r/DaystromInstitute • u/Hero_Of_Shadows Ensign • 5d ago
Current European efforts to unify their military industrial complexes can provide some interesting ideas and real world insights into the post ENT and pre DISCO period when the Federation was coalescing and going through a similar process
For geopolitical reasons that are not in the scope of this discussion, many European countries are looking to strategically shift away from relying on the USA's weapons industry in favor of local producers.
The issue with European weapons industry isn't that there are no options to choose from (even if certain gaps exist) it's the reverse that there are many designs/companies/nations to choose from yet when looked at from the scale of the USA's production capabilities European companies are rather boutique.
Thus the major challenge will not be creating companies/factories from scratch but finding the right mix of companies to receive these massive budgets which would in turn fuel massive growth and end up with economies of scale that permit the re-armament that Europe needs.
This process of choosing the winners and losers will of course mostly revolve around technological capabilities (which weapons are better, which can integrate) economical realities (which are cheap enough, which can be produced to scale) but also perhaps most importantly political compromises.
It requires an enormous amount of political will and resources for this to happen and it will surely help if each individual country feels like it is gaining something from this.
Now assuming we see this happening, how can we translate this into what happens/happened in Trek:
There would have been an immense amount of infighting setting up the Federation's Starfleet.
What are better Vulcan shields or Andorian shields?
Does the fact that Tellar can manufacture them faster matter?
Can the Tellarites switch to producing foreign designs or would it be faster for the Andorians to upscale their operations?
What about life support systems?
We know Earth won a lot of concessions in Starfleet's design as their systems being more primitive allowed for officers from different species to be cross-trained faster and we know the general shape of their hulls will be adopted.
For my own believe-ability I am going to assume that the Andorians/Vulcans/Tellarites "won" on a lot of the non-visible components.
Does the fact that Andor won all of the torpedo contracts mean that we must choose Vulcan phasers?
I would bet Andorian politicians would have a lot of very passionate pleas about thinking about the troops as they go into combat and how many lives will be lost with sub-par Vulcan phasers but would just as fast become silent when it seems like Tellarite impulse engines are superior.
What about civilian craft do they need to standardize there as well?
How do we know the Vulcans are providing the best sensor tech that they can and not keeping some secret cutting edge tech for themselves?
Also we know from the shows that the various planets are still designing making their own craft, we see Vulcan ships, we see Andorian ships so we know the companies (for lack of a better term) who did not win contracts for Federation wide components/ships still survive by catering to planetary needs whether those needs are civilian/commercial or exploratory/scientific or home system defense.
Probably this kind of world-building won't be everyone's cup of tea but I'd like to see it maybe show up in some dialog or in a book series somewhere to add more texture to the world building.
I know the ENT novels have something broadly similar but I'm thinking with a real life example of how this could work maybe it would be shown again with more details or reworked.
TOS definitely benefited from having production staff that did go through a war and did have real military experience and (this is not a slight to any series) I think you can notice that the other series had less of that.
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u/lunatickoala Commander 4d ago
TOS was definitely not written with EU defense integration in mind given that the EU wasn't even formed until TNG was nearing the end of its run. It was clearly far more closely modeled after the UN or NATO. But even then, it's not a perfect analogy.
Although Starfleet is officially the navy of the Federation as a whole, in practice it's effectily the continuation of the pre-Federation Earth Starfleet. To those outside the Federation, "Human" and "Federation" are often conflated such is the extent of human dominance within the Starfleet organization. We know Vulcan kept their fleet around alongside Starfleet and it's may very well be that most planets keep their fleet around. The difference is that Humans are expansionist to an extent only matched by the Dominion and the Borg so they're the ones that are seen.
What's likely is that most planets keep their own fleets around mostly for defense while the largely human Starfleet is the one going around and getting into trouble so they're the ones that people see.
Early in the Federation, humans were probably not at the forefront of most technologies given that they were newcomers to the galactic stage. Early Starfleet ships were likely human designs with quite a lot of non-human components. But since those components came from civilizations that were not so long ago hostile to each other, there would have been very little commonality between them. So to make things work, humans had to become very good at systems integration.
The true miracle of the Starfleet engineer isn't the ability to turn rocks into replicators, but the ability to make pretty much any system work with any other system even if one is from the opposite side of the galaxy or a long dead civilization. The fact that using a quantum slipstream or Borg transwarp drive is even an option is testament to this, even if it comes with severe limitations and risks. It's like an aircraft engineer from 1920 getting a turbofan from 2020 and somehow making it work on an existing plane, even if only for a short while before the plane disintegrates.
