VOY:Spirit Folk or "PaddyWorld"

[TGLS]

You forgot about Enterprise; the NX-01 had armour considering they constantly go on about hull playing rather than shields...it’s just that they treated it exactly like shields defeating the purpose of trying to make it more primitive than TOS onwards.

Two reasons: One, I focused on Defiant type armor that is actually useful in the TNG era, in part because the discussion is about having civilians on Galaxy-class ships instead of armour. Two, I in fact forgot about it.

[FaxModem1]

You're missing my point, either intentionally or not. Civilians traveled on ships for colonial and trade reasons for hundreds of years, with freighters, trade ships, etc. being lost all the time. In the past century, this became unacceptable and rightfully so, but was also easily detectable, because of the advancing of technology. A freighter's voyage from one location to another should take days at the most. A couple hundred years ago? Their journeys took months, if not almost a year to complete.

Now, imagine the same thing in Trek-verse. A ship might be taking weeks, if not months, to get where they're going. They disappear. Starfleet investigates, but turns up nothing, or finds out that alien influence was involved(a giant probe, alien mind influence, or in the case of the Yamato, an alien computer virus from a culture thousands of years ahead of the Federation). The UFP is not the masters of the galaxy, but people dipping their toe into the water, and hoping not to get bitten, and becoming better at doing so.

The problem with that line of thinking is that the world of Star Trek is in no way rough around the edges as one would expect if it was trying to fully emulate the Age of Sail (which was one of the major inspirations for TOS) and pre-20th Century realities.

Instead we have "modern times only only more advanced" and it leaves one expecting that people would act like they would today in such circumstances, especially when it feels like any Star Fleet ship could pop back home whenever they like, and that outside of FTL communications they may be the only Federation ship around even if they tried to travel back home for months and are deployed for potentially years on end. In the case of Nelson's best friend and successor, Collingwood, he didn't see his family for years, was in poor health and constantly sent messages back home begging to be relieved so he could spend his last years with his family. In the end he died on the boat ride back home after being relieved of his command in 1810 after succeeding Nelson in 1805 and last seeing England and his family in 1803, spending almsot his entire time onboard his flagship with only short trips to shore.

To put it another way, how'd people feel if USS Cole had been hit and non-contractor civilians like family had been killed, not simply from the public, but from the military itself asking if this is really a wise thing to be doing, risking such lives when they can stay home.

I really do wish they'd made the scale of Trek distances greater than it was. Have it be that a trip like is shown in an average Trek series is a major deployment, leaving civilization as the crew knows it behind but I feel that would only work on a show with aesthetics of Firefly, not the cut and dried, immaculate way Starfleet and their warships are decked out in and makes you feel Earth is just a weeks trip away the way home is for a modern sailor (not including submariners).

Another problem in presentation is how we never really have a map or guide to where everything is. But the Federation was always supposed to be big. You could say that it's the equivalent of navigating around the British empire in the 19th or 18th century. They may be a fair distance from the core worlds. But they are almost always near the Federation border. A ship like the Hood or Defiant may be relatively close to home, but the big boys aren't, or in the words of Captain DeSoto, "Galaxy-class boys may be enjoying the frontier, but I'm hauling my butt back and forth between starbases". Picard seems like the exception, not the rule, as most ships tend to stick close to home. Their families were probably off ship most of the time.

Having families aboard might make sense if you're supposed to be exploring far from home for a generation. If you want a rationalization, Starfleet put the kids on board policy in place to satisfy their new exploration procedures, the Yamato going boom made it unpopular, and Enterprise and a few other ships like the Odyssey and the Saratoga were utilizing the program until their next change in personnel, but Wolf 359 and the Dominion put a stop to it quick.

Of course, this is us rationalizing inconsistent storytelling over 15 years with over 21 seasons of television in one era. Thats a lot of different perspectives. For example, Riker went from condemning species for eating meat to cooking eggs for his friends in less than a year.

We could also say that it was due to the parasites from Conspiracy infecting the head brass, as they were in charge of Starfleet for an undesignated time until Picard and Riker quashed it.

[TGLS]

On the other hand, Jake Sisko was on the Saratoga at Wolf 359, so there's that.

