Remove ads

To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

Linked contents
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
Reader mode
Godwinson said:
Early on, it could be that Earth was trying to make up for its perceived youth and inability to act independently of Vulcan. Then it eventually turned into the "we look to better ourselves" post-scarcity thing, and Starfleet is the place to go to improve yourself and make the galaxy a better place. Then, alongside that, I'd always imagined that the other early member worlds of the Federation were much less expansionist and/or less willing to plonk an unsupported colony down on a marginal world during the 22nd and 23rd centuries, so that by the time it gets to the 24th century there are flat out more human colonies in the Federation than there are other member world colonies.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

That kind of raises the opposite question: if humans are (say) half the living beings in the Federation and two thirds of the beings doing the fighting and dying on behalf of the Federation, aren't they badly underrepresented on the council? We could run into something like this, or maybe a more general schism, if we get bogged down in another ugly insurgency with the added bonus of a possible Vulcan dolchstoss narrative.
 
Briefvoice said:
I think he is making a good decision in having characters not make complaints, as opposed to an occasional bit of color from sources not connected to the Federation Council and not within Starfleet itself.

I think the "arbitrary fabricated inner voice' comes from when quest participants assume that this is an actual problem about which something must be done, when the quest itself has never taken the position that this is a problem about which something must be done.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You used pretty much the same argument to disqualify any warning about our logistics network and suggestions to do something about it which I don't think turned out that well. And I think that what we have seen/read so far is enough to suggest that it could become a problem if we do nothing about it (or at the very least strengthened existing problems) and I don't think waiting to see massive Fed Council protests before "fixing" it is a very smart strategy...
 
On the topic of logistics, we should note that only two Starfleet Engineering ships will be unassigned come the next Snakepit. That means we're only going to be able to start two mining colonies, assuming it works the same as last year. On the bright side, we'll have a bit more pp to play with for other tasks.
 
Erandil said:
You used pretty much the same argument to disqualify any warning about our logistics network and suggestions to do something about it which I don't think turned out that well. And I think that what we have seen/read so far is enough to suggest that it could become a problem if we do nothing about it (or at the very least strengthened existing problems) and I don't think waiting to see massive Fed Council protests before "fixing" it is a very smart strategy...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Well in that case, it's a bad decision and the QM should reach down and manipulate the NPCs to make it not an issue. Because I don't want to have species character quotas be a thing.
 
Leila Hann said:
Sure, and explanations like that can go a long way toward humans being massively overrepresented in Starfleet without it raising questions about how egalitarian the Federation actually is. But there's a difference between "massively overrepresented" and "literally 90+ percent of Starfleet." We can and should have more Starfleet alien characters than the shows.

We already do, I think, but were it up to me I'd push it a bit further than we have.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Honestly, I think we're doing a LOT better in some ways and 'as well' in others. Look at the breakdown of people we can reasonably call main cast characters, people who appeared in the bulk of the episodes for the primary series. Series are in chronological order, and characters who can reasonably be considered 'nonhuman' are bolded.

ENT: Archer, Phlox, T'Pol, Reed, Mayweather, Sato, Tucker,
TOS: Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov
TNG: Picard, Riker, Troi, Worf, Data, Dr. Crusher, Geordi
DS9: Sisko, Worf, Dax (multiple iterations), Kira, Odo, Bashir, O'Brien, Quark.
VOY: Janeway, Chakotay, Torres, Tuvok, Paris, The Doctor, Kim, (Seven of Nine + Kes)/2 since those two characters didn't really overlap.

Percentagewise that gives us:
ENT: 28.6%
TOS: 14.3%
TNG: 42.8%
DS9: 62.5% (impressive!)
VOY: 50%

If you look at members of the supporting cast, the percentage of nonhumans craters, simply because it's not worth investing in makeup for a one-shot redshirt. The chief of security may be an alien, but the redshirts are nearly always human.

Now, compare and contrast to the Enterprise-B bridge team during the first five-year mission:

Nash, Ajam, Samhaya, Stol, Zaardmani, Dr. Asurva, Bazeck, Leaniss- I may be forgetting someone but that's a core cast corresponding to the 'big name' characters of TOS, TNG, or Voyager; if we made To Boldly Go into an Enterprise-B-centered TV series, they'd be the main cast for the first few seasons. In Nash's second five-year mission, the personnel get shuffled around a bit- but one human is bumped OFF the bridge, and one human is bumped ON in a position of lesser authority.

