# Whats it like for the masses in the Federation? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 2, 2012, 11:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533 "2012-03-02T11:36:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2012, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533/41 "2012-03-04T17:46:21Z")
> [@Lobohan](#): > > I don’t think that’s accurate. The vast majority of episodes feature an initial scientific, exploration or diplomatic mission. Guns end up being used because this is an action-drama about spaceships. Yeah, this…I just went through the TOS Season 1 episode list… The Enterprise’s initial duty in each episode _The Cage_: Exploration _Where No Man Has Gone Before_: Exploration _The Corbomite Maneuver_: Exploration _Mudd’s Women_: Police/Military (Maybe…I’ve not seen the episode lately, so I’m not 100% on why they were chasing Mudd at the start.) _The Enemy Within_: Scientific _The Man Trap_: Humanitarian/Transport _Charlie X_: Scientific/Transport _Balance of Terror_: Military _What Are Little Girls Made Of_?: Scientific/Transport _Dagger of the Mind_: Transport _Miri_: Humanitarian _The Concience of the King_: Complicated, but the lie told to trick Kirk into maybe performing police duties is humanitarian. _The Galileo Seven_: Humanitarian (the Enterprise’s main duty) and Scientific (why the Galileo splits off and gets into trouble) _Court Martial_: Military, nominally, though it’s not clear what the Enterprise was doing when the accident happened. _The Menagerie_ 1&2: Another court martial, so again military, nominally, but again, not performing military duty. _Shore Leave_: Shore leave. So, none of the above. _The Squire of Gothos_: Unclear duty, looks to be transport. _Arena_: Military (though, ironically, the actual fighting of the episode takes place outside the context of formal military action). _The Alternative Factor_: Scientific _Tomorrow is Yesterday_: Resupply, none of the above. _The Return of the Archons_: Scientific/Historical/Something of that Sort (determining the fate of a ship that crashlanded 100 years before) _A Taste of Armageddon_: Diplomatic (and accidentally caught up in a bizarre war they had no idea about) _Space Seed_: Unknown duty. _This Side of Paradise_: Scientific _The Devil in the Dark_: Humanitarian (while they intend to kill the Horta, they think it’s a pest-exterminating job, not a military/police action, as they don’t know the Horta’s sapient - and, of course, when they determine this, they switch to diplomacy) _Errand of Mercy_: Ironically…military. _The City on the Edge of Forever_: Unknown duty. _Operation – Annihilate!_: Humanitarian/Scientific So, a count (due episodes like Conscience of the King, this count is slightly fuzzy): Military/Police: 4-6 episodes Exploration: 3 Other Scientific: 7 Humanitarian: 5-6 Diplomatic: 1 Other/Unknown: 4-6 I don’t feel like going through the other seasons or series, specifically, but, discounting stuff like the latter seasons of DS9, where they were actually in the midst of a full-scale war, and thus military efforts came to the forefront, the count will be similar - if anything skewing a little harder toward ‘unknown/other duty’. ---
**Author:** ![Quimby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/22d042/32.png) [@Quimby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quimby)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2012, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533/42 "2012-03-04T19:02:14Z")
The fact that Military matters get stressed as much as they do is a function of the fact that we are watching a TV show about it. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2012, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533/43 "2012-03-04T19:22:24Z")
> [@Tengu](#): > > Yeah, this…I just went through the TOS Season 1 episode list… > > The Enterprise’s initial duty in each episode… > > _Court Martial_: Military, nominally, though it’s not clear what the Enterprise was doing when the accident happened… They were studying an ion storm from inside it. Finney was in the pod taking readings. So, scientific. Good analysis - thanks! ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2012, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533/44 "2012-03-04T19:26:29Z")
> [@Tengu](#): > > Yeah, this…I just went through the TOS Season 1 episode list… > > The Enterprise’s initial duty in each episode > > _The Cage_: Exploration > _Where No Man Has Gone Before_: Exploration > _The Corbomite Maneuver_: Exploration > _Mudd’s Women_: Police/Military (Maybe…I’ve not seen the episode lately, so I’m not 100% on why they were chasing Mudd at the start.) > _The Enemy Within_: Scientific > _The Man Trap_: Humanitarian/Transport > _Charlie X_: Scientific/Transport > _Balance of Terror_: Military > _What Are Little Girls Made Of_?: Scientific/Transport > _Dagger of the Mind_: Transport > _Miri_: Humanitarian > _The Concience of the King_: Complicated, but the lie told to trick Kirk into maybe performing police duties is humanitarian. > _The Galileo Seven_: Humanitarian (the Enterprise’s main duty) and Scientific (why the Galileo splits off and gets into trouble) > _Court Martial_: Military, nominally, though it’s not clear what the Enterprise was doing when the accident happened. > _The Menagerie_ 1&2: Another court martial, so again military, nominally, but again, not performing military duty. > _Shore Leave_: Shore leave. So, none of the above. > _The Squire of Gothos_: Unclear duty, looks to be transport. > _Arena_: Military (though, ironically, the actual fighting of the episode takes place outside the context of formal military action). > _The Alternative Factor_: Scientific > _Tomorrow is Yesterday_: Resupply, none of the above. > _The Return of the Archons_: Scientific/Historical/Something of that Sort (determining the fate of a ship that crashlanded 100 years before) > _A Taste of Armageddon_: Diplomatic (and accidentally caught up in a bizarre war they had no idea about) > _Space Seed_: Unknown duty. > _This Side of Paradise_: Scientific > _The Devil in the Dark_: Humanitarian (while they intend to kill the Horta, they think it’s a pest-exterminating job, not a military/police action, as they don’t know the Horta’s sapient - and, of course, when they determine this, they switch to diplomacy) > _Errand of Mercy_: Ironically…military. > _The City on the Edge of Forever_: Unknown duty. > _Operation – Annihilate!