I remember a line from "Bread and Circuses", where the proconsul was having a conversation with Captain Merrick, basically asking him if Kirk would "break", by going against his principles. Merrick replied that Kirk was a "starship captain", meaning that he and others in his position were special...the best of the best. Given that we're dealing with TOS, do you think that there was indeed a delineation between "spaceship captain" and "starship captain"? In fact, do you think that the track you were on during one's Academy years purposely weeded out candidates for certain roles? Could this be the reason for Janet Lester's anger in the "Turnabout Intruder", not because there was an actual prohibition against females, but that, in a merit-based society, being a "starship captain" is, by default, skewed towards males, and therefore seen as an "exclusive club"?
Being a starship captain...a big deal?
- Thread starter dswynne1
- Start date
- Status
Maybe as to Lester, although I think she was just cuckoo. But yes, there was definitely a difference between Merrick or, say, the captains in Charlie X and Conscience of the King, Ramart and Daly, and starship captains.
Back in TOS, there were 13 Starships and they were the best of the best of the best. Leagues ahead of anything else.
Nowadays, the Enterprise is one of hundreds of ships of identical ability, most of which are much bigger, and Starfleet has been churning them out for 100 years.
Yay retconning.
Nowadays, the Enterprise is one of hundreds of ships of identical ability, most of which are much bigger, and Starfleet has been churning them out for 100 years.
Yay retconning.
Why in a merit based system would being a starship captain be skewed towards males?
If its something about physical strength then why isn't Spock a captain? Are these merits based on human male qualities?
Janice Lester could have failed the test that Merrick failed and it may have had nothing to do with her gender.
Tracey passed the test so its obviously not all the effective.
I think we saw 5 starship captains in TOS. All were male. Maybe 5 others we didn't see were female. Maybe some were Andorian. We don't really know. Lets hope the criteria they chose starship captains was merit-based and those merits were not highly biased towards human males.
Well, no - you're conflating two separate things, there being about a dozen ships like the Enterprise and the Enterprise being a starship. Every Trek era shows there are multiple starship designs in parallel service - sometimes in pairs or trios of the Nacelles Up / Nacelles Down / Four Nacelles fashion, sometimes simply with older and newer models serving side by side.
There could be a dozen ships like the Enterprise in a fleet 600 starships strong, or in a fleet 14 starships strong. It's just that we have no real reason to believe in the latter. Say, Kirk knowing people from the Constitution community personally is different from him knowing about 100% of starship skippers personally, unless otherwise stated.
TOS really offers no support for the claim. If Starfleet thought ships like Kirk's were the best, wouldn't it give the meatiest assignments to those ships? Instead, Kirk in TOS performs menial tasks, is sidelined from big wars, and is considered the second choice in pretty much everything. If he gets to save the galaxy, it's wholly by accident, never by Starfleet assignment.
That aside, starships indeed are said to be "the best", although possibly only in the sense that any USN vessel is in a different league from any civilian vessel when it comes to those all-important frontiersmanship skills. But apparently, Kirk's ship is close to the worst of the best.
Timo Saloniemi
Kirk is second choice and worst of the best? What???
He misses out on the big war with the Klingons, being sent to that backwater Organia instead. He's the second skipper to the DDM, to the Space Amoeba, and to the Omega Cure/Disease. In between those assignments, he mainly ships medicine and performs health checks on scientists. The one time he's invited to a parade, he admits he's not really needed there.
And the sort of ship he flies won't even be missed if she goes silent for half a year...
Timo Saloniemi
And the sort of ship he flies won't even be missed if she goes silent for half a year...
Timo Saloniemi
In "Court Martial" Commodore Stone says "Not one man in a million could do what you and I have done. Command a starship. A hundred decisions a day, hundreds of lives staked on you making every one of them right."
There's Merrick's appraisal."He commands not just a spaceship, Proconsul, but a starship. A very special vessel and crew."
The Enterprise has done important things for goodness sake. It was the starship at Organia waiting for backup from the rest of the fleet, it was responsible for all the ambassadors in "Journey to Babel". It was sent to monitor the Romulan border in "Balance of Terror". It was sent on the prestigious edge of the galaxy mission in WNMHGB. The Enterprise was sent on numerous important diplomatic missions. Kirk's Enterprise was very often first choice. It was rare when it wasn't. I wonder what the other starships did. Did they destroy giant amoeba clouds (perhaps the Vulcan ship was the closest at the time), go on missions to find out why Deneva had ceased contact with the Federation. Were they sent to get the cloaking device?
