SFdebris

This is Star Trek. You don't find things like 'reasonable floor plans', 'practical ship designs', 'sane working conditions', or 'believable military tactics' in Star Trek.

Not until they hired an ex-Navy man as a writer, anyway.

Gene was more of an armchair quarterback/general.

Well if they did that Star Fleet would be no different then the Dominion!

Ah, touche!

In all fairness, you don't find believable military tactics in like, any fiction ever. (Okay, so in 99.999999999999% of thereof)

edited 8th Oct '14 5:14:52 PM by CobraPrime

I think that's what won a lot of people over with Stargate SG-1. Especially compared on the curve of regular hollywood, it was practically a documentary on how things would logically done.

Gene Roddenberry was a pilot in the Air Air Force during World War Two. However, he had some weird ideas about the military, I suspect his experience with the LAPD kinda shaped how he wanted "Starfleet" to run.

Not helping matters was having Berman and Bragga mangle science. Like youse guys pointed out, Ron Moore did have some time in the Navy...but he dropped out of college. That did give him a leg up on Michale Pillar and B&B.

There's a difference between things like tactics, which were usually ranged between being very basic or totally nonsensical, and the concept that the role of the forces could be subsumed by something that wasn't primarily a military organisation. An organisation which practised codes, procedures and ideology that wouldn't fit a contemporary or historical army.

Which lead to stuff like the Federation flagship- the one sent into a dangerous situation about once a week- having children aboard. Because utopia.

Time Enough at Last

Yes its not Fair

edited 9th Oct '14 10:08:45 AM by FrozenWolf2

What did he say in the middle?

Did anyone else ever notice how after Star Trek VI you stopped seeing anything 'Federation' that wasn't also 'Starfleet'? How the only privately owned starships were third parties outside the Federation, and how almost all of the time Starfleet Admirals were in charge of diplomatic negotiations? I have a little bit of personal fanon that explains the big difference between Kirk's Federation and Picard's.

Remember how Starfleet couldn't have cloaking devices thanks to the 'Treaty of Algeron' following an event known as the 'Tomed Incident'? Supposedly, a Romulan Warbird crashed into a Starbase, and it's singularity drive going up wiped out thirteen Federation outposts, causing both sides to come to an agreement before things got ''really' ugly? Only it was a set up, and none of the outposts that were destroyed actually had anybody on them, wasn't the Federation clever?

Lies. All of it. It's what the Federation wants you to believe happened, because the truth is nowhere near as flattering of the Federation as they'd like it to be.

This is the tale of the time between Kirk and Picard. The time of the Enterprise-B. And the time of the Excelsior.

Now, depending on whether or not you count Generations as canon (and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't, I like to think Scotty's line in Relics gives you a loophole), Kirk may or may not be dead. Him being dead makes this simpler, and if he isn't he doesn't. It's possible that, with McCoy head of Starfleet Medical, Sulu a captain, Scotty retiring and then going missing, and the rest doing who gives a fuck, Kirk just didn't feel like sticking around San Fransisco and buggered off somewhere. Now that I think about it, Scotty vanishing gives us a perfect out. Kirk did get the Enterprise-A out of mothballs to go looking for him, he just got even more lost on the trip than Scotty did. Maybe Uhura, Chekov, Chapel and anyone I'm forgetting went with him, maybe they didn't. The point is, Kirk's not a player in this. You've got Sulu, Kirk's (sort-of, I guess you could call him that) Protege, on the Excelsior, and you've got Captain Dipshit on the Enterprise-B, the pathetic and utterly unworthy heir to Kirk's Legacy, and then the rest of Starfleet. On second thought, fuck that guy. After the disastrous shakedown cruise, E-B gets a new captain. Some guy who's younger than most captains but very experienced, served on some big-name ships, got fast-tracked to command cuz they could tell he had the balls for it. So we've got Ex and E-B leading the way, Starfleet looking at designing new ships for the coming era, peace with the Klingons, the future's so bright I gotta wear shades, etc.

