One of my fanwanks is that whereas before the holodeck could only create simulacrums, it was the modifications the Bynars made that made it capable of generating the true A.I.s that were featured in later episodes and Voyager. That Starfleet still doesn’t know exactly how it works but they can duplicate it.
Two things:
Kirk not only surrendered the Enterprise, he surrendered the ENTIRE Federation. Of course, that was in a novel*. But, it was written by David Gerrold, so take that for what it’s worth. Not like I trust him for canon. (*The Galactic Whirlpool, IIRC)
Second, speaking again of courts martial, I think Kirk should have lost his command for the events in And The Children Shall lead. He goes down to the transporter room to watch the shift change on the planet. He watches as the transporter operator, without any scan, communication or other warning to the two red shorts on the plant that their replacements are coming, and that there’s no danger on site, beams two doomed red shirts into deep space! Then somehow the highly skilled operator, one of earth’s best, no doubt, again without a scan or transporter lock, beamed up two man sized globs of interstellar vacuum.
THAT should be enough to remove Kirk from any command larger than the toilet cleaning crew.
But mind control, you say! They were all under Gorgon’s mind control. But they weren’t. Not all, and not all the time. Kirk never saw the corridor of sharp knives the Enterprise was flying through.
And if “alien mind control” was a defense, there’s be no discipline at all. “Captain. why were you groping Yeoman Rand on the bridge?” “Mind control”. "Scotty, why were you drunk in engineering, hanging from the warp core, singing “Loch Lomond?” “arr, mind control!”. “McCoy, why did you kill Spock in cold blood?” “Mahnd control, jimmie Boy”.
Court-martialed for losing crew? I think the Federation is happy if you just bring the ship back (or it brings itself back presumably) in once piece. I mean look at how they train their captains:
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Captains have to take the “Kobayashi Maru” test to see how they fair in an “unwinnable scenario” where every option leads to having their ship destroyed.
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I recall an episode of TNG where Diana Troi had to pass an officer’s exam that basically required her to send one of her best friends into the airducts (excuse me “Jeffries tubes”) to his (simulated) death by radiation
Why would Kirk have been court-martialed? The Federation doesn’t give a crap about their crew. Hell, look what happened to Spock! How many crewmen have died because some circuit breaker or override switch is placed on the wrong side of barrier to protect against radiation or hot plasma or warp juice or whatever?
Or to describe “love”.
Asking, hell, they downright knew something was up. Early on the main protagonist is the new guy on board and is being introduced to the half-dozen other members in his department. The phone rings, is answered, and the guy who answered it announces, “The old man and XO are on their way.”
The protagonist turns to the others to see if they think that’s as weird an announcement as he does and they’re not there. He then turns back to the guy who answered the phone and he’s not there either – they’d determined that the attrition rated for non-bridge personnel on away teams was too high and all had hiding places to be rather than get press-ganged into one.
Being the only one there, the protagonist gets tapped. He comes back alive but by the skin of his teeth and quickly found his own hiding place.
As was the TNG episode “The High Ground” for its reference to terrorism’s role in the unification of Ireland - just four years away now, according to Data: Irish Unification of 2024 | Memory Alpha | Fandom
Weirdly, Kirk started the self destruct process when the ship was taken over by a guy who wanted it to go directly to Cuba (I mean Cheron), but explicitly rejected using self-destruct when the ship was taken over by guys who wanted to conquer the galaxy.
The key is to vary the excuses:
Why did you beam out the two redshirts into the cold vacuum of space? Mind control
Why did you grope the yeoman? That wasn’t me, it was a transporter duplicate containing all my primal urges (O-kay).
Why did you abandon the ship to sip mint juleps all day? Mind-affecting spores
Why did you hijack the ship? Temporary insanity caused by ponfarr/needed to take my old captain to a nursing facility (Spock hijacked the ship twice).
Why did you kill that girl? Possession by Jack the Ripper
Large crew? 430 people in a capital ship? That could only be possible if the ship itself was already heavily automated. And it wasn’t totally, because one of the later episodes in TOS was about an experimental computer that could run the ship with minimal crew. It failed.
In comparison, the USS Nimitz has about 6,000 people aboard.
So what would all those people do on a starship? The crew would have people such as:
- A number of different scientists.
-Medical personnel - lots of technicians and engineers to fix stuff
- weapons officers
- people who maintain the shuttles and shuttle bay
- Officers on the bridge and heads of sections
- propulsion engineers, refuelers, people who maintain space suits, yada yada
- security, both in-ship and away teams.
- stewards for the officers and VIPs.
The amazing thing isn’t how many crew are on such a ship, but how few there were. ~400 crew is about what you’d find on a WWII destroyer, a ship about 500 ft long and 50 ft wide. The U.S.S Enterprise was much bigger -about 1000 ft long, and much wider. In fact, it was about the dimensions of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier (the one in service at the time - the first nuclear carrier), and that’s probably not a coincidence.
That Enterprise had a complement of 5,800.
Keep in mind that the NCC-1701 is a much less compact shape than any real-world wetnavy vessel. It might well have had the same interior volume as a destroyer.
NCC-1701 was 947 ft long and 417 ft wide overall. The engine nacelles (60 ft in diameter at the widest point) accounted for 504 of the 947 ft. The 417 ft was the diameter of the saucer section, which was 11 decks thick only through the middle. The section at the circumference was just two decks thick, and the bridge at the top accounted for one whole deck. The secondary hull was 349 ft long and 112 ft in diameter at its thickest part. Keep in mind that the hangar deck at the rear was more than 60 ft wide, 30 ft high, and 80 ft long, including the area occupied by the doors. The access pylon between the primary and secondary hulls was just over 100 ft wide (front to back) at the top, about 20 ft thick (side to side) at the base, and around seven decks tall from top to bottom. The pylons connecting the engines to the secondary hull were approximately 150 ft long and 30 ft wide (front to back). FWIW, the ship’s gross weight was 190,000 tons.
I could probably do the math to make a rough approximation of the ship’s habitable internal volume, but I’m just too damned lazy. (Also, I hate math! :mad: )
All data are taken from TMoST, pp. 171–191.
The two things that make NCC-1701 different that CVN-65 is that 1800 of the crew is in the air wing, which isn’t a factor in a starship, and that the starship doesn’t use bunkrooms and stuff crew wherever there is a wide spot. There are no more than two to a cabin. They’re using the space less efficiently, but that was meant to be the difference between the then-current Navy and Starfleet.
2024 in Star Trek was an awful year. It’s also the year of the Bell Riots on Deep Space Nine, and massive political upheaval in France.