to take command of his unit after he's gone. Harry Kim got screwed out of promotions all the time, but was still fifth in command despite being junior to every single Starfleet officer on the ship as well as however many Maquis were either made lieutenants or had previously had Starfleet commissions which predated Kim's own. Department heads with lower ranks than members of their departments. Acting captains and especially acting first officers of lower rank than some of the people under their temporary command. Inconsistent rules over whether a person could be promoted to captain and/or admiral without transferring to the Command department. Inconsistent rules about how the Bridge Officer test was applied. Officers from foreign services (Kira Nerys, T'Pol) pulling rank on Starfleet officers on Starfleet ships (not Deep Space Nine, of course, but the Defiant.) It just . . . grr!

• Pay grade? As long as you choose to ignore the claims about not having salaries, because they're silly.
• The "personal authority" thing probably has to do with who is captain of what - the personal authority cited is Kirk's as "Captain of the Enterprise.". Presumably, a captain of a ship has some authority over even higher-ranked visitors, which technically is what Decker was. As for T'Pol, she was an exchange officer. Starfleet might just have given her an acting rank while she served as part of the Enterprise's crew.
  • In addition to being "Wagon Train to the Stars" Star Trek was also Hornblower IN SPACE! and there was, indeed, an old British naval tradition that a Commodore visiting another officer's ship had little to no authority to command that ship's crew despite their much higher rank. In fact, in one of the Hornblower books, Hornblower - by then not only a Commodore, but also 1. a lord and 2. married to the sister of the Duke of Wellington - has to hitch a ride on a glorified patrol boat, commanded by a mere Lieutenant. Said Lieutenant is not particularly competent, and Hornblower muses on how despite his vastly higher rank, wealth, and social status, he can't actually order the Lieutenant to do anything related to the running of the ship, he has to reason with the Lieutenant or hope to awe the Lieutenant into doing his bidding with his titles. A visiting admiral, on the other hand, could relieve a captain in his squadron (which, apart from the fact that the crew just respects him that damn much, is probably why there's little drama attached to Admiral Kirk taking the Enterprise in the movies (Decker Junior's little hissy fit notwithstanding). This tradition isn't carried over to modern navies, which may be why we don't see that many of the numerous mad admirals in the TNG-era just try to relieve the captains.

We Will Not Use Army Tactics In The Future

• Can somebody explain to me why the Federation (and Dominion for that matter) has forgotten about such things as tanks, IFVs, personal armor, ground attack aircraft, helicopters, artillery, squad automatic weapons, barbed wire, digging trenches, offensive tactics that did not involve imitating Leeroy Jenkens, and other things we did not see at the Siege of AR-558? Really, has everybody forgotten about all but the most basic ground tactics?
  • Because that would have completely busted the show's budget.
    • And yet they had enough money for several CGI space battles. They could have diverted some of time and cash to show a long range CGI tank duel, or if the budget was already over the limit, at least mention that "our armor divisions were overwhelmed". Plus, there's the matter of body armor. Why not reuse something from TNG, TOS, or even a non-Trek show? And really, there is no excuse whatsoever for the hilariously poor infantry tactics. Was it too much trouble for the writers to consult with somebody in the armed forces or at the very least rent a WWII movie? Sure, any of these suggestions would have probably cut into other parts of the budget, but Starfleet probably wouldn't have ended up looking like total idiots.
    • Excuse me, but I'm pretty sure that most of those space battles weren't CGI. At least according to this page. Of course they did use CGI on numerous occasions, but most shots of ship-to-ship combat were models.
    • A CGI tank battle would have looked completely ridiculous. And saying "they've overwhelmed our armored divisions!" would have sounded ridiculous. The viewers would have immediately asked why they didn't get to SEE those armored divisions being overwhelmed (the old "show don't tell" rule). And their tactics weren't that bad. In the Siege of AR-558 they did at least hunker down under cover and herd enemies into a choke point. It just broke down into a melee fight when the Jemhadar overwhelmed them with superior numbers. What you asked was why the Federation didn't use, and I quote, "tanks, IFVs, personal armor, ground attack aircraft, helicopters, artillery". True they could have afforded some body armor (though in the Siege of AR-558 they were explicitly low on supplies so it's somewhat understandable) but all those other things you listed would have drained the budget completely even if it was just for one episode.
    • ^^"And yet they had enough money for several CGI space battles." A CGI space battle is far cheaper and faster to make than a live-action ground battle sequence is to film. ^While I agree that the general suckitude of the Starfleet tactics used at AR-558 has been overstated, they still made several key errors. For instance, they didn't even attempt to collapse the cave entrance. At the very least this would have slowed the Jemhadar down, perhaps long enough for Starfleet to return and reinforce their position. But then, the Jemhadar weren't immune to this problem themselves. The disappearing-reappearing mines they set up were almost completely worthless. It hurt the morale of the Starfleet forces, sure, but they would have been much more effective if they worked like real mines. Instead of letting the enemy walk past the same spot a dozen times before exploding, they should have been set to drop out of their little subspace pocket and explode the first time someone got close to them. If they had done that, the Starfleet officers might have all been killed before Sisko ever made it to AR-558.
  • Apart from the budget, what kind of space armada would bother with ground equipment for most of its engagements? All the real battles would be fought among the stars. Over in the Mirror Universe, I recall the chilling ending to the Star Trek: Enterprise two-parter which had the Terran Empire's new Empress introducing herself to Earth by declaring "Surrender now or we'll begin targeting your cities." In other words, if they don't surrender, she's going to start blasting whole cities into oblivion with phasers and photon torpedoes from a Constitution-Class starship of the kind available to James T. Kirk in his time. If one of those ships has roughly the firepower of a nuclear-armed submarine fleet, it stands to reason that all the real action in these wars takes place between these starships. The only time to send in troops is while attempting to occupy a place, and once you've destroyed the other guy's shields, you can send them in directly with your transporters. Equipment intended for use in two-dimensional warfare is obsolete.
    • "...what kind of space armada would bother with ground equipment for most of its engagements?" Uh, the kind that sometimes needs to secure ground targets without completely demolishing them in the process? A salvo of modern-day ICBMs (with or without nuclear warheads) can utterly annihilate an enemy city from miles away, and yet the American government has yet to phase out the US Army. It's all well and good to say "Surrender or we'll glass your city from orbit" ...until someone calls your bluff. If your enemy knows you need the city intact, or is willing to gamble on you not being the type to wantonly slaughter civilians (which the Federation is decidedly not), then what do you do when you say "Surrender or else!" and the enemy responds "Or else what?"
    • "Or else we phaser you into submission!" It's not mentioned incredibly often, but a star ship's phasers can be set on stun just like the handhelds, and with a wide beam too. (See the original series episode "A Piece of the Action" for a demonstration of this.) Another possibility: "Or else we'll transport these six thousand troops we're carrying right into your citadel." Deep Space Nine in particular showed that the Federation does have some shock troops, and the Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" indicated that the Enterprise-D on war footing was capable of housing that many troops at a time. For that matter, considering some of the ruthless and downright genocidal enemies the Federation was facing in each series, it might well be willing to get a bit nastier and say "Or else we'll release this brand new silicon-based virus of ours on your planet; there's no known cure and it's extremely contagious and deadly." In the case of the Dominion War, this was the very kind of enemy the Federation was facing, and I should point out the Cardassians and Romulans certainly didn't pull any of their punches trying to slag (what they thought to be) the Founders' home world with their armada's weapons during their ill-fated attack on the Dominion. Again, some of the fighting was hand-to-hand or at least phaser-to-phaser, but this was mostly between troops on star ships and space stations, not on the ground. Having troops still makes sense in a future with energy shields and transporters, but making them march and roll artillery across a field at each other does not. Of course, over in the Mirror Universe, where neither the Terran Empire nor the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance had any scruples whatsoever against slaughtering civilians, there's no question at all that anyone would be using scorched-earth tactics early and often.
  • For the same reason that armies don't make rectangular formations on open fields and take turns shooting at each other anymore. Combat evolves over time, and what was once the most innovative tactic in the book is now obsolete.
    • There's a very real difference between "evolving over time" and abandoning a still useful tactic.
  • Rule of Drama and Rule of Cool basically; the Klingons are still using swords and not very efficient swords at that, but it's more entertaining to watch than both sides sitting in bunkers targeting one another with swarms of automated AP drones and different types of Technobabble from across the horizon.
  • Out-of-universe reason: because the writers assume a starship can do anything, including phasering into submission enemies in a bunker or an army covered by a tactical theatre shield. In-universe reasons: by the time we saw Federation ground forces they were in the non-militant TNG era, where their military abilities for ground combat had decayed to the point they can't even design a decent handguns are ergonomic nightmares; the Klingon we saw on the ground are space vikings and would naturally prefer blades to guns and other practical equipment (and even then they still used mortars in "Nor the Battle to the Strong"); by the time we saw the Jem'hadar army, the Dominion was forced to use a more aggressive and apparently less competent version of the Jem'hadar, they probably were just too stupid or aggressive to use them; other powers we never saw on the ground, so for what we know the Romulans and the Cardassians do have powerful armies (and that would explain Shinzon's status as a war hero in spite of his incompetence: if he's army he would have gained his reputation in ground battles, and his incompetence in Nemesis would be explained by him simply having no training in starship combat and improvising as best as he can).

