Favorite Star Wars fighters

[Cpl Kendall]

As strange as it sounds to us, there was a time when exploration and scientific discovery was made by the military, mainly the Royal Navy. There were numerous voyages which included scientists on vessels to observe or as the primary purpose of the voyage.

Roddenberry was apperently a fan of Horatio Hornblower and based Kirk in part on him. It's not much of a stretch to imagine tha he took inspiration from other aspects of that time.

So Starfleet isn't without prcedent for it's practices. However it's important to note that the RN's first priority was combat, not research. With SF, it appears to change from series to series and episode to episode.

[Mike DiCenso]

Well, yes. The RN as well as the U.S. and other navies have had exploration duties at various times throughout their history. That being said, the historical precident often has the RN or USN fielding dedicated exploration vessels. For example, Captain James Cook's ship, the HMB Endeavour was purpose modifed from a merchant collier.

The same was true of HMS Challenger which was a heavily modified from her original role as a corvette so that she could be outfitted with the equipment needed to probe the ocean depths.

United Federation of Planets starships, on the other hand, are seldom modified that way. A crude analogy would be HMS Victory or U.S.S. Iowa being built from the get-go with extensive science labs, and given a mission of exploration and discovery as their primary assignment.
-Mike

[Roondar]

As strange as it sounds to us, there was a time when exploration and scientific discovery was made by the military, mainly the Royal Navy. There were numerous voyages which included scientists on vessels to observe or as the primary purpose of the voyage.

Roddenberry was apperently a fan of Horatio Hornblower and based Kirk in part on him. It's not much of a stretch to imagine tha he took inspiration from other aspects of that time.

So Starfleet isn't without prcedent for it's practices. However it's important to note that the RN's first priority was combat, not research. With SF, it appears to change from series to series and episode to episode.

Considering how much R&D the military (in general) still does to this very day and considering that a lot of that tech ends up being used by consumers I'm not that surprised to be honest.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the RN's first priority was deterrence and keeping the peace. Not combat ;)

As for Starfleets role, it seems to me it doesn't actually change all that much: they do both, but despite all the brave words by the starship captains and all the political statements about the primary directive it's quite clear that (as echoed by the Klingons during ST:VI) their primary goal (during all series but Enterprise) was plainly deterrence and keeping the peace.

Evidence for this can be found in most series, the enterprise keeps getting sent in to defuse explosive situations, defend colonies from danger and other similar things. It can even be found in Voyager where Janeway does not exactly shy away from using force (and her generally superior technology in the region) to get what she needs even when other options clearly exist.