Does it? Only thing unaccounted for in their system would be our actions, but those are not hard to predict - if a person runs to us asking for asylum while being pursued by another ship claiming that person is a criminal, Starfleet will try to learn more of the situation, while not being overly paranoid about the person. Just make sure that you herd the right kind of lunatic, and during the wait some incident will happen.
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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pheonix89
Wants to be Seven Of Nine
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That's a very, very big thing to leave unaccounted for.
Edit: It's also not the ONLY thing. Because once the fugitive is in OUR space they can't predict them reliably either, as the fugitive will not be deliberately following the script and there's far too many unknown factors they can't control to model them.
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Yeah, but (the rest of my post). Plus, even they do get them wrong, they don't exactly lose much, and it's more data for their "What would Starfleet do" system.
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This is frankly the best argument against the Harmony of Horizon pulling a stunt like what's being contemplated - they hate it whenever someone goes off-script.
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Yes, but that raises the question "is the Horizon space fleet more like an army, or more like an astronaut corps?" Having danger signs for severe mental health issues might or might not get you put on leave in the former, but it definitely would in the latter.
If they have systems that automate the monitoring of mental health and are mindful of this kind of issue, you'd expect them to be more mindful of it in high stress professions, not less. "This person is in a high stress profession" is not a reason for you to not figure out the warning signs of their impending mental breakdown before it happens, if you're in the business of carefully watching people for signs of breakdown.
Which comes back around to my actual point: it makes little or no sense for the Harmony to have a system that has an effectively-zero failure rate normally, but that suddenly starts failing when dealing with starship captains. Far more likely that their system has a comparable failure rate across the board.
But see, that raises further questions: why are they uniquely worried about their captains going mad? The Klingons have a huge number of small corvette-sized ships, and they don't have troubles like this- or rather, while I'm sure they occasionally have captains do something daft in pursuit of Honorglory, it doesn't seem to be such a problem that they have to seriously worry on a regular basis about rogue captains.
The Cardassians and the Romulans have problems like this maybe, but if so it has more to do with political loyalty, not with their officers going violently insane without warning.
We don't have problems like this, at least not on a regular basis.
But we've got at least two, maybe three, incidents where the Harmony attributed the
What I'm trying to get at is that we should maybe be asking the question:
If we take their core narrative at face value...
What is it about Harmony society, that makes sudden outbreaks of violent mental illness a recurring theme among their senior naval officers? What is it that makes their citizens, or at least their naval personnel, have this easily flipped switch? On one side of the switch they're the same kind of clever, rational, polished people we could easily imagine serving in Starfleet. On the other side, if the Harmony's own descriptions are to be believed, they are capable of piracy or, as we've recently seen, murder, when someone or something presses their buttons. For that matter, remember the time early in our interactions when one of their parasite craft seemed to be fleeing to our lines and broadcasting distress calls, but was reeled back in by the Harmony fleet before our ship responded? That may have been a similar incident.
So again, if we accept the Harmony's own narrative, it seems as though violent 'insanity' is lurking a pretty short distance beneath the surface for them. Why might that be, and what does it say about their society that we see them 'snap' so often?
Alternatively, if we don't accept the Harmony's narrative (the crazy captain committing piracy was actually trying to bully the Tauni into rejoining the Harmony, the crazy captain who just committed murder on one of our ships was actually some kind of weird brainwashed agent, etc.)...
What does it say about the Harmony, that "other people are crazy" or "our people are crazy" or "this person is crazy" is their default go-to explanation for any strange or bad behavior?
...
This is where I come in and start talking about how the Harmony seems, de facto or intentionally, to be set up as the "narcissistic gaslighting space empire."
Are there? Just pursue the fugitive until you get picked up by Starfleet, then they will try to figure situation out, fugitive will be unnerved by wait, will try to do something rash, and you have your incident. And if something goes off track, well, you didn't lose much.
Possible HoH narrative:
The majority of our population are safe and happy. But those people, our happy core, do not make good naval personal. We need citizens who are closer to the edge in order to make a strong navy. But not over the edge - we cull those before they can reach our military.
Sometimes, being closer to the edge, means they can go over it before our crime predictors can spot it. After all, we have to reduce our monitoring on the ships as there is only so much space you can devote to computer processing room and mental health analysts before you start impacting on the duties of the rest of the ship.
