Well that solves that. Wow. Never got the impression they had so many.
Saw it again. Some new thoughts.
- Thread starter AJBryant
- Start date
Well that solves that. Wow. Never got the impression they had so many.
I was thinking we don't get what SFA is. Pike talked about his dissertation. What if schooling has changed and the academy is a PhD level program for people coming in with a college level education. This would allow variable completion times to come into play.
Further, I offer that the displinary meeting and commissioning was only for graduating cadets, based on the amount of red squad... er cadets I saw on earth when the drill was lowered.
And lastly, Uhura is a Cadet and a Lt.... based on dialog when she relieves the Enterprise communications officer. Saavik is the same, in star trek 2 going from failing the no-win scenario to being a lt on the bridge... and weeks later, serving as a lead scientist on the grissom.
Kirk is never referred to by rank BECAUSE he was made first officer of the Enterprise before he ever served a shift.
Its possible you can enlist as a ensign (like a college graduate can now), you can take your education and go to an elite war college/science college/international relations college and come out at a higher rank and fast track career.
The key to this story is what was Captain Pike doing. When he made kirk an overnight cadet... that may have been an exceptional favor and not a regular recruitment tactic. You can't go from a bar fight to being a Naval Academy student overnight... it just cannot happen. When he made Kirk the 1st officer to Spock, he opened a door in his command hieracy where the 2000 odd people on the Enterprise now called an instanteously reassigned first officer sir. When he picked Kirk as his relief over every available captain and first officer in the fleet, he made an intergalactic statement of the type of fleet he plans to build.
Further, I offer that the displinary meeting and commissioning was only for graduating cadets, based on the amount of red squad... er cadets I saw on earth when the drill was lowered.
And lastly, Uhura is a Cadet and a Lt.... based on dialog when she relieves the Enterprise communications officer. Saavik is the same, in star trek 2 going from failing the no-win scenario to being a lt on the bridge... and weeks later, serving as a lead scientist on the grissom.
Kirk is never referred to by rank BECAUSE he was made first officer of the Enterprise before he ever served a shift.
Its possible you can enlist as a ensign (like a college graduate can now), you can take your education and go to an elite war college/science college/international relations college and come out at a higher rank and fast track career.
The key to this story is what was Captain Pike doing. When he made kirk an overnight cadet... that may have been an exceptional favor and not a regular recruitment tactic. You can't go from a bar fight to being a Naval Academy student overnight... it just cannot happen. When he made Kirk the 1st officer to Spock, he opened a door in his command hieracy where the 2000 odd people on the Enterprise now called an instanteously reassigned first officer sir. When he picked Kirk as his relief over every available captain and first officer in the fleet, he made an intergalactic statement of the type of fleet he plans to build.
Seemed to be a cloud of small objects where the Kelvan had been-lifepods?
Just saw the movie-loved it. Too much fun. Piss on canon-this was a great romp!
It stands to reason that any ship at all, whether it has civilians on it or not, would have enough shuttlecraft to evacuate plus 10%+ emergency buffer. Why the hell would Starfleet not equip a vessel with more than adequate means of escape? Is humanity going to forget the lesson of the Titanic any time soon? 
darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
Got to have it to start with. Furthermore, no recycling/reclamation system is 100% efficient, so you actually need a surplus to start out with. Plus a reserve on top of that for emergencies (like when the recycler breaks down, or a hull breach vents atmo). It's a closed loop system, so EVERYTHING must originate (and terminate) within the ship for long periods of time.
darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
He also probably joined the service when he was 12-13 years old. The concept of people not being adults until they are 18 is a late 19th/20th century concept.
darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
They never really gave you a true sense of the size of the ship to begin with either. The Main Shuttlebay on the D is the better part of 2 stories tall. Go stand next to a 2 story building and look up.
Go into town (if you live in one that has one) and find a 10 story building and go stand next to it and look up. Now multiply that by 4 and you have the rough height of the E-D.
