Presidents of the Federation Are Based in France—Why?
- Thread starter Rrune
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20th-century New York was seen multiple times in time-travel stories and historical footage. As for post-WWIII, Trip Tucker mentioned in "Storm Front" that NYC still existed in the 22nd century but was very different. In the 24th century, Harry Kim played in the Juilliard Youth Symphony, which presumably is based at the Juilliard School of Music in NYC.
Maybe it's New New York, in which case it'd be good news everyone!
Maybe they're guarding other things....
Maybe they did think about it. Their conclusion was likely that they wanted to save money.
We never saw toilets either, maybe humans used seashells...
New Orleans, in DS9. We also saw the interior of a building in Antwerp, Belgium before it was bombed. Plus we've seen less urban locations like Riverside, La Barre, etc. And numerous Earth cities have been mentioned, if not visited.
That was the city of Mojave.
Thanks, I couldn't think of any sightings of Trek-era NYC, or Washington DC come to that. Interesting that a very American-centric show hasn't shown either of them.
Yeah, they even mentioned the city of Lennongrad, named after Yoko's late husband.
I think that's their token effort not to be too America-centric.
Not necessarily. TUC was the last TOS movie as far as anyone knew, the movie didn't have a big budget, and it's not like STAR TREK shows spend a lot of time on Earth anyway. I can certainly believe that, in the push to get movie into theaters in time for the anniversary, that nobody gave a lot of thought to how this was going to affect future STAR TREK shows umpteen years down the line.
How often has STAR TREK visited the President's HQ in France in the twenty-seven years since they filmed TUC? Once? Twice? That's not much of a commitment.
On practical level, saving time and money by reusing that painting probably made more sense than worrying about its minimal effect on future TV episodes or whatever.
"So, where should we put the Federation president, not that it really matters in terms of the plot?"
"Putting it in France would knock a few thou of the budget, give us more money to spend elsewhere."
"Viva la France!"
Plus, it would be difficult to top the Eiffel Tower as an instantly recognizable and timeless structure that tells everybody where the president's office is.
That would be a little on-the-nose.
Lets see instantly recognsible
Sydney Opera House
Elizabeth Tower (aka The Clock Tower at Westminster Palace that houses Big Ben)
The Statue of Liberty
St. Basils Church
Tokyo Tower
Washington Monument
The White House
Taj Mahal
I could go on but I think my point is made that there are plenty of other instantly regonsible and timeless structures that tell everyone where we are.
I do wonder why Starfleet Headquarters wasn't in Earth orbit, a large space station/dry-dock/orbital habitat.
I could be mistaken but the first time we see HQ is in the films, at which point they would have the budget to build models for an orbital facility, with only a small 'space port' on the surface for transporters and shuttles.
I could be mistaken but the first time we see HQ is in the films, at which point they would have the budget to build models for an orbital facility, with only a small 'space port' on the surface for transporters and shuttles.
Why would you do it that way? For the admin functions of Starfleet Command, are there any advantages of having it in orbit? Much easier to just live on the planet where you can have an apartment in an atmosphere so you don't have to worry about life support failing. You can walk to work and breathe the fresh air. Why would you want to be in space unless you had to be?
The orbital facilities would only be needed for Starship operations functions, which are a transporter beam away from Earth. This is exactly what we see in TMP, and it's also what Starbase 11 is.
The real question is why Starfleet would need an enormous facility like Spacedock or Starbase 74 in orbit of a clearly habitable planet!
^ For the housing and maintenance of starships, transferral of delicate cargo, an armed platform from which to defend said planet, a statement boasting of the power and position of the Federation/Starfleet, to maintain the idyllic and peaceful lives of the civilians by having 'military' installations out of sight.
As for the failing life support why does Starfleet even utilise starships then? Why not send out unmanned probes for exploration, research and defence, controlled remotely by officers safely located on M-Class planets.
As for the failing life support why does Starfleet even utilise starships then? Why not send out unmanned probes for exploration, research and defence, controlled remotely by officers safely located on M-Class planets.
Obviously you can't pilot a planet around the universe, so ships make perfect sense, as do the related orbital facilities as I said above.
As for why there aren't more unmanned ships, that's a good question. Star Trek does talk about probes etc for longer range scanning but it seems like they've decided that putting people on big spaceships is the best way to go. We did see defence drones in BOBW so presumably they do exist. The "attack fighters" in the Dominion War may have been unmanned too, and the Prometheus defeated a small Romulan fleet with just two medical holograms in command.
I was talking more about the offices for the chain of command and the operational support functions. Surely you wouldn't want to put all your top brass on a space station? Accidents do happen, but they're likely to be more catastrophic in space than on earth.
There's simply no need to be in space when you can hold briefings and issue orders from the end of a subspace comm channel, so why wouldn't your headquarters be in the significantly more comfortable and hospitable environment of Earth?
Earth's "life support" has many ways of failing -- hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, wildfires, droughts, floods, heat emergencies, blizzards, lethal gas clouds bursting out of lakes, etc. Even on Earth, millions of people already rely on the controlled conditions of artificial, enclosed environments to protect us from the deadly extremes of nature outside. (The widespread adoption of air conditioning in the 1960s and after caused the rate of heatstroke deaths in the US to plummet by 80 percent!) By comparison, outer space is relatively placid. There's not much to worry about beyond temperature extremes, micrometeoroids, and radiation.
And humans already have abundant experience at building artificial megastructures dependent on complex, reliable life-support systems to maintain the lives of the people within them. We call them skyscrapers. Skyscrapers' interiors rely on artificial circulation of air, heat, and water and the continuous functioning of intricate electrical and mechanical systems in order to sustain a livable environment within them. And those systems are generally so reliable that you never have to think about how dependent on them you are when you go into such a building. Yes, there's a slim chance that something could fail, but that doesn't stop people from spending large portions of their lives in skyscrapers, putting business and government offices in them, etc. Every system can fail, yes, but humans have the experience to build artificial environments and safety systems with a very high level of reliability. And that's just here on Earth. A civilization that's been building artificial structures in space for generations will have plenty of expertise in maximizing the safety of such environments.
As I said, I don't think that's true. Earth is a volatile, geologically active planet. Most habitable planets probably are, because a planet without a tectonic and volcanic cycle to recirculate minerals and gases might not be able to maintain a livable balance of such things on its surface. So a planet is a dangerous place.
There has been abundant scientific research over the decades into the construction of artificial habitats in space, and it's been determined that it's an entirely viable way for a civilization to live. There's enough raw material in our asteroid and cometary belts to allow us to build habitats containing thousands of planet surfaces' worth of habitable land area right here in Sol system, and we can tailor such environments to suit our needs rather than relying on a hit-and-miss search for existing planets that approximate Earth conditions, or spending centuries to terraform a world and wrestle its existing environment into a shape we like over its ongoing objections. There's a wealth of science fiction that posits future societies that live almost entirely in artificial megastructures in space -- e.g. Iain M. Banks's "Culture" series, the Halo video game franchise, and the anime franchise Mobile Suit Gundam (which built on the scientific concepts of Gerard K. O'Neill's seminal book The High Frontier, as discussed on this site). I've featured artificial space habitats and similar megastructures frequently in my own science fiction writing, both original (my debut story "Aggravated Vehicular Genocide" and my novel Only Superhuman) and Star Trek tie-ins (for example, the megastructure-based alien civilizations in Myriad Universes: Places of Exile and TOS: The Face of the Unknown).
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