I claim this planet in the name of...

• One thing that has never made much sense to me is the colonization and border procedures of the Federation (et al). Early in First Contact, Admiral Hansen relates that the Federation colony on Ivor Prime has been destroyed (he even describes it as "our colony"). A scene later, Picard states that the Borg ship "will cross the Federation border in less than an hour." So: Federation colonies lie outside the Federation's borders. This follows in a Space Is an Ocean kind of way... but does it really make sense? If the Federation has colonized a planet, why do the Federation's borders not then extend to claim it? This question touches on a set of broader issues: how does one claim a planet in space? How does one claim space itself? We have certainly seen examples of different powers disputing ownership of given worlds (Cestus III, for example, and the various border conflicts with the Cardassians, and the business with the Sheliak), which reminds us that there is no one agreed-upon way of claiming interstellar territory. So: just what constitutes the Federation's borders? And why establish colonies outside of them (especially considering that habitable yet uninhabited, M-class planets always seem to be in such plentiful supply)? And do said colonies outside of the Federation's borders not enjoy the Federation's protection... at least not the same degree as worlds within its borders?
  • Could be they're non-contiguous borders or an exclave and you have to fly through, say, Ferengi space to get to Ivor Prime. Or borders aren't perfectly even, but are a bit more "jagged" so a Borg ship flying straight for Earth would pass through Federation space when it hit Ivor Prime, then fly into Ferengi space and come out the other side into Federation space again.
    • Consider the United States of America, which includes states that are not geographically attached to the main portion of the country (Alaska and Hawaii) as well as territorial possessions like Puerto Rico. To get to Hawaii for example, you must actually leave U.S. territory and cross over the international Pacific Ocean. One of the weirder ideas of Star Trek (and a lot of other science fiction space nations) is that anyone would bother to make territorial claims to empty space. It could be argued that this is a security issue (you do not want Klingons buzzing around just outside the boundaries of the Sol System). But especially in the case of remote colonies, the Federation may not hold formal claim to all the space around them, especially if there are other civilizations in the area.
  • Some people may hate to think of the Federation this way, but it's basically a matter of power and control. If you have enough ships to take control of an area, and your enemies think it's too much of a risk to try and take it from you, then it's yours. Ergo, "Federation Space" is the area of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants where the Federation has undisputed control. The colonies outside this area are places where the Federation is still encroaching. In theory, those worlds will become part of Federation Space once the Federation solidifies its control over them.
    • Yes, but even in saying this, there needs to be formal, legal, recognized mechanisms in place to establish where these areas of control begin and end if you're going to call them "borders."
  • Trek has never shown an actual canonical map of the Federation, and has been rather inconsistent on this, but judging from what've seen on the various series, the most likely conclusion is that the Federation's borders are not contiguous, like most nation states today, but rather that Federation space consists of numerous pockets of worlds and colonies separated by stretches of open, unclaimed space.
  • Here is an intriguing question... what is the status of space itself in terms of ownership (especially the bulk of space that lies outside of solar systems)? Is it analogous to the ocean here on Earth — that is, no power can claim it beyond a certain distance? Or is it more like mountains or tundra or some other kind of terrain that you can't built large-scale settlements on but can put railroads or highways through — it's yours and only some sort of border dispute will suggest otherwise? Or is it some complex combination of the two, where there are spaceways or shipping lanes that are policed and maintained but beyond them an "open space" that's a kind of no man's land?
  • A possible complicating factor that seems to be ignored is that space is not static. Not only do planets rotate and revolve around a star but solar systems move within the galaxy. And the galaxy moves as well. Therefore it would be like the boundaries of the Federation would move. It is possible that movement could place colonies outside Federation territory atbtimes.

