Just Finished Reading "Children of the Storm" ...

[Edit_XYZ]

^But again, how do any of those advantages require a manned craft rather than a drone?

They don't necessarily, but Starfleet probably has a strict policy against automated attack drones after the M5 debacle.

Who said anything about automation? I'm talking about remote-controlled craft, like present-day UAVs.

The same thing can be said about larger crafts - as early as 'Enterprise', one could effectively remote-control far larger ships.

The only possible answer - in the star trek universe no one uses remote-control or AI control - at least, not often - for some as of yet unspecified reasons (the M5 incident would not have stopped the klingons/etc from using AI control).

 

[Christopher]

The same thing can be said about larger crafts - as early as 'Enterprise', one could effectively remote-control far larger ships.

Not really, because it would get harder with distance, and because the whole point of a starship is to deliver experts such as scientists, engineers, and the like to places where they can do their work. Combat is a far more dangerous situation so there's a better reason to go with remote-controlled vehicles.

Just look at real life again. We still send soldiers to foreign countries on ships and planes, and once they're there, they operate UAVs to confront the enemy rather than needlessly risking their lives in frontline combat.

The only possible answer - in the star trek universe no one uses remote-control or AI control - at least, not often - for some as of yet unspecified reasons (the M5 incident would not have stopped the klingons/etc from using AI control).

Except -- how many gazillion times did we hear Picard or Janeway or whoever ordering their crew to "Launch a class-one probe" or the like? We have abundant canonical proof that Starfleet routinely uses remote-guided or autonomous robotic vehicles for scientific or intelligence-gathering purposes.

 

[captcalhoun]

UAVs are only operated for a limited time. and some are titchy literally-thrown-into-the-air jobs that last a few hours.

the big jobs like Predators and Global Hawks aren't even operated by people in the same country. the ones you hear about on the news blowing up al-Qaeda guys in Pakistan and shit? some guy in Nevada's flying that off a satellite link...

you still need boots on the ground to hold territory and you need boots on the ground to do a mission lasting longer than about 12 hours.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

The same thing can be said about larger crafts - as early as 'Enterprise', one could effectively remote-control far larger ships.

Not really, because it would get harder with distance, and because the whole point of a starship is to deliver experts such as scientists, engineers, and the like to places where they can do their work. Combat is a far more dangerous situation so there's a better reason to go with remote-controlled vehicles.

As we agree, star trek starships are used for combat, as well. Why are they not remote-controlled during those missions?

As for distance - during 'Enterprise', rather large drones were remote controlled from Romulus - not some border outpost. The 'distance' problem was all but solved.

Just look at real life again. We still send soldiers to foreign countries on ships and planes, and once they're there, they operate UAVs to confront the enemy rather than needlessly risking their lives in frontline combat.

The analogy is not convincing because in real life, we don't have the AI or remote-control capabilities shown in star trek - we're not even close, actually.

The only possible answer - in the star trek universe no one uses remote-control or AI control - at least, not often - for some as of yet unspecified reasons (the M5 incident would not have stopped the klingons/etc from using AI control).

Except -- how many gazillion times did we hear Picard or Janeway or whoever ordering their crew to "Launch a class-one probe" or the like? We have abundant canonical proof that Starfleet routinely uses remote-guided or autonomous robotic vehicles for scientific or intelligence-gathering purposes.

Then why is remote-control not used for combat, but only on such a small scale?

As said, there must be an in-universe reason that explains why no one is using such techniques - but the obvious rationalizations are all unconvincing.

In my opinion, this reason can very well remain undisclosed, as it remained until now - what matters is that in star trek, one doesn't use remote control on a large scale, whether it concerns starships or fighters.
It's really part of star trek universe's flavour - the human adventure, not the AI's or the remote controlled ship's.

Fighters, on the other hand, were already introduced in canon star trek - and their introduction doesn't signoficantly alter the universe (we already have shuttles, etc).
More importantly, their introduction fits with a starfleet that actively searches for ways to ensure the security of the Federation and its citizens, after being shown just how impotent, how unable to do this it is - both during the Dominion War and during 'Destiny'.

 

[Christopher]

As we agree, star trek starships are used for combat, as well. Why are they not remote-controlled during those missions?

Starfleet ships are not meant primarily for combat -- the Defiant being the sole exception. So this objection is specious.

Then why is remote-control not used for combat, but only on such a small scale?

As said, there must be an in-universe reason that explains why no one is using such techniques - but the obvious rationalizations are all unconvincing.

In my opinion, this reason can very well remain undisclosed, as it remained until now - what matters is that in star trek, one doesn't use remote control on a large scale, whether it concerns starships or fighters.
Fighters, on the other hand, were already introduced in canon star trek - and their introduction doesn't signoficantly alter the universe (we already have shuttles, etc).

