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So the Klingons declared war on the Federation on DS9. I believe when the whole Klingon situation was straightened out and the Khitomer Accords were reinstated, the UFP was at war with the Dominion/Cardassian Alliance by default due to treaty. Other than that, it's hard to say, because the few other known wars during that period (vs. the Cardassians pre-TNG, vs. the Tzenkethi) aren't shown on screen.
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May 9, 2021 00:41
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Infidelicious posted:TLDR: If you have an organization that bears responsibility for fighting wars, it's a military. Let's be honest in the end it is certainly a case of semantics, Starfleet does handle wars / the military thing but I will make one comparison that might fight better than the usual example of modern militaries: historical "warrior" classes. Human history is full of examples where the line between civilian organizations/classes and those we would consider the "military" is blurred. Let's take a religious order like the Knights Templar. They considered themselves to be more than just "soldiers" and similar to Starfleet covered a huge range of responsibilities that would go far outside of that of any modern military and most importantly they'd claim (let's ignore how earnest that was) that their function only serves god, that they only fight to protect their religion. I think Starfleet should be viewed through a similar lense. It isn't JUST like any regular modern military organisation (just as Federation economics aren't) and their "crusade" is exploration and science. Will they do the fighting if it needs to be done? Yes, just like any warrior class in human history that consisted of privileged citizens, religious leaders or nobility but they also wouldn't have shared our understanding of "military" or being a mere soldier. They had functions in society that shaped their lifes far more. Let's also not forget that for most of human history those who fought in wars were average people who wouldn't have considered themselves to be "soldiers", they were farmers, artisans etc. who just happened to fight for whatever reason. So if Picard says "Starfleet isn't a military" I take it to mean "Starfleet doesn't consist of soldiers and doesn't think like a military either" and there is enough to merit such a stance. Maybe Picard should have added "but we can act as military and are prepared to do so if this is required of us", They are basically a futuristic militia of a scientist class who happens to have some very powerful guns.  This also explains nicely why the Federation is relatively weak in regards to its military strength (they really shouldn't have problems to deal with the Klingons for example) despite having access to so many resources, an enormous population and technological knowledge. Also look at Wolf 359, the poor display by the Federation against a single Borg cube is much better explained if you see them as "space militia" who scrambled to muster a proper defense because it simply isn't like a "standing" army (military) who is in a constant state of preparing for war. This gets emphasized further by the fact that a project like the Defiant was only launched AFTER such a distrous display. Any real military organization would have seen it as its duty to be much better prepared and wouldn't waste the technological advantage the Federation obviously has over other major powers, just like no real military would ever agree to something like the khitomer accords. On the other hand this definition of a "scientist space militia" also leaves enough room for individuals who see this weakness and might want to shift the balance towards a more organized military side and that's where the evil Federation admirals get their time to shine. Still considering the size of the Federation and its population Starfleet always seemed rather "small" to me, even their headquarter is extremely modest for such an organization and the numbers (be it ships or personel) is certainly tiny if it would be a proper military. Like I said, Starfleet not being too serious about the military aspects of the organization does provide a good (canon) answer to why the Federation doesn't easily dominate its part of the galaxy because in theory they should be just as overwhelming in strength as the Dominion is to the Alpha/Beta quadrant. FlamingLiberal posted:So the Klingons declared war on the Federation on DS9. I believe when the whole Klingon situation was straightened out and the Khitomer Accords were reinstated, the UFP was at war with the Dominion/Cardassian Alliance by default due to treaty. It's probably similar to how modern NATO members see it when they are involved in "wars". I mean Germany didn't declare war on Serbia when they joined the NATO operation in the Kosovo conflict and it should be noted that it's often called "the kosovo conflict" and the term "war" gets avoided. It was justified as humanitarian war effort and I'm not saying that it wasn't or that it was wrong but it's probably the best analogy to the kinds of "wars" the Federation would have including defensive wars (though I doubt the Federation was really obligated to respect the alliance with the Klingons because I doubt it allowed for a "first strike" policy which the Klingons employed, the Federation reentered that alliance just for pragmatic reasons). LinkesAuge fucked around with this message at 01:46 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 01:33
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nine-gear crow posted:A lot of post-Enterprise beta canon stuff has tried to retcon it so that yes, MACO has always existed and is still an active part of Starfleet in the TNG/DS9/VOY/LDS/PIC era, you just didn't see it on screen because... gently caress you. Prequelitis retconens is a terrible wasting disease with no cure, but there is a preventative measure: isolating points of contamination and mercilessly excising them before their gangrenous rot contaminates the entire franchise.
