People were pretty tired of global wars by that time, since they were still recovering from the global thermonuclear fooforaw that ended the Eugenics war.
Uh, Romulan. Though that name was used because their culture was thought at the time to have similarities to that of Ancient Rome.
That would be good. Also good would be the story of Captain April, first commander of the Enterprise, told in more of a ***Forbidden Planet ***style, which was closer to Roddenberry’s original concept.
There’ve been recurring proposals over the years to have a Starfleet Academy TV series or movie, and there actually was a YA book series (with a young Cadet Worf, I think), but ST really is more about getting out among the stars. That said, the TNG episode “The First Duty,” about the shenanigans of Wesley Crusher and his classmates at the Academy, was quite good.
I haven’t checked Memory Alpha in a while, but I thought those were two separate wars. The Eugenics was the “20th Century brush wars” that Kirk mentioned in A Private Little War, and that they ended without GNF. Regular fighting overthrew the genetically-engineered supermen, and order was restored. WWIII was the global nuclear holocaust between the Communists and Capitalists* that 1966 America feared was coming. It was in the wake of that that the events of First Contact occurred. Why they had an unfired missile was never explained.
You and I may agree on this, but on the SD, we are the minority.
*And as we know from TNG, the Communists won. 
ISTR some late-canon episode in which it was revealed that there was either a companion world at the heart of the empire or a homeworld ethnicity type of humanoids known as “Remans”.
And, of course, in Star Trek: Attack of the Lens Flares (which is kind of extra-canon IMHO), the villain Romulan was named Nero.
It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but this novel addresses the ‘first contact’ concept in an interesting way, from what I remember.
Has it occurred to anyone that far from being Earth’s best and brightest, Starfleet is the dumping ground for the malcontents, meddlers, emotionally disturbed, chronically hyperactive, et cetera, who are pushed through a “Starfleet Academy” that doesn’t appear to teach them about much of anything other than the vaunted “Starfleet regulations” which are often regurgitated as some kind of a plot complication, and thus onto staffing largely autonomous ships run by semi-sentient computers which contrive elaborate play fantasies of interstellar conflict and natural celestial hazards for the crew to ‘solve’ by applying pseudoscientific technobabble solutions that generally add up to inventing a new particle or manipulating some kind of nebulously defined ‘energy field’ to ‘close a temporal rift’ or somesuch?
This would explain why nobody ever remembers the ground-breaking technology they invented just last week to solve a similar problem, or how all aliens are basically humans with bumpy heads and one or two dominant species traits/personality disorders, or why nobody on Earth actually seems concerned enough about the large number of supposedly threatening species and powers such that they maintain a massive defensive force in the Solar System. It also explains why the J.J. Abrams produced movies have such dramatically different administrative rules, basic physical principles, and appearance; it’s just Release 2.0 of the Star Fleet Gaming Licence (STGL) with new rules for rapid character development (wing it on the fly), advancement (accelerated promotion/leveling), technology development (any technology is availble if needed to resolve an impossible plot complication like being stranded on an icy moon lightyears from anywhere), and luck (unlimited Fortune point pool and automatic resurrection for PCs). Starfleet is just the future of LARPing, and Star Trek is just the Role Models of the future.
Think about it…
Stranger
That would explain quite a bit…
The “brush wars on the Asian continent” that Kirk mentions in “A Private Little War” are a clear reference to Vietnam. I’ll go out on a limb here and guess if you didn’t realize that, you weren’t alive or cognizant in 1967.
In “Balance of Terror,” it was made clear that Romulus and Remus were the double planet system at the heart of the Romulan Star Empire. (The next time you watch that episode, take a close look at the navigational chart put up on the main viewscreen.) At the time, I think everyone assumed both planets were populated by the same offshoot of the Vulcan race. In the third ***TNG ***movie (Nemesis) it was shown this isn’t so. The Remans are apparently a separate species.
If I’m not mistaken, it was also made clear in “Omega Glory” that the Yangs and Kohms had fought the East-vs-West war Earth avoided. (Though theirs was bacteriological, rather than nuclear.)
Roddenberry originally came up with the Star Date concept to avoid arguments over what happened when. TOS made a big mistake by placing the Eugenics Wars explicitly in the 1990s. The Trek timeline has now been revised so many times, I’ve lost track of it.
Is the dean of SFA a talking raccoon? With some kind of entish secretary?
As I’ve argued elsewhere before on the Dope, Starfleet has the power of imprisonment (after court-martial conviction) and potential death (when ordered on dangerous missions) over its members, and enforces the law against Federation civilians (just ask Harry Mudd), as well as providing exploratory, diplomatic and military services. It clearly isn’t just a LARP, social club or bowling league.
This is like my theory that Forrest Gump really isn’t some Zelig, being involved in everything happening in America.
He didn’t go to China to play table tennis, for example. His so-called Army buddies took him down the road to play against some Asian dudes in a bar somewhere and told him it was China. What does Forrest know about how far China is? He probably wasn’t even a good player, but his “friends” keep telling him he is. The they all have a big laugh and get drunk.
If you imagine the whole movie that way, it’s a really dark and depressing movie. And he really is a “retard”, in the parlance of the movie. Not some genius-savant. Just an average idiot.
The introduction to the novelization of the first movie talks about how Kirk and crew were old style while the new humans were more advanced. Throwbacks like Kirk were necessary to explore the galaxy. Picard seemed new humanish to me with his sense of superiority to everyone including Q.
One of the things I liked about the first DS9 episode was how Sisko and Picard did not get along at all well.
Sign me up. I had seen a few episodes of DS9 from the first season, and thought it was great, but when I watched it through I gave up after season 4. The Dominion War was going on way too long, a lot of the stories made no sense, and I laughed at how after the show runners bragged about setting everything on the station so that they couldn’t visit a planet, solve a problem, and vanish they brought out the Defiant which often did exactly that.
"Today’s exercise will be fighting a sehlat hand to hand. Er, hand to claw.
When a guy leads a traitorous attack in which your Wife is killed, you don’t ask him to join your bowling league. ^:dubious:^
Then what about those rented shoes, Mr. Smarty Pants?
You will need a weapon.
Step 1: Construct some sort of rudimentary lathe.
“Go for the eyes, like in Episode 22! …Go for the mouth or the throat, its vulnerable spots!”
Stranger