Last edited:
Yeah, just no. The E is on the front lines in Organia, not to mention on several other occasions. The DDM, space amoeba, and Omega mission were all accidents, but the E was the one sent to investigate in each case.
Since all those Trek eras are the work of later creative teams with their own ideas, it's irrelevant to my point. In TOS, the Enterprise was a Starship, which was a "very special type of ship" and there were 12 like her.
From the writers' guide, giving us the intent of the people behind the show:
Captain Ronald Tracey of the USS Exeter was the only Captain of Starfleet that we know of that went bad! Garth was injured in a crash or something and probably had mental difficulties (Tracey seemed to have gone mad too by the end of the episode but that's not confirmed) Matt Decker tried to take over The Enterprise as was his rank but his diminished mind showed Spock his failure to command with integrity! The Defiant's Captain we didn't get to know and was probably sent insane by the space his ship had drifted into! Commodore Robert Wesley was like Kirk, a strong willed Commander of his ship and crew! I can't think of another Starfleet Captain in the series although Merrick had tried to join the service but he lacked the iron will of Kirk's I guess!
JB
JB
C
C57D
Guest
Yes, yes and yes!
Although never stated on sceen that the 12/13 Starship (Connie) class were the best that the (Human side of) Starfleet had in service during TOS, the missions Kirk undertook showed their preeminence, for the most part. Yes the occssion check ups for frontier science bases etc but that's probably just down to the "nearest ship at the time" effect!
Although never stated on sceen that the 12/13 Starship (Connie) class were the best that the (Human side of) Starfleet had in service during TOS, the missions Kirk undertook showed their preeminence, for the most part. Yes the occssion check ups for frontier science bases etc but that's probably just down to the "nearest ship at the time" effect!
You might be confusing apples, oranges, and pears.
Apples = Starships.
In TOS a starship is an interstellar space craft. And not any old interstellar space craft, but one registered in the UFP. And not any old interstellar space craft registered in the UFP, but one owned and operated by the UFP government. And not any old interstellar space craft registered in the UFP and owned and operated by the UFP government, but one owned and operated by Starfleet. And not any old interstellar space craft registered in the UFP and owned and operated by the UFP government and specifically by Starfleet, but belonging to a special category classified as starships.
I don't know exactly what the difference is between a starfleet spaceship and a starfleet starship is, but size and number of crew is one factor.
I don't know whether the Antares described as a "cargo vessel, a "science probe vessel", and a "survey ship" in "Charlie X" was a civilian or a Starfleet ship. But it had a crew of 20, and as Captain Ramart said:
And in "Court Martial" Commodore Stone said:
So starships must have been restricted to only the largest size Starfleet vessels. And the way Stone described the constant danger of starship duty, starships can not be ordinary Starfleet defense branch ships making routine patrols in time of peace with little danger, nor typical science vessels. Instead they must have more dangerous missions than science vessels or peacetime military, being explorer ships constantly facing the unknown (even though it sometimes seems like most of Kirk's missions are more mundane than that).
So in "Bread and Circuses" Merick was quite correct to say:
Oranges = like the Enterprise
In "Tomorrow is Yesterday" Kirk tells Christoper that:
A statement important to the size of Starfleet, but quite vague. Does Kirk mean "12" or "12 others"? How much or little like the Enterprise did a ship have to be for Kirk to consider it like the Enterprise? Was Kirk's "fleet" equivalent to all of Starfleet?
Pears = Constitution class
The term Constitution class was never used in TOS or TAS, only in later Trek. For economy of production, all the other starships seen in TOS were filmed using the Enterprise model or a consumer plastic Enterprise model. Thus all the other starships seen in TOS either belonged to the same class as the Enterprise or to other class(es) that looked externally similar to the class that the Enterprise belonged to.
In "The Doomsday Machine":
Thus all starships seem to have the same configuration, and possibly only starships have that configuration.
Timo said:
Timo is wrong that "Every Trek era" shows many different starship designs. Actually every LATER Trek era shows many different starship designs. In TOS either 1) there is one starship class or 2) all the starship classes look externally similar, or 3) the different TOS starship classes look externally just as different as those in other eras, but the producers couldn't afford to make different models for the different starship classes.
