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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> Battle re-enactments are eminently useful for military officers

But what good are they for a doctor and an engineer? To paraphrase Ender's Game, how do you apply the lessons learned at The Alamo, or on the fields of ancient Ireland to three-dimensional warfare (not even thinking about the wormhole at this point) in space?

Another thing that struck me is that perhaps nobody wastes time because of the culture the Federation has become. They don't have money, either, and don't seem to particularly miss it. Perhaps Star Trek depicts a humanity that has finally decided to better itself consistently, on a mass and individual level.

Or perhaps when anything is accessible via subspace radio, holodecks and replicators, the only thing that truly brings peace and a sense of accomplishment is actually accomplishing something instead of clicking on cows.

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"three-dimensional warfare (not even thinking about the wormhole at this point) in space?"

... well... if you take Star Trek seriously, for some mysterious reason, space battle in their universe isn't actually 3 dimensional. At best it's 2.5, taking place on a two-dimensional plane with a few hundred meters of play in the third. Also, everything takes place at what would, even with modern military hardware, be considered point-blank range. Not only is Star Trek combat modeled on naval warfare, it's modeled on 17th century naval warfare.

To your next paragraph, I would point out that we are following the elite of the elite. Sisko is the officer, out of all the presumably billions-if-not-trillions of people in the Federation, who is considered most suitable to be in charge of an incredibly strategic station. Odds are he's not a typical sample of humanity, nor any other officers there. I suspect our best officers today similarly do not "waste" much time either.

Otherwise... I'm a big fan of taking canon "seriously" and trying to work out how it could actually be working. I particularly enjoy playing this game with Futurama, something you're not "supposed" to do that with. But having spent some time on Star Trek, I find it's really, really hard to square the stated philosophy of the Federation with what seems to be the reality of the Federation. It just doesn't make sense. Even such old chestnuts like "Why did the Enterprise actually carry families?" are old chestnuts precisely because it really, honestly doesn't make sense. Starships are blowing up all the time in Star Trek, usually not even due to hostile action (or at least, conventional hostile military action). And I just find that in the end, there's no practical way to actually put together the pieces into anything like a coherent whole.

Almost as if Star Trek was written over the course of decades by dozens upon dozens of writers mostly focused on how the current episode will turn out.

Warfare deserves its own comment.

You can fucking reproduce historical figures with incredible fidelity, but you can't have a swarm of tiny battleships piloted by equivalent AI? Instead, you send your best people in a small warship right into the enemy lines, where they can be picked off at leisure?

Why aren't you people just firing a solid wall of torpedoes at the enemy? Why aren't you flinging black holes around like birdshot? Considering how many ships are lost per battle, why aren't you just launching cloaked warp cores at the enemy and decloaking & detonating when they're in their midst?

Did they completely forget about the self-replicating mines? Ignoring where they get the energy, why not fire a wall of those at the enemy? Right before the first wave hits, it should replicate another wall right behind them, and so on and so forth.

Yes, sort of expanding on cstross' point, real-world military technology is also rapidly advancing well past what Star Trek has ever considered. The 1960s heritage shines through here too. In the original series, hooking up a Big Honking Computer that gives the Enterprise some sort of drone-like control possibility was a Big Deal, the focus of an entire episode. And they had to actually bring in new hardware, it wasn't just a software patch.

I've seen a moderately serious treatment that suggests that in a fight between our modern military and the Enterprise, the modern military might very well win. The Enterprise does have the ability to slag its choice of ground target, and we'd have a hard time retaliating as long as it stayed in orbit, but that is pretty much all they could do. It seems it would be trivial to block their transporter, shuttles may be shielded but they seem to be slow and one imagine we could wear them down even with conventional weaponry, and Federation ground troops are laughably incompetent by real military doctrine standards, armed with a single line-of-vision ray weapon that immediately gives away their position every time they use it, somehow no air support, and their use of this weapon is also incompetent. Any modern military would chew them up on the ground, to say nothing of the elite ones.

Also it seems like any ol' script kiddie from real modern Earth would be able to penetrate their computer security by accident. The Federation seems to be incapable of writing a login screen without a cross-site scripting arbitrary code execution attack built right in and easily accessible in seconds from the keyboard.

