Starfleet Academy, the bottom half of graduates.

[The Wormhole]

According to Military.com, only about 6 percent of SEAL applicants make it. MACO is twice as hard.

There's a difference. SEALs are simply the special forces division of the Navy. MACOs are an entire military branch. An entire military branch being twice as hard to get into than a special forces unit is a little much, especially in a utopia paradise where the MACOs are supposedly the only military branch. That is, the only one anyone admits to being military.

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

Kind if ironic utopian Earth has such tough standards for the one organization they admit is military.

Actually, that makes a certain amount of sense to me, if you want to minimise the scale of an organisation, you want to the best quality recruits for the role (cf USMC [~182,000] vs RM Commandos [7,760 about 4% of USMC or < 1/2 an MEB), the latter are trained to a much higher fitness and training standards by default).

 

[at Quark's]

They might get the routine jobs. Or end up working in an administrative capacity. Or perhaps in the PR section of Starfleet. You know, the kind that goes to secondary / primary school when they have job orientation days ("tomorrow will be exciting as we'll have a real Starfleet officer that can tell you what it's like to serve in Starfleet!")

 

[Longinus]

According to the stuff from the novelization of The Expanse/The Xindi, that wouldn't work. 90% of those who enroll in MACO Academy drop out within the first few months, and of those who do last the first few months, only 3% of them actually graduate.

Kind if ironic utopian Earth has such tough standards for the one organization they admit is military.

MACO were disbanded when the Federation was formed.

 

[The Wormhole]

My comment still applies to the period before the Federation is founded.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

My comment still applies to the period before the Federation is founded.

Did ENT really claim pre-Federation Earth was truly Utopian? I don't recall that - it seemed to be 'we're improving, but we've got a long way to go'.

Also, Malcolm's dad was still in the Royal Navy, so I don't think you can say the MACOs were the only military organization on Earth.

 

[The Wormhole]

Did ENT really claim pre-Federation Earth was truly Utopian?

Yes, it's all laid out in Broken Bow. War, famine, poverty are all things of the past, according to Trip as he tries to justify to T'Pol the unnecessity of the Vulcans' continual guardianship of Earth.

 

[Discofan]

Yes, it's all laid out in Broken Bow. War, famine, poverty are all things of the past, according to Trip as he tries to justify to T'Pol the unnecessity of the Vulcans' continual guardianship of Earth.

Yeah, Trip says that but then we see a hick shoot at someone that wasn't even threatening him with a weapon. Not very likely in a world without war and poverty for decades. My brother lives in a very quiet neighborhood, most of the time he doesn't even lock his door when he leaves for a few hours!!!

 

[Kerock]

Surely not everyone in Star Fleet goes to the Academy, it would not be big enough to graduate enough people to fill all the positions.

 

[Tim Thomason]

Surely not everyone in Star Fleet goes to the Academy, it would not be big enough to graduate enough people to fill all the positions.

There's more than one Academy in the Federation, and more than one campus even on Earth. Only a few characters (Picard, Sisko, Wesley Crusher, the Kelvinverse folks, offhand) are known to have attended the San Fran campus, and even then it was only for a portion of their training. Sisko, for example, had field training on a Starbase.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

We also know that Starfleet does use Enlisted people. They get some kind of training, but it's not necessarily Academy training. Or even if it is (O'Brien supposedly went to the Academy somewhere, I think) - it's not necessarily at all comparable to the Academy training we think of.

 

[The Wormhole]

There's more than one Academy in the Federation, and more than one campus even on Earth. Only a few characters (Picard, Sisko, Wesley Crusher, the Kelvinverse folks, offhand) are known to have attended the San Fran campus, and even then it was only for a portion of their training. Sisko, for example, had field training on a Starbase.

The following characters are confirmed or implied to have attended the San Francisco campus:
Picard (confirmed)
Riker (implied)
Wesley (confirmed)
Sisko (confirmed)
Nog (confirmed)
Janeway (confirmed)
Chakotay (confirmed)
Harry Kim (implied)
B'Ellanna (implied)
Kelvin Timeline TOS cast (all confirmed except Scotty)

It should also be noted, Bashir attended Starfleet Medical School in San Francisco.

