As well as Inspector Lionheart and Professor Dunning...
Can someone please explain......
- Thread starter Infern0
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In "The Battle", Picard called Vigo his Weapons Officer instead of his Tactical Officer.
MI-13 is listed (not used except in fiction)
In ST:TMP, Chekov was Security Chief and sat at the new Weapons console on the bridge (and greeted Spock's Vulcan shuttle at the airlock), and Billy Van Zandt's Rhaandarite ensign manned the Internal Security station (and collected Kirk's field jacket when he returned from the Voyager VI probe).
If you want to get really literal, I would tend to presume that Starfleet Intelligence is the Federation's equivalent of MI6 (external intelligence-gathering) and that Federation Security (established in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) is the equivalent of MI5 or the US FBI (internal Federation police).
I don't know about that. Starfleet Intelligence is the intelligence division of the Federation's military. It's the equivalent of the Army's or Navy's intelligence division, not the equivalent of the CIA, which is civilian. There's far too great a tendency among fans to assume that Starfleet and the Federation are interchangeable, to forget that there's a difference between the military and the civilian government that it works for.
Federation Security would be a civilian security organization working for the government. They would be the equivalent of the FBI and perhaps the Secret Service (at least, I used them as a Secret Service type of organization in Ex Machina, civilian security charged with protecting UFP government officials and diplomats).
Fair enough, but we've never actually seen any other intelligence organization within the UFP other than SI that I'm aware of. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist -- but so far as I know, there IS no civilian intelligence agency. (Unless you count Section 31, which I do not.)
Interesting. That would imply that Federation Security might be the organization that Agents Wexler and Kistler from Destiny are part of.
Quite possible. After all, the US didn't have a formal intelligence agency until WWII (the OSS, succeeded by the CIA). Perhaps the UFP government has no civilian intelligence agency and simply relies on SI to handle intelligence matters. The point is simply that SI is part of the military, not part of the government per se.
And of course you're right that Section 31 is in no way, shape, or form an intelligence agency. An agency is a governmental bureau or administrative division. Section 31 is not a part of the government hierarchy; it acts on its own rather than following anyone's orders or carrying out the government's policies. It's not an agency by any definition of the word.
I have no objection to that idea.
It might be appropriate to point out that we have only two examples of a security chief and tactical chief being one and the same person. One is Worf, and the other is Tuvok. And both are casualty replacements of sorts.
Kirk's ship certainly had the jobs well separated in TOS, although the people he considered his "tactical officers" (say, "Arena") were never shown being in charge of firing the ship's guns.
The division of labor on Picard's ship before Tasha Yar's death was uncertain, but it could be argued that Yar never was "truly" responsible for firing the big guns as such - she merely temped in that job when the Chief of Tactical, possibly Worf, was doing something else. Similarly, it could be argued that Janeway had a Tactical Officer until the Caretaker's displacement wave killed him or her or it. Even absent specific evidence, we must accept that Picard always shuffled his officers in creative ways, and that Janeway had to deal with casualty replacement. We have no direct evidence that this would have been true of other starship skippers.
Timo Saloniemi
Kirk's ship certainly had the jobs well separated in TOS, although the people he considered his "tactical officers" (say, "Arena") were never shown being in charge of firing the ship's guns.
The division of labor on Picard's ship before Tasha Yar's death was uncertain, but it could be argued that Yar never was "truly" responsible for firing the big guns as such - she merely temped in that job when the Chief of Tactical, possibly Worf, was doing something else. Similarly, it could be argued that Janeway had a Tactical Officer until the Caretaker's displacement wave killed him or her or it. Even absent specific evidence, we must accept that Picard always shuffled his officers in creative ways, and that Janeway had to deal with casualty replacement. We have no direct evidence that this would have been true of other starship skippers.
Timo Saloniemi
Technically, Malcolm Reed was fulfilling both roles, at least until the MACOs became involved in security, although we may not wish to create strict equivalency between Earth Starfleet and Federation Starfleet.
Fictitioucly yours, Trent Roman
Fictitioucly yours, Trent Roman
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Veering OT: I heard two different reasons why the show was renamed for the US market - one was because there had been a show on US TV called Spooks already, and it had bombed, so they didn't want people confusing the two. The other was that the word had racist connotations. Personally, I think it's most likely they wanted a title that was a bit reminsicant of 24, in an attempt to get the same audience.
Speaking as someone who has left the United States once in his life -- when he was briefly on the Canadian side of the border in visiting Niagra Falls when he was 8 -- I can say that until you said this, I had never heard that the word "spook" had any racist connotations. Urban Dictionary confirms that it does, but I've literally never come across that particular meaning for the word in my life.
^ I was pretty surprised by that one as well when I saw the film adaptation of Human Stain, where the meanings of 'spook' becomes a plot point. Regional, perhaps.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
But even the MACOs were, bizarrely, capable of both. Most of the time they provided muscle, of course, but in "Harbinger", we see Hayes running tactical simulations of space battles with the Xindi.
Because they wanted to add Tuvok to the cast without getting rid of Keru.
In the fiction, it makes sense. If your ship is boarded in the middle of a space battle, you probably wouldn't want some nameless peon handling one of the tasks.
For one thing, it appeared that the MACO were not Starfleet - it was more like an Army vs. Navy setup there, with Archer reluctantly taking onboard a Ranger team even though he already had plenty of his own Navy MPs or Marines aboard.
Regarding Reed's role, we have to remember that the ship launched from Earth ahead of schedule, uncompleted and probably grossly understaffed. And then spent the next two years out there without a chance to obtain more crew. Reed could be considered a rather special case even in UESF, then.
Regarding shifts, one would think each position has to be filled in triplicate to keep the ship working. And it doesn't appear as if a Red Alert would require the presence of the department chief. Any underling will probably do, explaining how Kirk had varying mixes of people manning his helm and navigation and comms stations during alerts. So we could always say that either the Chief of Tactical or the Chief of Security was offscreen at a particular time. That way, Worf could have been a Tactical Officer for Picard originally, although not the Chief Tactical Officer, while Yar would have been the Chief Security Officer, and so forth.
Timo Saloniemi
That doesn't make any sense, because we've clearly seen Tuvok and Keru working simultaneously. There's no need to invent a nonsensical explanation when there's already a perfectly clear and correct explanation: that Tactical and Security are two different jobs, regardless of the fact that they're sometimes combined. Tactical is about fighting space battles and protecting the ship from external dangers; security is about maintaining the crew's safety and peace within the ship or on away missions.
Worf was clearly not in any security or tactical post in TNG's first season. He was the bridge watch officer -- a free-floating position responsible for manning any station that needed it, filling in at conn or ops when Geordi or Data was away, and holding the conn when the captain and first officer were away.