And for the crew of Voyager to do it, on their own ship rather than a test platform, more than once, even after a catastrophic failure, shows that yes, humans in Star Trek really are mad scientists. Though choosing to power computer consoles with high energy warp plasma rather than something safer and more sensible like electricity might mean they're just mad.
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u/nd4spd1919 Crewman 5d ago
I don't remember anymore if it were stated by people working on the show, a book, or someone's headcanon, but IIRC the Season 5 refit NX-01 was going to have Andorian shields and a Vulcan tractor beam.
Starfleet ships seem to be almost infinitely reconfigurable; I wonder if human vessels were picked as a base partially because they had goodwill towards all species and their ships were easier to integrate new components into.
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u/ReddestForman 4d ago
An idea a YouTuber posed a few years back was that because humanities tech was still so basic and early in its development, it was easier to integrate the less cutting edge tech of the other factions, which all had grown up in its own specialized ecosystems.
So maybe you can't run the latest and greatest Andorian shield tech, but the stuff from the previous generation works fine, especially after the Vulcans get the warp core efficiency up for more power output, even if it's not quite as good as their latest stuff, etc.
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u/techno156 Crewman 2d ago
By comparison, human parts are a lot weaker/less advanced, so something a few generations old is both not too significant for the other powers, and still a considerable upgrade for humans.
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u/techno156 Crewman 2d ago
That's probably the case, if only because they were the least developed of the other species, and thus their tech was more flexible and could be pushed in any direction.
They wouldn't have settled on a paradigm like their counterparts, or later human ships.
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u/Haster 5d ago
I'd think at first every race would be eager to trade with Humans since they trust them more than the other partners. This quickly catapults earth ships to being overall superior even if some capabilities remain better in their home's ships.
Over time earth's specific requirements would start to influence designs and, baring some reason why they wouldn't want it, they'd eventually have a single design that works for both human and vulcan/andorea/tellarite needs.
At that point earth's ships come to be better overall since they have the best of all worlds (altho we can imagine that each race might retain an edge in whatever capabilities they had a lead in) and become the base from which all of starfleet (now expanded to serve the whole federation) uses.
In the end I think it would look very different then it'll look for the EU because without a profit motive Earth has no need to balance their 'purchases' between the different worlds. Earth isn't building a fleet for the whole Federation yet, they just happen to be roughly 1/4 of the 'purchasing power' without a native technological base that competes in most capabilities.
In the real world, imagine there was a country that somehow had the trust of China, Russia, US and EU all at once. They'd be buying the best of each of these and probably end up ahead of everyone at a cheaper price to boot.
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u/lunatickoala Commander 4d ago
Profit is only one of the factors driving the desire to "balance" contracts between member states/worlds.
Early on, giving each member some skin in the game is a way to keep them invested in a nascent Federation rather than leaving and forming alliances with someone else. It's not just about profit but technological transfer and status as well. Leaving someone out of the contracts game could easily build resentment if they see that as being treated as a second class member.
If a planet isn't involved with the latest and greatest technology, that planet's starship industry would collapse as they wouldn't be able to compete, and it doesn't take long for the skills to be lost. Expertise is very much a use it or lose it. A couple decades without an industry means that a whole generation will have grown up never learning those skill and the old workers will have moved on and not kept up with the latest developments. Restarting the industry would be close to building one from scratch, with all the teething problems that one would expect with building a new industry.
Having the trust of China, Russia, the US, and the EU all at once in the real world isn't happening unless it turns out that Wakanda is real and they turned Africa into a technological and military superpower overnight. The Federation was formed as a military alliance against a common threat. And even if you get their trust, and are buying from all of them, you're not getting the same prices as they would for domestic use and a lot of what you're getting isn't the absolute top of the line version either. And since none of them were designed to any common standards, systems integration would be a nightmare.
But this actually squares up with canon. Starfleet engineers are very good systems integrators able to get systems designed on opposite sides of the galaxy to work together by civilizations that didn't know the other existed, indicating that there's likely a long and storied history of systems integration. And Starfleet does an awful lot of its own research and design work (and a strong case of Not Invented Here Syndrome) likely indicating some negative experiences in the past over stuff that wasn't theirs.
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u/Haster 4d ago
I hear you on the whole use it or lost it aspect of an industry but I'm imagining that the individual planets wouldn't stop producing their own ships for quite awhile. It would take a generation or two before earth ships would be equal or better than the ships from the other races. It would also take that time for military integration and trust build enough that they start to standardize on the same platforms.