To boldly stay in federation space and fight our battles

• How come they hardly ever actually go "Where no man has gone before?" In a lot of the seasons the Enterprise is acting as a rescue ship, going down to Earth for shore leave, or no more than a week or two away from a Federation Starbase. TNG and DS9 had wars and border conflicts and all that going on but would it have been so hard for other Federation ships to fight there battles and the flagship, (which is primarily an explorer ship mind you) to be ordered to go to the closest place in the Delta Quadrant or just send more than one ship to explore further out there?
  • There are plenty of other long-range exploration vessels Starfleet uses. The reason why the Enterprise never ventures too far out of Federation space is because it's the flagship. It's the best ship and crew they have and its presence is intended to inspire and reassure allies and intimidate enemies. Picard's reputation and the Enterprise's namesake don't carry as much weight in truly uncharted space.
  • True but there must be more ships that can give them morale. Star Fleet at least in the TNG era had over 50 battleships ships in active duty. Plus it was there primary mission to explore strange new worlds. Not the other vessels. Something like the Defiant,(was that ship active before DS9?) could be refitted with most of the equipment the Enterprise has and could do the job quite well, provided they have a good crew.
  • It's not just that it's a Galaxy-class ship, it's the Enterprise. Name brand recognition, if you will. There ARE other ships that are doing deep space exploration, and the Enterprise does its share of it too, but it has to split its time between diplomatic missions and patrols. The Defiant is specifically designed as a warship and simply does not have the equipment for scientific missions that a class of ship designed for that purpose would. For the size, a Miranda-class would be much better, and we see them used frequently in TNG for just that purpose.
  • We see the Enterprise visiting unexplored areas within Federation space all the time. Presumably, Federation Space, Klingon Space, Romulan Space etc. is dividing between the areas of the galaxy that each power has managed to lay claim to, and considering how massive even just the 1/4th of the Milky Way galaxy is, it's easily possible that there is plenty of planets, stars, and so on that the Federation hasn't even encountered yet. The Federation is less "let's hide in our backyard while claiming to be explorers" and more like "let's find out the layout of our own backyard before we try to go into someone else's".
    • Most episodes take place within the region of space nominally claimed by the Federation, but which are entirely unexplored. In particular, some episodes like "Up The Long Ladder" and "The Masterpiece Society" involve rediscovery of early Earth colonies. Since Earth did not have fast warp drive in those days, these colonies cannot be very far from Earth itself. Yet they remained undiscovered for centuries. Prior to when DS9 tried to go all Star Wars and engage in Flaunting Your Fleets, it was originally stated that starships were very valuable, and not numerous. Even if Stafleet had hundreds of ships, they could not have done thorough exploration of every single star system in the Alpha Quadrant during the few centuries they have existed. Plus you have seemingly uninhabited planets ("The Devil In The Dark", "Home Soil", etc.) that turn out to have sentient life. Finally, there is all the territory held by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who don't care what lesser species like humans, Klingons or Romulans put on their star charts.
  • Good point. Though I would like to see more intergalactic travel. Hopefully if a new Star Trek series comes out they do so.
    • The post-DS9 and post-Voyager (non-canon) books set up for that. Once they get quantum slipstream drive working, Dax is rather peeved when Starfleet refuse to assign her ship to an exploration mission, as she was rather hoping she'd get to go to another galaxy. It's a bit of an off-hand comment (nobody else has yet either, it's not like there's not plenty of the Milky Way to explore still) but people are definitely thinking about it. I wouldn't hold your breath for another series with the movie reboot timeline going on though.

The Commodore Exclusion

• Why do you suppose the rank of commodore falls into disuse after TOS?
  • In most navies Commodore is the rank of the commander of a flotilla or squadron, and a separate role from that of an Admiral. Since the Next Generation era is both more peaceful and more peace-oriented, and focused on large individual ships on long-term solo missions, it's likely that Starfleet would de-emphasize the overtly military structures of the previous century. It might have made sense to bring it back for the Dominion War, especially for Sisko himself; on the other hand they had full-sized fleets and Admirals out in the field anyway.
  • Out-of-universe, they mirrored the US Navy renaming the rank as "rear admiral-lower half" (note the TNG rear admirals having both one and two pins on their rank badges). In-universe... Dunno.
• Commodore is back, baby!

Section 31?

• Why did the writers create Section 31? I mean it seems to run contrary to all Star Trek stands for doesn't it? What with Roddenberry's vision of the future being that we humans don't have "Big Brother" watching us from the shadows, doing nasty stuff that no one wants to think about because we'd grown out of our social and political infancy. I know I'm not all that comfortable with the idea, and I'm pretty sure Gene Roddenberry wouldn't have been all that keen on the idea while he was alive. So I guess my question is, why did the newer writers create it in the first place.
  • That's actually a really good question. In all honesty, I think most of the writers that came on after he died just lacked in vision and imagination. Now I'm not trying to be insulting but let's be honest. Behr himself once said "It's easy to be a saint in paradise. Why is Earth a paradise in the twenty-fourth century? Well, maybe it's because there's someone watching over it and doing the nasty stuff that no one wants to think about. Of course it's a very complicated issue. Extremely complicated. And those kinds of covert operations usually are wrong!" While Mr. Behr is right about modern earth, he seems to have forgotten that the story of Star Trek does not take place in a Dystopia. Like you said yourself, by the time of Star Trek we're supposed to have grown out of needing shadow government organizations and secret police. While I imagine that Mr. Behr, and people who simply don't like Gene Roddenberry have a counter argument for this observation, most likely that anyone who does not agree with them is being unfair. While many over the years have accused Roddenberry of being an evil, lying, stealing and sadistic a-hole (and you know who you are). Most people (including the writers) seemed to have forgotten that it's not so much the man behind the idea, but the idea itself that's important. And as to the writers, they seem to lack as much imagination when It comes to there work. Because what made Roddenberry's storytelling so great wasn't the internal conflicts, but external ones. Roddenberry's work could be provocative while still giving the audience a UFP as a happy-go-lucky place where everyone gets along and the Prime Directive is always right. He and his writing staff were just that talented.
    • Well first of all, this whole section seems more like complaining than a Headscratcher, and second, my response may be viewed as Natter, so both may be deleted. But for now, in response, the writers of TOS and TNG, to the extent that they avoided any internal conflict within the Federation, simply shipped all the problems over to aliens who weren't that advanced yet. That doesn't really take much more talent than writing about problems within the human civilization of the day. And you really didn't get to see much of how this happy-go-lucky place actually functioned, or what civilian life was like there, since those two shows took place entirely in space among interactions with aliens who almost always didn't share those values.
  • I'd say the writers' reasons for revealing that the Federation has a Section 31 to do its dirty work ties together with their reasons for bringing back the Mirror Universe in certain episodes and the popularity of some of those episodes with the fans. Regardless of his personal integrity or lack thereof, Roddenberry's utopian vision does come off as more than a bit naive. The original series episode "Mirror, Mirror" seems especially well-written in retrospect because the brutal and treacherous mirror versions of the crew seem a lot more believable as characters because they're so much like the people around us right now: acting more in their self-interest than anything else, for better or for worse. (Worse, mostly, though bearded Spock and Marlena did seem to have some decent and noble objectives.)
    
