Weekends in Starfleet

[The Wormhole]

^^Indeed, that is how the novels have rationalized Picard getting an actual court-martial over losing the Stargazer, the fact that it was abandoned essentially intact was considered grounds for criminal charges. Had the ship actually been destroyed, he likely would have faced lighter consequences.

 

[urbandefault]

I'm not millitary and I haven't looked it up, but doesn't a "general quarters" alert mean that everyone is supposed to go to wherever they are scheduled to be? Like, if you're on break, get back to your station? Or if you have a scheduled day off, get to your bunk or whatever and wait for orders?

I don't remember Trek using General Quarters often, if ever, but they should have.

 

[J.T.B.]

I'm not millitary and I haven't looked it up, but doesn't a "general quarters" alert mean that everyone is supposed to go to wherever they are scheduled to be? Like, if you're on break, get back to your station? Or if you have a scheduled day off, get to your bunk or whatever and wait for orders?

Right. "General Quarters" is what you sometimes hear in movies as "All hands to battle stations!" In the USN also known as Condition 1. You are in action or about to be. Everyone is on duty at their assigned battle station and everything non-fighting-related is shut down for as long as necessary. Including the galley, so sometimes on a big ship, if everyone has been at battle stations for an extended time and you are not actually in battle, such as in a long amphibious operation, they will set Condition 2, which allows some of the crew to rest and the cooks to prepare some (cold lunch-type) food and coffee.

I don't remember Trek using General Quarters often, if ever, but they should have.

Sulu announced "General Quarters Three, intruder alert!" in "The Man Trap." There are a number of episodes were "secure from general quarters" is ordered. But usually "Red Alert!" seems to mean General Quarters.

 

[Timo]

the fact that it was abandoned essentially intact was considered grounds for criminal charges

To be specific, Starfleet apparently doesn't require skippers to blow up ships they abandon - if it did, Picard would have blown up his, rather than explicitly logged an entry stating he intended the ship to survive. "Abandoning intact" is clearly allowable at least under certain conditions, which we do not know for certain.

But we can speculate that when there is no expectation of enemy activity nearby and in the near future, a derelict can be left to wait for further Starfleet action such as recovery or scuttling, and Picard might have felt (and in the court martial, sufficiently established) that the one enemy was defeated and that others would not emerge... Barring coincidences that did not outweigh the benefits of leaving the ship unscuttled and available for future recovery and repair.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Wormhole]

I don't remember Trek using General Quarters often, if ever, but they should have.

Sulu announced "General Quarters Three, intruder alert!" in "The Man Trap." There are a number of episodes were "secure from general quarters" is ordered. But usually "Red Alert!" seems to mean General Quarters.

Yeah, read alert basically is general quarters. Here's the Memory Alpha page on General Quarters to show its usage in Trek.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

It's interesting how inconsistently Trek Captains blow up their ships that are about to be captured. Picard tries to do it in 11001001 and Where Silence Has Lease. In Rascals, not so much. Janeway tries to set self destruct when the Kazon are about to take the vessel. In Displaced she makes no attempt to.

 

[MacLeod]

My main issue with VOY's auto-destruct is that in TOS it took three people, in TNG it took in FC it was back to three but in VOY it only needed the Captain, what happens if they went crazy and initated autodestruct? Surely you would think that it should require a minimum of two people.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ I tend to think that Starfleet intentionally changes the auto-destruct method without warning, from time to time, thus making it harder for an enemy to guess (and exploit) it.

I'm not joking, BTW.

 

[Queen Mab]

Well, the necessities for a weekend would be primary religious. But as Gene "eliminated" religions in Star Trek this becomes moot.

Except the writers apparently didn't get the memo, so religion is alive and well in the Trek future.

I really don't get the smiley. Aren't you a Star Trek fan and supposed to be all sensible and stuff?

 

[T'Girl]

My main issue with VOY's auto-destruct is that in TOS it took three people ...

In TMP Kirk ordered Scotty to just take care of it all by himself.

I really don't get the smiley

I use an emo to close the majority of my post, here and other sites too. And the majority of my emails.

In the case of the Stargazer, I wonder if Picard set a "boobytrap" self destruct in case someone other than Starfleet boarded her, but the Ferengi found a way around it. I don't recall the Ferengi Day-mon stating whether they had been aboard.

 

[MacLeod]

Well to be fair, in TMP's case. I got the impression that Kirk was simply ordering Scotty to make the steps necessary for an uncontrolled M/AM reaction. No doubt several failsafe systems had to be disabled first. So they wouldn't have to go through the steps needed to arm the actual auto-destruct system.

 

[Timo]

It's interesting how inconsistently Trek Captains blow up their ships that are about to be captured. Picard tries to do it in 11001001 and Where Silence Has Lease.

He isn't trying to deny the enemy the use of the ship in either of the cases, not principally anyway. Like Kirk always did, he's chiefly trying to bluff the enemy into ceasing and desisting.

In "11001001", he and Riker are the only two people aboard, save for the supposed enemy, so blowing up the ship wouldn't be much of a loss. But since Picard doesn't know why the ship is being hijacked, he's setting a countdown rather than simply ending it all there and then; the action serves as a means of investigation, then. Sure, he says enemy use of the ship must be denied, but he also believes there are other methods to achieve this.

In "Where Silence Has Lease", the point is that Picard is threatening to kill his crew, as Nagilum has no interest in the ship whatsoever.

Janeway is in a fundamentally different situation, as everybody she is likely to fall victim to is interested in her ship and her technology. Picard could easily give the Ferengi, the Klingons or the Romulans an open lecture on Starfleet technological secrets, and the listeners would just walk out bored by all that stuff already thoroughly familiar to them. But Janeway feels she would violate the PD if she allowed the local starfarers to find out how her replicator makes coffee.

Timo Saloniemi