Why couldn’t the Federation News Service be a “civilian” institution? After all, the American Broadcasting Corporation isn’t a wing of the federal government. (The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, though paid for by the federal government, is independently run.)
As far as I can tell, nearly every reference to a Federation citizen using money can be explained by a non-Federation economy. I think the question of Federation money was answered pretty definitively in “In the Cards” (DS9) when Nog grouses about how the Federation abandoned a currency-based economic system.
There’s no reason why a Federation citizen couldn’t have credits issued by some other government. One presumes that Kim is paying for his drinks somehow. (If he didn’t have any money, he could stop in at the replimat next door.)
I always thought one aspect of the Fedreation that cried out for exploration was its art. The UFP is basically a leisure society: sure, people work and have jobs, but no one worries about basic subsistence anymore. Can you imagine, then, a society in which everybody had the time to write, paint, compose music, learn an instrument, make films? The Federation would be like our society now, but a thousand times worse: an endless cacophony of derivative, third-rate art-product, released in such volume that even attempting to “keep up” with this or that discipline would be ludicrous. No wonder no one on the Enterprise reads or listens to anything created after the 20th century.
I’ve always figured that when Star Trek people talk about “money” or “currency,” they’re thinking about coins and bank notes and strips of latinum and suchlike. It’s easy to see how natural human arrogance could turn “we have gone cashless” into “we have rejected the very concept of money.”
(In my best Gul Dukat-before-he-went-bonkers voice)
You mean you still believe all this Federation anti-Cardassian propaganda?
We’re a peace-loving cultured species. Portraying us as a brutal invasion force was pure Federation invention. We were only on Bajor for both our planets’ best interests. Your slanderous insinuations are an absolute outrage.
If impulse speed is speed from a slow crawl up to “almost lightspeed”, then I have no problem with traversing a solar system in a few minutes - I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take days for sunlight to make it past Pluto in our solar system.
You may be right. But as I said, it stuck out to me when I first saw the episode because I felt sure that at some point, ST had explained that you can’t transport moving objects. It certainly doesn’t jive with the way everybody stops and stands perfectly still before they’re beamed out, does it?
In “The Most Toys”, O’Brien transports Data while he is firing a disruptor and is able to stop the discharge before he materializes. If that’s possible, I don’t see why something as mundane as stopping momentum wouldn’t be.
Except for the ST:TOS movie (“The Search For Spock”?) when Kirk can be heard continuing the sentence he started at initiation of beam-up before they rematerialize onboard the ship.
I’ve always viewed the Federation economy as very similar to the Culture’s economy from Iain M. Banks’s novels. Within the Federation/Culture there is no need for exchanging currency for anything, but both entities have funds (in the Culture’s case it’s rumoured they have the largest amount of currency available in the galaxy) for trade with outside groups.