    Flash forward to Deep Space Nine, and not only are we back to dealing with the Mirror Universe again, but the station itself is parked right on the edge of the Federation in a politically sensitive spot between Bajor, Cardassia, and the Dominion. Unlike Kirk, Picard, or even Janeway, Sisko and his crew don't get to take off and leave the problem of the week behind them at the end of each episode. The Federation's dealings with other powerful political entities who don't play by the Federation's rules raise all kinds of complicated issues and problems for which the Federation's highly academic theoretical principles don't always provide any clear-cut practical solution. Section 31, for all of its shadiness, is not so much a government organization of secret police as it is an extra-governmental group that uses the loophole in Starfleet's charter from which it draws its name to justify "extreme measures" and underhanded dealing with other entities when the Federation is threatened. It's more like the CIA or some such than the secret police, though it's not officially recognized as a Federation entity. It also tends to serve mainly as a counterweight to the likes of the Romulans' Tal Sh'iar and the Cardassians' Obsidion Order.
    
    One should also note that real life continues to influence the plot; Roddenberry's humanistic optimism was particularly common in the interval between World War II and the Vietnam War when good and evil seemed especially clear-cut (evil = goose-stepping Nazis and godless Commies, good = freedom-loving Americans and refined civilized Europeans) and good had won a great victory over evil. It might have seemed to him that humanity was destined to go on improving itself not only materially but morally as well. Events of the last five decades, however, have greatly tarnished this kind of utopian optimism, giving rise to terrorism and corruption and cloak-and-dagger operations operating on, at best, a highly questionable kind of morality. Cynicism and pessimism have made their resurgence, rendering Roddenberry's vision rather dubious at best.
    
    Are we really to believe that the technology that can solve so many problems in this vision of the future wouldn't give rise to problems of its own? Phasers and photon torpedoes may be more precise than our bombs and missiles, but nothing guarantees they'd be used any more humanely. Can any government really be composed of a band of angels headed up by an archangel, even one as diverse and far-flung as the Federation? Moreover, when has any government ever not had some dirty work it needed done, whether or not it was willing to dirty its own hands with it? The writers weren't being lazy at all positing the existence of a Section 31; theirs is actually quite a realistic deduction from exploring the world of Star Trek in depth. Indeed, as the Enterprise prequel series suggests, it's likely some version of Section 31 has always existed; Kirk and Picard just never saw very much of it because they rarely came into contact with any of the Federation's dirtier business. Archer and Sisko, in contrast, are each on the very edge of the Federation's frontiers, where most of the dirty business that is the stock and trade of organizations like Section 31 is to be found.
• I thought the whole point behind Star Trek was that humanity and it's technology was inherently good? And that humanity would eventually mature enough to join the rest of the intergalactic community as equals and friends? I always thought that kind of optimism was ageless, is Roddenberry's vision really all that dubious?
  • Well you're right, I think that was Roddenberry's original point, but in fact I think it was even more naïve than that: that humanity was destined to be better and more mature than any other alien societies it was likely to meet. The only prominent alien species, at least as far as I can remember, that is portrayed as being more mature and refined than humans was the Vulcans (apart from a few isolated immortals and energy beings maybe), but even the Vulcans are portrayed as being less balanced than humanity, what with their rigid adherence to logic and suppression of emotion. TOS especially is mostly about humanity teaching other species how to live more ethically and be more civilized.
    But of course, that's Roddenberry's vision. He wasn't around for DS9. I'd say the point behind Star Trek as a whole has become simply to tell stories.
  • Roddenberry's original point was to fill us with hopeful confidence, not blind arrogance about humanity's future. The 23thrd and 24th century humans don't ignore human weakness, the show often reminded us that humans aren't perfect. For instance, not once did any of the five famous captains ever claim humans are better than any other species. They often did remind the audience that in order for our society to evolve, humans had to fight to overcome our weaknesses. Which, going back to the main point shows how much Section 31 runs counter to what the series as a whole is meant to represent.
    • That means that human societies evolved, but that of other species didn't. (Again, including all of the other major players in interplanetary politics.) That *is* arrogance. Not of the captains, but of the vision in the first place.
  • Are not both the characters and we the audience meant to be horrified by Section 31's tactics for precisely that reason? Recall Bashir's words: "This organization, this thing that's slithered its way into the heart of the Federation, has to be destroyed." The whole point is that the future is optimistic and near-Utopian, but it takes vigilance against forces from within and without to keep it that way.
    • Yep. it is Misaimed Fandom on an old fashioned power-fantasy, many of whom quite like the idea of being an "edgy" secret spy who gets to do all those nasty things that they wouldn't want done to themselves, but quite fancy being allowed to do to others. That and the idea that being morally conflicted is somehow the same as being mature and adult concepts. Section 31 is something to be abhorred and fought against, but some fans choose to embrace it.
    • I think they mostly embrace the plot point, not the organization itself.
    • Interestingly, Bashir clearly finds Section 31 appealing in a way for all of those same reasons, even as his strong sense of morality leads him to condemn it.
    • Hell, didn't one of the writers say that we're meant to think Section 31's defenses of what they do are meritorious? If so, Section 31 is Starship Troopers-esque bullshit, pure and simple. It's the same message of "You peaceniks are only able to sleep safely at night because Hard Men are making Hard Decisions for you that you can't possibly understand!"
    • I don't know if one of the writers said that, but who cares? Think what you like! It need not detract from your enjoyment of the story.
    • That's kind of a problem for me, because I don't believe in Death of the Author.
    • All it really means is: you, reader/viewer/whatever, get to decide for yourself. You are not beholden to an author's interpretation, but get your own. It's an odd thing not to believe in.
  • Put differently, why would the existence of Section 31 be any more of an intrinsic challenge to Star Trek's values than the self-motivated Admiral/Commodore/Ambassador trying to interfere with our heroes's mission for nefarious purposes — a stock Star Trek plot line since the very beginning? Merely because it implies something more systemic and ingrained that isn't as easy to write off as the actions of one jerk, but a sober look at Starfleet reveals that its higher echelons of power seem awfully corrupt anyway. An exchange from "The Pegasus" sticks with me: Admiral Pressman: "I have a lot of friends at Starfleet Command, captain!" Picard: "You're going to need them."
  • Actually, a valid question is why wouldn't the Federation have an organization like Section 31? No matter how Utopian the Federation itself might be, there is little evidence that the surrounding powers (Klingons, Romulans, Ferengi, Cardassians, etc...) are similarly enlightened. Perfect pacifism only works if everybody is a pacifist! Even Roddenberry grudgingly put guns in his characters' hands and on their ships in recognition that life forms and even non-living things from outside the Federation might be destructive and require force to be dealt with. However, not all hostile threats are overt, covert threats also exist. In the TNG episode "Data's Day", Picard is neatly tricked into transporting a "Vulcan ambassador" to "important negotiations" with the Romulans. In actual fact, she was a long-term Romulan spy and had artfully arranged for the Enterprise to give her a ride in style back to the Romulan Empire! So clearly Starfleet security is not up to the task of weeding out covert threats. Wouldn't it make sense to have an intelligence-centric organization tasked with countering the efforts of parallel organizations such as the Romulan Tal'Shiar and Cardassian Obsidian Order? Gene's vision was sort of soft when it came to alien threats. By the TNG timeframe his new primary villains, the Ferengi, were treated as almost comical from the get-go (e.g. "The Last Outpost"). Once he was kicked upstairs, later writers knew that a conflict-free future would be too boring for viewers. MAD Magazine would spoof this by stating that one TNG episode plot was "Like last week, when Deanna outwitted a devious hairstylist?". If they're going to have serious enemy threats, then isn't some kind of black ops organization as necessary as Starfleet itself? Especially if the goal is to allow the majority of the population to lead more morally-virtuous lives?
    • Intelligence-centric organization... Like Starfleet Intelligence? Section 31 isn't just Starfleet spy organization, they obviously already have that, it's an autonomous terrorist group (altho the exact relationship between them and Starfleet is left ambiguous). I don't believe their existence goes against Star Trek. Suggestion that they need to or should exist is another matter entirely.
  • Now the above argument actually does have some weight to it. After all Gene Roddenberry didn't create everything in Star Trek while he was alive, but he was the one who ultimately decided what was canon and what wasn't. When you think about it, story elements created after his death like Section 31 could be considered non-canon.
    • That Roddenberry "was the one who ultimately decided what was canon and what wasn't" is nominally true insofar as he liked to issue edicts like "Star Trek V is apocryphal!" in flailing attempts to exercise post hoc control over a franchise that lay in the hands of others (and which were promptly ignored by virtually everyone on the production end, even if they were accepted by some fans with particularly narrow horizons as to what counts as "legit" Star Trek). While one could regard story elements created after his death as non-canon if one so chose, that would be redefining "canon" into something extremely limiting, and if you wanted to be absolutely consistent, then EVERYTHING after his death would have to be consigned to the shadowy illegitimacy of non-canon... you shouldn't get to pick and choose.
  • Well, by the time Deep Space Nine rolled around, most of the writing staff and showrunners were brand new, Gene was dead, and Paramount was looking at Star Trek as a license to print money. A lot of those writers didn't really agree with Roddenberry's idea of utopia, or felt that it was impossible for humans to attain one, there had to be something dark and nasty at the heart of it. Thus was born Section 31. DS9 as a whole was a Darker and Edgier, borderline Deconstruction of the Star Trek itself, partly because a lot of people involved didn't know how to tell stories about "perfect" people (neverminding that, as pointed out, Star Trek humans are self-admittedly far from perfect) and the rest were interested in actually tearing this utopia apart narratively to see what interesting stories popped out.