But it was inconsistent for the writers of Trek to inject fighters when they'd already established the use of remote drones for other purposes. It was careless thinking on the part of the creators, and we should be able to admit that the universe has the occasional conceptual flaw in it.

More importantly, their introduction fits with a starfleet that actively searches for ways to ensure the security of the Federation and its citizens, after being shown just how impotent, how unable to do this it is - both during the Dominion War and during 'Destiny'.

How the hell does it do that? Sticking live pilots in fighters just throws away lives unnecessarily, since there's nothing they can do from a fighter cockpit that they can't do just as well with remote control, and since the added mass and power demands of an occupied cockpit will reduce the fighter's performance and make it less effective at defending a ship or station.

Besides, it's hard to comprehend how a bunch of tiny little ships with pilots in them can be more effective at defense than the kinds of weapons and forcefields they already have. If you can build a photon/quantum torpedo that can maneuver and home in on an enemy ship, what more could you accomplish with a one-person space plane?

 

[Edit_XYZ]

As we agree, star trek starships are used for combat, as well. Why are they not remote-controlled during those missions?

Starfleet ships are not meant primarily for combat -- the Defiant being the sole exception. So this objection is specious.

You can make a case that starfleet ships are not used primarily for combat.
Klingon/Dominion/Romulan/etc (a LOT of etcs) ships ARE used primarily for combat. Why are they not remote controlled?
So this objection is most definitely NOT specious.

Then why is remote-control not used for combat, but only on such a small scale?

As said, there must be an in-universe reason that explains why no one is using such techniques - but the obvious rationalizations are all unconvincing.

In my opinion, this reason can very well remain undisclosed, as it remained until now - what matters is that in star trek, one doesn't use remote control on a large scale, whether it concerns starships or fighters.
Fighters, on the other hand, were already introduced in canon star trek - and their introduction doesn't signoficantly alter the universe (we already have shuttles, etc).

But it was inconsistent for the writers of Trek to inject fighters when they'd already established the use of remote drones for other purposes. It was careless thinking on the part of the creators, and we should be able to admit that the universe has the occasional conceptual flaw in it.

Most of the trekverse is inconsistent if you are to apply rigid logic to it - wildly inconsistent.

What matters is that it IS CANON - and no more inconsistent than having ships - belonging to just about anybody - be crewed, instead of AI or remote controlled.

As a star trek writer, you have to respect established canon, yes?

More importantly, their introduction fits with a starfleet that actively searches for ways to ensure the security of the Federation and its citizens, after being shown just how impotent, how unable to do this it is - both during the Dominion War and during 'Destiny'.

How the hell does it do that? Sticking live pilots in fighters just throws away lives unnecessarily, since there's nothing they can do from a fighter cockpit that they can't do just as well with remote control, and since the added mass and power demands of an occupied cockpit will reduce the fighter's performance and make it less effective at defending a ship or station.

Except that, for some as yet unexplained reason, no one uses large scale remote-control in star trek - not even powers who DO use their ships primarily for combat or who DO use fighters (including 'Sacrifice of Angels' Federation, remans, etc).

Besides, it's hard to comprehend how a bunch of tiny little ships with pilots in them can be more effective at defense than the kinds of weapons and forcefields they already have. If you can build a photon/quantum torpedo that can maneuver and home in on an enemy ship, what more could you accomplish with a one-person space plane?

Because the fighters are better at homing in on an enemy ship/tactical maneuvers in a large variety of situations/environments than small/far less sophisticated torpedos - would be a viable rationaliation.

If you prefer another reason - for the same reason everyone uses starships for combat instead of firing photon/quantum torpedos from their homeworld/spacestations during war.

 

[Christopher]

You can make a case that starfleet ships are not used primarily for combat.
Klingon/Dominion/Romulan/etc (a LOT of etcs) ships ARE used primarily for combat. Why are they not remote controlled?
So this objection is most definitely NOT specious.

The US military is mainly a combat force, but it still uses a combination of manned ships/aircraft and unmanned frontline drones. What I'm talking about here is not a hypothetical scenario -- it's present-day fact. So obviously there must be a valid reason for doing it.

What matters is that it IS CANON - and no more inconsistent than having ships - belonging to just about anybody - be crewed, instead of AI or remote controlled.

Canon doesn't matter, except to fans who don't understand what the word means. It's not an endorsement or a law. It's merely a description of a category that can be wildly inconsistent within itself.

As a star trek writer, you have to respect established canon, yes?

