“In My Trek Universe”… something borrowed from Traveller discussions, sorry.
@tanksoldier, Ahhh, okay. I thank you for the explanation.
There are so many different acronyms floating around on the Internet nowadays–all made up by whoever is typing the message that day–that it’s difficult/impossible to keep up with them all. I try to puzzle them out but that one just was beyond my comprehension.
The “Comic Sans” class Starfleet Transport ship. USS Garfield, USS Odie, USS Charlie Brown, etc, hehe.
“Lost history” covers only so much, as time travel to study the past is a thing (TAS: Yesteryear), and even including accidents, Starfleet personnel have travelled to the 1930s (TOS: City on the Edge of Forever), 1940s (ENT: Storm Front), 1960s (TOS: Tomorrow is Yesterday), 1980s (Star Trek VI), 1990s (VOY: Future’s End), 2000s (ENT: Carpenter Street), and 2020s (DS9: Past Tense). Plus, there are accurate enough records that a 24th century ship can retrieve detailed genealogical histories of a random woman who was cryo-frozen in 1994 (TNG: The Neutral Zone).
That just means Ancestery.com survived…
given that the upper bound of the death count from dialog references was 600 million, out of a population that would have been pushing 10 billion, we wouldn’t be looking at the kind of “everything is destroyed” atomic war feared in the cold war era or which occurred in franchises like Mad Max or Terminator. in fact if you work out the percentage, it is 6% of the global population… about twice the percentage of the world pop as WW2 killed in the 1940’s. which suggests a major war but not a world ending one.
while we know nuclear weapons were employed, it was probably a limited exchange at best (most likely just a few strategically located cities, and some of the larger military bases), and most of the conflict would have been fought as conventional warfare with infantry, tanks, and planes. possibly some non-nuclear orbital weapons platforms, given that the Borg attack on the complex in montana was initially believed to be an attack by the eastern coalition.
But multiple nuclear explosions will have a major impact on many data storage facilities. The vast majority are not shielded against EMP…
CW: modern political references
My Deep Space 11 campaign recently had new crew arrivals from the USS Ocasio-Cortez (named after one of the great presidents from Earth’s mid-21st century). It made my players chuckle.
BC
I wish I could love this twice.
actually most datacenters locate their main hardware within faraday cages as a matter of security and to prevent disruptions from RF interference, and usually are located in basements of buildings, again for security. the companies that run them also tend to use offsite backups, as well as archives on optical disks for long term storage of important data. military sites and government sites usually include additional hardening in the form of more robust locations and computer hardware designed to be resistant to EMP effects.
further there are a large number of organizations around the world, private and governmental, which are dedicated to preserving records of publicly accessible data in archives on physical or optical media, most of which is stored in sites which are both underground and protected from the physical and electronic effects of nuclear strikes. these organizations have been operating for the last half century or so and thus would still exist in Trek’s timeline.
the main loss of information from a nuclear war would not be in terms of records or data, but in the finer details of the specific events of the conflict, since that information is usually found within the populace itself as experiential memory or in unarchived data on less secure personal computer systems.
Well, we’re already in a parallel universe, since in Trek there were the Eugenic Wars in the 90ies.
We’re getting off-topic, by the way.
That has been retconned in ENT. Now it seems that the Eugenic Wars and World War III are eitheer one and the same or happened close to eachother.
I totally agree!
I believe that funny names are not realistic. So we will not see Starfleet vessels named after cartoon characters. But we might see Starfleet vessels whose names could be mistaken for cartoon characters by the uneducated.
- The USS Garfield was not named after a cartoon cat but a scientist.
- The USS Beagle was not named after Admiral Archers favorite breed of dogs but an exploration vessel.
- The USS Miranda was not named after a character from a Shakespearean play but for the fifth moon of Uranus (whose moons are all named after characters from play by either Shakespear or Pope).
@mithril2098 you forgot to mention that some of these are even deep underground.
My group will be on USS Kurosawa, Akira Class, ship
With starships named for persons, I always use the full name as the U.S. Navy does; e.g., the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan and the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, not the U.S.S. Reagan or U.S.S. Vinson. Are there navies that just use the surname of an individual? That would seem ripe for confusion.
I always figured the Miranda class was named for Ernesto Miranda.
The Royal Navy will sometimes name ships after an individual (See HMS Hood) or more often a Royal (HMS Queen Elizabeth) but they are rare and normally relate to someone who has been dead for a couple centuries.
Also because ship names are recycled the earlier ships can become more famous than the original source of the name.
The warship’s name was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 11 July 1945 and I think no ship can be named like this anymore.
Plot Idea; A Starfleet officer, William D Porter, perhaps only by lucky incompetence, saved a federation world and they insist to have a ship named William D Porter, which is forbidden
Can you explicate this? I read the article but I’m not clear what you are referring to when you say “named like this.”
I think the name was banned for the naming list, too much trouble, too much bad reputation. No William D Porter ever again. The 5 Craziest War Stories (All Happened on the Same Ship) | Cracked.com
No, nay never, no, nay never no more