The majority of our population are safe and happy. But those people, our happy core, do not make good naval personal. We need citizens who are closer to the edge in order to make a strong navy. But not over the edge - we cull those before they can reach our military.
Sometimes, being closer to the edge, means they can go over it before our crime predictors can spot it. After all, we have to reduce our monitoring on the ships as there is only so much space you can devote to computer processing room and mental health analysts before you start impacting on the duties of the rest of the ship.
pheonix89
Wants to be Seven Of Nine
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So: Just pursue the fugitive hoping he doesn't shake you. Hope Starfleet picks you up. Hope they don't figure the situation too fast. Hope he IS unnerved into doing something rash. Hope they don't stop it.
.... And you didn't GAIN anything either because now Starfleet and the UFP have proof from your mouths of the hidden dystopia.
People keep writing off absolutely huge unknown lynchpins like the behaviour of the crew of an Excelsior-class as minor.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Yes. Starfleet captains have a great deal of individual authority and it is entirely possible they will opt for protective custody of a possible criminal until things are sorted out, which will most likely wreck the plan before it even really begins. That is exactly what I'd expect of most of our Vulcan captains, for example. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Zara would probably have kept such a person in her personal sight at all times chatting their ears off, preventing them from arranging some kind of incident by never having the time alone to build a bomb or acquire a weapon.
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Well, for starters, you've lost a ship captain who presumably knows a lot about Harmony tactics, technology, and culture? It's usually a bad idea to willingly hand someone a defector on the assumption that they'll do something stupid and violent enough to get themselves killed, so that the defector's knowledge can't be used against you.
The "Starfleet tries to figure things out, fugitive unnerved by wait, fugitive does something rash" sequence of events could easily unfold in so many different ways that there's no way to rationally predict what will or will not happen. It could easily have backfired on them. Moreover, there's no obvious benefit to the Harmony in arranging this. So we end up subtly embarrassed. We know what it looks like when the Harmony is trying to subtly embarrass us; that's what they did with the Muuyozoi and tricking us into getting our asses kicked at Live Fire Splatoon or whatever they call that sport.
The Harmony is good at subtly embarrassing us. They don't need to pull risky shit like this, to accomplish that goal.
See, I get that. The point is that for fuck's sake, even we manage to have psychiatrists on our ships and keep a pretty good grip on outright mental illness among our crews, and the Harmony's ships are at least as fighting-palace-ey as ours if not more so. Their little tenders might not have dedicated counselors but those are also the ones associated with giant flying carriers that DO, and that can presumably carry reserve crew to operate any individual corvette if individual members of its crew have to be put on mental health leave.
All in all... I mean, I get that you can construct narratives like this.
My own point is that the narratives only make sense if the Harmony has a serious problem with thinly veiled, poorly suppressed insanity and irrationality and violence lurking under the surface of the bright shiny happy exterior. Which is totally in keeping with everything we've been worrying about from them.
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"Sorek arrested me and then delivered me to a remand facility where over months of hard therapy and drug treatment I learned a modicum of control over these strange urges. 3/5 stars."
"Zara talked at me in the most cheerful upbeat voice for 48 hours straight until my various mental illnesses and personality defects died of starvation. 6/5 stars, would recommend."
Are we sure Zara isn't a pony in disguise?
- Location
- Patriarchova
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- Mid-Atlantic
Hm, while we're at it, we have at least one high-functioning high-stress captain of our own, and while this isn't a plausible scenario it's at least an entertaining role reversal...
"Adele fled to my escape ship, and was picked up by my pursuers. Meanwhile the Federation patiently explained to the Harmony that she was an escaped madwoman. Then she shot the Harmony crew in the confusion. Can you make this rating system give complex numbers of stars? I am so confused right now."
"Adele fled to my escape ship, and was picked up by my pursuers. Meanwhile the Federation patiently explained to the Harmony that she was an escaped madwoman. Then she shot the Harmony crew in the confusion. Can you make this rating system give complex numbers of stars? I am so confused right now."
Night
Widow Null
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She shot the WHOLE DAMN CREW?
Stars irrelevant. Go immediately to pirate queen and/or professional McCree player
Actually, where does it say that fugitive was a warship captain? I reread the log, and didn't find anything. Couldn't it be a civilian ship?
Other than that, I guess I can see the points of failure for such plan, even if I don't think they are quite that unpredictable.
pheonix89
Wants to be Seven Of Nine
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Probably.