I have to avoid directly contradicting it in my fiction, insofar as possible when it directly contradicts itself. But that doesn't preclude me from pointing out on a BBS that some of its concepts are implausible or difficult to justify, or from pointing out logical flaws in arguments offered by other people attempting to justify them. This isn't one of my stories, it's a theoretical discussion about whether the use of fighters can make sense in a space/science-fiction context. And I don't find any of your arguments in favor of using fighters to be plausible or consistent. Especially when you claim that the way things are actually done today in reality is implausible.

 

[Relayer1]

From the Starfighters in Trek thread :

Caliburn24, there's something else you are overlooking that is pretty important.

A fighter is armed, possibly heavily so. It out-guns any civilian craft, probably almost all merchant craft, most planetary colonies, subspace relays, and basically anything that is unarmed and unprotected.

Therefore, a wing of long-range fighters challenges more points in space simultaneously than a single starship. It forces the opposing side into a strategy where they must choose which among a variety of points to defend and how.

If your reply is that well you can defend everything well enough to fend off one fighter, think again please. Once you do that, the reply will be to attack some points with two or three fighters at once while ignoring others. If you increase defenses again then you enter an arms race spiral. This puts pressure on both sides. At some point, choices between mutually exclusive ways to spend one's economic resources must be made.

By itself it may not be decisive to either side, but strategically the more ways each side puts pressure on the other, the greater the wear, and ultimately one side will suffer from some significant opportunity cost. Fighters may not be where the breakthrough occurs, but the use of fighters in conjunction with other strategies could apply enough pressure to present the opponent with too many things that must be addressed at once to forestall defeat.

Even if a fighter is not capable of taking on a capital ship, producing and deploying numbers of smaller armed craft over a large area forces the enemy to commit large numbers of their larger more difficult / expensive to produce capital ships to oppose or contain them. This or produce fighters of their own.

 

[Idran]

Canon doesn't matter, except to fans who don't understand what the word means. It's not an endorsement or a law. It's merely a description of a category that can be wildly inconsistent within itself.

He wants to come up with an in-universe explanation for an apparent contradiction, dismissing it as "all fictional universes have inconsistencies" sucks all the fun out of that.

 

[Christopher]

^I'm just trying to correct the misconception that canon is somehow the single most overridingly important thing to the point that it needs to be rendered in bold capital letters.

 

[Idran]

^I'm just trying to correct the misconception that canon is somehow the single most overridingly important thing to the point that it needs to be rendered in bold capital letters.

But for the game, it is. That's the whole point of it, take everything that's canon and find a way to resolve all inconsistencies. And something being canon or not, in the context of what Edit_XYZ is trying to do (not in the context of Star Trek as a whole, or any fictional universe as a whole, just in the context of the goal of inconsistency-resolution), is the most important facet.

 

[Christopher]

^So it doesn't matter to you that it's just plain wrong?

 

[Idran]

^So it doesn't matter to you that it's just plain wrong?

Why would it?

 

[Christopher]

Because it's wrong.

 

[Idran]

Because it's wrong.

I'd link a certain XKCD comic here, but I'm worried it'd be taken as more mean-spirited than the joking tone I intend.

I know you don't go in for the inconsistency-correction game as much as some, Christopher, but it's not really that it's wrong, no more than any mutually-understood usage of a word is wrong. It's an occurrence of word drift due to slang usage, that's all. In this context it's basically a fandom term distinct from the common meaning. When a fandom says "ship", they don't mean a boat, and when they say "slash", they don't mean cut. But those aren't wrong either. It's only an issue with the word "canon", I think, because the fandom usage is just close enough to normal usage that it seems like they're incorrect rather than just using it as a slang term within their community. Though that's just a supposition on my part. But in a fandom context (of which the inconsistency-correction game is a subset) the word "canon" has taken on its own meaning, because that meaning is more useful to the people within fandom than the usage you're talking about.

I guess I should ask, if you were writing a person who is trying to communicate what Edit_XYZ said with the meaning he intends, but without using "canon" in that way, what phrasing would you use? Is there a good word or phrase to use instead of canon that you would prefer people use in that context that isn't especially awkward? And what about the derived terms "head canon" and "fanon"?

 

[Christopher]

But the problem is that fans' misunderstanding of what canon means leads them into all sorts of arguing and worrying that's completely unnecessary because it has nothing to do with reality. Like when they worry so much about which stories they're allowed to enjoy or accept. That's just sad. This is supposed to be entertainment. It's supposed to fun. It's supposed to stimulate the readers' imagination. Readers should embrace their own right to make decisions about how to interpret the story, to bring their own imagination to bear. I'll never understand fans who think they need some higher authority to instruct them in what to believe about a work of fiction. It's sad because they're holding their own imaginations hostage to a nonexistent force. I think if fans understood just how little significance canon actually has, they wouldn't drive themselves so crazy over it for no good reason.

