My Grievances of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

Who holds the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade and was the same rank as Worf.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

The Party Machine making the decision of who will be the Candidates for President is similar to the Admirals, they are the elite and the power Brokers of the party who put forth the Candidates (If you don't the way they tell you to in the Primaries, there are consequences to pay, and most don't want to pay them, so, they vote the way they are told to vote).

Arnold Swartzenegger can never be President, only US born are eligible. As far as the "Tea party" Republicans, no mystery there, they were trumpeting traditional Small Government Republlican Values (And many of them Religious Right Moral Values), so, they were naturals for a Republican Party looking to find their way back to their roots.

For most Political positions, yes, all that matters is for them to have a silver tongue and be capable of winning elections. The President of the US however, is the most powerful position on the planet, having control over enough Nukes to blow the world up 10s of times and running a Country of 300Million Voters, they should have some kind of Executive Experience running large Organizations or Managing large numbers of people and projects.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

Well of course, there is no process for selecting a starship captain. (At least not yet. We need starships, first.)

Picard rose pretty fast and unconventionally, too. He was only 28 when he was given command of the Stargazer after his heroic act. Whether that came with a promotion to captain or not is purely problematic. He was in command and stayed in command of that ship for over two decades.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

You're suggesting that Starfleet works the same way as the Democratic or Republican party. I respectfully submit that that's complete nonsense. If that were true, Starfleet would be a massive wreck, hardly capable of performing any of duties.

A political party is simply not analagous to an organization like Starfleet. They have different purposes, different needs, and simply cannot operate on the same sort of system.

Yes, I know that. It's one of the very minimal requirements I already mentioned. Off the top of my head, they entail (in the us) nothing more than age limits and citizenship limits, those for the position of President being stricter than those for other positions.

Obviously. But equally obviously, such a process does exist in the world of Star Trek.

Picard spent more than six years rising through the ranks before that happened, had proven himself on a number of different occasions and was already a well-seasoned Lt. Cmdr., and, apparently, the ship's 2nd officer. And the Stargazer was an 'overworked, underpowered vessel that was always on the verge of flying apart at the seams.' His rise was exceptionally fast, but hardly comparable to an almost completely untested cadet being given command of the brand new flagship of the fleet after 1 day.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

Once or twice is a co-incidence, but all. All together are a pattern.

And remember, the nuTrek crew aren't the same as the TOS crew. Many more aliens, a cyborg, no Rand, Chapel left and Carol joined - just like the YE timeline's Enterprise-D crew wasn't identical to TNG-Prime.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

/shrug
Same rank != same years in service or grade, same training, or same position in the chain of command.

-Season 1 Geordi performs maintenance ("Lonely Among Us") and displays knowledge of metallurgy ("Heart of Glory".)
-Season 1 Geordi is present in many of the staff conferences. Worf isn't.
-Season 1 Geordi is the officer left in charge of the E-D when Picard, Riker and Data are absent from the ship in "Arsenal of Freedom".
-Season 1 Geordi is one of the five people discussing the removal of the captain in "Lonely Among Us." The others are 1st Officer, 2nd Officer, medical officer and counselor.
etc. etc.

More than a "junior grade pilot" IMO

And the bigger point I made stands, La Forge went from JG to Lt to Lt Cmdr over the course of years not days. A progress of promotion not a jump (tho maybe accelerated a bit by TPTB compared to RL).

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

Well, it was one hell of a day.

He probably saw more action in that day, than some officers see in a lifetime.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

Yeah, but what you referred to only happened twice and never happened again, so again it's just coincidence.

No, the crew isn't the TOS crew, they are the crew of the later movies and of pop culture. Nobody knows who Janice Rand or Nurse Chapel are, so they don't make the cut. All the characters were pretty much made to be the popular ones that people know, so probably those you'd see in the movie with Khan or the whale movie, as regular viewers would call it. All the other characters don't matter. If they had left Chekov out, or maybe even a couple of the characters out, and saved them for later, it would feel genuinely more like it was not fate. But they didn't do that and they explicitly invoke fate several times.

I don't know why this is really such an issue. They changed something. Why is it such a big deal that the new Star Trek is different? It doesn't make it any better or any worse. Some people probably like it a great deal more.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

You honestly don't believe an Admiral has the ability to promote someone to Captain if they see fit? Remember Admiral Marcus was up to no good, he had a plan to start a war with the Klingons, and wanted people in places he could use them, so, entirely believable to me, that he had something to do with getting Kirk into that chair as he inferred in STiD.

We saw in DS9, The Admiral that was moving folks around into positions of his choosing for his takeover due to the Dominion threat.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

Maybe, but it still wasn't all that different from any number of other storylines in the history of Star Trek which didn't result in anything even close to this kind of reward.

