Whats it like for the masses in the Federation?

Cafe Society
41

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’.

42

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.

43

They were studying an ion storm from inside it. Finney was in the pod taking readings. So, scientific.

Good analysis - thanks!

44

If this were reddit I’d upvote that post.

Can we get an upvotes system plz?

45

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.

46

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.

47

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.

48

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.

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.

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.

49

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).

50

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!”