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I never like this episode and Chuck did talk about the whole thing with only accepting one applicant.

One thing that bothered me about that as well is that Wesley had to take it at that Starbase where they only take one applicant. No reason explained why the Enterprise couldn't warp away to let's say a major Starbase where they accept more than one. Or why he needs to take it at this base. Was it the closest?

I suppose Wesley being on a starship wouldn't have a place of permanent address. Like for example, if you live on Colony Beta Max VHS that is your permanent address and you would compete from that colony or be the representative of that colony while competing in that sector with other colonies.

I guess Enterprise is his permanent address and Starfleet policy is one representative from one starship each year if they can.

This also could be only for the officer program. The enlisted program is far more open and diverse and would be realistic to fill out a starship's ranks as opposed to us believing starships are just filled with nothing but officers with a sprinkle of enlisted.

You see, the thing is... ONLY ONE CANDIDATE PER PLANET A YEAR, SO LIKE... lets say the Federation has 200 planets. That's 200 new officers a year. That is, for an interstellar organization... PITIFUL, when the Enterprise is over 1,000!

Nobody700 wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 3:19 am You see, the thing is... ONLY ONE CANDIDATE PER PLANET A YEAR, SO LIKE... lets say the Federation has 200 planets. That's 200 new officers a year. That is, for an interstellar organization... PITIFUL, when the Enterprise is over 1,000!

No I get it.

Was that actually stated? I can't remember. I mean if not then I could see a quota based on populations. But that is still stupid.

Starfleet lost 11,000 people in Wolf 359, on 39 ships. Since we saw crew leaving their ships we can assume it wasn't a complete 100%. But that still amounts to 282 crew per ship on average.

900 billion projected to be killed in DS9 in a hypothetical projected loss to the Dominion. Large fleets in DS9 where they took elements from fleets to form a 600+ ship fleet to take DS9.

Yeah one candidate per year is just plain dumb. Something about scale the writers weren't really thinking about.

Too be fair, the 900 billion is civilian population

Now, on to the whole one person per planet a year... that was stated, and frankly, was part of this dumb idea Gene had. I heard no one comment on this, but to Gene, and ONLY Gene... the movies were canon, and that's it. The reason season 1 was such a terrible remake of TOS? Because TOS... never happened. Now the rest of Trek and writers ignored that, but given that, you can see Gene's weird idea for Starfleet form. From an exploration unit to a military unit to, in TNG... The federation's best of the best, espousing how AWESOME humanity is. The preachers of the gospel.

Nobody700 wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 6:19 am Too be fair, the 900 billion is civilian population

Now, on to the whole one person per planet a year... that was stated, and frankly, was part of this dumb idea Gene had. I heard no one comment on this, but to Gene, and ONLY Gene... the movies were canon, and that's it. The reason season 1 was such a terrible remake of TOS? Because TOS... never happened. Now the rest of Trek and writers ignored that, but given that, you can see Gene's weird idea for Starfleet form. From an exploration unit to a military unit to, in TNG... The federation's best of the best, espousing how AWESOME humanity is. The preachers of the gospel.

Well you are a civilian until you are in Starfleet. 900 billion is a huge number and realistically Starfleet could still have strict requirements to get in and still have more than enough to man ships, bases, shipyards, etc. The US military commissions 20,000 officers per year and while I couldn't get a number for how many of them were US Navy, I did get a number of 2,000 being recruited in 2023.

All things being equal and just using the 900 billion figure, Starfleet as a direct analog for US Navy would be 600,000+ per year. Which does sound reasonable if they were there to just man ships and bases. Much more than that if enlisted were included in filling out the ranks.

Starfleet Academy if I recall, is solely on Earth. Having 2.4 million+ perhaps as high as 3-4 million if you count those that will eventually dropout, instructors and all the admin people, would be alot for one place on Earth. I guess the Academy is more scattered than localized.

Oh and the older I get the more I feel Gene Roddenberry was more of a hack.

McAvoy wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 3:13 am Oh and the older I get the more I feel Gene Roddenberry was more of a hack.

You can thank him for the existence of Trek, but not much more than that, I feel.

Also, 900 billion citizens is comically low. At the time of First Contact, the Federation consists of at least 150 species. Presuming each has a main-planet population of 5 billion on average, that'd be 750 Billion people alone. Most of these species have several colonies and a not insignificant amount of those have been space-faring and interstellar for several houndreds of years before humanity. As usual, the old wisdom remains true: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." aka people are bad at naturally understanding the scale of things out there.

