How difficult (or easy) it is to operate a starship?

[Tim Thomason]

In The Search For Spock Scotty rigs the Enterprise-A to run primarily on automation with only a bridge crew (although this does fail when they engage in combat.)

Scotty: "Admiral, I set up the Enterprise-A for full automation. She'll give us no trouble on our trip to the Genesis Planet."
Kirk: "Good work, Scotty, but we're going to be taking the original Enterprise instead, on account of the Enterprise-A not being built yet."
Scotty: "What? Where in blazes was I all afternoon?"

 

[tharpdevenport]

I can't speak for a 23rd century Federation starship, but with a 24th century Federation starhip is really depends on where the ship is, what it is doing and the crew compliment.

We know from season of spin-off Trek shows a starship faces outside dangers that can affect the people and systems the ship without them knowing until it's either too late or close to too late, so there has to be some difficulty operating it because systems are always beign checked, tweeked, etc. I remember early in TNG there was at least one comment about worry about a catostrophic systems failure with the new new Enterprise D computer system.

Then we know there can be internal threats. And there is also field experience going on with seasoned crew teaching new crew by practice, altering systems, taking some offline, or even diverting resources to one which can hinder others. It's takes more than a guy who knows how to do one or two things well, to really operate a ship properly in the long haul, rather than some genetically engineered genius knowing enough for the short run.


The more enlisted crew members (and bigger the ship), the more that will be going on.

 

[Shawnster]

In Remember Me Beverly Crusher ends up running the Enterprise by herself using voice command. I suppose that was her own pocket universe, though.

Pocket universe aside, it didn't seem impossible to her that a single person could fly the ship. Of course, she also had no choice.

As stated earlier, Picard and Riker flew the Enterprise D back from the Binar homeworld to the starbase.

Kirk seemed up to the task of helming the Enterprise by himself when he was on Gideon. Not a real Enterprise, but he didn't know that.

 

[eyeresist]

Riker could fly a starship with a joystick.

Forget the buttons with tiny print. I find it very interesting that in Voyager we see a number of instances that various crew members are able to almost immediately manipulate command and control consoles of alien ships whose script is in that native language, which doesn't seem to be any impediment to understanding their function.

Contact lenses equipped with universal translators.

 

[Scotchy]

Touche, Mr. Thomason, I stand corrected. They hadn't trashed the original quite yet.

 

[MikeS]

In The Search For Spock Scotty rigs the Enterprise-A to run primarily on automation with only a bridge crew (although this does fail when they engage in combat.)

Scotty: "Admiral, I set up the Enterprise-A for full automation. She'll give us no trouble on our trip to the Genesis Planet."
Kirk: "Good work, Scotty, but we're going to be taking the original Enterprise instead, on account of the Enterprise-A not being built yet."
Scotty: "What? Where in blazes was I all afternoon?"

McCoy: Actually Jim, they have built the Enterprise-A. But as we've not wrecked this ship yet, it's still called Yorktown

 

[Drone]

Kirk seemed up to the task of helming the Enterprise by himself when he was on Gideon. Not a real Enterprise, but he didn't know that.

In This Side of Paradise, he admits that he actually can't do it.

 

[F. King Daniel]

It varies a lot and is very inconsistant, deending on the writer. M-5 almost made crews obsolete in TOS, Scotty rigged the Enterprise to be flown by 5 in STIII, Bok rigged the Stargazer to be run by Picard's voice command in TNG, the Promethius had a trained crew of six in Voyager, Voyager herself was flown by Janeway solo at the end of Year of Hell, and the USS Vengeance was designed for a minimal crew (i.e. just Khaaaan!) despite being the biggest Starfleet ship ever built.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Also, this is how one flies a starship using those unlabelled jellybean buttons: http://cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/mcmaster-uss-enterprise-bridge-blueprints.php

 

[T'Girl]

In This Side of Paradise, he admits that he actually can't do it.

Uhura said she disabled the communications equipment, except for the short range stuff. Off screen, Kirk could have discover that other crewmembers had done the same with their parts off the ship.

Sure it's from 100 years into the future of a different universe, but at least it's in English.

In the movie Gravity, Sandra Bullock's mission specialist character was able to board a unfamiliar Russian spacecraft (where everything was marked in the Cyrillic alphabet), and successfully return to Earth.

 

[Drone]

In This Side of Paradise, he admits that he actually can't do it.

Uhura said she disabled the communications equipment, except for the short range stuff. Off screen, Kirk could have discover that other crewmembers had done the same with their parts off the ship.

Perhaps he may have not yet discovered such sabotage, but he didn't use that as a qualifier in his statement, so I would tend to take the comment categorically at face value.

Sure it's from 100 years into the future of a different universe, but at least it's in English.

In the movie Gravity, Sandra Bullock's mission specialist character was able to board a unfamiliar Russian spacecraft (where everything was marked in the Cyrillic alphabet), and successfully return to Earth.

I think that it's much easier to accept the notion that the control systems on another ship from Earth, regardless the nationality, would hew pretty closely to the American model, so regardless of the complete unfamiliarity of the language, I think it makes much more intuitive sense that the purely Terran situation could be more readily handled, than one involving an alien race whose thought and development behind how those same systems would be conceived and constructed, is much harder to swallow as being clear cut and boilerplate.

 

[topcat]

everyone in the academy is taught navigation...

It seems pretty easy to over run voyager and its systems. How many times did people at a pre warp state of development take it over?