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May 9, 2021 02:36
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That also just seems entirely unnecessary when Beyond's idea of "MACO was dissolved and their personnel given a place in Starfleet when the Federation was formed" works pretty simply and effectively
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May 9, 2021 03:10
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Starfleet stopped using MACO after an experiment gone mad tried to summon meteor to destroy Gaia
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May 9, 2021 03:31
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“Qo’noS is dyin’, Kirk!”
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May 9, 2021 03:42
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thotsky posted:They don't really say what replaced it, seemingly treating a similar question from one of the frozen people in the TNG episode "The Neutral Zone" with bemusement. Since Riker is the one smirking at the question we can probably surmise that for him the answer is casual sex. TV is just theatre, but advanced, it's an artistic pursuit. Videogames are likewise basically just "every other art medium before, combined + interactivity." I get the real reason for dogging TV back in the 90s and how "watching TV" is fundamentally different than "making TV," but the way it's put, makes it sound like nobody consumes art, they're all too busy making it. Go out to a poetry slam and nobody listening, just waiting their turn to speak... or maybe that's how it works already? Never been to a poetry slam. People go around making fun of lazy slobs just listening to music, like those dinguses don't know they can just use their infinite free time and money to just get good at music makery.
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May 9, 2021 05:03
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You gotta listen at a poetry slam, so you know when to slam
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May 9, 2021 05:08
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When wars break out, Starfleet runs around shooting people with their peace guns, and as they bleed out, they are consoled by the fact that actually they were shot by an unarmed noncombatant. There really doesn't seem to be the sentiment in the show itself that they're nonmilitary. Pacifists sure don't sign up to Starfleet. Beyond just the rank structure, there is a rigidity to the command structure that I think generally isn't associated with any real-world civilian organizations, but is commonly expected in a military organization. The shows never seem to have any problem with their military identity. A military organization can get involved in various nonviolent missions, but it doesn't change the fact that they're armed and expected to fight when fighting may be needed.
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May 9, 2021 06:00
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The fact that Starfleet considered themselves explorers, scientists, diplomats and humanitarian relief workers PRIMARILY and expresses that self-perception when asked is actually a good thing beyond the semantics because it implies that they are trained to think of use of force as a last resort, as opposed to their primary mode of operation. Which bears out in the fiction.
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May 9, 2021 07:34
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The contradiction between Starfleet clearly being a military organisation and the show ocassionally say 'no these are peaceful science-exploration warships' is that is was a show created by a coked up Hollywood liberal who wanted to portray a post-scarcity utopia but also had no firm ideology and still venerated the armed forces he'd served in, so you have this weird hodgepodge of vaguely defined and seemingly contradictory institutions where the protagonists are the military but woke but also when push comes to shive definitely a military
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May 9, 2021 09:23
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I keep hearing people say that majel said gene was a maoist by the 70's at least but I don't know how true that is and also lol yeah roddenberry and his drug abuse
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May 9, 2021 11:07
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Lets not forget this was all muddied by like 4 movies that gene had no control over that leaned hard on military protocol that gene hated. He is said to have hated 2,3,4,5,6 cause they represented more miltitaristic star fleet. TMp is more his vision. Which is lol 70s
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May 9, 2021 15:48
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I just pretend those guys hanging around in football pads in TMP were MACOs
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May 9, 2021 16:57
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I just think it's worth accepting that when some new aliens of the day are apprehensive about a starfleet ship and consider it a warship, they're not being ignorant savages; they're being totally rational about the massive ship that could laser them into smithereens.
