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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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There is a certain irony in having Nash, never the most by the book person, now being the one responsible for ensuring other captains don't copy her shenanigans.
 
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Actually it makes a lot of sense. Who else would understand exactly which rules to break and when to do it better then Nash does?
 
lbmaian said:
Love it. Also that you're ignoring the existence of the Enterprise series :p
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Well, not ignoring, but this is an alternate timeline where the creative team behind Enterprise never really got to touch this show. There may well be a few elements that come through; I have one in particular in mind. There may have been a canonical Captain Archer of the Earth ship NX-01 Enterprise. But the show was never made in this timeline.

lbmaian said:
Hmm, well I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's not exactly the promotions that I'm having a beef with, but the fact that you can't necessarily continue on in your specialization, regardless of your rank.

There seems to be an awful lot of talented people in Starfleet, and there are drastically diminishing amount of billets per increasing rank, so from my naive eyes, I'd think that Starfleet could afford to let personnel, even command personnel, to specialize.
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They do, BUT there are catches.
1) The constant stream of highly talented and motivated and young individuals coming in from below means that it is very hard to justify staking out any single position forever. Because you have to be more capable than every new young hotshot who shows up, AND not so capable that your talents are obviously, urgently needed elsewhere.

2) Starfleet officers (and military officers in general) do receive generalist training. There are officers who specialize, it's very clear that there are, but at the top ranks there aren't very many openings for them. If we look at Starfleet's organization chart according to Oneiros in particular, we see that there are actually quite a few commodore slots, many of them specialized... but a much more moderate number of rear admiral slots, nearly all of which are generalist or at least require the admirals in question to know which end of a starship points up

To give a (possibly bad) example, right now the US military has multiple branches, and all branches have the enlisted and commissioned split AFAIK. Advancing in, say, the Navy, does not advance you in the Army. If you're a naval officer on the command track, you're specializing in commanding naval vessels, not commanding ground armies, and perhaps not even naval intelligence. But it looks like in Starfleet, if you're on the command track, you're expected to develop expertise in all forms of command?
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Starfleet doesn't seem to acknowledge that it needs large ground armies, or that those armies would need separate commanders. There are separate tracks for intelligence, medical, to some extent engineering (in that you can probably get promoted straight from being a ship's engineering officer to a shipyard command, and from there up to flag rank for shipyard operations). There'd be more separation for science except that all Starfleet officers are expected to be good at it.

But the largest single specialization track is the one that begins with tactical/security/operations, runs up through the very important roles of ship command and executive officers, and then leads up to the ranks of the 'generalist' flag officers who command sector fleets, starbases, and most of the "tracked" flag officer positions we use.

Regarding officers effectively being managerial positions: from my experience, there are still significant differences between managers with different backgrounds, even to the point where the managerial "promotion" system gets awkward, where some managers that are incredibly good at senior positions are mediocre at "closer-to-ground" positions, and vice versa. In more senior positions, general leadership matters the most, while in lower positions, it's technical skill that matters more. In my experience, it's not just a "how much responsibility can you handle" issue, it's also a "what level of managerial abstraction are you best at" and "what type of team you're managing" issue. (For ex, at the company I work for, I know of a senior manager that decided to "drop down" to a managerial position only two steps removed from developers for a more hands-on approach in an increasingly critical org.)
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This is all true- what I'm trying to get at is that there are very strong pressures pointing the other way, and very good reasons why the military does sometimes promote people out of a job they like.

I'm also kinda unclear on how captaincy (or rather CO) and rank are related in Starfleet. From what I can tell, commander-rank positions can captain ships, but commodores and admirals can't? Commodores can command fleets, but admirals have to fly desks? Or that captain-rank command officers generally have to be either captaining a ship or on a shore assignment, instead of being any other possible position on a ship? I do know that there are different divisions within Starfleet, namely the command vs operations/engineering vs science split. Montgomery Scott made captain rank in the engineering division, but I don't recall him ever captaining a ship (unless there's some temporary circumstance that I can't recall).
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Rank structure in the movies and TV show could get screwy, especially in the Star Trek movies where they had to keep promoting the characters (who were obviously 20-30 years older than they had been in TOS), but then needed to come up with an excuse for why everyone was aboard the Enterprise and taking Kirk's orders. Because unlike the hypothetical To Boldly Go writers, they couldn't depart from the formula of "same person is always the captain, with the same collection of officers who obey them."

