In my understanding, volunteering to **serve **on board a ship (of **any **kind) puts you “in the service,” be it military or civilian. You subject yourself to **their **rules and regulations and surrender whatever personal freedom you might have.
Of course, you always have the option of **leaving **if you find this is not to your taste. Which is as it should be. Get the hell out and let someone else who **wants **to have a chance.
Take us out of orbit Mr. Sulu, ahead warp factor one. This was the last line in many TOS episodes. Scotty was amazed Kirk was going to Troyius from Elas on impulse power. This not using warp drive in a solar system was TNG and later convention.
Let’s put it this way - could anyone on Enterprise-D ignore a direct order from Picard?
The real reason for this was that he wanted to diddle Elaan for as long as possible. 
I sure as all hell would have, on numerous occasions. And I’d have been happy to do so, even if it meant losing my commission (which they give you in the sevice) or post.
Wow that looks really similar to the Enterprise-C from the Narendra III incident.
Regarding the families aboard ship, remember, the Galaxy Class Enterprise-D has (or had) diplomacy as it’s official primary mision. It was supposed to basically just cruise around and “show the flag” while doing things like transporting goods refugees diplomats relief supplies etc if I am remembering correctly.
It is not the service as we know it. Just because it has some elements of things you have experience with, doesn’t require it to have all the elements of what you’re familiar with.
“No” service or organization is going to let you bring your family? Well, historically, soldiers, and particularly, officers, in some militaries could bring their families.
Again, you can’t deny the premise, part of which is that one of the purposes of Starfleet is to have families and non-military people as part of the long-term mission of exploration.
They don’t expect an exploratory and diplomatic vessel to be performing military functions most of the time.
This is science fiction. It’s about thinking outside the terms of your personal experience.
To add to what I said earlier and compliment what Ascenray said, for the Enterprise-D specifically, as The Flagship of Starfleet and the Federation it would seem abnormal to me, within the context of the Star Trek universe to not have families onboard the ship.
The episode I referenced regarding the Enterprise-C did show an alternate -D without dependants
Congratulations—the fact that you dreamed up an exception to what was explicitly stated to be a generalization clearly invalidates my argument. :rolleyes:
I disagree, as space exploration becomes a standard part of human life, families will be part of that.
Huh? 
To claim Starfleet is not a military organization is like saying the Royal Navy of the 18th and 19th centuries was not one because they engaged in other things (e.g., exploration, scientific research, diplomacy, law enforcement, regulation of commerce, search and rescue) in addition to providing for the national defense in times of war.
Starfleet personnel do all of the above too. They also wear uniforms and insignia of rank. They attend an Academy and have a chain of command. They are subject to rules, regulations, disciplinary actions, and courts martial. They can lose or resign their commissions. They are armed with weapons of mass destruction and are authorized to use deadly force when thought necessary. They are awarded decorations and frequently die in the line of duty. Sounds pretty damned military to me.
Yes, in the past naval officers were allowed to have their wives travel on board ship with them, and some chose to exercise the option. Officers in the United States Army were also allowed to bring their wives and families with them to frontier posts, and enlisted men were allowed to marry their laundresses and live on base with them. But this was the case for a very small number of personnel, and the women were all performing useful functions. If there were children involved, there might have been maybe a dozen at a post with a garrison of several hundred. No big deal. But more often than not, men enlisted in the Army or Navy to get away from their families, not to bring them along (even if it had been allowed).
I realize that Roddenberry in his dotage was dreaming of something like an ideal community of people free from everyday concerns and conflict, all living in perfect harmony on board a spacecraft cruising a friendly Galaxy, but that just ain’t gonna happen, ever. The whole idea is so preposterous it explains why I can now stand to watch only a handful of ***TNG ***episodes. Even Mission: Impossible is more realistic than they are.
To borrow a line from the ***TOS ***Writer’s Guide:
“If you’re one of the people who say ‘The character acts that way because it’s science fiction,’ don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
And yeah, I did like the way the Enterprise-D was portrayed in that time-warp episode; it had a Combat Information Center and everything. The best part was Picard’s reaction to the mere suggestion there should be families on board—one of sheer incredulity.
Yeah—just like with the Robinsons.
Come on - we all know the only reason they had families abroad is so that the writers could write stupid “family-friendly” stories about stupid kids like Worf’s stupid stupid stupid son. It was a screenwriting crutch, nothing more.
And Wesley! Can’t forget Wesley! Gag! :mad:
I suppose we all should have known Roddenberry was losing it when he said in one interview “Wesley is me at 14.” :rolleyes:
Who said that. Me? I said Starfleet is not primarily or solely a military organization and it’s not a service as we know it.