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May 9, 2021 17:23
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Still one of my favourite intakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kntMdtzG5a8
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May 9, 2021 18:07
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SlothfulCobra posted:I just think it's worth accepting that when some new aliens of the day are apprehensive about a starfleet ship and consider it a warship, they're not being ignorant savages; they're being totally rational about the massive ship that could laser them into smithereens. Yup. And in TNG: Conundrum, when the whole crew gets amnesia, they take one look at the Enterprise's specifications and immediately conclude that it's a warship. They find nothing odd about the fact that this is the ship that was sent on a daring strike mission deep into enemy territory.
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May 9, 2021 22:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:I just think it's worth accepting that when some new aliens of the day are apprehensive about a starfleet ship and consider it a warship, they're not being ignorant savages; they're being totally rational about the massive ship that could laser them into smithereens. The humans make relatively low-tech weapons with the specific intent of surrendering them because they're hiding that their ship is a hell of a lot more advanced than it appears, and wasn't even built by them, on a vengeance mission of "we're looking for the race that destroyed the Earth and killed 99.99% of humanity, and if we find that you're even remotely connected to them we're going to gently caress you up".
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May 9, 2021 22:44
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Powered Descent posted:Yup. And in TNG: Conundrum, when the whole crew gets amnesia, they take one look at the Enterprise's specifications and immediately conclude that it's a warship. They find nothing odd about the fact that this is the ship that was sent on a daring strike mission deep into enemy territory. I've always liked how they conclude this and then it saves the day because of how hilariously overmatched their enemies are
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May 9, 2021 23:30
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Payndz posted:There's a Greg Bear novel where the humans' ship rocks up in an inhabited alien system, and the first thing the locals do is effectively a customs check for weapons with the rule of "we don't allow that poo poo in our space AT ALL, and if you don't like it you can GTFO." I always thought it would be funny to have aliens insist that the Enterprise strip out all its phaser emitters and torpedo tubes before being allowed into orbit. These are our laser flashlights. Please don't up the power or it could be a dangerous weapon. This is our monowire survival knife. Please don't extend the wire out too far, or it could be a dangerous weapon.
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May 9, 2021 23:39
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Powered Descent posted:Yup. And in TNG: Conundrum, when the whole crew gets amnesia, they take one look at the Enterprise's specifications and immediately conclude that it's a warship. They find nothing odd about the fact that this is the ship that was sent on a daring strike mission deep into enemy territory. To be fair, this is actually an absurdly stupid assumption for them to make given what we know about the D. It's a ship where a huge portion of its interior volume is devoted to housing families and it literally has its own school system. Most of the rest of it is theoretically occupied by storage and equipment for exploration operations and things like that. Someone with no knowledge of its mission at all should look at those specs and be asking questions like "why is this floating hotel armed to the teeth?" It'd be like looking at a Royal Caribbean cruise ship with a Tomahawk missile launcher and assuming that it must be a warship instead of just being wildly confused. It's basically the least warship-y ship from any Star Trek show.
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May 10, 2021 04:52
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"What are our offensive capabilities?" "Quantum torpedoes, phaser banks... and organic Andorian ice pears from... an arboretum." "That's normal. Nothing strange about that. Fire the pears."
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May 10, 2021 05:07
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Brawnfire posted:"What are our offensive capabilities?" "My god, those pears are going through their shields like they're made of tissue paper. Our ship is far too well-armed for this to be a war!"
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May 10, 2021 05:35
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Paradoxish posted:To be fair, this is actually an absurdly stupid assumption for them to make given what we know about the D. It's a ship where a huge portion of its interior volume is devoted to housing families and it literally has its own school system. Most of the rest of it is theoretically occupied by storage and equipment for exploration operations and things like that. Isn't that literally part of the arc of the episode? The crew start looking closer at the Enterprise and realise that their warship has a bunch of children on it.