Also, Scotty temporarily commanded the Enterprise several times when Kirk and Spock were away, and generally did really great at it. Although if the Federation used the same precedence chart it would be Uhura running the ship when Kirk and Spock were away, pity we didn't see that. :(

More generally- in reality, the ranks of 'commander' and 'captain' generally exist for people in charge of vessels. You need ranks that are medium: high enough that there are two, three, or four categories of officers that take orders from them, but not so high that you'd have six or seven separate ranks aboard the ship (which is too many given the actual size of the ship's crew)

Higher ranks exist for the purpose of coordinating groups of ships, which is a different job than commanding a single ship, and generally it isn't a good idea to try to do both at once. They also coordinate large groups of people working groundside (in a navy, this generally means a base or other facility), who are so numerous that you need a higher-ranking senior executive just to keep track of them all. Captains normally command no more than several hundred people, so a base with five thousand staff would probably require an admiral.

Incidentally this is one of the reasons why you really, really want to pull the best people of captain's rank all over Starfleet for your admirals. They're the ones with really serious responsibilities for management. Not a lot of people have the job, but you want the best ones you can get.

Wouldn't an obvious solution to this be simply shifting commands of officers that still want to stay in their current roles, not necessarily moving that officer up? More ambitious officers don't have to be "blocked" by such officers, because I imagine Starfleet and Federation culture, even in the absence of monetary incentives, generally encourages personnel to move up rather than sideways. The system as it stands just seems inflexible.
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Moving people sideways doesn't solve the problem, becauseyou're still filling up the top ranks with people who aren't interested in moving and will be occupying those jobs for the rest of their careers. If all your starships are run by fiftysomething people who are determined to live out their glory days as captains for the rest of their lives, how does the next Nash (or, thinking forward, the next Garrett or Picard) get to shine?

Couldn't you just be demoted or transferred to another position? Failing that, getting fired is very reasonable.
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Experience shows that MOST real people generally accept promotion. It's a mark of distinction and respect to be offered. Starfleet is already unusual for the degree that it does otherwise.
 
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You know, in the churn of stars and supporting cast that TBG has in the 'meta', it's kind of analogous to Doctor Who, innit? Interesting to think about, especially since Boldly Go is airing at the tail end of Who's hiatus period, and when the show came back, well...
http://www.team-tennant.com/interview/id4.html said:
Russell T. Davies: I would have loved to have done a Star Trek crossover. The very first year, we talked about it. Then Star Trek finally went off air. Landing the Tardis on board the Enterprise would have been magnificent. Can you imagine what their script department would have wanted, and what I would have wanted? It would have been the biggest battle.
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aeqnai said:
You know, in the churn of stars and supporting cast that TBG has in the 'meta', it's kind of analogous to Doctor Who, innit? Interesting to think about, especially since Boldly Go is airing at the tail end of Who's hiatus period, and when the show came back, well...
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So we should be expecting one of our Expolorers to come across a blue police call box floating in space, in the near future?
 
The analogy has occurred to me, yes. The rotating cast makes it more possible to keep a show going for a long time, too, which may factor in alt!UPN's decision. They may be banking on turning the Star Trek IP into the American equivalent of Doctor Who; I haven't really thought that one through.
 
Hm.

Casting for T'Lorel.

My brain keeps circling back to the question of what Jolene Blalock would do with a Vulcan woman who wasn't constantly getting hijacked as a fanservice character and a "haha, Vulcans aren't so tough now are they" plots about addiction to this or psychic disease that. This may be a sign of mental defects on my part. What do people think?
 
As a side note about the highly generalist way that Starfleet approaches the abilities of senior command slots.
That is probably a large reason for the preference given to Explorer Corps commanders to be promoted into those ranks and positions.
EC crews and captains are, more or less by definition, the best generalists that Starfleet has on tap.
That's a rich seam of talent to main from, no matter your problem.
 
Simon_Jester said:
They do, BUT there are catches.
1) The constant stream of highly talented and motivated and young individuals coming in from below means that it is very hard to justify staking out any single position forever. Because you have to be more capable than every new young hotshot who shows up, AND not so capable that your talents are obviously, urgently needed elsewhere.
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I think the commercial business and military bureaucracy are just intrinsically different, at least for vibrant industries. In the commercial sector, there is a LOT of career movement that's not simply going up. Businesses are starting up and failing all the time, people are often expected to change companies at least once in their lives, job changes between managerial and non-managerial positions are common, etc. This evidently is not the case in the military, and to a certain extent, Starfleet. That's probably where a lot of my confusion comes from.

