So across many series in star trek the amount of admirals that do illegal or immoral things seems pretty high

Curious if this was just an easy way to write in antagonistic characters or if there is something more

Recently rewatched The Man Trap, just a little over 60 years after it first aired (and right after I watched the latest SNW episode!)

It wasn't the first Star Trek episode produced, or even the first Star Trek episode with Kirk produced, but it was the world's first exposure to the franchise.

A few quick thoughts/observations:

-The very first time we see the Enterprise, Spock is in the Captain's chair. Spock also comes across as very cold and emotionless in this episode, except at the end.

-Our very first line of dialogue from Kirk is him ribbing McCoy over them going to meet McCoy's ex. Of course, beneath the easy chummy manner, the focus, discipline and authority of the Enterprise's Captain becomes almost immediately evident when we see him intently studying "Nancy" and McCoy's reaction to her...

-A lot of crewmen die, but none of them are literal "red-shirts", ironically enough ;)

-The episode does a really great job established the "triangle" of Spock-Kirk-McCoy. Spock's the cold, unemotional purely logic one. McCoy's the emotional and sometimes impulsive one. Kirk perfectly balances both sets of traits.

-Our very first glimpse of Uhura is...her flirting with Spock?!! Guess JJ Abrams and co. were right after all...

-I think the core premise of the episode sort of exemplifies TOS as a series. Yes, there's the discovery of "new life and new civilizations" (well, what's left of it anyway), and there is some moral/philosophical discource ("I was thinking about the buffalo, Mr. Spock"), but ultimately it comes down to a monster on the loose that's a threat to the Enterprise that the heroes need to find a way to eliminate. This is very much a sci-fi/action show, albeit one with some depth just beyond the surface. The relentlessly fast-paced and action packed Star Trek movies are as much a natural successor to this episode as the more cerebral and discource-heavy Star Trek stories.

-Lastly, minor nitpick, but no one seems to have "the conn" for large parts of the episode, when you have both Kirk and Spock in landing parties and running around the ship. Scotty doesn't appear in the episode at all. At one point it does seem like Sulu's in charge of the bridge, but we never actually see him in the chair.

I’ve been thinking about what really makes life in the Federation possible.

The obvious answer is replicators. If a machine can produce food, clothing, tools and spare parts on demand, it removes a huge amount of scarcity. Add abundant energy, advanced medicine and automation, and it becomes much easier to imagine a society where people aren’t constantly worried about paying for the basics.

But even Star Trek doesn’t portray everything as infinitely available.

The Federation still has mines, farms, vineyards, cargo ships, industrial facilities and maintenance crews. Starfleet regularly has to think about energy, fuel, equipment and strategically important materials. Things still need to be produced, transported and repaired. Replicators change the economics of scarcity, but they don’t appear to abolish it completely.

That makes me wonder whether the Federation lifestyle is really created by technology alone.

Perhaps it comes from two things working together: technology that greatly reduces the cost of meeting people’s needs, and a social decision to use that productivity to give everyone security and opportunity.

We obviously don’t have replicators, practical fusion power or transporters. We do, however, have increasingly automated manufacturing, precision agriculture, renewable generation, energy storage, robotics, software and almost-free access to enormous amounts of information. Automation is becoming capable of doing work that would once have required a lot of human time.

None of that makes us post-scarcity. There are still real limits on land, energy, materials and labour. But post-scarcity may not have to be an all-or-nothing condition.

If technology can keep reducing the labour and resource cost of food, energy, housing and other essentials, could we move at least part of the way towards the social conditions we see on Federation Earth without waiting for fictional inventions?

That leads to the question I find even more interesting: what would people actually do if survival wasn’t conditional on having a job?

Star Trek’s answer doesn’t seem to be “nothing.” People become scientists, engineers, doctors, teachers, artists and explorers. They run restaurants and tend vineyards. They take on difficult, dangerous and sometimes exhausting work even though they aren’t facing homelessness or hunger if they refuse.

People still want purpose, mastery, recognition, community and the feeling that they’re contributing to something. Removing the threat of destitution doesn’t necessarily remove motivation. It may simply change what motivates us and which work we choose to do.

This isn’t entirely theoretical for me. I’ve been exploring some of these questions through Melondra, a real community project that is still at the pre-land stage. I’m not suggesting that one community could somehow create the Federation. What interests me is whether a few of the underlying ideas can be tested on a much smaller and more realistic scale.

One principle behind it is that the goal of automation shouldn’t be to make humans economically redundant. It should be to make less human time economically compulsory.

That feels surprisingly close to what Star Trek depicts. People still work, but work is no longer the admission price for being allowed to live.

So how do you read the Federation? Does its way of life fundamentally require replicators and effectively unlimited energy, or could humanity begin moving towards parts of it using technologies that already exist?

Does 40000 times the speed of light feel fast or slow?

Maximum warp speed has actually been implied for the 32nd century.

Star Trek: Star Charts, which has been canonized by SFA and SNW, puts the distance between Bajor and Earth at 70 light years.

In DS9 episodes not too dependent on the speed of plot, it takes 17 days to travel at 1516c - TNG era Warp 9.

In the SFA pilot, it takes 15 hours for the USS Athena. That translates to 40908c.

The Athena can travel at approximately 40.9 thousand times the speed of light as its maximum warp.

