One question about Star Trek the new movie

Cafe Society
61

Here’s my explanation for why senior officers always go on away missions.

We don’t get to see much of life on Earth or other planets in Star Trek. We are given to understand that it is pretty much a utopia. We are also told (sometimes) that there is no money, at least by the time of TNG, and Kirk denies having money in The Voyage Home (though arguably he only means cash). People are generally shown to work not for financial gain but for self-improvement. But utopias are boring. Self-improvement is boring. What clearly motivates the people in Star Fleet is adventure. Senior officers are basically administrators. Paperwork and staff meetings aren’t exactly going to satisfy anyone’s need for self-actualization. Without monetary payment why would anyone want to be a captain or a first officer? Because that’s where the action is! Star Fleet discourages starship captains from leading away teams, but they know they can’t actually do anything about it because that is how captains are rewarded - they get to choose the away teams, and as much as possible they choose themselves! Starships clearly have boring duty assignments - characters sometimes complain about them, Captain Picard once called Turbolift control for crying out loud! What a boring job! Why would anyone do it? In the desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, they will someday be promoted to a position that gets to actually beam down to an alien planet just once, even if it’s just as a red shirt to be fodder for the tar pit alien of the week!

It’s often been commented on that most of what Star Fleet does doesn’t even need people! Why not just send down a probe to do reconnaissance? Why send an entire starship to go explore strange new worlds when it could be done much more easily from home? Why are the same five people sent down to explore an entire planet when they get there? Because the only thing that gets people to show up for work at all in Star Trek is the opportunity to do something actually dangerous and exciting now and then! And those opportunities are kept artificially scarce in order to preserve the value of the only currency Star Fleet has available.

62

Ships can carry only so much weaponry. A few asteroids parked in earth orbit could mount huge guns and massive shields. On the other hand, it makes a stationary target, so the shielding and guns would have to outweigh the lack of mobility.

63

This has always seemed ridiculous to me too. Why did they bother modeling the ship’s hierarchy after real life? In real life, a captain would NEVER leave his ship, and neither would the first mate. If you model the Star Trek situation after NOAA, or a research ship, which it most resembles, the people leaving the ship to “gather data” are most certainly not the “operations” officers responsible for running the vessel and keeping it afloat.

If they were going to behave in odd ways, Roddenberry shouldn’t have named a captain or first officer - it would have been more appropriate to invent some new functions for his main characters.

The most ridiculous thing about the current movie is the age of the crew. We’re supposed to believe that this fresh-out-of-the academy bunch are immediately given senior officer roles? Where’s the experienced crew?

64

The usual command structure of a capital ship:

Captain - Executive accountable, leads the overall mission of the ship. The captain drives the “Why We’re Here” of the ship’s mission profiles. The captain is also the de facto chief legal authority of the ship, and is materially and administratively accountable for the ship and for the actions of her crew.

Executive Officer - 1) Chief Operations Officer - runs the ship on a daily and routine basis, 2) Assistant Captain - assists the captain as needed, shadows the captain in his/her executive functions.

Department Heads - Lead each department (Medical, Engineering, …)

Capital ships typically do not have permanent or routine ground ops - if they do, the ground component has its own component, and the ship’s end of the matter is to get the ground assets to their destination, and to support them as needed.

Fine - the Federation missions are different. You’d still need a dedicated capital crew to manage the ship end, but you’d need specialized encounter people to handle the actual ground relations, as well as both an internal ship security force and a ground defensive force.

These are non-overlapping roles. In a ship of the explorer type, you’d need an overall captain of the ship, an XO-ship, and an XO-ground ops. In practice, the teams that routinely hit the ground would led by encounter team leads, typically led by people rating from LTJG up through LCDR.

The command layer has a basic job - clearly relay the mission requirements to the operational assets. The operational assets do the actual work, and the chain of command ensures information flow in both directions (up and down the chain).

But Roddenberry never used that model. And the character model employs main characters, which leads to the same damned three people on the ground, and leads to the same damned two or three pilots in BSG doing everything.

65

Spock had already graduated, no? He was even an instructor at the Academy, and first officer to Pike. Uhura (and Chekov) were little geniuses… Not as much experience, but better at the roles they had than the “experienced” crew (Uhura replaced a more experienced person who didn’t know Romulan or other languages relevant to the mission at hand). In the case of McCoy, and I suspect others, their supervisors died during combat, and hence they were promoted instantly. Scotty is not entirely without experience, just punished in a distant planet until he’s beamed back to the ship.

The only one you may have a case is Kirk, stowaway and loudmouth. The only reason he got to first officer was that he was smart and told Pike (correctly) what was happening, and everyone else was dying around him, and to captain was because he made Spock show his emotional side.