Starfleet Academy speculation thread

[Penta]

This was originally going to be like all my other threads.

I wanted it to be like all my other threads.

And then I stumbled upon "Eye of the Beholder" from TNG via Memory Alpha.

I swore and deleted all of what I had written.

So instead I'm going to ask a question:

How many of those SFA Annexes do people think there are?

 

[Chaos Descending]

I'm at a loss, what did "Eye of the Beholder" have to do with SFA again?

 

[Penta]

It mentioned SFA annexes some of those under investigation had graduated from.

 

[SpyOne]

WOW. Good spot. I had completely missed that myself.
To save others a bit of digging, this one TNG episode features 3 characters who, according to their files (at least one of which is shown on screen as well as quoted in dialogue), graduated from Starfleet Academy but not from the campus on Earth.
So there are Starfleet "Annexes", or satellite campuses from which one might graduate, on Psi Upsilon III, Beta Ursae Minor II, and Beta Aquilae II, at least.

This actually solves a pretty major problem.
See, Gene supposedly thought that all Starfleet officers went through Starfleet Academy. The show has never contradicted this.
But if Starfleet has more than a handful of ships, this starts making Starfleet Academy unreasonably huge. Starfleet Academy must produce enough graduates each year to replace all the officers who retire or die.

Let's just plug some estimates into that equation to show what I mean.
Let's suppose that the average Starfleet career is 40 years. So the average Academy graduate will serve for 40 years before he retires or dies.
Lets also suppose that the average Starfleet ship has a crew of 500, and 100 of those are Officers (and thus Academy graduates).
As a final supposition, suppose Starfleet has 4000 ships on active duty.

That works out to 400,000 Officers, 10,000 of whom die or retire in any given year.
West Point, the US Army Academy, has a graduating class of 1000 each year (meaning only 5 of 6 freshmen graduate).
The University of Iowa has 30,000 students at any given time, including those pursuing post-graduate degrees.
In 1987, the University of Connecticut admitted 2500 freshmen, which was much more than usual.

So, Starfleet Academy would need to be four to ten times the size of a modern university.

Try some different numbers:
30 year career, 200 officers per ship, 12000 ships.
That gives you 80,000 new officers every year.

But if Starfleet Academy has full campuses on multiple worlds, ... not only do the graduating classes get down to a manageable size (say, 5000 on Earth and 2000 at each Annex), but you can also have people who graduated the same year who never met each other. I mean, there were probably people in my high school class I never met (176 people), but ... well, I'd remember someone like Data. Or Worf.

As to the question: I'd guess that Starfleet offers to put an Annex on any member world, but not all of them accept. IMO, Vulcan probably doesn't have one.
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Daniel_Kwan

 

[Penta]

GR did postulate that all officers went through the Academy, yes.

He also thought that all SF personnel were commissioned officers.

The second hypothesis has been rejected, in canon, very firmly through Chief O'Brien.

For some reason, I thought that the first hypothesis had also been rejected, through Troi's graduating from the University of Betazed, not Starfleet Academy.

Anyhow, SovOne: One on every member world would be too many. SFA would have to be huge. If we go with the Annex idea (I wobble back and forth on it since discovering it; it raises as many problems as it solves, and more importantly only gets mentioned in this episode), it seems more likely that the Annexes get placed on a regional basis.

I'll be really honest - I've never liked the idea that all SF personnel (or even all SF officers) go through SFA. It creates massive holes.

It seems a lot more likely to me that the majority of SF officers come through an ROTC-like program. It brings a diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds to the officer corps that couldn't be provided by everybody going through Starfleet Academy, the same way ROTC provides the military with a diversity of viewpoints that couldn't be provided just by everybody going through the service academies.

Similarly, I also figure there to be an OCS program for enlisted personnel seeking to become officers.

I figure that SFA has the one campus on Earth - probably 5000-8000 cadets all years, graduating around 2000 cadets per year. It's not actually in San Francisco, it's in Marin County, on the other side of the GGB.

The majority of SF officers, though, go through some kind of ROTC-ish program, hosted by civilian institutions. A smaller proprotion of officers, mostly in the medical and science branches, join up through a direct commission program.

 

[neozeks]

Yay, I win!

But to be fair, mentions of those annexes happened (IIRC) in some kind of a dream sequence - though I have no idea why anyone would dream up something like that if it doesn't really exist.

