Is Sol too empty of ships in Star Trek?

[scvn2812 504]

I raised this thought in the other thread about STV and the possibility of navigational issues with going to warp in a system, such as having to dodge debris and other ships at C+ velocities. Bryan countered with the point that the Enterprise was the only ship in interception range and that we didn't really see any other ships on screen. My contention was that numbers of military ships don't necessarily reflect the number of ships around period. After all, for every cop car there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of semi trucks on the roads or for every blue water navy ship (the best analog we have to the Enterprise) there are many, many civilian ships of all sorts and far more as you get closer to land and you start to have more yachts, fishing trawlers, sport boats, cruise liners etc.

 

I say this, but on the other hand, there's something that rings a bit hollow in that argument. Earth in Star Trek NEVER has any traffic. I don't think we've ever seen a non-Starfleet ship coming and going from any location in the Sol system. Maybe in Enterprise? So what's the deal? Is this not important enough to show on screen and its just assumed to take place off camera? We've seen Coruscant and while it would be ludicrous to assume the same volume of traffic, shouldn't we at least see a handful of ships or even just one puttering to and from Earth orbit?

 

Am I think about this all wrong though? Is it wrong to transplant our economics onto a futuristic star nation that has access to on site fabrication of complex items via replicators (just add power and raw matter) and perhaps even minimally invasive mining techniques via transporters? Where we would assume that they would do most of their industry and mining in space for reasons of environmental protection, it may not even be an issue if you can use the transporter to basically pan for gold and mine in a way that doesn't require major excavations or release toxic chemicals into local aquifers. Mining of asteroids, barren planets and moons, comets etc. might only be for extremely rare materials and in quantities that we wouldn't see highways in space when we see orbital shots of Earth in Star Trek.

 

In other words, the exact opposite of what you see in Coruscant which is essentially a modern city in space with invisible highways and legions of ships coming and going at all times. Shipping might just be for stuff that can't be replicated and that list might be fairly small and involve relatively small objects. Well, aside from stuff to establish colonies like industrial replicators. One would assume those would be rather large but depending on their output, they might not be something shipped around often enough for there to be obvious commercial traffic coming and going from planets like Qonos or Earth.

 

The stuff carried by freighters in DS9 would be luxury goods like naturally created wines, unreplicatable natural resources, delicacies etc. meanwhile the stuff needed for day to day life is largely harvested from the environment without serious consequence and replicated on site.

 

I don't think it would be a stretch to say that maybe 90% of what the average household has to go to the store to buy would fall under the category of stuff we've seen replicated with trivial effort in Star Trek. That would take a big bite out of commercial shipping.

 

As far as travel, I wonder how many people are really traveling off world at any given time. Probably not all that many. If you're looking at a couple or three days to the next system, that's equivalent to a cross country drive. How often do most people really take trips lasting longer than a few hours? A couple times a year maybe, depending on the nature of our jobs. How about a week or longer? I go out of state for a week about once a year to visit relatives and that's about it. When I was working in retail, a week at a time is about as long as they'd let you have off in one chunk. That's a long time to be away from friends, family, work or other obligations. A trip across the Federation might last months. Historically, the only times people traveled that far were either for exploration, trade, war or migration. That's a long time to be away from home and I'd be willing to bet that in all cases except war and migration, maybe 1% of the population had the means, desire and a motive to drop everything and leave for a few months.

 

Travel time and the consequences for society has been on my mind to a degree, I spent a few weeks teaching about the American Revolution and that was the hardest thing to get across was how different people's lives were and how travel times had a lot of consequences for what people thought, how they acted and for the war itself. (Its not fun trying to fight a war half a planet away when communications between the quartermaster of your armies in the field and the motherland are limited to the speed of a sailing ship.)

[Brian Young 11,994]

To my knowledge, the only civilian ship we've seen in the Federation was the cargo ship the helmsman in Enterprise previously served. But that was before Starfleet had more than a few ships.

Later, the only non-Starfleet ship we've seen that I can recall was the automated freighter Enterprise destroyed in The Ultimate Computer.

In my opinion, from TOS onward, there is no civilian traffic.

Consider The Survivors, when a colony was destroyed but no one had a ship to get away. Consider all the times colonies were discovered where Starfleet ships had crashed, such as The Ensigns of Command, but I can't recall a single one from civilian ships. In that same episode, there was no mention of any civilian ships that could help with the evacuation. Note it was to take 3 weeks to get the necessary evacuation ship in place.

[scvn2812 504]

On the other hand, people do travel. Maybe not many and maybe not often but all those people at Risa come from somewhere, likewise Professor Galen, Picard's mentor, didn't have Starfleet assistance iirc and he went around the galaxy prior to running into Picard again. Also we have the Hansens who also weren't working for Starfleet and snagged a ship.

 

I've no objection to ships being rare and perhaps enormously "expensive" and possibly strictly regulated given that a shuttle is a potential weapon of mass destruction but clearly civilians can and do travel and can get a degree of autonomy.

[Khas 12,158]

To my knowledge, the only civilian ship we've seen in the Federation was the cargo ship the helmsman in Enterprise previously served. But that was before Starfleet had more than a few ships.

