I know a strictly military-focused show goes against Roddenberry’s vision, but what are the chances that we could see some sort of war-focused Trek in the future? The scenes in “Under the Cloak of War” (SNW 2x08… yes I’m a few weeks behind) fascinated me. What would a MAS*H-style show look like in Trek? Could the show tell the story of the war exclusively from the medical perspective? Until now, we’ve only gotten glimpses of war shown through the eyes of our main characters (O’Brien, Nog, Chakotay, Burnham, M’Benga, Chapel, etc) and we’ve gotten fleet-level looks of battles, but very little on-the-ground coverage of war.
I’d prefer the setting to be some war set some time after PIC–something we as an audience know nothing about. What are your thoughts, Lemmy?
The difficult thing about planet-side battles in Star Trek is the phasers. When one is hit with a phaser on high power, there is nothing left worth saving by a medic. Weapons in Trek are too efficient to make surface war particularly entertaining.
Yeah, with Trek technology war would be pretty terrible and boring and come down to energy production.
In DS9 the Cardassians build automated weapon platforms and the Federation builds self replicating mines. At that point I find it hard to imagine that war wouldn’t just become a matter of industrial replicators churning out autonomous weapons and defensive systems as fast as possible. Your only need a few control ships in an area with subspace communication to manage massive fleets.
It also seems like Federation tech is pretty near the end game since they’re competitive in all the quadrants (I haven’t finished Voyager though, I can’t remember how they fare against Borg tech), so overwhelming enemies in quantity and energy reserves would be an acceptable strategy.
So maybe we don’t see many phaser wounds, but saying that there’s nothing there ignores all the other ways people can get injured in a battle (explosions, crashes, etc). There may not be analogs to bullet wounds, but I bet there are plenty of other ways.