Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

[Axaday]

Intrepid is a Starfleet ship with a Vulcan captain who selected only Vulcans for his crew so that the ship wouldn't stink.

But...I guess I can't prove it. I feel certain that they still have their own science vessels. Maybe not?

I similarly think the Klingon War flashback epsisode halfway dropped the ball. The leader of the soldiers was an Andorian, but he was the only one I saw. At least in the Pocket-verse I am pretty sure it was established that when the Federation was founded Andorians took over defense and border patrol, humans took over exploration, Vulcans took over science fleet, and Tellarites took over the supply-cargo ships.

 

[Copper Bezel]

It's weird no matter how you slice it. It very often feels like Starfleet is the human space fleet that's only about as open to other Federation species as we'd expect any other individual member planet's space fleet to be. The only real indication to the contrary is the fact that none of these other planets are ever shown having fleets of their own, because that would make the humans less important. We're told that this is because Star Trek can't be a show about mostly alien crews because the makeup would cost too much and no one would watch it. Prodigy used an all-alien crew because cartoons don't have makeup budgets, and nobody watched that, so I guess the logistics check out. If that reasoning does apply, we're really just supposed to be pretending that most Starfleet officers aren't human and it's a coincidence and don't ask silly questions.

But we can't really just ignore the humans and focus on the ships, because the show blatantly tells us in the most explicit design language it can that Starfleet ships are human engineering. Enterprise deeply screwed the pooch by introducing a wholly human-produced pre-Federation starship with some limited and stylistically invisible Vulcan technology, and then making it look exactly the way we'd expect from a precursor to the Starfleet ships we know (a ship that got an even earlier precursor via Star Trek Beyond and a future refit to make it even more explicitly a proto-Connie.) That fundamentally demolishes the idea that Federation ship tech is a blending of the strategies of its early members. Like it does deep percussive violence to the notion. The idea is gasping its last agonizing breaths in a field in rural Ohio through a sucking chest wound (making a Star Wars Prequel to Star Trek sure was a great idea that resulted in a fantastic series with no downsides to later canon.)

And that "T'Plana type" ship does show up in SNW when T'Pring comes to visit in "The Serene Squall", tweaked to be more consistent with the Vulcan ships from Enterprise than the version in Discovery, which got the same "cool tech" filter as the Shenzhou etc. It looks a lot like the Ni'Var. If the Vulcans are at the table building Starfleet ships, why do they also build non-Starfleet ships that look the way they did all along? (I hate that this is also one of the best non-Federation ship design aesthetics in the entire franchise, all the more so that it came from Enterprise and still looks best on the Ni'Var itself.)

Maybe this is one area where it's a feature that there are so many contradictory explanations at work, and you can just ignore whichever 40% of the canon you like least.

WHY THE **** DOES THE PHOENIX HAVE BUSSARD COLLECTORS JOHN EAVES I WILL FIGHT YOU IN THE STREET

 

[Axaday]

Other species prefer to stay home.

Or maybe Starfleet doesn't pay a salary so only the super socialist planets can stomach the idea of signing up.

Maybe the vast majority of the Federation members have very limited resources.

But I actually think a great portion of the workers on the lower decks are Lanthanites.

 

[Axaday]

I was probably always on a collision course with reality. It is hard for me to accept the new Scotty whose accent is quite different. And it is ironic really, because he is a true Scotsman and James Doohan wasn't. But they just don't match for me.

Did James Doohan every say Leftenant?

 

[Andrusi]

I like to think the oddity of Starfleet ships appearing to be crewed mostly by humans is explained away by the greater oddity of all the alien species that look identical to humans, like El-Aurians or the gangster planet people.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah but that's kind of the issue isn't it? They have never actually needed the makeup. They could tell us anyone is an alien. They don't have to keep telling us everyone is from Ohio. But they do.

