What percentage of the missions weren't on screen

[The Laughing Vulcan]

Let's face it, if you had to deal with hostile aliens, God like beings, supercomputers and interstellar wars on a weekly basis, you'd quickly go nuts and burn out.

For every episode of Star Trek we saw, there must have been many that we didn't, the milk runs, the uneventful explorations, the dull every day business of starship duty.

What sort of ratio would it have been?

Did we see half of their missions on TV, a quarter, a tenth?

 

[Starbreaker]

13.26% + or - 2.6%

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

As many as the plot requires.

 

[DiSiLLUSiON]

13.26% + or - 2.6%

No, actually, it's +/- 2.741%, I'm sure of it.

 

[Luckyflux]

Funny you mention that since I always liked the episodes that showed the crew doing somethine routine. Such as routine charting of a space sector, or routine supply run to a colony, or some other kind of mundane task.

I just liked seeing them have the same boring jobs that I did, so that when something really cool and exciting happened, they would take me along with them. I didn't get that vibe, if they started out, let's say, viewing a supernova explosion...

 

[Timo]

I'd like to approach this in terms of stardates. We get about 25 adventures per year, and most of them last for just a couple of days, but they aren't spread out evenly every two weeks, not in stardate terms. That is, a thousand stardates supposedly denote a year, so 1000/365 stardates roughly mark a day - giving us a tool for estimating when and how often the adventures take place.

If we do this for TOS (even though the stardate system above was only devised for TNG and later spinoffs), we get something rather semi-realistic: fewer than 20 missions per year, and plenty of recuperating time in between. In TNG, we get a higher density of missions - and a higher percentage of episodes where the heroes in the teaser tell they have just completed an untelevised mission, and in the epilogue tell that they are now heading for another untelevised mission, thus effectively tripling the density of missions.

That in mind, I'd allow for some undocumented Kirk adventures, but I'd like to give Picard, Sisko and Janeway simple milk runs whenever an adventure is not shown or mentioned. Otherwise the latter three heroes would just fall apart from fatigue. And conversely, Kirk would look a bit bad for whining about fatigue ("The, uh, crew has earned some rest, don't you agree?") in all those episodes where they end up taking shore leave, unless we gave him offscreen justification for his fatigue.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Green Shirt]

Makes you wonder how much time was actually spent cataloging gaseous analomies.

 

[EEE]

I'd like to approach this in terms of stardates.

"Stardates are a combination of time and space." - Gene Roddenberry.

To answer the question... there were no other missions, because if it wasn't on-screen it wasn't canon! So even if a mission happened off screen, it didn't happen because it was not on screen. *grin*

 

[EnsignRicky]

If you look at it like a pie, the on screen missions would be the peperoni.

 

[Destructor]

47%

 

[C.E. Evans]

^^^
There was once an idea that the average length of time between various episodes was about two weeks (more or less). Maybe 47%-50% isn't such a bad ball park figure...

 

[neozeks]

Makes you wonder how much time was actually spent cataloging gaseous analomies.

Bah, that's the job of all those boring other Starfleet ships. Enterprise's job is getting into trouble!

 

[SilentP]

Makes you wonder how much time was actually spent cataloging gaseous analomies.

Bah, that's the job of all those boring other Starfleet ships. Enterprise's job is getting into trouble!

Nooo, you forget about the poor ships that end up being in the same sector as the Enterprise (unless they're there to bring someone to or from the Enterprise), they're there to get hit by anomalies that then hit the Enterprise but get clues from the hapless no-name ship's unfortunate fate