Simon_Jester said:
But the largest single specialization track is the one that begins with tactical/security/operations, runs up through the very important roles of ship command and executive officers, and then leads up to the ranks of the 'generalist' flag officers who command sector fleets, starbases, and most of the "tracked" flag officer positions we use.
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Many of those positions require different skill sets though, besides simply management. In particular, ship captain, fleet commodore, and starbase admiral all look pretty different in my eyes from a skill aptitude standpoint.

While surely many people will have the skills to do well in them all, you'd think there would be at least a couple officers that are best at some particular role, like captaining small ships, or managing deep space outposts, or supervising a shipyard, or fleet level commanding. Wouldn't it be in the best interests of the service as a whole to keep these officers where they are, if they also want to stay at their current role? Not necessarily the same position, but same role (e.g. a captain of one Miranda could transfer to captain another Miranda or a Centaur, ideally helping spread escort-level commanding expertise around).

So it's not simply about what an officer would like - it's also what they would realistically be best at. I'm not counting Nash as part of this - see below.

Higher ranks exist for the purpose of coordinating groups of ships, which is a different job than commanding a single ship, and generally it isn't a good idea to try to do both at once.
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Well Nash performed admirably here at the Battle of Kadesh :)

I do think Nash has ample aptitude for large-scale command and the potential to make admiral, so promoting her does make sense. But I'm also half-way expecting Nash to pull a Kirk and saving the Federation by doing the job she's best at - captaining a ship.

They also coordinate large groups of people working groundside (in a navy, this generally means a base or other facility), who are so numerous that you need a higher-ranking senior executive just to keep track of them all. Captains normally command no more than several hundred people, so a base with five thousand staff would probably require an admiral.
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Idea: Let's get Rear Admirals to captain Galaxies with their 6000 crew capacities :D

Moving people sideways doesn't solve the problem, becauseyou're still filling up the top ranks with people who aren't interested in moving and will be occupying those jobs for the rest of their careers. If all your starships are run by fiftysomething people who are determined to live out their glory days as captains for the rest of their lives, how does the next Nash (or, thinking forward, the next Garrett or Picard) get to shine?
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I was assuming that Starfleet and Federation culture would still be advertising the whole self-improvement culture, and the vast majority of officers would still have ambitions of promotion. Kirk with his return to captaincy apparently didn't inspire hoards of officers to try following in his footsteps. If everyone wanted to stay at their current level, then yeah, that would clog the promotion pipeline, but it looks to be pretty rare.

Experience shows that MOST real people generally accept promotion. It's a mark of distinction and respect to be offered. Starfleet is already unusual for the degree that it does otherwise.
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The context of what you're quoting was that the rat race was the way to get rid of badly performing officers - I was pointing out the alternative of moving to a job you could be good at.

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Simon_Jester said:
This may be a sign of mental defects on my part. What do people think?
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Taken out of context, this is just inviting a response :V
 
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If we don't get an arc where Nash steals the prototype Ambassador to foil a plot against the Federation I'll be disappointed.
 
The one think that's bothering me now is:

'What happens when the next FYM ends?'

Will Captain Mrr'Shan stay on Enterprise?

Given how you guys reacted to the idea of giving Nash a third, it's not likely...

so the Enterprise looses something, at least this promotion was more like Riker or Spock getting the chair, the next one?

I love Star Trek, not just for the typical Exploration and seeing the unknown. I love the Enterprise and the heroes that show up around and in it, as well as those Heroes that populate Starfleet in general. The Enterprise has always been something special for me, and we've seen it here...Because it had THE Enterprise Captain of this era in the chair...yeah, there were slow times, but that's part of the thankfull fact that the Federation doesn't face a threat to it's exisistance at all times....

The Other EC ships? I am 100% on board with a shifting around of captains there(though I would love to have seen more of Eaton and T'lorel.), It's part of the identity of THOSE SHIPS. The Enterprise? You get the right captain and you let them run it as long as they want, because you'll get something special...

Now? it feels wrong, I'm even going back to how I felt about the promotion(FORCED Promotion) now...

After Mrr'Shan, it's going to be people we eather don't know, or people that were in the quest earlier...but aren't connected to the Enterprise.

And it's going to happen every five years, and from what I've heard, it'd be worse if it doesn't. I remember reading people discussing making second FYMs a reward for good service in a crisis... that makes me feel like Nash and Straak are no longer special, they're just captains who performed admirably, instead of the heroes that they were. and even then, you just broke your whole paradigm, the first part of this whole FYM for Nash was holding the line pretty well against the Cardassians...

