Families on starhips: Great Idea or grossly irresponsible?

[timmy84]

A lot of people here are focusing on the Galaxy Class and the Enterprise D specifically. Lets look at DS9 and the Miranda Class. Thats what Sisko was on at the Battle of Wolf 359. They, a ship with probably only one or two hundred crew had families on board, and couldn't be bothered to load them onto, lets say, shuttles, or jettison a few of the escape pods before facing the Borg, a species Starfleet wasn't 100% ignorant on. I find that to be grossly irresponsible.

Now a couple here brought up military bases. That would be a better comparison to DS9 itself, and not a starship. My dad was in the Army too, but we had always chosen to live off base. And when my dad was stationed in West Germany, we lived off base as well (although I think that is more because the base didn't have housing, but instead contracted with outside places to provide housing). However when my dad was stationed in Turkey in the early 80's, no family was allowed, and my mother and older brother (I wasn't born yet) lived with family (ironically in West Germany). While leaving on a military base does open you up to risk, these bases usually are right next to large civilian communities anyways. If a war were to have broken out, the cities would have been in as much danger as the bases.

So DS9 I find more acceptable to have a civilian population. I just can't accept it being acceptable on a starship. What about the Excelsior, they had returned from a multi year mission and had no families. Are you telling me 23rd century Starfleet officers are made of harder stuff then those soft pansies of the 24th century?

The question is rhetorical, and the answer is yes they were.

 

[Sci]

I used to think it grossly irresponsible, but lately I've been less harsh about it. The more I think about it, the less I can see a meaningful difference between having children aboard a starship and having children living on a military base.

 

[Pavonis]

You know, we don't actually know that the Saratoga crew had their families onboard, living with them. All we saw was Sisko's family, and we don't know why they were there. Maybe they were only being ferried to Sisko's next assignment (or from his last one - we dont know how long he'd been the Saratoga XO) when the ship was ordered to Wolf 359.

 

[Use of Time]

Another thing to think about is what exactly do these families do all day? I could only hang out in the holodecks so long and with a ship of the Ent-D's size there would probably be some sort of waiting list. I get the ship was intended for a 20 year mission but man would you want your kids to spend their entire childhood life wandering the corridors and cowering under the beds every time the red lights started flashing. I get they can go to school and maybe find some sort of way to volunteer but man that ship would get very small, very fast.

 

[CoveTom]

A lot of people here are focusing on the Galaxy Class and the Enterprise D specifically. Lets look at DS9 and the Miranda Class. Thats what Sisko was on at the Battle of Wolf 359. They, a ship with probably only one or two hundred crew had families on board, and couldn't be bothered to load them onto, lets say, shuttles, or jettison a few of the escape pods before facing the Borg, a species Starfleet wasn't 100% ignorant on. I find that to be grossly irresponsible.

That's an interesting point. I never thought about that before, actually. I was always under the impression that the Galaxy class was unique in having families on board, and that the reason is that the Galaxy class ships were designed for extreme deep space missions where they would be out of contact with Earth for years at a time. Whether that understanding came from dialog in the show itself or from outside materials I read, I really don't know.

I also was under the impression that these extended deep space missions, and the inclusion of families, was why the Galaxy class ships were so luxurious in comparison to other classes of ships. They really needed to be like a small city in space, providing all the living needs for a community.

The Miranda class, however, was definitely not a luxury liner and doesn't seem suited to long voyages involving families. Frankly, neither do most classes we've seen. The Intrepid class, of which Voyager was a member, certainly was never designed to carry families on board. As I recall, there were no children on board Voyager when it began its mission; Naomi Wildman was the first.

So if I was going to try and reconcile all this, I'd have to go with the theory, posited by Pavonis, that perhaps families were not a normal part of the Saratoga's crew. Perhaps Sarah and Jake Sisko were on board for some special reason. We hear Sisko, as the first officer, reference getting the civilians to the escape pods. It could be that the Saratoga was on a mission to ferry some civilians from one place to another for some reason when they suddenly got called into battle at Wolf 359.

 

[timmy84]

I think its worse to assume that Starfleet would divert a ship transporting civilians to a battle.