Many fans confuse the apples of starships with the oranges of ships like the Enterprise and the pears of Constitution class starships. The creators of TOS worked under the assumption that all three were the same. But they never explicitly said so in any episode during the era of TOS or TAS. Thus to strict fans the equation of starships with ships like the Enterprise and with Constitution class starships is not in any totally canonical sources and need not be correct.
In the era of TNG a much higher proportion of Starfleet ship classes were considered to be starships than in TOS, thus making the honor of being a starship captain seem a bit lower.
Nowadays is AD 2018, or Year 2018!, also known as They Shall Have Stars. But They Shall Not Have Stars might seem more fitting, since manned space flight is limited to trips to and from the International Space Station. There are no starships in 2018, let alone hundreds of ships like Kirk's Enterprise.
Last edited:
Meaning there could be thousands or tens of thousands of starship captains on Earth alone.
The information content being, he's Navy while I'm a dropout; his ship is a warship while mine was a survey boat. There's no information content there about how many starships might exist, as the relevant bit is that one starship exists in orbit of the planet at that very moment.
Everything important she ever did was against Starfleet's intent, though. Intriguingly enough!
Well, no - she deployed two officers and then fled with her tail tucked between her nacelles. And if Organia really mattered to the UFP (as opposed to it mattering to the Klingons, apparently), why wasn't the fleet sent there in the first place?
Or then some of them. But that's a classic job for second-rate ships, for cruisers - to move people around so that the big ships can concentrate on what they do best, that is, being big and intimidating and invincible and unavailable.
A job that did not need doing, as the Romulans had been quiet for a century - an excellent example of the ship achieving big things chiefly by accident, as opposed to her being assigned to heroic duty.
Prestigious how? And the chief attribute would appear to be "expendable": she was to find out if one could explore beyond the Barrier (the existence which did not come as news to the heroes as far as we could tell), not to conduct the actual exploring. Much like Picard was tasked to check out Farpoint so that others could use it as a base for exploration...
In which she and her crew were strictly forbidden to partake. Again, the ship was influental in significant things against Starfleet's explicit intent.
Where was she the first choice, exactly?
We have routine ferry or resupply missions, such as "Man Trap" or "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" or "Dagger of the Mind". We also have emergency ferry missions, typically of medicines, such as "The Galileo Seven" or "The Cloud Minders", in which availability would be the key criterion (and even then, these were relay missions, for that storytelling convenience where being slightly late for a good reason was excusable).
But when was the ship sent to deal with a crisis? Bascially never. She dealt with crises that happened on her watch, right next to her, with no other ships around (or with other, possibly better, ships preceding her and being destroyed): "The Alternative Factor" has her supposedly saving the entire universe, but purely because she happened to be at Ground Zero. Likewise, mopping up after the Intrepid in "Immunity Syndrome" is a job Kirk expects somebody else to handle, only to learn he's the only man on the spot.
Classically, the most important thing for an important ship would be to sit tied to a pier, while the second-rate vessels are being run ragged.
Trek is probably different, though: Starfleet can't afford to be a mere "fleet in being". The big ships, the Federation Flagships, apparently would do the TNG thing and actually perform diplomatic missions instead of just ferrying others to perform such missions.
Nobody was sent to find out why Deneva had gone silent, not for "over a year". Supposedly, not a mission of great prestige, then. But the Vulcan ship was explicitly equal to the hero ship in capabilities, so supposedly another second-rate vessel at the right place at the right time. Kirk really did not expect to be given the mission of following up on that disaster - and his explicated argument, "we're so very tired", is hardly heroic, so there could be more pragmatic reasons behind his conviction.
Ah, accuracy with the semantics, please - what I said was that every era shows that many starship designs exist. And TOS is one of those, even when it fails to actually show those competing starship types on screen. There are past starships (the Archon), there are parallel starships with different crew counts (the Intrepid, the war games ships), there are starships with registries all over the place (the Constellation, the ships of "Court Martial").
In contrast, there is no TOS line to the effect of "There are X starships in the Fleet"... Nor in any other era, for that matter.
Timo Saloniemi
"The Return of the Archons":
I find it quite easy to believe that the Archon was an older and different class of starship than the Enterprise, but I find it hard to believe that starships of the Archon's class are still in service a century later in the era of TOS. They might be, but there is no reason to say that they probably are, especially considering what Tyler said in "Menagerie" about the time barrier being broken and starships becoming much faster.
