Especially ridiculous when it’s the sector Earth is in.
I mean it kinda makes sense when the Enterprise is out exploring the far reaches of known space, but nobody else within range of Earth orbit is wild.
They’ll all be back on Tuesday.
I thought it was weird when crew members would take individual vacation. That’s not how ships work.
Leave? That’s exactly how ships work. And they usually take one of the shuttles.
I haven’t been in ¨he Navy,but I understand most everyone stays on the boat until they dock, and then they’re back on the ship before it leaves again. Whwn the ship gets back to home port, then everyone can take a break.
Otherwise, you have a fragile and intricate web of arrivals and departures around the world to keep a ship fully staffed.
Yeah, but it’s only ever senior staff who gets to that, and the federation ships have an Enterprise rent-a-car full of Warp-4 minivans that apparently need very little skill to pilot or resources to operate over long distances. None of that is much of a match for the tenders, lifeboats, and helicopters on your average Navy ship.
It is only senior staff that we see do that. The Enterprise D is designed to act like a mobile logistics hub for deep space missions and it routinely has Federation staff coming on board and leaving based on the mission profile.
Deep Space 9 showed that runabouts could be operated almost entirely by voice control (Odo was able to pilot one without much difficulty). I’d imagine shuttles would be just as easy or easier to pilot given their more limited equipment loadout.
The crew can be offered shore leave anytime the ship is docked at a space station or a friendly planet so long as operational requirements allow. Hell, there was an episode where Picard basically forced Riker to take leave along with about half of the crew because they “wouldn’t require a full ship’s complement” for that mission. So it seems to be almost entirely up to the captain. Individuals (at least from senior staff, not sure about the lower decks) could take personal leave at the captain’s discretion as well (worf travelling to his tournament, geordi attempting to attend a symposium on warp fields, etc).
Yes, that is how it works on Star Trek. My question is if it’s a realistic way to run a space fleet, or even if it’s in-universe consistent. Seems like random events happen all the time and you always want to be prepared.
It seems the makers of Star Trek wanted to have a comfortable middle class academic life for its characters, but also the adventure of TOS. There was always a weird tension there. I only resolved it by creating a head cannon where planetary life is so existentially vaccuous, that people would rather risk their lives and the lives of their children on a space ship than live safer lives on the ground.
I mean… https://listofdeaths.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation
Keep in mind also that we only see little snippets of time portrayed in the show. Even individual episodes can have gaps of days or weeks between scenes! The show wouldn’t be very exciting if every other episode was just them lazily cruising to their next mission and filling out crew reports or whatever.
Edit: Yeah, I could see planetary life being pretty unfulfilling. Like… what are you gonna figure out that hasn’t already been figured out? Gotta go out into the great unknown to solve a new mystery.
Yeah, basically, I think Star Trek never resolves the existential void that would come at the end of capitalism.
Instead it replaces it with the striving that is depicted in The Burnout Society.
Edit: Actually, that is the answer. Instead of money, people look to accomplishments for social status and distraction.
But we’re taking about Star Trek, not modern-day navies.
Starships don’t have to be at port for someone to get off or on.
It’s not just transportation, it’s coordinating staff assignments. And it doesn’t make sense in a frontier setting, where the Enterprise seems to blip back and forth into and out of.
And also travel time. DS9 to New Orleans has got to take most of a vacation.
I guess it just tends to make the Enterprise more of a floating research university with all the amenities, which always annoyed me. TNG is a great case study for The Burnout Society–buncha overachievers.
In the episode with the worm parasite things, Picard mentions that it’s rare for a deployed starship to return to Earth so maybe their planetary defenses rely on orbital weapons?
Canonically that’s Star Base 1’s job. Although depending on the episode it may be in orbit around Earth or Jupiter.
I’m guessing they also rely on various in-system defenses such as Luna and Mars as well. Utopia Planetia surely has some ships that could be deployed to Earth in hours or maybe even minutes if needed. What kind of crew complement they’d have available is a different story.
Oh that’s why Admiral Shelby thought that networking a bunch of starships was a good idea. Earth has a ton of ships to throw at a problem but probably only a few with full person-power and sufficient experience to be effective in a surprise conflict in Sol.
