ABOVE: Starfleet Academy, San Francisco, California.
FIRST FLEETS
The Starbase program also flourished. Although at the end of the Romulan War there were only three completed Starbases, by the mid-2160s there were fifteen spread across the Alpha Quadrant. During this period, the Starbases, as well as the outposts along the Neutral Zone, came to define the borders of the Federation 500 light-years across.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Starbase 2 and 3 were completed in 2158, Starbase 4 was completed in 2160. Starbase 1 was abandoned by the Romulans as a condition of the peace and Algeron fell into the boundaries of the Neutral Zone. As a monument to all the lives lost in the destruction of Starbase 1, Starfleet “retired the number” and has never commissioned another starbase with the designation “1.”
The Daedalus-class vessels bravely explored beyond that border, but not without losses. Within a decade of their launch, the Essex, the Archon, and the Horizon would be lost with all hands, and it would take a very long time to discover their respective fates (over a century for the Archon and Horizon, almost two for the Essex). The captain of Essex was Bryce Shumar, the sole survivor of the destruction of the Excalibur.
In later interviews, Admiral Douglas would say that the eagerness to complete the first five ships of the class was to blame. “We were in too big a hurry,” Admiral Douglas said. “We filled those ships with the best people we had, but those first five ships had been rushed through the assembly line to get them ready for the war. When the war ended, we should’ve taken a little more time before sending them to the frontier.”
Still, Daedalus-class vessels had some success in their explorations, making many scientific discoveries, which were brought back to the Federation Science Council, whose chief minister during this period was Eric Vebber.
“It was an amazing period,” Vebber said in his book Hodgkin’s Law: How Termites Explained the Galaxy. “I’d been a professor at the American Continent Institute when I was chosen to lead the Council. The Daedalus ships were sending us a treasure trove of scientific information, and it was my job to organize it and distribute it to the member worlds.”
Of particular interest to Vebber and his team was the prevalence of Earth-like cultures and humanoid species throughout the Galaxy. “As a scientist, it seemed counter-intuitive,” Vebber said in an interview. “Given the wide variety of life in the universe, why would the overwhelming majority of civilizations be populated by people who looked like us? There had to be an explanation.” Vebber found the answer to this in the work of a twenty-first-century biologist, A. E. Hodgkin. In 2093, Hodgkin visited the planet Locarus Prime, Where he discovered termites. Though one would have assumed that those termites were somehow transplanted from Earth, Hodgkin, after examining their DNA, linked them directly to the Locarus biosphere. Hodgkin began working on a theory, which eventually was called “Hodgkin’s Theory of Parallel Planet Development.” It eventually drew links from the primitive biological stages to societal developments, from family units to forms of government.
“I was always a fan of this theory,” Vebber said, “but in his day, Hodgkin didn’t have access to enough data to prove it. Suddenly, in my job as head of the Federation Science Council, I did.” Vebber would prove Hodgkin’s Theory, declaring it Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planet Development, which received the approval of the Vulcan Science Academy.
“I wasn’t a snob about the Vulcans,” Vebber wrote. “That thrilled me to death.”
ABOVE: Though Starfleet ships went in peace, the dangers they faced were not to be underestimated, especially where first contact was concerned. The Daedalus-class Valiant (the second ship with that name to lost in space) went to the Eminiar system with the intent to open diplomatic relations, but found itself in the middle of an interplanetary war. The Valiant was destroyed in orbit. A few crew members were able to evacuate the ship in an escape pod and land near one of the largest cities. They survived for a few days before being captured and executed. It would be another hundred years before the war ended, and Eminiar became a member of the Federation. It was then that the handwritten log from the last surviving crewman, Commander Lee Billings, was brought home.
ABOVE: Albert Elias Hodgkin was a unique biologist, the first to conclusively connect genetics to higher levels of societal structures. in this passage from his notebooks—published posthumously—he makes a leap that his data was still far from fully supporting.
BOLD BEGINNINGS
The work of these first Federation starships also served as a prelude to the coming decades. The Daedalus, commanded by Malcolm Reed (Who had served as Archer’s security chief for his entire career as a starship captain), was the first Starfleet vessel to visit the planet Organia. Reed and his crew found a very primitive, peaceful culture but in Reed’s captain’s log he posted that he was surprised by the Organians’ reaction to their visitors. He had expected the Organians to treat him and his crew as gods, and yet they seemed to have no reaction to them landing a shuttlepod in the middle of their town square. As the future would tell, the Organians were not at all primitive; they were in fact far more advanced than the Federation.
At this time, however, Reed had no idea of their true natures—and thought nothing of possibly contaminating what he believed was a primitive culture.
Before the Horizon was lost, Captain Vince Waldron had a similarly cavalier attitude. His ship visited the planet Sigma Iotia II, and the Horizon’s contamination of that culture would turn the entire planet into a replica of 1920s Chicago. (For more detailed information on this, see A Piece of the Action: The Unique Case of Sigma Iotia II by Edward Paskey.) Such bold entrances by starships and their captains on primitive worlds would soon become a thing of the past.
ABOVE: The captain’s log excerpt is from the S.S. Daedalus on the first contact with the Organians.