There is very little evidence for different numbers of crew in different starships in TOS. In "Charlie X" Kirk says there are 428 people on the Enterprise at that time.
In "The Immunity Syndrome":
So the Intrepid in "The Immunity Syndrome" had only 0.934 as many persons aboard as the Enterprise in "Charlie X". Maybe Vulcans are 1.07 times as efficient as Humans - many Vulcans would claim much more than that - and only need 0.934 times as many crew members as Humans. Maybe the Enterprise was a little over crowded in "Charlie X" for some reason.
In "The Ultimate Computer":
All of these quotes are consistent with an average compliment of about 400 per starship. And not even I am picky enough to think that there is enough of a difference between "about 400" and "428" to claim that a starship with only "about 400" crew members has to be a different class than one with 428 persons aboard. It is certainly possible that some of the starships in "The Ultimate Computer" were members of other starship classes that happened to look similar to the Enterprise's class on the outside. I have even suggested that. But I would never have thought that such a minor difference in crew numbers would be an argument in favor of it.
In science fiction the word starship means any spacecraft used for interstellar manned voyages, especially faster-than-light voyages. TOS certainly showed the existence of many alien and Federation ship designs that were starships by that definition. But according to the starfleet definition of a starship, there was only evidence of one starship design, possibly consisting of one class, possibly of several different classes, but one basic design.
According to Star Trek Script Search there are only four cases of the phrase "star ship":
"The Enterprise Incident":
"The Tholian Web"
"The Tholian Web":
"Wink of An Eye":
Searching for "starship" instead of "star ship" in TOS and TAS got 226 results in 213 excerpts. Of these very few indicated that "starship" could be used about a non starfleet vessel. Thsoe few exceptions are listed below:
"Arena":
"Mirror, Mirror":
This is the Mirror Universe, not Federation Starfleet.
"Elaan of Troyius":
"Beyond the Farthest Star":
"The Lorelei Signal":
"The Time Trap":
Technically none of the characters calls the alien ships in the graveyard "starships".
Memory Alpha claims that the Antares in "Charlie X" is "a Federation starship operated by Starfleet".
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Antares
Captain Ramart and First Officer Nellis wear Starfleet-like uniforms so the Antares could be a Starfleet vessel. But it is said to have a twenty man crew.
In "Court Martial":
Stone says that starships have crews of hundreds. Therefore Starfleet ships with smaller crews can't be starships.
In "The Enterprise Incident":
The Commander's words suggest that a starship is one of the Starfleet's finest vessels, and that the majority of Starfleet ships are lower than starships in guality. (of course there could be a type of Starfeet vessel considered even better than starships.) Thus the majority of TOS era Starfleet vessels would seem to be classified as mere spaceships instead of as starships.
In "The Doomsday Machine":
When they see the starship it looks a lot like the Enterprise.
Spock says the ship has starship configuration. There seem to be only three possibilities:
1) The starship type of Starfleet vessels contains only one class, the same class as the Enterprise, and Spock detects the configuration of the starship type and of the Enterprise's class. All starships have a saucer, a secondary hull, and two nacelles, connected by struts.
2) The starship type of Starfleet vessels contains several different classes, that all have the same basic configuration as the Enterprise's class, and Spock detects the basic configuration of a starship without yet detecting the precise configuration of a specific class of starship. All starships have a saucer, a secondary hull, and two nacelles, connected by struts, but there is some variation between classes of starships.
3) The starship type of Starfleet vessels contains several different classes, that have two or more basic configurations, and Spock detects the precise configuration of the Starship class of the starship type (the Starship class might be named after a U.S.S. Starship). In a Star Trek canon that included only TOS, there would be no proof that the Enterprise is a member of the Constitution class, and thus it might be a member of the Starship class. Otherwise the Starship class and the Constitution class look very similar from the outside.
This alternative seems like the only possibility for the possibility that "many starship designs exist in the era of TOS." Or at least starship designs with noticeably different arrangements of saucers, secondary hulls, and nacelles.
What about possible multiple noticeably different starship designs in Discovery? Discovery might be in an alternate universe to TOS. Discovery is apparently over a decade before TOS, and the class types of Starfleet vessels and the terminology to describe them might change radically in that time.