I may come back and catch any replies to this post, but I'm gone...
 
lbmaian said:
The context of what you're quoting was that the rat race was the way to get rid of badly performing officers - I was pointing out the alternative of moving to a job you could be good at.
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I can't speak for the Federation or Starfleet, but "up or out" is something that many real world military forces instituted to deal with an actual problem. In the absence of a war acting as an aggressive sorting device, ranks became filled with officers who were there mainly on the basis of seniority. You suggested just getting rid of poor performers, but there are reasons why that sort of thing is difficult for a military.

Anyway speaking for Starfleet in this game, moving jobs does seem to be the primary way to survive as a Rear Admiral if you're not getting promoted to Vice Admiral. By keeping "in the churn" and hopping from job to job you build your resume and don't stay in one place long enough to feel pressure to being pushed out.


MS-21H 'Hawke' said:
I love Star Trek, not just for the typical Exploration and seeing the unknown. I love the Enterprise and the heroes that show up around and in it, as well as those Heroes that populate Starfleet in general. The Enterprise has always been something special for me, and we've seen it here...Because it had THE Enterprise Captain of this era in the chair...yeah, there were slow times, but that's part of the thankfull fact that the Federation doesn't face a threat to it's exisistance at all times....

The Other EC ships? I am 100% on board with a shifting around of captains there(though I would love to have seen more of Eaton and T'lorel.), It's part of the identity of THOSE SHIPS. The Enterprise? You get the right captain and you let them run it as long as they want, because you'll get something special...

Now? it feels wrong, I'm even going back to how I felt about the promotion(FORCED Promotion) now...

After Mrr'Shan, it's going to be people we eather don't know, or people that were in the quest earlier...but aren't connected to the Enterprise
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Nash ka'Sharren wasn't connected to the Enterprise until she was. We didn't know her until we did. I see no reason that every new captain the Enterprise has can't become a new friend the same way. I'm sorry this is such a downer for you, but I feel like this quest is a production where players (that is, the NPCs) have their entrances and their time on stage and then their exits. Some of them have repeat performances and some reappear in new roles, but it's not about any of them or even any one ship. It's the saga of Starfleet itself.
 
@anon_user :

Since a lot of the episodes are from the point of view of totally different ships, there's a lot of very serialized episodes that can be shown in no particular order. As an example, you could take half of Captain Nash's adventures and scramble them with other episodes and nobody would notice, except insofar as she had a big personnel shift in the middle of the third season.

However, there's a 'backbone' of episodes that form a coherent story arc, either involving extensive personnel transfers like the shuffle at the end of the first five year missions, or involving major plot events. Sometimes the writers have several episodes in a row on the same subject; the Biophage arc was particularly intense that way.
 
Briefvoice said:
Nash ka'Sharren wasn't connected to the Enterprise until she was. We didn't know her until we did. I see no reason that every new captain the Enterprise has can't become a new friend the same way. I'm sorry this is such a downer for you, but I feel like this quest is a production where players (that is, the NPCs) have their entrances and their time on stage and then their exits. Some of them have repeat performances and some reappear in new roles, but it's not about any of them or even any one ship. It's the saga of Starfleet itself.
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Many people don't get attached to things like the Starfleet. Only to the characters themselves.
 
lbmaian said:
I think the commercial business and military bureaucracy are just intrinsically different, at least for vibrant industries. In the commercial sector, there is a LOT of career movement that's not simply going up. Businesses are starting up and failing all the time, people are often expected to change companies at least once in their lives, job changes between managerial and non-managerial positions are common, etc. This evidently is not the case in the military, and to a certain extent, Starfleet. That's probably where a lot of my confusion comes from.
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There is a fair amount of lateral movement in that people are often reassigned from one task to another without a promotion- we've seen that in play here too.

The military is a lot more conservative about 'churn,' though, because people die when they mess up. When they find someone who's legitimately good at their job, they tend to try very hard to cultivate that skill and grow it into the kind of skill they NEED. Conversely, if they find someone who says "I'm not good at this job you promoted me to, can I have a lesser job," there is a tendency to kick them aside entirely (or give them a completely irrelevant task in a backwater post). Because if they can screw up a hard job when the pressure isn't on the military very hard in peacetime, they will almost certainly screw up easy jobs under the pressures of wartime, or the greater pressures of actual combat.

Many of those positions require different skill sets though, besides simply management. In particular, ship captain, fleet commodore, and starbase admiral all look pretty different in my eyes from a skill aptitude standpoint.
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Yes, but there's a lot of overlap. A starbase commander has to be good at a lot of the same things as a captain, and a commodore has to understand captaincy very well in order to bond with and work with their subordinate captains.