_: Humanitarian/Scientific > > So, a count (due episodes like Conscience of the King, this count is slightly fuzzy): > Military/Police: 4-6 episodes > Exploration: 3 > Other Scientific: 7 > Humanitarian: 5-6 > Diplomatic: 1 > Other/Unknown: 4-6 > > I don’t feel like going through the other seasons or series, specifically, but, discounting stuff like the latter seasons of DS9, where they were actually in the midst of a full-scale war, and thus military efforts came to the forefront, the count will be similar - if anything skewing a little harder toward ‘unknown/other duty’. If this were reddit I’d upvote that post. Can we get an upvotes system plz? ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533/45 "2012-03-05T21:53:17Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > There’s no such thing as post-scarcity; you always want something more. The allocation of resources MUST be determined by some kind of price structure; as has been pointed out, there’s obvious limits on the number of starships the Federation has, or view of San Francisco Bay, or the services of unusually talented individuals. The people of the Federation may be insanely rich by our standards, but that simply allows them to reach for things higher up on Maslow’s heirarchy - that’s the part of Picard’s stock money speech that actually makes sense. The comparison to climbing Everest is apt; people probably join Starfleet not to make college payments or save up for a house, but simply because the idea of exploring the galaxy and kicking Romulan ass is fifty-three different kinds of awesome. Christ, wouldn’t YOU sign up? Yes, scarce resources need to be allocated in some fashion, and it turns out that prices are a very efficient method of allocation. But “money” isn’t the only way we allocate things today. Some things you get just by virtue of being a citizen of such-and-such country. Other things you can get but you can’t buy. Want an invitation to Lady Gaga’s party? You can buy a ticket to her show, but you can’t buy an invitation to her private party. So how, given that invitations to Lady Gaga’s party are scarce, do these invitations get allocated? How do invitations to dinner at my house get allocated? How do invitations to sleep in my guest bedroom get allocated? They get allocated by the whim of the person hosting the event, or owning the house. And this is how most economic transactions throughout history have also happened. The monetization of most transactions is fairly recent. In the medieval era you mostly couldn’t outright buy land–you had to be granted the right to use land by some authority. So today you can’t buy yourself a generalship in the US Marine Corps, and in Soviet Russia you couldn’t buy a dacha on the Black Sea, or in Medieval England you couldn’t buy an Earldom. You could get these things or these positions, but you couldn’t buy them. So yeah, apartments with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge are scarce even in post-scarcity Federation Earth. That doesn’t mean that these apartments are allocated by whoever pays the most for them. It might be that Starfleet controls (one hates to say “owns”) a bunch of awesome apartments, and hands them out to various flunkies as perks, just like those Black Sea dachas. Yes, this sort of non-market allocation would be much less efficient at matching consumers with goods than a market economy. I’m sure Kirk loves his apartment, but he might not love it as much as he would love the bundle of goods and services he could trade for the value of that apartment. But perhaps the apartment isn’t his to sell or trade. And we can easily imagine that, given the relative lack of scarcity in Star Trek Earth, this sort of economic inefficiency is tolerated in the name of other social ideals. It’s not like people are going without food and shelter and entertainment and civil rights to provide Kirk with this awesome apartment, like people in the USSR. Of course, in real life the people who were in charge of distributing Black Sea dachas in the Soviet Union weren’t exactly impartial bureaucrats. They gave out these perks to their cronies in return for favors. But usually these favors weren’t wheelbarrows full of rubles, because what would your godfather do with a bunch of rubles? He doesn’t want worthless coupons for bread and vodka, he’s got all the bread and vodka he wants. He wants real favors. Money in Soviet Russia could only buy a small subset of goods, and even the lower classes tended to have plenty of money lying around, they just had nothing they could buy with it. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533/46 "2012-03-05T23:41:34Z")