Negotiating with Smegheads

Now, I will freely admit that I have seen less Trek than most, but I've seen the "We can't do ANYTHING to these people that might upset them because of the sensitive negotiations" plot device a number of times, and almost every time I've found myself wondering; why does the Federation constantly put up with negotiating with people who act openly hostile to them? "Code of Honor" from TNG, "The Way to Eden" from TOS... you figure Starfleet would demand that they be treated with the same respect they show the other party during talks of peace and/or trade, right?

• Usually in these situations the Federation has the weaker hand; they need something from the smegheads, the smegheads often don't need or want anything from the Federation at all. They have no leverage. (The ability to atomize the planet doesn't count, the Federation don't do or mention that sort of thing, period. That's not negotiation, it's piracy.) Philosophically, the Federation doesn't need a smeghead culture's respect in order to feel validated; and practically, because they're (supposedly) professional diplomats who are trained to eat up disrespect in order to do their jobs.
• The alternative point of view is that the Federation are the biggest smegheads of all; most of the people they interact with are responding understandably to the Federation regularly opening negotiations by parking a weapon of planetary destruction over their heads. The Federation diplomats have to be careful not to do anything more to upset the locals, when they tread so close to the brink of war as a matter of course.
• I give TOS a pass on this one. More often than not, when Kirk rolled into town, it meant that your entire culture was about to change forever. Is the leader of your society a computer/android/hologram? Expect Kirk to Logic Bomb it back to the stone age, and then give a Kirk Summation about how you should make decisions for yourself. Fighting a centuries-long war? Kirk will force you to either make peace, or be turned into radioactive mist by your enemies. Has your culture modeled itself on a misplaced gangster novel? Kirk will try to fix the damage for a while, then throw up his hands and declare himself the new don, demand protection money, and if you don't like it, you can take it up with the big-ass phasers I've got pointed at your city. It wasn't limited to Kirk, either. One guy thought it would be a good idea to turn a planet into Nazi Germany. Nicolas Meyer described TOS antics as Gunboat Diplomacy for good reason, and that point is pretty hard to argue.

Earth is the Federation?