BAM. Romulan invasion. They ain't using Klingon ships anymore either, they're fielding the first generation of Warbirds, and they mean business. Klingons and Federation getting along? Bad, they might team up and curb stomp the Romulans. Better hit them now, while the Klingons are too weak to do much and the Feddies are still distracted by the end of an era and shit. Was there ever an in-universe discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of phasers and photons vs disrupters and plasma torpedoes? Never mind, not important to discussion. Federation's caught flat-footed. Romulans always took back seat to Klingons, captains not so versed in fighting them. Turning into Mordin Solus, but never played Mass Effect 2. Off topic. Federation's on the defensive and not doing well. Most of that planned next generation of ships never see the light of day. Not enough time. Have to keep the ships already in service in the fight. Only new ships getting built are Excelsiors. Excellent all-arounder cruiser. Cost of construction vs returns equals happy face. Towards end of war Constellation and Centaur classes introduced, along with Soyuz-variant of Miranda class. Getting ahead. During war, ship upgrades vs new designs.

Not enough. Federation ships of the time were not standardized. Despite officially being the standing space force of the Federation, Starfleet was still mostly humans at the time. Other member races had their own ships, own fleets. Different designs, different strategies, hard to coordinate mixed-unit forces. Even worse, Romulan infiltrators were everywhere. Civilian organizations kept turning up compromised. Many privately owned stations and outposts were full-on collaborators by that point.

Things were looking bad. Like, worse than Enterprise bad. Desperate, the Federation started negotiations with the Klingons, and by negotiations I mean "HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLP!!!" The Klingons weren't too sure. Yeah, so they were friends now, or at the very least no longer enemies, but the Empire was still dealing with that whole "our moon blew up and wrecked our homeworld" thing. In response the Federation handed over the old Neutral Zone territory to them, along with some of the Federation border worlds. This is why Khitomer, a planet located in the Neutral Zone in Star Trek VI, is a Klingon colony world come The Next Generation. It also didn't hurt that Romulan infiltrators were found in the Klingon government (probably by Sulu or Cameron Frye's replacement.) With the Klingons aiding the Federation, things got better. A bit. What with Romulan ships being dedicated warships while the Federation ones were a bit more general-purpose, things were still rough. Presumably, the Excelsior and/or the Enterprise-B crews were doing stuff like 'prevent the Romulans using the Guardian of Forever to mess with the Federation's history' and shit like that.

So we've got a deadlock here. The Romulans are attacking on one front and defending on another, but they've got the edge in manpower and resources. The Feds and Klingons are both running on fumes with outdated ships and dwindling stockpiles. Desperate for ships, Starfleet pulls all the old Constitution class ships out of storage and send them into battle. But since the Constitution class was outdated before the war started, serving on them was pretty much a guaranteed death sentence. As far as big ships went, the only thing Starfleet had that was worth talking about was the Excelsior class. Bigger, tougher, and better armed, the Excelsiors were the backbone of the Federation forces during (and after) the war. Starfleet experimented with taking Constitutions apart and putting them back together differently, but these variants were little better.

Behind the scenes, something big was happening. Whether through misfortune or sabotage, critical parts of the Federation's civilian government were eliminated. Some were destroyed from within by spies, others simply shut down due to the death and destruction. Starfleet basically absorbed large amounts of the government, leaving much of the actual political power in the hands of the military. While the Federation President could still overrule any action Starfleet took, most of the basic functions of the government and it's bureaucracy were now handled by Starfleet officers. This new, bigger Starfleet took every advantage of the situation that it could. It basically dissolved all of the separate member world's governments, reducing them local extensions of Federation law. Likewise, Starfleet dismantled all of the separate space forces, using the excuse of battlefield cohesion to enforce Earth's starship designs on the other races. Under further actions justified to the public as 'necessary for national security', Starfleet utterly obliterated the Federation's private sector. Everything was either nationalized or liquidated, and all Federation space stations, outposts, starships, businesses and scientific organizations became Starfleet departments. The Federation currency was done away with, in favor of a socialistic system designed to trap everyone already in the system from leaving. News, communications, transportation, it was now all under Starfleet's direct control. Secure in it's control of the Federation's resources, Starfleet began taking more extreme and riskier actions in order to end the war.