I think a lot of the scale problems come with the TNG era though. TOS actually had mention of multiple different branches the Federation besides Starfleet. ''Bread and Circuses'' (the one with the Romans) mentions ''the merchant service'' which the rebel captain of that episode is part of. He crucially is not ''main Starfleet'' like Kirk. In the episode ''Tomorrow is Yesterday'' where they go back in time to the 1960s, Kirk mentions that Starfleet comes under the banner of the United Earth Space Probe Agency (UESPA) which again implies that Starfleet is just one department. The name UESPA even implies that Starfleet is the exploration arm of the Federation rather than the ''everything'' arm it would be later.

Christopher: "Must have taken quite a lot to build a ship like this."
Kirk: "There are only twelve like it in the fleet."
Christopher: "I see. Did the Navy..."
Kirk: "We're a combined service, Captain. Our authority is the United Earth Space Probe Agency."
Christopher: "United Earth?"
Kirk: "This is very difficult to explain. We're from your future."

And in an impressing feat of continuity, ENT would also mention UESPA as well as of course the MACOs:


I agree that Gene isn't a good as his reputation. But being an air force man I think we can credit him with something here. As with ''having Voyager recognise the Beta Quadrant'' was considered too much for the audience to handle, I think that TNG just simplified it for the ''silly simple people'' watching and in turn made plot holes for itself.

Too be fair... this was very early into the show and I don't know if Gene and the writers decided if the Federation was humans, humans who worked with aliens, or a whole council of aliens that humans were a part of. Had they known and decided on it, they probably would not have named themselves Earth. I'm willing to handwave that Kirk is getting this stuff wrong cause like, I dunno... he was raised in the service of Earth's own fleet as a kid and joined Starfleet but he can't not remember what his dad taught him. I dunno, it's flimsy as fuck, but best I got.

Also on the 900 billion civilians... that's how many would die in the war, not TOTAL population. Total war would END the Dominion invasion. The Dominion's strength was NOT showing this was total war till the very end, because if they did threaten the Alpha Quadrant with total war... the Alpha Quadrant would STOMP THEM. They had to form deals and trades and peace agreements. Remember, the moment the Romulans joined the Federation and Klingons... they won. It took a while, but the moment the Romulans joined, the three parties only suffered ONE real defeat, and were just victory after victory.

Nobody700 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 4:33 pm Too be fair... this was very early into the show and I don't know if Gene and the writers decided if the Federation was humans, humans who worked with aliens, or a whole council of aliens that humans were a part of. Had they known and decided on it, they probably would not have named themselves Earth. I'm willing to handwave that Kirk is getting this stuff wrong cause like, I dunno... he was raised in the service of Earth's own fleet as a kid and joined Starfleet but he can't not remember what his dad taught him. I dunno, it's flimsy as fuck, but best I got.

Also on the 900 billion civilians... that's how many would die in the war, not TOTAL population. Total war would END the Dominion invasion. The Dominion's strength was NOT showing this was total war till the very end, because if they did threaten the Alpha Quadrant with total war... the Alpha Quadrant would STOMP THEM. They had to form deals and trades and peace agreements. Remember, the moment the Romulans joined the Federation and Klingons... they won. It took a while, but the moment the Romulans joined, the three parties only suffered ONE real defeat, and were just victory after victory.

Many shows rely on their villains being a bit stupid in order for the heroes to win and this is no different.

The original Dominion plan was to wait until they were strong enough to win. Time that they assumed they had due to the distances involved. But the wormhole sped up their planning by decades and threw them into a war before they were ready.

And yet, why? The Dominion were not introduced as obviously evil jack booted thugs. They were introduced as a trading alliance similar to the Ferengi. If they sent Weyoun to negotiate on those terms, mutual exchange, please respect our borders, then the Federation would have listened because a negotiation is what they love doing. Sometimes even to their own clear detriment as we saw with the DMZ. And thanks to the good old PD, the Feds would not have stuck their noses in even after they learned of cloning facilities and Quadrant wide fascism even if their relationship would cool. Then the Dominion could have used that time to build up their forces and to slowly replace the enemy leadership.

But no, kidnap Sisko and wipe out a Bajoran colony. Yeah, cool, sure. Makes sense.

Ya gotta remember, they are made up of people who wanna test the Federation, see how far they can go, and they had no idea what Bajor was before they destroyed the colony. They are 'in their space' as they see it, which is a lie, and Bajor is a 'threat' until they decide it is not. The Dominion are made up of jack booted monsters who prefer death to those that are vastly weaker than them and those strong get the fake hand of friendship before the Jem Hadar boot drops on your face.