Biology only ensures obedience, and even then it does not ensure that the obedient will be performing to their fullest or be the right ones for the job. This is, incidentally, why the hereditary aristocracy idea falls apart; in a hereditary aristocracy, there always alternative options in the ruling line, other ruling lines, and non-obedience that act to contain incompetence/malfeasance and prevent the total failure of the system.
"There is no backup to this system" is not a reliable guarantee that "this system" will work better than other, similar systems elsewhere. Certainly not
much better.
Furthermore, I don't know where you're getting this "no alternatives" thing from, and honestly I suspect lecturing me on it will be pointless. Since you seem to have written your own mental backstory for Apiata society that is one, kind of disturbing, and two, speculative. I don't think I agree.
The death of a baroness as a result of the wrong end of court politics wouldn't normally result in a purge of everyone in their lands...unless of course that baroness is Apiata in which case it absolutely will. The Apiata system of government creates much more absolutist outcomes in failure than any hereditary aristocracy because its assurances of obedience and loyalty do not allow for less destructive ones. This is why the Apiata would, why they must, invest heavily in preparing queens for all aspects of leadership. The loss of resources and people when a queen fails can be quite extreme.
Um... it now sounds like you're moving on into speculative ideas like "historically if a queen died as a result of Apiata politics, all her drone/worker offspring/relations were killed too." Speculative ideas that are, one, kind of disturbing, and two,
speculative. Since frankly I have enough stressors without worrying about that right now, I'm not going to engage with this.
It's a good thing that I never made that argument then!
The Apiata are, again, motivated by two factors: Queens are leaders. Successful queens are successful leaders.
For a cadet at Starfleet Academy, what is graduating as a leader? Officer-track.
For a cadet at Starfleet Academy, what is the greatest level of success possible? Graduating your specialty as qualified for the Explorer Corps.
And that's why they go Explorer Corps officer-track or wash out trying. That's where the Academy tells them successful leaders go.
All of them. Uniformly and without exception.
Only Apiata queens are showing up at the Academy for officer training, no workers or drones. And they're literally
all such "success at any cost" freaks that they'd rather not have a Starfleet career at all than do anything other than qualify for the Explorer Corps.
I don't buy it.
I think lbmaian's "uh, don't take this too literally, guys" analysis is much more plausible.
I'd caution against reading into the member Starfleet crew incomes too strictly.
They do give indications on how much each member is contributing to Starfleet, but with Academy expansions and tech-related bonuses (such as that EPS safety one that "increases" crew income by preventing deaths), there's plenty of leeway to jigger around each member's exact contributions.
I mean, the Kadeshi are somehow contributing crew while they're hundreds of lightyears away from the nearest Starfleet Academy! (Which is why I'm eager to see what happens if they somehow become a major affiliate.)
Agreed. On some level I think what's going on is that the Kadeshi
talking to us and the reports from
Stargazer are inspiring people to join Starfleet (miss those Stargazer logs. And bonuses. *sniff* )
All we know for sure is that Apiata ozziras aren't considered as officers in the crew O/E/T system (even if they are described in
one update as "non-queen officers"), because their ozzira-commanded Stingers don't have any O cost.
edit: Well it's possible that Stingers do have "officers", but like the Klingon Bird of Prey, is so low in number, that it "rounds" to a 0 in the ship crew O/E/T system. But OTOH, ozziras seem to be as common as "normal" officers, and in a ship as large as a Stinger (nearly 600kt versus Klingon BoP 30kt), that's bound to have enough ozziras to add up to 1 crew cost.
The thing is, it's strongly implied that "officers" includes a lot of jobs that on a modern navy ship would not be 'officer' jobs.In real life, officers almost
always supervise some group of people doing something, and 'normal' officer:enlisted ratios are something like 1:5. That doesn't include the noncommissioned petty officers, but it gives an idea of what's going on.
Starfleet, by contrast is
very officer-heavy. And our 'E' and 'T' personnel graduate from the same academy as our 'O' personnel.
This is why I keep feeling that it's more accurate to talk about O/E as being 'goldshirt/redshirt' than 'officer/enlisted.' That, or Starfleet just having vastly more officers than necessary relative to the enlisted ranks.