Finally, a way out. One of the starship prototypes had just what they needed. It would be revolutionary. Faster, tougher, and more maneuverable than the Excelsiors, it was armed with experimental phaser beam weapons, far more potent than the pulse cannons carried at the time. It also came with a more advanced photon torpedo launcher, enabling it to fire multiple torpedoes more rapidly than the current ships. It was the Ambassador class, and it would win the war.

Starfleet pretty much blew it's entire load on the Ambassadors, sinking everything they had into producing as many as they could, as fast as they could. The upshot was that, short of a literal miracle, it'd be at least half a century before they could scrounge up the materials to do anything besides maintain the ships they already had. Anything new would be a rare occasion for some time, and an entire generation of Starfleet officers would spend their careers serving on ships old enough to have been in service before they were born.

Starfleet considered it a pretty fair trade. Like the Excelsiors, the Ambassadors hit the engineering cost-benefit sweet-spot, essentially being the best possible ship Starfleet of that time could ever think up. It was the perfect blend of battlecruiser and deep-space explorer needed to win this war, and Starfleet took full advantage of that. The U.S.S. Ambassador and her sister ships were now leading the fight, while the Excelsiors shifted into a 'workhorse' role that they would stay in for, pretty much forever.

The war was a mixed blessing for the Klingons as well. Sure, they got the territory and resources they needed, but the fight against the Romulans saw a lot of the established generation killed in battle, while the replacement generation got caught up in a cultural upheaval sparked by the war affecting all aspects of Klingon life. Basically, all the Klingons were getting into the fight, even the ones who had fulfilled other societal and cultural functions, and this new generation of 'warriors' decided to model itself on ancient history. This is why the cultured, sophisticated, organized and militaristic Klingons in Star Trek Vi were replaced by a bunch of drunken, bellowing yahoos who couldn't strategize their way out of a wet paper sack. Their entire culture and understanding of who they were became based on a two-dimensional, heavily idealized version of the past, turning a galactic superpower into a race of renaissance faire enthusiasts who had completely lost their connection to reality. Hopefully this gets reversed somewhere down the line, otherwise extinction looms for them.

So, blahblahblah fighting, blahblahblah killing, blahblahblah treaty, blahblahblah no cloaking device and we go away for fifty years or thereabouts, the end, war's over. Starfleet cooks the history books to cover up it's actions, and sets about creating a sterile, conformist culture based around the virtue of having your head up your own ass. Depending on the timeline, Picard could be one of the first children born in this new Federation, and part of his elder brother's attitude problem could be from being old enough to actually experience the takeover, and remembering the days when the Federation was actually a Federation. The Klingons begin their cultural de-evolution, and the Federation settles in for a few decades of being flat broke and barely able to keep things together thanks to a crippling lack of resources and manpower. The Ambassadors become an orphaned line; newer than any other ship in service, but everything that follows will be a replacement, not a contemporary. Apart from them, everything else is an Excelsior, a Miranda, an Oberth, a Constellation, or a Centaur. They get upgraded with Ambassador parts, hence why nowadays they shoot beams instead of multiple dots really fast and all the controls are touch screens instead of actual buttons.

Eventually, Starfleet saves up enough to create the next generation of starships. They get the 'brilliant' idea to design only one ship, and then create smaller ships from the same components. Since the Excelsior and Ambassador classes did so well, they try to hit the sweet-spot a third time with the Galaxy class.

It blewed.