Later, the only non-Starfleet ship we've seen that I can recall was the automated freighter Enterprise destroyed in The Ultimate Computer.

In my opinion, from TOS onward, there is no civilian traffic.

Consider The Survivors, when a colony was destroyed but no one had a ship to get away. Consider all the times colonies were discovered where Starfleet ships had crashed, such as The Ensigns of Command, but I can't recall a single one from civilian ships. In that same episode, there was no mention of any civilian ships that could help with the evacuation. Note it was to take 3 weeks to get the necessary evacuation ship in place.

 

Actually, we see the Merchantman, in The Search for Spock, which was the ship that sold Kruge the information regarding Genesis. We also see that Oberth-class Starships are being used by civilians in the 24th Century, like the SS Tsiolkovsky from "The Naked Now", ans the SS Vico from "Hero Worship".

[scvn2812 504]

I think the most accurate portrait of space travel for Trek is likely that having possession of a ship, even a shuttle, is many, many times less common than having a boat. Space travel is time consuming and resource intensive so only a fraction of the population does it regularly but with very stringent regulation, it does happen. A shuttle with a hundred Gee acceleration like Brian's E-D crossing the surface of a Borg Cube, or that can use warp drive to hit relativistic speeds like the E-nil in ST:TMP, is a weapon of mass destruction after all. Who could blame any race for limiting unnecessary space travel? Especially when its noteworthy for smaller planets and outposts to have shields.

[Ted C 12]

We don't see much non-Starfleet space traffic of any kind in Star Trek. Aside from claims that the Federation is sufficiently communist that the government controls all space travel (your mileage may vary on that one), there's the issue of operational costs.

 

A starship has to be expensive to build. Boosting materials to orbit will have a high energy cost (even if you use transporter technology, you have to pay for the potential energy difference), all the electronics will probably use a lot of rare elements, the infrastructure for building ships has to exist. Even small ships that can be built on the surface will incur a lot of these costs. These are costs that a government can probably bear a lot more easily than a private citizen or even a small corporation (not that we actually see many independent corporations in Star Trek). An individual with a starship is probably stinking rich, and wealth is not a recognized life goal in Federation society.

 

As for the lack of Federation ships around Earth, I would suggest that their defense model is based on deploying most of their assets to their frontiers. Their goal is to detect and intercept threats at the border. To their thinking, an enemy fleet at Earth will have to have already fought through their defenses to get there. Their core worlds aren't supposed to be exposed to attack because their ships met the threat far away. This causes a crisis when an enemy shows up inside their defensive ring, and their fleets are trying to chase the attackers to Earth.

[scvn2812 504]

That is dead on what I was thinking but just didn't manage to articulate in that way. I absolutely concur that private civilian space travel is probably not outlawed within the Federation but sanity dictates that it is probably even more strictly regulated than air travel is today. If an improperly flown plane, even a little biplane, is a tragedy waiting to happen, a mishandled shuttle at sufficient velocity may be apocalyptic. Its never been discussed what would happen to a planet if it were struck by a warp driven ship but I doubt it would be pleasant.

[Tyralak 12,068]

I have always figured it was a combination of a few factors. One, stories in Star Trek are almost exclusively told from the perspective of the military. Civilian ships are usually not large parts of the story line. Two, the SFX budgets being as limited as they were, the expense of showing large amounts of civilian craft, especially when they weren't important to the story, would have likely been considered a waste of money. Three, space isn't like your standard interstate. It's BIG. REALLY big. Because they aren't in viewing range, doesn't mean they aren't there. I live in the San Francisco bay area, there are a couple of naval bases around here. You don't have a ton of civilian traffic around those bases. If you were filming a TV series based on a navy ship, and you filmed the base, you wouldn't see many civilian ships at all. I suspect it's the same thing in Trek.

[Afishymeadow 534]

I imagine Starfleet would have orbital docking stations around bodies all over the solar system. No doubt with their own shuttles.

[enigma 521]

There should still be a lot of small ships\shuttles flying around even if one percent of Earth's population could afford it. Then there are commercial shuttle\ship pilots. Taxi service, Cruise ships, Freighters, etc...

 

Then there should also be tourists from other member planets, corporate owned starbases (you don't think corporations wouldn't love to build their own?), refueling depots and so forth.

 

Not only that but the UFP should have a "Home Fleet" as it were, to defend Earth and the rest of the Sol system. (Something like having the cap ships stationed near Earth with a few stationed over Mars while a few squadrons of fighters patrol the outskirts of the system.

 

The bare minimum is that there should have been some traffic to and from Earth but plenty of atmospheric traffic. The problems with falling shuttles and whatnot can be partially solved by having a lot of tractor beam platforms stationed in the sky.

[Jason 27]

Problem argue as far Earth goes beyond military and tourism or for the fun having fly shuttlecaft not civilian needs they can simple beam form place to place. They space station and surface defense again like give lot more fire power then starships do. We did get see some defense in place Star Trek Best of Both World part II.

More important point must of time when see Earth it is under attack. Any civilian own ship fled the solar system. Must of time when we get see Earth it time of when they flee.