• The Federation is a political alliance of multiple intelligent species, each of them with distinct cultures, distinct senses of aesthetics, distinct values and morals...except Humans? Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single aspect of Federation society that isn't also, coincidentally, a Human one as well. It's been discussed elsewhere that Humanity appears to be the only race in Star Trek without a "Hat." Is this because the Federation and Earth are basically the same thing? Is Federation culture at large indistinguishable from Human culture? Was the role Humanity played in creating the Federation so enormous that there's no way to separate the two?
  • Earth is not the Federation. It is a MEMBER of the Federation, more specifically one of the founding members. It is also the location of it's HQ primarily because of that fact. There are many more civilizations that are a part of the United Federation of Planets, about 150 if I remember correctly. However, all of those members still have their own laws and governments (including Earth) separate from the UFP. The best way it think about it is to look at it in resemblance to the European Union or even the United Nations.
    • Not true. At least, it does not seem to be. For example, the Federation (and Starfleet specifically) enforces a ban on genetic augmentation that is based entirely on Earth's bad experiences centuries ago! This appears to be a blanket prohibition affecting all member worlds and species, despite the fact that the Eugenics Wars were limited only to Earth. So, for example, Julian Bashir's parents had to go through illegal means to have their son's genetic defects corrected. They apparently could not even have sought citizenship on a nonhuman Federation member planet and gotten the genetic treatment done there legally.
    • Presumably seeing one world suffer the effects of a controversial technology is bad enough, and the other Federation worlds agreed that they didn't want to repeat the Eugenics Wars' horrors themselves. Kemocite was probably banned for the same reason: the Xindi tried to destroy Earth with it, hence nobody wants that stuff being traded without regulation. Perfectly understandable.
    • Fridge Brilliance: Earth's the only one who needed to make anti-genetic augmentation laws, because the other Federation members weren't stupid enough to cross that line in the first place. One can picture the Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites looking at the humans and saying "You people did what? I'm amazed you still have a planet!"
  • Note that there are Federation-wide laws that have little or nothing to do with Earth. Tallonian crystals, for example, are illegal anywhere but the Tallonian home world, so presumably the Tallonians are the ones who pressed for restricting their export.
  • This is very much a case of Depending on the Writer. It is not uncommon for storylines to assume that the destruction of Earth would mean the immediate collapse of the Federation. Likewise, humans make up a visible majority in Starfleet and appear to have the largest number of interstellar colonies. This is because Earth Is the Center of the Universe and Humans Are Special. Other species often seem to be confined to their home worlds, and have few, if any, colonies.
    • This was a major consequence of the 2009 Star Trek. For some reason (probably just to heighten the sense of tragedy), virtually the entire Vulcan species lived on Vulcan itself, and was wiped out when Nero destroyed the planet! Only a small minority of space-traveling Vulcans survived (Word of God claims around 10,000). Which is extremely bizarre since Vulcans have canonically had interstellar space travel capability for thousands of years! That's how the Romulans came to be a separate race! Yet apparently other than the Romulan sub-species (and possibly a few others) there were seemingly no other Vulcan colonies of note.
    • In TOS, Spock is the only non-human (well, half-human) regular among the crew of the Enterprise. It is further noted that it is not common for Vulcans to serve in Starfleet, which is why he was on the short list of candidates to make telepathic contact with the Medusan ambassador Kollos in "Is There In Truth No Beauty?". The Betazoids do not appear to have joined the Federation yet at this point, as Vulcans are their primary source of telepaths.
    • The very first episode of TNG "Encounter At Farpoint", involves Q intercepting the Federation starship Enterprise and putting humanity on trial! No mention is made of the 149 or so other species, despite the (half-)Betazoid sitting next to Picard and the Klingon behind him. This trend would continue throughout the series, with "The Federation" and "Starfleet" being treated as synonymous with "human". In fact, when questioned about being a Betazoid, Deanna clarifies that she is only half-Betazoid and that her father was "a Starfleet officer", the implication being that meant that he was a human, since she apparently felt no need to specify his species.
    • Quark is prone to commenting on this on DS9. Dax, and later Worf, are the only non-human Starfleet regulars until Nog signs up (Kira is technically with the Bajoran government, and Odo is the station constable, not a Starfleet officer). He also tends to use "The Federation" and "humans" interchangeably quite often.
    • In VOY, B'Elanna Torres expresses worry over raising her part-Klingon daughter on a starship where she explicitly points out nearly all of the crew are humans.
    • The Federation civilian government, as depicted in the films, contains many aliens, although the capital of the Federation is Earth. But Starfleet admirals seem to almost invariably be human (or at best Human Aliens).
  • I believe Robert Hewitt Wolfe or one of the other DS9 writers stated that they saw the Federation as entity where each member world had it's own sovereign government, and largely managed their own internal affairs, except for Earth. Earth is most analogous to Washington DC in the US. DC does not have home rule, but Congress has jurisdiction over it. Similarly, the government of Earth IS the Federation government, while the different member worlds, like Vulcan, have their own governments.
  • From what we've seen on-screen, Earth and mankind hold an enormous preeminence in the Federation: Starfleet descends from a United Earth organization, aside for the odd non-integrated starship Starfleet crews are mostly humans, the Starfleet admirals and politicians we've seen are for the majority humans, and Earth is the seat of the government, the legislature and Starfleet Command (and most likely the judiciary too, but that I don't recall ever having been mentioned on-screen). On why is that... Let's see the founding races at the time of the birth of the Federation: the Vulcans, a technologically advanced race with a somewhat racist mindset that at the time of the founding had just seen most their whole mindset turned upside-down, and that could have also had the government subverted for a while by the Romulans during the war (McCoy once mentioned that Vulcan got conquered, and that's the most likely way it happened); the Tellarites, a decently advanced race with a penchant for picking verbal fights with everyone; the Andorians, a militaristic race with technology and might comparable to the Vulcans and on the verge of war with them and the Tellarites until recently; and the Humans, the guys who brought the afore-mentioned guys together in a working organization and apparently led the fight against the Romulans (otherwise, why would it be called Earth-Romulan War?). Which one of the four founding races is the most likely to have preeminence on the others?
  • Humans may simply have a Hat after all: they happen to like space travel, and/or the sort of life offered by Starfleet, more than most other Federation races do. The other Federation races probably think of us as inherently nomadic, unable to settle down for any reasonable period of time - say, ten or twelve generations - before we're off and searching for new places to live and trade.

Enterprise Exceptionalism: Concerning letters

• The Enterprise always has the same registry number reused with a letter added, to E that we've seen and all the way up to J at some point in a possible far-flung future. However, you never see another ship with a "low number here-G" as a designation in the time of TNG/DS9/VOY. Even when the ship the guest star of the week came in on has the same name as a TOS ship, it won't have the same number plus a letter. I know the Enterprise is the flagship, but no other ship has ever done anything worthy of having the next one be the Whatever-A? And you'd think a military (at least mildly so) organization would have to either have the name-old-number-D naming as either A Thing or Not A Thing, not "we're gonna do this weird unprecedented thing that's nowhere in our rule book for this one ship and this one ship only."
  • Making it even odder is that only one other ship has ever explicitly had a lettered suffix: the USS Yamato in "Where Silence Has Lease" (NCC-1305-E). Even though that ship turned out to be fake, there's no reason to think that the registry number would be anything other than accurate. But when the genuine article appears in "Contagion," its registry has changed to NCC-71807. Weird.
  • If the Expanded Universe/Fandom theory that 'NCC' stands for 'Naval Construction Contract' is correct, it seems likely that Federation ships aren't usually given a name until well into the ship's construction (possibly until they're nearly completed). It seems to be tradition that ships named Enterprise belong to Starfleet's most advanced, state-of-the-art class of capitol ships, so Starfleet probably knows exactly which upcoming vessel will carry that name far in advance of that ship actually being laid down (I've always thought that Starfleet probably intended for Enterprise-A to be an Excelsior-class vessel, not a renamed Constitution). In other words, most ships have names that were attached to an anonymous contract number; whereas the starships Enterprise are issued a contract number that reflects Starfleet's intention to give them that legacy name.
  • I've always felt it was an extremely rare honor where Starfleet orders a new ship to replace an older one and specifically wished to evoke and honor the accomplishments of the previous ship to bear the name by giving it the previous ship's registry number and the letter postfix. For what it's worth, the producers of DS9 intended for the new U.S.S. Defiant to explicitly be the Defiant-A with the same registry, but they weren't able to justify the production costs associated with that for just the one episode (the series finale). [1]
    • Which is made extra funny by the fact that it's at least the third ship of its name.

