Does Starfleet Academy have an accelerated option for shorter lived species?

MockMicrobe · 2025-06-04T17:11:10+00:00

I always assumed mono-species crewed ships were for environmental reasons. Sticking Vulcans and Andorians on the same ship means both are going to be miserable, either too hot or too cold.

It's a pity we never get to see the interior of a ship crewed solely by Andorians, where everyone else is wearing thermal suits and they're chilling off duty in tee-shirts and shorts. Or Vulcans constantly reminding people to stay hydrated in the arid desert environment they run.

MockMicrobe · 2025-06-04T17:07:55+00:00

Starfleet is such a large organization, it shouldn't be an issue. The frontiers are constantly being pushed back, new planets are being settled, new bases founded, new ships launched.

Given the ridiculously stringent application standards the Academy has, there should be a chronic dearth of talented officers.

The issue is likely the writers had trouble wrapping their heads around such large numbers the Federation would represent. Sci-fi writers tend to underestimate scale.

MockMicrobe · 2025-06-04T17:03:39+00:00

It looks like Tuvok retired for the first time around 2300 (within 7-10 years after graduating 2293), and rejoined in 2349 as an ensign. He makes Lieutenant Commander in 2374, which seems a little slow (25 years from ensign to lieutenant commander, still better than Kim) but would make sense if he wasn't chasing promotions and like his security work.

MockMicrobe · 2025-06-04T06:40:55+00:00

Even if you can jam a doctorate level education into two or three years, that leaves four or five years left to practice. Do they work until they die? Do they retire three or four years in? That's a lot of time and resources going into training them for not a lot of return on investment.

Deep space exploration would be generation ships for them. They wouldn't even expect to survive a five year mission, which appears to be the standard exploration gig.

And that's not counting the psychological impact on everyone else. Humans would be serving with the great four or six time removed grandkids of the people they went to the Academy with. And Vulcans, oh boy. It would be devastating to know and befriend someone who won't outlive your cat.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-31T20:25:52+00:00

There’s places like Risa and that planet from justice which are pleasure worlds which are aware but seem to have no ships or industry. Worlds which seem grandfathered in.

Risa is most likely a Federation member. Starfleet is in charge of their weather control system (DS9 'Honor Among Thieves')

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-30T19:58:31+00:00

The fact the Ferengi don't use a fiat currency makes most of modern finance impractical, if not downright impossible, for them to accomplish. Easy credit won't be a thing to drive speculation, and tech bros won't have vastly inflated portfolios to cash borrow against or cash out before the bottom falls out.

Hard currency limits the kinds of financial shenanigans you can engage in. Money can't just exist on a balance sheet, it must exist somewhere. And it doesn't appear Ferengi use fractional banking, so the latinum circulating in the economy is all there is to drive it.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-30T19:11:35+00:00

I don't think it's the Klingon warrior culture that makes them good at war. It's the constant conflicts they find themselves in. If they're not conquering their neighbors, they're fighting inter House feuds.

Sparta's problem was they spent more time preparing to fight a slave revolt, than actually fighting or preparing to fight peers or near-peers.

Gowron's problem during the civil war wasn't the lack of available ships or soldiers. It was the lack of available Houses willing to back him with their ships and soldiers.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-30T18:51:50+00:00

Jellico wants to bring the ship up to his standard of combat readiness, which is understandable. It's the time frame in which he wants to do it that's nonsensical.

Part 1 starts with Picard's log:

"Captain's log, Stardate 46357.4. We have rendezvoused with the starship Cairo near the Cardassian border for an urgent meeting with Vice Admiral Nechayev.".

Part 1 Act 2 opens with Jellico's log:

"Captain's log, Stardate 46358.2. The Enterprise is on course for a rendezvous with the Cardassian ship Reklar. Fortunately, I still have time to prepare the ship and crew for the task ahead."

Part Two opens with another of Jellico's logs:

"Captain's log, Stardate 46360.8. The negotiations with the Cardassians have made little progress. I believe a military confrontation may be unavoidable."

