Ok, just to be clear, was it implied that literal orgies were happening in "Naked Now" or am I being malicious?!?

[Christopher]

Yes, but their families don't physically go on missions with them, they don't ride in tanks and planes with them.

The intent was that the saucer section would be left behind somewhere safe before the battle section went into combat, as we saw in "The Arsenal of Freedom." (This was later ignored because of the difficulty of working with the 6-foot Enterprise miniature, the only one that could separate.) And it's not as if frontier towns or forts never came under attack. It's not as if cities are never hit by storms or wildfires or earthquakes. There's no place where people's safety is absolutely guaranteed. (I for one have never understood how people are willing to risk having homes and families in a city like San Francisco that's right on top of an active earthquake fault. Having families aboard a starship hardly seems any more dangerous than that.)

What would you think of a mercenary who, say, takes his 8-year-old son into the jungle to fight rebels because otherwise he'd "feel alone"?

That's a straw man. Starfleet crews don't bring their children down on away missions to dangerous planets. They leave them on the ship surrounded by state-of-the-art shields and weapons.

 

[CoveTom]

Yes, but their families don't physically go on missions with them, they don't ride in tanks and planes with them.

It's one thing to go and live in a house near a military base, but it's another to go and face an enemy who's shooting at you.

Honestly, who made the decision for children? I'm a little perplexed by the ethics of this. Of course, parents make decisions, but in this case, they're deciding about the fate of other human beings.

What would you think of a mercenary who, say, takes his 8-year-old son into the jungle to fight rebels because otherwise he'd "feel alone"?

In this case, the combat vehicle *is* the military base. They are one and the same. So you are left with either putting families at risk because a starship could go into combat or separating families for many years at a time while ships are off on long-term missions.

As for who made the decision for the children, presumably the parents, who are entrusted with making most all decisions for their children. No one is forced to enlist in Starfleet and, as we have seen, anyone can resign from Starfleet at any time. Even an android. So it is the families themselves, and no one else, who are making these decisions.

 

[Christopher]

In this case, the combat vehicle *is* the military base. They are one and the same.

Again, the whole point of saucer separation was that they weren't supposed to be. The "base" was just being carried around on top of the combat vehicle and would be left behind when combat was needed. The later producers just ignored that intention.

Although a Galaxy-class saucer is less of a military base and more of a university village, since the Galaxy class was meant to be a research vessel that only engaged in combat when all else failed, making military analogies inappropriate.

 

[Oddish]

Although a Galaxy-class saucer is less of a military base and more of a university village, since the Galaxy class was meant to be a research vessel that only engaged in combat when all else failed, making military analogies inappropriate.

That seems about right. Despite the show's intro, the Enterprise D seemed to do more diplomatic, scientific, and courier work than exploration. And it had saucer separation. So having children on it was questionable, nothing more. Putting a kid on a deep space exploration ship like Voyager would have been less defensible.

 

[CoveTom]

Again, the whole point of saucer separation was that they weren't supposed to be. The "base" was just being carried around on top of the combat vehicle and would be left behind when combat was needed. The later producers just ignored that intention.

Although a Galaxy-class saucer is less of a military base and more of a university village, since the Galaxy class was meant to be a research vessel that only engaged in combat when all else failed, making military analogies inappropriate.

I don't entirely agree, because we have to go by what actually appeared on the screen, not by what someone's intention was early on that got changed. In the entirety of the Enterprise-D's lifespan that we saw on screen, saucer separation was performed only four times. And in one of those four times, it was actually done so that the saucer could be used as a diversion in combat! It seems clear, then, that either Starfleet or Captain Picard (or both) do not consider it a routine practice to separate, even when there is a good possibility of a combat situation developing. It's also interesting to note that of the four times they did separate, only one of them was actually ordered by Picard. One was ordered by LaForge and two by Riker.

In addition, even if the practice was to separate before going into combat, the truth is that we often see situations where combat is unexpected or unpredictable. You're not always going to have the opportunity to separate the ship. So even if that were standard practice, you are still going to be taking families into combat situations from time to time.