Starfleet Academy for Gifted Youngsters

• Does anyone else find it strange that Starfleet does not appear to have any kind of formalized training program for cadets and crew possessing psychic powers? In cases such as Spock, Troi and Tuvok, they invariably seem to have received whatever training they have on their home planets by members of their own species. This training may or may not be formal. For example, Troi's mother actually criticizes her for not honing her telepathic potential more, to which Troi's defense is basically that she didn't want to. Yet the use of those abilities is an integral part of Troi's job on the Enterprise! Why would Starfleet allow for an ability that is part of an officer's job function to go untrained? Are security officers allowed to skip hand-to-hand combat training, or even a simple physical fitness regimen, on the basis of not feeling like pursuing them? Since there are entire species with psychic abilities, finding qualified instructors should not be difficult.
  • Spock and Tuvok received their training on Vulcan, and both exhibited an interest in keeping their mental abilities finely-honed. Both practiced Vulcan meditation disciplines regularly and treated their use of the mind meld as a kind of Sufficiently Analyzed Magic.
  • Deanna Troi, in contrast, is very informal about how she uses her powers, and is never shown as doing any kind of mental exercises even though on at least one occasion we see her mother, recognized as an advanced telepath, meditating. Her powers are seen as invaluable to the ship, yet ironically they appear to be largely untrained.
  • As far back as TOS ("Where No Man Has Gone Before"), Starfleet was apparently testing cadets for ESP. But no indication that this ever became more than a note in their personnel records was ever given.
  • Also in in TOS ("Is There In Truth No Beauty"), a rare human telepath, Dr. Miranda Jones, is being employed by Starfleet to work with an alien ambassador. It is noted that she received her telepathic training on Vulcan (granted she is not a member of Starfleet).
  • As psychic phenomena are commonly encountered by Starfleet ships, it seems odd that they have no formal curriculum at the Academy for training psychic cadets, nor are psychic phenomena studied as a scientific topic, as most encounters with such abilities are often handled ad hoc.
  • Vulcan and Betazoid psychic powers are very different phenomena, manifesting in completely different ways in the two species. It's likely that whatever training they get on their homeworlds is the best training available for their specific abilities, and there's really no way for Starfleet to top it. Additionally, Troi's psychic powers are notintegral to her job, her job is the ship's counselor, and I believe it's actually stated in one episode that she doesn't use her empathy on her patients, because it actually makes the job of providing therapy for them harder instead of easier. Her empathic abilities are a special skill that she has that Picard occasionally finds useful, but her role on the ship is not be a "walking Oujia board." So Starfleet has no reason to lament her lack of discipline in honing her abilities, since it's not an integral part of job she was hired for, just a side-benefit that sometimes comes in handy. Like Worf's various bladed weapons; they're not an official part of his job as Chief of Security, just a hobby that sometimes turns out useful. Starfleet can't gripe if he doesn't keep those weapons in perfect condition at all times, because they're not why he was given the post. Worf would be expected to keep whatever Starfleet-issued weapons and equipment he had in good working order, because they're important to his job, just like Troi would be expected to keep her psychology credentials up-to-date, but the blades/psychic powers are sideline.
    • Troi relies heavily on her empathy both in her function as a bridge advisor to the captain, and in providing therapy to patients. To the point that she actually tries to resign both her commission, and her position as ship's councilor when she thinks she's lost the ability in "The Loss." In fact, in that episode she was utterly flabbergasted when she realizes she was actually able to help a patient relying only on her training as a physiologist, instead of her empathic abilities. I think you're misremembering a line where she states that Betazoids don't make good animal trainers because they tend to get too caught up in the animals' emotions during the training.

Pilots in command division

• The uniform colors indicate what division the crew member is in: gold for command, red for operations, blue for sciences (the former two colors get switched around for the TNG era). But why are the helmsmen/navigators/flight controllers in the command division, as indicated by their uniform colors? Given that their job seems to be more technology based, with charting courses, choosing speeds, wouldn't it make more sense to put them in the operations division?
  • Helmsmen are regularly called upon to take over the bridge if the immediate command staff are otherwise engaged. Yes, their role requires technical skill and equipment, but so do those of actual captains and first officers. Plus, helmsman-to-command is probably a somewhat more common career path than, say, communications-to-command or transporter-technician-to-command.

Division colors

• As mentioned in the previous folder, the crew is divided into three divisions, commanding officers, pilots, and navigators are command division, engineers, communications, security and other technical skills are operations, and scientists, medical staff, and counselors are sciences. Command wears gold in ENT and TOS and red in TNG era, operations wear red in ENT and TOS and gold in TNG era, while sciences were blue in both cases. However in the TOS movies, the color system becomes more complex, with more color options that span divisions. In the Motion Picture, with division being indicated by patches, command wears white, engineering wears red, helm, communications and navigation wear yellow, science wears orange, medical wears green, and security wears gray. Then from Wrath of Khan onwards, the colors are command white, engineering and helm yellow, science, communication, and navigation gray, and medical green. Why did they change to a more complex system and then go back to a more simple one?
  • Someone higher up decided that a change was needed, and their successor decided to go back. This happens *all the time* in real life; the US Navy for example has changed working uniforms three times between 2008 and 2016, while at the same time introducing a new service uniform, replacing two combat uniforms, restoring an old dress uniform, and flirting with restoring another. The Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps have all changed uniforms as well in the same time frame. Reasons include adapting to changing combat circumstances, adapting to changing social norms, keeping up with civilian fashion, admirals trying to "leave their mark" on the service, and so on.
  • In the case of Star Trek, it may also be necessary to change their uniforms' color scheme on occasion to ensure that all member species of the Federation can see the differences between uniforms. Possibly the abortive use of white for command was a concession to some newly-admitted race whose vision extended into the ultraviolet, and "white" was really UV-that-looks-white-to-humans. Eventually the new species became sufficiently integrated into the larger Federation that such a gesture was no longer necessary, and they went back to a simpler system, using three colors that every sighted Federation race could distinguish by hue, shade, and/or intensity.

Why No Transhumanism Allowed?

• The Federation is a pretty liberal and tolerant society, except for one glaring exception: Transhumanism. There seems to be a clear cultural bias against anything Transhuman. Genetic engineering is forbidden, and the Borg are considered to be the Federation's greatest enemy. The argument can be made that this bias is political - the Borg are overtly hostile, after all - but it seems almost unreasonable at times. There are many benefits to genetic engineering which are ignored just on general principle, and a Hive Mind is not an inherently evil concept. But these concepts are rejected or considered wrong just out of hand. What's going on there?
  • The single biggest reason for outlawing genetic engineering is the Eugenics Wars - i'm sorry if I sound rude, but this was pointed out many times on-screen and is the basis for Dr Bashir's entire backstory. We can debate how wise or ridiculous that decision is, but there is a clear cut reason and the Feds went for it all the way instead of cherry picking the good and the bad. And as for the hive mind not being an inherently evil concept, that depends entirely on what your view of personal freedom and individuality is. If I have learned anything from Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Archer and Janeway, it is that the Feds consider these things second only to food and air. They would fight you to the death no matter how benign your hive mind is before they let you plug it in to their crew and proof of this is everywhere. Look at Riker and Pulaski gunning down their clones, look at the Voyager episode Unity, look at Seven of Nine's story arc, look at how Picard reacts to Hugh, look at how Janeway rationalises killing Tuvix or how Archer rationalises killing Trip's clone.
  • The real reason is because transhumanism evokes Nazi eugenics in the minds of most writers. So only villains tend to be transhumanists in fiction, especially pop fiction. The Borg turn people into machines literally, just as dictatorships try to do figuratively. Genetic engineering types try to replace the genetically inferior with the genetically superior, which sounds Naziish even if the details make it extremely different. Since writers tend to make villains metaphors for old school evil IN SPACE, they expand those superficial similarities into being outright alien versions of Nazis and Commies and Monarchies, and so forth.