 

[Axaday]

We don't know how long Vulcans had warp before Earth, but it seems to have been at least 1000 years. And they had been looking at Earth in the 20th century. They used their warp drives. But despite that, Starfleet is out charting the galaxy in the 23rd century. It could be that the Vulcans were hemmed in by Andorians and Tellarites and Romulan and Klingon space are were just being polite, but I draw the inference that they really weren't explorers. I think they made some colonies and they went to study anomalies that they identified with telescopes from home, but had no interest in just going everywhere and seeing what was out there. Maybe because they hated the conflicts that inevitably arose from that. They have never been interested in joining Starfleet in great numbers despite having been introduced in the first episode and having a very easy makeup application.

Trill are insular. I think Betazoids are kinda decadent and can't be bothered going out in space. Risians are hard to pick out in a background or crowd. I think they live in paradise and enjoy it. I think Tellarites are still doing the bulk of the heavy lifting in freighters.

I can't catalog every species. We don't know the vast majority of them, but I think we can draw some inferences that made sense. I think Earth is heavily populated and also has a lot of colonies that are also human. They may be a whole lot of other worlds that have a stable population of 20 million people. There could be 100 times more humans than a lot of other planets that aren't interested in colonizing other planets and don't have the population boom problem that humans have. There could be a lot of other planets that for a variety of reasons just aren't interested in Starfleet. Star Trek has leaned heavily on Starfleet and the Federation being an expression of something strange about Earth.

 

[Copper Bezel]

When Enterprise is getting poetical about human exceptionalism I mostly chalk that up to its being Enterprise. But when they're talking to outsiders in all the other shows, Starfleet presents itself as representing a federation of dozens of member worlds.

I do think you're right that Vulcans should largely be fewer in number and less adventurous than humans as a general cultural thing. As we know them now, I have the feeling they did more "surveying" than "exploring", content to map the galaxy without actually stopping off at any exotic planets full of the usual assortments of Mirandas, Prosperos, and trans-dimensional Sycoraxes that Enterprise is so fond of visiting. I mean Vulcans, pfff, they're probably just out there studying stars and dark matter halos and shit like that, nerds.

And I think you're right about humans spreading their seed. I think Discovery S3 makes that explicit, where we're seeing an awful lot of stated or implied humans in Starfleet, regardless of the fact that Earth isn't a Federation member, because naturally Earth isn't the only human-inhabited world and worlds largely inhabited by humans aren't the only ones humans live on either.

But I would say it's a little pointier than it is representative to say that Vulcans were introduced in the first episode and had an easy makeup application - first because I think I recall it wasn't entirely without hiccups in the beginning, and second because while the first episode introduced a (half-)Vulcan, it didn't introduce the Federation per se, a lot of this stuff worked backwards. I don't think they were trying to answer any of the questions we're asking now because they wouldn't have made any sense at the time. It's not like when I finally get to time travel back to ask Andrew Probert how the glowy red bits can be Bussard ram scoops now if we already know they keep glowing even in orbit and at warp. He would know exactly what I was asking and he would cry and thank me and the future would be sa

Spock's singularness as a type of alien person came before the decision to make the same species the other most important founder of the Federation and Starfleet, and that's why we have that dialogue drop about an all-Vulcan ship as a lampshade. If Star Trek has been leaning on Starfleet being a curiously human venture for the past 60 years, it's also been making limp gestures to pretend otherwise for about as long. I don't recall if Lower Decks included any explicit reference to the Titan having a mostly-non-human crew, and it's not on the wiki if it did, else I'd say that was one case of splitting the difference and acknowledging the human majority while also telling us there are at least some ships with way more aliens on them, but I guess that's still just a paperback rationalization.

I think the species-specific workarounds are a dead end. You're right, we can't catalog them all. I don't know an obvious limitation for the Andorians but there might well be one. There's no limitation for the Bajorans going forward, now that they're in the Federation and we know they're Reverse Vulcans who also make lots of colonies, but there's already a couple in Starfleet and there was only one planet of them until recently, and we know they're a presence in the future Federation because the UFP president in 3190 had grandparents, so they could be half of Starfleet in 2600 and the math would work out, we wouldn't know the difference.

At base, though, I just think it's sort of lame. It feels like just making excuses for why none of the alien cultures get to be as cool and important as we are, and the reason it feels like that is because it is. I kinda prefer no explanation to one that somehow feels vaguely patronizing to everyone involved, in and out of universe.