But what if, with the Apiata, 'O' personnel really
do refer only to those who are actually in command of significant numbers of people (as in, more than a 2-5 worker detachment)? That, all by itself, would mean that ships with less than about 4-5 units of Enlisted/Tech crew would almost certainly not have a whole unit of 'O' aboard. Even those that do have that many might not, though something built to the same scale as a queenship almost inevitably would.
Actually, the original Intel Brief by Leila has drones as carrying the Apiata young after they're born but before they're fully developed, a la marsupials. Briefvoice takes a different, more sea-horsey tack. I don't know if Oneiros has really explicitly canonized either POV.
Suspect he hasn't. The big catch is that if Leila's picture is closer to the truth, the only thing that can 'replace' the physical presence of a queen in a colony for demographic purposes would be the combination of frozen ova
plus something like an artificial womb...
So I went with Briefvoice's version simply because it's a
precondition for making it even believable in my opinion that you'd have queen seriously considering doing anything other than hang around their colony.
As I've been previously quoted above, I actually suspect our first round of Apiata "Officers" came from the top level of the Apiata "T" and "E" pool of Orizzas and other high ranking workers. As Simon's noted, Queens probably always have a weather look to their hive, and in the early days before membership I doubt they would see much prestige in joining up with Starfleet. Compare with an Orizza, limited to at best a Stinger with the Apiata and instead could be commanding a Constitution, or Constellation, or maybe even one day, an Excelsior. If you're a 'defective' Orizza and can live away from most or all of your family, it'd be worth looking into.
I figure that Ozziras aren't biologically that distinct from other Apiata workers. They're just workers who got promoted to middle management positions.
I would look at the O-E-T as meaning something different to the Apiata and their species-pool not being directly comparable to the Federation pool. If the Federation commissioned a Stinger, I imagine it'd have at least O-1 and probably subtract a T.
Agreed, because everyone in the tactical and navigation pools, or much of them, would be 'O' because 'O' means 'goldshirt,' not 'commissioned officer.' And 'E' means 'redshirt,' not 'enlisted.'
Think about how many of the redshirts we've seen on Star Trek were actually ensigns or lieutenants.
On Queens and Command, I would suspect they do some sort of aptitude testing for Queens and don't automatically shuffle them all off to the navy. There's probably queens that go right into public management, queens that go into diplomacy, queens that run a accounting hive [idk].
Bet on it. Yeah.
That being said, I wonder if the solution isn't that Queens have life-cycle stages? Maybe younger queens aren't ready to reproduce yet and you can toss them on ships to get high-pressure leadership experience and also as a slight Darwinian pressure so only the best Queen-Captains survive
Later, their eggs become ready and they move back to their hives to help run the family and prepare the next generation and keep producing eggs until they die.
Or it could be the other way around, where young Apiata reproduce and take on the Queen role politically, before hitting something like menopause and transferring out to serve out in the navy until death. IIRC older honey bees tend to be the guard bees so that's a nice parallel. This would also kinda fit with Nash's Queen, who acted pretty 'young' tbh.
These are pretty good explanations. Also, if Apiata have something like normal human life expectancies and generation lifetimes, you'd tend to have two, three, or even four generations of adult queens "stacking up" at any one time; things could get pretty complicated in terms of who runs what colonies and in what capacity unless
either there is a recognized "princess" status where the queen isn't ready to run a colony yet,
or there is a recognized "post-menopausal" state in which older queens tend to settle down into advisory or 'take risks in leadership roles for my daughter's colony' mode.
If it's the first case, where the younger queens have a set time in the navy before they'll eventually have to go home, it makes sense for Night's idea they'd basically be EC or bust. Gotta get maximum returns from that Academy investment.
Now see that makes sense!
See I drew a very different connotation when I read that. The men of other species are considered part of another caste called Untgrizzi. It's a mash between their word for drone -- which means it has male connotations because they apply it to other men -- but the different between the Apiata Drone and the Alien Drone is Unt, or utility.
In other words, what I`m getting from that is they consider their drones as lacking practical utility and alien drones are surprisingly capable, not that they consider drones to be female.
Which kind-of makes sense since they'd consider drones to be drones.
The way I figure it, the Apiata themselves probably struggle with this and have trouble mapping other species' gender roles (and for that matter biological sex, not quite the same thing) onto their own. They may not even have a consistent picture of how this mapping should proceed themselves, and us trying to figure out how it 'should' work would border on impossibility.