And the personnel files are vague enough (it just says 'Starfleet Academy Beta Aquilae II - no Annex or anything) that you could interpret it as the officer applying for SFA at the SFA office on that world or something.


So if you really don't like the idea, Penta, you can still find a way around it.

But I think the idea is plausible (and so do some of the novel writers - one of the DS9 relaunch novels mentions the establishment of a SFA Annex on Bajor after it's admittance in the Federation). It explains why practically every single officer seems to have went to the Academy. Of course, the main San Francisko facility is probably still where the best of the best go.

Re: ROTC - ROTC is an almost uniquely American thing, the vast majority of countries don't have it (and ROTC officers constitute a small proportion of officers even in the say, US Navy - 20%, according to wiki; the Coast Guard doesn't even have a ROTC program)
Re: OCS - OTOH, I can see a place for OCS (it also admits civilians, doesn't it?). After all, why should people that already have degrees go through the full 4 or however many there are years of Academy?

But my pet theory is that OCS is also conducted by the Academy. So, when some of the officers talk about being at 'the Academy', they actually talk about their OCS classes. That could explain why we never hear about other comissioning sources while still preserving the OCS route.
Heck, it seems even at least some of the enlisted training is conducted by the Academy, as per 'The Drumhead':

TARSES Yes, sir... All my life I wanted to be in Starfleet. I went to the Academy's program for enlisted personnel... took training as a medical technician...

Or per Chief O'Brien's temporal mechanics Academy classes.

 

[SpyOne]

Anyhow, SovOne: One on every member world would be too many. SFA would have to be huge. If we go with the Annex idea (I wobble back and forth on it since discovering it; it raises as many problems as it solves, and more importantly only gets mentioned in this episode), it seems more likely that the Annexes get placed on a regional basis.

First, and totally irrelevantly, the board automatically underlines out names, making some letters hard to see. I'm SpyOne.
Second, let's see how huge I've made Starfleet Academy:
I said 2000 per annex per year, and there are 150 member worlds, so that would be 300,000 new officers every year if there was an annex on every member. And if the average career were 20 years, that would be 6 million officers total. At 200 officers per ship, that would be 30,000 ships.

That is quite a lot, but not an impossibly large number. Bigger than I wish it were.
Still, if only 75 member worlds actually host an annex, you get a decent number: 15,000 Starfleet vessels, which would allow a few thousand to be sent to the front in the Dominion War without spreading far too thin everywhere else.
YMMV.

I'll be really honest - I've never liked the idea that all SF personnel (or even all SF officers) go through SFA. It creates massive holes.

It seems a lot more likely to me that the majority of SF officers come through an ROTC-like program.

Well, I had the idea that if one had a degree from another university (like say University of Betazed, or the University of Mississippi), SFA offers a 1-year "Academy Lite" program: covering who to salute and other stuff you would have picked up while getting your degree from the Academy.

This would explain how someone like Deanna Troi could become interested in joining Starfleet while already in college, and wind up a Lieutenant Commander just a few years later.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

I've always thought that even the Academy and its local branches wouldn't be enough...even if the Academy was approving the curriculum I would expect the equivalent of ROTC to exist in the Trekiverse. To me, as others have illustrated, the sheer numbers of personnel required would suggest that it would take more than just Starfleet Academy--even with branches--to maintain appropriate troop levels.

 

[neozeks]

I said 2000 per annex per year, and there are 150 member worlds, so that would be 300,000 new officers every year if there was an annex on every member. And if the average career were 20 years, that would be 6 million officers total. At 200 officers per ship, that would be 30,000 ships.

That is quite a lot, but not an impossibly large number. Bigger than I wish it were.
Still, if only 75 member worlds actually host an annex, you get a decent number: 15,000 Starfleet vessels, which would allow a few thousand to be sent to the front in the Dominion War without spreading far too thin everywhere else.
YMMV.

Don't forget, at least half of those officers won't even be on ships but on starbases and other 'shore' units. 'Frontline' troops comprise only a small percentage of personnel in any military force.

 

[Penta]

Well, starbases are a little odd personnel wise. They have the crew required to operate the base, the crew required to service the ships that stop by or homeport there....The crew req'd to deal with the civilians who likely live there...And on we go.

I don't think we know either the crew and personnel stats of a starbase, or even how many there are. Nor do we know a damn thing about planetside bases.