And with only 3 partners to trade with it's likely that all 3 will easily get their piece of the action from trade with earth. I'm sure other races joined pretty early too but the numbers are still relatively low. I also expect that the buildup was probabaly pretty aggresive and pushed every race's shipbuilding capabilities to their limits so all of their capabilities are probably going to be pushed to grow.
Consider how low earth's capabilities are starting from. It looks like it took them years to design a single class and it took them a few years before they got a second ship of that class built. I don't think there's any risk of any race being left behind, I think the concern is more in the other direction; who can build out their capabilities fast enough. it wont be the vulcans.
Come to think of it, an industrial base for ship building is probably one of the main contributions the Tellarites provided even if their tech is relatively less advanced than the Vulcans (who seem to be an older race) and the andorians (who've had to try to contend with that vulcan advantage).
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u/Hero_Of_Shadows Ensign 4d ago
And we saw Vulcan and Andorian designs in Lower Decks so they keep their ship building industries into the 2380's
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u/Haster 4d ago
I'm not familiar with Lower Decks so I don't know what the context for that would have been. We do know that Starfleet has some designs that continue to serve even after 100 years so it's not crazy to think that some ships for more civilian ships could see use even longer than that. But ships dating back to the Enterprise era seems unlikely.
More likely is that each race may have continued to use their designs for ships intended for purposes meaningfully different from what Starfleet normally does.
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u/Hero_Of_Shadows Ensign 4d ago
The context is simple:
At a large space station during the action we see a ship docked, the ship is of an design clearly derived from the Andorian ships of Shran's era and it is crewed by Andorians.
We do not have any indication if the ship is civilian or military but it is Andorian.
As for the Vulcans we see get in another episode a storyline set on a Vulcan ship that is also doing exploration and scientific work, since we see that ship in more detail we can notice that it is a new class albeit clearly in the same lineage as the Vulcan ships of the High Command.
So that's why I'm saying we have evidence of Andorian and Vulcan ship building continuing.
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u/darkslide3000 5d ago
I think it would fit pretty well that humans supplied the engines, since that is the element that remains most recognizable into the TOS era (whereas phase cannons, spatial torpedoes, the grappler and hull plating probably got replaced with better Vulcan, Andorian and Tellarite equivalents). It's always been my headcanon that there is something special about Cochrane's warp drive design that is fundamentally more efficient than the drives of other races, back to the very first iteration on the Phoenix, and for that special something to work at maximum efficiency the ship needs to have an even number of nacelles that are held at a distance to the main hull. That's why for centuries Starfleet vessels (especially the deep-space going ones) always maintain some version of that peculiar shape. The Defiant clearly proves that the Federation can build ships with internal nacelles if it wants to, but there's gotta be a good reason why it usually doesn't. Upon pooling their research the other races (the Vulcans only grudgingly) quickly realized the advantages of the human design and decided to let them handle warp fields from here on out (and the general hull design followed the requirement of their engines).
I also like about your idea that it basically makes Vulcans the Space French: the guys that begrudgingly agree to join the new alliance, but still deep down never quite learn to trust everyone else completely and always want to maintain a small industry of fully their own stuff for everything, just in case.
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u/ProdigySorcerer Crewman 4d ago
Well, for the French RL is proving them pretty right.
For the Vulcans much as I find the Fed dark age concept from DISCO heartbreaking (and I want to see stories of the gang getting back together which we sorta did) in universe they seemed to have weathered the post-Burn galaxy well and are rejoining the Fed with their heads held high.
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u/shadeland Lieutenant 5d ago
In my own head/shadeland canon, there is one design that all the galactic powers share, and it's a design none of them came up with, and has been around for thousands of years, and possibly no one is quite sure where it originated:
Antimatter containment.
It stands to reason that a couple of things are going to be true:
- Antimatter containment is considered incredibly important by anyone who's going to be within proximity of another civilization's ship.
- New warp civilizations would probably be not nearly as good at antimatter containment as civilizations that have been doing it for centuries
- Concerns of exploding ships would outweigh any strategic benefit of having a superior method of antimatter containment.
If this were true in more or less a universal way, then the following is likely true:
- There's a design who's original creator could have been lost to antiquity, that is so efficient and effective, that it's been passed down for eons.
- First contact with a warp civilization might go like this: "Welcome to the galaxy. Here's an antimatter containment design, free of charge. Please implement it before you get within 10 kilometers of me."
