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The Ultimate Crew
colonelmarik
Member Posts: 2,200 Arc User
So, I always enjoy playing with crew rosters, and I amazed myself that I'd never thought to make an ultimate crew roster! So, I thought I'd let everyone in on the fun.
The idea here is to select who you would want as your ultimate crew, choosing a Captain then each department head, from each of the series.
I don't include any of the new Star Trek, in large part because of the tendency of the characters to be SO badly written (Mary Sues, etc.). You can include the newer shows if you must.
This makes the options:
Command: Kirk, Picard, Jellico, Sisko, Janeway, Archer
Tactical (Helm): Sulu, Wesley, Ro, Paris, Mayweather
Security: Uhura, Yar, Worf, Odo, Tuvok, Reed
Engineering: Scott, LaForge, O'Brien, Torres, Tucker
Operations: Chekov, Data, Kim, Sato
Science: Spock, Troi, Dax, Seven, T'Pol
Medical: McCoy, Crusher, Pulaski, Bashir, EMH, Phlox
Executive: Riker, Kira, Chakotay
A couple of explanations.
I included Edward Jellico, just in case anyone wanted to use him.
I consider Uhura the original show's chief of security, coordinating security teams from the bridge and handling secure communications. If you disagree, you may consider her in some other role, as you like.
Similarly, I made Chekov an Operations officer, because his role on the original show was often much like Data's, and Data was Operations.
Neither Spock nor Kira are included in the Executive Officer selections, because they appear in other places. If you don't use them in the other places, you can use them as Exec.
Feel free to include others I may have missed.
So! My selections for the ultimate crew are:
Command: Jean-Luc Picard
Tactical (Helm): Tom Paris
Security: Odo (Worf, if I take only Starfleet personnel)
Engineering: Montgomery Scott
Operations: Data (no contest)
Science: Spock (also no contest)
Medical: Julian Bashir
Executive: William Riker
So what do you think? What's your ultimate crew?
The idea here is to select who you would want as your ultimate crew, choosing a Captain then each department head, from each of the series.
I don't include any of the new Star Trek, in large part because of the tendency of the characters to be SO badly written (Mary Sues, etc.). You can include the newer shows if you must.
This makes the options:
Command: Kirk, Picard, Jellico, Sisko, Janeway, Archer
Tactical (Helm): Sulu, Wesley, Ro, Paris, Mayweather
Security: Uhura, Yar, Worf, Odo, Tuvok, Reed
Engineering: Scott, LaForge, O'Brien, Torres, Tucker
Operations: Chekov, Data, Kim, Sato
Science: Spock, Troi, Dax, Seven, T'Pol
Medical: McCoy, Crusher, Pulaski, Bashir, EMH, Phlox
Executive: Riker, Kira, Chakotay
A couple of explanations.
I included Edward Jellico, just in case anyone wanted to use him.
I consider Uhura the original show's chief of security, coordinating security teams from the bridge and handling secure communications. If you disagree, you may consider her in some other role, as you like.
Similarly, I made Chekov an Operations officer, because his role on the original show was often much like Data's, and Data was Operations.
Neither Spock nor Kira are included in the Executive Officer selections, because they appear in other places. If you don't use them in the other places, you can use them as Exec.
Feel free to include others I may have missed.
So! My selections for the ultimate crew are:
Command: Jean-Luc Picard
Tactical (Helm): Tom Paris
Security: Odo (Worf, if I take only Starfleet personnel)
Engineering: Montgomery Scott
Operations: Data (no contest)
Science: Spock (also no contest)
Medical: Julian Bashir
Executive: William Riker
So what do you think? What's your ultimate crew?
Once, I was simply called Mojo. Now, I'm forced into a new name, but don't be fooled, I'm the original STO Mojo!
This game needs detailed crafting, exploration and interaction systems.
This game needs detailed crafting, exploration and interaction systems.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Comments
While i enjoyed Enterprise i also think that the crew is lacking the accumulated experience of the crews that followed them so i will exclude them from the list.
The 1960's space opera called Star Trek with Kirk and Spock may have birthed an excellent franchise, but to paraphrase a different franchise: Space opera does not qualified personnel make. It's a bloody miracle that ship did not blow up 5 times each episode and therefor the TOS crew is removed from consideration due to incompetence.
This leaves the crews of TNG, DS9 and Voyager since those tended to have experience and the right mindset to operate a vessel to a professional standard.
The crews of Voyager and DS9 were (eventually) well suited for the extreme circumstances in which they had to operate, but they still were less experienced than the command staff of the Enterprise D/E so I'll opt for an entire crew from that (TNG) series.