Naming of wars

• Is it me or the names of wars in the Star Trek Universe make no sense? Isn't calling something "the Dominion War" or the "Cardassian War" like calling World War II the "German War" or the Cold War the "Russian War"?
  • War nomenclature is rather inconsistent by nature... mostly what journalists and historians glom onto. Consider "The Crimean War" (where it took place), "the Boer War" (who the war was fought against), "the Opium Wars" (the trade good over which they were fought), "the Six-Day War," "the Seven Years War" or "the Thirty Years War" (the length of the conflict), "the War of 1812" (when it started), "Metacomet's War" (the person who triggered it), "the Soccer War" (the event that precipitated it), "the War of Jenkins' Ear" (long story)... Any name is a name of convenience, so while the Federation might use "Dominion War," naming the main combatant, other powers might call it "the Federation-Dominion War" or "the Multi-Quadrant War" or something else. There are numerous names for the American Civil War that frame the conflict in different ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_American_Civil_War.
  • To add to the above, the initial name for WWI favoured in North America was "the European War"... which scarcely assumes that no war has ever been fought in Europe.
  • Kind of amazingly, the phrase "Dominion War" is only spoken twice: in "Valiant" and in Nemesis. Far more often it's simply "the war," which needs no further explanation in context.

How Long Before They Name a Ship After You?

• We've seen quite a few ships named after historic figures, but they're all historic to us. Hood, Farragut, Zhukov, Grissom, Pasteur - all of these names were famous in the 20th Century or earlier. (I seem to remember there being a Cochrane at some point, too, so let's extend it into the mid-21st.) So at what point did Starfleet stop naming its ships after its heroes? Wouldn't it make sense for there to be an Archer by the TOS era, or a Decker or Kirk or Pike by TNG? Especially the latter two - they can name ship after ship for the one they commanded, but not for the men themselves?
  • It's a good point, but there are a few exceptions. There is a U.S.S. Gorkon in TNG, for example, and a U.S.S. Archer in a graphic in Nemesis. There's a shuttlecraft Pike in "The Most Toys." There are also plenty of ships with names like Lantree or Frederickson or Curry or Donovan or G'Mat that might well be named for future historical figures that we just don't know about.
  • There was also a Starship Chekov which was destroyed at Wolf 359 (the ship's name was on the filming model that appeared in the starship graveyard scene, so it's canon). We can't say for certain that this ship was named for Pavel A. Chekov, but it's a pretty safe bet that it was. In fact, the Trek reference book authored by production designers Mike and Denise Okuda—"The Star Trek Encyclopedia"—notes that the ship was "Named for the noted Russian space explorer."
  • Also there was a U.S.S. Sarek in "Favor the Bold," so apparently they can name a ship for you pretty quickly after death or maybe even before.
  • I wonder if Kirk remained controversial in death, and that there was also some Kirk-hater nixing naming things after him, even a century later.
  • Not that long. Star Trek Online in one of the fairly early storyarcs features a USS Opaka.

Why have Starfleet security protocols become less secure between the 23rd and 24th century?

• In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the mere act of opening a classified file requires Kirk to go through a retinal scan to confirm his identity. However, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and other series set in the 24th century, voice recognition and short security codes enough to give the computer any command whatsoever, including the activation of the self-destruct sequence. And it's not like the computer scans for some other biometric data besides the voice: in the TNG episode "Brothers", Data is able to impersonate Picard by simply imitating his speech. So the question is, why has Starfleet security seemingly degraded in the decades between TOS and TNG?
  • The Federation's complacency and ego is a key plot point throughout the first two seasons of TNG (whether this was intended to be the case or not is debatable). And you can see this everywhere in the early days (I would recommend watching SF Debris for specific examples). Basically, in the 22nd through 23rd centuries, Earth Starfleet and the Federation was smaller, the frontier was larger and they were in the middle of a cold war with the Klingons - thus they acted like soldiers. Their security was tighter, their ships looked more rugged and they were on the lookout for threats from every corner. By the 24th century however, the Federation is easily the top dog in the Alpha Quadrant, with the Romulans nowhere to be seen, the Klingons as allies, and the Cardassians yards behind technologically. Out came the beige corridors, the counselor on the bridge, the hand phasers that looked like vacuum cleaners instead of guns and the belief that they were pretty much invincible. This in fact, is pretty much the plot of Q Who. They thought that they were invincible, and when the Borg and the Dominion showed up, it was too late; they had to relearn the old ways on the fly with ships designed for a different era. They are slowly getting there though: compare the Federation post Wolf 359 and Dominion War and you start to see a wholly different organization - grey uniforms, battleship-like starships and rapid fire weapons.
  • It's understandable that the aforementioned complacency would lead into Starfleet not developing new security measures, but why would they decide to give up using ones they already have? Even if it's not wartime, there's still the risk of the various aliens and entities the Enterprise meets trying to hijack it's systems, which happens numerous times, in episodes like "11001001".
  • Actual reason: Watching characters go through extensive visible and obvious biometric security measures every time they want to do something important would make the flow of the episodes drag and decrease dramatic tension for everyone who doesn't get excited by extensive visible and obvious biometric security. A movie has more time and pacing ability to work with and someone probably wanted to show off their own security knowledge, thus the retina scan for that but not for any of the TV episodes.

Who did Chekov piss off?

• In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Chekov's career has advanced to the point that he's XO of a major vessel on a top-secret mission. This is a pretty big deal, with the next step being a command of his own. Why, then, after the events of III and IV, do we see him serving as navigator on Enterprise-A? This is a major demotion - at best, he's now fourth in command (Kirk, Spock, Scotty are all higher in the chain, and Sulu (before his promotion) and Uhura may be as well). And besides Kirk (whose demotion was an Un Ishment), he's the only member of the main cast whose career was affected. So what happened? Did he get scapegoated for the loss of the Reliant, despite Terrell being the commanding officer?
  • Given that the Reliant was a smaller ship than the Enterprise-A, being fourth in command on the latter might comparatively be more prestigious than second in command on the former, the same way being second in command on a large battleship might be considered more important than commander of a small frigate.
    • That seems unlikely. The Reliant according to canon is a Miranda class vessel about 80% of the size of Enterprise, with proportionately scaled down but otherwise similar capabilities, which would be analogous to the comparison of say, a USN Arleigh Burke class destroyer and a Ticonderoga class cruiser. In principle these differ in capability and role, but are in practice interchangeable for the most part, and the difference in rank seniority between the two is NATO OF-6 vs OF-5, with even that distinction appearing hard to justify given that the USN intends to replace the Ticonderogas with Flight III Arleigh Burkes. I suspect the real reason is that the writers wanted to put the old crew back together and assumed that the audience wouldn't think too hard about it.

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