I know the events of Enterprise make it clear that the old independent generation ship freighters were going away, but it did not specify if that would be the end of it. We see some independent traders in TOS and beyond, but mostly Vulcans, Bolians and eventually Ferengi. Are there any canon or novel-verse mentions of the ECS after the Federation?
I was just thinking about this the other day! Mayweather in ENT was the only human I could remember in all of Trek who lived on ships but as a civilian. In TOS, the movies (Search for Spock, Final Frontier, etc.) we see tons of alien traders and on DS9 there are all sorts of comings and goings but there seems to be almost no human civilian smugglers, traders, etc. The Maquis is like the closest we get to just regular human folk in space and they're terrorists! I find it a particularly strange omission.
Kassidy Yates never mentioned much in the way of an ECS, but that's so far in the future you dont hear anything specifically about Earth authority unlike the 23rd century.
The USS Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek (2009) had the registry number ECS-1022. Of course, it was a simulation and not a "real" ship in-universe.
Obviously, Harry Mudd and other miners still show an independent trading service. Ditto Kassidy Yates. It's just warp got fast enough it became less wagon trains and more regular trains.
However in the novel of the same name, the ship was an ECS freighter too, just the older Enterprise era type. If the ECS continued and built ships like the 2009 one, the simulated Maru is an existing class with the older ships name plastered on.
I'm pretty sure that in order to work at all, the no-win scenario of SF Academy will have to be made of whole cloth, differently for each set of testees. Its not the Kobayashi Maru test, even, except for James T. Kirk (and for the bunch of cadets unlucky enough to try it on Commandant Kirk's 50th birthday). And it mixes and matches things like location, victim, adversary and so forth at random, throwing realism to the winds in favor of sheer unfairness. Whether the ship with the registry ECS-1022 ever existed is debatable. Whether it would exist in 2258 when Kirk takes the est is debatable, too. But not impossible: even if it looks "contemporary", it may instead be that the other ships in the movie are museum pieces, and for that exclusive reason left behind when the actual Starfleet goes to Laurentius... FWIW, ECS-1022 is more than seven thousand ticks lower than the registry seen on computer screens describing the old Horizon in that 2150s ENT episode... Timo Saloniemi
I dont recall a registry number for Horizon, but I'd have to rewatch. Somehow I'd doubt that the registry numbers for those freighters had any more meaning than for Starfleet vessels. It does seem likely that there would be a lot more of them, though.
I kind of hope it still exists. I think there would still be some value in brand recognition in the future, maybe even moreso if no one's just paying them to do a good job. I always find it cool in any fictional universe if there are multiple corporations still existing rather than just one monolithic organisation like Weyland-Yutani or even Starfleet to some degree.
Then again, it at least sounds as if it used to mean Government rather than Cool Unique Corporation Brand originally. Back when Earth was just Earth, that is. (Or was it always one of those things that call themselves bigger than they are - say, like The United States National Presidential General Sewing Supplier Co. might be a single room in a Bronx basement run by two elderly ladies and having three regular clients, two of whom only ever come for the tea?) I doubt there was much central control to ECS, of course - it just looked less anarchist if somebody was allowed to slap an official umbrella name onto that unholy gaggle of individualist profiteers. And we don't know if an ECS registry means a ship bows in the direction of ECS. Might be clever branding: "Earth Cargo Ship" would be the common Earth Cargo Authority prefix for all Earth cargo ship registries from whichever company, out of the hundreds out there, but a single company would choose to call itself "Earth Cargo Service" and adopt a cool logo saying so, so that it could usurp those three letters for commercial purposes. That is, in the end, the big organization in actual episode dialogue is not ECS, it is ECA (that's the party that gives out the licenses in "Horizon", say). ECS is just the prefix for the name, and to the registry. And possibly the name of an individual corporation. But one may read canon in multiple ways. And alas, it doesn't sound as if one is going to be contradicted by additional evidence from, say, DSC - as a dramatic element, ECS and ECA are probably dead both, as Earth herself in fact hasn't made a single appearance in DSC yet! It's all on the general level of the Federation now... Then again, Boomers might still exist as a thing. After all, Sulu in "Friday's Child" is adamant that "a freighter's" speed as late as the 2260s still remains no higher than Warp Two... Not the speed of "the freighter", but the speed of all of them. Timo Saloniemi
The latest Enterprise novel Patterns of Interference by Christopher L. Bennett has a planet that was being explored by Earth Cargo Services as a story plot in the book. So yes they continued after the Enterprise series ended.I don't want to post major book spoilers .But this story arc was one of my favorite parts of the novel.
Sulu mentions in one episode that freighters can do about warp two, that sounds like the slow moving cargo ships depicted in ENT.
The whole concept of human/other ran cargo vessels is a bit silly really, surely these things can be automated? I think there was an episode of TAS where that was the case.
An episode of TOS already... Apparently, piracy is a thing in Trek. Perhaps live crews help do something about it? OTOH, freighters in the TNG era are superfast, taking just days or sometimes hours to get to places - and they are supersmall, so obviously only hauling extremely high credit-per-kilogram goods. It might be vital to have traders aboard the ship in addition to the goods to be traded, so that the ships can operate on the apparent tramp mode and get good deals at every port. Timo Saloniemi
Just my opinion and many will vehemently disagree, but... Contrary to the thinking of many fans, I am unconvinced that The Federation provides a life of ease, comfort, and challenge for all. I believe that for the most part all we are shown are members of "the 1%" upper classes who live in a cashless society of plenty with unbounded opportunity. Indeed, I think we see peeks below this ruling class veneer in many places. That merchant service being one of them. DS9 had Kasidy Yates and her crew, and DS9 also received any number of non-Federation and perhaps working class Federation subjects' ships. Then you have the occasional visits to mining planets and such where working conditions range from manual labor and even strikes to more automated and comfortable. Mining must have been critical to the Federation economy for them to start using "retired" obsolete holographic Doctors to swing pickaxes. Replicator, warp, etc. technologies would be energy hungry, and perhaps a very high level of such mining for energy sources and exotic materials was vital to sustaining the comfort of that 1%. Cyrano Jones, Harry Mudd, et al. may have been rebels who escaped what they saw as the yoke of Federation oppression to eke out an existence on the periphery one way or another.