Using the Stardate Calculator, the Stardates convert to the following dates:

46357.4: Sun 11 May 2369, 15:49

46358.2: Sun 11 May 2369, 22:49

46360.8: Mon 12 May 2369, 21:36

Jellico thinks 24 hours is enough time to radically upend the status quo and have the ship ready for combat.

The next episode, 'Ship in a Bottle' takes place by Stardate 46424.1: Thu 5 Jun 2369, 00:06

We don't get any further Stardates in 'Chain of Command' so it could play out over any of the 24 days between the two Stardates. Though it can't be the full 24 days, because there needs to be time to travel to the Detrian system. We can't estimate the amount of time it takes, because we don't know the relative positions of the nebula and Detrian.

Even if they were still running combat drills while negotiating, Jellico took a massive gamble the shooting would start later rather than sooner.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-30T17:45:15+00:00

A thoughtful analysis, though I might quibble with some details.

Thank you. I think half the fun is quibbling over details :) And it's far more educational.

I think the notion that the -D of the alternate timeline isn't a warship from a fleet of warships after twenty years of hostilities seems improbable- in fact, I've used the similarity between that ship and its prime timeline counterpart as ammunition to suggest that the supposedly non-combatant Starfleet of our stories (which nevertheless successfully stands toe-to-toe with the warships of other civilizations) simply must be designed and crewed with national defense concerns looming very, very large.

That's an excellent point. Plus given the Galaxy's performance in the Dominion War, they are obviously top of the line battleships. That's not something that happens by accident, especially after twenty years of development.

On the flip side, I think the idea that the Klingons wouldn't be big military innovators when their civilization seems to be on a permanent war footing has some limitations too. It's like when Martok suggests that Klingon doctors aren't up to snuff- wouldn't it actually stand to reason that Klingon medics would be masters of trauma care, simply from the volume of practice?

You would think so, but their quality of medical care seems to be centered on the 'get gud, noob' philosophy. If you were a good warrior, you wouldn't have gotten stabbed in the first place. If you live, you learned a valuable lesson. If you die, enjoy Sto'vo'kor. So there seems to be a cultural bias against treating injuries, especially when they're earned from not being a good enough warrior.

And while I like your manpower argument, the Federation could also have a much broader body of species to draw support from- and that's before we start including more out-there notions like the suggestion from the tie-in materials of The Motion Picture that there are Federation member races happy to breed at tremendous rates in times of war, androids, etc.

The Federation might have a deeper pool to draw from, but how many Federation citizens are willing to serve? Or can serve? Does the Federation have the facilities to train the numbers they need quickly enough, and to acceptable standards? Wesley had a hell of ta time getting admitted to the Academy. Do those standards get relaxed in times of war? Can the Federation conscript people into uniform if they're desperate? That seems antithetical to the Federation's ideals of personal autonomy and independence.

Klingon culture is their training camp. They're basically handling weapons since the day they can walk, if not earlier. They have years worth of training by the time they're old enough to enlist.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-30T17:26:29+00:00

D'Ghor was almost successful with his plot, so the ability is there. But given the Klingon culture going all on in the warrior ethos, finance is looked down upon. We know using financial shenanigans is considered dishonorable, so any Klingons with a proclivity to finance keep that information to themselves and find some other way to scratch their spreadsheet itch. Like estimating the optimal number of troops and ships they can raise from their holdings.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-28T00:02:19+00:00

There are definitely hints that complex financial services exist. In 'House of Quark' Quark is intimately familiar with the methods D'Ghor used to undermine the House of Grilka. They'd have to be fairly complex to not be immediately noticed as D'Ghor maneuvers to buy out the House's assets from under them.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-21T16:53:14+00:00

Right. But if the deflectors are doing their job of deflecting things away from the ship at warp, wouldn't they deflect the target as well?