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May 10, 2021 09:39
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Alchenar posted:Isn't that literally part of the arc of the episode? The crew start looking closer at the Enterprise and realise that their warship has a bunch of children on it. It's been a while since I've seen it but I'm pretty sure the guy the memory-erasing aliens inserted as the first officer over Riker was there exactly to steer them away from these kinds of realizations. He kept pushing everyone to stay on the warpath all the way up until they realized that the whole scenario was total nonsense.
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May 10, 2021 09:45
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It's clear that Gene Roddenberry and the other Star Trek writers didn't fully think through all thematic choices they made for Star Trek, or maybe they didn't care. The Enterprise-D has families on board, which could make sense for a ship that does long-range scientific work, but then they assign the ship to do dangerous tasks close to home such as patrolling the Cardassian DMZ.
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May 10, 2021 11:34
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I have some thoughts about the Kobayashi Maru. In Wrath of Khan, Kirk said he got a commendation for "original thinking" for hacking the simulation, which suggests that the Kobayashi Maru was not a graded exam. In the 2009 Kelvin-Trek movie, Kirk is put on trial for hacking it. That tells me that Abrams didn't really understand the Kobayashi Maru. It's more akin to a wargame. When the military runs a wargame, "winning" is not the point. The military conducts wargames to give officers exercise in decision-making, or to see how hypothetical tactics and strategies might work in real life. They're not supposed to be trials of passage.
Kurzon fucked around with this message at 11:44 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 11:40
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Kurzon posted:I have some thoughts about the Kobayashi Maru. In Wrath of Khan, Kirk said he got a commendation for "original thinking" for hacking the simulation, which suggests that the Kobayashi Maru was not a graded exam. In the 2009 Kelvin-Trek movie, Kirk is put on trial for hacking it. That tells me that Abrams didn't really understand the Kobayashi Maru. It's more akin to a wargame. When the military runs a wargame, "winning" is not the point. The military conducts wargames to give officers exercise in decision-making, or to see how hypothetical tactics and strategies might work in real life. They're not supposed to be trials of passage. I’m absolutely positive Abrams understands the Kobayashi Maru and changed it to create drama and plot elements.
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May 10, 2021 13:16
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Kurzon posted:It's clear that Gene Roddenberry and the other Star Trek writers didn't fully think through all thematic choices they made for Star Trek, or maybe they didn't care. The Enterprise-D has families on board, which could make sense for a ship that does long-range scientific work, but then they assign the ship to do dangerous tasks close to home such as patrolling the Cardassian DMZ. That was more premise drift. The original idea with TNG during pre-production was that they'd be spending most of their time out beyond the frontier, but over time the show spent more and more time closer to home.
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May 10, 2021 13:26
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The D had the best sensors, they kept getting assigned to border patrol during cold war flare-ups while awesome subspace novae went unpeeped-at
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May 10, 2021 14:33
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Paradoxish posted:To be fair, this is actually an absurdly stupid assumption for them to make given what we know about the D. It's a ship where a huge portion of its interior volume is devoted to housing families and it literally has its own school system. Most of the rest of it is theoretically occupied by storage and equipment for exploration operations and things like that. I mean only if you assume by modern standards. In Star Trek provisioning a ship doesn’t seem to be an issue so having families on a warship isn’t that big a deal. Hell bringing a family to a war zone used to be fairly common depending on the culture doing the fighting
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May 10, 2021 15:01
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Pascallion posted:Another IV defender logging on. It’s even better after years of revenge fantasies. IV is the best in the entire series and I pity anyone who doesn't understand this. 1. It's a fantastic end of the trilogy that started with star trek II 2. It was Nimoy taking on a way to REPAIR what made star trek good with some solid goals and nailing all of them: - giving each actor a chance to shine - telling a moral and environmental story that didn't involve war, shooting things, or punching things - bringing dignity back to the character of spock so that he himself could not feel ashamed of it 3. More to the last part of #2: the scene at the end when Spock finally meets Sarek after his return is way better than people realize. It's the end of a character arch that lasted 30 years on screen. 4. The animatronic whales are some of the most convincing special effects of all time 5. It inspired the creation of real life transparent aluminum 6. The music awesome and anyone who says otherwise is dead wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd3NG2JX6lc G-III fucked around with this message at 15:27 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 15:21
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CharlestheHammer posted:. Hell bringing a family to a war zone used to be fairly common depending on the culture doing the fighting It wasn't unusual in the first half of American history for family members to be in the baggage train.