 

[Axaday]

I don't want to get this thread moved to P&R, but here are stats on where the US Military come from. https://www.governing.com/archive/m...duty-employee-workforce-numbers-by-state.html The list starts with California and Texas as should be expected, but doesn't proceed in population order. New York comes in 9th. A bunch of southern states are way up the list. Indiana isn't a tiny state, but has a pretty small participation in the military. Iowa and West Virginia are admittedly toward the low end on population, but with only 248 and 197 in the military...they are practically uninvolved. But Iowa grows a LOT of grain. They have a different thing to do.

I expect that if you dig in a little bit, you would find that states with bases get more people in that branch. People that grow up in an Army town join the Army. People who grow up by a Naval base join the Navy. Starfleet Headquarters and Academy are in San Francisco, CA, Earth. Kids growing up on some planets see pictures of starships and hear about things they do in school, but they don't see them. Their uncle didn't join. Their cousin isn't out there.

Multiply that effect when you are talking about another species from another planet.

 

[Axaday]

But I would say it's a little pointier than it is representative to say that Vulcans were introduced in the first episode and had an easy makeup application - first because I think I recall it wasn't entirely without hiccups in the beginning, and second because while the first episode introduced a (half-)Vulcan, it didn't introduce the Federation per se, a lot of this stuff worked backwards. I don't think they were trying to answer any of the questions we're asking now because they wouldn't have made any sense at the time.

Sure, but that issue went away a long time ago. Golden Age Trek could have been covered in Vulcans. But it still isn't even in NuTrek.

 

[Copper Bezel]

The idea that Starfleet might be a mostly-human organization as a matter of inertia and the culture around Starfleet itself makes more sense to me than some of the other options. I still think I'm more compelled by what I'm now realizing is the television weak anthropic principle, that all the shows about non-human crews don't exist because no one is watching them. Anything you'd introduce from a speculative angle like this institutional inertia thing, if I was a showrunner, I'd want to immediately complicate it, because I'd think the value of having such a thing as an explicit part of the story would be to make it subject to historical shifts in a dynamic universe. I feel like that offers more potential for interesting dynamics to explore than does West Virginians in the US military.

They have started to tell us that some humans are from the Moon, and don't call it Luna there. Maybe they'll stretch that muscle a bit and someday we can have a human crew member come from one of those colony planets that have existed since at least TOS, when it comes their turn to have a backstory dump when in a crisis bonding moment or volunteering for a dangerous mission.

Sure, but that issue went away a long time ago. Golden Age Trek could have been covered in Vulcans. But it still isn't even in NuTrek.

Yeah, but now that'd be a retcon, and while Secret Hideout Trek isn't exactly opposed to those, they honestly wouldn't have a compelling reason to question the handwave either. Even when it doesn't look enough like TOS and TNG for certain kinds of fans, the modern shows are still basing themselves around what we've always seen on screen.

But we do have Deep Space Nine, where they seem to have taken it as read that Starfleet is a mostly human organization and even embraced that, but made Deep Space Nine itself an intercultural hub with a Bajoran security force and a Ferengi bar and so on, so that instead of just having "the Bolian cook" on your ship, each of the major players in makeup bring a whole train of extras with them, and it even starts to mean something (root beer) for Starfleet to be mostly humans when they aren't the overwhelming majority of the characters we see.

I'm sorry if it seems like we're having an argument and I'm moving the goalposts, I'm not entirely sure what we disagree on and whether you've convinced me. I still think Star Trek is a little inconsistent in its answers to why we see mostly human crews representing a Federation that is not vastly majority human, and that that comes mostly from the realities of making a weekly TV show where alien makeup takes time and hassle and just prevents a character from being able to tell us about their childhood in West Virginia anyway, and how that gets echoed into how subsequent series look and think.

When I know that's the behind the scenes reality, I'm disinclined to find the lore justification more compelling or notable. We know why artificial gravity nets are ubiquitous even in environments where they'd be counterproductive and never get knocked out in a fight like the other internal systems, too, and it's not going to make all of the not-wirework more interesting to me to learn that gravity nets are an indestructible and impossibly energy-efficient technology provided by the Tholians with the single downside that they can't be turned off when you need to move something heavy in the cargo bay.

