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** Several episodes give the crew size as 430, which really isn't very many at all (a real world aircraft carrier has a crew complement of about 5000). The commanding officers would beam down because only they had the authority to make contact with a newly discovered planet. The cannon fodder redshirts were security guards whose job was to act as bodyguards for the main characters. (Although it does seem serving as a security guard under Kirk was more hazardous than most captains in the Federation.)
*** Comparing the ''Enterprise'' to an aircraft carrier isn't fair; a carrier is a capital ship designed to carry 30-80 smaller fighter craft. This spaceship isn't anywhere near that large.
** The vast majority of the crew are going to be maintenance and operations crews. You only need a small number of people to give orders, but that translates into hundreds of people to carry them out: e.g. the captain orders the ship to go to warp, a full maintenance crew is keeping an eye on the engine and adjusting the power levels. Giving the order to fire a torpedo means the torpedoes have to be armed and loaded, which requires supervision, and a team of people to keep them ready for use and properly looked after - which is shown (with the munitions being called "phasers" but acting as torpedoes) in "[[Star Trek/Recap/S1/E14 Balance of Terror|Balance of Terror]]". Shuttles need to be fueled, repaired, cleaned after use, etc. Food, air and fuel need to be organised. People need to fill out paperwork whenever any of these resources is used up. And so on. Double that for the large science teams Federation ships carry... who in turn need their ''own'' maintenance and administrative personnel for their scientific equipment... (You'd expect the computer to do a lot of the work, but the story 1. doesn't allow shipboard AI [[A.I. Is a Crapshoot|for some reason]] and 2. is based on present day ship crews.)
** There are several episodes dedicated to the lower decks of the various ships who sit at a console waiting for something to happen. Nothing is immune to decay. Fuses, lightbulbs, plasma couplings and other things need to be maintained, probably on a daily basis. That stuff isn't very glamorous but it is necessary. Scotty merely represents the leadership of the entire engineering department that is putting the ship back together after every battle.
** They're cataloging and researching samples taken from the various planets they've visited, writing sociological papers on those planets' societies, doing tech tests, revising the star charts, and all that other stuff too.
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** I always comforted myself with the idea that in-universe, he was an acrofatic stout powerful scotsman warrior sumo guy.
* Same way james Doohan did, he ate more calories than he burnt off. Presumably in the gap between the series and the movies he wasn't running for his life, or in a blind panic trying to fix the engines before the latest godlike alien Kirk pissed off blew it up, so he got more sedantary and just didn't cut back. Plus he got old(er), and with age comes a slowing metabolism.
** You may remember "That Which Survives" and how the access tube Scotty has to work in wasn't wide enough for a man to roll over in, even though the stuff he had to work with was on the top of the access tube. So two ensigns had to tip him on his back and slide him in upside down. One would think he'd be afraid of someday getting too big to fit in the tubes.
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== Super-Special Holodeck Batteries? ==
* Here's one - why do the holodecks run on a different and ''incompatible'' power source than the rest of the ship? ''Voyager'' sometimes barely had enough power to keep the lights on and the air recycling, but there was plenty of juice for Tom Paris to play "Captain Proton". And even with that, you're telling me
** That was a [[Voodoo Shark]] to explain why they could let the writers play with the Holodeck when they were otherwise rationing power, especially replicator power. Their power troubles eased off after a while... your call whether that made it better or worse.
** Possibly unintended [[Fridge Brilliance]] - with so many holodec disasters such as Moriarty any whatnot in the past, the incompatible power source may have been a deliberate move on Starfleet's end so that power to the holodec could be cut off immediately if necessary, without any rogue programs being able to divert power from another part of the ship in order to sustain themselves. The real problem could be less converting the power than overriding whatever system was put in place to keep the power source seperate from the rest of the ship's systems. What's more confusing is that the EMH doesn't run on the same juice, or if he does, why they don't ration holodec usage anyway so that they don't burn through his time too quickly.
*** Rogue programs or... humans suffering holodiction?..
== We've Been Boarded! Oh well... ==
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* We've seen how powerful anti-matter is in the Trekkiverse? Why is that ''no one'' seems to have weaponized the stuff? Even in a "we used to do that, but the stuff is way too dangerous" manner?
** Photon torpedoes use antimatter warheads. There's been other references too, like the Vulcan civil wars being fought with antimatter bombs, and the Enterprise-D using an antimatter spread to attack a Borg cube. And the planet killer used an antiproton beam to slice through planets.
** [[Star Trek/Recap/S2/E13 Obsession|Kirk ''did'' weaponize antimatter.]] And doing so almost killed him.
== Those Ships Need Seat Belts! ==
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== Lily-White Starfleet? ==
* The biggest question of them all: where are all the ethnicities? This becomes a major head against wall moment for this troper, because the timeline of the Star Trek universes includes several major wars, including a nuclear World War III that supposedly killed 600 million people. It would be fair to assume that most of these casualties occured in the world's most powerful nations, namely, the United States, Europe, Russia, and China. ''So why do white people still make up 90% of Starfleet?'' The world population has always been overwhelmingly non-white, so any world government/military would reflect that one-fifth of the the world population is Chinese, one-fifth Indian, one-fifth African, and two-fifths various other ethnicities. Starfleet also seems to prefer rather Anglo names for its ships. Star Trek in all its incarnations has been noted for being progressive for showing different ethnicities, and has gotten better at doing so over time, but it always bugs this troper how it appears all non-white populations are minorities in the future.