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May 10, 2021 15:46
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Started DS9 S7 and I’m stuck on something. In his vision where he first sees his mother, Sisko clearly knows he’s on Tyree. It was just thrown out so casually almost like we’re expected to know where it is — was there some other mention of Tyree before this? To me it just looked like any desert so I’m not exactly sure how Sisko knew it was Tyree other than “he knew because it moves the plot along”.
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May 10, 2021 20:56
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Martytoof posted:Started DS9 S7 and I’m stuck on something. In his vision where he first sees his mother, Sisko clearly knows he’s on Tyree. It was just thrown out so casually almost like we’re expected to know where it is — was there some other mention of Tyree before this? To me it just looked like any desert so I’m not exactly sure how Sisko knew it was Tyree other than “he knew because it moves the plot along”. The prophets did it
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May 10, 2021 21:22
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Kurzon posted:I have some thoughts about the Kobayashi Maru. In Wrath of Khan, Kirk said he got a commendation for "original thinking" for hacking the simulation, which suggests that the Kobayashi Maru was not a graded exam. In the 2009 Kelvin-Trek movie, Kirk is put on trial for hacking it. That tells me that Abrams didn't really understand the Kobayashi Maru. It's more akin to a wargame. When the military runs a wargame, "winning" is not the point. The military conducts wargames to give officers exercise in decision-making, or to see how hypothetical tactics and strategies might work in real life. They're not supposed to be trials of passage. Kelvin Spock gives a thematically similar answer to Kelvin Kirk that Prime Kirk gave to Saavik. "How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn't you say?" is pretty similar to "The purpose is to experience fear. Fear in the face of certain death."
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May 10, 2021 21:59
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean only if you assume by modern standards. In Star Trek provisioning a ship doesn’t seem to be an issue so having families on a warship isn’t that big a deal. Hell bringing a family to a war zone used to be fairly common depending on the culture doing the fighting I think the issue is mostly that bringing family involves leaving them in harm's way, which on a spaceship means permanently exposed to the vacuum of space if it gets blown up. And this is in a setting where most wars take place a month away at worst, which seems pretty reasonable for deployments without families. Also bringing along the family in historical times was probably both about year long deployments and long journeys and a matter of the warzone being comparably safe for the families (up until defeat), unlike their undefended homes. The Federation should be mostly safe everywhere.
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May 10, 2021 22:51
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BonHair posted:I think the issue is mostly that bringing family involves leaving them in harm's way, which on a spaceship means permanently exposed to the vacuum of space if it gets blown up. And this is in a setting where most wars take place a month away at worst, which seems pretty reasonable for deployments without families. I mean the ship can eject the families with saucer part. They rarely do but they can.
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May 11, 2021 00:05
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just frisbee those kids out of harm's way
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May 11, 2021 00:15
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BonHair posted:I think the issue is mostly that bringing family involves leaving them in harm's way, which on a spaceship means permanently exposed to the vacuum of space if it gets blown up. And this is in a setting where most wars take place a month away at worst, which seems pretty reasonable for deployments without families. Yeah I'm pretty sure this is an artifact of the pre-production concepts for the show, where the Enterprise would be getting way the hell into deep space and the Federation was itself supposed to be really big. Like, the TNG tech manual has the Federation spanning a volume of space so large that even a Starfleet ship would take months (or even over a year? need to refresh myself on the tech manual) to transit it. The idea was originally "how can we ask people to just not have family for a stretch of several years at a time? well, maybe we shouldn't ask that of them" Then as time went on the setting shrank and by the time the Dominion War rolls around, Deep Space Nine is only like a few days away from Earth, if that.
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May 11, 2021 01:41
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