Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn\u2019t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it\u2019s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, \ntooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they \ndon\u2019t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight \nthem, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit \nspace-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they\u2019re as likely \nas not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the \nprocess. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and \naccidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn\u2019t actually \nhappen to anyone else; it\u2019s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.\n
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So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
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Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don\u2019t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They\u2019re just like \u201cyes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience\u201d.
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THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE\u2019S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
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vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
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humans: we\u2019re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
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vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
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humans: hahaha yeah
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humans: it did tho
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vsa: IT EXPLODED
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humans: it exploded twice as fast
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I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they\u2019re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
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Yeah, I love this.
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Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they\u2019re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
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Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their \u201ccooler\u201d heads take action in months or weeks.
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All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
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klingons: okay we don\u2019t get it
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vulcan science academy: get what
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klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you\u2019re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
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klingons: why do you let them run your federation
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vulcan science academy: look
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vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don\u2019t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
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vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they\u2019re offended by that, steal their\u00a0warp cores, plug those\u00a0together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn\u2019t want to waste a trip.\u00a0
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vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it\u2019s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.\u00a0
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vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.\u00a0
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klingons: \u2026. can we be a part of your federation
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Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the \u201cfirst human warp drive\u201d thing in the movie. That was\u2026 Not how Vulcans would have done it.
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you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O\u2019Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station\u2019s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer\u2019s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
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\nyou know what, I\u2019m not done with this post. let\u2019s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,\n testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful\n of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation \nof a treaty with the Romulans. they\u2019re playing catchup trying to develop\n a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?\n do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just \nsee if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey, \nwhile we\u2019re at it, while we\u2019re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let\u2019s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we\u2019re invisible.
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\u201cbut why\u201d said the one Vulcan in the room.
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\u201cbecause that would fucking rule\u201d said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
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there\n must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human \nengineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every \nsingle one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like \u201cour\n assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate \nbuilt a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you\u2019ve eaten \nit.\u201d
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Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
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Like:\u00a0\u201cGuys, we totally wouldn\u2019t do that!\u201d But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: \u201cYou totally did.\u201d
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\u201cThat was ONE TIME.\u201d\u00a0
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There\u2019s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.\u00a0
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And human historians go,\u00a0\u201cOh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.\u201d To which the producers respond: \u201cHow is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????\u201d
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There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is\u00a0\u201cWe stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.\u201d
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reblog for new meta.\u00a0
RE that last line: McGuyver.\u00a0
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\u201cMacGuyver\u201d is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
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during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.\u00a0
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\u201cwhat is the word\u00a0\u2018fuck\u2019 for,\u201d the innocent young vulcans want to know.\u00a0\u201csurely there are more logical intensity modifiers.\u201d
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\u201cyeah, you\u2019d think so,\u201d say the weary, jaded vulcan professors.\u00a0\u201cyou\u2019d really fucking think so.\u201d
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there is a phrase in vulcan for\u00a0\u2018the particular moment you understand what the word\u00a0\u2018fuck\u2019 is for\u2019.\u00a0
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This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
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The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
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The Borg weren\u2019t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50\u2032s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
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This thread is amazing. Even as a baby star trek nerd that only really knows the new movies.
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\u201cthere is a phrase in vulcan for \u2018the particular moment you understand what the word \u2018fuck\u2019 is for\u2019.\u201d
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I just died
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I lost my shit at \u201ctoasts your bread after you\u2019ve eaten it\u201d
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Oh please please someone write this
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the best thing about this post is that the way it\u2019s written - by multiple human authors getting over-excited about ridiculous, wonderful, impossible ideas that ought by rights to be terrifying - is itself proof that we\u2019re like this
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Where’s that old three-column graphic with the hammer-n-sickle and the swastika above summaries of Soviet and Nazi doctrine and the American eagle above like “if we don’t know what we’re doing, surely the enemy can’t predict us”?
Anyway just a reminder that Trek, like a lot of midcentury spaceship SF, was often adapted from around-WWII American Navy experience. (That’s why spaceships have self-destructs: because seaships can be scuttled. That’s a big part of why Ron Moore’s neo-BSG was interesting, because it went back to the Navy well, only modernized with all-volunteer crews and carrier doctrine)
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