Zara would have ALSO had a contingency plan because the naive portion of her persona is very much a front she uses to keep people looking at the "naive harmless goofball" and NOT at what the rest of the crew is up to.
Remember that time she acted like she totally fell for that smuggler's story ... and had a dedicated tail on him the whole time?
This gets back to the potential Psycho-Pass inspiration, actually. Reminds me of a lot of themes from the anime where the people most in danger of becoming latent criminals are the police in charge of tracking down and stopping latent criminals, because they're under pressure that no one else is.
Picture a society where safety and lack of stress is assumed baseline. Where citizens regularly carefully check their own psychological profiles, voluntarily request therapy or help if under any sort of pressure, and take genuine pride in being psychologically healthy as their society teaches them to understand it. And the core of this understanding is to relieve and eliminate sources of stress or discomfort. Anxiety and discomfort are not to be tolerated.
And their society can genuinely deliver that... in a controlled setting. Which is not space. Interstellar service is the one setting where stress and anxiety are guaranteed and where sources of discomfort and pressure can't be avoided. Because these are the people who have to go out and deal with that. So these people, who are taught to monitor their own psychological health, see stress building up. They see themselves being driven ever closer along the line to latent criminal, and they do all the things they're taught to do to relieve stress and pressure and fix themselves. Usually it works. Sometimes, though, they're stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle where their anxiety and fear about their degenerating psychological health causes that health to get worse, and now they have even less leeway to correct and they get more anxious and their psychological health gets worse and the pressure is growing and they need to break the cycle but they're also on a dangerous mission where there's no time for safety or relaxation and-
And one day they realize that the next time they get evaluated, that's going to be it. Then there's a decision to be made. Sometimes a cliff to be fallen off.
That same sapient in the Federation system would never go crazy like that because they wouldn't be so pressured to stay sane.
Well, given the character that is the inspiration for this Adele ... quite plausible.
- Location
- Patriarchova
Point of order: Makpol and Zara both detected the same Ashidi distress signal. Makpol just got a much more garbled version of it due to the gate he was sensing it from being mostly shut.
pheonix89
Wants to be Seven Of Nine
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How are they NOT unpredictable? If nothing else the minute the defector sets foot on UFP ship he's now the only element of the equation Horizon DOES understand sufficiently well to predict.
And even a civilian ship is a WMD. The minute a plan involves deliberately giving a lunatic control of a starship it's fucking terrible!
The other thing I don't get about the insistence that this is a Horizon plot: What did they gain? We lost a captain. THEY lost any chance of playing the "oh starfleet's just paranoid about us" card. Knowledge of the PsychoPass thing they've got going will do terrible things to their diplomatic standings. Especially because it doesn't seem to work all that well. By their own reckoning they have worse lunatic in command of a starship problems than we do.
We haven't had a single case of a captain going nuts like they've had in god knows how long, blatant enemy action excluded. This is what the second one, maybe more, on our border alone since first contact?
Which means they've created a system that's great for stopping smaller scale criminals but creates ELE-capable criminals. Brilliant. Brilliant. /s
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True-ish, although at the same time... "fear of being mad" is a known and well documented form of mental illness. Again, I'm not even denying this characterization, just saying that the Harmony has a distinctly flawed system if they're still susceptible to it.
I mean, Psycho-Pass is a Japanese work for a reason; we know how many issues Japan has with mental illness, refusal to acknowledge it, and so on.
Hah! KNEW there was a reason!
...Well, actually I didn't.
Point of order: Qolp was not captain of a mainline starship. She stole a civilian vessel. Given her skill and knowledge of Trellium-D she was an engineer of some kind.
Listen possible murderers whom I will never meet getting shot on sight before they murder despite the fact they might have been driven insane by the society they are in is a small price to pay to make sure SOMEONE doesn't keep putting thier GARBAGE in my RECYCLING BIN, JERRY
Listen possible murderers whom I will never meet getting shot on sight before they murder despite the fact they might have been driven insane by the society they are in is a small price to pay to make sure SOMEONE doesn't keep putting thier GARBAGE in my RECYCLING BIN, JERRY
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We don't actually know the direction of causation. Rather than their system causing people to become dangerously unstable it could instead be that they need this system because Horizon have an inherent tendency to become dangerously unstable. In some ways that would make a lot more sense.
EDIT: Unless the post just above is supposed to be QM confirmation.
EDIT: Unless the post just above is supposed to be QM confirmation.