To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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- Sci-Fi
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- star trek exploration fully automated luxury gay space communism top level canon (canon) #hashtagcontent all-encompassing space amoeba cardassian boy bands cardassian magical girls darkest bureaucracy debate makes the qm cackle like palpatine hoh is an empire quest it has to be foreign infiltrators more ships ship happens singers delenda est starfleet this is not an empire quest ur waifu is collective?
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Slang for Lieutenant.
You know, the one that messed up their landing site by falling?
- Location
- alphen aan den rijn
question: how long you think it will take for specialist teams or hazard teams to be in the r&d pipe line?
for me it more about story then the finer details of the gameplay
for me it more about story then the finer details of the gameplay
Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
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- He/Him
Well, one of our Personal Tech teams should be finished with their project in 2 turns, the other in 4-5. Unless there's a benefit to jumping up the tree in some way (and I don't see one that doesn't have pre-reqs) I expect one or the other to get assigned to Specialized Teams. So... Either 2 years or 4-5. Specialized Teams has a pretty good chance of completing in 2 years, though.
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- Location
- alphen aan den rijn
so give or take 4 too 5 years for specialized teams to finish?
i can live with that
i`m asking because we seem to be doing a fair bit of away missions of late (rescue, intel, raids and other things) i thought it might be relevant
i can live with that
i`m asking because we seem to be doing a fair bit of away missions of late (rescue, intel, raids and other things) i thought it might be relevant
- Location
- Tulsa Oklahoma
You know, I've been thinking about how to punish those who breach the prime directive and figured out this result "any individual found to have knowingly and willingly breached the prime directive is to be returned to their home world and be banned from ever leaving the planet, using interstellar communications or holding public office for the rest of the lifetime of said individual. Any vessel found to have committed the same will be considered in mutiny and be considered a pirate vessel and treated as such."
- Location
- Australia
Well, it's that or five days with no Second Desert allowed.
PRIME DIRECTIVE: HYPER IMPORTANT POLICY THAT MUST BE OBEYED! WITHOUT!! EXCEPTION!!!
PUNISHMENTS ON-SCREEN FOR VIOLATING IT: like borderline nil, especially if you're a main character
DEAR DOCTOR: EXISTS
PUNISHMENTS ON-SCREEN FOR VIOLATING IT: like borderline nil, especially if you're a main character
DEAR DOCTOR: EXISTS
"Personal Log, Captain Jean-Luc Picard. After saving the planet of Data's 'pen pal,' Starfleet Command has seen fit to punish me by only allowing bread and gruel to be replicated for the next five days. In addition, whenever I ask for Earl Grey, Hot, it now serves Blackberry Currant, cold. This has been one of the most difficult weeks of my life, and I eagerly await a warm cup of earl grey when my punishment expires in 12 hours."
That seems pretty pointless. People violate the prime directive because they think they're doing the right thing. If you want to stop PD violations you need to make them see it's not the right thing, not threaten them with awful punishments.
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
Well yeah but it's Thoughtmaster. Pointless brutality is kind of his thing.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
To engage with this in more detail because to me this looks like non-trolling...
Furthermore, as a practical matter, it would require summary judgment of what does and does not constitute a Prime Directive violation, which is completely impossible. You can't really determine whether a crew or ship has collectively violated the Prime Directive until they've docked, had the crew interviewed and the ship's records examined. And probably had a team of xenosociologists go back to the affected planet and carefully vet the situation to see if there was any significant lasting effect.
By which point saying "the USS Poor Bastard is to be regarded as a pirate ship and its crew as mutineers" doesn't make any sense; the ship is already safely in your custody as are any responsible members of its crew.
...
Plus, this kind of punishment always gives rise to the same kind of situation that ultimately brought down the super-harsh-Legalist Qin Dynasty in China.
It all started with the Dazexiang Rebellion. And that rebellion started with a couple of captains leading their army companies out to do border patrol missions. During their march, they were delayed by heavy rainstorms. Severely delayed. Very much so. Now, the Qin had super-harsh penalties for everything, so the conversation went like this:
Captain One: "So hey, Captain Two, what's the penalty for rebelling against the emperor?"
Captain Two: "Certain death!"
Captain One: "And what's the penalty for showing up late to your duties?"
Captain Two: "Uh... certain death?"
Captain One: "Well, guess what? We're going to be late!"
Their totally predictable rebellion failed, but it set in motion a series of events and unrest that eventually brought down the dynasty within, oh, a decade or so.