[Archanubis]

Having families aboard might make sense if you're supposed to be exploring far from home for a generation. If you want a rationalization, Starfleet put the kids on board policy in place to satisfy their new exploration procedures, the Yamato going boom made it unpopular, and Enterprise and a few other ships like the Odyssey and the Saratoga were utilizing the program until their next change in personnel, but Wolf 359 and the Dominion put a stop to it quick.

I think that was the original plan when TNG was proposed - the Enterprise-D would be a generational ship, and the children on board would be the crew that brought her home after their mission was complete. Never really worked out that way.

My personal feelings on the subject was that it was the product of the antebellum years of the Federation, which TNG started at the tail end of. With a formal alliance with the Klingons finalized and the Romulans self-contained, some admiral(s) or Federation Councilman thought it was a good idea to allow civilians aboard starships, especially long-range explorers like the Galaxy-class. Not even conflicts with races like the Cardassians and Tzenkethi, or "tensions" with the Ferengi could shake the Federation's optimism at the time - which is one reason why I think any conflict during this time were little more than border skirmishes. The first crack in the wisdom behind this policy came when the Romulans made a resurgence into galactic affairs,; if the higher-ups in Starfleet weren't questioning the policy after that, they should have been. Then came the Borg, and with the losses at Wolf 359 - many, as we see in "Emissary," being civilians - I have no doubt Starfleet was seriously questioning the wisdom of letting civilians and children on board their ships (I have no doubt that a number of casualties at Wolf 359 were children). Heightened tensions with the Cardassians and eventually the Dominion War probably put an end to the program for the foreseeable future.

[SuccubusYuri]

I mean ultimately, it's like how the transporter system has conflicting presentations on how it works. It's just down to writers doing what seemed cool that week. You want your universe to be practical, so you bring families along for 15, 20 year missions, but you also want to have your plots in Klingon space, at Earth, so you always seem to come back to the core.

I think the easiest rationalization is just, the Enterprise is the flagship, we see the flagship most, so just assume it all works out well for everyone else xD

[Dînadan]

I think the easiest rationalization is just, the Enterprise is the flagship, we see the flagship most, so just assume it all works out well for everyone else xD

That’s my personal headcanon for why the Ent-D spent so much time flying around Federation space, transporting diplomats, hosting conferences, etc; as the flagship it had to run around trooping the colours, showing the flag, etc so didn’t have time to do much in the way of actually exploring new frontiers

[Wolf359]

This is yet another instance that shows that IQs will drop sharply in the 24th Century. It's as though there is no concept of safety, and, what's more, implies that the Federation is a tyrannical regime.

When the USS Yamato is destroyed by an alien computer virus in the beginning of TNG Contagion, I was waiting for the inevitable consequences of this disaster: There ought to be an uproar, memorials for the victims, and a complete reassessment of Starfleet policies allowing non-essential civilian personnel (families) to reside permanently on warships. But, none of that happened. Wesley's still on the show, and so are all the other kiddies. Indeed, the families aren't even off-loaded from Starfleet ships at the Battle of Wolf 359!!! This proves, without a doubt, that not only is the Federation tyrannical, they're stupid, evil, and completely psychotic. Imagine if the US Navy decided to just go ahead and take the families of sailors and officers with them to the Battle of Midway!!! Let's not leave out Marines; they got wives and kids too, so let's take them to Guadalcanal! The US Army can take their loved ones with them to storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day! Fun for the whole family!

Here's another point; if you're carrying so much reactive fuel aboard that in the event of a containment failure that whatever remaining fuel destroys your whole ship, that's a major safety problem! In fact, it's a design flaw. Though Contagion does suggest that a containment breach that happened the way it did was improbable, it still happened, and how many times have we heard the words "warp core breach in progress," meaning that the system already knows that there will be a failure in containment, but it does nothing to jettison the fuel in the system in order to prevent an explosion. What a bunch of morons!!! They do not build adequate safety devices and mechanisms into their ships, which might as well be deathtraps, just ticking time bombs waiting to go off at the slightest sign of hostility.

Even worse than the crew hardly ever being given seat belts and sticks of dynamite being placed inside every console so that the slightest jolt will set them off, is, as Chuck once pointed out in "The Haunting Of Deck 12", the computer is programmed to warn of said console explosions... it's just decided not to bother! So all those console deaths we've seen over the years were easily preventable. Oh and let's no forget that some bright spark decided to change all of Voyagers circuits with bags of spunk so that a block of cheese can destroy the ship and kill everyone too! And in the warp core breach thing, why are the antimatter ejection systems always the first to go offline? The only time I remember it actually working was during the crash of the Yangtze Kiang, and it wasn't even having a core breach at the time, yet someone still died. They got better though.