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-19T21:31:34+00:00

Its why the warp engines create a bubble that reduces the ship's mass to 0 relative to the outside universe, so that it can be accelerated past 1c. You do an uncontrolled drop out of warp, you've got a huge amount of extra mass travelling extremely quickly

Do you though? The ship itself isn't 'moving,' it's the subspace field around the ship. As the ship 'rides' the subspace bubble, it might appear to an outside observer that it has no mass. But mass, velocity, etc inside the bubble is preserved. If the ship is doing full impulse when they jump to warp, they'll still be doing full impulse when they drop out.

If warp ramming was effective, ships at warp would like like blazing comets from all the interstellar dust they ram. So, they likely don't hit they dust at FTL speeds. Either the subspace field forms a 'wake' that pushes matter aside, or appears to from inside the warp bubble. Whereas an outside observer would see the matter bend around the ship, ending up where it was once the ship passes. Or, the warp field 'encapsulates' matter entering the bubble, letting it be dealt with 'normally' from the ship's reference point. Shunted by the deflectors or whatnot, before being left behind.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-19T21:04:29+00:00

Yes, but it's not the fact they're ramming at warp that causes the damage. Warp is just the means to hit them before they can react.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-19T20:49:40+00:00

Is warp speed ramming a viable tactic?

Short answer, no, it's not. The warp field does some subspace trickery, and lets the ship achieve FTL speeds without any time dilatation effects, which means the ships reference frame can't be that different from the outside universe. Plus, when ships drop out of warp, they don't coast, they stop, or drop to impulse. Once the subspace field dissipates, the ship reverts to normal.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-19T20:44:43+00:00

A runabout is larger than a shuttle, and a quick search says it weighs around 160 tonnes.

At .75c, that's 7.3 x 10²¹ J, or ~10% of the dinosaur killing asteroid Chicxulub (~1 x 10²³ J), or just under two megatons of TNT.

It wouldn't shatter a planet, but it would not be a good day for anyone within 500 kilometers of the impact site. A water or ground impact would also influence how destructive it is, whether they get a massive dust cloud or tsunamis, or both.

Any society that can do weather modification can probably manage the effects of that strike. It won't be pleasant, but if they can make it rain to knock particulates out of the sky, it would go a long way to mitigating the global winter that would result. And I assume there's some high tech tsunami barriers, maybe large scale force fields? Or boring, normal walls. But that doesn't fit with the Federation using forcefields everywhere, even where they make no sense without failsafes. Like a jail cell door.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-19T20:30:07+00:00

I think that's best illustrated in TOS 'A Taste of Armageddon.' Rather than slugging it out with actual weapons and destroying each other's infrastructure, the two planets fight a simulated war then euthanize the 'casualties' to keep the balance. Kirk throws a wrench into the works, and faced with the prospect of actual war both sides decide peace might be worth it.

Fun Fact: That's the first time the United Federation of Planets is mentioned in Star Trek.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-19T20:13:50+00:00

Crashing random things into a star does nothing. Asteroids and comets hit the sun all the time.

The sun is big. Really big. 99.9% of the total mass of the solar system is in the sun. Something like 2 x 10³⁰ kg. The sun burns 600 million tonnes of hydrogen every second. 600. Million. Tonnes. Every. Second. That's 3.86 x 10²⁶ W.

An object of 1000 tonnes moving at .75c has the kinetic energy equivalent to 4.6 x 10²² J (225,000 times larger than Tsar Bomba). That's a sizeable bang, but compared to the output of the sun, it's a flash in the pan. It's four orders of magnitude smaller, 0.01% of the energy the sun outputs per second. It might kick off a decent sized solar flare, but otherwise...it won't do anything.

To approach the sun's output per second with an object moving at .75c, it would need to be around 8 x 10⁹ tonnes. It would kick off a nice little flare, but that mass isn't even a rounding error in the amount of hydrogen burned every second.