I think you're probably right that, despite some definite contradictions, most Trek shows assume most of the time that Starfleet is mostly humans, especially when they're not thinking about it, and that separately, it's almost possible to explain away why it might be like that. I also still think the SNW made the right call not calling attention to it or inventing an independent Vulcan science navy.

 

[Axaday]

I'm not entirely sure what we disagree on and whether you've convinced me.

I did and our mutual admiration grew 3 sizes.

 

[Axaday]

I also still think the SNW made the right call not calling attention to it or inventing an independent Vulcan science navy.

It wouldn't be their invention. They had it in the non-canon Pocket-verse. And a Vulcan science vessel on its way back from studying the Gamma quadrant appeared in a 1st season DS9 episode. It doesn't make much sense to me if they don't. The Federation is more like the UN or NATO than the United States. The various planets have a lot of autonomy. Vulcans largely sneer at Starfleet which isn't just an inference from casting, but something directly entered into evidence. Spock was specifically derided for choosing Starfleet over the Vulcan Science Academy, so I'm pretty sure that VSA graduates (Burnham is an exception to every rule I can think of) don't usually go work for Starfleet. They used to go around studying things in space all the time. Why would they have stopped? Just sit at home and analyze and collate sensor data beamed back from Mirandas? I don't think so. They want to go look at what they want to go look at.

 

[Copper Bezel]

I tried to look up that Vulcan ship and Google gave me the baseball episode instead, since it has another Starfleet Vulcan ship.

I think there's a layer of nuance we're missing though. The Raven was a Federation ship doing a science mission that wasn't associated with Starfleet. It looks like a runabout because humans only ever make ships that look like Starfleet ones, but it's probably not a navy surplus sale special like Crusher's Elios, and seems to be a similarly independent er, family business?

I imagine there's quite a lot that involves science and doesn't involve Starfleet going on out there in relation to any Federation member world, and I imagine a lot of it would be run by major institutions rather than a sort of ... citizen scientists study the most dangerous species in the galaxy sort of thing. That one might be a uniquely human activity actually. At the same time, I don't think even the institutional ones would go as far (or get there as fast) as Starfleet does, or put themselves to the same kinds of risks. We've seen Starfleet ships play host to some kind of big experiment or survey project run by a non-Starfleet but Federation scientist in just about every series; I imagine there are plenty of non-Starfleet scientists who happen to be Vulcan doing the same thing but even more condescending. The big, beefy exploration ships that travel at warp 9 and carry tons of torpedoes are all going to be Starfleet.

Realistically, we'd also probably see even more of those decommissioned auxiliary craft turned into private or institutional hands. You know, I think the most interesting thing to see actually, would be for Uhura to tell the audience that there's a Vulcan long range survey ship involved in the plot this episode, and Pike says "onscreen", and it's a Kelvin type in brown livery. Like it wouldn't necessarily have to have changed the plot if that was *this* episode, and they picked up the shuttle after the accident too. Maybe Star Trek just isn't that interesting though.

(In the 24th century, it's all Mirandas with the guns cut off.)

Edit: Either way, it's a Federation ship, it's also a VSA ship, is it a Vulcan ship? I mean, it is in the way that the Raven is a human one, in that humans are on it, but I don't think there's one big Vulcan fleet any more than there is a non-Federation Earth "fleet" that includes every random science vessel, freighter, and cruise ship.

 

[Axaday]

It was my turn to move the goal posts. The DS9 1st season ship wasn’t shown, but they hailed them and a stiff Vulcan captain spoke in front of a very Vulcan backdrop that definitely wasn’t an old Starfleet ship. But maybe VSA just has 10 ships or something.

