The original high concept and pitch title of Star Trek was literally “Wagon Train to the Stars”. So the parallel was quite explicit.
Wagon trains carried settlers to populate new lands. The naval vessels of that or any other day did not.
Picard was smart. He didn’t want children on board to begin with.
Rhetorical question: Learning to ride a bike or traveling on commercial aviation is as risky as engaging in interstellar exploration?
And no, I wouldn’t allow a child of mine to play high school football, not so long as I have control over his (or her) activities. You can get killed (or worse, crippled) in that stupid game.
Proving that the true inheritor of TOS was in fact Firefly.
Yes, and yet, millions of other parents do. Funny you can’t see that your viewpoint is not only not absolute, it isn’t even common.
No one is forcing you to take your kids on a starship. For the handy example, is it better or worse that Wesley was there on the ship when his father died? He got to be with him every day, whereas if his father was off halfway across the galaxy while Wes stayed at home, he’d have never known him at all, likely. But, if Jack hadn’t joined Starfleet, he’d probably still be alive. And maybe Wes would have been killed by a falling piano. Or maybe not. Who knows? You can’t live your life in fear.
See post 68
I don’t give a good goddamn what other people do. If they’re stupid enough to agree to such things, that’s their business. It’s just too bad that natural selection operates so slowly.
He was? Seemed to me Wesley had very little recollection of his father, who left a little hologram behind for him before he died.
Wha? Are you familiar with the nation of Australia? Or even the Mayflower?
The Mayflower was a merchant vessel, not a military one, and while Australia might have transported some of their unwilling-prisoner-colonists in military vessels for security, voluntary colonists needed no such accommodations.
Not sure if the distinction between merchant and military ships is all that relevant, especially since Gene Roddenberry specifically decreed that Starfleet was not a military organization, and Picard says as much in a TNG episode.
And it never made a lick of sense when he did so, not even once.
But if that was the premise of the show, then that was the premise of the show. You can’t fight the basic assumption of the story.
The creator of the show said it was the premise but the events depicted in the show contradicted him constantly. It has the same weight as if Dick Wolf announced that Law & Order had always been a musical comedy.
Yeah, we’ve been discussing that since the Nitpicker’s Guild was in real paper newsletters. It’s both. And it’s neither.
I saw that, but I thought maybe I misunderstood because it was so subtle. Well played.
Starfleet personnel graduate from an academy, wear uniforms and insignia of rank, have a chain of command, are subject to disciplinary action and courts martial, enforce interstellar law, combat piracy, and occasionally even fight in wars. Sounds pretty damned military to me.
Plus David Marcus calls them “the military” in Wrath of Khan, the best movie.
I forgot “patrol Federation space and maintain the security of its borders.” Duh! :smack:
Naval vessels might have rescued and evacuated colonists in situations of extreme danger (natural disasters, wars, political upheavals) and helped to resettle them elsewhere, but this was far from their primary task.
The Enterprise did from time to time perform such duties (“This Side of Paradise,” “Up the Long Ladder”), but ferrying civilians was certainly not what it was intended for.