I am thinking along the same lines. After all McCoy went to the academy as a medical doctor. A 17 year old Ensign Checkov suggest that all officers don't go through the academy as years of TV series have suggested. SFA may serve the same function as the elite war colleges where potential senior leaders are sent. Kirk can be explained by an Officer and Gentleman type OCS program before entering the academy with Uhura.
We have all spent many years self describing how Sulu, Riker, Paris, Nog, Tucker.... were the elite of the elite. So we find it hard to believe that a single Captain, Pike in this case can just pull a Kirk aside and bestow super-elite status and immediate command upon him based on the potential he sees. But judging by how Nog reacted to the Red Squad cadat leadership that is how Starfleet operates.
On the question of military realism, the only thing that slightly—and I do mean slightly—bothered me was the apparent reversion to the "all officers, no crew" writing of the TNG era. DS9/VOY had sort of fixed that problem by acknowledging there were NCOs and crew on board.
Do agree with those upthread that in an ideal world, the writers would stick to the 18th/19th Century Royal Navy concept—something like the HMS Beagle being a lot more like Starfleet than the modern US Navy—but we're long past the point where we can have any real hopes for that.
Do agree with those upthread that in an ideal world, the writers would stick to the 18th/19th Century Royal Navy concept—something like the HMS Beagle being a lot more like Starfleet than the modern US Navy—but we're long past the point where we can have any real hopes for that.
If a fleet of battleships, owned by the government, is engaged in a war with battleships owned by another government, firing torpedoes at each other, and whose officers can be subject to a court-martial if they disobey orders, what word other than "military" could you possibly apply to that?
Starfleet academy is training cadets to be officers in the fleet. The fleet that fights wars and transports soldiers to battles. It's like arguing that the U.S. Navy is not a military organization.
When the United Federation of Planets is at war, there is only one military organization that is depicted, and that is Starfleet. What possible evidence exists that Starfleet does not act as the ONLY military organization of the Federation?
Maybe some people view Starfleet as the modern-day NASA, which is mainly a scientific organization, but most NASA pilots are U.S. Air Force officers, and the minute you outfit the Space Shuttle with ray guns and torpedoes, it has become a military vessel.
o brien and others were crew but just dressed in similar uniforms unlike tos were the crew /techs wore distinctive uniforms for the most part.
as for kirk i wonder seriously if jim had thought about the academy taken the tests and for some reason decided not to go further with it.
remember that line about his aptitude tests being off the chart.
for all we know kirk might have attended college but not done anything with his life since leaving it.
Looked like debris from the Nerada to me. I could be wrong, but i really dont want to have to pay to see the film again to find out.
Except they're not battleships, the wars and battles they get involved in are incidental to their primary purpose and they only fight them out of sheer necessity, and they spend the vast majority of their time conducting missions of exploration, diplomacy, and humanitarian purposes. Does the US Navy crew its aircraft carriers with marine biologists, geologists, and meteorologists and use the aircraft aboard to monitor hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico?
DS9 features the only genuine "war" in Trek continuity other than perhaps ENT which I stopped watching almost immediately and don't know what happened in. While I enjoy DS9 the most out of any Trek, it's not really relevant to the TOS/AU-TOS paradigm we're working with now. The Defiant was something novel and unusual to the Starfleet of its age: a ship of war. Until then, they armed their ships and personnel because of the hazards they foresaw in space. Gene Roddenberry said outright that one of the overarching themes of Trek is peace and not just through superior firepower.
I agree with whoever said above that Starfleet was an armada full of the space equivalent of the H.M.S. Beagle: armed, nominally Naval, but exclusively exploratory in nature.
I agree. He could have taken the tests in order to get his mom off his back. That's why I took the ACT a second time. And Mom was right. Even though I took it with a blow-off attitude the second time, I scored two points higher and got all sorts of additional scholarship opportunities. I thought I'd never live it down, but she hasn't brought it up again.
It's even possible he was doing a bang-up job with his life, other than the occasional bar-fight. He may have been a very successful business man, or motorcycle racer, or both. Prime Kirk had many interests. It's very possible that nuKirk was well on his way to developing one of them when the course of his life changed to Starfleet. After all, even competitive racing and successfully managing your own branding and team doesn't compare to commanding a starship.