What the pocketverse said wasn’t actually that Vulcan had its own fleet. It said there was a Federation science fleet that was pretty much Vulcans. It was birth of the Federation time and maybe eventually got phased out, but I would expect as many nonVulcans there as we see nonhumans in the pretty much human exploration fleet called Starfleet. But at the time there was also an Andorian defense fleet and there doesn’t seem to be one now. It is possible that everyone just put their ships into the tasks they were built for but stopped building them and Starfleet eventually took over everything as the old ships wore out and timed out.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, that seems plausible. Maybe the Vulcan ship we see tiny in SNW is just 100 years old, too, although it's being used to get from Vulcan to the plot and back in as little time as possible, so probably not.

The USS T'Kumbra and its crew of condescending, baseball-playing Vulcans seems like an extension of the Intrepid in TOS, which could then be an extension of what was happening in the Pocketverse. But I started Google searching again for that S1 episode, cursing myself for maybe a little bit skipping the first season or possibly two with my recent rewatch, and got reminded that in S4, the Vulcans are pinned in dialogue as discovering the Hur'q planet where the Sword of Kahless ended up and being at the forefront of early Gamma Quadrant exploration. So DS9 seems to do a planned demolition on the "Vulcans don't get out much" rationalization, but also says they've got a bigger presence in Starfleet than we see, and also a lot of independent exploration activity that may or may not be a unified Vulcan science navy and that we're certainly not told to think of as the activity of particular Vulcan universities and research bodies or whatnot.

I didn't actually expect to find material supporting my newly invented headcanon but somehow I am still slightly disappointed how little it works.

 

[Cybersnark]

We see in Lower Decks that the Vulcan High Command has its own ships even in the 24th Century. That's where T'Lyn comes from.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Fascinating. A novel class in this case too, carrying the identifying quirks of the Suurok class (like the Ni'Var) into the TNG style, with that lumpy and layered look of the Klingon and Cardassian ships of the era. I wonder whether those pods are part of the functioning of the warp ring, and whether they count as nacelles, or if they're deflectors like I assume the grated trapezoids on the fuselage are? (I see there's a thin wing that loops around from the rear of the pods and connects in the back.) Or put more simply,

+

=

Good damn job LD. Even the interiors are based on Enterprise but updated including funky spherical consoles sort of like the Ferengi use, which is better than Discovery managed. I'm not even mad. That's such a perfect realization of the idea of "TNG-Voyager era Vulcan ship".

However, I've also just learned that there's a much worse one with seniority. Apparently I wasn't paying attention in TNG and DS9, and there are TNG-era Vulcan ships in there on a couple of occasions too, which they didn't have to creatively insert into the timeline at the time because it was just the present then. Looks like it was grey in all those appearances, but the model got painted in retroactive Vulcan bronze like the First Contact ship (and subsequently all other Vulcan craft) at some point before showing up in a Christie's auction?

And it's probably okay that these ugly mofos stay in the memory hole, being the first isn't a substitute for being the best. Except....

Obviously, they have the "annular warp drive", too, and this is the one that directly inspired the Enterprise design, which in turn inspired all the other Vulcan ships with the rings that show up in every subsequent era of Trek chronology from SNW to the Discovery future. Except ... it's not actually a round ring. Enterprise took inspiration from this shape in TNG, and worked backwards to a more primitive version with the simple ring. That means the T'Plana type from Discovery was arguably right in futzing with the shape in the TOS era (even if nothing else about that design is without sin,) because the ring was always meant to evolve into this Enterprise D deflector shape. Enterprise itself apparently complicates its own effort by showing off a future Vulcan ship as a schematic that has three actually-round rings from the distant future era that we now know as the middle of the Burn.

Round warp rings, I guess, are like round primary hulls in Starfleet, they play around here and there but just keep coming back to the classic.

Edit: I saw a reference to a painting in The Motion Picture inspiring the ring of the TNG ship design, but I checked and it's nothing, it is indeed a ship with a ring, but like in a NASA way, no indication it's anything to do with Vulcans etc..

 

[G.B.Blackrock]

I'm confused about this assertion that Eridani is a star. Is it not a constellation?

 

[Copper Bezel]

Yes, we should be saying 40 Eridani but we're not going to. And it's probably best to just say "the Vulcan star system" anyway as this is a triple star.

Edit: I swear I remember the nomenclature being more obtuse than it is. 40 Eridani is the whole triple system.