Provided by Dalekcheese@lemmy.world
The Enterprise-D was a symbol of life in the Federation of that era. They enjoyed decades of prosperity and relative peace, and the design philosophy of the Galaxy class reflected that.
The Enterprise was built for deep space exploration and was (in theory) supposed to be deployed for years at a time without returning to Earth. The designers wanted it to be comfortable, and Starfleet personnel wanted their families to be with them on those long haul missions.
Being a major power in their part of their galaxy that was technologically advanced and at relative peace with other major powers, they were a little full of themselves.
Not long after its mission started Starfleet began encountering forces like the Borg and the Dominion, and they realized they weren’t quite as untouchable as they thought. This became a major theme both in-universe and in the real world.
The designers wanted it to be comfortable
I think it’s funny when people criticize the D for looking like a luxury hotel in space. You’ve got crew deployed on this ship potentially for years at a time. Of course you’re going to put some wood paneling, beige and pastel colors, and potted plants in there. Would you want to spend every waking hour looking at gunmetal grey deck plating? Spruce the place up a bit! Saves
moneytime and effort on dealing with all the mental breakdowns.And when it does make it home, it’s not a rust bucket!
IE, after episode one all the families should have been evacuated from the ship leaving only crew
I was about to make a point about how the USS Odyssey being destroyed by the Jem’Hadar with all hands lost is a case in point, but it turns out that they did exactly that:
Fortunately, most non-essential crewmembers and all civilians had been offloaded at DS9 prior to departure, saving hundreds of lives.
When the notion of carrying crew members’ families on future ships is raised on Enterprise in the NX-01 era, Reed also rightly calls this out as a moronic idea.
They’re hoping Geordi LaForge is in command - he ordered the only saucer separation where the intention was to safely preserve the civilians, and where the separation itself wasn’t an untested dangerous high-warp maneuver. (The Arsenal of Freedom)
Riker, on the other hand, separated the saucer in order to shoot at a Borg cube from two directions at once. (The Best of Both Worlds)
Picard is the one who wouldn’t drop out of warp to do the separation. (Encounter at Farpoint)
Riker also ordered saucer separation after a warp core breach was in progress and unstoppable. (Generations)
Those were the only four times the Enterprise-D was shown to separate.
It was originally intended to be a thing every time the D had to get dangerous, but it was rejected due to taking up too much screen time.
The limitation/rarity ended up being pretty special, so it worked out better this way in my opinion.
Yellow and red alerts where a much more natural ways to heighten the tension.
Saucer separations were truly an “Oh shit!” moment when they had to resort to such measures.
But thanks to Riker, twas The OG Multi-Vector Assault Mode field test basically.
These kids don’t traumatize themselves, gotta do something since all of Earth’s problems are solved
It builds character!
It would be like if Columbus in 1492 decided to go exploring the far unknown ocean and asked all his crew to bring along their families because they would all be gone for a long while … what could go wrong?
Besides running out of food?
Head canon: In times of infinite abundance, people prefer a glorious death to an easy life, even for their children.
I mean even in the actual canon, the civilians and families that live aboard the Enterprise signed up for the experience knowing full well that seeking out new life and new civilizations would incur the possibility of those things being hostile. The crew does their best to minimize risk but ultimately if those people wanted a life of guaranteed peace and safety they’d have stayed on Earth.
Which series have children on-board? Enterprise didn’t. TOS didn’t. TNG did. DS-9 did, but it’s also largely not a military posting. Voyager?
TNG only. The Enterprise D was the only headline ship that was meant to carry a permanent civilian population
One baby was born on voyager, but that wasn’t supposed to happen, she just happened to be pregnant when they left.
I don’t recall any others (well, one other, but that’s way at the end), though I could easily be forgetting, but it certainly wasn’t intended in that case.
Voyger was explicitly designed for deep exploration although it was tasked with hunting the Maquis at the start of the series. It’s crew compliment was a lot less than Enterprise D (given it was the flagship).
See the people of the Culture - while life in a ship is pretty safe normally ships can get up to dangerous stuff.
The people of the Culture? Is that an episode?
Ian M Banks book series. The Culture is a hyper advanced civilization run by sentient AIs who control giant colony ships and interact with other civilizations.
One of these days I’m gonna have to read the whole thing myself, but in the first few pages the ST:TMP novelization, Roddenberry himself sort of implies that Starfleet is full of deeply conservative throwbacks who have a weird combination of wanderlust and tolerance for authority that life on post-scarcity Earth cannot satisfy, and that both they and the Earthbound population are happier with Starfleet personnel being off-planet.
It strikes me as a hand-wavey way to justify to himself how he can have a free-love, no-money utopian society, yet all the media he could manage to get made is basically showing us a combination of NASA and the US Navy, with a pretty marked tendency towards the latter. For Gene, any 23rd-century people whom 20th-century minds could even comprehend would have to be psychological Luddites.