First episode TNG
“This is the furthest humans have ever been, which is why we ran into the Q”
Every other episode
"This federation Outpost needs our help! Never you mind that we’re still traveling away from everyone else and have been since series beginning, they’re there and need our assistance!’
The Enterprise D didn’t do much long range exploration. It spent a lot of time shuttling diplomats, and seemed to get back to Earth at least every other year.
The Enterprise D wasn’t traveling away from everyone. It was the flagship
I kind of like how they (don’t openly) address it in The Orville. If you pay attention to where they are or where they’re headed during a lot of episodes, they’re basically doing local milk runs most of the time.
Which makes sense given that the Orville isn’t supposed to be a tip of the spear ship. It is near the Cerritos in terms of its mission profile.
Ah, good ol’ second contact. Closing the admin left open from first contact
One must be prepared for anything when interacting with an alien race for the first time. But we don’t do that.
Bit Riker, Geordi, and the Crushers were already at this Farpoint Station. How did they get there? At the very least, they preceded the humans on the Enterprise!
People seem to be forgetting how absurdly huge space is. And in all three dimensions.
Unless there is a mitigating circumstance where a task force is absolutely necessary, ships (especially the larger ones) would be far apart from each other.
But let’s say Starfleet has a ridiculous amount of ships. Some absurd number we know they don’t have. Like a billion ships. If you were to evenly space (hah) them out over the most canon chart we have of The Federation, there’d still be tens of lightyears between one ship and the next.
And that’s just if we limit the ships to Federation territories. If we account for ships doing many exploration missions in far-flung areas thr distances become even more enormous.
But ships travel at the speed of plot! If the writers wanted to, they could have back up ships there in an hour.
The episodes we see are the dangerous/difficult/extraordinary events. We don’t see the business-as-usual, where everything goes according to plan.
This week on Star Trek: Georgi puts on his PPE and cleans the Dilithium chamber during monthly warp core maintenance.
I’d watch it.
Legit I’d toss this on while playing a game.
Have some dialogue that sounds like people walking by (quiet, louder, quiet again) and some show dialogue between people in engineering and I’m sold.
If Paramount were smart, they’d do something like this. Disney+ has all kinds of “screen saver” ASMR-adjacent things. Paramount could easily whip up an hour-long slow pan of generic crew life on the Enterprise. I mean, I’ve put on the 10 hours of nacelle white noise you can find on YouTube.
Question: in all of the shows, particularly the TNG era 24th century ones, did they ever depict using a wrench to turn a bolt or anything like that? Occasionally they’ll fire a little laser at something…
Is the Enterprise entirely toolless?
The bolts are self sealing, so they probably don’t need a lot of tools.
It’s part of Trek philosophy: everything has to be futuristic and unfamiliar, even if it makes no sense, like palm flashlights.
My favorite Star Trek commentary is found on Ronald D. Moore’s audio track to the BSG mini-series.
I mean just simply…how is the thing held together? The crew just walks up to a wall, grabs a panel and yanks it off. You can peel the Enterprise like an orange.
And how do the doors always know your intent? The answer is don’t think about it, Morty.
Lower Decks was supposed to be that. A sitcom of low ranking crewmembers.
Then send all of the senior staff to the planet together.
I think this is how the “currency” of knowledge and experience works in Star Trek. The more senior position you have, the more away missions you get to take, which is part of the incentive to be promoted. Since there’s no money, experience becomes currency (in a sense) so having the privilege of away missions and all of that is like getting a raise. We see this in the various shows (SNW in particular) where being picked for away missions is a kind of desired reward.
Plus, it also fosters more captain openings in a society where people can just keep going well into their 100s. It’s how Kirk got to become captain of the Farragut, yeah? His captain died on an away mission?
Starfleet Command: Task group? WTF is that?!
The Enterprise D didn’t do much long range exploration. It spent a lot of time shuttle diplomats, and seemed to get back to Earth at least every other year.
“…and now they discover that the signal is coming from inside the Neutral Zone.”