Timo said:
And there may be ships with different designs and representing different classes in TOS. But no ships that are both called Starships and are seen on screen in TOS show more than the slightest external differences from whatever class the Enterprise is. There are no big differences like the number or arrangement of nacelles, for example, in ships that are both called starships and are seen onscreen in TOS.
__________________________________________________________________
For some reason the Trek BBS is very difficult for me to use compared to other boards.
Last edited:
The point being, there are starships in every era, and eras necessarily overlap. What TOS explicitly is NOT saying is that starships would be the same as Constitution, without precedent or peer.
But no evidence against the existence of, say, fifteen designs, either. All we ever get either way is Spock stating that the Constellation matches the "starship configuration". But he could equally well say the Reliant matches the starship configuration, or that the Hathaway does - one design being a match does not logically rule out others matching.
But again, none indicated that it could not, the way it is frequently used in every other Trek incarnation.
Which is splendid, because we now have proof that Starfleet operates ships of all sizes (TAS gives us that for the era even if TOS fails to deliver) but also that only those of a certain size qualify as starships, which goes well with a starship skipper being special.
It doesn't follow that Kirk's ship would be the best of the best in the starship category. But her being in that category was never in doubt, which confuses the issue somewhat.
On the other hand, a starship skipper being special does not convince me of anything much when he is being explicitly compared to a civilian dropout who commanded a "Class 4 survey ship". Merrick would be outmatched by the skipper of a star frigate or a star corvette, too - it's just that none of those stumbled upon Pseudo-Rome, perhaps because starships are the ones in charge of exploration. Similarly, Merrick would be even more outmatched by the skipper of a Starfleet vessel bigger and badder than starship, but that issue never arises.
Basically, we're debating whether TOS is at odds with the spinoffs or not. Naturally, all the spinoffs add to what TOS has to offer, meaning they contain material not found in TOS. But this is only at odds with TOS if TOS explicitly denies the existence of the add-ons, such as starships of other configuration, or starships greater in number than a dozen, or starships bigger than Kirk's. None of that denial is to be found in TOS, thankfully enough.
Timo Saloniemi
I thought you were arguing that Kirk was some bumbling fool who got in big adventures by luck or being in the right place at the right time - a sort of loser who got the left-over assignment that none of the important captains wanted.
Why is saying there are 12/13 Constitution class vessels which are the best in the fleet at odds with the spin-offs? Did Riker or Picard say something like that back in the TOS era there were ships around much better/bigger than the Enterprise 1701 ?
I agree that later TOS movie era Sulu's ship may have possibly been bigger and faster that the 1701-A maybe - but in the TOS era I don't see any evidence of it.
I haven't seen TAS for a while but were they saying in TAS there were better ships than the Connies - I think I'd remember that.
Yeah, its a big deal, whether the number of ships is "around ten" or an order of magnitude greater (in other words, this ancient argument aside).
In later Treks there seemed to be hundreds of Starship Captains compared to the small number we meet or hear of in TOS!
JB
JB
Where did you get that impression? I was saying that Kirk flew a second-rate ship. All the more heroic of him to triumph, then!
(Actually, calling her second-rate is an insult to second-rate ships - the ship is supposed to be a "cruiser", which is the semi-modern word for what used to be "frigate" in the sailing ship world. Frigates did not deserve as high a "rate" as the capital ships of the day, those fighting in the battle line. Ships of the line went from 1st to 4th rate; frigates, later referred to as cruisers, were 5th or 6th if rated at all.
The key difference was in frigates operating solo, though. Which is what Kirk does, but the relationship goes beyond that - because dramatically Kirk is the captain of a sailing frigate, Horatio Hornblower or his ilk, just in spaaaaace.)
It depends on our definition of "best". Many spinoffs now show ships much bigger than the Constitutions, for that specific era and for eras preceding it. None of these appear inferior to Kirk's ship qualitatively, so one would think they would be "better" or at least more prestigious commands. Except a smaller-end starship probably would be more gutsy and more likely to produce heroes.
No - but they didn't claim the opposite, either. All things thus being neutral, the fact that such ships are shown is an uncontested pseudo-fact of the Trek universe. And also nonproblematic when it comes to things like Kirk's heroism or the greatness of his achievements.
Two separate spinoff strands, the JJverse (more specifically, its "prime universe" prehistory) and DSC, now show this evidence. Without contradicting TOS on the issue, as long as we don't arbitrarily insist that Kirk's ship was the biggest or the fastest.
Timo Saloniemi
- Status