Why does starfleet use uss

The mission of the Enterprise is primarily research and diplomacy, and it is superbly equipped for both. For those occasions when a show of military force is unavoidable, the ship is also equipped with an impressive array of defensive and offensive weapons. The mission of the Enterprise is exploration, science, and diplomacy.

It is not a warship, nor is Starfleet a military organization in the 20th Century sense. Nevertheless, the galaxy is a big place, full of unknown -- and occasionally hostile -- life forms.

For those times when the Enterprise must protect itself and the interests of the Federation, the ship is fully equipped with both defensive and offensive weaponry. When provoked, the Enterprise is a formidable adversary. The Federation Starfleet is an extraordinary organization dedicated to exploration, diplomacy, research, and defense.

Although its mission includes military elements vital to the Federation's survival, Starfleet does not primarily consider itself a military organization in the 20th Century sense of the term. In reality space is very big and filled with a lot of nothing. I bet most stellar systems are probably not so interesting, that they'd attract the interest of every baddie or random alien with something to prove.

That said, even with FTL travel I'd venture to say that most star ships go years between serious injuries, let alone deaths. Life just isn't that exciting. Also, although Star Fleet may have a number of Ships of the Line and labeled warships, their proclaimed primary mission has always been one of peaceful exploration. There seems to be no issue in TOS with romantic liaisons when they don't interfere with duty.

The reasons for it are explicit in subsidiary materials for TNG: For long duration vessels, the ability to keep family close by allows having a relatively "normal" life.

Given the size of the Federation, and the speeds given, taking annual leave "back home" could be a physical impossibility, or at least prohibitively long, for many crews.

Shorter duration vessels seem to have families back at home port, much like modern naval practice, tho' it's quite likely that a small and rotating group of family members might be abord a given vessel, in lieu of leave.

Kirk wasn't also a crewmember; likewise, it doesn't indicate she is. We see some other non-uniformed individuals, as well But nothing conclusive.

The divergence would tend to imply that later ships probably don't carry significant numbers, but there is little conclusive evidence. Because, like all her predecessors, this Enterprise was a ship of exploration, not war. In an alternate timeline , the Enterprise was the first Galaxy-class war ship constructed.

I was always under the impression that Star Fleet didn't have any dedicated warships until the Defiant Class , a class not fully developed and realized until the DS9 series. Most Star Fleet vessels were meant to support the main role of peaceful exploration. While the ships could be well armed, they were typically meant to avoid violence when possible. The design of the ships and hypothetically the crewing philosophy was really worked out pre-Borg.

Like any bureaucracy, they may have simply never updated their idea of how to crew a ship. It should also be noted that not all Star Fleet vessels carried families.

I don't believe that Voyager carried any family members. It could be that Enterprise-D and other Galaxy class ships carried families as an experiment, and most importantly, to give the writers a whole new stream of episodes ideas and twists available.

I think this was part of the utopian vision Gene Roddenberry had about the future. Any utopian vision essentially relies on not having to make the trade-offs between competing good things in the real world - in our real world, it's clear that having a ship full of families and civilians on a ship that sees combat every third episode is a bad idea.

Maybe the idea was to do a lot of storytelling with the families, but outside of Wesley Crusher, I don't recall much. What would have been really interesting would have been a story-arc where it becomes clear to Starfleet that the mission of the Enterprise was incompatible with the safety of the families Deep Space Nine can be seen as the rebuttal to this vision, and that's why it's my favorite of the Treks.

Families are still present, but are exposed to danger, and occasionally ARE actually evacuated. Roddenberry intended the "wagon train to the stars" motif. It was changed by the network into a more militaristic series in the context of the Cold War during which it was developed. Vietnam made the Communists the bad guys during this era. The dark, hairy Klingons fill the roll in the series.

If you watched TNG closely, you will observe times when Picard does not dance around the point that he will push his people to take on missions from which he knows they will most probably not return.

One could call it "cold blooded". This is a notably point. The wagon train concept is inherently hostile. The "settlers" are going where they can only cause conflict with the indigenous populations, and they should know that.

TNG seeks to present the future as a place where there is no human induced war, but focuses, too often, on human induced warfare. If humans weren't there, there'd be no war with the humans in "the final frontier", most of the time. One can not maintain hostilities with the Romulans, the risk of hostilities with the Klingons, and a host of other hostile species, who don't care for humans the Gorn, etc.

If children and spouses are on board Federation ships, I see it more as the result of massive population growth on a galactic scale, and a Federation Council that is willing to risk the lives of women and children to support its propaganda.

Given the rate at which humans can reproduce, and assuming that inter-stellar colonization has rendered control of human population a low priority, one could even imagine a fundamental need for expansion, either on the basis of growing populations, or the concept in business that one is either growing or dying, transferred to an imperial scale.

As has been noted, there is little enough human bloodshed in the series to make the use of children and spouses as propaganda tools "in universe" a viable gambit and a means of more effectively spreading the Federation's influence wherever its "vessels of exploration" choose to go, with built-in colonizers on-board.

If modern "adventure" sports people take their children into dangerous situations, the concept of such persons being "the special breed" that joins Starfleet, per the propaganda concept, makes perfect sense. What would be too dangerous to risk for some, makes it more interesting for others, a means of "setting themselves apart". In such a society, who worries about the loss of a parent or a ship?

The dead don't speak, and the living embrace the loss as their own badge of honor for service. Service is, after all, voluntary, and in the U. No demonstrations daily in the streets to stop the war. But I don't think there was any Federation in the early episodes. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Does USS imply a Starfleet vessel? Ask Question. Asked 3 years, 3 months ago. Active 3 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 6k times. Improve this question.

Machavity RoboKaren RoboKaren 3, 1 1 gold badge 21 21 silver badges 40 40 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. No, but it's complicated Please note that there are two types of prefixes described: The name prefix , followed by ship's name. It is a bit vague if all Federation ships belonged to Starfleet. In a not completely canon Star Trek: Voyager Technical Manual we read that: NAR registry number prefixes were among those used on vessels that were non-Starfleet but still under Federation jurisdiction.

Italics mine. Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Edmund Dantes Edmund Dantes 7, 1 1 gold badge 38 38 silver badges 55 55 bronze badges. Sorry, I mangled the question and fixed it in post. I meant whether USS meant it was owned by Starfleet rather than under private or civilian ownership. Frustrated, Rutherford insults and knocks around the virtual avatar only for it to murderously rebel and attempt to kill both of the junior officers while they're trapped inside of the program.

Ever since the Holodeck's introduction, as the recreation room on the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Animated Series , the chamber has a tendency to go rogue and override safety protocols, directly putting crew members' lives in mortal danger. Multiple episodes of The Next Generation had crew members trapped in the virtual reality, fighting for their lives against the fantasies they themselves had programmed. Perhaps most notably, The Next Generation had a program of Sherlock Holmes' arch-nemesis Professor James Moriarty gain sentience and escape the Holodeck to menace the entire crew of the Enterprise through his connections to the ship's computer systems before being negotiated with to stand down and leave.

While Rutherford and Tendi are similarly able to escape from Badgey's hunt, wounded but alive, it does open the question that if there's a part of a starship that has such an evident frequency in malfunctioning and putting its crew's lives at risk of injury and death, why keep them on board the vessels until the technology has been effectively corrected to prevent such potential safety hazards. In the case of Lower Decks , the design flaw is explained by Rutherford rushing development on his custom program for the explicit purpose of impressing Tendi, but this is far from the only instance in which the Holodeck has malfunctioned so horrifically.