 

[David cgc]

Yeah, Trip says that but then we see a hick shoot at someone that wasn't even threatening him with a weapon. Not very likely in a world without war and poverty for decades. My brother lives in a very quiet neighborhood, most of the time he doesn't even lock his door when he leaves for a few hours!!!

Moore was a farmer. Wild animals could still be a concern. Or the occasional crashed alien ship.

 

[Discofan]

Moore was a farmer. Wild animals could still be a concern. Or the occasional crashed alien ship.

In a civilized wolrd, that bumpkin should have called the local authorities and stayed in his house. His very reaction is not one that's compatible with the peaceful world described by Trip (I blame that on incoherent writing). I know farmers, in fact, I live on the verge of the countryside side so to speak and most of them have degrees and are sometimes more sophisticated than people you'll meet in cities. That scene is about as incoherent as if we had been shown two people in cowboy outfit fighting a duel!

You want to make believe that we're in a peaceful future? Make it BELIEVABLE!

 

[Stibbons]

The FASA RPG dumps the underperformers in the Merchant Marine (a base slur on that noble institution), the Colonial Command and Starbase Operations. I suppose it makes sense, if you don't get the top marks you get to do the support roles- Freighter crew (like that of the Huron), back-up survey work (like the Antares) and logistical support on the Starbases and K-class stations for colonies and passing starships.

 

[MAGolding]

Moore was a farmer. Wild animals could still be a concern. Or the occasional crashed alien ship.

Any farmer ought to know what the common local wild animals look like, and probably most large exotic animals, and so eliminate them from consideration when seeing an alien life form.e

In a society with space travel and knowledge of strange but intelligent beings of other species, any civilized and educated person would not be very frightened by a crashed spaceship. The crashed spaceship would be expected to be either unmanned, or have human occupants, or nonhuman occupants, or a mixture of occupants.

It is possible there were one or more wars with hostile aliens before "Broken Bow", but there weren't any in canon I know of except for the Kizin wars in TAS, which not all fans consider totally canonical. And the Vegans in James Blish's adaptation of TOS, which is usually considered even less canonical. So the farmer should have heard of various friendly or non hostile aliens and possibly never heard of any hostile ones. And he should have known that no matter how weird a living being from a spaceship looked like, it would probably be a person and deserve to be treated like a person.

And Earth would probably have a law stating that if someone thinks that a spaceship has landed or crashed, and then sees a weird creature like they never saw before, they should assume that it is a person from outer space with rights and treat it like a person. Considering how popular science fiction has been for decades, I think it is rather shocking that as far as I know no jurisdiction on Earth has such a law yet.

So the logical thing for the farmer to do would be to call the authorities and then maybe go to see if he could help any possibly injured people of any species that might be in the crashed ship.

In a civilized wolrd, that bumpkin should have called the local authorities and stayed in his house. His very reaction is not one that's compatible with the peaceful world described by Trip (I blame that on incoherent writing). I know farmers, in fact, I live on the verge of the countryside side so to speak and most of them have degrees and are sometimes more sophisticated than people you'll meet in cities. That scene is about as incoherent as if we had been shown two people in cowboy outfit fighting a duel!

You want to make believe that we're in a peaceful future? Make it BELIEVABLE!

Yes, I agree.

 

[Discofan]

Plus it was a stupid grain-silo for pets' sake!!! Why would someone need to guard a grain-silo with a deadly weapon on a planet where war, poverty, and hunger were things of the past? (according to Trip that is)

That's what I find hard to swallow. That guy is an anachronism!

 

[Jetboogieman]

"You have come bottom 10% of your class.

It is the ruling of this tribunal without possibility of reprieve you are to be taken from this place to the dilithium mines on the penal asteroid of Rura Pente, there to spend the rest of your natural lives.". - Starfleet Academy Superintendent

 

[The Old Mixer]

Aight, I'm far from the first person to defend Enterprise, but I just watched the silo scene and there was a little more going on than is being put forth here. The Klingon was being pursued by the Suliban (whom the farmer didn't see), was armed, and had just blown up the silo with his weapon. The farmer tried to get him to drop his weapon and only fired when the Klingon started approaching him without doing so. So not exactly some potentially friendly alien who just crashed on the farm and got shot on sight.

 

[Sir Stewart Wallace]

The United States wouldn't have joined United Earth without a 2nd Amendment grandfather clause.