Sooner or later, they could expect a friendly visit from a pshrink/psocial worker like Troi who would do a computer search to find out in which corner of the Federation their nearest next-of-kin lived, and then pack them off on the next available shuttlecraft.
I’m going to assume your question was purely rhetorical, and that you had absolutely no intention of insulting my intelligence with it. :mad:
Heck, they were forced into the role in Homeward and were not happy about it.
Not settlers, but kids aboard warships weren’t uncommon in Hornblower’s day, and even after:
Yes, I used to do living history, and I know about young/underage children serving in the American, British, and other militaries until relatively recently. Sometimes they enlisted legally, sometimes not, and occasionally with the connivance of their parents and the recruiter. Often they came from poor families with many children, or they were simply orphans.
Somehow, I don’t see a parallel with children on the *Enterprise *here.
(Occasionally, a ship’s captain would have his wife on board as well, or allow his officers to bring their wives along on a voyage. I shudder to think what their lives must have been like, though they were of course of a much hardier breed than I imagine the average wife of a Starfleet officer would be.)
[archly] I see no reason for answers to be couched in riddles.
Yup, a three month voyage on a small, one room shuttle with Ensign Johnson… :eek:
At least in the Star Trek universe, they took the whole ‘Wagon Train To The Stars’ thing more a little more figuratively… Spaceports should have paved roads folks!! Sorry, that was one of my biggest peeves with Firefly… A space “frontier” area can certainly resemble the ‘Old West’ in feel, but once someone gets to the point of spaceports and interstellar travel, it shouldn’t actually look like it!
That took forever…
I’m glad someone shares my sense of trekmour. 
Did you make a dirty joke here, or do I just have a dirty mind? :dubious:
Not the worst TNG episode by any stretch, but I was intensely annoyed by that episode where the Enterprise crew was subjected to alien mind control by the introduction of an addictive computer game.
Mothers, don’t let yer kids become mindless video game zombies - was sanctimonious message du jour.
He answered as simply as your level of understanding permits. 
I thought it was remarkably like “The Trouble with Tribbles,” in that the menace came from something apparently harmless yet insidious.
Like root beer.
I put that episode as like fourth worst of all time. Over 1000 crew, from many different species, and ALL are affected the same way, instantaneously, by the “game”? Even Worf? And, unfortunately for Wil Wheaton, Westly has to save the day. AGAIN.
Not even Ashley Judd could save it.
Root beer, mmmmmmmmmmmmm! :o
Just like the Federation…
This sort of thread reminds me of why I liked Trek at the level I did. There were too many inconsistencies in the world building for my taste - is the enterprise a military ship or not (and if not why does it act like one so often), does the federation have money or not and how does the economy work with replicators, how does a transporter work (if it can duplicate and/or ressurect people there are huge implications, and sometimes it can), and so on. And the tendency to come up with an amazing new ability for the ship or some super scientific breakthrough one week, but then forget it the next week (and worse, invent another new ability to then be forgotten about) breaks suspension of disbelief and removes dramatic tension.
Those things only bother me if I get really into the series and try to think/talk about it a lot, though. If I’m just watching a show occasionally to see the characters get up to adventures and/or drama, then I’m not going to try to form the whole thing into a coherent picture in my head, so don’t end up saying ‘wait, that doesn’t make sense’ or ‘but he should be able to fix that easily, he did last week’. That’s where I think TNG worked great, you could come in occasionally for a TV SF fix and enjoy it easily without having to stumble over the inconsistencies in plot and world building.
Also, I don’t agree that the interior aesthetics of the ship were bad - it feels dated now, but I didn’t get a ‘hotel and convention center’ vibe from the ship when I used to watch it.
To me, the real stumbling block is how La Forge could be affected, since he doesn’t have conventional eyesight. The show doesn’t even try, they just show Riker telling him about the device and later we see La Forge under its thrall, but we never see him wearing it.
It had potential as a premise - an alien species wants the ship’s power and manipulates the crew to get it. Compare this episode to “11001001” (a heavily cybernetic species steals the Enterprise after tricking its crew into abandoning it) and “Conundrum” (a species gives the entire crew amnesia - including Data, this time - and tries to trick the crew into thinking they’re involved in an interstellar war).
Loathe as I am to praise Voyager, the manipulation-recruitment premise works best on an individual level, as in their episode “Nemesis”, which I thought was one of their best.
Oh yeah, I should have mentioned Geordi as part of my problem with this ep.
Conundrum is bad, but in a similar style I list Clues as like the fifth worst of all time. “We must all give ourselves amnesia otherwise the super powerful and super violent but surprisingly forgiving aliens will kill us all!” When people complain about TNG being wimpy, I have to grudgingly agree concerning this episode. Not only would Kirk not have put up with the shenanigans of this episode, neither would have Picard in any earlier episode.