Lower Decks Season 3

[stryke]

In conclusion, I feel like this season was certainly okay but is roughly on par with the first season in terms of both humor as well as writing.

I agree with everything above mostly including the rating being spot on apart from this line as I do think this was a way stronger season than the first. Sure it's got no ep quite as good as No Small Parts but a lot of that season was just plain not very good while s3 was way more consistently solid than that..

[McAvoy]

Well, on a purely demographic scale, the US recruits like 200 people per million people per year into the army. Assuming Starfleet has similar recruitment levels (one hand, no competition, other hand, post-scarcity), they'd be able to replace the bodies in a year.

From social standpoint though, recruitment could easily be surpressed by heavy casualties, politics could easily be swayed to a "no casualties" solution with even a little death given how peaceful 24th century Federation is, and they didn't lose a million raw recruits. It's far more likely they lost hundreds of thousands of seasoned officers. The new generation isn't going to get the same quality of training the last one did. That could have organizational impacts far in excess of the numbers.

I don't think we can use real world examples for recruitment. We knows that the Federation has 150 members not including colonies and allies. We know that Bashir and band of misfits calculated a lost Dominion War would result in 900 billion dead.

Some fan estimates put the Federation at around 2 trillion. Basically if you were to apply real world numbers to the Federation, Starfleet would be recruiting 400 million per year.

Even if we account for 300 million of those being planet side or on star bases, asteroid bases, outposts etc. That leaves 100 million for example for a fleet that severely underman their ships. Like the Intrepid class having 150 crew or the Galaxy having 1,000 including civilians. Even though both ships could easily fit ten times that number without issues. Only the Defiant seems to have the proper crew size for its size.

I always thought that the members of the Federation maintained their own fleets for their own purposes. So maybe they take away from Starfleet reaching that sort of potential. I'd imagine also the physical limit of how many ships, bases etc Starfleet has.

Why have let's say 100 million officers and enlisted if you only need 1 million to man the fleet for example.

[CharlesPhipps]

I don't think we can use real world examples for recruitment. We knows that the Federation has 150 members not including colonies and allies. We know that Bashir and band of misfits calculated a lost Dominion War would result in 900 billion dead.

Digression: I liked the subtle critique of Bashir's supergenius friends because I work in academia who is filled with people who assume they have magical insight into these things. Which was, of course, that the Dominion would have been WORSE with the extermination of the human race or at least Earth.

Some fan estimates put the Federation at around 2 trillion. Basically if you were to apply real world numbers to the Federation, Starfleet would be recruiting 400 million per year.

David Weber's HONOR HARRINGTON series actually discussed the difference between space navies and regular militaries in his books that I always liked too. Which was the fact that when you had space superiority, the traditional numbers needed become utterly irrelevant since someone who is able to fire from orbit has absolute power. Also the difference between a shapeship needs and a planet habitable were so different as to be unimaginable.

Of course, Star Trek's numbers make no sense and never have on any level. I think the 50 year Bajoran Occupation had 15 million die when I would think that at least ten times as many as that would be more reasonable.

[Madner Kami]

Last year, about 65-70 million people died. For ease of use, let's say it was 70 million and the world's population is about 7 billion. So about 1% of the global population dies each year, the vast majority from natural reasons or "technical complications".

If 15 million Bajorans died in a 50 year span, that'd be about 300,000 per year. To loose that many people a year on regular Earth, you'd get a global population of 30 million. On an entire planet. And for that number to be statistically or even culturally impactful, the real population would need to be a lot lower even. Russia alone has sent 150,000 people to their death in under a year, not accounting for non-death casualties...

During World War 2, up to about 85 million people died in a six years or eight years, depending on if you count the start as the Invasion of Poland or the Second Sino-Japanese War. And this was a war that of was fought as a war extermination on two different continents (Germany against Russians and Jews, Japanese against non-japanese asians). That was roughly 3% of the world's population at the time in just six to eight years.

Star Trek planets are comically underpopulated and writers have no fucking clue when it comes to scale. Also, most are too lazy to actually use a calculator or some damn basic math. Some sources managed to claim, that the Klingons lost just 200,000 "warriors" during the Dominion War...

To modern day Earth, the occupation of Bajor or the entire Dominion War, doesn't even qualify as a tuesday...

[CharlesPhipps]

Last year, about 65-70 million people died. For ease of use, let's say it was 70 million and the world's population is about 7 billion. So about 1% of the global population dies each year, the vast majority from natural reasons or "technical complications".

If 15 million Bajorans died in a 50 year span, that'd be about 300,000 per year. To loose that many people a year on regular Earth, you'd get a global population of 30 million. On an entire planet. And for that number to be statistically or even culturally impactful, the real population would need to be a lot lower even. Russia alone has sent 150,000 people to their death in under a year, not accounting for non-death casualties...

During World War 2, up to about 85 million people died in a six years or eight years, depending on if you count the start as the Invasion of Poland or the Second Sino-Japanese War. And this was a war that of was fought as a war extermination on two different continents (Germany against Russians and Jews, Japanese against non-japanese asians). That was roughly 3% of the world's population at the time in just six to eight years.

