Tarsonis wrote:Prosorusiya wrote:So here’s a few questions for y’all to chew on:
1. What, properly speaking, should the department color for a historian be? Some cannon sources say red, like McGyvers in TOS although she technically had a separate duty as a phaser gunner according to the script. Some TNG sources point towards the blue sciences department... but then you run into the issue of is history a science? Really the writers probably should have made that the “research” department of Starfleet more tha science but hey hindsight.
History is a social science. But beyond that really ST tends to ignore the "historian" profession and instead emphasizes archeologists who are as far as I'm aware a type of scientist. So blue really.2. If you were Starfleet, let’s say TNG era, and wanted to send a ship to do a sociological/Historical/archeological mission, what class ship would you send? I think one could make arguments for either Oberth or Miranda... the poor old Oberth though so little detailed shots of it (where’s the shuttlebay, even?), so many onscreen explosions.
How about the Olympia Class?3. Why is it that Starfleet officers are so weirdly inconsistently ignorant of history sometimes? Like in the “Big Goodbye”, which I recently watched, why was it that people were vaguely aware of the 1940s and gangsters having existed... yet were like “car? What is a car?”... even though the car existed before and long after the period in question and the word as used to mean wheeled vehicle has been used before automobiles were invented and probably will be for long afterwards ?
As it's already been said bad writing. Really it's a clumsy way of showing how "Advanced" ST is, even though ST Nemesis and ST09 pretty much shredded the idea that there are no more automobiles. ST Voyager also had a car episode.
Yeah as a professional historian what I was getting at is the line between science and art can get blurry depending on your specialization. For instance I’m more a conventional historian looking at texts, so roughly midway twixt art & science but then also a historical interperator/living historian so I swing more towards the art end of the spectrum. Also we tend to dabble in things that aren’t strictly “history” (looking at written sources), I mean I’m not technically a sociologist but a lot of my research does butt up against it at times. Probably the more scientific-ness and more direct usefulness of archeology influences their appearance in Trek. We do see a lot of sociologists as well...I’ll have to look at what their uniforms are, but probably blue.
The freakin’ Gold Key comics were already exploding the idea of “no cars” although they were super non-cannon.
Olympic Class is an interesting suggestion. Might have stiff competition from my favorite Miranda class though!
