I’ve only seen a handful a handful of Star Trek episodes but it seems like they usually send a small group of officers down to strange planets. Is this true, or were there episodes with marines on board the ship?
Is any serious ground combat ever depicted?
If there are marines, do they wear combat unis, or the standard tight fitting federation unitards?
If there are no marines, does the show ever explain why?
Thanks.
Are Space Marines called Spacines?
*Enterprise *had MACOs who were dedicated assault troops; the other shows just had yer standard Redshirt phaser bait.
They did not explain why because it would detract from the suspension of disbelief. Actors with lines cost more and nobody tuned in to see Joe Blow as “Redshirt Killed First.”
Best Chain of Command moment (paraphrased): Somebody bad appears on the bridge. Picard says, “Mr Worf, please shoot him.” Worf says to underling, “Shoot him.” Underling shoots him. Rather minimalized, as Worf was a Lt Commander and there were still LAYERS of command structure before we got to Seaman Underling, but closer than usual.
They never really address the issue directly, but on DS9, which does feature a fair amount of infantry type combat, it’s the goldshirts who do most of the fighting, which would normally mean Security (or Engineering) in that era. Some episode showed them wearing the regular uniforms, some showed them in a kind of coveralls with a color-coded stripe across the chest.
Most of them don’t get to say anything meaningful, though we do have one episode where Jake Sisko found a badly wounded goldshirt on a planet the Federation was fighting over, and he made references to various things that ground combat evidently involves in the Trekverse, but we rarely, if ever see, including field artillery and “Hoppers”, implied to be some kind of atmospheric combat transport.
Follow up: Does the Enterprise ever exchange fire with planetary targets? I suppose you could argue that an orbiting starship makes a large ground invasion force obsolete.
There was a Starfleet Colonel West in ST:VI—the “Colonel” bit suggesting he was in some kind of ground forces, not the naval-styled starfleet proper.
Aaaand…a couple of pics of one of the few Federation soldiers we ever see onscreen, from DS9.
Poor guys…no body armor, no helmet—apparently not even a canteen. Or a watch.
(Who am I kidding—Starfleet’s about half a step up from Starship Troopers (the movie) when it comes to combat. Or a step below—at least the Mobile Infantry had equipment, even if they never did anything sensible with it.)
“We’re a combined force” (or something to that effect) - James Kirk in Star Trek IV
It does drive me crazy that the Captain is always going on away missions. Ridiculous!
Serious ground combat isn’t shown in “Star Trek” largely for budgetary reasons. The shows were all pretty expensive to produce as it was, so expanding the cast and adding even more expense in costumes and whatnot would be sort of pointless.
Scriptwise that did, however, lead to some weird anachronisms. It’s often noted that 94% of Starfleet appears to be made up of officers, which is weird, though I’ll grant that in 300 years maybe the notion of “officers” and “enlisted” men could be totally different than it is today (today’s two-stream division of military responsibility is itself not the way it’s always been.) It’s equally weird that the only people who ever seem to beam down to tricky or dangerous situations are the ship’s command officers, and even weirder than on a ship that has hundreds of servicepeople on it, it never occurs to them to bring three dozen Starfleet officers with phaser rifles to, you know, add a little bit of muscle. The weapons themselves don’t have any sort of consistent capability - sometimes they’re capable of blowing up a ship and sometimes they’re about as powerful as a Daisy air rifle. Nobody seems to carry any weapons OTHER than direct fire phasers; indirect fire weapons are almsot never seen. Sometimes they seem to kill people without making a physical mark on them, and sometimes they disintegrate a person. The ship itself as as fragile as a glass menagerie and anything that breaks can only be repaired by some clever, once-in-a-lifetime solution devised by a bridge officer, as opposed to just the rank and file getting down to assholes and elbows.
There’s no point in trying to make any sense of this because it doesn’t make any sense, and any attempt to explain it requires absurd spaghetti logic.
All this, at least on TV, is pretty much attributable to budget and to the need to have the name stars get screen time and lines. The Star Trek shows have always been about the core cast of characters, so that’s what they concentrate on.