And behold, 75% nonhumans, so on diversity metrics @AKuz gets props for doing better than Deep Space Nine, a series which explicitly had Starfleet co-operating on a space station that had a preexisting alien population to justify bringing in more aliens to the main cast!

Furthermore, the supporting cast are far more likely to be nonhuman, for the good and simple reason that all I have to do in order to write one of my redshirts (I think she might technically be a goldshirt) as an Amarki is to think up a lyrical name ending in 'ss' and remember things like 'Amarki carry swords on their persons at nearly all times.' When I needed to make up four junior officers quickly for an omake, well... I have an Earthling, a Tellarite, a Vulcan, and an Amarki. When- was it Oneiros? Briefvoice? conjured up another tranche of junior officers to send to the Enterprise-B, the breakdown was similar.


And you might reply "Well, that's AKuz, who's got all this cool outre stuff going. What about more boring, pedantic, unimaginative omake writers, like Simon_Jester?" ;)

Eyeballing the characters from Devas and Asuras, counting only those from the Endurance crew, including those who have not yet appeared but whose dialogue or roles are at least partly written... Of 'main cast' characters I have two Vulcans, an Andorian, a Tellarite, a Betazoid, and two humans. Of the 'redshirts' I have an Amarki, three humans, an Andorian, and a Vulcan. There's two or three more of indeterminate species because their scene isn't really written... but you can bet that no more than one of them will be human.

And I didn't make any special effort to diversify my cast. The characters' species is only actually a plot point in, hm... arguably as many as four out of fourteen cases, maybe stretching to five if you think there's something characteristically human about how Chekov handles the challenges of [tum te tum te tum].

Humans are strongly represented, but they're not in any meaningful sense 'dominant,' and my 'diversification' level is around 64%, roughly on par with Deep Space Nine. I suspect it'd be better higher if it weren't for the fact that I've got two canon human characters aboard the ship and that it's slightly easier for me to think up disposable redshirt names for humans than for aliens.

And again, if there is ANY Star Trek series that might overrepresent nonhumans in the main cast, it would be Deep Space Nine, simply because of how many non-Starfleet or semi-Starfleet characters it brings in as recurring characters.
 
Last edited:
It's pretty funny Enterprise manages to have a larger proportion of aliens in the main cast than TOS while being set on an explicitly Earth starship, but I think that just speaks to how much budget is a factor.
 
To be fair, that's basically just "replace McCoy with an alien." Phlox and T'Pol are, like, the only aliens on the ship as far as I can remember. It's one change, although I'm quite sure Roddenberry would have done at least a few more aliens if he'd had the budget.
 
...Wow. That scene came together really fast. Thanks, @Leila Hann, you must have shook something loose, because like a thousand words just poured out of my head describing a scene aboard Endurance and the last moments of the poor, abused vessel known to posterity only as Hasque(3).
 
Simon_Jester said:
abused vessel known to posterity only as Hasque(3).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That makes me think it'd be interesting if there was a species that numbered its ships like the Idirans from The Culture, who had ships like Light of God-134. This is a little conceptually different from the Rigellian cutters that just use a class name + number, instead being more like if we had a Constitution B named Enterprise-5.

I don't think it'd work conceptually for the Sydraxians though as they'd want individual ship names to attach individual glories to and there's no fucking way they'd want to sing songs about ships with names like Zealot-552.
 
Briefvoice said:
Well in that case, it's a bad decision and the QM should reach down and manipulate the NPCs to make it not an issue. Because I don't want to have species character quotas be a thing.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Member states caring about "adequate" representation in an organisation that is meant to represent them all doesn't exactly scream unrealistic or unbelievable to me. Indeed it is one of the main characteristics of pretty much every single multinational organization I know of with.
 
We do mostly only see the mission and patrol ships of Starfleet and their crew.

I would not be surprised to see more Vulcans in science/research and medical, or Tellerites in logistics when compared to their numbers on Starships.
 
