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Questions/musings about the size of Starfleet | Report this post to moderator
By: nsr019 (Odo's file, contact) @ 04:52:33 on Sep 06, 2003

I was just wondering... exactly how big is Starfleet Academy? From what I've seen in the TV shows, it looks just like a normal sized university, unless San Francisco is one giant uber-college-town in the 24th century or something.

Anyways, given the size of the Federation, the *millions* of personnel probably necessary to defend it and explore the galaxy and so on, having one tiny little college churning out a few thousand graduates every year doesn't seem very prudent.

And of course, that's just peacetime, what about in wartime? Couldn't the Dominion churn out Jem Hadar as fast as they built rifles to arm them with? How did Starfleet keep up *that*? Is there some ten-million-person-strong Starfleet Reserve that they tapped into, or did they actually create a draft or something? (that would definitely have the Great Bird spinning in his grave)

Really, the practical thing to do is to use androids or holograms or something, but that would violate several codes of personal freedoms, probably leading to some sort of Federation civil war which would've been a rather interesting story concept to follow (I think Voyager hinted at it).

But I digress. The size of Starfleet is very sporadic, in TNG a Borg cube destroyed 39 ships and crippled Starfleet for a year (leading one to believe that Starfleet is like a navy, with a starship akin to a naval vessel) but in DS9 they routinely had battles with fleets of hundreds (leading one to believe that Starfleet is like an air force, with hundreds upon hundreds of rather easily-replacable craft).

Anyways, is this all writers' artistic freedom/sloppiness, or is there a coherent explanation for it?


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