VOY - Virtuoso

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

If anything, this kind of underlines the point being made about Starfleet being a military in spite of all attempts to call it something else.

Right. While I don't give two floppy disks about whether Starfleet is good or bad -- for what we know about S31 and the PD I don't feel we have to really get into it -- I just wonder if the post disparity world that Roddenberry envisions can get away with this.

[Admiral X]

DS9 brought that nicely into question.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

DS9 brought that nicely into question.

The Defiant?

[Admiral X]

The wars with the Klingons and the Dominion.

[clearspira]

These people ARE BAD soldiers.

FYP.

SG1, generally, doesn't have the luxury of having access to portable personal shielding and a spaceship equipped with replicators, a transporter and planet-cracker level of armaments at the ready. By your given standards, not even the Klingon Forces and Jem Hadar are a military...

SG-1 by season 6 had the Prometheus which is essentially an Earth-made Hatak mothership, and by 8 had the Daedalus, which is a fusion of Goa'uld, Asgard and Ancient tech. Atlantis had Atlantis, and Universe had the Destiny. Stargate Earth has had Federation level ships longer than it hasn't at this point. Your comparison is laughably wrong tbh.

[Robovski]

We see ships and people who are not Star Fleet but are in the Federation, traders, colonists, scientists... We never see anyone that seems in the slightest military who isn't Star Fleet. Star Fleet uses military ranks and chain of command, has courts martial, is armed, has armed vessels, and has the capacity to represent the Federation. They are a governmental body obligated to aid citizens and colonists and defend the Federation apparently even to carry out it's wars. We never see a Federation Navy or Army or any other armed force outside of Star Fleet. There is some evidence of civilian Federation government but none at all of a serving armed force for even defense that is not Star Fleet.

In this case while it may have been Gene's intention for Star Fleet to not be military, there is no military for it to not be said military. This is like saying I don't have a flower garden because I've decided to call flowers canned beans and my yard the pantry.

[Darth Wedgius]

With a compromise between the customs of dozens of worlds, some complexity in what is military and what isn't military should be expected.

Starfleet is a military organization, sometimes. On ships with odd NCC numbers, this doesn't apply on Tuesdays. Ships with an odd number of photon torpedoes on board are military, unless the captain is left-handed, in which case the ship is military only with an even number of photon torpedoes. Quantum torpedoes are treated on a divisible-by-three basis instead of odd/even basis; I'll leave the math explaining why as an exercise for the reader.

If the second shot misses and the third shot hits, Starfleet ships of Miranda class or less tonnage are allowed to get within 100km of a heavy cruiser and revert to non-military status by calling "safety base," unless the cruiser is travelling at warp 6.735 or higher.

If the captain is a lacto-ovo vegetarian born in a region with frequent rainfall, the port side is military but the starboard half isn't. What about people standing in the center of the ship, you ask? They try not to do that.

Hey, it makes as much sense as any of the canon explanations.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Tough crowd.

[Fianna]

We see ships and people who are not Star Fleet but are in the Federation, traders, colonists, scientists...

Are those people actually employed by the Federation government, though, or are they simply private Federation citizens?

[clearspira]

We see ships and people who are not Star Fleet but are in the Federation, traders, colonists, scientists...

Are those people actually employed by the Federation government, though, or are they simply private Federation citizens?

That's a good point, but given their reaction to the Maquis i'm not sure there is a difference in the Fed.