Honestly I'm having problems coming up with anything right now. I'm just really thrown by what I've read.

And I feel I've addressed the whole military base thing. Its not constant danger being encountered on military bases. The families at Joint Base Lewis-Mchord (sorry, I live in Washington and thats the major base here) aren't in danger of the bases warp core breaching.

And for arguments sake, if a war were to reach JBLM, it would probably either be evacuated before it came (in shuttles and escape pods I assume) or be nuked (which would suck for the people of Tacoma, who would envy those who incinerated in JBLM).

 

[BillJ]

Life's dangerous.

Seven million people were cooked by the Xindi probe in The Expanse.

 

[timmy84]

Life's dangerous.

Seven million people were cooked by the Xindi probe in The Expanse.

Yeah, and thousands of people died when the Breen bombed San Francisco.

 

[R. Star]

Yeah, that was a major plot hole in DS9's pilot that Saratoga went into battle with her civilians still on board. I'd have to say that all of the ships there had civilians on board. Certainly on Enterprise no mention was made of evacuating the noncombatants even when they were specifically preparing to fight the Borg. Guinian was certainly around for the whole episode.

Wolf 359 did pretty much change the Federation on a number of levels. You see less civilians around on Federation starships as a whole. You probably had thousands of the dead in that battle be non-Starfleet personnel. By the time the Dominion War rolled about you hardly saw any civilians on Federation starships. Certainly the Enterprise E not once was shown with civilians on board.

The idea of having your families on the starship sounds great in theory, but in practice the Borg didn't care and probably assimilated entire families as a whole in that battle.

 

[BillJ]

The idea of having your families on the starship sounds great in theory, but in practice the Borg didn't care and probably assimilated entire families as a whole in that battle.

But if Data doesn't luck out and put the Borg to sleep, most of those people are on Earth and get assimilated anyway.

 

[CoveTom]

I think its worse to assume that Starfleet would divert a ship transporting civilians to a battle.

Not really. The Borg were the biggest threat the Federation had ever faced, and they were plowing their way to Earth where, if successful, they would have assimilated the entire population. At that point, concerns such as "well, that starship has civilians on it" would become moot. Starfleet would rightfully order every single ship within range to join the battle, because otherwise you were looking at the potential end of humanity.

 

[R. Star]

The idea of having your families on the starship sounds great in theory, but in practice the Borg didn't care and probably assimilated entire families as a whole in that battle.

But if Data doesn't luck out and put the Borg to sleep, most of those people are on Earth and get assimilated anyway.

Your point being? By that logic they shouldn't have even bothered fighting at Wolf 359 since all the people there are going to die anyways if the Borg win.

Data did "luck out" and the Borg were beaten. Regardless, it was poor judgment by the Federation to put noncombatants in combat.

 

[Pavonis]

Before Wolf 359, space was a wondrous adventurous place to be shared with civilians.

After Wolf 359, space was "disease and danger, wrapped in darkness and silence", and definitely not for civilians.

 

[BillJ]

The idea of having your families on the starship sounds great in theory, but in practice the Borg didn't care and probably assimilated entire families as a whole in that battle.

But if Data doesn't luck out and put the Borg to sleep, most of those people are on Earth and get assimilated anyway.

Your point being? By that logic they shouldn't have even bothered fighting at Wolf 359 since all the people there are going to die anyways if the Borg win.

Data did "luck out" and the Borg were beaten. Regardless, it was poor judgment by the Federation to put noncombatants in combat.

Point being, life is dangerous.

Unless you're proposing we wrap our children in bubble wrap and store them in a closet until adulthood, they are going to face danger. Picard's own nephew died in a house fire.

Space is dangerous, but so is Earth and living on colony worlds.

 

[timmy84]

I think its worse to assume that Starfleet would divert a ship transporting civilians to a battle.

Not really. The Borg were the biggest threat the Federation had ever faced, and they were plowing their way to Earth where, if successful, they would have assimilated the entire population. At that point, concerns such as "well, that starship has civilians on it" would become moot. Starfleet would rightfully order every single ship within range to join the battle, because otherwise you were looking at the potential end of humanity.