Yeah, actually, I know that. I should have more stressed the point that you don't typically enter an academy as a 22 year old (although at least in this case, Pike made a point of Kirk having been a ne'er-do-well for a few years).
The point I should have stressed is that he's only had three years of training to do this incredibly complex and dangerous job -- and he's also had no years of experience in observing how it's done and getting used to a command structure.
I can *accept* FTL drive, cause Trek's always had it. I can *accept* phasers, transporters, Vulcans, Klingons, etc., cause Trek's always had 'em.
I *cannot* accept this total lack of reality in the critical aspect of their origin story because it shows a typical Hollywood writer's lack of understanding of THIS kind of thing (in favor of, let's face it, something that looks VERY much like a Mary Sue story), because Trek has NOT as a rule had that kind of credulity-straining crapola.
No, the implication was that he INTENDED to graduate early.
Academies have standard curricula and specific things you have to do (including things like the senior cruise, where you actually serve time on a ship learning the REAL ropes).
They are not like a regular college where you can overload a core curriculum and take "18 hours" instead of "12."
Ummmm... no.
He was still a cadet. He was still in a cadet's uniform, he was still taking cadet tests, and was called up on charges for CHEATING. If he was a graduate, none of this would be true.
He was lucky. Once.
For that, you get a medal. Or a promotion. You don't get a free year-early graduation, a medal, a jump of six rank steps and your own ship.
That kind of shit is "Mary Sue" storytelling. It's not professional, it's rank amateur hour.
You realize that these "young men" had already spent half or more of their lives DOING what they were doing, right? They *got* the experience, they moved up through the ranks. (Alexander doesn't count: It's good to be born a prince, you get your general's stars with your baby rattle, but you still have to be taught tactics by your father's generals, and learn how to fight and start of leading small groups and wings.)
I took this to be another case of a writer not knowing what really goes on. I took it to be a reference to a senior thesis, which some schools require; or, perhaps, like other officers, Pike attended an advanced graduate school *after* graduating from the academy (as many academy graduates today still do) to learn more intensive material useful for his command (I know academy grads with advanced degrees in international relations, history, languages, area studies, etc.).
Orrrrr, it could be a case where Starfleet Academy is not what you think it is, nor is it what it was in the Prime 'verse.
I interpreted "dissertation" to mean that Starfleet expects its people to continue putting out research in much the same way academia expects its professors to publish or perish. After all, pretty much everyone on board a Starfleet vessel is a scientist in some capacity or another. So some of them happen to be badasses on the side -- well fan-fucking-tastic, this is a space opera story! Epic characters and improbable heroism are the meat and potatoes of space opera.
Instead of accusing the writers of ignorance and stupidity because you think it ought to work differently, why not accept what happens on screen and work backwards from there?
And Kirk had been trained to do the job of commanding a starship, and then proved he could DO IT by actually, you know, doing it.
I really don't get the distinction you're trying to draw.
Horation Nelson spent 7 years in the Navy and was a Captain by 20, for distinguishing himself through actual service.
Kirk spent 3 years in a military academy and then was promoted to 1st Officer in a crisis, then promoted to Captain in a crisis, and then had that rank confirmed because he provided EXCELLENT service in the field in his capacity as Brevet Captain of the Enterprise.
In each case, except for the length of service, you have very young men being given jobs they've PROVEN (by action in the field during live combat situations) they can do.
It just rubbed YOU the wrong way, because it was less time than YOU felt was required.
But it's really not patently absurd on its face.
Edited to add one final addendum:
You talk about how Nelson "moved up through the ranks". Yes he did. But he had the help of a very influential navy relative with contacts in the fleet, who made sure Nelson, at the age of 13 was admitted as an officer, and who actively sped up his rise through the ranks.
So Nelson being a Captain at 20 was not somehow normal, nor was it something everyone was ok with. There were many, many people hoping the young upstart would fall on his face.
That seems rather similar to how Pike was actively doing everything in his not inconsiderable power to speed Kirk's rise through the ranks, thinking he was something Star Fleet needed.
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