Governments worrying about their representation in an intergovernmental body is realistic in the abstract general case.

In the case of the Starfleet we've consistently been depicting, it is bluntly not realistic.

We've been portraying crews that are highly diverse, majority or supermajority-nonhuman, on a regular basis. The proportion of nonhumans among our omakes is as high or higher than the proportion of "random generated" officers Oneiros gives us (that is, the ones we never heard of until it was time to vote on a promotion).

Insofar as the playerbase has any control, the rank and file of Starfleet is extremely diverse. Nonhuman species are heavily represented.

The playerbase's control over high-ranking slots is modulated by the concern of what kind of senior officers Oneiros provides to be voted on; we have no agency independent of the candidate lists Oneiros offers. And yet nonhuman species are still heavily represented, with Earthlings being at most a plurality and sometimes not even that.

It would be grossly unfair to start slapping the playerbase with consequences for "not enough nonhumans in Starfleet" when the playerbase has done just about everything to amplify nonhuman numbers in Starfleet, short of blindly voting to promote nonhumans at random without even bothering to consider their merits. That would be random punishment of the players for a reasonable gameplay decision made for reasons entirely separate from any prejudice on the players' part.

Oneiros has not been unfair to us. He has not imposed any penalties on us for "too many humans." So far, every negative consequence we've gotten from having "too many humans..." even though we have as many or more nonhumans on the whole as Deep Space Nine... it's all been coming from the self-flagellation of various members of the playerbase.


And I honestly wish it would just stop, so that we can vote for the candidates we approve of and think would be suitable for various positions, without people among the playerbase calling us a pack of anti-Andorian racists or whatever for appointing a pair of humans out of a candidate pool that contained six humans and four nonhumans, most of whom were significantly less experienced than the humans.

If candidates were chosen completely at random there would be higher than a 1/3 chance of that happening by chance. Furthermore, the Explorer Corps candidate pool has been significantly depleted of nonhumans recently, precisely because we appointed two nonhumans to Explorer Corps commands, and two more to commodore task force commands in the Licori Border Zone, under T'Lorel, a nonhuman whose career has been a phasing booming success from the very moment we started the game.

It's just... grossly unfair to the voterbase to bring this up at a time like this and treat it like it's a major issue we've somehow failed to address.
 
Last edited:
Simon_Jester said:
Governments worrying about their representation in an intergovernmental body is realistic in the abstract general case.

In the case of the Starfleet we've consistently been depicting, it is bluntly not realistic.

We've been portraying crews that are highly diverse, majority or supermajority-nonhuman, on a regular basis. The proportion of nonhumans among our omakes is as high or higher than the proportion of "random generated" officers Oneiros gives us (that is, the ones we never heard of until it was time to vote on a promotion).

Insofar as the playerbase has any control, the rank and file of Starfleet is extremely diverse. Nonhuman species are heavily represented.

The playerbase's control over high-ranking slots is modulated by the concern of what kind of senior officers Oneiros provides to be voted on; we have no agency independent of the candidate lists Oneiros offers. And yet nonhuman species are still heavily represented, with Earthlings being at most a plurality and sometimes not even that.

It would be grossly unfair to start slapping the playerbase with consequences for "not enough nonhumans in Starfleet" when the playerbase has done just about everything to amplify nonhuman numbers in Starfleet, short of blindly voting to promote nonhumans at random without even bothering to consider their merits. That would be random punishment of the players for a reasonable gameplay decision made for reasons entirely separate from any prejudice on the players' part.

Oneiros has not been unfair to us. He has not imposed any penalties on us for "too many humans." So far, every negative consequence we've gotten from having "too many humans..." even though we have as many or more nonhumans on the whole as Deep Space Nine... it's all been coming from the self-flagellation of various members of the playerbase.


And I honestly wish it would just stop, so that we can vote for the candidates we approve of and think would be suitable for various positions, without people among the playerbase calling us a pack of anti-Andorian racists or whatever for appointing a pair of humans out of a candidate pool that contained six humans and four nonhumans, most of whom were significantly less experienced than the humans.