No, I honestly don't. I believe an Admiral probably has a lot of leeway and room for personal discretion while working within the rules, but I honestly don't believe they can just make someone a captain, just like that, without any official process or without the candidate still being required to meet a lot of specific requirements. Obviously, here I'm talking about a permanent command - battlefield promotion is different.

I also don't see how Admiral Marcus could really expect Kirk would be of any particular use to him in terms of his evil scheme. Certainly any more than any other officer.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

Kirk saved the Earth in TVH and went from disgraced officer with a career headed towards the dumpster to having most of the charges against him dropped and given a starship command. (A reward disguised as a punishment).

Kirk saved the Earth in TMP and was apparently given his command back permanently. ( till the next time he foolishly became an admiral)

Kirk's reputation as rule breaker makes him the perfect fall guy for Marcus' scheme.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

This is going back to the discussion we were having in this thread last week, so for anyone who wasn't around then, I'll summarize what I already said then:

Starfleet has a long history of leniency in punishment, especially in cases where officers acted out of a conviction that the rules where clearly wrong and were ultimately *proven right*. This tendency goes all the way back Spock's acquittal for the Talos IV incident.

This kind of argument is only relevant if I were arguing that starfleet doesn't reward people for saving Earth at all. Of course they do. But there's a clear difference between rewarding a man by allowing him to go back to a position he's already very capably filled for years and rewarding a man by promoting him to a position far above his experience level.

Marcus' scheme didn't even exist yet, at the end of ST09, did it? Section 31 hadn't even recovered the Botany Bay yet.

This is a rather difficult subject for me to figure out, since it hinges on the one part of STID that is just not clear at all. How much of what happened was actually Marcus' plan? Was Khan destroying the archive and running to Qonos always part of the plan? Or was Marcus' use of Kirk and sabotage of the Enterprise just really impressive improvisation?

If the plan was detailed ahead of time, how could they know for sure it would be Kirk going after Khan and not someone else, considering that was a clear result of Pike's death - an unpredictable event? How could they even be sure that Kirk would actually survive the attack on the briefing room?

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

When TNG introduced a 14 year old Alpha-shift hemsmen, did the TNG fans go crazy? Wesley was the son of Picard's two best friends so there must have been the hint of nepotism there.
Did GRs fantasy of himself as a boy destroy Star Trek as we knew it? Nope we sucked it up and moved on.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

It's impossible for Marcus' plan not to have been set in motion before Nero showed up. How could he possibly have built Vengeance, in secret, in less than a year? And he clearly tells us he wanted Kirk in that seat, he helped Pike advocate for Kirk Captaining the Enterprise.

Of course Khan going on the run wasn't part of his plan, he lost control of him, no one plans to have their own head popped like a zit. His plan was to start a war with the Klingons, and to be prepared for it, which included having the Behemoth Vengeance available and have the right people in the right places, including Khan and/or the other Augments as well as "His" Starfleet personnel that he knew would be onboard and not question what was going on if things looked suspicious when he made the move to start the war.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

There is absolutely nothing to support this idea in either movie, while the second movie, short of having a character make a declarative, affirmative statement to confirm it, pretty much hinges on the overwhelming likelihood of Marcus having done just that--recovered the Botany Bay before the end of ST09.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

He may have been working towards something, but who says the Vengeance was built specifically with this plan in mind?

If Khan's runner was completely outside Marcus' control - why would Khan ever choose *Qonos* as the best hiding place? A planet full of people who hate humans, and potentially hate augmented humans even more (considering the aftereffects of the ENT klingon augment virus are still being felt in this time period). And just incidentally, the one planet which provides Marcus with the perfect opportunity to start the war he's been itching for. If Khan is free, I'd think he wouldn't do anything to further Marcus' plans, out of spite if nothing else.

And if that whole thing wasn't planned, how did Marcus arrange for the Enterprise to be sabotaged on the fly when Kirk and Spock went straight back to the ship and took off for Klingon space?

Khan's description of his awakening outright said that Section 31 began aggresively searching space 'as a result of the destruction of Vulcan', leading to the discovery of the Botany bay.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

Simple. To try to trick Marcus into loading a ship up with the top secret torpedoes to go after him, thereby creating the best opportunity to get his people out of the clutches of Section 31. Marcus was salivating too much, from the opportunity to start his pet war, for him to realize how he was being played.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

But the torpedoes did have live warheads. If Marcus fired them, Khan would just die with his people. And Khan couldn't know that Kirk would come and decide to take him prisoner instead of just killing him. If it weren't for kirk's entirely unplanned shuttle ride, Khan would simply be stuck wandering around some Klingon ruins.

 

Re: My Greivences of Nutrek. What makes me a hater...

How do you know they had live warheads? When did any of them explode? When could any of them be scanned before our heroes figured out how to open them?

No, the whole point was that they were not really torpedoes at all. They just appeared to be. The only time any of them blew up was after the bodies were removed and one was turned into a real torpedo.