Well, I already talked about the subject
@Night is lecturing me on, so I'll just repeat myself:
"The extent to which that kind of luck should be a factor in our decisions is the extent to which captains make their own luck- which wraps back around to the factors that really
are under their control, but in more subtle ways. Like their ability to make their command feel confident, so that their decisions are executed with the minimum of error or trouble. Like their attention to detail meaning that their ship is not merely passing inspection, but exceptionally well-maintained, so that mechanical problems don't interfere with whatever daring trick they attempt. Like their positive attitude making it easier for them to stay creative and resourceful in an emergency."
Given the issues that are arising here, I think we need to differentiate "luck" into two categories: "fortune," and "chance."
SOME of what we call 'luck' is in fact the consequences of intangibles that we cannot easily measure on a performance metric. Good management tends to lead to organizations having good luck, or
appearing to have good luck, because they are in position to capitalize on fortunate events, while minimizing the consequences of bad events. This has always been the case.
For the sake of having a separate word for it, I am going to call this 'fortunate.' A person can make themselves fortunate, by knowing how to put themselves in the path of good events, and avoid bad events. Good or bad fortune actually CAN be the cumulative result of lots of little good or bad decisions.
BUT this sort of 'luck' is very different from pure chance. Some things really are just plain random. Or they're the consequences of things that are entirely outside your control, such as enemy action, or the presence of totally unknown alien ruins on the planet you've been asigned to survey.
You can judge a captain in part by their fortune, but NOT by outcomes that are the result of pure chance.
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Example 1:
The
Enterprise-B survived the ambush at 33 Fujit because Oneiros's combat app crashed the first time, and then the random number generator played favorites on his second go-around. We rationalized this as a temporal loop incident.
That was chance. It was not a direct consequence of Nash being super-smart somehow, or of Nash preparing the
Enterprise-B extra super-well. It wasn't even some kind of 'intangible.'
In-story,
Enterprise flew through a spatial anomaly that interacted strangely with the warp core, creating the time loop. Out-of-story, Oneiros threw some dice, dice that said the
Enterprise would have been destroyed- but then a completely bizarre software glitch blew up, and he had to roll the dice over again, and
Enterprise pulled it off that time. Again,
that was chance.
We can't say that the
Enterprise-B is a super-ship, or that Nash is a super-captain, on the strength of this incident. Because it was a complete fluke, and if the whole thing had happened over again, the result would almost certainly have been much less positive. This is equally true if we look at the narrative AND if we look at the dice results.
Example 2:
Now, look at
Enterprise's performance during the biophage crisis.
Enterprise did more than any other single ship to get us working with the Romulans. Under Nash's command,
Enterprise repeatedly helped out the Romulan Quarantine Fleet to the extent that it arguably saved that entire fleet and many thousands of Romulans from the biophage. She capped this off with her leadership during the Battle of Kadesh, during which time
Enterprise managed to avoid taking ANY serious harm from the biophage, even as other explorers suffered serious damage.
That was, in some sense, 'luck.' But narratively, it was luck that was a direct consequence of Nash having the best command team in Starfleet, knowing how to get the best out of them, being quick and resourceful and doing everything in their power to optimize the performance of their ship. And mechanically, it certainly helped that
Enterprise had (in effect) an Elite crew that gave them +3s on all their die rolls compared to the Romulan ships, or to
Riala, or compared to a stock
Excelsior like
Kumari
This was Nash being
fortunate, in the sense I used the word before. Her success was a direct consequence of the enormous combined pile of skills, positive attitude, and right actions taken by herself and her crew, including some consequences that were not so simple and concrete as we might expect.
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Now, if we look back over Nash's track record, we find lots of good luck. But some of this luck was chance, and some of it was
fortune. Nash deserves credit for putting her crew in the way of good fortune (in mechanical terms, for conferring those +1 bonuses; in narrative terms, for all the little ways she got the very best out of her crew). But Nash does not get any kind of credit for the fact that Oneiros's combat app crashed, for instance.
By similar logic, the loss of
Miracht was not due to Mbeki being "unfortunate." He didn't do anything wrong, his crew acted
exactly as we'd expect. There is no sign that Mbeki 'failed' in any way that we would expect, even from an explorer captain.
He quite simply ran into a thing that overwhelmed his ship by sheer power. The same way he'd have gotten overwhelmed if Qute decided to transport
Miracht out in front of a Borg cube and slather it in honey mustard or something.
My complaint here is that you are trying to take the result of
chance, impersonal randomness that has nothing to do with a specific person's competence or successes. And you're trying to treat that result as if it reflects on the inherent
fortune, the inner vices or virtues of a person that make them suitable for high-stakes positions of responsibility.
Basically, the only reason for doing that is "well, I know it's superstitious nonsense, and I'm doing it anyway," which is just punishing someone out of bloody-mindedness.
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Now,
@Briefvoice is making a much more sensible argument here. He is arguing that (to use my terms) Mbeki failed because of poor 'fortune.' Because of some weakness, or rather the lack of any special strengths, that resulted in him being overcome by circumstances that someone else could have passed through.
This is the
valid form of the argument "maybe Mbeki isn't cut out for Explorer Corps command after all." It at least makes sense, it's credible.
Notably, though, this is precisely why we have the court-martial. To go over Mbeki's actions in exhaustive detail, to glean every tiny bit of information we can possibly glean from what happened, to figure out if this was something many of our other captains could have handled, or if it was something
none of them could have handled.
Maybe Straak or Thuir would have run additional scans- but maybe the aliens who built the weapons on this tomb world had them so well sensor-stealthed that even explorer sensors would have found nothing, since there was nothing there to find. Maybe Nash (and more to the point, Bazeck) could have kept the shields up through the first salvo from the planetary particle guns... but that doesn't do much good if the guns get to fire several salvoes before
Miracht (or
Enterprise) gets out of range.
Maybe this was just the trap that would have gotten
ANY ship we now have that sailed into range. Just plain too big a set of weapons for us to withstand, hidden too well for our current sensor generation to detect. A deadfall that was inevitably going to land on
someone. Unless that ship simply stayed out of range entirely, which would have been a violation of Starfleet standing orders.
Was there enough evidence to spot this in advance? Was the firepower of the defenses low enough that an
Excelsior had any chance of survival? Well, we have the logs! We can have Zaardmani, the finest sensor operator in Starfleet, go over the information available. We can see what signs were and were not present. We can compare to other, comparable incidents in Starfleet history where some hidden danger was (or was not) spotted and counteracted.
But in the absence of reasons to believe that Mbeki DID miss something Straak or Thuir or Eaton would have caught, or that Mbeki DID lose in a situation that (say) Nash or Saavik would have survived... Well, it doesn't make a lot of sense to just blindly assume that he must be damaged goods.
It would make more sense in the Generic Military Service where nearly all peacetime ship losses are caused by some error of judgment on the part of commanding officers. But that isn't our reality, because we DO find our ships sometimes confronting things that are complete outside context problems.