 

[Christopher]

I don't entirely agree, because we have to go by what actually appeared on the screen, not by what someone's intention was early on that got changed.

"Have to?" No. It's a creative work. We're allowed to analyze it on any level we want. Fiction is not an authoritarian dogma. It's supposed to stimulate our thought and imagination, not restrict them. I see no reason to limit oneself to considering a work of fiction from only one perspective.

If the subject of the conversation is the validity of taking families aboard starships, then I think it's negligent not to consider the intentions of TNG's creators when they introduced the idea. If they had intended the entire crew to go into dangerous situations as a matter of routine, then they might not have decided to put families on board. The reason they did make that choice is because they expected that the families would not be taken into combat along with the rest of the crew. You can't understand or fairly judge their creative choice if you don't recognize that they were approaching it from that perspective.

The decision made by later creators to abandon saucer separation, as I said, was forced largely by the practical difficulty of working with the miniature. If that had not been an issue, they might have chosen to continue the practice. Again, it is impossible to fairly assess their choice without considering all the factors that went into it. It's unfair to argue that bringing families on starships was an illogical choice if you willfully refuse to acknowledge the real-world considerations that led to a fundamental mismatch between the creators' original intentions and the final practice of the show. Yes, it's a flaw, but it's a flaw that exists for well-documented reasons.

In the entirety of the Enterprise-D's lifespan that we saw on screen, saucer separation was performed only four times. And in one of those four times, it was actually done so that the saucer could be used as a diversion in combat! It seems clear, then, that either Starfleet or Captain Picard (or both) do not consider it a routine practice to separate, even when there is a good possibility of a combat situation developing.

Picard is a fictional character. The only reason he didn't use saucer separation more is that the writers chose not to let him. And that's because the original writers who came up with saucer separation were replaced, and because it proved too impractical to shoot saucer-sep scenes on a regular basis. It's not something that arose organically from in-story logic, it's something that was artificially forced on the show and characters by real-world factors.

In addition, even if the practice was to separate before going into combat, the truth is that we often see situations where combat is unexpected or unpredictable. You're not always going to have the opportunity to separate the ship. So even if that were standard practice, you are still going to be taking families into combat situations from time to time.

Yes, and you could get killed in traffic driving to work in the morning, or you could get caught in a wildfire or earthquake or toxic gas leak in your own house. No situation is completely free of danger. I've heard this objection raised a thousand times over the past 38 years, and I've always found it disingenuous.

Especially since it's a TV show. Dangerous situations happen because that's what adventure shows are about. Set a Trek series on a planet surface, and that planet will get attacked just as regularly as a starship would.

 

[Skipper]

Yes, and you could get killed in traffic driving to work in the morning, or you could get caught in a wildfire or earthquake or toxic gas leak in your own house. No situation is completely free of danger. I've heard this objection raised a thousand times over the past 38 years, and I've always found it disingenuous.

I don't think it's even remotely comparable. It would be like taking my family to meetings with bloodthirsty terrorists in a war zone with their trigger fingers ready, with the excuse that, "Well, you can get struck by lightning at home, too, and if the bullets start flying, you just get in the car and leave. I don't see any problem!"

Of course, the possibility of death exists everywhere, but I don't see how that justifies wanting to expose people who can't give informed consent (like small children) to such high risk.

 

[Christopher]

I don't think it's even remotely comparable. It would be like taking my family to meetings with bloodthirsty terrorists in a war zone with their trigger fingers ready, with the excuse that, "Well, you can get struck by lightning at home, too, and if the bullets start flying, you just get in the car and leave. I don't see any problem!"

That is, again, a straw man. Starfleet does not put families on ships intended to go into war zones. It puts them on research vessels intended to conduct scientific missions. The Defiant didn't have families on it. The Enterprise did. (And it was supposed to be unusual in that respect, because it was meant to spend as much as 15 years in deep space at a time and to have a large complement of civilian scientists, and nobody would expect civilians to commit to a 15-year mission without their families. But once again, the later producers changed or misinterpreted the original intention and retconned in families aboard more conventional Starfleet ships like Ben Sisko's Saratoga.)