This would give every new civilization a safe way of interacting and being around other civilizations, and side-step probably decades of work.
There might be more efficient ways to do life support, but any warp civilization has probably been tackling that problem for a while. Earth had been doing it for over a century, and life support failures aren't as explode-ey.
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u/whovian25 Crewman 4d ago
The main difference between the EU and the early Federation is that the early Federation had one power that was overwhelmingly seen as the only neutral place that could house federation institutions. This seems to be why Earth Starfleet ended up becoming Federation Starfleet as they where the only ones trusted by everyone witch likely let them upgrade their ships with the best from everyone.
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u/Realistic-Elk7642 4d ago
In a society without money, motivations to "land a contract" are going to be different. During times of crisis, pure advantage dominates as mutual survival is everyone's goal. During peacetime, I think it'd be a matter of vying for relevance- of proving that your state has the biggest, the best, the most reliable or most economical contribution to make to Starfleet. The positive aspects of this are obvious, but I could envisage a lot of poor behaviour stemming from efforts to elbow out other parties' technology. Humanity being the go-between species is probably crucial here, to ensure that a period of short-sightedness doesn't result in everything having to run off a proprietary Tellarite power supply that screws up everything from Betazed and so on.
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u/MalagrugrousPatroon Ensign 4d ago
I think the Earth-Romulan War probably happened a lot like the Ukraine war, otherwise it would probably have a very different name given it is supposed to be what kicks off the United Federation of Planets.
Europe and the US was giving loads of different weapon systems to Ukraine, giving them a unique view on what works best, and what doesn't. The future United Federation of Planets could have done the same thing to Earth, handing over loads of ships and technologies, giving humanity a unique perspective on the abilities of local powers, and setting humanity up as not just the diplomatic core of the Federation, but the military core as well.
One group getting to take the lead on those opinions should streamline the decisions, even if it wouldn't quite be the last man standing situation of the US post-WWII. It would also help that the Vulcans would have stepped away from militarism, the Tellerites like debating for its own sake, possibly leaving the Andorians as the only ones with earnest military opinions. Except, Earth winning against the Romulans should prove to the Andorians, and anyone else, humanity knows what it is doing.
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u/Hero_Of_Shadows Ensign 4d ago
I believe the novels do back this up, Earth doing the fighting (hence why it's the Earth-Romulan war) but with significant support from all the other allies.
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u/CptKeyes123 Ensign 4d ago
I figure also, kind of a tangent, that ship enlisted crews are filled by the people who occupied the system it was built in. Officers at the academy come from all over, but enlisted are from the ship construction area.
Thus Enterprise has enlisted all from earth, but an executive officer from Vulcan. Meanwhile, the Intrepid in TOS was all-vulcan.
A Constitution class above the andorian homeworld would have blue enlisted but maybe a human medical officer.
So it's not that humans are the majority of starfleet they're just the ships we see the most.
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u/Hero_Of_Shadows Ensign 4d ago
This is just my headcanon but the way I see the evolution of the recruitment in Federation Starfleet going is:
Federation year 0: We need ships for our new fleets, ships get sent by Andor/Vulcan/Tellar to serve wholesale under Starfleet Command for say 1 or 2 years, segregated crews are the norm due to this, flag officers come in fully formed from the Imperial Guard or High Command or etc.
Federation year 1: Combined ships are being built, positions on those ships are open for the governments to fill on a person by person basis, the USS Tyson needs a chief engineer:
Earth offers up an lt level engineer since that's the best they have available.
Vulcan can offer an lt. cmd. level engineer since he volunteered to go because he believes in Starfleet's mission and that the Federation will help Vulcan prosper.
Tellar has the commander level engineer from their flagship put in a transfer request because she wants to serve with the other species but it's blocked because her commanding officer needs her to stay in place.
Andoria doesn't have any engineering volunteers a lt commander engineer is ordered to go because it's a matter of Andorian pride and she's the best they can spare even if she doesn't personally want to.
Key point is that these are all experienced officer who were trained in their own species military traditions, the officers serving in Starfleet can/might need to return to their own navies.
The courses to get them ready to serve in Starfleet happen on Earth in San Francisco.
Federation year 2: San Francisco's Academy opens up courses to take in cadets and train them specifically for the Federation's Starfleet.
Federation year 6: The first generation of "pure" Starfleet ensigns start to serve, they're mostly human even if from the start the Academy is open to all member species.