> [@Quimby](#): > > We have discussed this in other threads but Starfleet has three responsibilities in the Federation: Military, Exploration and Scientific Research. Each is of equal importance. I think it is tough for people to get because nothing currently exists that is anything like it. In the early writers guides and stuff Roddenberry clearly drew an analogy to ships of the British Navy during the Hornblower era, which had military and scientific and exploration components. The Beagle was a military vessel but didn’t do a lot of shooting when Darwin was aboard. He also meant the Captain to be very self sufficient since he often not able to communicate instantly with Star Fleet, for instance in **Balance of Terror**. By the time of TNG that was pretty much over. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533/47 "2012-03-05T23:52:44Z")
Excellent, **Tengu**! I can’t resist a few geekish quibbles. In **Arena** they were drawn to the base to discuss military matters, though it was a ruse. You might forget the short battle on the surface, and I believe Sulu was on the edge of fighting in orbit. So it is a clear military thing. **Conscience of a King** - The troupe is touring and hitches a ride, so humanitarian? **City on the Edge of Forever** - definitely scientific, since they went to the Guardian’s world to investigate the ripple in time emanating from it. But I agree with your thrust. In fact, I suspect there were even fewer military episodes in later seasons. I can think of “The Enterprise Incident” and maybe “The Doomsday Machine” but that is about it. In fact Errand of Mercy was all about having an enemy race while not having a war. ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533/48 "2012-03-06T00:18:25Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > In **Arena** they were drawn to the base to discuss military matters, though it was a ruse. You might forget the short battle on the surface, and I believe Sulu was on the edge of fighting in orbit. So it is a clear military thing. I’m actually not sure why we’re in disagreement, here - as I said, they were there for military reasons, but the main battle of the episode was an informal duel between Kirk and the Gorn, which they were forced into by a third party. > [@](#): > > **Conscience of a King** - The troupe is touring and hitches a ride, so humanitarian? Kirk is convinced to go pick them up on the pretence of getting a new kind of food to relieve famine on the planet [Cygnia Minor](http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Cygnia_Minor). > [@](#): > > **City on the Edge of Forever** - definitely scientific, since they went to the Guardian’s world to investigate the ripple in time emanating from it. I should have noted that ‘unknown’ wasn’t necessarily the case in the episode itself - some of them were simply my memory and Memory Alpha’s episode summaries not having the answer. ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533/49 "2012-03-06T00:23:49Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > …or in Medieval England you couldn’t buy an Earldom… Not the best example. While you couldn’t exactly buy at tile outright, but you could get one in exchange for loaning the King a large sum of money (or use of your wife). ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533/50 "2012-03-06T00:44:02Z")
Let me state that I’m happy to see Starfleet go on scientific missions and such. It’s fun, as long as it makes for a good episode. That doesn’t mean its _primary_, fundamental purpose is to do that. It has fleets of warships, and when the Federation goes to war, Starfleet is what they call in to do it. _Starfleet is their sole branch of military._ The Air Force’s primary purpose is to support ground military actions. It generally does this by controlling the skies, and . And when we’re not at war, they do a lot of other things, too. The Navy’s primary purpose is to blow the living crap out of anything that floats, or happens to be near the sea, or might possibly one day decide to annoy us. When it’s not doing that, they run humanitarian missions, patrol the seas, and so forth. So yes, it’s military. And trying to handwave the numerous wars run by Starfleet (and only Starfleet) is rather ridiculous, and smacks of _Moving the Goalposts_. Plus, let’s face it: Starfleet ain’t the brightest bulbs in the Quadrant to begin with. This is the organization that sends large numbers of uninvolved women and children (oddly, no civilian men as far as I could see) into the depths of space. In fact, they were _actually_ blown up numerous times, but fortunately always came back thanks to rewriting time or something similarly implausible. And let’s not forget that the designers made the warp core highly unstable and liable to explode at any time, but failed to provide a consistently-working ejection mechanism. Fortunately, Star Trek Engineers are less “technologists” and more like “wizards”. And can’t you imagine the discussion about the Enterprise-D? Engineer: “Alright gentlemen, here are our blueprints. This ship will be quite roomy, has big and powerful engines, a large passanger section, AND hosts our finest scientific and military implements.” Starfleet Dude: “Hey, the ‘neck’ on this thing is pretty thin anyway. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could, like, detatch it and fly around the saucer?” Engineer: “Nah, then it’s need engines itself. Ooh, let’s have a drink to celebrate.” _Three bottles of Romulan Ale later_ Engineer: “Awwrigh- _hic_ - we makez da sausher sheparate, and you guyz pretend you’ll protect alla dem families but never uszhe it!” Starfleet Dude: “_Hic_ Deal! I’lll write out da orderszh right now!” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-it-like-for-the-masses-in-the-federation/614533.md?page=2)