A more responsible thing to have done was divert the starship away from the Borg. Not send it flying into battle. They know the Borg were heading to Earth, so why not send the ship to, I don't know, somewhere else.

 

[T'Girl]

A more responsible thing to have done was divert the starship away from the Borg. Not send it flying into battle. They know the Borg were heading to Earth, so why not send the ship to, I don't know, somewhere else.

If the children and spouses are aboard a armed starship, and that ship was tasked with a combat mission, then the ship is going into a fight, that's it.

The responsible thing for the Saratoga, or any of the dependent carrying ships, heading toward the anticipated battle a Wolf 359 to have done would have been to load the dependents into lifeboats/lifepods and eject them into space well short of the battle, tell starfleet command where you did this, and ask that they be picked up. If you survived the battle, then you yourself could return to retrieve them. This would be for ship types that lack something similar to a Galaxy's saucer.

The Saratoga had lifeboats, Ben Sisko left in one. But Jake Sisko and his mother were still on board. The decision as to whether to evacuate dependents would have been the captain's, who might have felt that a pre-combat evacuation wasn't necessary. Poor choice.

 

[CoveTom]

A more responsible thing to have done was divert the starship away from the Borg. Not send it flying into battle. They know the Borg were heading to Earth, so why not send the ship to, I don't know, somewhere else.

Because, as I said, Starfleet needed every single available ship to deal with a threat that was so serious it could literally have meant the end of human civilization. Faced with a crisis of those proportions, concerns about the safety of civilians on board a particular starship would be considered irrelevant.

 

[R. Star]

But if Data doesn't luck out and put the Borg to sleep, most of those people are on Earth and get assimilated anyway.

Your point being? By that logic they shouldn't have even bothered fighting at Wolf 359 since all the people there are going to die anyways if the Borg win.

Data did "luck out" and the Borg were beaten. Regardless, it was poor judgment by the Federation to put noncombatants in combat.

Point being, life is dangerous.

Unless you're proposing we wrap our children in bubble wrap and store them in a closet until adulthood, they are going to face danger. Picard's own nephew died in a house fire.

Space is dangerous, but so is Earth and living on colony worlds.

So? That doesn't mean you should just blindly expose people to danger for no reason. There's a fine line between bad things happening and stupid actions resulting in negative consequences.

 

[Pavonis]

I'm still not convinced that there were civilians commonly on Starfleet vessels in the 24th century.

We know the Enterprise had families of the crew aboard. We assume all the Galaxy-class ships did, too.

There were passing references to civilians aboard other Starfleet ships. Thomas Riker would've been eligible to bring family aboard the Gandhi after serving there 6 months. We don't know what kind of ship the Gandhi is, though, nor what it's mission was. We know the Saratoga had Ben Sisko's wife and son aboard at the time of the battle (were they always aboard?), and that Jennifer Sisko was not a Starfleet officer. There was a reference to other civilians aboard the Saratoga after it was seriously damaged at Wolf 359, but that doesn't mean they were merely passengers.

We don't know in what capacity those civilians were serving! We assume they were merely family. Probably they weren't!

I think it's perfectly plausible some those civilians were consultants to Starfleet in some way, perhaps experts on tactics (similar to Kyle Riker) or experts on the Borg (if anyone in the UFP could be considered an expert). There's no reason to think that the civilians weren't brought there deliberately and of their own will.

Just because someone isn't in Starfleet, that doesn't mean that they can't risk their lives.

 

[T'Girl]

I'm still not convinced that there were civilians commonly on Starfleet vessels in the 24th century.

Picard early comments concerning children suggests that the Stargazer did not have children aboard, but that could indicate that Stargazer was the exception, and not the rule. Riker seem quite comfortable around them, so perhaps they were present on his previous ship.

I think it's perfectly plausible some those civilians were consultants to Starfleet in some way

Keiko was aboard the Enterprise Dee as a civilian, I think of her as a civilian contractor in the employ of Starfleet, employed as a botany scientist. She was there long enough to form a relationship resulting in marriage with Chief O'Brien.