 

[Idran]

But the problem is that fans' misunderstanding of what canon means leads them into all sorts of arguing and worrying that's completely unnecessary because it has nothing to do with reality. Like when they worry so much about which stories they're allowed to enjoy or accept. That's just sad. This is supposed to be entertainment. It's supposed to fun. It's supposed to stimulate the readers' imagination. Readers should embrace their own right to make decisions about how to interpret the story, to bring their own imagination to bear. I'll never understand fans who think they need some higher authority to instruct them in what to believe about a work of fiction. It's sad because they're holding their own imaginations hostage to a nonexistent force. I think if fans understood just how little significance canon actually has, they wouldn't drive themselves so crazy over it for no good reason.

That is sad, yeah. But when one indulges in the inconsistency-correction game, that view of canon isn't used as a restriction. It's used to enhance the fun, to make it a challenge. It's resolving problems from the perspective of inside the universe, and in that sense, it's stepping outside the universe and saying it's a mistake in production that saps the fun away; it's like saying you aren't really bankrupt in Monopoly because it's not real money. (I know, Monopoly's such a horrible game that applying "fun" to it in any sense is itself a logical flaw, but still. )

I agree that fans worrying about what's canon can cause problems. But I don't think fandom is as restrictive as you think it is. The very fact that the terms "head canon" and "fanon" exist shows that it's not that fans think you have to always abide by what's canon, it's that they have a different view on what canon means and sometimes violate it on purpose or come up with their own extensions of it even when those are contrary to (their view of) canon. Outside the inconsistency-correction game, they have their own personal view of a universe, and that view could easily conflict with either the creator or the rights-holder.

To give a more personal example, if I remember right (and correct me if I'm wrong), you left out referencing to Counter-Clock Incident in WTC both because it wouldn't fit and because you found that episode to be on the dumb side? In fandom a fan wouldn't have any problem with that; they would simply describe it as "Counter-Clock Incident isn't in my personal canon for the show". There's no worry or fretting involved, the description is simply intended to communicate that "I know what canon is, but my view on what 'counts' differs from what the creators say; authorial canon doesn't matter, and so I have constructed my own mental set of what portions of a universe 'count'." Sometimes the really fastidious ones might go through a whole series picking and choosing, but they're a minority. It's more something that comes about naturally as they watch or read a series and react to each component. It's like that "What books never happened for you" thread right in this forum, the folks there just describe it in different terms.

Yeah, there are fans that act the way that concerns you, but honestly, from the perspective of someone that's dipped into a lot of fandoms, they tend to have the same view as you. They just describe it differently.

(And of course this doesn't really apply to comics fans who quite simply get insanely annoying about the issue, so maybe that's part of where it comes from? I think you've written comic tie-ins before, so I'd assume you have some contact with that fandom too.)

 

[Edit_XYZ]

^So it doesn't matter to you that it's just plain wrong?

Because it's wrong.

You throw stones while living in a house made of glass, christopher.

What were your arguments?

The US military is mainly a combat force, but it still uses a combination of manned ships/aircraft and unmanned frontline drones. What I'm talking about here is not a hypothetical scenario -- it's present-day fact. So obviously there must be a valid reason for doing it.

Already answered by me:
"The analogy is not convincing because in real life, we don't have the AI or remote-control capabilities shown in star trek - we're not even close, actually."

In other words, comparing today's military to star trek's military organisations is a straw-man argument.
Also - why are you repeating already refuted arguments, christopher?

And

Starfleet ships are not meant primarily for combat -- the Defiant being the sole exception. So this objection is specious.

Also answered:
"You can make a case that starfleet ships are not used primarily for combat.
Klingon/Dominion/Romulan/etc (a LOT of etcs) ships ARE used primarily for combat. Why are they not remote controlled?
So this objection is most definitely NOT specious."

The rest of your 'arguments' is composed of badly disguised ad personam attacks such as:

Canon doesn't matter, except to fans who don't understand what the word means. It's not an endorsement or a law. It's merely a description of a category that can be wildly inconsistent within itself.

When, only a few posts back, I was writing:
"Most of the trekverse is inconsistent if you are to apply rigid logic to it - wildly inconsistent."

Does it appear as I have a problem with canon being inconsistent?
And let's hear your definition of the word 'canon' - seeing as I don't understand the concept.

Plus - when talking about overdoing the 'try to resolve canon inconsistencies' game you should look at yourself first:
One of the biggest weaknesses of your star trek books is that they always try too hard to explain canon inconsistencies, to incorporate too much canon, etc.

 

[Sandoval]

Fight! Fight! Fight!