What does the Prime Directive demand in the following scenario?

[Grendelsbayne]

Not if it's a Federation ancient ship. Or how about if this ancient ship was Klingon or Romulan or Borg (before FC ruined them)? This pre-warped race would be in imminent danger.

If it's a Federation ship, it's not ancient. But that would (probably) be reason to get involved and try to take the ship back, if still possible. At least, that's what Kirk would do, but whether his way is entirely legit is up for debate.

Klingon or Romulan is none of the Federation's business.

Borg could potentially be an exception for the security of the Federation.

 

[Lexx Shrapnel]

Prime directive demands they do nothing. They are not the ones responsible for the ancient ship, from Starfleet's perspective it'd be the same as in the episode First Contact. Monitor the situation and if they're about to actually get the ship into space, introduce themselves.

What if they barely understand the ship or the ship moves on it's own without the pre warpies knowing how to start it?

 

[Graham]

Depending on the era, we've seen that Starfleet are willing to sit and watch an entire civilisation die rather than interfere with them. They're not going to interfere with somebody who finds a ship, no matter what happens.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

What if they barely understand the ship or the ship moves on it's own without the pre warpies knowing how to start it?

Even so, it's by definition an internal affair.

 

[The Wormhole]

What if they barely understand the ship or the ship moves on it's own without the pre warpies knowing how to start it?

Dude, the Prime Directive apparently doesn't allow Starfleet to save civilizations from extinction level events. Pretty sure they're on their own if an alien ship turns itself on amongst the locals.

Unless of course, this ship had the Omega Molecule on board. In which case, BURN THE MOTHERFUCKERS TO THE GROUND as per the Omega Directive.

 

[Lord Garth]

A pre warp race finds an ancient speceship that functions and belongs to a race that is extinct?

Go down and blow it up?

Shoot them out of the sky?

Kidnap anyone who knows about it?

They found it on their own. Let them figure it out on their own.

As far as my view of the Prime Directive in general: In certain situations (not this one) some rules just aren't meant to be followed. Some rules make sense. Others are just an excuse to tie your hands so you can claim helplessness.

Yeah. If I were in Starfleet, I'd be court-martialed and booted out. At least in the 24th Century.

 

[at Quark's]

Nah. That was grade-A bolognium. Either you believe in non-interference the way it is presented in the 24th century shows or you don't (I don't). You can't interfere with people just because they are messing with something that may make them more powerful than you. It especially didn't make any sense in the Delta Quadrant.

In fact I agree with you. If we are to believe in the Omega Directive, the Federation's ultimate attitude would be "we believe in upholding lofty ideals and allowing every one his or her own path of development... well as long as it doesn't have negative repercussions for our way of life, in which case we'll use each and any means available to us to prevent that". That sounds like something erm, a real-world western style democracy would actually do, rather than our idealistic Federation with evolved humans.

The sad thing is it wasn't even necessary, I think. Apart from inventing that silly Omega directive, the episode itself is fine. The only reason to invent that Omega directive was as an excuse for Janeway & Crew to get involved in this week's mess, which was complicated a bit because of this non-interference principle. With a little more effort though, they probably could have crafted the story in such a way that they had to be involved for other reasons or were involved of no choice of their own. But no, they chose the lazy way out ('can't because of the Prime Directive? Well, we'll invoke an Even More Prime Directive, just to make this episode possible'), solving the direct problem of that episode, but creating huge other problems along the way. If you can't trust the Prime directive to be really Prime anymore, what can you trust?

 

[urbandefault]

A pre warp race finds an ancient speceship that functions and belongs to a race that is extinct?

Go down and blow it up?

Shoot them out of the sky?

Kidnap anyone who knows about it?

How do Starfleet/Feds even know? Space is big.

They need to butt out. Too much non-non-interfering goin' on out there.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

If it's not Federation technology, then they wouldn't do anything.

 

[Timo]

A pre-warp civilization finds an ancient ship that doesn't work. A bunch of Federation citizens land on the planet and teach the green-haired subgroup of the locals how to work the ship, so that they can annihilate the pink-haired subgroup with it. What does Starfleet do?

Nothing again, as per "Angel One". Indeed, the PD says they can't even touch the Federation citizens, because their meddling is an internal matter of that planet.

Really, the Prime Directive seems to be primarily about the UFP government keeping Starfleet from doing, like, anything, like, ever, without first getting clearance from said government. Which is a prudent measure to take, because otherwise Starfleet would just go and do everything all the time.

Starfleet can go after its own, though, and will. And sometimes the line is allowed to go rather thin: Academy dropouts and lecturers alike may be hunted down, even when random civilian sailors cannot.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Rahul]

Here is the thing:

Despite Star Trek being around for quite a long time, we don't exactly know if the Prime Directive applies only to the Federation, or if it is a universal rule in the Alpha and Beta quadrant.

I have always been a believer in the second scenario: That, despite their many conflicts, all spacefaring species have some loose "contract" that they don't mess with pre-warp societies. It's just too good an explanation for the Fermi Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox), and we know that the Vulcans, one of the oldest races, abided by it since basically forever (from ENT), and probably forced it upon other races to as well, like they did with the humans.

It's also the only plausible explanation why the Federation is able to explore so many "untouched" pre-warp civilisations in the first place, and them not already beeing usurped by the klingons, Cardiassians or anyone else. Also, we see a surprising lack of klingon/Romulan occupied species. A universe where not everyone abides by the Prime Directive would look a lot more like the Star Wars universe, with one or two older species occupying all the planets and using the local populations as work forces. (Though clearly the Dominion in the Beta quadrant doesn't care about it - which makes sense, since they didn't have contact with the Alpha/Beta quadrant forces before, and therefore weren't part of the "non-interference" agreement).

