Tanksoldier
“Even in a post-scarcity economy, some people’s contributions are more valuable than others.”
I completely agree. However, when I first floated the idea of playing/running Star Trek for the game group some months ago, the wife of one of the guys that is an avid Star Trek fan acted like I was a blasphemer from Dante’s lowest ring of Hell for mention it. Sooooo that may be a side bar conversation.
Rgr on all the MWR facilities/hotels. When I was stationed in Italy, and going up into Germany multiple times a year, I stopped there in the facilities at Garmisch quite a few times. If I remember correctly. They had a good hotel, a camp ground, cabins, a good restaurant, and then of course hiking trails, ski rentals (I believe ski instructors too, but I never stayed there in the winter.
A side note. I know that a few times a year the military gets a crews ship and fills it with military members and families. Then the Navy uses it as practice on counter terrorist ops etc. I’d forgotten about that until I read these posts. That would be a GREAT hook for an adventure, especially for a novice group …
Vamp. Again thanks for the run down. Like I said, I have limited to no knowledge on the shows so it is good to see what main characters did for MWR. I will say that I am using Netflix to catch up on the shows, but it will take me a while to get through Enterprise, DS9, & the TNG I missed back in the day.
As the name of Garmisch-Partenkirchen (which is the actual name of the village) is famous throughout Germany for skiing and being part of the Four-Hills-Tournament, the MWR facilities having ski instructors is a pretty solid bet.
On the note of cruise ships: What about the Holo-Ships we saw on Insurrection? A tour from here to Risa (and back) on such a ship could provide ample opportunity for interesting holodeck-missions.
Oh, and…
I strongly reject the correlation of the value of people’s contributions to their paycheck. I, for example, would not value my contribution to society above that of a nurse (esp. during the Pandemic). As you might guess from the setup, my paycheck begs to differ. Extremely. I can maybe agree on “are considered more valuable”, though.
Interesting little detail to add to this: a couple of the earlier Enterprise novels mention that Crewman Cutler sets up a semiregular RPG group for a few of the junior crew aboard Enterprise (including Sato and Mayweather), using a game system of her own creation.
On this point… even when it was Terok Nor, the station’s promenade area was a civilian marketplace with merchants and other businesses on hand (there were businesses there which had to be persuaded to stay when Starfleet moved in - that was part of Sisko’s arrangement with Quark, who spoke on behalf of the Promenade Merchant’s Association. We know for a fact that it contains numerous shops, stalls, restaurants, and other recreational areas, beyond just Quark’s bar and the holosuites.
Risan culture and hospitality seem to have been a constant for a long time - they’re well-established when the NX-01 stops there for shore leave - but it’s worth noting that it seems to be a Federation world, and accustomed to Starfleet officers taking leave there, by the 24th century.
In a scarcity-economy, a thing is worth what someone is willing to pay for it… including a person’s time, expertise and labor. In a post-scarcity economy those valuations may be different but they will still exist.
Any economy needs a way to keep track of resources expended.
Whether the Federation has a method of tracking the time someone spends on a project or whatever, there will be SOME method of keeping track and that will also be used to keep score… that’s the role money holds today. The Federation may not use “money” but it will use something.
In Ye Olde Days mediums of exchange were based on the value of the item itself: gold, silver, seashells, whatever. Note that in Even Older-Ye Olde Days gold and silver weren’t very valuable. They aren’t actually useful for much except jewelry and thus didn’t become valuable until there was enough excess produced to support a leisure class to wear jewelry and an artesian class to craft it. Before that you couldn’t eat it, boink it or smoke it so it was mostly worthless.
Money is used as an abstract representation of the effort YOU put in and what value the economy gives to that effort, and allows you to acquire the products of someone else’s effort based on that evaluation, and this need not be valuable in itself.
That abstract representation of labor, expertise and other resources expended will still be made with something.
…and I suspect Kirk’s offhand response is meant to mean they don’t use cash, but I realize others disagree.
It seems to me that the intention is that material resources, at least by Picard’s era, are largely irrelevant (and in Kirk’s time, it’s rapidly heading that way). They have unlimited energy, courtesy of the matter-antimatter power systems, and replicators.
Much as some might not like the idea, I suspect Earth and many other Federation worlds run a basic income system. A given individual has access to as much energy and shelter as they need and can replicate food and so on. Advanced computer systems and replicators make most retail and manufacturing jobs meaningless, but then people don’t have to do these jobs to survive.
Naturally, a number of people just leach off the system and do nothing, but many more have decided to use their time to learn essential skills and give back to society at large, in medicine, science, art, or the manufacture of artisanal products (New Orleans cooking or champagne for example), while others have moved off world, where they can challenge the universe head on - in Starfleet or colonies. It’s an ideal for what you’d get from a full post-scarcity society.