**
**** Most humans should be African, then. If Asia got wiped out, that would make Africa the most populous continent. [[Broken Aesop|Discrimination in Starfleet, you say?]]
**** Geordi LaForge is an African, not an African-American. Miles O'Brien is Irish, and Dr. Bashir is most likely of Middle Eastern descent. Presumably a fair amount of the humans aren't Americans but just sound like they have American (or English) accents due to the Universal Translator.
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*** It possibly has to do with China being decimated by World War III. Maybe the population loss was so much that they really ''are'' proportionally represented in Starfleet? Or Japan imposed their culture on China during WWIII, liked they tried to do in WWII, so some people of Chinese descent ended up with Japanese names?
**** Along those same lines, it's also noteworthy that the eastern half of the United States is almost never mentioned in Trek, and cities like New York and Washington DC don't seem to exist. Characters from North America usually hail from the rural midwest or the west coast, and the Earth government's based in San Francisco. It may be that the nuclear war was fought between China and the U.S., and both mainland China and the eastern U.S. were hit so hard that their populations fell permenantly behind everyone else.
*** There are ''Klingons'' with Chinese surnames for names, though! [[Insane Troll Logic|Maybe lots of them
** Given that regions such as China and India ''are'' so densely populated, it could be that those ethnic groups were among the first populations to migrate ''en masse'' to colony worlds. Their colonies would therefore be the longest-established human settlements outside our solar system, which would make them the best-defended and most-civilized ... hence, the ''least'' likely planets to require a visit from an exploratory vessel like the ''Enterprise''. They do exist, we just don't see episodes about them.
* It should be noted that [[MST3K Mantra|as a television series]], the casting of all the ''Star Trek'' series is dependent on the average population makeup of the city in which it's produced, so what appears on screen is not indicative of the population of Earth, but the population of LA-based Paramount Studio's casting calls. So for all we know the crew of the Enterprise ''should'' be more, er... brown than normally shown, but when you make a casting call for extras and only
** Err... is there any actual evidence that "only Caucasians showed up" to casting calls for extras? May have been truer in the 1960s, but from the '80s onward?
*** Also, the names of ships and planets in Star Trek are still Anglo- and Euro-centric, which has nothing to do with filming location.
*** It's a show made by Americans for an American audience. Ships have Anglo- and Euro
** As [[SF Debris]] pointed out in his review of TNG's "Code of Honor", it ''is'' entirely possible to cast an entire planet filled with black people, so they certainly could be more ethnically diverse if they wanted to.
*** It's interesting that your and OP's definitions of diversity seem to be less "showing a variety of different ethnicities" and more "having fewer white people". Comes off sort of racist if you think about it.
**** When the issue is that there there is a larger proportion of white people in the cast than there is in the population at large, the only ways to remedy the issue are to increase the main cast or to have fewer white people. And the cast was pretty big already.
== Spock's Fabulous Makeup ==
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== What does the Alpha Quadrant Look like? ==
* When the dust had settled, you pretty much had four great powers in the Alpha Quadrant: the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Cardassians. Then there are secondary powers like the Ferengi, the Breen, and the Nausicaans, and one-off species like the Tzenkethi and the Son'a; but dealing just with the Core Four, this is complex enough, so let's leave them be.
* At different points, each of the four powers is referred to as sharing a border with each of the other three. Assuming they all have contiguous territories--which I guess they might not--there are only two possible explanations: There's a point where the borders of all four come together at a ninety-degree angle and they meet in some center, like Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico; or three of them have borders that ''would'' come together and meet at a 120-degree angle (like an equilateral triangle divided into thirds) and the fourth one being plunked down in the center of this and extending out from the central point.
* Actually, the former doesn't work, either: The Federation had a Klingon Neutral Zone ''and'' a Romulan Neutral Zone ''and'' a Cardassian DMZ. So it had borders with all three extending for a good while. For the Square States model to work, it would only touch one of the three at a geometric point.
* As for the latter setup--I guess it works, but it's pretty stupid, isn't it?
** Allow me to introduce you to a concept called "3 Dimensions". Space is not a flat map where 4 regions can only meet at a single corner. Granted, this *is* Star Trek which adores the [[Space Is an Ocean]] trope. The boundaries can wander and roam all over the place, and it would be pretty easy for all 4 empires to share stretches of contiguous border.
** The relevance of the third dimension depends how big the empires are: the Galaxy is much narrower along its "vertical" axis (its thickness is only 1% of its diameter). While this is still an enormous distance, and it's reasonable to expect overlap, we're also dealing with incomprehensibly-huge nations here that may well extend far further than that in the "horizontal" plane. Assuming they each spread evenly from a central point, the borders would reasonably tend to line up when viewed from above.