If candidates were chosen completely at random there would be higher than a 1/3 chance of that happening by chance. Furthermore, the Explorer Corps candidate pool has been significantly depleted of nonhumans recently, precisely because we appointed two nonhumans to Explorer Corps commands, and two more to commodore task force commands in the Licori Border Zone, under T'Lorel, a nonhuman whose career has been a phasing booming success from the very moment we started the game.

It's just... grossly unfair to the voterbase to bring this up at a time like this and treat it like it's a major issue we've somehow failed to address.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You're dramatically overstating both how onerous being conscious of representation is and how much it effects our decision making process. A lot of us simply find the idea of a Federation where we have a diverse and varied cast of characters fun, and like to encourage that where possible. I honestly don't understand objecting to that.
 
Put this way.

I'm quite comfortable with us saying "let's play up the nonhumans and support them as candidates."

I'm uncomfortable with people saying "we don't have enough nonhumans, our version of Starfleet is in danger of being criticized for being a human-dominated organization, because we just picked two humans out of this pool that was generated for us with six humans out of ten candidates, after appointing like four of the nonhumans who might have been in this pool to other positions."

There's a difference of tone and attitude between those two stances, and I feel that it's very important. "Hey, let's do this!" is cool. But "we're bad because we're not doing that, and even when we try to do that pretty hard it's not good enough," when we are in fact doing 'that' rather well...? That's just us beating ourselves up for no reason.
 
Last edited:
I think it's quite reasonable to raise the possibility we'll receive some sort of criticism in-universe for appointing three humans to various positions since that's literally a critique that came up last time. Not necessarily fairly, but that happens.

Also I don't think anyone is actually accusing anyone else of speciesism, @Simon_Jester :p

I just think you gotta walk the walk is all. Saying we shouldn't be concerned with diversity, even if hypothetically we found ourselves in a scenario where literally all of our EC captains are humans (as @Briefvoice seems to be suggesting) seems kinda silly to me.
 
I view the press statements of 'too many humans' as one of the political factions making waves to try to push their own agenda further forward.

Quite frankly, I am dismissing any such statements until we start hearing it directly from the Council. The Federation has a free press, so the reporters can speculate on any damn thing they please.
 
Honestly there is probably a contingent of the press that have been salty about all the Humans in Starfleet since Earth built all those Connies in the last century and take every opportunity to bring up that issue over and over again even though it's as relevant to modern Starfleet as the Red Scare is to the War on Terror.
 
I see no speciesism issue. As long as people are willing, and able, to do their roles well in Starfleet, there is no problem.
 
Well after a shitty day of travel, thousands of words of pontification on Starfleet species diversity and voting ... nope, not touching ><

(Although, I'd hardly be surprised if Oneiros used "lack of diversity" or similar complaints in the narrative of some events or crisis, ala the Caldonian pseudo-science guys.)

Nervos Belli said:
On the topic of logistics, we should note that only two Starfleet Engineering ships will be unassigned come the next Snakepit. That means we're only going to be able to start two mining colonies, assuming it works the same as last year. On the bright side, we'll have a bit more pp to play with for other tasks.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

All colonies, whether mining and/or research, require colony ships rather than engineering ships. Engineering ships are basically used for construction and repair of stand-alone space structures like starbases, plus ship repair (light repairs, towing to starbases/berths).

We currently have 4 colony ships free for work, with the other 2 assigned to the GBZ. Which is why in the last snakepit, we were limited to 4 colony requests, and should still be limited to 4 this year.
 
lbmaian said:
Well after a shitty day of travel, thousands of words of pontification on Starfleet species diversity and voting ... nope, not touching ><

(Although, I'd hardly be surprised if Oneiros used "lack of diversity" or similar complaints in the narrative of some events or crisis, ala the Caldonian pseudo-science guys.)



All colonies, whether mining and/or research, require colony ships rather than engineering ships. Engineering ships are basically used for construction and repair of stand-alone space structures like starbases, plus ship repair (light repairs, towing to starbases/berths).

We currently have 4 colony ships free for work, with the other 2 assigned to the GBZ. Which is why in the last snakepit, we were limited to 4 colony requests, and should still be limited to 4 this year.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Ah, I remembered that wrong.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top