I’ll be in my bedroom.
BTW, the 12 number comes from the episode “Tomorrow is Yesterday.” From the Blish version
Christopher: It must have taken quite a lot of money to build a ship like this.
Kirk: Indeed it did. There are only 12 like it in the Fleet.
As for Galactic Empires not being galactic, might I remind everyone of our “World” Series.
Speaking of the old ST manual, I have an original. When you are a geeked out 12 year old the book was a world of wonder. Almost every thing in the book was later changed but at the time it was the cat’s meow. About the number of ships they listed the original 12 or so then had about a hundred listed as further construction. The galaxy map was also there as well. I have scanned the appropriate pages of the manual if anyone is interested in how they appeared.
Galaxy Map
Starship List
I don’t know anyone who grew up reading the original Technical Manual who didn’t get stoked when the Dreadnought-style Enterprise burst on the scene in “All Good Things.”
I personally said “It’s about time!” out loud.
Not to mention the exclusively Terran participation in the “Miss Universe” pageant.
Aesiron - That would go along way towards explaining why the Enterprise is “the only available ship in the quadrant” in every episode.
These factoids are interesting as a backdrop, but how do they relate to the actual story? Is a future civilization going to deploy a million space battleships against a planet or are they going to send one Starship Enterprise Swiss Army Knife ship? Does each plot conflict end with the hero ship firing its superweapon and taking out a thousand dreadnaughts at the end of each episode?
How relevant is an “empire” of millions of planets completely separated by light years of space?
First of all, we don’t know how many habitable planets a galaxy can have. Maybe Earthlike planets are so rare, and terraforming so difficult, that the entire galaxy contains only a few thousand inhabited worlds. That’s just as likely as a billion worlds.
Second of all, how much does an interplanetary warsship cost? Maybe each is worth the GDP of a thousand worlds. I could see why there wouldn’t be enough of them
Third of all, if there* are*millions of worlds, the very concept of a galactic empire is unthinkable. No organization can be that large and that complex without collapsing into tens of thousands of warring factions. I could see, maybe, millions of inhabited worlds - but a single unifying political structure? Impossible.
Boy, you aren’t kidding. I still remember how delighted I was when I got my copy from the old Kaufmann’s department store (no longer there) in my hometown. I still have the book in its original black plastic binder. I loved that thing to death back then. When they referred to several of the ships mentioned in it in ST:TMP, I just about jumped out of my seat!
No hard figures. But the Enterprise came across dozens of new worlds during its five year mission. So inhabited planets don’t seem to be rare.
The starship Enterprise was often compared to the aircraft carrier Enterprise (which was the state of the art “ship of the line” when the show was produced) so I figure they were equivalent in cost. The difference is the United States is one country on a single planet. The federation was thousands of planets or more - they should have been able to afford a fleet thousands of times bigger than the United States Navy.
I was talking about galactic empires in general, actually. The ST universe doesn’t make much sense anyway (and is, IMHO, one of the most boring major invented worlds out there).
If you’re going to make such a comparison, I think you should be comparing the United Federation of Planets to the United States of America. Clearly the names are meant to imply that, though it’s kind of iffy. (Given that Vulcan has an ambassador to Earth & all.)
Roddenberry also intended Kirk be like a Captain of a British ship in the early 19th Century, in that he is often out of touch with his superiors and thus must make his own decisions (Balance of Terror being the best example.)
As for the number of ships. perhaps a lot more the twelve had gotten build, but they seemed to have lost one every couple of weeks, so maybe they were doing the best they could to keep up. I seem to recall that in the novelization of ST:TMP it was mentioned that Kirk’s fame came in part from being one of the few captains who brought his ship back at the end of the mission more or less in one piece.
Because I expect at least some sanity and realism. If in a technothriller novel set on Earth it depicted there being only 50,000 soldiers in China it would be laughable and stupid. Ditto for this.
Also for the Star Wars Galaxy, much of the Galaxy is unified by the fact that humans are the dominant species.
Have you met humans before? A human-dominated galaxy would be the *least *unified thing possible. Maybe I could accept a galaxy united by some serene, non-competative alien race, but humans?
In the presence of other species I have no trouble believing that humans would band together (at least more so than they do IRL).
You throw realism out the window the second you bring in FTL drives and artificial gravity.
It’s called the suspension of disbelief. It’s easy to accept that in the future they have some advanced but unexplained technology that allows people to travel at high speeds or whatever but stuff like what Curtis is mentioning can break that suspension of disbelief. I mean, really, it wouldn’t have been difficult for the creators to just take ten minutes to think about how silly their numbers were and make the counts higher.
This is exactly like when one of my D&D players tries to do something ridiculous and implausible and explains it away with “what realism? This is a game with dragons and wizards, man!”
I think the saying is, “people will accept the impossible, but not the unlikely.” In other words, you can change the rules, but you still have to follow them.
Oh, I’m down with suspension of disbelief. I just don’t find the fact that Kirk’s Enterprise is only one of 12 such starships to be a breaking point for mine. Much harder for me to accept is the idea that Starfleet accepts him going on all landing parties. (Though there’s a fair number of them which, by their very nature, he could not delegate.)
My suspension of disbelief breaks mostly on character issues. The TOS, DS9, and original trilogy Star Wars characters are mostly believable (I mean the main cast, not Obi-Wan & Yoda.) TNG, Voyager, and the prequel characters, not so much.
Hmmm. Not sure I agree. Seems like the same thinking as this:
[QUOTE=Some imaginary guy in the 1700s]
If there are millions of citizens, the very concept of a nation is unthinkable. No organization can be that large and that complex without collapsing into tens of thousands of warring factions. I could see, maybe, millions of people on a continent - but a single unifying political structure? Impossible.
[/QUOTE]