Oh, come on. Her choices were to strand her crew on the other side of the Galaxy, or to obey the Prime Directive. I mean, you can’t realistically expect a Starfleet captain to pass up an opportunity to violate the Prime Directive, can you? She really had no choice.
ISTR that Kirk’s ship didn’t have “Away Teams”, but “Landing Parties”.
Again, Kirk’s attrition rate is only a few times worse than the peacetime death rate for the US navy from 1993-2000, during non-exploratory missions.
The novelization of Star Trek the Motion Picture states that Kirk was the first captain (!) to complete a five-year mission with his ship and crew substantially intact. Kirk seems bad, but apparently Starfleet crew would be begging for Enterprise berths (the alternative would be a captain like Decker who lost his entire crew).
Some of y’all are being awfully hard on Captain Kirk.
Magellan’s expedition started off with about 270 men in five ships. Three years later, 18 men in one ship managed to make it back to Spain. (Magellan wasn’t one of them–uh, spoiler alert!–since in real life the Captain does not have “plot armor”.) To be fair, the other 250+ men didn’t all die; at some point the San Antonio said “screw this, we’re going home” and returned to Spain.
James Cook is famous for not losing any crewmen to scurvy, but that didn’t mean he didn’t lose any members of his crew. On his first voyage, he lost 30 men (out of a a total complement of 94) to disease after stopping in at the Dutch colony of Batavia (modern Jakarta, Indonesia). On his third voyage–spoiler alert again!–Cook himself was killed, along with four literal “red shirts”–Corporal James Thomas, Private Theophilus Hinks, Private Thomas Fatchett, and Private John Allen, all of the Royal Marines.
That’s just the sort of thing that happens when you “boldly go where no man has gone before”.
OK, hang on with me here. Kirk was rightfully lauded for the five-year mission.
Because, according to the forward to the novelization of the first movie - behold my nerdy memory - Enterprise is the only one of the 13 original Constitution-class starships to make it back with both ship and crew in any way intact. That is, despite his losses of personnel, Kirk’s record exceeded that of all other five-year missions the Federation sent out into the void.
So either the Federation can say the entire program - expense, lives and so forth - were a terrible idea or they can paint Kirk et al as ‘true heroes’ and ‘representing the best of us’ and work on getting to NextGen levels of utopia without the need for Kirk any further.
We know from TNG that loss of ship mandates a court martial. (Mostly, for surviving it, I think.) I think it fair to conclude that this is not a recent policy, but individual crew losses would probably be looked at as part of a Captain’s annual performance review.
As for Scotty rigging the ship to perform with a skeleton crew: One must ask how long a mission that was intended to be the case for: Zipping out to Genesis Planet and back, no problem. Five year mission, I don’t think so.
Another reason for a larger crew: cabin fever. How many of you are going slowly stir-crazy from being isolated with just a few outside contacts? It’s only been a few weeks. Stretch that out to 5 years! The more people, the more you can get away from the ones who are driving you crazy, and vice versa.
Even if you reject the notion of commissioned officers and enlisted people, and go with some sort of unified rank system, you’re STILL going to have people who are low-ranking and work in the ship’s laundry, or collect garbage, or clean the heads. And you’re STILL going to have the commander, XO, boatswain, various other department heads, etc… along with people in between to carry out orders.
I mean, I think Roddenberry was trying to get at some sort of notion that Starfleet was more exclusive and space-agey than your average military, and trying to use 1960s terminology (“qualified astronaut”) to indicate that.
But it’s kind of dumb to say that there would be no officers; there would be people doing those roles, even if they didn’t have an official commission from the Starfleet Prime Minister or whoever granting them authority. And there would be people doing the enlisted roles as well.
Yeomen, indeed. No wonder spellcheck didn’t like it. A yeoman in a US Navy enlisted rank but clearly that’s different in the future.
Actually, that is just the sort of thing that happens when you split infinitives. Using proper grammar saves lives.
That begs the question of why such automation isn’t used more. The “Jeffries tubes” are ergonomically ill-designed in terms of access by the engineering crew for apparently routine servicing; for some reason the ships’ designers made the tubes big enough to move through only in a severe crouch, and many of them have open ports with large vertical drops and only built in ladder to move up and down with no apparent fall protection even though all of the gravity on the ship is artificially generated and could presumably be deactivated in that area for ease of movement. It would make more sense to have the internal workings of the ship accessibly primarily by remotely operated or autonomous servitors and only human servicing in an extreme case of damage or failure. Instead, we see no automation except for the ship’s computer, and everybody seems shocked that Lt. Cmdr Data is an android as if the technology of the era shouldn’t be able to crank them out by the billions. We can only imagine what Snowpiercer-esque horror show is going on under the deck panels in Main Engineering.
On that basis, we may assume that the junior crew on away teams are not selected for their skills, bravery, or fighting prowess, but for how low they stand on the weekly crew popularity survey. Ensign Schmidt developed an annoying whistling habit and next thing you know he’s demoted from Junior Astrodynamical Gravitation Technician to Security Team Member #2, given a red uniform shirt, and sent down to the next planet with Kirk, Bones, and the attractive new blonde lieutenant in a gold miniskirt to demonstrate that the apparently idyllic forest moon populated by walking teddy bears is actually a cannibal nightmare from the mind of Wes Craven.
Stranger
Hey, don’t blame me! I was merely quoting the Trekkie Bible:
“Although the *Enterprise *is a military vessel, its organization is only semimilitary.”
and
“Reference is occasionally made to ‘the crew,’ in which case it is a generalized statement meant to include everyone aboard the ship. A reference to ‘senior officers’ would refer to a much smaller, specific group of the crew members.”
(Op. cit., P. 209)
I don’t make up this shit, I just parrot it. 
First published in 1968, however, it does not cover the third season and is therefore not “the complete history.”
“Yeoman” wasn’t a rank, but a description of duties. They were basically personal assistants, their responsibilities apparently consisting mainly of getting coffee for the captain, bringing him stuff to sign, and having a crush on him. They were apparently mostly of the lowest rank (ensign or whatever), except in one of the movies there was a yeoman who was a lieutenant jg.
Not a recent policy at all; the Royal Navy court-martialed any captain who lost his ship, as far back as the 18th century, if Patrick O’Brian can be trusted (and he’s usually pretty accurate with the history). Jack Aubrey faces one after losing the Sophie to the French; he’s cleared.
According to Wikipedia, (which I trust less than I do POB), most navies hold a court-martial when a ship is lost, which is less about assigning blame and more to establish and record the circumstance of the incident.
I have no idea of how accurate that page is with regards to canon but it says that Yeoman Rand from TOS was enlisted.
The best bet is to just ignore anything Roddenberry said about ranks. Can anybody actually envision Janice Rand going through astronaut school? Or any of the red shirts that get blown up, disintegrated, zapped, turned into duodecahedrons?
The Great Bird of the Galaxy was and always will be full of horta shit.
I am shocked, ***shocked ***to learn of this inconsistency! :eek: :dubious:
What a burn.
A LOT of people figured “Yeoman” was Trek-speak for female go-fer.
TMoST is one of my favorite books! My copy is so dog-eared and ratty! I loved the discussion on why the green makeup planned for Spock wasn’t photographing green.
The 60s censors were adamant the Kirk HAD to keep his mouth closed during kissing.
The censors also vetoed any costume design that revealed the UNDERSIDE of a woman’s breast. Nobody understood why. Some speculated the censors thought moss grew there.
~VOW