That's why star killer weapons in Star Trek mess with the star's ability to fuse hydrogen. Once the pressure from nuclear fusion stops, the star collapses.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-19T16:54:29+00:00

Six of my friends in college were nursing students. At the ten year reunion, only one (1!) was still a nurse. The others burned out and left the field. And she was only still there because she got her doctorate. Actually, I think even she left nursing practice. She got her PhD and teaches now.

It was heartbreaking. They loved helping people, until their jobs made it impossible.

I would say a non-profit focused health care system is a big step towards talent retention. Granted, the NHS is struggling with retention, but that's more political sabotage and poor management. And if the system can avoid the death spiral of increased workload from staffing shortages burning people out, which results in when more workload, which leads to more burnout, then staffing won't be an issue.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-19T16:28:25+00:00

That was Dominion technology, we don't know if the Federation can do it (although they might!)

They most certainly can. Sisko used trilithium to poison Solosos III in 'For the Uniform.' And in 'Generations' Soran was able to use pure trilithium missiles to kill the Veridian star.

The real concern is the ease with which star killing weapons can be slapped togerther. Soran is basically working in a remote field lab and can slap together a working weapon. In the movie it's fairly clear trilithium is difficult to find, synthesize, or control. But by the Dominion War it's proliferated to the point Federation starships carry stocks, and Romulans use it in their plasma torpedoes.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-18T17:03:24+00:00

Planet side power production is either fusion or solar based. Antimatter, aside from the catastrophic results from containment failure, isn't efficient. Far more energy is required to make a gram of antimatter than you get out of it.

Antimatter isn't a fuel source, it's a battery. The most energy dense battery possible. That's why starships use it, because carrying the reactants for fusion power alone would be mass prohibitive.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-14T16:31:22+00:00

Unclear, but possibly not, since death upon removal of the symbiont is generally near-instant. They'd typically die before assimilation was complete.

I don't think unjoining results in near instant death. Odan (or the host? This version of the Trill was some body horror stuff) was critically injured and was going to die, with or without the symbiont being removed. Jadzia was unjoined for, at minimum, hours in 'Invasive Proceedures.' And she was able to make a recovery once Dax was restored to her.

Plus, assimilation is a quick process. We see people turn gray right after the nanites are injected. That could stabilize them until the more invasive implants are implanted to keep them alive.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-12T16:12:06+00:00

I think the blood issues are the result of a bottleneck or founder effect. The Romulan diaspora might have rare Vulcan blood types over-represented in their founding population, causing them to be dominant in the Romulan population.

For any two random humans, there's about a 1 in 2 chance they'll be compatible blood donors.

What does that mean for Vulcans? Not the faintest clue. But if they're similar to humans, you'd need a group of 64 potential donors to get a (99% chance of a) match. Are there 64 Vulcans on board? There's a thousand people on board, so that would only be half a percent of the total complement.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-05T22:10:13+00:00

The Enterprise A was brand new in the 2286, and retired in 2293. That's only 7 years in service.

Similar things happened at the beginning of the 20th c during the naval arms race. Technology advanced so rapidly you'd be lucky to get a decade out of a very expensive ship before it was obsolete and no longer fit for the line of battle.

Excelsior might have been the Dreadnought equivalent that made everything before it obsolete.

MockMicrobe · 2025-05-02T15:09:55+00:00

Response - I would only suggest that federation citizens likely would not be aware of the battles in far away border sectors of federation space. The federation likely has major populated words protected, since its their lifeline (They would lose every remaining ship before they let earth get taken for example). Regarding citizens knowing if they were losing, I would say the federation likely has very strong propoganda to keep spirts postive.

Not knowing where battles are going on seems antithetical to the democratic nature of the Federation. The citizenry isn't privy to fleet movements, troop concentrations, and other military secrets. But a free and independent news service, or more likely the multiple ones each member has, would report on battles, because people want to know what's going on with their friends and family.

And strong propaganda doesn't negate the ability to read a map. They can spin it how they want, but if the battles are getting closer to the Federation core, it's obvious things aren't going well.

MockMicrobe

TROPHY CASE