To be fair, Starfleet also has some of the most renowned engineers in the galaxy, with some of their foes claiming they can make “Rocks into Replicators”. If they REALLY needed a watch, they’d find some sand and twigs and bubble gum and they’d MAKE some watches. 
And yes, one of the big reasons we don’t see ground troops in battle armor is that it would be expensive to come up with that stuff. Most shows that I’ve seen that bothered to do this saved money by borrowing the armor from earlier productions (Power Rangers and FireFly have both used the StarShip Troopers armor, Babylon 5 borrowed space suits from 2010, etc.) Sometimes this works well enough, sometimes it looks really REALLY tacky.
As for the Captain always going down to the planet, if you watch Babylon 5 (granted, not Trek, but still relevant), it seems that military regulations REQUIRE that two command-level officers go in if it looks like there could be a First Contact situation, in order to help guarantee there is someone with the experience and authority not to botch the first meeting (Earth nearly got wiped out due to a botched First Contact situation on that show).
On Star Trek, it’s just because nobody can stand up to the might of Patrick Stewart. I mean, comon! He’s Gurney Freaking Halleck!
Well, phasers have several different settings available; they can be set from ‘stun’ to ‘disintegrate’.
OK, in the case of the original 1960s Trek, Roddenberry had his peculiar vision of what Starfleet would be like(*), and that version of the Enterprise (as well as the TNG-series version while he was in charge) apparently did not have “Marines” per se, but a security department, attached to Operations/Engineering that would also do boarding/landing parties.
(*Roddenberry’s TOS ship allegedly did not have enlisted men as a distinct personnel class from commissioned officers; his reasoning at the time, per his book, was that everyone who made it to space would be the equivalent of an astronaut-rated specialist with a graduate degree, and that the commissioned/enlisted distinction, descended from the old class system, would have faded away – remember, this was the 1960s --. Watching the 1960s show you’ll see that neither “ensigns” – who would be a commissioned officer in a modern Navy – nor “yeomen” – who would be a Petty Officer enlisted rating – wore any rank insignia whatever. More practical reason? Economics, again. Not having to sew distinct uniforms or build distinct sets for a crew/chiefs/officers mess/recroom )
Arena (TOS) begins with some ground combat. It was poorly done even for 1966. Thankfully, Ripped Shirt Kirk is able to save the day by the end.
Franchise canon seems to indicate that early Starfleet ships sometimes carried a form of Marines (MAACO), and that by Kirk’s era the various corps were combined into one organization. (As has been posted already by several Trek Dopers.)
One thing to remember, Star Trek was meant as entertainment. Over analyzing it and nitpicking every little thing about it … well … that is the ultimate Trekker entertainment. I’ve been a charter member of the Nitpicker’s Guild for well over a decade (officially from 1993, unofficially, since 1969). Would’ve been one sooner if Al Gore hadn’t wasted so much time inventing the internet.
How would this be handled IRL? I mean, say someone clearly hostile literally just appears in the middle of the command center of a sea vessel. (Doesn’t have to be magic, say she’s just really good at sneaking around or something… 
)
I guess something like “rules of engagement” apply here? What are they?
-FrL-
The Captain rips his shirt open and whups the intruder’s ass.
Failing that, it depends on if the ship has a Marine Detatchment, and how close the nearest jarheads are. I think the Navy also has armed personnel of it’s own who are tasked with protecting the ship.
Dudette, that’s Captain Kirk you’re talking about.
The nearest Boatswain’s Mate will hurl a well-stained, half full coffee mug at the intruder. Problem over.
I for one, welcome our Flying Spaghetti Monster overlord!
The ship I served on, which was a cruiser with a complement of 400, had no Marines or other soldiers embarked. While underway nobody carried a personal weapon, and only the Chief master-at-arms and the Combat Systems department had quick access to small arms. The CMAA is like a sherriff for the ship’s community, but a sudden hostile presence on the bridge would be well beyond his brief.
Maybe the navigator and quartermasters would stab it with their compass dividers.
Actually, the visored commander’s caps that some Navy officers wear would make a pretty decent projectile, wouldn’t it? At the very least, getting smacked in the forehead by one would distract an intruder long enough for the Boatswain’s Mate to finish his coffee before throwing the mug.