 

[Rahul]

In this case of a universal "don't touch pre-warp civilisation"-rule, the answer to OP's question would be to try to take the starship away as fast and secretly as possible, and try to enable this civilisation a "normal" development to space travel again. Probably even trying to wipe out all records of the incidents and maybe even some mindwipes (like they did on TNG with some pre-warp people that were beamed on the Enterprise).

Similar to what the Federation did in TOS "A private little war", where they tried to counter the (secret!) influence of the klingons with a little influence on their own to bring the planets society back to "normal" (ANOTHER indication for this interpretation of the "universal" Prime Directive - in that the klingons had to break it secretly, to have plausible deniablitiy in front of the rest of the galactic community).

Once these people did have successfully reverse-engineered the warp drive though, it comes back to the uniquely Federation approach of either 1) diplomatic contacts or 2) non-interference in internal affairs again, and treating them like any other space-faring race.

 

[valkyrie013]

Prime directive, to me, is a rule #1, however, rules can be bent, or even broken if a situation calls for it.
The Omega Directive is there becasue, if the omega molecule goes boom, it destroys the ability to warp for a light year or more. so yes, It affects me, so I'm going to step in and hulk smash your stuff. So that is a viable violation of the prime directive to make.. if it has past that system ramifications..
So in your example, the devil is in the details. If its just species X's ship that had a foulup and crash landed, and they find it, reverse engineer it, and then build there own, or rebuild that ship, Prime directive says don't interfere. If we seen it, then we'd watch, and if they achive warp, then we go in and say Hi, and tell them to be nice.
If its a "doomsday" weapon of some sort, and there trying to rebuild it, Then we might do something, go in and sabotage it, etc. and watch. we wouldn't come in with a fleet and General directive 24 the planet..

So with anything, there are exceptions to every rule, each situation is different, the prime directive is the starting point, and its up the each captain to decide what the ramifications of each indecent is.

 

[MacLeod]

The PD would seem to indicate you would have to leave them alone as by taking action you are interfering, sure you might keep an eye on them as we know the Federation already does to civilisations nearing developing FTL travel.

 

[Doom Shepherd]

Watch them.

If they blow themselves up at any point while tinkering with it, not your problem. (Pre-Warp doesn't mean "able to understand warp if it wasn't for one key bit of data" after all.)

If they don't develop warp but the ship makes them aware of the factual existence of not-them intelligence, so much the better, but keep an eye on them, just in case the revelation pushes them to destroy themselves out of paranoia. Or to become hyper-aggressive for the same reasons.

If they're very smart and they're making it work or about to make it work, First Contact procedures may be in order.

Now, if this is an "ancient" Federation ship that traveled backwards through time before crashing on the planet...
You might have to steal it. Or break it. Or at least the bits that make it go.

 

[Jedi Marso]

Leave it alone until such time as said race is ready to begin warp trials on its own ships, at which point they meet the TNG criteria to initiate First Contact.

 

[Rahul]

The PD would seem to indicate you would have to leave them alone as by taking action you are interfering, sure you might keep an eye on them as we know the Federation already does to civilisations nearing developing FTL travel.

The PD just says it's not allowed to interfere in the first place. Once the interference has taken place, either by accident or third party players, it's a whole different situation.

All precedent then shows subtle interference to undo the consequences of the first interference is not just allowed, but recommended (ENT:Civilization, The Communicator; TOS: A private little war, Patterns of Force, TNG: First Contact, Who Watches The Watchers).

 

[USS Triumphant]

If it's a Federation ship, it's not ancient.

Unless it ended up in the distant past through some sort of temporal accident, and existed to the present from that point. I can't think of a canonical example (though I'd argue that the difference between Data's head being under San Francisco in the 1800s and the USS Timescrewed being under a mountain on an alien world 4 million years ago is merely one of scale ), but it has happened in the novels at least twice that I can think of off the top of my head.

 

[Tim Thomason]

Unless it ended up in the distant past through some sort of temporal accident, and existed to the present from that point. I can't think of a canonical example (though I'd argue that the difference between Data's head being under San Francisco in the 1800s and the USS Timescrewed being under a mountain on an alien world 4 million years ago is merely one of scale ), but it has happened in the novels at least twice that I can think of off the top of my head.

It could be an ancient Vulcan ship, or Tellarite ship, or some other long-lasting Federation culture. Maybe the ancient Vulcan ship has secrets that are very valuable to Federation archaeologists, if only the locals stopped poking around.

If it was a bunch of cavemen using it to start their own bronze age, would Starfleet simply stun them all from orbit then tow the ship away?

 

[Grendelsbayne]

A pre-warp civilization finds an ancient ship that doesn't work. A bunch of Federation citizens land on the planet and teach the green-haired subgroup of the locals how to work the ship, so that they can annihilate the pink-haired subgroup with it. What does Starfleet do?

Nothing again, as per "Angel One". Indeed, the PD says they can't even touch the Federation citizens, because their meddling is an internal matter of that planet.

Really, the Prime Directive seems to be primarily about the UFP government keeping Starfleet from doing, like, anything, like, ever, without first getting clearance from said government. Which is a prudent measure to take, because otherwise Starfleet would just go and do everything all the time.

Starfleet can go after its own, though, and will. And sometimes the line is allowed to go rather thin: Academy dropouts and lecturers alike may be hunted down, even when random civilian sailors cannot.

Timo Saloniemi

Captain Merrick would supposedly have to stand trial for breaking the prime directive if he returned to the Federation. He was never Starfleet.

It's unclear, though if any Federation citizen would be held to it or only professional starfarers.