You’ve just set forth the case for why this is a perfectly plausible premise. In history, we have had armies with trains of civilians, including families and service providers; we have had fortresses with attached villages; we have had ships with family members on board; we have had outposts with attached towns, in which the outpost’s personnel could have their families practically next door; we have foreign embassies in which staffers have their families on post; we have mixed military-scientific outposts, like in the Antarctic. Star Trek has space stations in which the civilian population outnumbers the military staff.
It’s all there. On the Enterprise, you’re just putting it all together and making them mobile. And that’s the premise.
You’re making the mistake to taking your personal experience and assigning it to the category of “human nature” instead of just what societal organization happens to be at the time, which is changing constantly.
That’s a reference to individual character decisions. It’s not a strike against the premises of speculative fiction, which is actually how science fiction works—let’s take something that doesn’t exist and put people in it. In an above post, I listed a bunch of things that so far as we know are impossible, but science fiction works with it. This is merely a societal organization matter, which we know isn’t impossible, because we have examples of variations of it, many of them you listed yourself.
Star Trek hasn’t ever been able to really decide whether they’re going to portray space combat as basically WWII-style fighter combat, a-la the Defiant vs. Borg, Enterprise non-saucer section, Birds of Prey, etc… or whether it’ll be more of a Napoleonic-style slug-fest with relatively slow moving ships, a-la Wrath of Khan, Yesterday’s Enterprise, Star Trek VI, etc…
That’s the real problem here (as with much of Trek)- they never really codified any of that, and it was always open for directorial and writer interpretation for any given episode/movie/scene.
As a child, I grew up on a military base, out in the middle of nowhere in California’s Mojave desert. My dad was a civilian, yet we lived on the base, used base facilities, etc. When the base was established in 1943, there was no significant civilian town/city to act as a support to the base. The base itself was a “temporary” facility, so banks wouldn’t offer mortgages except on very unfriendly terms to the civilians who were hired by the Dept. of Defense to work at the base (it was a weapons design/test facility). So for the first roughly 25 years of its existence, civilians lived on the base in housing built by the Navy for them, using the base facilities (even, for the first decade or so, the post exchange and the comissary!).
Civilians on the base were not subject to military authority. A member of the Navy might be somehow involved in the table of organization for the civilian workforce (there was a relatively unique inter-relationship of military and civilian workforces that to this day remains the backbone of how things get done there), but you didn’t take “orders” from the Navy personnel.
To me, this is an example of what the Enterprise-D is. She’s just China Lake in a mobile, space-faring form. She’s got personnel from Starfleet on board, but she also has just plain civvies. And I’m okay with that, because the UFP isn’t engaged in a war, and the Enterprise-D isn’t a warship.
The fact that the Enterprise-D in Yesterday’s Enterprise doesn’t have families on board because it’s a military vessel simply emphasizes the point. That ship would be more analogous to a forward military base built in the Pacific during WWII, where you would hardly expect families to end up living with whomever got posted there. It’s a complete paradigm shift.
What I think got lost during the show was what effect this has on use of the Enterprise-D. Whenever that ship is headed into what will clearly be a battle, it should leave all non-“military” personnel on the saucer, dump the saucer off out of harms way, and proceed to the battle with just the engine/weapons section. Yeah, there are potential problems with this, but it’s still doable, and was clearly what they were thinking when they put the whole thing together at the start of The Next Generation. But all of that takes precious screen time to accomplish, and I think they just kinda gave up on the concept right away for that reason, if no other.
But to assert, as terentii does, that there is no possible way that this could happen is ludicrous. Maybe YOU wouldn’t do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s inconceivable. Clearly.
And to add one point - if the Cold War suddenly got hot, and the Russkies decided to nuke China Lake, or Beale, Luke, Eglin, or Offut, would the decision to have families on bases be retroactively judged to have been wrong? Because one could say they were in danger the whole time they were living there. Heck, being anywhere in Omaha was probably dangerous in the same way. Early ICBMs weren’t all that accurate. Yet, somehow, families lived on base all these years.
If things were different, they wouldn’t be the same.
Hostile action by someone like the Borg or Klingons or Romulans who take no prisoners isn’t the only reason the saucer section could separate and be a life boat. If Decker had sent his saucer away, and fought the planet killer with just the warp drive section, more would have lived. Because the PK doesn’t chase spaceships that aren’t a threat.
Or if there was, say, a computer virus that had the risk of blowing the warp core. If the saucer section had separated, most of the people on the Yamato would be alive.