Is it smart to have families on the Enterprise-D?

Just get me the fuck away from Jessica Fletcher.

 

Ah, Cabot Cove. A place with a murder rate so high it makes Detroit go, "The fuck, man?!"

 

And why do people keep living in whichever city the current crop of Power Rangers lives in, given that there will inevitably be weekly monster attacks and giant robot/monster throwdowns tearing up the downtown area? (For that matter, why do the villains always focus their attempts to invade Earth on that same particular city instead of someplace the Power Rangers don't live?)

 

Death is the Only Option:

You're a low-ranking ensign on the Enterprise assigned to an away mission on a never-before visited planet. The rest of the away team consists of senior officers.

OR

You're serving any position on any other Federation starship, your ship has been dispatched to rendezvous with the Enterprise.

 

The writers were better with Picard's love interests.

I don't remember a single one dying.

Any time a woman was interested in Kirk, they tend to end up dead.

 

Death is only the beginning.

There was the woman Picard had an affair with years earlier, who had the son that wasn't Picard's son.

 

"Away team?" No. That's a TOS trope you're describing, so the phrase you want is "landing party."

Let's see, just for the heck of it, here are all the known Enterprise-D fatalities during TNG:

"Lonely Among Us": Engineer Singh, aboard ship
"Heart of Glory": Two security guards, aboard ship
"Skin of Evil": Tasha Yar, away mission
"Where Silence Has Lease": Haskell, conn officer, on bridge
"Q Who": 18 unnamed personnel, aboard ship
"The Bonding": Marla Aster, A&A officer, away mission
"The High Ground": Three unnamed crew, aboard ship
"The Best of Both Worlds": 19 crew dead or missing after Borg attack
"The Loss": Marc Brooks, unspecified accident (referenced)
"In Theory": Engineer Van Mayter, aboard ship
"Disaster": Conn officer Monroe, on bridge
"Violations": Ensign Keller, in engineering (flashback)
"Ethics": Sandoval, disruptor blast (referenced); Fang-lee, unspecified (referenced)
"Schisms": Hagler, aboard ship (after abduction by aliens)
"Lessons": Science officer Richardson and 7 others, away team
"Descent": Two security guards, away team; security guard Franklin, on bridge
"Gambit": Security guard, away team
"Lower Decks": Sito Jaxa, missing and presumed dead, away mission
"Eye of the Beholder": Engineer Kwan, suicide in warp nacelle
"Genesis": Conn officer Dern, on bridge

So that's 14 fatalities off the ship, 51 aboard ship, and 3 unspecified. Of the off-ship fatalities, only four were known to be security guards, with only one definite security death on an away mission, the far-from-anonymous Tasha Yar, prior to the 6th-season finale. Of the on-ship fatalities, only three were known to be security; but all in all, it looks like for the most part, you had considerably better odds of survival on an away team, not worse. (Although perhaps that's because TNG away teams usually consisted solely of regular characters.)

If anything, it seems that the most dangerous single posting on the ship was the conn, since at least three people died at that station -- plus there's the conn officer Q froze half to death in the pilot, and the conn officer who got sucked out into space in Nemesis, so the whole series is bracketed by conn officers suffering.

 

How many redshirts and crew members died on TOS over the entire series? I bet the ratio is much worse compared to TNG.

 

Well, here you go:

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Sta...)#Captain_James_T._Kirk.27s_five-year_mission

In the first season (not counting the pilots), redshirts only account for about 1/3 of the fatalities. It wasn't until season 2 that they became the primary cannon fodder.

Not counting the pilots, the onscreen death toll would appear to be 45 people out of 430 crew, while in TNG it's 68 out of a bit more than 1000. So yeah, that's a significantly worse ratio.

 

This happened to jump out at me: These three didn't die on shore leave, but rather when the terrorists board and try to blow up the Enterprise. (Presumably, one of them was the guy gunned down in a corridor by a female terrorist.)

 

^Sorry. I misremembered and thought they'd been killed in the explosion at the start of the episode. The post has been edited.

 

Yes, it is a good idea to have families on the Enterprise. To be separated from your husband/wife and especially kids for long periods of time is extremely painful. I would want, if my husband would agree, to have him and our kids on the Galaxy Class with me. If I didn't I would miss him terribly and I would miss many moments of my children's growing up that only happen once in their lifetime.