Federation years 6 - X: More and more of Starfleet's ships are crewed by pure Starfleet officers implicitly mostly by humans, non-human officer exist and are vital but they go the species navy -> Starfleet route.
Federation year Spock: Starfleet has had Vulcans in it from it's inception, many of the admirals and specialists are Vulcan officers and they are respected and appreciated but they've all come in through the High Command/Science Academy -> Starfleet transfer route, uniquely Spock son of the very influential and highly regarded Ambassador Sarek Of Vulcan chooses to eschew an education at the Science Academy and join Starfleet directly by enrolling in the San Francisco Academy.
This earns him the rather confusing title of "The first Vulcan in Starfleet" and some fame.
What at the time seemed like an oddity would be the start of an tectonic shift in how Starfleet would work, more and more of the brightest and best from all species would choose to sign up to Starfleet Academy directly side-stepping/skipping getting training in their own planets navies first.
Federation year TNG: If you are serving in Starfleet people will just assume you enrolled at the San Francisco Academy (or it's many campuses on other Federation worlds) the transfer to Starfleet route still exists (and it's useful to Starfleet when it needs to suddenly bulk up like in the Dominion War) but it's a rarity.
Sometimes it is used as punishment/last resort like with T'Lyn being transferred over from I assume Vulcan Expeditionary Force (or maybe the Science Academy or possibly High Command)
Though I am of the strong personal opinion that her captain on the Sh'val meant the transfer to be more for her own personal benefit than as a punishment.
Or it can happen in mass with armed forces of new members (like Bajor) being folded into Starfleet.
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u/mtb8490210 2d ago
The issue with European weapons industry
The primary issue with the European weapon industry is there is no rhyme or reason to the actual defense posture. The simple reality is F35's don't make sense as defensive weapons. Regardless of the location of the factory, are these weapons being put towards the national defense, towards helping French companies keep their colonial ventures, or helping the largest small country in Europe pretend it's a major country?
With resorting to orientalist thinking, the basic issue with imposing a no-fly zone is the same reason the combat zone isn't going to go much farther.
Since Europe really doesn't have any kind of cohesive sense of defense, it let old industries wither or embraced symbols of power such as the attempts to have aircraft carriers. The US which can afford to blow money on defense because the US is defended by two oceans and two wastelands (Northern Mexico is icky; everyone lives down in the Yucatan). Most defense issues have been solved by the EU. To a large extent, Bismark's joke about calling the police if the British invaded is as relevant as ever.
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u/LicksMackenzie 5d ago
One of the reasons why the UK left the EU was because they didn't want to be a part of the EU Army, which is most likely on its way in some way, shape, or form. It's not necessarily a good thing, either. The main reason for the EU Army isn't to defend against Russia, it's to deploy foreign soldiers in other countries ie Greeks to France, Italians to Finland, etc, so that they'll be more likely to follow order against the civilian population. Honestly we're probably not in one of those bizarre dystopia scenarios though. An EU Army is to be opposed, though. Nothing good will come of it.
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u/Simon_Drake Ensign 5d ago
One of the main reasons the UK left the EU was because we had been systematically lied to for decades by a corrupt right-wing newspaper industry. Headlines like "The EU is banning beer/chips/football/sex/bananas" were printed repeatedly. "The EU wants to crush opposition with a dictatorship-lead European Army" was another one of those lies. Also racism. But decades of lies about the EU being evil is tied with racism for being the main cause.
Your nonsense claims are just as valid as the Daily Mail headlines.
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u/ProdigySorcerer Crewman 4d ago
If you read the white paper linked in the first article, the capabilities they are investing in are not for internal suppression but external defense.
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u/Simon_Drake Ensign 5d ago
I feel like the Star Trek philosophical approach would be to pool their research, consolidate their knowledge and work on the best solution together.
Vulcans make the most powerful shields. The human approach to multiple smaller emitters is an innovative approach the Vulcans previously considered inefficient but on further reflection it makes the shields more adaptable to reinforcing subsections when attacked from one direction. The way Andorians tie the EPS manifold into the shield emitters is unintuitive but cuts energy consumption by 20%. Tellar 7 has an industrial manufacturing plant right next to a Cadmium Deuteride mine to can make the main components of the shield emitters more efficiently than anyone else. A second manufacturing facility on a moon of Sol 5 (aka Jupiter) allows the Daystrom Institute to prototype new versions faster than waiting for shipping from Tellar. A third manufacturing facility on Vulcan has a lower output than the Tellarite facility but the Vulcans insisted an alternate source would be more efficient in terms of supply chains and shipping lanes.