When all sorts of offenses, including those a good person can commit while trying to be a good person, are punished super-harshly, things get messy. Good people who get caught in the gears of the system start making decisions that hurt the system. Badly. Because if you're going to destroy their lives for actions that were well-meant or unavoidable, they might as well try to take you down with them.
See, this actually works in the case of willful and deliberate breaches (e.g. that crazy historian who created the Nazi Planet in Patterns of Force, except that he died before the end of the episode). But then...
Since the entire point of the chain of command is that the captain is the one who personally makes and is responsible for these decisions, I'm not sure I even understand what this is even supposed to mean.
Furthermore, as a practical matter, it would require summary judgment of what does and does not constitute a Prime Directive violation, which is completely impossible. You can't really determine whether a crew or ship has collectively violated the Prime Directive until they've docked, had the crew interviewed and the ship's records examined. And probably had a team of xenosociologists go back to the affected planet and carefully vet the situation to see if there was any significant lasting effect.
By which point saying "the USS Poor Bastard is to be regarded as a pirate ship and its crew as mutineers" doesn't make any sense; the ship is already safely in your custody as are any responsible members of its crew.
...
Plus, this kind of punishment always gives rise to the same kind of situation that ultimately brought down the super-harsh-Legalist Qin Dynasty in China.
It all started with the Dazexiang Rebellion. And that rebellion started with a couple of captains leading their army companies out to do border patrol missions. During their march, they were delayed by heavy rainstorms. Severely delayed. Very much so. Now, the Qin had super-harsh penalties for everything, so the conversation went like this:
Captain One: "So hey, Captain Two, what's the penalty for rebelling against the emperor?"
Captain Two: "Certain death!"
Captain One: "And what's the penalty for showing up late to your duties?"
Captain Two: "Uh... certain death?"
Captain One: "Well, guess what? We're going to be late!"
Their totally predictable rebellion failed, but it set in motion a series of events and unrest that eventually brought down the dynasty within, oh, a decade or so.
When all sorts of offenses, including those a good person can commit while trying to be a good person, are punished super-harshly, things get messy. Good people who get caught in the gears of the system start making decisions that hurt the system. Badly. Because if you're going to destroy their lives for actions that were well-meant or unavoidable, they might as well try to take you down with them.
The sensible response to a breach of the Prime Directive by Federation forces and citizens and/or within Federation territory is basically as it already happens; the responsible parties get dragged before a Starfleet court of law and told to explain themselves. At which point it's determined if and to what extent damage was done if there should be a punishment for the breach.
There is a difference between cultures dying out and cultures evolving into something so new and different that it bears no resemblance to what it was before.
If you look at real humans who belong to real dying cultures or whose ancestors' cultures really died, it's not a pretty picture. Life is shorter and sicker, interpersonal relations less healthy, unhealthy means of escapism such as alcohol and drug abuse is rife, performance in school is worse, measures of cognitive ability lower, fertility is lower.
The evidence is, kill a culture, doom its people to around 300 years or so of misery. Possibly longer. Beyond 300 years, we're moving beyond the realm of records of sufficient accuracy to draw firm conclusions from.
My point here is that even if they were geniuses of such stature that a complete failure of so many key city systems didn't kill anyone, this was a really, really big crisis and their emergency services would be going flat-out (heck, I imagine help from other parts of Vulcan had to be called in).
My point is that an alien seeing people over their Dunbar's Number differently and having a much higher Dunbar's Number still has a Dunbar's Number.
You're missing my point again.
My point is that herbivores all eat some meat, so it is very, very easy for herbivores to evolve into carnivores. And since nature abhors a vacuum, the empty predatory niches would be quickly filled in a situation where they'd be artificially emptied.
Hence why the most likely explanation for the ecology of the Shanpurr homeworld is that there must have been large-scale artificial intervention only a few tens of thousands of years ago.
There are plenty of reasons why the Shanpurr themselves may be an unaggressive species (such as, they were the most dangerous thing in their local ecology), the idea that most species on their homeworld are unaggressive is harder to justify since again, nature abhors a vacuum. If there were no aggressive species in an ecosystem then one would expect that aggressive strategies would quickly evolve to take advantage of the neglected strategy.
This is an excellent argument for why to intervene.
While I agree with you, it's worth remembering that even "leaving them alone" is hard also. Isaac Arthur has a good video on this topic.
We could also send anthropologists to all the Shanpurr worlds to research all the native cultures.
It would mean something would be there for the Shanpurr and their clients to work on once they get interested in cultural diversity.
It won't fix the problem, but it would help.