ABOVE: The Prime Directive has become one of the key provisions in the Federation Charter. Its importance has been continually reinforced since its implementation. One case involved the planet Sigma Iotia II. The twenty-third-century Starship Enterprise revisited Sigma Iotia II and discovered the unique contamination caused by the initial encounter. The following report to the Federation Council addresses the way the Federation dealt with this planet, and attempted to correct the unintentional contamination.
THE KLINGON QUESTION
Once established, the Federation found that its most consistent source of conflict was from the Klingon Empire. The Klingons were in an expansion mode as well, but fortunately they were not seeking territory currently governed by the Federation. However, contacts between Federation starships and Klingon vessels almost always were tense, if not outright hostile. It became clear that the Klingons viewed Starfleet, and particularly Earthlings, with distrust and disdain. The Federation, ultimately concerned with maintaining the peace, was finally spurred into action when the Starfleet vessel Rochelle was attacked by a Klingon warship while escorting a Denobulan freighter. The Klingons, claiming the ships were violating their territory, fired on them, destroying the freighter. One of Earth’s oldest allies, Denobula had considered joining the Federation for many years. However, this act of hostility caused the Denobulans—already scarred from the Romulan War—to withdraw from galactic affairs.
ABOVE: The destruction of the Denobulan freighter.
The Klingons destroyed the Denobulan freighter because it was being escorted by what they called a “Human” ship. Starfleet and the Federation Council recognized that the Klingon hostility toward Earth was a developing problem that needed to be addressed. It was not only worrisome in the Klingons’ interactions with Earth, but it was affecting the Klingon attitude toward the entire Federation. In 2174, the Federation commissioned a study by the Science Council to determine the root of this hostility.
“It wasn’t easy to get information on internal Klingon affairs,” Vebber wrote in his introduction to the study, “and we did not think that Klingons would share openly any information with Humans. That i
s why Council members from other worlds, specifically the Andorians and Tellarites, gathered most of the information for this study.”
The study’s findings drew a straight line back to the first meeting of Humans and Klingons, and the High Council’s report regarding Klaang’s return to Qo’noS by the Enterprise NX-01. After an exhaustive presentation of the facts, the study was harsh in its conclusions:
“In summation, Captain Archer interceding to save Klaang’s life rather than letting him die with honor forever colored the Klingon view of Humanity. As we have seen in this study, in the years since that first encounter, any positive role Earth played in Klingon affairs has been ignored or dismissed by Klingon society—the ‘meddling’ and ‘dishonorable’ nature of Humans is always emphasized.”
The study would have a profound effect, most notably on Jonathan Archer himself. Having retired from Starfleet as an admiral in 2169, Archer had moved into the diplomatic service and became Earth’s ambassador to Andoria, where he was serving when the report was published.
“I was flabbergasted,” Archer told his biographer. “It was difficult to face that my initial instincts could’ve been so wrong. In my mind, the study cast a pall over my entire career.” He was determined to do something about it. Archer gave up his ambassadorship, and the next year, using his influence and profile, became a representative on the Federation Council. He had only one goal in mind.
The Articles of Federation already had strong language protecting an individual world’s right to conduct their internal affairs how they saw fit. The Federation above all else valued a world’s right to self-determination, as long as it didn’t infringe on the freedoms of other members.
Archer wanted to add an amendment to this clause. The Articles would guarantee that the Federation and its exploratory arm, Starfleet, would not interfere with the culture or internal politics of any world, member or non-member.
This provision did not have immediate support from the Council. Many of the members did not see the necessity of placing such a stringent restraint on their fleet. But Archer was determined. “I had spent along time in space,” Archer said, “and I had a lot of examples of advanced civilizations taking advantage of primitive ones. To me, the limitation of a law like this was a testimony to the height of our civilization.”
Archer fought passionately for it on the council, and succeeded in changing many minds. In 2178, the Council amended the Federation Constitution to include Starfleet General Order 1, otherwise known as the Prime Directive. This one law would serve to define the non-interference philosophy of the Federation for centuries to come. Seven years later, due in no small part to this achievement, Jonathan Archer was elected president of the United Federation of Planets.
ABOVE: What was meant to be a simple rule of non-interference has grown into one of the most complicated laws in the Federation. Constructed to be a “living” document, by the twenty-forth century the Prime Directive had forty-seven sub-orders. When it was first conceived, it had two main goals: to prevent misunderstandings between civilizations and to protect primitive worlds that were no t ready to receive advanced technology.
THE AGE OF EXPLORATION
In its first sixty years of existence, the Federation experienced a rare, extended period of peace. Many worlds sought membership, and it was only through a strenuous vetting process that a world’s government could gain acceptance. Meanwhile, uninhabited worlds were discovered and peacefully settled. The Federation Council was kept abreast of the needs of its member worlds, and tasked Starfleet with fulfilling those needs. Colonies sprang up across the galaxy: Tarsus IV, Berengarius VII, Deneva, Marcus XII, Aldeberon, the irreverently named Planet Q, and dozens of others were established during this period, often in response to a specific need from the member worlds. The mining colony on Janus VI was established in the late twenty-second century to provide pergium, the rare element used to power life-support reactors in artificial environments.