Rather than being the best possible ship for it's cost it could be, the Galaxy class was a nightmare. The only thing truly impressive about it was that it was simultaneously both over and under designed. Over-designed in that they crammed so many functions into it that it became so massive certain fundamental flaws in Starfleet ship designing principles couldn't be compensated for, preventing it from performing to the best of it's theoretical possibilities, and under-designed in that so many corners were cut no sane person would ever approve it's construction. There was a crippling lack of auxiliary systems, redundant failsafes, or efficient component design. The new LCARS consoles were so energy inefficient that instead of electricity they ran on plasma from the warp core. Said warp core was prone to catastrophically failing from so much as a dirty look, and the safety measures were so stupidly designed, they had a tendency to fail if the warp core did. Part of the problem was that the energy needs of the ship were so great that no sane warp core design could properly meet those needs. Instead, the standard procedure on a Galaxy class ship was to set up an out of control, runaway reaction in the warp core, and hope like hell you can keep the permanently overloaded reactor from blowing up. Rather than have anything important to keeping the various parts of the ship running in rooms with easy access, everything was stuck inside a network of cramped tunnels repair teams had to crawl through, presumably because the ship designers didn't want anything ruining the sleek walls of the corridors and rooms. Briefly back to the warp core; they had it in the exact same room as the computer controls, ensuring that if something started to go wrong, you would have to flee the room containing the controls needed to stop the problem. You also apparently can't put surge protectors on plasma conduits, as any damage taken by the ship would cause a control surface on the other side of the ship to explode with enough force to send the person using it flying across the room, along with roasting them alive. Rather than have each subsystem housed in it's own computer core, one single system on three linked cores handled everything, ensuring that if one system on the ship became corrupted by a virus, every other system would be as well. Like the warp core. Also, the ships were designed to have a large civilian population, including crew-member's spouses and children. Said children were free to wander the ship, and could easily walk up to the warp core controls and start fiddling with them.

Unlike the Excelsiors and the Ambassadors, the Galaxies offered a very poor return on their cost. They had what is possibly the smallest production run in the history of Starfleet, with less than ten ever built. Of the variants meant to perform in more restricted roles, the only one ever produced in large amounts was the Nebula class; also the only design of it's generation to constantly provide large returns on their cost. By cutting large parts of the Galaxy design and sticking the remaining bits together, they wound up with something that was actually viable as a deep-space research cruiser/fleet support ship. The rest of the designs blew chunks, and most of the ones built at the time were obliterated at Wolf 359, necessitating Starfleet's continued use of the ships they were meant to replace. As such, Nebulas were a common sight long after the rest of it's generation had been scrapped.

Wolf 359, the Cardassian Border Conflict, and the Dominion War managed to burst Starfleet's bubble, and the quality of their ship designs began to improve, although not before they released a line of ships whose manual door overrides required power to operate, as well as starships whose windows were energy fields instead of solid matter.

Okay.

..... We have a fanfic board you know? I avoid it specifically to not be exposed to that.

... Yeah. I agree. Please. Take it there.

I'm not sure why I did that.

I think if I hold ideas in for too long they burst out in some fashion.

Yeah that's why I ended up doing a blog, keeps brain runs under control. ;)

Sfdebris is on TGWTG now filed under "new talent"

"Bitch I been runnin' this shit befo' you knew what a router was. New talent? I was reviewin' when yo ass was still in diapers. O Gdebris out."

edited 11th Oct '14 2:40:57 PM by thatguythere47

This would be big news four years ago.

Workforce.

SF Debris keeps tempting me to recite "Tom Paris facts". (and Neelix facts if I'm ever in a bad mood)

Video's not been working for me for several hours. Thanks Blip.

EDIT: I admire that TGWTG has lumped all the new people under "New Guys" ensuring that they are harder to find. God the site layout sucks ball.

edited 11th Oct '14 9:30:28 PM by Ghilz

At least Sf Debris is landing on his feet. TGWTG has a sucky website, but now Chuck has monetary support.

I hate javascript for websites, yes I have Blip unblocked but the main website still has issues with the script.

I just use the drop downs and I've never had a problem with it but -shrug-

Pretty sure his Patreon far outdoes what TGWTG gives him in publicity revenues

Time for a SFDebris movie. Are you one who changes your mind?

edited 14th Oct '14 5:16:29 AM by NateWinchester