[CareerKnight]

Not that this isn't interesting but back to the review. Chuck mentioned DS9's holodeck in the list of holodecks we have seen malfunction but the only time that happened that I can think of was in Our Man Bashir and that was cause by them doing something to it that it was never intended to handle. And if that's the only time the thing broke then that's another point for Quark's bar over the USS What the heck were we thinking when we designed this ship?.

[Beastro]

A big problem is all the extra space they take up when it could be used to slim down and make their warships more rugged. In a classic naval warfare sense, it's more area to cover with armour.

Oh gawd, don't even get started on why Starfleet ships are utter design-disasters when it comes to combat-capability. One only needs to look at the Defiant, a ship that throws punches in the weight-class of in-universe battleships, despite only being about the size of the TOS-era saucer-section, to realize how stupid it is to build just one Galaxy, when you could have about 10 Defiants for the same amount of material and half(!) the manpower (assuming Galaxys having a minimal crew of 1000).

Another thing to keep in mind is that all of this takes place in space, and the more areas vulnerable to being opened into it the worse. Of course there are things like force fields, but in the middle of battle things are expected to fail and we don't ever see anything like a pressure hatch inside any Trek ship except for the cargo bay doors.

It would be neat to see Red Alert actually meaning something besides the cosmetic silliness we see, where hatches are sealed and non-essential areas are not only evacuated by depressurized as a precaution if only to save on oxygen.

What annoys me the most is how full of "fighter plane" mentality Star Trek is with end on end fire, especially forward, being the primary focus instead of broadside in historical naval fashion. So much of Trek warfare is just charging at the other enemy, if the ships are even moving at all, like many TNG fights were like with Enterprise sitting still trading shots with the enemy.

As bad as what we got in DS9, it was still better than the rest but, oh, to see something like a good old fashioned battleline with damaged ships falling out of line, trailing smoke and debris as they burn.

I think the easiest rationalization is just, the Enterprise is the flagship, we see the flagship most, so just assume it all works out well for everyone else xD

That’s my personal headcanon for why the Ent-D spent so much time flying around Federation space, transporting diplomats, hosting conferences, etc; as the flagship it had to run around trooping the colours, showing the flag, etc so didn’t have time to do much in the way of actually exploring new frontiers

The flagship nonsense has always pissed me off ever since I was little.

How exactly is it a flagship? It certainly doesn't reflect a real flagship, which is whatever ship a senior officer is commanding in a group of warships that can be anything. About the closest thing that comes to a designed flagship today is something like the Blue Ridge Class, that is effectively defenseless as it's nothing but a floating command and control facility for amphibious invasions, and now, for Fleets stationed overseas.

BTW, showing the flag is a serious job, one that the USN is oddly misequipped for these days, since submarines and carriers by their very nature are unable to show the flag without putting themselves into a very vulnerable position. It's why some servicemen I know have half-joked about building new battleships or gun cruisers for that very purpose. They'd be near useless in war, but cheap (electronics are what costs the most in warships today, the hull is dirt cheap) and be something very intimidating to have to cruise off a crisis within sight of potential foes.

Actually with the training and conduct problems the USN is having currently, having something like that makes slightly more sense to have throw out overseas, even if it here wasn't much to begin with.

Now if Enterprise was something like a training ship, especially modern masted ones that serve to train the young like Gorch Fock, however, the flagship BS also seemed to entail that Enterprise is one of the best ships/crews in Starfleet, if not the best...

Enterprise-D as this -



- makes so much sense though. That would explain so much of what we saw from all the good will visits, humanitarian and diplomatic missions, the hippy captain and pacifist XO, being stuffed full of civilians to the point of being a flying mall, having such a light armament for its size.

Of course, that would also mean a training ship is what stopped the Borg and saved the Federation countless other times....

[Darth Wedgius]

The flagship nonsense has always pissed me off ever since I was little.

To be fair, "flagship" can also mean, "the finest, largest, or most important one of a series, network, system, chain, etc." That might be giving the writers too much credit, I admit...