This is why the military tends to model the characteristic skills of flag rank officers (commodore and up) as an extra layer of skill you place on top of the skill set of field grade officers (commanders and captains). Which are in turn layered on top of the skills of company grade officers (lieutenants and ensigns). Corresponding issues arise in things like shipyard command: you can't run Starfleet's entire construction program if you can't run a single berth.

Training people specifically as flag officers when they lack experience as field grade officers simply doesn't work, so you are basically forced to draw flag officers from the ranks of the captains. Furthermore, since there is no real use for a "very senior captain" (what will you do, give them a shinier ship?), there's a limit on what you can do with your successful field grade officers EXCEPT see how they perform as flag officers.

I will note that the transition from field to flag officers is actually quite tricky, as is the transition from junior to field grade. This is why many militaries have the equivalent of post-graduate schools dedicated to training senior officers in things that their original Academy training did not and could not cover.

While surely many people will have the skills to do well in them all, you'd think there would be at least a couple officers that are best at some particular role, like captaining small ships, or managing deep space outposts, or supervising a shipyard, or fleet level commanding. Wouldn't it be in the best interests of the service as a whole to keep these officers where they are, if they also want to stay at their current role? Not necessarily the same position, but same role (e.g. a captain of one Miranda could transfer to captain another Miranda or a Centaur, ideally helping spread escort-level commanding expertise around).
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Lateral transfers raise the problem that they are in effect an alternative to transferring new talent up. This results in it becoming much harder to find and bring in the new talent you need at the field grade officer level. Why are we giving Escort One's captain Escort Two, when we'll just have to promote yet another person to run Escort One? Why not just send the new guy straight to Escort Two?

And sure, there are going to be officers who hang on in one place more or less forever. But they're usually the ones whose careers are stalled because other people with greater potential keep getting promoted over their heads. Starfleet would have to be foolish to knowingly leave someone in a mid-ranking job who has the potential to be a great admiral, and have to settle for lower-quality admirals as a consequence.

Well Nash performed admirably here at the Battle of Kadesh :)

I do think Nash has ample aptitude for large-scale command and the potential to make admiral, so promoting her does make sense. But I'm also half-way expecting Nash to pull a Kirk and saving the Federation by doing the job she's best at - captaining a ship.
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You know... it's not clear that Nash actually did an admiral's job at Kadesh. We don't know if, narratively speaking, she handled the fleet tactics well. From what we know, it's quite possible that she rallied the ships and shouted "charge!" but didn't actually try to coordinate their movements during the battle.

Sure, we know we won those battles, but that may have had more to do with our ships having deflector shields and the Biophage ships lacking them. The way the battle went down is actually very much characteristic of it being a huge confused furball where ships blasted away at each other more or less randomly with minimal coordination.

[Note that if Nash did not do a great job as an admiral at Kadesh, this is in no way a mark against her as an officer. We lacked doctrine for fleet battles, and Nash lacked any prior fleet command experience, having been thrown into the role in an emergency after the actual serving flag officers were killed or maimed in action. I wouldn't expect her to do a better job than I would expect a ship's lieutenant to do if forced to take the captain's chair and command during a battle. Almost ANYTHING she did, other than just freezing up and being useless, is a sign that she's got nerves, talent, and potential.]

Idea: Let's get Rear Admirals to captain Galaxies with their 6000 crew capacities :D
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Heh. Well, there's a bit of a range. In real life, a Navy captain is equivalent in rank to an Army colonel, and colonels can typically command up to a few thousand soldiers. In Starfleet, almost no ship they have has more than, oh, 500 or so crew at the moment, and most have less.

The context of what you're quoting was that the rat race was the way to get rid of badly performing officers - I was pointing out the alternative of moving to a job you could be good at.
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Well, basically, if you have an officer who's at a given rank and is NOT the person you'd want to promote, and this is established by them being passed over for promotion over and over... They're probably not doing a very impressive job at the job they do have. As an example, do any of us really want to promote Scott Linderley as vice admiral? Some do, perhaps. But for some of us the answer is 'maybe not' because we're looking at his performance and we aren't impressed with him. Conversely, if there was a non-disruptive way to replace him, that didn't have mechanical penalties attached, a lot of the same people who aren't impressed would want to try replacing him. We'd be hoping that the next guy would do better.

Taken out of context, this is just inviting a response :V
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Well, people may reasonably think I'm mentally defective for thinking anything even tangentially related to Enterprise can make for good TV. But my honest impression is that Blalock was a decent actress who knew how to play a Vulcan without playing a Spock clone. But they kept trying to make the character 'sensitive' and 'vulnerable' (and sexy) in ways that resulted in the wrong kind of character drama.
 
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