* And another thing: Federation space includes a bajillion species, both Fed members and pre-warp civilizations whom they ignore under the Prime Directive but protect from foreign interlopers by maintaining their own territorial integrity. The Romulans have only the Remans. The Cardassians had only the Bajorans until they got thrown out. The Klingons tried to enslave two races in TOS and had one whom they had enslaved in ENT. But for the most part all three species had their space to themselves.
* Now assuming that the likelihood of a Class-M planet will develop an intelligent race is pretty much the same anywhere (and I can't see any reason it wouldn't be) that means that the Federation is either much larger territorially than the others, or it has a much denser concentration of inhabitable planets, which one assumes mean many more resources to exploit. Either of those factors would give it a huge advantage over the other civilizations, would make the the Alpha Quadrant's dominant superpower. But it deals with each of the other three as equals most of the time.
** In the first half of TNG I could easily imagine the Federation being run by such shrinking violets that they can be bested by enemies a fraction of their size. Then the Borg came along and gave them a wake-up call. It's kind of like the United States in [[WWII]]: In 1940, despite being much larger than Germany, the US army was severely outnumbered, outweighed, and outclassed by its German counterpart, because the Germans were on a war footing and the US wasn't. In 1943, the US war machine was going all-out, and even without the rest of the Allies would have had every advantage over the Germans in a one-on-one fight.▼
** Where this breaks down is that the Federation had had a ton of Pearl Harbor moments, starting with Wolf 359, the near-war with Cardassia in "Chain of Command," the war with the Klingons in Season 5 of Deep Space Nine, the Dominion alliance with Cardassia, the second Borg invasion.
▲** In the first half of TNG I could easily imagine the Federation being run by such shrinking violets that they can be bested by enemies a fraction of their size. Then the Borg came along and gave them a wake-up call. It's kind of like the United States in WWII: In 1940, despite being much larger than Germany, the US army was severely outnumbered, outweighed, and outclassed by its German counterpart, because the Germans were on a war footing and the US wasn't. In 1943, the US war machine was going all-out, and even without the rest of the Allies would have had every advantage over the Germans in a one-on-one fight.
▲** Where this breaks down is that the Federation had had a ton of Pearl Harbor moments, starting with Wolf 359, the near-war with Cardassia in "Chain of Command," the war with the Klingons in Season 5 of Deep Space Nine, the Dominion alliance with Cardassia, the second Borg invasion. . . . Eventually, the Federation certainly created the impression that it was going balls-to-the-wall to deal with all these threats. But if it were, and if it's as much a potential powerhouse as you suggested, it couldn't help being as strong in the Alpha Quadrant as the Dominion was in the Gamma--In which case it would have beaten the Cardassians and the fraction of the Jem'Hadar fleet that got through before the wormhole got cut off like a rented mule, even without the Klingons' help, and would have faced the entire Gamma Quadrant Dominion force on an even footing. Instead, it's barely keeping its head above water with the fraction of the Dominion fleet in the Alpha Quadrant, and at the beginning of the sixth season everyone's puckering their assholes at the thought the rest of the Jem'Hadar will show up and give the Dominion an insurmountable numerical advantage.
** Remember the Federation supposedly has no military, that most of Starfleet's ships are equipped for research and humanitarian aid and that most of the crew signed up for the engineering or scientific opportunities. Starfleet simply doesn't operate on the level of the Cardassian or Klingon militaries; it seems reasonable that the Federation must be many times larger and more (economically) powerful if it's even able to maintain an equal relationship. Even when they get onto a "war" footing, they're still mostly using obsolete ships (notice the ''Excelsior''-class appears a lot in Deep Space Nine), crewed by personnel with woefully inadequate combat training, as they have no dedicated military academy or warship production facilities. The few instances where a ship or crew is up to scratch militarily (the ''Defiant'', any ''Galaxy''-class with the children offloaded) they're normally portrayed as being able to tear through enemy ships by the dozen, with the exception of the very first battle with the Dominion.
** While this is pure fanon, it is also possible that the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians have enough worlds and subject species under their control to have comparable resources to The Federation, but the fact that they are Empires that conquered these territories instead of democracies that formed alliances with them along with a healthy dose of institutionalized racism means that the races who these Empires are named after are the ruling class and are the only ones to rise to the possitions where The Federation deals with them (i
▲** While this is pure fanon, it is also possible that the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians have enough worlds and subject species under their control to have comparable resources to The Federation, but the fact that they are Empires that conquered these territories instead of democracies that formed alliances with them along with a healthy dose of institutionalized racism means that the races who these Empires are named after are the ruling class and are the only ones to rise to the possitions where The Federation deals with them (i/e: Government and Military)
== Rank Structure ==
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* "The height of this stupidity-", "Why would they do something so nonsensical?", and so on are the way practically every Star Trek headscratcher starts. I can understand occasional criticisms of things you like, but it seems like Star Trek fans on tropes websites think it's a stupid show written by idiots for complete buffoons. Why are they even watching?
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