ON THE PRIME DIRECTIVE:
For all of that, we've never had a "tempted to violate the Prime Directive" Event come up in this quest. Off the top of my head I can recall one instance where we had a starship nearly get spotted accidentally and another where Yrillians were screwing with a pre-Warp culture and our people had to stop them while preserving the Prime Directive. But never an instance where violating the Prime Directive was tempting in order to protect a culture from something else.
I think that's mainly because Oneiros doesn't have our explorers encountering the pre-warp civilizations the Prime Directive applies to very often.
Whereas in the TV shows, the
Enterprise (and
Voyager) run into a new random planet full of aliens every other week. Possibly literally. So the Prime Directive comes up a lot for them.
The closest we've had to that was this incident in 2309Q2, as logged by Captain Nash:
We are helping out the scientists who are a little reluctant to travel in the contested frontier without support. Earlier scans revealed a pre-industrial age civilisation residing on a Class M world not far rim-ward of Indoria. Our sensor crews have accomplished much of the work, but there are some areas the scientist are very keen to explore that are emitting naturally sensor-resistant waves. When they requested use of a shuttle to access these areas, I decided I could do with a good wilderness stroll myself, and will be joining them.
...
Massive EM storms, the same ones that give our orbit-based investigations so much trouble, have disabled our shuttle on approach. Our pilot brought us in as gracefully as he could, and we are all intact. Unfortunately, we have now been found by the locals.
Initial reactions are mixed. I'm not sure if I'm to be crowned as a goddess or burned as a witch. It may be both.
...
That was a narrow escape. We were to be sacrificed to appease the "gods" who send the Ion Storms. Thankfully, a beautiful priestess helped us escape, giving us the chance to prove that their "gods" were, in fact, renegade Orions!
Which, incidentally, saves me from an awkward Prime Directive talk.
Honestly, the Prime Directive to me seems most absolute when dealing with the politics of foreign entities, and even then they find ways to bend it. SFDebris has covered how it gets pretty ethically sticky when you go to like "oh we can't divert a comet that's going to hit a planet because the civilization there is prewarp, sad!" and just from my limited memory that's usually where they do PD violations.
Honestly, I suspect there's like, two sections to the PD: Prime Directive with peer (ie warp-capable) powers, and Prime Directive with sub-warp powers. I think the former section must be near-absolute; but I suspect the latter has a clause like "Under some cases the Captain's own judgement overrides this directive."
I am about 100% sure this is the case.
Starfleet shouldn't interfere with the politics of foreign warp-capable entities only because that's the business of the Federation as a whole, not because there's any moral principle why we shouldn't interfere with their politics.
And yet, some Starfleet captains seem to think of it as a moral principle.
ON THE KEPLER:
Still, some ship is better than no ship.
If the event is one that chews up weak ships and spit them out, having our weak ships not show up is a
MUCH better "no ship" outcome than having one of our weak ships get chewed up and spat out.
In universe, why would we not want to make ships have a larger fuel/consumable reserve?
Because it costs more? Because higher Defense means more space committed to the warp drive and less to sensors and lab facilities? Not every ship needs to be able to zoom across the quadrant at Warp Factor Eleven.
Tongue in cheek counter to minimum D on Keplar:
Captain's Log, USS Keplar.
It has taken us a full month to crawl to the interesting anomaly the Enterprise found. Our crew are eager to begin pulling it apart, but first of all we have to travel to Starbase 3 to resupply, so they will have to wait another two weeks to do more than initial readings. Once we can put in some full time poking, hopefully they can solve it before we have to pull back to resupply again.
Even our Defense 2
Mirandas seem to be able to cover one map square per week without any particular trouble. And to spend months on station without stopping for resupply. That's good enough. The Defense 1
Oberths are doing fine with survey work and so on. The
T'Mir certainly hasn't had any trouble operating for long periods in deep space without constant resupply.
I'd counter that we quite possibly do want science ships showing up to otherwise non science events. At least alongside our normal garrisson ships.
This is Star Trek, 90% of problems are solved by technobabble. Having our mobile technobabble generstors respond to the same event as an escort might mean the the event can be solved in a way outside of the competance of either ship.
For example a colony calls for distress after one of its supply ships is hijacked by pirates. Sounds like a definite escort job. But maybe if a Kepler turns up too they can figure out the the pirates are using a nearby astrological phenomenon to get the drop on their targets. Whereas on its own the escort might have been ambushed and failed the event, with science support it is aware and ready.
I don't know if Oneiros' event resolution works like that, with mulitple possible paths to success. But it seems to me like a big part of Star Trek is trying to science the shit out of every possible problem.
See, the problem with this approach is that you're visualizing the "good news" scenario. The ship trying to solve a problem shows up, assisted by a helpful free science vessel! It's like a normal event response, only better! There's no downside!
But you're not visualizing
what could go wrong. What if the science vessel shows up first and the pirates decide to crack it open and loot its valuable equipment? What if the emergency is a separatist movement on a planetary surface, or a trade negotiation, and the science officer's captain commits a diplomatic faux pas because he's been doing nothing but study spatiotemporal whozits for the last three years?
So there is very much a downside.
I trust SWB's analysis: generalist escorts are not a good solution to our event response needs, because they try to be cruisers
and fail. Going forward into the era where our cruiser tonnage isn't limited by our 1000kt berths, cruisers are going to be big enough to be generalists; escorts aren't. A successful escort needs to be specialized- specialized in combat, specialized in insta-winning science tasks, OR a hybrid Science/Presence/Defense ship that can respond to ALL peacetime event needs.