You could think of it as a hipster version of the ideal anarchist society!
True, but you still have to keep track of things like building starships… man hours, resources, etc.
Money is an abstract way of keeping track of all of that today: not just paying workers, but how much steel goes into a battleship. How much fuel oil it uses, how much ammunition, how much paint. All of that is kept track of by money.
You would have to have something to tell you that building two Excelsiors is better than one Steamrunner… that Ambassadors are inefficient, whatever.
We do it today by saying it takes $12b and two years to build an Excelsior, and $18b and 36 months to build a single Steamrunner. That’s how we evaluate things.
There has to be something similar to track all of that in Starfleet, otherwise you’re just randomly building ships. (Which might explain why Starfleet has 1000 ship classes out there).
Computing power and algorithms being what they are in the 24th century, I’m sure they have systems for tracking all materials, scarcity thereof, equivalent cost/availability of labor, and so forth (dare I say, “Enterprise” Resource Planning? Nyuk nyuk.)
More to the point though, because Star Trek is basically a sci-fi soap opera primarily about the characters, availability of valuable resources is always going to be driven by plot. One moment, there’s only one ship available to deal with an emergency, and the next, there’s a dozen ships warping in to handle a crisis.
Hey man, it’s okay that you haven’t seen every episode of Trek ever. I’m just giving you what info I have.
I did think of one last thing. I know you said you don’t think Holodecks count, but both DS9 and Voyager have programs that they leave running indefinitely, and each person has their own specific character to play, so it does become a community project other than ‘just sitting on the beach watching the sunrise.’ Voyager has a sleepy little town in 1800s Ireland called ‘Fairhaven’ and DS9 has a 1960s casino/bar on the Vegas strip called 'Vick’s" (he’s the owner and also the singer and also maybe sentient?"
Yep, but there has to be a unit of measure so you can compare raw materials to labor to time, etc. Something may require less labor but more materials but less build time vs another design. Which is more efficient? The one that costs less.
…except they don’t. Starfleet doesn’t have the ships to sustain the relief of Romulus. In Picard Starfleet is short of ships and resources, having to pull back and leave systems they previously patrolled undefended. Even in earlier times Enterprise was the “only ship in the sector”. Starfleet has limited resources. They just may not be the limitations we think of today.
I think the resources problem is a typical case of small-scale vs large-scale. Picard Starfleet (I hav yet to see PIC. Or DIS, for that matter…) may lack ships – but the people on the ships or in established colonies have anything they need, most of the time.
Anyway, yes, availability of resources will always be a problem. Not everyone can use the holodeck any time. Or the replicators for unlimited supply of food and goods. Etc. There will be some rationing in some way and it may or may not be individual (e.g. per rank vs per capita) and it may or may not be convertible.
I’ve yet to come into a situation where this actually matters in terms of book-keeping. If the question of such resources come up, I’d usually decide on what is better for the story. Rule of cool, y’all!
I disagree: Starfleet was in the process of building 10,000 ships to aid in the evacuation - using almost entirely automated construction. It was only after the synth attack that the project was abandoned - time became an issue at this point, not resources. And the project seems to have been abandoned for political reasons, not economic.
Starfleet is also capable of churning out dozens of new ships in a very short period of time - the fleet sizes only a year into the Dominion War (and after devastating attacks on Federation homeworlds) attest to that.
And the “only ship in the sector” trope is very much a 23rd century thing (except for Star Trek First Contact, which didn’t actually make much sense on several levels) - the kind of capabilities I’m talking about are Picard-era.
Also remember that space is big (cue Douglas Adams quote). Just because the Federation can churn out a glibbadybabillion ships doesn’t mean they’ll have every sector of space adaquately covered.
And that’s not true. The Enterprise was not the only ship in the sector in First Contact. Picard had been ordered to stay away from the battle! The admiral in command feared that Picard being a former Borg drone was compromised…
The whole trope gets funnier if you remember that they even said that a certain ship was the only ship in the quadrant! (But at that time a quadrant was not one quarter of the Galaxy but a much smaller region.)
The bit I remember most about that scene is that the Enterprise was explicitly patrolling the Romulan Neutral Zone. The battle took place near Earth, and the Enterprise was able to get there at maximum speed in 3 hours. According to Memory Alpha, that’s Warp 9.995 - and ST-Minutiae puts that at around 1.75 light years.
In other words the Romulan Neutral Zone is less than 2 light years from Earth…
Time IS a resource. Manpower IS a resource. If there are no constraints, if you’re not giving up anything to build those ships and crew them, there’s no cost… so why didn’t Starfleet already have 10,000ships if they are completely free of all constraints?
Since you mentioned Douglas Adams, might it be 42? 