I've seen a moderately serious treatment that suggests that in a fight between our modern military and the Enterprise, the modern military might very well win.

Seems the Reddit-originated movie-bound story Rome Sweet Rome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome has a similar issue with the Roman military vs well-equipped (but no resupply) Marines gone back to that age. Modernity works up to a point, but eventually it takes "boots on the ground" with massive resupply chains to win.

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_%28film%29

The big E's one advantage is it's already in space.

Just tractor some asteroids and drop them in the ocean. Aside from the tsunami's, a few weeks of saltwater rain would make it really tough to feed 6 billion people.

Swing back by in a year, and then really fight with whoever is left.

Follow up: I assumed this was cstross without looking, but it doesn't seem to be. Sorry, I can no longer edit.

One that always got me is: why does no one think of using the transporter as a weapon? Once the enemy's shields are down, you can just beam the entire enemy crew into space and have a relatively undamaged enemy ship to capture.

One of the things I loved about the Stargate series is that they took a lot of these questions somewhat seriously. Transporters are used as weapons in Atlantis to beam in big ol' bombs until the enemy eventually works out what's happening and how to prevent it. In some ways you can still tell it's ultimately a Star Trek sequel, but they did a reasonable job of thinking it through much better.

It also doesn't suffer from "Cool Technology in one episode -> never heard from again" syndrome, to give another example of an improvement over Star Trek.

If you've never watched it, I recommend it. It sort of dies with a whimper rather than a bang (opinions on the spinoffs are mixed), but SG-1 was very good for a very long time. Mainlining the first season episodes without commercials and in sequence is really a spectacular experience if you can stomach the "time wastiness". The first couple of seasons in particular really captured the sense of humans being thrust extremely suddenly into a new, huge universe without guides very well.

Stargate does mostly avoid that issue, but it falls down on the fact that the Goa'uld are ridiculously incompetent at both a strategic and tactical level. The most obvious being the fact that they never developed the iris that humans managed to develop almost immediately.

My theory is that they actually had an incentive not to be too competent. As long as their squabbling just gets a bunch of minions killed, it's fine. But suppose that one Goa'uld decided to fortify stargates, use a bunch of secret weapons simultaneously, and begin conquering in earnest. This guy would be wildly successful, for a while -- until the rest of the Goa'uld power structure decides to take him down.

It's well established that all Goa'uld have the vast knowledge required to pull miracles out of their hats at will. They can and will punish any defector who doesn't have a huge advantage. Just look at how they allied against Anubis, when he made his bid for supremacy.

The Goa'uld are not pathologically incompetent; they're just wary of being disruptive.

There is an episode which explicitly makes the point that the Goa'uld make very sure not to arm their minions with too much weaponry or tactical skill. The Goa'uld are very aware that they are not Gods and there isn't anything in particular preventing the Jaffa from overthrowing them.

I always wondered this as well. It seems like with the transporter accidents that occasionally happen where someone's pattern is lost, they could even just dematerialize the enemy and then memset(0) the transporter buffer.

My theory is that there are some rules of war that most people with transporter technology follow. We've already seen examples of similar conventions in Trek; for example those banning thalaron & subspace weapons (Nemesis & Insurrection movies respectively).

My theory is

I think a more realistic theory is that the script writers simply had to draw a line somewhere and ignore the obvious inconsistencies from that point, or they would have never finished an episode.

It was an entertainment TV series after all, not a scientific paper...

I do agree anyway that many episodes were real turds. Personally I hated every single one with "Q" in it. Often those were not even internally consistent.

Once the enemy's shields are down it only takes one or two photon torpedos, much more efficient. In addition, I don't know of any species in star trek with the technological capability to transport hundreds of people from a ton of different locations simultaneously. The federation transports only a dozen or so people max at a time, and they're usually all standing together.

I always wanted to weaponize the borg. Capture one drone, keep him in statis, and then beam him onto an enemy ship. Wait thirty seconds, and open fire.

The trick is doing it right after it starts assimilating the ship, but not after it's successfully done so and suddenly turns on you and everyone else in the sector...

My mom's company knows when she logs back in after signing off for the day on her remote workstation. A big no-no, and grounds for termination or losing your telecommute privs. It's a big insurance company, go fig. The point is, you think the Collective doesn't know when a drone is put into stasis? The Collective would be like, "Whoa, drone 0x1ffe5ac3409f just went offline, hostiles encountered, last known location Sector X Quadrant Y. WTF? Imma send a squad cube on over to check that shit out." Congratulations, you're dead.