Not every colony was established out of functionality; the Federation was committed to the freedom of its people, allowing individuals to move freely within its borders. Individual colleges and universities, such as the American Continent Institute, funded their own exploration and survey missions. In 2170, a group of Native Americans left Earth and eventually settled on Dorvan V, where the colonists were completely devoted to preserving their cultural identity. It exists and flourishes to this day.
Often called the Age of Exploration, this was a period of unprecedented advancement and enrichment, the result of an efficient sharing of knowledge through exploration. The Federation Science Council found an uninhabited planetoid to establish a repository of all the knowledge gathered by Starfleet. Called Memory Alpha, it became the library of the Federation, where academics from across the quadrant could come to receive the up-to-date information on every field of scientific study, and examine original source material that cannot be reproduced.
ABOVE: The main lobby of Memory Alpha.
By 2196, when the Daedalus-class vessels were removed from service and replaced by the new Einstein and Baton Rouge classes, Starfleet was now almost completely crewed by graduates of the Academy. For thirty years these graduates—the Galaxy’s best and brightest—explored and catalogued the universe, sending information back to Starfleet Command computer technicians either on Earth or on the many starbases. These computer technicians updated the information in their computer cores, then sent subspace “packets” to every base, world, and ship in the fleet.
During this time, it also became clear that an Earth-based date system was not appropriate for a galaxy-wide organization. Thus, at the dawn of the twenty-third century, the Federation implemented the stardate system. Based on a mathematical equation affected by a vessel or world’s location in the Galaxy, it was a standardization of time-keeping that favored no one planet. Individual worlds still kept their own calendars, but once in space, everybody had the same watch.
Starfleet and the Federation were helping civilization reach its pinnacle. But they were both about to face their greatest challenge.
2223: THE DILITHIUM CRESCENT
Though many sources of the valuable crystal dilithium—essential to the warp engines of the interstellar civilizations who used matter/anti-matter propulsion—had been discovered and developed over the centuries by many space-going species, it wasn’t until the beginning of the twenty-third century that a Klingon scientist named Krent developed a theory as to where the greatest concentration of these resources were. He discovered that a unique combination of forces resulting from the formation of the Milky Way Galaxy had produced a stretch of space where dilithium was most likely to be found. This area, dubbed the Dilithium Crescent, became crucial to the Empire. The Klingons were the only people who had made this discovery; it gave them a very substantial edge when searching for new sources of the powerful element. When the discovery was initially brought before the Klingon High Council, it was decided that every effort needed to be made to keep it a secret, and the Klingons succeeded in this for several decades. (Krent was given the highest honor ever afforded a Klingon scientist: a state execution to keep his discovery quiet.)
Upon Krent’s discovery, the mining ships of the Empire were ordered to concentrate their search efforts in the Dilithium Crescent. Although part of the area was already within the Klingons’ sphere of influence, much of it wasn’t. The Empire quickly sought to change that.
Sussman/MacFarlane, the main sequence star in the Crescent, had no Class-M planets (“M” stood for “Minshara,” a Vulcan term adopted by Starfleet that referred to planets with oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres that could support humanoid life), but it did have a dense asteroid belt where the Federation mining ship Castro had staked a claim. The Castro’s captain, an asteroid prospector from Earth named Troy Adams, had only discovered minute traces of dilithium but took a gamble that there was more. He would never find out; on June 18, 2223, a Klingon D5 warship entered the system and destroyed the Castro without a
ny warning. It then sent out a subspace transmission signaling that the system belonged to the Klingon Empire.
The problem for the Federation was that the Sussman/MacFarlane system (named for the two astronomers from Proxima who charted it) was not technically part of the Federation. Adams’s claim on the system and his death created a delicate diplomatic issue. Ultimately, the Federation took the stance that though the system didn’t belong to them, it wasn’t Klingon either, and the Klingons had greatly overstepped by destroying a Federation ship and killing a Federation citizen.
It was clear that the Federation would not—nor could not—go to war over the death of a single person, but they had other avenues to pursue. Federation planets would no longer be allowed to trade with the Klingon Empire, and those non-Federation worlds who traded with the Klingons would find their contracts with the Federation under review. The Klingons, who had had a robust trade relationship with many worlds, suddenly found themselves cut off by these sanctions—not just in terms of dilithium, but also food and other resources.
The sanctions, however, only led to a more aggressive reaction from Qo’noS. Additional Klingon ships moved into systems they had not already laid claim to. This time, however, the Federation immediately disputed their territorial claims.
These tit-for-tat actions set the tone for Federation/Klingon relations for the next seventy years. They also played a role in the development of the most ambitious of Starfleet’s ships.
CONSTITUTION CLASS
Robert April was a Starfleet officer who as an ensign served on an Einstein-class ship, the Gates, and later in his career had served as first officer aboard a Baton Rouge-class ship, the Los Angeles. His shipboard experiences and knowledge of Starfleet history had caused him to develop a sense of frustration at the limitations of the starships in service.
Star Trek Federation: The First 150 Years Page 9