Either way, the horse has already bolted, so Prime Directive doesn't apply and we won't help anyone by treating the Shanpurr and their clients like they are inferior. The Shanpurr might actually appreciate the Federation treating them like a nosey granny giving them help for their own good however... We'll have to learn more about them before we'd know, of course.
fasquardon
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yes, and as I said, I get your point about the point of militarization.
Yes, but as I thought was an obvious implication, if Dunbar's Number is high enough, the distinction between "has a super-high Dunbar's Number" and "has no upper limit on the number of people they can treat as distinct individuals upon interacting with them" becomes kind of academic. Thinking about the number of people you can plausibly expect to meet in a given period of your life... I'd say that if Dunbar's Number were an order of magnitude or so higher, it would be difficult to tell that the number even existed at all.
At some point "BUT THEY STILL HAVE A DUNBAR'S NUMBER" becomes such a nitpick that it only matters to the xenobiologists, and the question "wait, do they just not have a Dunbar's Number?" becomes a valid question that the xenosociologists may have to ask themselves even if the answer is "yes, they do, which is good because otherwise it would disastrously upset all our models of neural structure."
Okay, to be fair, I missed the step in your inferential chain about "therefore, apex predators evolve rapidly in an environment that lacks them." The good news is, I didn't actually intend to dispute that conclusion.
Can we speculate about biological phenomena that might explain a persistent lack of aggressive, predatory species?
The first thing that pops into my head is an ecosystem where most higher forms of life have flesh/blood/etc. that is strongly toxic to other species, possibly as a defense against parasites or mosquito-like insects. So microbes may evolve that are capable of breaking down the dead bodies of such a species (just as venomous frogs and so on still decay)... But apex predators tend not to emerge in such an ecosystem, because to flourish they would have to adapt to be able to survive the antiparasite/anti-vermin toxins of many large animals, not just a few.
Plausible?
To be fair, it's simple, it's just ethically problematic.
The alternative of poking around trying to uplift alien cultures is both ethically problematic (less so if done well, as much or more so if done poorly) and hard to do (especially if you're trying to do it well).
This is not a knock-down argument for nonintervention or intervention. The point is that nonintervention is in many ways the simpler strategy to execute, whereas "enlightened uplift that doesn't hurt anyone" is in many ways a much harder strategy to execute. Which is exactly the price you pay for the fact that on average, GOOD uplifts will lead to utilitarian positive outcomes.
Sort of.
You'd see a predator/prey paired relationship lock in such a case. Promptly followed by the predator going extinct because either the species ate all of the prey species or because the prey species successfully outlasted the predator. Promptly followed by the prey species becoming a persistent pest until either the local ecology adapts or is stripped and dies as the former prey species breeds without constraint except food.
Well, they almost punished Kirk for it in the Kelvinverse. But then the Admiral Marcus scandal happened and I guess they 'forgot' about the punishment afterwards.
No. If the prey can handle their own toxins without dying, something else can deal with their toxins while eating them.
However, almost certainly, you'd see predators becoming specialized to a very specific range of prey in such a situation.
Or predators would form symbiotic relationships with the microbes that can break down the prey's toxins and predators in different regions would have different microorganisms living in them to deal with the mix of prey in a specific area.
I'm sure there are more possible solutions. Biology gets inventive sometimes.
fasquardon
- Location
- madison
I actually have a theory about that. You know how in quest star trek the original generation is a mix of exaggerations, and excessive visual shorthand? well enterprise was an inquest docudrama production, and dear doctor got them sued by the estate of just about everyone involved who had one. The actual situation on the ground was likely greatly oversimplified, with lots of important facts left out.
The real archer was far from perfect and fucked up a fair bit but in the sense of failing his intended course of action rather than making weird decisions. for example exposing a Vulcan listening post by mistake. The show decided to interpret the historical records of a well-meaning but inexperienced and mildly failure prone captain as someone who had almost always done exactly what he was trying to do.
This matches my theory that Voyager is all a holo-memoir by Harry Kim, where he erases all the shitty things he did that made him an eternal ensign and made Janeway look cruel and capricious. Except he's a lazy asshat, so sometimes he gets Tom and the Doctor etc to write sections for him.
So-so. In principle it could work, but that kind of biochemical defense is fairly easy to circumvent, evolutionarily speaking; Compare antibiotics, and how the more you use them, the more you get pathogens that have developed immunity to them. On the scale you're talking about, predators would adapt pretty damn fast, and the poison would almost have to have developed before complex animals did in order to be spread across all animals. Barring targeted outside intervention, of course.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
I doubt it, unless he's big into being humiliated.