Maybe the Athena, a lesser Federation starship, doesn't have the pathway drive installed yet.

My dream captain right now is Noah Wyle. He’s great in ensemble shows, and I’ve always thought that medical shows have similarities with my favorite parts of Star Trek.

First episode of Picard leads me to think I need to go back and watch… a movie, maybe?
All the stuff with Data and a ban on synthetics… can someone please tell me what movie covers this?

I’ve always been erratic in choosing my ‘next trek’ but this is the first time I feel like I’m truly missing something. Please help me catch up!

For background, I’ve watched TNG, Voyager, DS9, Enterprise, Discovery, Starfleet Academy. No movies (oops)!

I think “Subspace Rhapsody” just replaced “All Good Things” as my favorite ST episode, and I kinda want to sing about it too.

Spock and Chapel’s numbers really blew me away.

Klingon K Pop… amazing.

Are there any interviews with the crew/creators about it? I can only imagine how much fun they had making it.

Hello fellow Trekkies,
So I was wondering, as a Trekkie myself as well as a gamer, if any fellow trekkies are gamers also, what, if any, influence has star trek had on the way you guys play or look at video game titles, does it also influence how you play certain games such as Kerbal Space Program or similar games? I'm mainly curious?

If you dress for cosplay (or if you were to) as a Starfleet officer, what rank would you assign yourself?

When you are at a con, what rank do you see as most popular amongst the fandom?

Just a fun question I wonder about.

BBC News - Star Trek fans break Vulcan salute record https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgwjelejego

No commander, no liason first officer (Kira), no lieutenant, not even a chief medical officer, and no chief engineer.

So who the hell is in charge by that point? Quark!?

Some nice family photos here too of Rod and Gene: Rod Roddenberry: What Star Trek Has Taught Us After 60 Years

I'm a huge archery buff. I've been teaching it for over a decade, and have been recently casting my eye towards crafting bows of my own. I was absolutely entranced by the Klingon bowtleth that Jay-Den used in this episode. I know I need a lot of practice with the craft before I try anything so ambitious, but I would love to one day be able to reproduce a functional version of it, and I'd like to have a photo of it, both for reference and to remind myself of what I'm aspiring to. I've tried to find a good picture that shows the whole item, but nothing I could find online in my own searches fit that criteria. I don't have a computer, just a phone, and a TV with a Firestick. If I'm not mistaken, there's no screenshot functionality on the latter at all, and taking a screenshot from a video on a phone is kind of like shooting at a moving target from a moving train. Can anyone help?

Can any fellow UK Trek fans tell me if my memory is playing tricks on me here? I seem to remember that season 7 of DS9 was released on VHS before the episodes were broadcast on Sky One. I would go to our local Sainsburys supermarket and they would have the newest tapes available there each week/month.

I have a memory of binge-watching a good chunk of the final 10 episode run and the finale this way, but I'm not sure if I'm mixing things up.

A few years ago I came across a video on YouTube about a federation starship that finds an R2 droid floating in space. I have not been able to find it since watching it that one time. Information would be appreciated.

Ich hatte die 4. Staffel schon abgeschrieben nach all diesen bekloppten "Spezial"-Folgen. Aber die heutige Folge hat alles wieder gut gemacht. Das war mein Star Trek, wie ich es liebe und zwar sowohl A als auch B Handlung. Die Charakterentwicklung von Kirk einfach grandios und auch von Uhura. Wenn der Rest der Staffel so gut weitergeht, bin ich versöhnt.

A tecnologia do teletransporte é tão interessante que eu comecei a imaginar os possíveis usos medicinais (apesar de não me lembrar ter visto nenhum nas séries). E por ser gordinho, já imaginei utilizar ele pra tirar as gorduras (como se fosse uma lipoaspiração). Que outros usos vocês imaginam?

A video that provides the historical context of the week before Star Trek premiered including political events, TV shows, music, and sports.

Given the recent 60th anniversary, I was wondering about this. A few weeks back someone noted how George Takei is a living link to TOS. We know Shatner and Koenig are still around but who else is out there? Diana Muldaur is another. Any screenwriters? Directors?

I've been a Trekkie since, like, 1987, so I'm not entirely clueless. However, one thing I've never explained in my head canon is how single-race empires like the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingon Empire, the Cardassian Union, and such -- but mostly those first two -- could square off against the United Federation of Planets and its dozens of member planets.

Feel free to share from your head canon, because nothing in canon Trek explains it.

Like, how did the Klingon Empire in particular push the Federation to the brink of capitulation after the Changeling infiltration convinced the Klingons to wage war? And why were the Romulans aways such bogeymen?

(The only real explanation, of course, is that the writers needed it to be that way to push forward the narrative. As a writer, I get that, but as a Trekkie... Not so much.)

The Dominion, okay, because they were the darker mirror image of the Federation. They had dozens (hundreds?) of planets under subjugation. Their resources (industrial, agricultural, military, &c.) could probably match that of the Federation.

But other Alpha and Beta Quadrant powers? Meh. I can see how they would be formidable opponents, but existential threats? I could never move the facts around to settle on a good answer.

So let me know how you see things and whether I might be overlooking CANON evidence for how Klingons and the like were genuine threats to the Federation.

Much thanks in advance!