Star Trek planets are comically underpopulated and writers have no fucking clue when it comes to scale. Also, most are too lazy to actually use a calculator or some damn basic math. Some sources managed to claim, that the Klingons lost just 200,000 "warriors" during the Dominion War...

To modern day Earth, the occupation of Bajor or the entire Dominion War, doesn't even qualify as a tuesday...

To be fair, we can assume that Major Kira is talking about those directly killed by the Cardassians versus natural complications but it's still an incredibly underwelming number given we've seen Gulags (not death camps), famine, extra judicial punishment, and more.

[Al-1701]

I think the Cali-class is meant to be the "white elephant" of Starfleet. There are plenty of real world examples of ship classes that looked good on paper but never lived up to expectations and were eventually sold for scrap. I don't think it was a wartime class because of how under-armed it is.

It's just a ship that can be built quickly and cheaply for low priority missions. Therefore, it gets inferior equipment, is low on the list for refits, and tends to have lower quality crews.

[hammerofglass]

My favorite recent "no sense of scale" example is that the entire Federation-sized Romulan Star Empire (minus Romulus) resettled on Vulcan during the Discovery time jump and they're a minority group. That would be like the entire US minus Philadelphia moving to one UK city.

[McAvoy]

I don't think we can use real world examples for recruitment. We knows that the Federation has 150 members not including colonies and allies. We know that Bashir and band of misfits calculated a lost Dominion War would result in 900 billion dead.

Digression: I liked the subtle critique of Bashir's supergenius friends because I work in academia who is filled with people who assume they have magical insight into these things. Which was, of course, that the Dominion would have been WORSE with the extermination of the human race or at least Earth.

Some fan estimates put the Federation at around 2 trillion. Basically if you were to apply real world numbers to the Federation, Starfleet would be recruiting 400 million per year.

David Weber's HONOR HARRINGTON series actually discussed the difference between space navies and regular militaries in his books that I always liked too. Which was the fact that when you had space superiority, the traditional numbers needed become utterly irrelevant since someone who is able to fire from orbit has absolute power. Also the difference between a shapeship needs and a planet habitable were so different as to be unimaginable.

Of course, Star Trek's numbers make no sense and never have on any level. I think the 50 year Bajoran Occupation had 15 million die when I would think that at least ten times as many as that would be more reasonable.

Star Trek writers always had that problem with scale. 15 million for an entire planet honestly isn't that much of we are to assume the Cardassians are Space Nazis. Don't get me wrong, it is still alot. Just not for a 50 year occupation.

Unless Bajor isn't that heavily populated. Like they number maybe a billion. It's interesting that we don't really see big cityscapes on major planets.

Maybe majority of that 15 million is due to starvation and only a small part of that number is actual Cardassian violence against Bajorans. Who knows.

The thing about crew numbers that drives me nuts is that you require the ship to be run on a 24 hour system. Which means shifts. Sure you probably can get away with two or three people to walk around the ship doing diagnostics, one for each shift. You don't necessarily need a second person by their side doing that.

Then there are jobs that may require more than one person. Like maybe three or four people. Even for safety reasons. So now you need 9-12 people for that one job per shift. Of course they wouldn't be doing just that job either. You also have to take in account that other things need to be done at the same time, take into account someone might be sick or indisposed on something else. And that is just for one little workshop/department on deck 15 of the Lollipop class.

Point is that for example, Voyager had a crew of 150. And from what i can tell they more or less had that number when they left DS9.

So at any given point a ship even larger than a Nimitz class carrier has about 50 people assuming 8 hour shift running around the ship making it doesn't breakdown. Let alone do anything else.

Enterprise-D was even worse.

We could argue that there is automation and perhaps some form of self repair in pre-Discovery Trek. But it doesn't really reflect on why these ships are so huge compared to their crew size.

It's like having maybe 10000 people on the Earth Spacedock.

[McAvoy]

My favorite recent "no sense of scale" example is that the entire Federation-sized Romulan Star Empire (minus Romulus) resettled on Vulcan during the Discovery time jump and they're a minority group. That would be like the entire US minus Philadelphia moving to one UK city.

Romulus did get destroyed. Who knows how many Romulans survived it. And maybe not all Romulans settled back on Vulcan anyway.

Talking about sense of scale is also somehow Klingons and Romulans having huge territories on par or even if smaller than the Federation and having the population to hold it. They would really need very a large population to do that. Otherwise they would stretched real thin.

[Al-1701]

My favorite recent "no sense of scale" example is that the entire Federation-sized Romulan Star Empire (minus Romulus) resettled on Vulcan during the Discovery time jump and they're a minority group. That would be like the entire US minus Philadelphia moving to one UK city.

Romulus did get destroyed. Who knows how many Romulans survived it. And maybe not all Romulans settled back on Vulcan anyway.

We also don't know if it was not just Romulus and not the heart of their empire and most of their major populated worlds. They had been effectively reduced to rump status by the time of Picard. We also don't know how many Romulans were killed in the Burn.