Tactical: Reed
Helm: Paris
Ops: Data
Security: Tuvok
Engineering: Scotty
Science: T'Pol
Medical: The Doctor
XO: Riker
I don't like my characters too saccarin, so have chosen those who have proven initiative and versatility in their roles. Seperated Tactical and Helm because they are seperate but complimentary roles.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Captain: Sisko
Tactical: Reed (tactical and Helm have to be different)
Helm: Paris
Ops: Data
Security: Odo (can do both security and espionage)
Engineering: LaForge
Science: Seven
Medical: The Doctor EMH
XO: Riker
Helm: Sulu
Security: Worf (honestly all of the TNG Episodes would be much shorter if Picard took in all of his suggestions)
Engineering: Scotty (La Forge is my a second choice)
Operations: Data
Science: T'Pol
Medical: Crusher
Executive: Spock (Can't really have the Ultimate Crew without him)
I agree with some of OP's choices but I'm surprised OP didn't include the Cerritos crew, Mariner would be a huge asset.
Honestly USS Enterprise wouldn't have survived a day without Spock being there to make sure everything was running smoothly, The captain was reckless and so were most of crew, you pretty needed someone with Logic to keep everyone in check.
There never was a space opera in the 1960s named "Star Trek", TOS was very firmly within the bounds of soft sci-fi (that is sci-fi that focuses on the soft sciences instead of the hard ones, but still makes at least some small effort at the hard sciences). Space opera is an entirely different beast that generally ignores all the sciences and concentrates on the action and eye candy, and usually uses familiar things with different looks in inappropriate locations, which is how we get things like airplane-in-space movements of ships and especially "space fighters".
Space opera did not start creeping into Star Trek until the movie era (mainly because Paramount Pictures wanted their own space opera to compete with Star Wars) and hijacked Star Trek Phase II from Paramount TV for that. Those elements from the movie era continued on in all the series that followed to some extent, though the first pure space opera series of the Treks wasn't until the dawn of NuTrek with Discovery.
As for the setup in TOS, it was fairly typical of some of the wilder sailing ship stories (and some westerns too, though Trek was actually based on novels like Hornblower) translated into sci-fi. Roddenberry just could not sell the idea to a Hollywood tired of the sailing ship genre, so he changed his pitch to reference the most popular series on TV at the time, the semi-anthology western Wagon Train.
The crew was quite professional, the main difference was that it was based on a quirkier, wartime (WWII) mix of character types instead of the more regimented and less tolerant of quirks all-volunteer modern forces that all the rest (except parts of DS9) are based on.
Kirk was a smart natural grifter with the knack of surrounding himself with the best innovative misfits possible, who take a hard-luck ship (it was too prone to find trouble even in the most innocuous of places and therefore had significantly higher casualty numbers than average) and pull off missions that few other ships and crews could survive. A lot of that had to do with not always taking things head on and by the book the way Picard would have done it and was appropriate for the kind of wild (and very isolated, remember the relay network was spotty at best) frontier of the mid 22nd century.
Kirk and company would have quickly ended up in the stockades if they were in the over-civilized and almost civilian-company style TNG era starfleet. They couldn't have operated effectively under the kind of HQ microscope with the admiralty looking over their shoulder and second guessing them that Picard and crew operated under. The TNG crew worked because despite being a little too civilized and idealistic, they were textbook-excellent at their jobs and did not let personal differences get in the way of that.
DS9 was something of a mixed bag and resembled the TOS crew in some ways. Unlike Kirk, who was competitive and tried to con his way through whenever possible, Sisko is a hardnose who, when push came to shove, would do anything to get the job done if the stakes were high enough, and despite a little handwringing it would not bother him too much as long as the end justified the means.
Kira was the first Trek regular with PTSD so she was slightly erratic but like Sisko would usually do whatever it took (though she agonized over it more). The rest were all over the place trope-wise and it is a wonder they could work together enough to get anything done (in fact it often took extraordinarily dangerous situations to get them to stop bickering with each other long enough to get through them).
Voyager was a lot like DS9 character-wise except instead of random oddballs it was two distinct sides for the most part, and neither Janeway's nor Chakotay's crews would have made it very far without the other. The crew is the most meticulously jigsawed together and precariously balanced of the traditional trek crews so there really is not much room for substitutions without it falling apart.
Janeway was the most Kirk-like of the post-TOS captains though that is still not that close. Like Kirk, she is competitive and sometimes sees situations like a game that needs to be won (though she lacks the grifter part), but like Sisko she is rather hardnosed and wound a bit too tight so tended to get too entrenched and almost vindictive at times. Chakotay was supposed to be the complement of her character but with all the last-minute changes to the series before launch the writers dropped the ball on that (like they did with so many other important threads from the original concept).
I agree that Enterprise was probably a little too far from the others to make sense of them mixing with the other crews. That said, there are a few comparisons that can be made, such as Archer is probably the closest to Pike of any of the traditional captains (which is not useful for this thread), and the crew was competent overall, and by the time the series ended probably would have had enough experience to catch up with the others.
About the only one in ENT who could substitute effectively for one of the TOS crew might have been T'Pol for Spock, but only as she was near the end of the series with her PTSD under control and some understanding of humans (and she probably still would not have fit in as well as Spock).
Overall, I don't think a "dream team" would really work in Trek.