Instead, you send your best people in a small warship right into the enemy lines, where they can be picked off at leisure?

Not to mention perching all of your senior officers in a bubble, on top of the ship.

> I'm a big fan of taking canon "seriously" and trying to work out how it could actually be working.

It's our Alamo :)

> Even such old chestnuts like "Why did the Enterprise actually carry families?" are old chestnuts precisely because it really, honestly doesn't make sense. Starships are blowing up all the time in Star Trek, usually not even due to hostile action (or at least, conventional hostile military action).

Time to pick some nits. Sure, we see ships blow up all the time, but we also see shootings, explosions and robberies on the news every night, but I've only dealt with a break-in at my apartment once, and I've never been shot at in the street, and the only explosions I see are on the fourth of july. Statistically, I'd wager that people are just as safe on a Galaxy-class vessel as they are in San Francisco. (Although, the Enterprise was on a mission of exploration, where you never know where you might end up - it's about as dumb as, say, packing all of your stuff into a wooden box on wheels and heading west... hm.)

But you're right. It's all terribly inconsistent. I'd wager that Futurama is probably easier to rationalize, because at least they portray a lot of the people as human, making dumb mistakes and irrational decisions. "Why is this so?" "Because Fry is an idiot." "Oh, okay." The only difference, really, is in rationalizing the technology, but how different is a self-sealing stembolt from the smelloscope?

"I'd wager that people are just as safe on a Galaxy-class vessel as they are in San Francisco."

No, definitely not. Over the course of TNG I think the Galaxy-class death rate was at least 33% in ~10 years. There weren't that many deployed at the time, and we see several of them blow up, and the carcasses of a couple of others.

On the other hand, how often in Star Trek do you see Earth, and even San Francisco, get attacked? The whole planet almost gets assimilated twice, attacked up by the Xindi and the Dominion, menaced by the whale probe...OK, Earth is probably still safer than any given Galaxy class ship.

Push the casualty rate high enough across the whole run of the series and you end up with an extinct humanity at the end of it. Especially since there is very little evidence to suggest that humanity has any really significant colonies anywhere, and quite a bit of evidence against it. (There's also evidence that none of the other major species do either, which combined with the way the Enterprise in all its incarnations is always the only ship in the sector strongly suggests a Federation and equal-powered foes that are a great deal less wealthy that it may appear at first.) Again we run up against the writers not really seriously thinking through the consequences of their own attempts to create drama, which wrecks up attempts to take it seriously. However, "Federation as declining dystopian human empire" is certainly one popular fanon interpretation.

> there is very little evidence to suggest that humanity has any really significant colonies anywhere, and quite a bit of evidence against it

It is kind of suspicious that most of the characters are from Earth; Tasha Yar is from a colony but there aren't any other major examples.

> combined with the way the Enterprise in all its incarnations is always the only ship in the sector

Space is big, and sparse. There are apparently hundreds of planets in the Federation (explicitly stated at times). There are also hundreds of starbases. And while in the original series there are only about a dozen ships in the same class as the Enterprise, by the time DS9 rolls around we see huge fleets of hundreds of ships on screen.

The TOS Enterprise didn't carry families because it worked in a frontier with considerably more outright dangers. I think in early TNG, it's implied that the Enterprise has what it thinks to be a much safer job, what with all the diplomatic missions and always being in closer contact with Starfleet. There's an entire episode where Q introduces them to the Borg just to remind them the galaxy is still dangerous.

Given how often Earth itself seems to be attacked, maybe they just realized there's no safe place in the galaxy so the families might as well be around to keep up the morale of the troops.

> Perhaps Star Trek depicts a humanity that has finally decided to better itself consistently, on a mass and individual level.

That's more or less explicitly the point. I think that's almost word-for-word what Roddenberry wrote in the series bibles, for TNG if not TOS.

Picard states this several times, almost explicitly, when explaining to alien cultures why the Federation doesn't use money. The pursuit of wealth was superseded by the pursuit of the betterment of the fellow man/member of the Federation.

Heh. "The enemy's gate is, um, that way."

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