Of course, the possibility of death exists everywhere, but I don't see how that justifies wanting to expose people who can't give informed consent (like small children) to such high risk.

But in a work of adventure fiction, if the characters were based in a city on Earth, they'd still be faced with constant danger, because that's how fiction works. Stories about routine, uneventful missions don't get told. We only see the stories where things go wrong. Realistically, that would be a small percentage of missions, the exceptions to the rule, but when you've got two dozen episodes per year, you have to artificially heighten the frequency of perilous situations. I mean, there were 135 Space Shuttle flights over the duration of the program, and only two ended in disaster. So you can't talk meaningfully about risk levels in a fictional context, because the risk level will always be artificially high regardless of the setting.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Only nerds could make a thread about orgies into one about saucer seperation underuse

 

[Oddish]

Only nerds could make a thread about orgies into one about saucer seperation underuse

As a 25-year veteran of assorted BBS's, I can tell you that topic drift is a very normal phenomenon.

 

[DonIago]

Hm. I've sometimes wondered how TNG would have progressed if it had held true to the intentions behind the scenes (e.g. saucer separation as a routine activity), but I don't think I've ever wondered how TNG would have progressed if the intentions behind the scenes had better aligned with what we actually got (e.g. would they have designed the saucer to be able to 'easily' separate if they didn't have the families onboard as part of the root concept?).

 

[Christopher]

Hm. I've sometimes wondered how TNG would have progressed if it had held true to the intentions behind the scenes (e.g. saucer separation as a routine activity), but I don't think I've ever wondered how TNG would have progressed if the intentions behind the scenes had better aligned with what we actually got (e.g. would they have designed the saucer to be able to 'easily' separate if they didn't have the families onboard as part of the root concept?).

I think a better way to handle the concept would have been to have two separate ships, a large research vessel commanded by Picard and a more heavily armed and maneuverable defensive escort commanded by Riker. Maybe the research vessel could even have had a civilian crew and only the defense ship would've been Starfleet. I think that would've aligned better with the demilitarized approach to Trek that Roddenberry was going for. (One thing people tend to forget is that the original intent wasn't just that the ship had Starfleet officers' families aboard, but a large complement of civilian scientists and their families, whom the Starfleet personnel were there to support and defend. That's one more early concept that fell by the wayside, since for most of the series, the only civilian scientist we actually saw was Keiko.)

Maybe having two ships instead of one would've made the FX work more complicated, but Battlestar Galactica managed to pull off a whole ragtag fugitive fleet 9 years earlier, pretty much the same way TNG handled the Enterprise -- by building a sizeable library of stock shots in the pilot movie and recycling them going forward.

As for your suggestion, I'm not sure how it would've happened, since what you describe is pretty much just doing things the way TOS did, and Roddenberry's whole goal was to make TNG new and different in its approach. Also, the concept of saucer separation was always there in the background in TOS and TMP. "The Apple" referred to ditching the engineering section and using the saucer as a lifeboat, a concept also discussed in The Making of Star Trek. Andrew Probert designed a prominent separation line on the neck of the TMP refit, and for a time there was a suggestion to include a saucer-separation action sequence at the climax of the film. So I think the idea of "Hey, let's use our bigger budget to finally show a saucer separation onscreen" was always going to be part of the development process. And that dovetailed with the idea of a more civilian approach, leading to the idea of routine saucer separation to protect the non-combatants.

Even if Bob Justman or Probert or the ILM people had come to Roddenberry and said "Nope, sorry, separating the saucer on a regular basis just won't be feasible," I'm not sure he would've been willing to abandon the idea of a civilian presence, and of the ship being oriented toward research and diplomacy instead of combat. That was very important to his thinking in that stage of his life.

Personally, I've always thought it would be refreshing to have a Trek series about civilian explorers rather than Starfleet all the time. The closest we ever got to that was Picard season 1, but several of its civilian characters were ex-Starfleet. The Prodigy cast were technically civilians in season 1, but they adopted the roles of Starfleet cadets, so I don't think it counts.