Single Races Aboard Starships.

[Red Ranger]

As we know from TOS and other later shows, all-Vulcan crews have existed on several starships, like the Intrepid in The Immunity Syndrome. I wonder if there are other starships with such crews?

Certainly, the Enterprise crew was mostly human, Spock being the only exception we saw in TOS, and M'Ress and Arex in TAS.

I would think the only logical reason for having a crew being all one race would be environmental conditions. Certainly, the temperature on a ship with all Vulcans would be pretty hot, and a starship with an all-Andorian crew would be pretty cold. Plus, I can see a race of methane-breathers needing special requirements that wouldn't allow them to serve on a ship like Enterprise.

In the Titan novels, it is established that they had to make special modifications for several of its non-human crew members aboard the Luna-class starships who come from different environments, perhaps owing to advances by the 24th century in starship design. As I recall, that was the point of the Luna-class -- integrating wildly different species.

Your thoughts on the practicality of Federation starships with all one race, or mixed crews.

 

[Jonas Grumby]

Well, I think you're right that, due to environmental considerations, in reality almost all spaceships would have single-species crews. Of course, in Trek, where about 99 percent of all sentient lifeforms we see are adapted to basically earth-normal environmental conditions, the issue is not so clear.

 

[T'Girl]

The Wounded Sky had a Starfleet officer who was basically a glass spider (and sometimes a cannibal), another officer was semi-humanoid from a race with no psychological perception of time.

My Enemy, My Ally had a Horta crewmember aboard the Enterprise, a different Starfleet starship in that novel was constructed "oversized" because many of the crew were the size of elephants (forget the name of the species), those elephant-sized crewmembers, for practical reasons, could not be assign to the Enterprise.

Picard's Enterprise supposedly carries either civilian specialists or Starfleet crew who are small whales, like porpoises or dolphins, hypothetically there could be Starships whos entire interior was gear towards this species, flooded with a air pocket near the ceiling or alternately filled with a breathable fluid.
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[Nerys Ghemor]

And that is why I LOVE Diane Duane, right there.

 

[The Wormhole]

The only Starfleet ships we know of which are exclusively one race are the Intrepid from The Immunity Syndrome and the T'Kumbra from Take Me Out to the Holosuite. It seems kind of odd to me that Starfleet would Nebula class starship and have it exclusively crewed by one specific race, especially in the 24th century when there are plenty of races serving in Starfleet. The Intrepid makes some sense, maybe there weren't that many non-humans in Starfleet in the time, and there just happened to be an all-Vulcan ship. However, when it came to the T'Kumbra, they should have just said it was predominantly Vulcan (meaning there are a few non-Vulcans on board) as opposed to exclusively Vulcan.

 

[Myasishchev]

I always reckoned the individual planets maintained separate forces within Starfleet up until some time between TOS and the films.

Plus, it's not really "everybody's human but Spock." Spock's pretty definitely a citizen of Earth, and so as far as we can tell (TAS aside) the Enterprise had a 100% Earth citizen crew.

 

[Tomalak]

It might be more efficient to work with predominantly single-race crews, and also explains why the majority of Starfleet officers we see are humans. For environmental reasons, including things like shift-patterns and length of the working "day", which will be different for each species, culture, working practices etc. Also different races will be better suited to certain tasks.

There's nothing to stop different races working together, but in practise you need to be more adaptable to do it. Maybe explains why most ships we see seem to be built in the Earth solar system, and with human names. There's probably another complex like Utopia Planitia around Vulcan and Andor too.

 

[sbk1234]

^^I always assumed this.

 

[Jakks]

The Wounded Sky had a Starfleet officer who was basically a glass spider (and sometimes a cannibal), another officer was semi-humanoid from a race with no psychological perception of time.

My Enemy, My Ally had a Horta crewmember aboard the Enterprise, a different Starfleet starship in that novel was constructed "oversized" because many of the crew were the size of elephants (forget the name of the species), those elephant-sized crewmembers, for practical reasons, could not be assign to the Enterprise.

Picard's Enterprise supposedly carries either civilian specialists or Starfleet crew who are small whales, like porpoises or dolphins, hypothetically there could be Starships whos entire interior was gear towards this species, flooded with a air pocket near the ceiling or alternately filled with a breathable fluid.
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A Horta on a starship...Hmmmm. Interesting.