Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isnāt just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, itās because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they donāt really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but theyāre as likely as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesnāt actually happen to anyone else; itās literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally donāt realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. Theyāre just like āyes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experienceā.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISEāS ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: weāre going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as theyāre unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - theyāre basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their ācoolerā heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we donāt get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but youāre also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they donāt do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because theyāre offended by that, steal theirĀ warp cores, plug thoseĀ together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didnāt want to waste a trip.Ā
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. itās getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.Ā
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.Ā
klingons: ā¦. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the āfirst human warp driveā thing in the movie. That wasā¦ Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated OāBrien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the stationās core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computerās hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, Iām not done with this post. letās talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus, testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation of a treaty with the Romulans. theyāre playing catchup trying to develop a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do? do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey, while weāre at it, while weāre building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, letās see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while weāre invisible.
ābut whyā said the one Vulcan in the room.
ābecause that would fucking ruleā said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like āour assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after youāve eaten it.ā
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like:Ā āGuys, we totally wouldnāt do that!ā But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: āYou totally did.ā
āThat was ONE TIME.āĀ
Thereās that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.Ā
And human historians go,Ā āOh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.ā To which the producers respond: āHow is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????ā
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise isĀ āWe stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.ā
reblog for new meta.Ā RE that last line: McGuyver.Ā
āMacGuyverā is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.Ā
āwhat is the wordĀ āfuckā for,ā the innocent young vulcans want to know.Ā āsurely there are more logical intensity modifiers.ā
āyeah, youād think so,ā say the weary, jaded vulcan professors.Ā āyouād really fucking think so.ā
there is a phrase in vulcan forĀ āthe particular moment you understand what the wordĀ āfuckā is forā.Ā
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg werenāt prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50ā²s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
This thread is amazing. Even as a baby star trek nerd that only really knows the new movies.
āthere is a phrase in vulcan for āthe particular moment you understand what the word āfuckā is forā.ā
I just died
I lost my shit at ātoasts your bread after youāve eaten itā
Oh please please someone write this
the best thing about this post is that the way itās written - by multiple human authors getting over-excited about ridiculous, wonderful, impossible ideas that ought by rights to be terrifying - is itself proof that weāre like this
it just keeps getting better.Ā
