Even if Jellico was right about it being a superior system, he was still being a shit leader.
You don’t come into a management position and instantly change everything up. You start by learning how things have been going with your staff and setting up a series of changes, with adequate forewarning, for them to adjust to reasonably.
You sure as hell don’t come into a situation that’s tense with time pressures, emotional pressures, legitimate causes to fear for their lives, etc, and then force a wide array of changes onto your staff.
Even if the 4-shift thing is unquestionably superior (and let’s assume it is, ignoring the Bajor comments people are making) - it’s still a stupid as fuck thing to do, under the circumstances.
Especially considering all the other changes and pressures he was adding on, all at the last minute, before a major battle.
Engine overhaul, protocol changes, shift changes, multi-day extreme overtime, on a staff that’s emotionally distressed right before their lives will be put at severe risk?
He’s an absolutely terrible captain and a disgrace to Starfleet. His bullshit would have endangered everyone’s lives for no good reason, had he not been damned lucky that the battle never came.
Yeah, that’s not how the military works at all. Maybe in business management, but not military. People seem to forget Starfleet is just that. The commander has a philosophy (that they will often draft a letter about when they assume command) and the unit adapts to it. People used to that are a little more understanding of Jellico and recognize that dread the enterprise crew had when they realized how good they had it under Picard.
People acting like Picard ran a tight ship are just deluding themselves. If Picard ran his ship half as well as, say, a modern air craft carrier then there would be no show. It’d be boring.
I really wish to see more accurate depictions of military life. Strangely competent in some areas but at the same time mundane incompetence everywhere.
It’s basically a workplace comedy, and one of the focuses of the show is how bad Starfleet is about making sure their strange new worlds are getting on okay a couple decades after first contact. The crew of the Cerritos are simultaneously Starfleet’s best, and an absolute embarrassment lol
It’s a fantastic show, that really gets the soul of Star Trek. You should check it out
not military. People seem to forget Starfleet is just that.
The Enterprise is a “ship of exploration”, as they remind us every other episode. It has a ton of biological and astronomical labs on board. Their mission is:
to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man / one has gone before
That’s the mission of a diplomatic vessel. They just also have weapons. It’s 100% not a military ship. Starfleet itself is repeatedly described as not a military organization.
The only “military” version of the Enterprise D is in the TNG episode where they encounter the Enterprise C that returns from the past. It’s completely different from the regular version, and the difference between the timelines is stark.
The Enterprise is a “ship of exploration” in a way that’s not possible today. You’re misunderstanding them. They’re like a explorer’s ship in the “Age of Exploration”, Captain Cook or Magellan or Christopher Columbus. Although their mission is slightly different: diplomacy vs. claiming territory.
All those ships were fast and had weapons too. Diplomacy requires weapons. Starfleet is clearly not a military. Even civilian ships today have “captains”, “first officers”, etc. Cruise ships have them. Even pirate ships had them. Rank and hierarchy is not exclusive to the Navy / military.
How many Naval battles were the Endeavor, Trinidad, and Santa Maria involved in?
Starfleet didn’t just send armed ships out exploring like Magellan. The Enterprise was frequently pulled out from exploring/diplomacy and sent into full battles because it was their biggest battleship.
Sisko was in Starfleet. The Defiant wasn’t for exploration and diplomacy.
Remember that DS9 (and the Defiant) operate on a 26-hour day because Bajor has a 26- hour day. That means a three-shift rotation would have people working an extra 40 minutes each day compared to an Earth-normalized ship (almost nine hours a day).
A four-shift rotation requires everyone to work six and a half hours a day.
Hell, the idea for a three-shift rotation was probably Starfleet’s idea. And the Bajorans probably went along with it just because they recently got away from pulling 18-hour days!
It took me decades to realize that, in Chain of Command, Riker was the one in the wrong. Jelico may have been a bit… difficult here and there, but Riker was being an insubordinate child.
Riker came from Alaska and his dad seemed like the 24th century equivalent of a conservative Republican, so maybe he valued the stupid capitalist Protestant work ethic that has no place in a post-scarcity society?
Both Riker and his dad came from Socialist Space Utopia capital: Earth. They’re a couple of impossibly-privileged people slap-fighting over hardly anything. There are worse things than father-son discord… and few things older.
But help me out with the size of the roster. Say you have 25 people needed to operate 25 stations. 3 shifts so you have 75 people on your ship.
Then you go to 4 shifts without stopping at a start base to pick up extra 25 people. And you have to put 1/3 of your crew in double shifts, or you spread it out so everyone picks up an extra shift 1/3 of the time. And in average everyone works as much as before.
Redundancy is efficiency. No ship would operate with exactly 75 people to cover 25 stations in three shift. Either some of those stations are redundant, or you have more than 75 people. Otherwise, one illness or injury would bring down the whole system.
A switch to shorter shifts would reduce redundancy on each shift, but each worker would get more rest and be less likely to burnout or get sick, even if they have to pick up occasional double shifts until they can take on more crew.
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